Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/145

 is free. We do not obey, or we resent the law, and suffering from its rigid restrictions, are enslaved by it. This is the motive of a great number of passages in Arnold's poems. In this view of nature, he has slipped out of his view of her as seen by science. Science could not talk of the joy or freedom of nature. And indeed, he was not faithful to the scientific view of her. His conception of her wavered with his mood. He sometimes, in a sort of reversion to Wordsworth, speaks of her as powerful to help him, as having, like a mother, the heart to help him. He appeals to her to fill him with the healing qualities he vainly imputes to her. He is happily inconsequent in his conceptions of her.

For example, there is a half-outlined conception of nature, quite different from the rest, which obscurely appears in a poem entitled Morality. He seems to imagine that behind nature there is a self-harmonious, self-conscious Life, as it were a Demiourgos, who, putting the thoughts of the Eternal Intelligence into form, has made the Universe and the intelligent beings who inhabit it, and therefore, being in nature and in man as thought, can bring them into communion and cause nature to work and feel with man; and the lines which close A Summer Night, seem to be filled with that idea—