Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/296

 290 Northup generally better. The transitional character of his age is well brought out in the " Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," in which he speaks of his soul as wandering, like that of an old Greek in a Northern land, between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born. At a later time of his life he passed into the newer world of a larger, saner, truer religious outlook; but his days of verse- writing were then over, and this change finds no reflection in any poetry from his pen. If the age and the absorbing demands of Arnold's vocation prevented him from achieving the highest rank as a poet, the limitations of his native poetic powers are also evident. He was not a constructive poet. He could not write drama at all. He attempted no epic further than a retelling of the mere episode of Sohrab, which owes much of its beauty to its Homeric echoes, and the Balder, which Professor Sherman and others rightly condemn. Even the lyric he scarcely attempted on any large scale, perhaps aware of his lack of ability, perhaps warned by the example of Wordsworth's dreary pages which as editor he excluded from his volume of well-chosen selections from the poetry of the sage of Rydal. And even within his chosen field of the shorter lyric he sometimes exhibits a poor ear; e.g., The hands propping the sunk head ("The New Sirens"), As if the sky was impious not to fall ("Empedocles"), Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my mind? ("To a Friend"), And yet, I swear, it angers me to see How this fool passion gulls men potently ("Tristram and Iseult" iii). Still, these are after all slight blemishes on a considerable body of good work poetry which places Arnold easily in the class just below Tennyson and Browning and among the chief minor poets of the Victorian era. But precious as is Arnold's poetry, it was obviously well that he turned from verse to criticism, literary and social. For the work of revealing England's shortcomings much needed to be done; and never was a man better qualified for the task. By temperament and by training Arnold was fitted for this work. He never lost his temper, and in his attacks on the beast of Philistine narrowness and ugliness he scored many hits. Of course it took time to make a lasting impression. He was cordially disliked by many of his contemporaries as a super- ficial dilettante. But gradually he came to be understood