poet's (Homer's) comment or Helen's mention of her brothers; or take his

*Α δειλώ, τί σφῶϊ δόμεν Πηλῆϊ ἄνακτι

θνητᾷ ; ὑμείς δ ̓ ἐστὸν ἀγήρω τ ̓ ἀθανάτω τε.

ἢ ἵνα δυστήνοισι μετ' ἀνδράσιν ἄλγε ̓ ἔχητον ;

the address of Zeus to the horses of Peleus; or take finally his

Καὶ σέ γέρον τὸ πρὶν μὲν ἀκούομεν ὄλβιον εἶναι.

the words of Achilles to Priam, a suppliant before him. Take that incomparable line and a half of Dante, Ugolino's tremendous words

"Io no piangeva; si dentro impietrai.
Piangevan elli .

take the lovely words of Beatrice to Virgil—

"Io son fatta da Dio, sua mercè, tale,

Che la vostra miseria non mi tange,

Nè fiamma d'esto incendio non m'assale."

take the simple, but perfect, single line

"In la sua volontade è nostra pace."

Take of Shakespeare a line or two of Henry the Fourth's expostulation with sleep

"Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge . . .”

and take, as well, Hamlet's dying request to Horatio

"If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story

Take of Milton that Miltonic passage

"Darken'd so, yet shone

Above them all the archangel; but his face

Deep scars of thunder had intrench'd, and care
Sat on his faded cheek . . . ..'

and finish with the exquisite close to the loss of Proserpine, the loss

"which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world."

These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate."

"The specimens I have quoted differ widely from one another, but they have in common this: the possession of the very highest poetical quality. . . . . Critics give themselves great labor to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better simply to have recourse to concrete examples; to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, and to say: The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there.

. . . Nevertheless, if we are urgently pressed to give some critical account of them, we may safely, perhaps, venture on laying down, not indeed how and why the characters arise, but where and in what they arise. They are in the matter and substance of the poetry, and they are in its manner and style. But if we are asked to define this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it. . . . Only one thing we may add as to the substance and matter of poetry . . . . that the substance and matter of the best poetry acquire their special character from possessing, in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness. We may add yet further, what is in itself evident, that to the style and manner of the best poetry their special character, their accent, is given by their diction, and, even yet more, by their movement. And though we distinguish between the two characters, the two accents, of superiority, yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with the other. The superior quality of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superi

orities are closely related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other."

Here, then, we have the full statement and exposition of the doctrine of the grand style. One may admit at once that it is open to several objections. It is vague; it argues in a circle; it makes distinctions, such as that between severity and simplicity, which we cannot clearly perceive. Finally it leaves us very much in the dark about the characteristic diction and movement of the grand style. Nor are we enlightened about the superior quality of truth and seriousness that is to be found in poetry of the grand style. To all objections Arnold smiles blandly, points to his passages, and says the grand style is there; read them and feel it. In short, Arnold's defence would be that he is not dealing with a subject capable of exact demonstration like a proposition in geometry. It is not demonstrable by the laws of pure logic. Once one admits this contention, Arnold's doctrine is reasonable enough, despite what Saintsbury calls the 'circularity' of his definitions. There is, however, one reservation to be made here. Arnold seems to imply that all poetry of the very highest quality is written in the grand style. Now, as many critics point out, his grand style has no place for much of what is recognized by all the world as inspired poetry. It shuts out, for instance, all but a very small portion of lyric poetry—and after all it is in lyric poetry that we have the most consummate expression of passion. Nevertheless, Arnold's main thesis is not touched by this objection, for we may hold that he has not enabled us to determine whether or not a particular passage or poem is great poetry and at the same time stoutly maintain that he has enabled us to determine whether the same passage or poem is in the grand style. Let us see once more what are its characteristics.

"It will be found," says Arnold, "that the grand style arises in poetry when a noble nature poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or severity a serious subject"; and again, “the substance and matter of the best poetry acquire their special character from possessing, in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness." Further, "the superior quality of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement

marking its style and manner." All this abstract definition does not, as Arnold admits, get us very far. He really relies on his illustrative examples to prove the existence and character of the grand style; in his own words, "The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there." Let us, then, examine these specimens to see if we can detect what elements they have in common.

Is Arnold right when he says "The specimens I have quoted differ widely from one another, but they have in common this: the possession of the very highest poetic quality." Most lovers of poetry would agree that the specimens are of very high poetic quality; would they be equally agreed in thinking that 'they differ widely from one another? To me they seem. curiously alike. There is the same dominant tone in them allthe tone of profound sadness, of melancholy tempered by resignation. They might serve as exemples to illustrate Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'emotion recollected in tranquillity', though the only 'emotion' they recall is that of suffering. But there is no poignancy of sorrow, no pang of present grief, in any one of them, not even in the 'tremendous words' of Ugoline:

Io no piangeva: si dentro impietrai:
Piangevan elli . .

One need only repeat the examples to feel this similarity, almost uniformity, of tone. Even the passage from Henry the Fourth's expostulation with sleep

"Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge,"

has a deep undercurrent of profound melancholy; what avail the pomps of kingly rule if care draws such fantasies in his mind that the king is denied the blessed sleep that comes even to the poor laborer 'crammed with distressful bread'? Clearly Arnold was mistaken in thinking that these passages differed widely from one another. So far from differing widely, they all express the sense of tears in things, the suffering of frail humanity, and express it not with that poignancy of pathos to which Arnold objects in the poetry of Burns but with the restraint of classic poetry. In short, suffering expressed with

the noble restraint of the classics is what characterizes Arnold's examples of the grand style.

Now anyone who knows Arnold's own poetry is not surprised that he should have rated so highly poetry of this particular kind. The prevailing tone of his own poetry is one of pensive melancholy. There is in it less of the 'tonic' quality than he finds in Homer, less of the triumph over suffering than in Dante, but much of the sense of tears in things one feels in Vergil.

"Desire not that my father! thou must live.
For some are born to do great deeds and live,
As some are born to be obscured and die."

(Sohrob and Rustum).

"Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back and flung
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in."

(Dover Beach).

Aftr reading that one understands why the examples Arnold chose to illustrate the grand style are prevailingly sad. They were what appealed to his own temperament. Now it may be, we grant, that Shelley is right in saying that

'Our sweetest songs are those

That sing of saddest thought';

it may be that there is something essentially nobler and of deeper appeal to mankind in the record of suffering nobly borne or triumphantly trodden under foot than in the expression of the joy of life. We may admit that Milton's lines

"Standing on earth, not wrapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days,
On evil days though fall'n and evil tongues,"

have a deeper appeal than Browning's,

"How good is man's life the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy."

But yet we cannot accept a doctrine of poetry that excludes from the highest rank, as a strict interpretation of Arnold's grand style does, all poetry that has joy as its inspiration.