Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/117

 in which he lived exercised over his self-questioning spirit. He is less in the tales than in himself. He is not rapt away by Sohrad and Rustum, Balder, or Tristram as Keats was by Lorenzo or Porphyro, or Morris by the tales of the Earthly Paradise. They truly escaped from their age, and brought passion to their subjects. Their subjects were more to them than their self.

Nevertheless, Arnold did partly escape from himself when he handled the noble stories of the past. His poetry then, partly freed from self-inquiry and its restlessness, rose into a clearer, sweeter region and reached a higher level of art. When we read the Strayed Reveller, the Forsaken Merman, Sohrab and Rustum, the Scholar Gipsy, the Church at Brou, in all of which he more or less escaped from self-consideration, we say, feeling their excellence, "What a pity he was so worried; what a greater pity that he worried himself; what a greatest pity that he allowed himself to be so tormented by his age or by himself, Yet, after all—for everything has two sides—we have seen how interesting as history as well as poetry he has made his age to us through himself. When he looked into its mirror he saw his own tired face, and the waves of thought that passed over it. But the reflection was also that of thousands who then lived and suffered and strove to find their way, but who could not, like Arnold, formulate their thought, or crystallise into words their feeling. And in this indirect fashion