Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/21

Rh closely written grammar-papers to be looked over" when he was desirous of doing better things. Oftentimes he mentions, though without complaint, the necessity of examining scores of pupil-teachers in small and inconvenient rooms and going without proper food. Pheidias may make good sandals, but to keep him at it would be a loss to sculpture.

But all the pleasanter were his vacations, which gave him time for employments that he liked, for writing his poems, perhaps taking a few weeks' run upon the Continent, where always, if possible, he sought regions abounding in clear waters. He published in 1852 (semi-anonymously, as before) "Empedocles on Etna," but withdrew it from circulation ere fifty copies were sold; the following year the first series of his "Poems" appeared, with a preface of considerable length. The volume contained nine new titles, among them "Sohrab and Rustum" and "The Scholar Gypsy." In 1854 it went into a second edition with some changes. In 1855 the "second series" of his "Poems" appeared.

In 1856 he wrote his mother of his delight at being elected to the Athenæum Club, and of looking forward with rapture to the use of that Library when he should be in London. He found it a place at which he "enjoyed something like beatitude." The following year he was made Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His first lecture was on the Modern Element in Literature. He afterwards wrote that he almost always had a very fair attendance. "To be sure, it is chiefly composed of ladies," he adds, but he reconciled himself by thinking, as he composed his lectures, 'of the public who would read him, not of the dry bones who would hear him.'

He wrote this year his tragedy of "Merope," as he said, 'to inaugurate his professorship with dignity rather than to move deeply the present race of humans.' He tried to give it "a character of Fixity, that true sign of the law." It was published and had a fair success, though he complained that the British public found it hard to understand his attempted reproduction of the power, grandeur, and dignity of the Greek imagination. He wrote a friend that the poem was reviewed "very expostulatingly."

He would have liked to devote his whole life to poetry, as Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley were able to do. But he found it no light matter to produce his best—all that was in him—with such a "hampered existence." He felt and resisted the temptation to transfer his poetic operations "to a region where