Quotes by Matthew Arnold

"Ah, once more," I cried, "ye stars, ye waters, On my heart your mighty charm renew; 10 Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you, Feel my soul becoming vast like you!" From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven, Over the lit sea's unquiet way, In the rustling night-air came the answer: 15 "Wouldst thou _be_ as these are? _Live_ as they. "Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, These demand not that the things without them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy. 20 "And with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silver'd roll; For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul. "Bounded by themselves, and unregardful 25 In what state God's other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty life you see." O air-born voice! long since, severely clear, A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear: 30 "Resolve to be thyself; and know that he, Who finds himself, loses his misery!" A SUMMER NIGHT In the deserted, moon-blanch'd street, How lonely rings the echo of my feet! Those windows, which I gaze at, frown, Silent and white, unopening down, Repellent as the world;--but see, 5 A break between the housetops shows The moon! and, lost behind her, fading dim Into the dewy dark obscurity Down at the far horizon's rim, Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose! 10 And to my mind the thought Is on a sudden brought Of a past night, and a far different scene. Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep As clearly as at noon; 15 The spring-tide's brimming flow Heaved dazzlingly between; Houses, with long white sweep, Girdled the glistening bay; Behind, through the soft air, 20 The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away, The night was far more fair-- But the same restless pacings to and fro, And the same vainly throbbing heart was there, And the same bright, calm moon.

My voice shall never be joined to those which decry Goethe, and if it is said that the foregoing is a lame and impotent conclusion to Goethe's declaration that he had been the liberator of the Germans in general, and of the young German poets in particular, I say it is not. Goethe's profound, imperturbable naturalism is absolutely fatal to all routine thinking, he puts the standard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favor of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, "But _is_ it so? is it so to _me_?" Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt Goethe's influence most deeply. If it is said that Goethe professes to have in this way deeply influenced but a few persons, and those persons poets, one may answer that he could have taken no better way to secure, in the end, the ear of the world; for poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance. Nevertheless the process of liberation, as Goethe worked it, though sure, is undoubtedly slow; he came, as Heine says, to be eighty years old in thus working it, and at the end of that time the old Middle-Age machine was still creaking on, the thirty German courts and their chamberlains subsisted in all their glory; Goethe himself was a minister, and the visible triumph of the modern spirit over prescription and routine seemed as far off as ever. It was the year 1830; the German sovereigns had passed the preceding fifteen years in breaking the promises of freedom they had made to their subjects when they wanted their help in the final struggle with Napoleon. Great events were happening in France; the revolution, defeated in 1815, had arisen from its defeat, and was wresting from its adversaries the power. Heinrich Heine, a young man of genius, born at Hamburg,[139] and with all the culture of Germany, but by race a Jew; with warm sympathies for France, whose revolution had given to his race the rights of citizenship, and whose rule had been, as is well known, popular in the Rhine provinces, where he passed his youth; with a passionate admiration for the great French Emperor, with a passionate contempt for the sovereigns who had overthrown him, for their agents, and for their policy,--Heinrich Heine was in 1830 in no humor for any such gradual process of liberation from the old order of things as that which Goethe had followed.

in the sea of life enisled, °1 With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live _alone_. The islands feel the enclasping flow, 5 And then their endless bounds they know. But when the moon° their hollows lights, °7 And they are swept by balms of spring, And in their glens, on starry nights, The nightingales divinely sing; 10 And lovely notes, from shore to shore, Across the sounds and channels pour-- Oh! then a longing like despair Is to their farthest caverns sent; For surely once, they feel, we were 15 Parts of a single continent! Now round us spreads the watery plain-- Oh might our marges meet again! Who order'd, that their longing's fire Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd? 20 Who renders vain their deep desire?-- A God, a God their severance ruled! And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.° °24 KAISER DEAD° _April_ 6, 1887 What, Kaiser dead? The heavy news Post-haste to Cobham° calls the Muse, °2 From where in Farringford° she brews °3 The ode sublime, Or with Pen-bryn's bold bard° pursues °5 A rival rhyme. Kai's bracelet tail, Kai's busy feet, Were known to all the village-street. "What, poor Kai dead?" say all I meet; "A loss indeed!" 10 O for the croon pathetic, sweet, Of Robin's reed°! °12 Six years ago I brought him down, A baby dog, from London town; Round his small throat of black and brown 15 A ribbon blue, And vouch'd by glorious renown A dachshound true. His mother, most majestic dame, Of blood-unmix'd, from Potsdam° came; °20 And Kaiser's race we deem'd the same-- No lineage higher.

But, after all, the criticism I am really concerned with,--the criticism which alone can much help us for the future, the criticism which, throughout Europe, is at the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on the importance of criticism and the critical spirit,--is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have, for their proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. Special, local, and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this program. And what is that but saying that we too, all of us, as individuals, the more thoroughly we carry it out, shall make the more progress? There is so much inviting us!--what are we to take? what will nourish us in growth towards perfection? That is the question which, with the immense field of life and of literature lying before him, the critic has to answer; for himself first, and afterwards for others. In this idea of the critic's business the essays brought together in the following pages have had their origin; in this idea, widely different as are their subjects, they have, perhaps, their unity. I conclude with what I said at the beginning: to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible. Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely to underrate it. The epochs of Æschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their preëminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 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. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. GROWING OLD What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? --Yes, but not this alone. Is it to feel our strength-- Not our bloom only, but our strength--decay? Is it to feel each limb Grow stiffer, every function less exact, Each nerve more loosely strung? Yes, this, and more; but not Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dream'd 'twould be! 'Tis not to have our life Mellow'd and soften'd as with sunset-glow, A golden day's decline. 'Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirr'd; And weep, and feel the fulness of the past, The years that are no more. It is to spend long days And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain. It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.