Mr Arnold's form. Its greatest examples
have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action
of intense poetic feeling--Shakespeare's, Milton's, Wordsworth's,
Rossetti's--and intensity was not Mr Arnold's characteristic. Yet
_Austerity of Poetry, East London_, and _Monica's Last Prayer_ must
always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical
weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. _Calais
Sands_ may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and _Dover
Beach_ is very much more. Mr Arnold's theological prepossessions and
assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an
argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a
testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the
argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the
thing that is _not_ the subject, the tendency outside the subject,
which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here
you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different
a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to
which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and _banal_,
and which prose literature never attains except by a _tour de force_;
that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant
music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory
of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among
all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea
usually inspired Mr Arnold--it is as natural to great English poets to
leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as
it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any
poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at
any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some
confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires
the poem; and for my part I find in _Dover Beach_, even without the
_Merman_, without the _Scholar-Gipsy_, without _Isolation_, a document
which I could be content to indorse "Poetry, _sans phrase_."

_The Terrace at Berne_ has been already dealt with, but that mood for
epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the _Carnac_
stanzas adequate, and in _A Southern Night_ consummate, expression.
_The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira_, written long before, but now
first published, has the usual faults of