Page:Matthew Arnold, Coates, Century, April 1894.djvu/8

Rh the importance of thus holding fast to happiness and hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue.... Carlyle's perverse attitude toward happiness cuts him off from hope. He fiercely attacks the desire for happiness. He is wrong; "We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope." ... Wise men everywhere know that we must keep up our courage and hope; that hope is, as Wordsworth well says,

Those who talk of Arnold's gloom ignore that playful and unique vein of humor which, threading his thought and conversation like a sunlit strand, lent them charm and brightness. In him the world lost a source of gladness. "He always conspired and contrived to make things pleasant." From those of his own household the statement is ever the same. "He was the very center and joy of our lives." His mirth was as spontaneous and irresistible as that of a child, and the buoyancy and elasticity of his temper were as wonderful as were its mildness and benignity.

But humor, we are told, finds no place at the top of Parnassus, and it would be absurd to claim that there is not in Arnold's poetry, as in most things wholly exquisite, a note of sadness and melancholy yearning. He is the greatest of our elegiac poets; yet "the irrepressible elation of the idealist" was his, and his verse, written with intense sincerity and exaltation of touch, has an out-of-door and incommunicable charm which restores and elevates the mind. If it is true, as Hutton tells us, that in his poems there are the qualities ascribed by Hazlitt to Wordsworth's "Laodamia," "the sweetness, the strength, the gravity, the beauty, and the languor of death—calm contemplation and majestic pains," equally true is it that to certain minds there have come "a refreshment and illumination from his pages, which they have found nowhere else"; that living, as he lived, very near to us, "his verse inspires, in those who care for it at all, an almost passionate devotedness." "One reads his poems," wrote an eminent critic years ago—"one reads his poems for the fiftieth time, and for the fiftieth time one feels inclined to esteem their author for the chief of living poets!"

To our great ones we pardon much, condoning often where we should condemn, but Arnold requires of us neither excuses nor compassion. In him was that rare combination of qualities ascribed to Pericles—a genius the most fervid, with passions the best regulated.

In an article published in the "Manchester Guardian," and entitled "Matthew Arnold—by One who Knew him Well," Mr. Thomas Arnold, the father of Mrs. Humphry Ward, and a man distinguished as one of the more important of those who followed Newman into the Church of Rome, thus writes of his brother:

Yes, he who at the time of his death "was probably, all things considered, the most distinguished man of letters of the English-speaking world," while laboring with entire devotedness for the happiness and elevation of men, was himself "surely and visibly touched by the finger of doom."

In this relation a deeper interest attaches to the following extract from one of the last letters which he wrote to this country.

Five years have passed since those words were written, and it is June. Once more I see the maple green, and the tulip-trees in flower—but

Florence Earle Coates.