Page:Matthew Arnold (IA matthewarnold00harr).pdf/16

 poem was devoted, the philosopher-poet of early Greece, whom the Greeks called Homeric, and whose 'austere harmony' they valued so well. Arnold's sonnet on 'The Austerity of Poetry,' of which two lines have been cited above, is a mere amplification of this type of poetry as an idealized philosophy of nature and of life.

This concentration of poetry on ethics and even metaphysics involves very serious limitations and much loss of charm. The gnomic poets of Greece, though often cited for their maxims, were the least poetic of the Greek singers, and the least endowed with imagination. Aristotle calls Empedocles more 'the natural philosopher than the poet.' Solon indeed, with all his wisdom, can be as tedious as Wordsworth, and Theognis is usually prosaic. Arnold is never prosaic, and almost never tedious: but the didactic poet cannot possibly hold the attention of the groundlings for long. Empedocles on Etna, published at the age of thirty-one, still remains his most characteristic piece of any length, and it is in some ways his high-water mark of achievement. It has various moods, lyrical, didactic, dramatic—rhyme, blank verse, monologue, and song—it has his philosophy of life, his passion for nature, his enthusiamenthusiasm [sic] for the undying memories of Greece. It is his greatest poem: but the average reader finds it twelve hundred lines too long, too austere, too indecisive; and the poet himself withdrew it for years from a sense of its monotony of doubt and sadness, until he was encouraged by Browning to restore it to his collection.

The high merit of Arnold's verse is the uniform level of fine, if austere, thought, embodied in clear, apt, graceful, measured form. If Tennyson can at times break into a Hugonic shriekiness, and even into some pulpit maudlin, and at times almost cloys us with a surfeit of honey, if Browning can take a plunge into a mud-bath of