s doom, and Erinnyes never, like
those of Aeschylus, appeased. The Romantics had loved to play with
exotic suggestions; but the East of Hugo's _Orientales_ or Moore's
_Lalla Rookh_ is merely a veneer; the poet of _Qain_ has heard the wild
asses cry and seen the Syrian sun descend into the golden foam.

In the three commanding poets of our English mid-century, learning
becomes no less evidently poetry's honoured and indispensable ally.
Tennyson studies nature like a naturalist, not like a mystic, and finds
felicities of phrase poised, as it were, upon delicate observation. Man,
too, in Browning, loses the vague aureole of Shelleyan humanity, and
becomes the Italian of the Renascence or the Arab doctor or the German
musician, all alive but in their habits as they lived, and fashioned in
a brain fed, like no other, on the Book of the histories of Souls.
Matthew Arnold more distinctively than either, and both for better and
for worse, was the scholar-poet; among other things he was, with Heredia
and Carducci, a master of the poetry of critical portraiture, which
focusses in a few lines (_Sophocles_, _Rahel_, _Heine_, _Obermann Once
More_) the meaning of a great career or of a complex age.

(2) In the elaboration of their vision of beauty from these enlarged
sources, Leconte de Lisle and his followers demanded an impeccable
artistry. 'A great poet', he said, 'and a flawless artist are
convertible terms.' The Parnassian precision rested on the postulate
that, with sufficient resources of vocabulary and phrase, everything can
be adequately expressed, the analogue of the contemporary scientific
conviction that, with sufficient resources of experiment and
calculation, everything can be exhaustively explained. The pursuit of an
objective calm, the repudiation of missionary ardour, of personal
emotion, of the _cri du coeur_, of individual originality, involved the
surrender of some of the glories of spontaneous song, but opened the
way, for consummate artists such as these, to a profusion of
undiscovered beauty, and to a peculiar grandeur not to be attained by
the egoist. Leconte's temperament leads him to subjects which are
already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands assume this grandeur
without effort. The power of sheer style to ennoble is better seen in
Sully Prudhomme's _tours de force_ of philosophic poetry--when he
unfolds his ideas upon 'Justice' or 'Happiness', for instance, under the
form of a debate where maste