Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/94

 are full of the permanent, noble, and primary passions of human nature, passing onwards into magnanimous action, whether of endurance of, or of resistance to, human or divine oppression—into action which awakens high passion and action in others. Such action, represented in poetic form, kindles high pleasure in us, however painful the situation.

In Empedocles there is no such action. A "continuous state of mental distress was prolonged in it"; the atmosphere was morbid, and the unhappiness monotonous. It was not then a fit subject of poetry and Arnold excluded the poem from his next book.

This is a very grand reason for so simple a matter as the poem of Empedocles on Ætna, and indeed it might lay itself open to some slight ridicule. It is an example of that overweening self-consciousness of himself as an artist which sometimes deprived his poetry of naturalness and of spontaneity. The real reason was that Empedocles bored him, and no wonder; and that Arnold, under the mask of Empedocles, exposing all his present woes, confusions and wanderings of thought, his hatreds and scorns of his time, had begun to bore himself. Again, the Empedocles of the poem is quite petulant with the Universe, and especially with that state of man which, having vast desires and conceiving noble ideals, is disenabled by the gods, and apparently on purpose, to realise them. It may be that this petulance, when Arnold came afterwards to read of it,