and nature, both having sprung from "the breast of God" (last line). Does this kinship involve a departure from the doctrine of "Religious Isolation" (page 500). (508.) 16. tasked morality: morality assumed as a task.

HUMAN LIFE

The voyage of the individual through life, prescribed in an "inly-written chart" or law of his nature, is beset with alien objects and persons that lure him aside. And fain would each of us follow such lures, steering at random. But an entirely random course is impossible: the higher powers frustrate continually our wayward impulses.

26. chartered: equipped and sent forth (finely recalling line 5). — In the poem as a whole, observe just what "some unknown Powers" do, and do not do, for the individual; cf. "Religious Isolation" (page 500). Contrast Arnold's view with other views of Providence.

TO MARGUERITE

In the poem above, Arnold had said that we leave behind, in our voyage through life, "The friends to whom we had no natural right" (line 29). Here, brooding sadly on the want of fundamental sympathy and understanding between human beings, he expresses the feeling that, in the deepest sense, each human being is alone in the world, placed apart like an island ("enisled") in the sea of life. Cf. Clough's 'Qua Cursum Ventus" (page 486).

THE BURIED LIFE

In the main, this poem elaborates the idea of a divinely-ordained solitude expressed in the preceding poem. But here the momentary revelations of human love that were hinted at in the preceding poem are enriched and deepened.

REQUIESCAT

(510.) 13. cabined: confined.

EMPEDOCLES ON ETNA

Empedocles was a philosopher of Agrigentum, Sicily, in the fifth century before

Christ. Because of his extensive knowledge and his success in curing diseases, he was regarded as a magician; he ended his life fittingly according to tradition -by flinging himself into the crater of Mt. Etna, in order that his sudden disappearance might cause him to be considered a god. For a short account of Empedocles the reader may consult Rogers' A Student's History of Philosophy; the best account, however, will be found in Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, Chapter V.

Although Arnold follows the known facts pretty closely, and represents a number of the characteristic doctrines of the philosopher, at the same time he plainly expresses his own modern outlook on life. This he could do the more freely because, as he pointed out, there is an analogy between the time of Empedocles and his own time. "I intended to delineate," he says, "the feelings of one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers, . . . having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail.... the calm, the cheerfulness, peared; the dialogue of the mind with itthe disinterested objectivity have disapself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust."

A favorite of Browning's, this dramatic poem reminds one of "Paracelsus" (page 403) in theme and also in treatment, though not in spirit. Compare its spirit with that of Tennyson's "Ancient Sage" (page 397). The old, despairing philosopher, weary of the world and of the problem of knowledge, is contrasted with the other two characters: the practical physician Pausanias, and the gay, sweetlysinging Callicles. It is a lovely summer morning, and a lovely scene, none finer in the world the slopes leading up from the sapphire Mediterranean to the cone of Etna ten thousand feet above. Pausanias has come by appointment with Empedocles

to hear from that wonder-working wise man the secret of his famous cure of the woman Pantheia, whom he had brought back to life after she had been "in a cold trance of death" for thirty days. Pausanias chances upon the young harp-player Callicles, who, because of the dark mood of Empedocles, is to sing unseen, from a distance, in order to woo him to better cheer. Then follows Scene II, given here entire.

(511.) 27. Mind is the spell which governs earth and heaven: the doctrine of Empedocles, which is typical of the Greeks and of Clough and Arnold, that the mind in its wide sense ("imaginative reason," to use a phrase of Arnold's) is the avenue to the true knowledge (in contrast both with science and with superstition).

The next

29. thine own words: two lines actually restate the words of Empedocles.

59. Chiron, the aged Centaur: the wisest of the Centaurs, living on Mount Pelion in Thessaly.

68. Phthia: a town in Thessaly town in Thessaly where Achilles was born.

70. Peleus: the father of Achilles. (512.) 84-85. A thousand glimpses a whole: "Each is convinced," said Empedocles, "of that alone which he has chanced upon as he is hurried to and fro, and idly fancies he has found the whole." See the note under "To a Friend," above, lines 9-14. Along with this doctrine of the limited vision of the individual, consider Arnold's idea of the limited vision of each epoch: see the note under "Revolutions," above.

98-100. I judge as lost etc.: He will not countenance a pessimistic interpretation of life, dictated by fear (line 102). Rather, we should seek "what most helps when known" (line 111).

136. be a man: This is in the mood of Greek humanism. Instead of despairing of life in a spirit of cynical skepticism or of pious otherworldliness, we should seek and obey the laws of man's

riched by centuries of Christian doctrine and experience, as far as line 241. The passage will be illuminated by a comparison with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Book II, Chapter IX. "Love not Pleasure," cries Carlyle, "love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved."

clash

(514.) 246. Other existences with ours: inscrutable nature, following her own law; which is not the human law (cf. 'Religious Isolation," page 500), and indeed clashes with the human law. The idea is expanded and exemplified in the stanzas that follow.

269. To fight as best he can: the "strife divine" of the moral life; see "Morality" (page 507).

(515.) 287-288. All things

Of but one stuff are spun: Empedocles supported his faith in reason as the true means to knowledge with the doctrine that we ourselves are made of the elements that constitute the universe - earth, water, air, fire. Knowledge is possible because the thinking mind and the object of thought are fundamentally one.

(517.) 426. Because thou must not dream etc. This thought, approached through the long passage preceding, is fairly representative of the ancient Greeks at the height of their culture. As humanists, they neither nourished supernatural "dreams" nor despaired in the face of human ignorance and fateful Nature. This golden mean between dreaming and despairing Arnold endeavored to revitalize in an age drifting to materialism and unfaith, availing himself of "the best that has been thought and said" in the intervening centuries for a corroboration of his position.

436. Cadmus and Harmonia: By Athena, Cadmus was made governor of Thebes, and by Zeus was given Harmonia in marriage. Having prayed to the gods to be removed from the ills of life (see line 438), Cadmus and Harmonia were transformed into serpents (line 435), and as such were oblivious of the woes of Thebes that they had witnessed, and unacquainted with the later woes. Why did Arnold introduce "the Theban story"

here?

440. the Sphinx: See the note under

Shelley's "Choruses from Hellas," line 1080, page 693, above.

(517.) 442. the Ismenus: a river in Boeotia, associated with the dark tale of Thebes.

477. And I again: Empedocles alludes, with deliberate ambiguity, to the transmigration of souls. Weary of life, an alien in the new age in which he finds himself, he now proceeds on his way to the summit of Etna. There, in the second Act (there are but two), he hurls himself into the crater, returning to the elements, but not to die wholly.

SOHRAB AND RUSTUM

Having the courage of his classical convictions, Arnold in his volume of 1853 suppressed the dramatic poem "Empedocles on Etna," on the ground that the subject was an unsuitable one. "The suffering," he said, "finds no vent in action" except the final plunge - and action, as Aristotle and Greek poetry had apparently shown, is the heart of the drama and the epic. In "Sohrab and Rustum," Arnold attempted, with a large measure of success, to compose a genuinely classical narrative poem. It is an heroic episode modelled upon Homer. The type of subject, involving clearly-defined, universal feelings, is Homeric; so is the design, the narrative pattern that unfolds itself; so is the simple, elevated tone, approaching what Arnold liked to term "the grand style"; so is the plain diction, throwing the main interest upon the events and the persons, rather than attracting attention to its own felicity. Nor is it wanting altogether that spirit of energetic imagination which gives vital movement to Homer, though it must be admitted that Arnold could not wholly avoid the perils of imitative composition, nor reproduce that extraordinary "rapidity" combined with "nobility" that he found in his master (see the fine essay “On Translating Homer").

Telling the story for the story's sake rather than with a moral or intellectual purpose, he did not obtrude his "criticism of life." Yet it is there, and accords with his usual way of thinking. In its pervading temper, says Stuart P. Sherman, this

poem differs widely from the temper of "Empedocles." "It is poignantly sad, but is not depressing; for it is in the heroic mood. The distressfulness of the action is relieved by the splendid courage and magnanimity of the participants, and their bitter conflict ends not in despondency but in a solemn peace, which affects the reader with a curious sense of liberation, enlargement, and exaltation. It yields, in short, the special joy of the truly tragic: a sense of something transcending the individual life, of something in the world nobler than nature, of something in the heart which destiny cannot break - a sense, in the presence of death, of deathless things." (518.) 1. And: Arnold termed the poem "An Episode," as if it were only part of an epic. The episode is from the story of Rustum (or Rustam), which is prominent in the epic "Shah-Namah" (Book of Kings), by the great Persian poet, Firdausi, of the tenth century. See the note under "Rubaiyat," line 39, above.

2. the Oxus: Arnold keeps this "majestic river," the chief river of central Asia, before us from the beginning to the end of the poem. It may be said to correspond, in the order of nature, to the great human powers displayed in the story. (519.) 11. As when: the beginning of an "epic simile" such as Homer and later writers of epic used.

...

(520.) 118 ff. First. . . Next etc.: This catalogue, or naming of the opposed forces, is another Homeric mode.

(523.) 282. Dight: furnished.

(524.) 336. be as my son: The poignant use of pathos based on non-recognition, involving language that has one meaning for the characters and another for the reader or spectator, is characteristic of Greek imaginative literature. It occurs with magnificent effect in the "Oedipus the King" of Sophocles. Arnold used it climactically from this point forward.

THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY

"There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there, and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies. Among these ex

travagant people, by the insinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gipsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the people he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others; that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned."

Glanvil, Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661 (Arnold's note).

By means of this simple story element, Arnold gives an obvious unity and focus to the charming view of nature and the brooding on the maladie du siècle that are the essential substance of this poem. One need not be an Oxonian to sense the extraordinary accuracy and sympathy with which Arnold has described the simple beauty of that Oxford country that he loved so well. Affectionately he dwells on its every feature the places with their names and associations, the human beings harmoniously present in the scene, the detailed objects of nature: birds, flowers, trees. In "Sohrab and Rustum" he had taken pains to render nature correctly, though not knowing the East at first hand; here, at home in the Thames country of his birth and boyhood and college days, he attains a truth due as much to fond familiarity as to that prevailing passion for seeing things as they are which he manifested in great matters and in small. Without Wordsworth's mysticism, without Tennyson's decorative instinct, he is perhaps the most faithful of nineteenth century poets in his presentation of nature's detail. Compare the whole tone, and the stanza-form, of Keats's "To Autumn" (page 254).

As the setting of the Glanvil story

afforded an opportunity for a minute pictorial treatment of nature, so the character of the vagrant scholar suggested the contrast between the spontaneous unity of such a life as his in that early time, and the "sick hurry" and “divided aims" of our modern world. Cf. "Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Obermann'" (page 501). (534.) 1. shepherd: Though turning soon to the actual Oxford landscape, at the beginning the poet evokes the pastoral atmosphere by representing himself as having talked with a shepherd in an upland field on an afternoon of late summer. 2. wattled cotes: sheep-folds. 23. corn: grain, wheat.

35. preferment's door: a position in the Church.

(535.) 42. erst: formerly.

fire.

59. ingle-bench: seat nearest the

66-69. in my boat I lie etc.: a characteristic Oxford picture. The boat is a punt (as in line 76).

(536.) 95. lasher: the pool below a weir (dam). The verb "pass" goes with "men," two lines above.

129. The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall: the windows, bright at the hour of dining, in the beautiful hall of Christ-Church College.

(537.) 147. teen: suffering.

149. just-pausing Genius: In Roman religion, each person was believed to receive at birth an attendant spirit that presided over his fortunes and in the end conducted him out of the world. Our Genius pauses justly to permit us to show our weakness before removing us from life.

85-86. Wandering

between two worlds etc.: The "dead" world is Europe before the French Revolution. Arnold is thinking, in particular, of its Christian religion, profoundly vital in the Middle Ages, conventionalized later, and regarded as "impossible" by the mind of his own age. The passing of the social standards of the old order was lamented by Burke in the famous passage beginning "The age of chivalry is gone. . . . The glory of Europe is extinguished forever" ("Reflections on the French Revolution"). The "other" world, "powerless to be born," is the new age of faith that will reëstablish, on a new foundation, the old sense of unity, and harmony, and certitude. Has the new faith (and with it, the new social order) come into being since Arnold wrote this poem, or are we, too, wandering between two worlds?

(540.) 96. false control: the pressure of the world and of his own restless "pain,"

as in the next two stanzas. The mood of the present stanza recalls what passages in "Lines written in Kensington Gardens" (page 506)?

99. sciolists: superficially scientific folk. Arnold has already dealt with their type of mind in "Progress" (see the poem, page 503, and the note, page 767).

115-116. Achilles ponders are dumb: The allusion is to the first book of the Iliad. The heroic minds of our time, like Achilles pondering in his tent, are dumb silent "though not content" (line 117). Arnold need not mean actual silence, but rather the lack of an assured, authoritative accent on the part of those who (like Carlyle, Tennyson, and himself) would look forward to the world yet unborn.

135. Ætolian: Grecian.

142. Spezzian bay: along the Italian coast, where Shelley spent the last months of his life.

146. Obermann: Senancour; see "Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Obermann'" (page 501).

157-160. an age

frivolity: Here Arnold suggests his hope for the new age, which should be sage without hardness (without the hardness, say, of the Middle Ages and Puritanism), and gay without frivolity (without the frivolity that the gayety of the Renaissance led to). Where and when has the peculiar texture of life that he desires existed? It should be remembered that Arnold himself, despite the melancholy in his poetry, had a gay, fun-loving side, urbanely displayed in his personal life, in his letters, and to some extent in his satirical prose criticism of his age. 164. The exulting thunder of your race: the noisy triumphs of the "Sons of the world" in line 161 of the active, worldly, scientific modern age.

167. pride of life: Cf. "Progress," line 46 (page 504).

(541.) 174. close: enclosed space.

194. Action and pleasure: typified, above, by the passing troops and by the hunters and gay dames. They are ever the | leading interests of sons of the world — see the note to line 164, above.