Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/77

 than by sympathy only with man's pleasure, strength and passion flow into his poetry. Men feel themselves expressed, sympathised with, and empowered by the noble representation of their trouble, and send back to the poet their gratitude and sympathy, till he, conscious of their affection, is himself uplifted and inspired, Then his poetic power, fed by human love, increases. A fuller emotion, a wider thought, a knowledge of life, deepened by imagination into something far more true than any intellectual philosophy of life can give,—fill his verse with the unsought for, revealing phrases, which seem to express, with strange simplicity, the primary thoughts of Being, to speak from the secret place where the laws of the universe abide.

The stoic tends to be unhuman, but is continually like Arnold self-humanised; and the breakdown of Arnold's stoicism into sadness for the world, and his expression of it, was a progress in him, not a retrogression. The higher levels of song, where joy lives because of the presence of faith and hope, he did not reach; but this mingling in his poetry of stoicism and of the sad crying which denies stoicism, of the spirit which isolates itself from the crowd of men in lonely endurance and the spirit which breaks down from that position into sympathy with men, gives to Arnold's poetry a strange passion, a stimulating inconsistency, an element of attractive surprise—the atmosphere changing from poem to poem and within the same poem—and a solitary distinction. No other poet is