Page:Essays and Studies

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MATTHEW ARNOLD'S NEW POEMS.

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David Gray's.^[1] Men listen, and depart with the belief that they have this faculty or this vision which alone, they are told, makes the poet; and once imbued with that belief, soon pass or slide from the inarticulate to the articulate stage of debility and disease. Aspiration foiled and impotent is a piteous thing enough, but friends and teachers of this sort make it ridiculous as well. A man can no more win a place among poets by dreaming of it or lusting after it than he can win by dream or desire a woman's beauty or a king's command; and those encourage him to fill his belly with the east wind

↑ This was a poor young Scotchman who may be remembered as having sought and found help and patronage at the hands first of Mr. Dobell and afterwards of Lord Houghton. In some of his sonnets there are touches of sweet and sincere emotion; but the most remarkable points in his poor little book, and those which should be most memorable to other small poets of his kind (if at least the race of them were capable of profiting by any such lesson), ate first the direct and seemingly unconscious transference of some of the best known lines or phrases from such obscure authors as Shakespeare and Wordsworth into the somewhat narrow and barren field of his own verse, and secondly the incredible candour of expression given in his correspondence to such flatulent ambition and such hysterical self-esteem as the author of "Balder" must have regarded, I should think, with a sorrowful sense of amusement. I may add that the poor boy's name was here cited with no desire to confer upon it any undeserved notoriety for better or for worse, and. assuredly with no unkindlier feeling than pity for his poor little memory, but simply as conveying the most apt and the most flagrant as well as the most recent instance I happened to remember of the piteous and grievous harm done by false teaching and groundless encouragement to spirits not strong enough to know their own weakness. It was a kindly but uncritical reference in Mr. Arnold's kindly but uncritical essay on Maurice de Guérin—an essay of which T have said a few words further on—that upon this occasion for once recalled the name to my mind, and supplied me with the illustration required.

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[1] This was a poor young Scotchman who may be remembered as having sought and found help and patronage at the hands first of Mr. Dobell and afterwards of Lord Houghton. In some of his sonnets there are touches of sweet and sincere emotion; but the most remarkable points in his poor little book, and those which should be most memorable to other small poets of his kind (if at least the race of them were capable of profiting by any such lesson), ate first the direct and seemingly unconscious transference of some of the best known lines or phrases from such obscure authors as Shakespeare and Wordsworth into the somewhat narrow and barren field of his own verse, and secondly the incredible candour of expression given in his correspondence to such flatulent ambition and such hysterical self-esteem as the author of "Balder" must have regarded, I should think, with a sorrowful sense of amusement. I may add that the poor boy's name was here cited with no desire to confer upon it any undeserved notoriety for better or for worse, and. assuredly with no unkindlier feeling than pity for his poor little memory, but simply as conveying the most apt and the most flagrant as well as the most recent instance I happened to remember of the piteous and grievous harm done by false teaching and groundless encouragement to spirits not strong enough to know their own weakness. It was a kindly but uncritical reference in Mr. Arnold's kindly but uncritical essay on Maurice de Guérin—an essay of which T have said a few words further on—that upon this occasion for once recalled the name to my mind, and supplied me with the illustration required.

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