Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/81

 by the noise of the contest in which he lost it. He rather liked the smoke and the roar of fighting; the revolutionary atmosphere he breathed with pleasure. But Arnold was of another temper. He hated noise, quarrel, confusion; he loved tranquillity, tolerance, clearness, plainness, moderation, ordered thought, and passions brought under control, especially those passions which belong to theological contests of the intellect. He had much ado to keep down his natural abhorrence of this tumultuous shouting about things which even then seemed to him to have nothing to do with the weightier matters of the Law or the Gospel. "It is a sorrowful time," he might have said, "to live in; the outward noise about things indifferent doubles my inward trouble."

Then again, the year before he published his first volume of poems, the whole continent was disquieted, and even England shared in that disquiet. France, Italy, Germany, Austria broke into revolution; the Chartist movement threatened revolution in England. The accredited order which in 1815 had restored so many of the evils the French Revolution had shaken, was again (to leave out 1830) broken into by popular fury, and with a confusion of thought and an ignorance of what was to replace the old, which jarred on everything which Arnold thought wise and practical. Clough liked it; he wrote rejoicingly from Paris, with whose revolution he lived; he stayed at Rome when the people set up a republic and fought the French.