Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/92



The second volume of Matthew Arnold's poems was published in 1852, and its title was Empedocles on Ætna, and other Poems, by A. Empedocles, a Greek of Sicily, one of the last of the religious philosophers, is supposed by Arnold—in a preface to an after-edition of the poem—"to have lived on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the sophists to prevail. Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered much we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern: the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity of the genius of the earlier Greek have disappeared; the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement of Hamlet and of Faust."

This is a sufficient description of the poem, and suggests its motive. It enabled Arnold to express, on the lips of Empedocles, the problems which confronted him in his own time, to tell with a certain passion how he felt concerning them, to relieve his heart by giving words to the profound discouragement and confusion into which they put his soul, and to suggest what means of escape from their tyranny occurred to him. Empedocles escapes by flinging himself into the crater