Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/123

 Matthew Arnold and fro in the house, will not let him go. At last, he seems to break away, but the next poem brings them together again, only to part. His love and her love faded for different reasons, and they slid away from one another. It is no wonder she ceased to care, for he mingled too much of his unquiet soul with his love; and women, in the matter of love, have no patience, and for good reason, with a lover whose psychology is engaged with his own soul, and not with theirs. It is no wonder, on the other hand, that he ceased to care, for her nature was unfitted to his, and, moreover, as we are unartistically informed, she had a past. Indeed, it is a melancholy business. There is none of the natural self-forgetfulness of passion in the poem.

As to the closing poem, which has its own grace and charm, it is spoilt by the verse which wonders whether she has not perhaps, in these ten years, followed her light and flowery nature, and returned to Paris to live an immoral life. That verse should be expunged; and I do not think that the poet could ever have really loved the girl, else memory of tenderness and of passion past would have spared her that conjecture. The greater artist would have left it out, even had he thought it. But Arnold, though an artist, was not a great artist.

I have said he was more of a careful artist in the poems which he wrote on subjects apart from his own time and his own self. He took great pains with them, sometimes almost so much self-conscious pains