Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/84

 all Greeks; for Arnold bent his poetic effort to that Hellenic spirit which, by temperance and the clearness ensuing from it, and by the desire to make the world better, made the artist-work of the Greeks so nearly perfect.

But to return to the sonnet on Nature (Quiet Work). It is plain that its view of Nature is quite different from that of the poets who preceded Arnold. It contains that scientific conception of Nature, already far more than half embodied, which declared that all its developments could be correlated under one energy and were forms of that energy, ourselves included. Belief in this theory made a mighty change in all poetry written by men who were sufficiently educated to realise it, and it influenced a good deal of Arnold's poetry from the beginning to the end. Not altogether; he slipped out of the theory where it pleased him. At one point, even now (and this is illustrated in another sonnet—In Harmony with Nature), he rebelled against it, at the point where it subjected man, as only a part of Nature, to its law. He was willing to be taught by the course of Nature. He was not willing to be mingled up with her.

We are different from her; we move on in a straight line, he might have said, Nature goes round and round. "We begin," he did say, "where Nature ends"; and he recurs elsewhere to the same thought.