Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/840

 Arnold, is to turn from the poetry of evasion to the poetry of skepticism. Here we find, as the burden of all their song, not the reactionary indifference of the simple artist, but the eager probing of the inquirer. Clough and Arnold are modern men, standing face to face with the problems of modern life. There is in their works no hatred of the new knowledge for itself, no intellectual cowardice regarding it; on the contrary, every fresh insight into the methods of Nature and the laws of life is welcome; but there is, at the same time, painful realization of the fact that the old foundations of the emotions are being sapped and undermined. What will be the result? Will science in this respect prove constructive as well as destructive? Will new emotional bases be given in place of those swept away? Or, will all the immemorial desires and aspirations and spiritual cravings of humanity be left to perish in grim despair before the blighting breath of a crass materialism which recognizes no sanctities and holds out no hope? These are the stubborn questions which, in one form or another, are put again and again, and for the most part left unanswered, in the poetry of the men to whom we now refer.

Clough's poetry, though little read to-day, and lacking almost every element of popularity, is of the utmost interest for those who care for the study of literature from the point of view here adopted. It was with little exaggeration that Mr. Lowell adjudged him the man who most probably "will be thought, a hundred years hence, to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle toward settled convictions, of the period in which he lived." He was the plaything of conflicting tendencies, which he saw he could not harmonize. Everywhere in his poetry the striving after truth is accompanied by a distressing realization of emotions out of touch and keeping with his intellectual environment. "What I mean by mysticism," he writes in one of his American letters, "is letting feelings run on without thinking of the reality of their object, letting them out merely like water. The plain rule in all such matters is, not to think what you are thinking about the question, but to look straight out at the things, and let them affect you." This is the sane utterance of a manly nature, alive to the manifold dangers of unchecked speculation, and not to be deceived by theological or metaphysical jugglery into any false sense of security. To hold fast to reality—that he saw was the prime requirement, to be fulfilled at any cost; and to seek for emotional excitation in what has been proved to be no reality, but a figment or shadow, would have seemed to him the willful blindness of folly or the despicable subterfuge of cowardice. But was the reality itself capable of furnishing scope for that emotional satisfaction which his nature demanded? Sometimes with more, sometimes