they are, as we would more clumsily say, educable. In 1852, writing to Clough on the
subject of equality (a political objective in which he believed by conviction if not by
instinct), Arnold observed: 'I am more and more convinced that the world tends to
become more comfortable for the mass, and more uncomfortable for those of any
natural gift or distinction?and it is as well perhaps that it should be so?for hitherto
the gifted have astonished and delighted the world, but not trained or inspired or in
any real way changed it.' Arnold's gifts as a poet and critic enabled him to do both:
to delight the world and to change it.
Isolation. To Marguerite1
We were apart; yet, day by day,
I bade my heart more constant be.
I bade it keep the world away,
And grow a home for only thee;
s Nor feared but thy love likewise grew,
Like mine, each day, more tried, more true.
The fault was grave! I might have known,
What far too soon, alas! I learned?
The heart can bind itself alone,
io And faith may oft be unreturned. Self-swayed our feelings ebb and swell?
Thou lov'st no more?Farewell! Farewell!
1. Addressed to a woman Arnold is reputed to have been Mary Claude, a woman Arnold knew in have met in Switzerland in the 1840s. It has been England at this same period who, though English, commonly assumed that she was French or Swiss; had connections with Germany and had translated but some recent biographies speculate she might German prose and verse.
.
T o MARGUERITE?CONTINUE D / 135 5 15Farewell!?and thou, thou lonely heart,2 Which never yet without remorse Even for a moment didst depart From thy remote and sphered course To haunt the place where passions reign? Back to thy solitude again! Back with the conscious thrill of shame 202530 Which Luna felt, that summer night, Flash through her pure immortal frame, When she forsook the starry height To hang over Endymion's sleep Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep.3 Yet she, chaste queen, had never proved How vain a thing is mortal love, Wandering in Heaven, far removed. But thou hast long had place to prove0This truth?to prove, and make thine own: 'Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.' test 35Or, if not quite alone, yet they Which touch thee are unmating things? Ocean and clouds and night and day; Lorn autumns and triumphant springs; And life, and others' joy and pain, And love, if love, of happier men. 40Of happier men?for they, at least, Have dreamed two human hearts might blend In one, and were through faith released From isolation without end Prolonged; nor knew, although not less Alone than thou, their loneliness. 1849 1857
To Marguerite?Continued
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,0 encircled
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
5 The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
2. Presumably the speaker's heart, not Margue-fell in love with Endymion, a handsome shepherd rite's. whom she discovered asleep on Mount Latmos. 3. Luna (or Diana), virgin goddess of the moon,
.
135 6 / MATTHEW ARNOLD
10 The nightingales divinely sing;
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;
15 For surely once, they feel, we were
