AUSTERITY OF POETRY

(541.) 1. That son of Italy: Giacopone di Todi, a poet of the thirteenth century.

14. Of thought and of austerity: On the want of substance in the poetry of the earlier nineteenth century, see the biographical introduction to Arnold, page 762, and his various comments on Byron. What is the significance of the word "hidden" in the previous line?

WORLDLY PLACE

3. Marcus Aurelius: Roman emperor and philosopher, whose Meditations was one of the books that Arnold most valued (for its "inwardness"), and who is the subject of one of the best of the Essays in Criticism,- -an essay that throws much light on Arnold's conception of the noble life.

WEST LONDON

than

(542.) 12-14. that cold succor ours: The charity bestowed by the great upon the little is cold, unsympathetic, because it is unknowing. In turning, with a true instinct, to the humble, the knowing, who understand her plight and therefore respond with a real sympathy, the woman points toward a future when human relations will be wider and sounder. See Arnold's essays on "Democracy" and "Equality"; and what he calls the "social idea" in the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy.

In this poem Arnold's note of disillusionment and desolation is sounded deeply. From the melancholy beauty of the sea spread calm beneath the full moon, he passes, symbolically, to the thoughts and feelings suggested by this scene. Characteristically, his mind turns first to Sophocles, who, hearing the sad music of the Ægean, had brooded upon the "ebb and flow of human misery" Then comes his own thought of the Sea of Faith, once at full tide but steadily withdrawing. Compare "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" (page 538).

28. shingles: pebbly shores, such as are common in England.

29-30. let us be true Το one another: The poet regards human constancy as a firm resting-place for the spirit in this age of dissolution.

37. ignorant armies clash by night: The poem ends in sombre hopelessness, contrary to Arnold's usual poetic practice. Contrast the end of a somewhat similar poem, "A Summer Night" (page 505).

PIS-ALLER

The title means "The Last Resource." If, unlike the poet, you cannot find a "moral plan" of life without the aid of revealed religion (traditional Christianity); if you find that for you it is a choice between revealed religion and nothing at all, cling, then, to your religion.

PALLADIUM

The Palladium was an image of Pallas Athena enshrined in the city of Troy; so long as it remained there it was believed to assure the preservation of the city. (544.) 1. Simois: the river of that name. 14. Xanthus: a river flowing through the plain where Trojans and Greeks fought.

21-22. the soul - a ruling efluence send: This belief in a soul, or higher level of life, serene and unchanging amid the endless fluctuation of our emotional and active life, is frequent in Arnold's poetry; cf., for example, "The Buried Life" (page 509), especially the last stanzas. No doubt in this respect he was influenced by R. W. Emerson. Read Arnold's essay on Emerson (in Discourses in America, 1885); and Emerson's essay on "The Over-Soul."

A WISH

(545.) 35. The world ere I was born: Cf. "Empedocles," line 186 and the ensuing passage (page 513).

37. never... the friend of one: The universe does not exist for the satisfaction of the individual. Cf. "Empedocles," lines 147-186 (page 513), also "Human Life" (page 508) and the notes.

RUGBY CHAPEL

In this memorial poem on Thomas Arnold (see the biographical introduction, page 762, above), the vigorous short lines are pervaded by a deep feeling that largely compensates the frequent commonplaceness of diction.

(546.) 106-109. we strain on etc.: Cf. "Immortality" (page 542), and the note (page 773).

145-146. through thee I believe etc.: The firm, strong, beneficent character of Dr. Arnold makes real and near, for his son, the great men of the past. But for such an example, they might have seemed mythical the expression of our dream of what men might be (lines 151-152, below).

(547.) 162. sons: as in John, I, 12.

182. keep, keep them combined: The goal is not merely individual salvation, but the salvation of all. Cf. lines 124-144, above. This social conception of the good reappears, prominently, in Arnold's gospel of Culture: "Culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater! the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light" (Culture and Anarchy). In Dr. Arnold's vigorous character, together with his zeal as a helper of mankind in the quest for character and light, Arnold in his early years found a type of personal excellence that influenced all his later thinking.

OBERMANN ONCE MORE

Review "Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Obermann'" (page 501), and the general note (page 766). — The quotation used as a motto may be translated as follows: "Do you know any boon that solaces the grief for a lost world?"

1. Glion: "Probably all who know the Vevey end of the Lake of Geneva will recollect Glion, the mountain village above the castle of Chillon. Glion now has hotels, pensions, and villas; but twenty years ago it was hardly more than the huts of Avant opposite to it" (Arnold's note). (548.) 39. my wandering youth: Arnold's years of groping for light and leading, before the conflicting claims of his nature were harmonized.

(549.) 109-112. The East bowed. . . in thought again: Passively resisting, the meditative Orient disdained the invasion of the active Occident, and when it was over resumed her timeless brooding.

133. pride of life: as in "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," line 167 (page 540), and "Progress," line 46 (page 504). To the late pagan "pride of life" succeeded the Eastern religion of Christianity, with its renunciation of the world and its humble quest of a childlike innocence (lines 134-140).

141. Oh, had I lived in that great

day: Arnold expresses, ostensibly in the words of the author of "Obermann," his own yearning for ecstatic religious experience, which he might have attained in its fullness when the Sea of Faith girdled the world (cf. "Dover Beach," page 543). For his sympathy with the early medieval faith, see also "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" (page 538).

(549.) 168. He lived while we believed: With this whole passage on Jesus compare the "Easter Day" poems of Clough (page 488).

(550.) 185-188. Unduped the way divine: The suggestion is that Christ's message to our age is fundamentally the same as that which he preached to his own; while of course "fancy" and "all too human creeds" allude to Christian theology.

Compare the message in the four closing stanzas of "Progress" (page 504). 193. Its frame yet stood: i.e., before the French Revolution, the "storm" of the stanzas that follow. 232. See

new: Revelation, XXI, 5. The whole chapter is recalled. 235-236. old-world cures

wholly feel: Can the woes of the modern world woes of the spirit and of the social order too (line 230) - be cured by an old religion that is only half believed?

237-238. such need of joy. whose grounds are true: Consider the diverse search for joy in the early poets Wordsworth, Keats, etc. and the same search, with less poetic gusto but a more critical sense of true grounds, in the Victorians.

245-246. But now yet born: Cf. "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," lines 85-86 (page 539). (551.) 269. If Paris etc.: If you can tear yourself away from the Capital of Pleasure long enough to make the short excursion to Sèvres.

286. A green, new earth appears: Through Obermann, the poet ventures to give a prophecy (prepared for in lines 7980) of a new era, a new spiritual and social order in the world, foreshadowed by a stirring of new life. Compare the almost contemporary Culture and Anarchy, Ch. I, fifth paragraph. Indeed, the poem as a whole may be read as a transition from the

individual and elegiac tone of Arnold's verse to the more social and hopeful tone of his prose, due to enlarged historical outlook.

(552.) 348. I saw the morning break: Cf. the suggestion of symbolism in the concluding passage of "Sohrab and Rustum" (page 533).

EMILY BRONTË: NO COWARD SOUL

The three Brontë sisters - Charlotte, Emily, and Anne-led a singularly secluded, monotonous, and intense life at the parsonage at Haworth in the Yorkshire moors. In 1846 they published, together, a volume entitled Poems "by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell." In 1847, Emily Brontë (1818-1848), a year before her early death by consumption, published her novel Wuthering Heights, a Yorkshire moorland tragedy told with a controlled intensity that makes it one of the great novels of the century. Though nourished, like her sisters, on the best literature, and writing from childhood onwards, she did not attain, in her short life, a vehicle of expression in either prose or verse equal to her passionate emotion, her masculine strength, her intellectual power, her austere and indomitable stoicism. Yet these qualities are in her work, plain enough to the discerning. In verse, she used simple, trite measures that are sometimes strangely in contrast with the burning emotions and ethical energy and insight that give her lines distinction. Best of her few poems is "No coward soul is mine," found on her desk after she had died standing upright, resting one hand upon the table, in the little parlor of the dreary parsonage.

In the present poem, compare Emily Brontë's attitude toward creeds, and the ground of her stoical faith, with the conclusions attained by Clough and Arnold.

GEORGE ELIOT: THE CHOIR

INVISIBLE

Mary Ann Evans ("George Eliot") (1819-1880) began her literary career with

the anonymous publication of her translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus), an epoch-making contribution toward that rationalistic restudy of the Bible which the modern scientific spirit had made necessary. Asserting that the testimony of the gospel witnesses was not falsehood, as a shallow rationalism had concluded, but rather "misrepresentation of the truth," Strauss made a thoroughgoing attempt to interpret the whole of the gospel narrative according to this point of view. Some years after the publication of this translation, Miss Evans put into English another German theological work, Feuerbach's Wesen des Christenthums (Essence of Christianity). By this time her talent had been rightly valued by George Henry Lewes, who in 1851 had become her unlegalized husband. To his encouragement and criticism is owing, in no small measure, the long series of novels which constitute George Eliot's most important work.

Her religious life began in a pious, ascetic, Calvinistic girlhood; carried her to an inner crisis when her vigorous intellect had developed; and continued in changing forms consonant with her growing rationalism. Her strong ethical and spiritual sense suffuses most of her writings. Her earliest published work was a religious poem of no consequence; and the best of her poems, "O May I Join the Choir Invisible," is religiously humanitarian.

The present poem was published with a motto, from Cicero, which may be translated: "I am more concerned with the long time to come, when I shall be no more, than with this narrow present." — With the thought of this poem, compare Arnold's "Rugby Chapel," beginning at line 145 (page 546).

(552.) 17. shaming still its child: Penitence, the offspring of "Rebellious flesh" (line 16) is shamed by the next lapse — a continual alternation.

(553.) 25. saw: The subject of the verb is "That" (line 23). "Self" (line 21) remains without a verb till line 30.

31-32. the human sky etc.: Cf. Isaiah, XXXIV, 4: "the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll."

CORY: MIMNERMUS IN CHURCH

William Johnson (1823-1892), — who in later life, upon succeeding to an estate, took the name of Cory, was for twentyseven years an assistant master at Eton. A medal man in his day at Cambridge, short, awkward, with crooked but sturdy legs, dreaded by his classes for his irony, yet easy to evade because of his nearsightedness, he must have been a picturesque figure. Yet he belonged to the company of "famous men," in the sense of Kipling's poem on schoolmasters, — “for their work continueth": many in a dis tinguished roll of pupils attributed to him their first awakening of intellectual enthusiasm. "It was with a division of from fifty to sixty boys, in a small and dingy room, that a teacher, whose every third sentence was an epigram, whose lectures, had they been delivered to a University audience, would have attracted professed students and curious listeners alike, spent deliberately and with enthusiasm the best hours of the best years of his life" (W. R. Nicoll and T. J. Wise, Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, page 399). With the aid of powerful spectacles and a binocular glass, he watched cricketmatches. "I cheer the games I cannot play," is a line found among his graceful verses on school themes. His hobby was the military and naval history of England, the minutiae of which he had at his tongue's end. Some of his poems show a tender sentiment for individual pupils that was probably not suspected from his classroom demeanor.

Cory, who loved the Greek elegiac poets among the ancients, and Tennyson especially among the moderns, published one short book of verse, Ionica. A typical theme is that of "An Invocation": the imagined delight of initiating the boy of ancient Greece, "Comatas," into the glories of modern literature. The admiration of boyhood, the delicate fancy, the freshness, the restraint, which charmed a small circle when the book was privately printed in 1858, are no less charming today.

Mimnermus was a Greek elegiac poet who flourished at the end of the seventh century B.C. The few extant fragments

GEORGE MacDONALD (1824-1905) These poems of George MacDonald represent a large body of Victorian verse, of transcendental tendencies, more notable for religious and ethical aspiration than for markedly poetic quality. The writer, a Scotsman, had been for a short time a Congregational minister, and continued as an occasional lay preacher after leaving his church (the congregation objected to his "unorthodoxy") to engage in literary work. He is best known by a series of thoughtful novels, - David Elginbrod, etc.. depicting Scottish life and evincing hostility to Calvinism in the handling of theological. problems; but he wrote also considerable verse, including children's poems. He lectured successfully in England and America, and was an eminent figure in philanthropy and popular education.

THIS INFANT WORLD

777

In 1856 a serious illness had compelled This MacDonald to winter in Algiers.

poem is the second of two sonnets inspired by an African scene of "great sweeps of savage mountains"; where rocks, once below the primeval ocean, were now covered with "crumbling lichens." As to his own frame of mind at the time, the poet says:

"A dry flow Of withering wind sucked up my drooping strength,

Itself weak from the desert's burning length."

For the general idea, compare "In Memoriam," CXVIII, etc. (page 357). But characteristic of MacDonald is the striking sestet, with its simple confidence of spirit, unperplexed by the "strife" of "God and Nature."

(554.) 14. thy child: This common phrase is here a suggestive sequel of "infant world," "young earth," and "old chaotic prime."

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894)

The Oxford Movement, which supplied the Pre-Raphaelites with a merely æsthetic stimulus, was the determining influence upon the religious poetry of Christina Rossetti. The sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who was the most remarkable member of a remarkable family), she lived a sheltered life in the London home, first of her father, and later of her other brother, William Michael. Though from youth physically delicate and for extended periods an invalid, she was assiduous in the observances of the Anglo-Catholic Church (as the Church of England was termed by followers of the Oxford Movement); engaged in such charitable and humanitarian undertakings as her limited strength and means permitted; and did a considerable amount of writing both in verse and in devotional prose. Her experience was devoid of striking external incidents, and, though her poetry reveals an intense inner life, she was habitually reticent regarding her pri