The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was the appeal of Mr Arnold's poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the _Shakespeare_ sonnet, to _The Scholar-Gipsy_, to the _Isolation_ stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.
In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of "the silver age." The prefatory _Stanzas_, a title changed in the collected works to _Persistency of Poetry_, sound this note--
"Though the Muse be gone away, Though she move not earth to-day, Souls, erewhile who caught her word, Ah! still harp on what they heard."
A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual contents were more than reassuring. Of _Empedocles_ it is not necessary to speak again: _Thyrsis_ could not but charm. The famous line,
"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,"
sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent address to the cuckoo,
"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?"
and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,
by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning
"And long the way appears which seemed so short;"
by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.
_Saint Brandan_, which follows, has pathos if not great power, and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediæval studies which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals the _Shakespeare_; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold's form. Its greatest examples have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action of intense poetic feeling--Shakespeare's, Milton's, Wordsworth's, Rossetti's--and intensity was not Mr Arnold's characteristic. Yet _Austerity of Poetry, East London_, and _Monica's Last Prayer_ must always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. _Calais Sands_ may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and _Dover Beach_ is very much more. Mr Arnold's theological prepossessions and assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the thing that is _not_ the subject, the tendency outside the subject, which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and _banal_, and which prose literature never attains except by a _tour de force_; that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea usually inspired Mr Arnold--it is as natural to great English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in _Dover Beach_, even without the _Merman_, without the _Scholar-Gipsy_, without _Isolation_, a document which I could be content to indorse "Poetry, _sans phrase_."