{"article":{"id":"britannica-11-ix-21","work_id":"britannica-11","title":"Ix. 21","normalized_title":"ix-21","slug":"ix-21","aliases":[],"subtitle":"Internet Archive OCR import","body_text":"His protest against the materialistic view of life is, perhaps, a more valid one than Tennyson's; he is at pains to show us the noble elements valuable in spite of failure to achieve tangible success. He realizes that the greater the man, the greater is the failure, yet protests unfailingly against the despondent or materialist view of life. His nimble appreciation of character and motive attracts the attentive curiosity of highly intellectual people; but the question recurs with some persistence as to whether poetry, after all, was the right medium for the expression of these views. Many of Browning's ideas and fertilizations will, perhaps, owing to the difficulty and uncertainty which attaches to their form, penetrate the future indirectly as the stimulant Ku*Ua. of other men's work. This is especially the case with Moni*. those remarkable writers who have for the first time Symoad*. given the fine arts a considerable place in English Pml'rliterature, notably John Ruskin (Modern Painters, 1842, Seven Lamps, 1849, Stones of Venice, 1853), William Morris, John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater. Browning, it is true, shared the discipleship of the first two with Kingsley and Carlyle. But Ruskin outlived all discipleships and transcended almost all the prose writers of his period in a style the elements of emotional power in which still preserve their secret. More a poet of doubt than either Tennyson or the college friend, A. H. Clough, whose loss he lamented in one of the finest pastoral elegies of all ages, Matthew Arnold takes xrao/rf rank with Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne alone among the Dii Majores of Victorian poetry. He is perhaps a disciple of Wordsworth even more than of Goethe, and he finds in Nature, described in rarefied though at times intensely beautiful phrase, the balm for the unrest of man's unsatisfied yearnings, the divorce between soul and intellect, and the sense of contrast between the barren toil of man and the magic operancy of nature. His most delicate and intimate strains are tinged with melancholy. The infinite desire of what might have been, the lacrimae rerun, inspires \" Resignation,\" one of the finest pieces in his volume of 1849 (The Strayed Reveller). In the deeply-sighed lines of \" Dover Beach \" in 1867 it is associated with his sense of the decay of faith. The dreaming garden trees, the full moon and the white evening star of the beautiful English-coloured Thyrsis evoke the same mood, and render Arnold one of the supreme among elegiac poets. But his poetry is the most individual in the circle and admits the popular heart never for an instant. As a popularizer of Renan and of the view of the Bible, not as a talisman but as a literature, and, again, as a chastener of his contemporaries by means of the iteration of a few telling phrases about philistincs, barbarians, sweetness and light, sweet reasonableness, high seriousness, Hebraism and Hellenism, \" young lions of the Daily Telegraph,\" and \" the note of provinciality,\" Arnold far eclipsed his fame as a poet during his lifetime. His crusade of banter against the bad civilization of his own class was one of the most audaciously successful things of the kind ever accomplished. But all his prose theorizing was excessively superficial. In poetry he sounded a note which the prose Arnold seemed hopelessly unable ever to fathom. It is easier to speak of the virtuoso group who derived their first incitement to poetry from Chatterton, Keats and the early exotic ballads of Tennyson, far though these yet were gottfai from attaining the perfection in which they now appear after half a century of assiduous correction. The chief of them were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, hissister Christina, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The founders of this school, which took and acquired the name Pre-Raphaelite, were profoundly impressed by the Dante revival and by the study of the early Florentine masters. Rossetti himself was an accomplished translator from Dante and from Villon. He preferred Keats to Shelley because (like himself) he had no philosophy. The 1 8th century was to him as if it had never been, he dislikes Greek lucidity and the open air, and prefers lean medieval saints, spectral images and mystic loves. The passion of these students was retrospective; they wanted to revive the literature of a","body_html":"

His protest against the materialistic view of life is, perhaps, a more valid one than Tennyson's; he is at pains to show us the noble elements valuable in spite of failure to achieve tangible success. He realizes that the greater the man, the greater is the failure, yet protests unfailingly against the despondent or materialist view of life. His nimble appreciation of character and motive attracts the attentive curiosity of highly intellectual people; but the question recurs with some persistence as to whether poetry, after all, was the right medium for the expression of these views. Many of Browning's ideas and fertilizations will, perhaps, owing to the difficulty and uncertainty which attaches to their form, penetrate the future indirectly as the stimulant Ku*Ua. of other men's work. This is especially the case with Moni*. those remarkable writers who have for the first time Symoad*. given the fine arts a considerable place in English Pml'rliterature, notably John Ruskin (Modern Painters, 1842, Seven Lamps, 1849, Stones of Venice, 1853), William Morris, John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater. Browning, it is true, shared the discipleship of the first two with Kingsley and Carlyle.

\n

But Ruskin outlived all discipleships and transcended almost all the prose writers of his period in a style the elements of emotional power in which still preserve their secret. More a poet of doubt than either Tennyson or the college friend, A. H. Clough, whose loss he lamented in one of the finest pastoral elegies of all ages, Matthew Arnold takes xrao/rf rank with Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne alone among the Dii Majores of Victorian poetry. He is perhaps a disciple of Wordsworth even more than of Goethe, and he finds in Nature, described in rarefied though at times intensely beautiful phrase, the balm for the unrest of man's unsatisfied yearnings, the divorce between soul and intellect, and the sense of contrast between the barren toil of man and the magic operancy of nature. His most delicate and intimate strains are tinged with melancholy. The infinite desire of what might have been, the lacrimae rerun, inspires " Resignation," one of the finest pieces in his volume of 1849 (The Strayed Reveller). In the deeply-sighed lines of " Dover Beach " in 1867 it is associated with his sense of the decay of faith.

\n

The dreaming garden trees, the full moon and the white evening star of the beautiful English-coloured Thyrsis evoke the same mood, and render Arnold one of the supreme among elegiac poets. But his poetry is the most individual in the circle and admits the popular heart never for an instant. As a popularizer of Renan and of the view of the Bible, not as a talisman but as a literature, and, again, as a chastener of his contemporaries by means of the iteration of a few telling phrases about philistincs, barbarians, sweetness and light, sweet reasonableness, high seriousness, Hebraism and Hellenism, " young lions of the Daily Telegraph," and " the note of provinciality," Arnold far eclipsed his fame as a poet during his lifetime. His crusade of banter against the bad civilization of his own class was one of the most audaciously successful things of the kind ever accomplished. But all his prose theorizing was excessively superficial. In poetry he sounded a note which the prose Arnold seemed hopelessly unable ever to fathom.

\n

It is easier to speak of the virtuoso group who derived their first incitement to poetry from Chatterton, Keats and the early exotic ballads of Tennyson, far though these yet were gottfai from attaining the perfection in which they now appear after half a century of assiduous correction. The chief of them were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, hissister Christina, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The founders of this school, which took and acquired the name Pre-Raphaelite, were profoundly impressed by the Dante revival and by the study of the early Florentine masters. Rossetti himself was an accomplished translator from Dante and from Villon. He preferred Keats to Shelley because (like himself) he had no philosophy. The 1 8th century was to him as if it had never been, he dislikes Greek lucidity and the open air, and prefers lean medieval saints, spectral images and mystic loves. The passion of these students was retrospective; they wanted to revive the literature of a

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