disappears, and in its place you have an indifferent
copy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impression is
that they are not unlike Heine; you look into them, and Heine has
vanished. The man is gone, and only an awkward, angular, clumsily
articulated, entirely preposterous lay-figure remains to show that the
translator has been by.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

His Verse.

In every page of Arnold the poet there is something to return upon and to
admire. There are faults, and these of a kind this present age is ill-
disposed to condone. The rhymes are sometimes poor; the movement of the
verse is sometimes uncertain and sometimes slow; the rhythms are
obviously simple always; now and then the intention and effect are cold
even to austerity, are bald to uncomeliness. But then, how many of the
rarer qualities of art and inspiration are represented here, and here
alone in modern work! There is little of that delight in material for
material's sake which is held to be essential to the composition of a
great artist; there is none of that rapture of sound and motion and none
of that efflorescence of expression which are deemed inseparable from the
endowment of the true singer. For any of those excesses in technical
accomplishment, those ecstasies in the use of words, those effects of
sound which are so rich and strange as to impress the hearer with
something of their author's own emotion of creation--for any, indeed, of
the characteristic attributes of modern poetry--you shall turn to him in
vain. In matters of form this poet is no romantic but a classic to the
marrow. He adores his Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shakespeare's
fashions. For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentiment
and distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk for
talking's sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, to
embody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount of
richness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. In
his scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent and
Shakespearean--for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Human
and interesting in themselves, the ideas apparelled in his verse are
completely apprehended; natural in themselves, the experiences he
pictures are intimately felt and thoroughly perceived. They have been
resolved into their elements by the operation of an almost Sophoclean
fac