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Introduction
Misery! we have known each other.
Like a sister and a brother
Living in the same lone home,
Many years...
These lines of Shelley with a little variation-melancholy in place of misery-may very well have been written by Arnold. Arnold, by universal consent, is one of the most melancholic poets of England. Melancholy is the chief characteristic quality of his poetry.
Melancholic Outlook: Looking upon the complex and conflicting life around him, Arnold could not count himself among the optimists. He could not, like Macaulay, put his faith in material progress and rest satisfied; nor could he, like Browning, believe God to be in Heaven and assume that 'all's right with the world. Most men, Arnold saw, live in a brazen prison.
Where in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall. (A Summer Night, Line. 38-41)
He saw them burden with stick fatigue, languid doubt, casual creeds, divided aims, palsied hearts, repeated shocks, mental strife and the strange disease of modern life. Seeing all this Arnold experiences 'nameless feelings' course through him and experiencing thus he could not but confess: ... from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day. (The Buried Life. Line. 73-6)
This was Arnold's melancholy - the result of his realisation of the 'something that infects the world' of the 'ground bone of human agony', of the 'heart break in the heart of things', of the still, sad music of humanity'.
Melancholy in Arnold's Poetry: Melancholy is there in all Arnold's poems from the gayest to the gravest, from the shortest to the longest. I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll' - he confesses in The Buried Life. The foil'd searching of mortality' - is how he describes the attempts of critics to know the secret of Shakespeare's genius. "I struggle towards the light" - he cries in Absence. Hark what pain' - he says, referring to the song of the nightingale, in Philomela. 'And never once possess our soul before we die' - he says pathetically in A Southern Night. 'Immedicable pain' is a precious phrase in Obermann Once More. Oh, hide me in your gloom profoundly solemn seats of holy pain he appeals in The Grande Chartreuse. In the same poem he records the suffering of his age.
Even a child described in Arnold's To a Gipsy Child by the Seashore has lost all the joys of life. He feels the "clouds of doom" which are shrouding his life and the life to him is synonymous with "vanity of hope". Unlike Wordsworth's concept of a child as "trailing clouds of glory" from heaven, Arnold's child is in a vale of tears.
Arnold cannot share Browning's facile optimism that youth is good, and "best is yet to be". Rather he says in Growing Old
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we are ever young.
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.
(Line. 21-5)
Similarly Youth's Agitations records the perpetual unhappiness of man. A young man thinks that youth is a period of agitation and longs for repose in his old age. When old he casts a longing, lingering look behind, and thinks that youth is distinctly better.
And sigh that one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common-discontent.
(Line. 13-14)
Empedocles on Etna also reflects the melancholic note. Arnold himself says that in this poem, "a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged unrelieved by hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done." Caught irrevocably in the meshes of the time spirit, Arnold could not but weep. In A Summer Night, a question from an anguished heart is lonely heard. The poet asks,
Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave, must man be one?
(Line. 74-75)
Again in Sohrab and Rustum there is a sense of tears in mortal things as this epic fragment deals with the death of a son at the hands of his own father.
The Cause of Arnold's Melancholy: Forlorn, sadness, pain, suffering, failure, loneliness, such words are frequently associated with Arnold's poetry. "Down in the depth of our life underneath all our activities, our interests, even our affections and our happiness he was conscious of an unceasing craving, a longing that can never be satisfied, to know and understand what life is and what the fate of man, a sense too that we are in the grasp of a power immeasurable and relentless against which it is vain to struggle; conscious too that this fruitless yearning is not in the individual breast alone, but is the deepest element in the life of our race, colouring all its story through all the centuries through which it dwells. upon the earth".This unsatisfied craving this fruitless yearning of humanity is one reason for Arnold's melancholy. The tragedy of Modern life is another cause. The Scholar Gipsy is an eloquent commentary upon the Victorian age, full of sick hurry and divided aims. There is a deep melancholy undertone throughout the poem:
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day.
The inevitable loneliness of humanity is another cause of the melancholic note. 'In the sea of life enisled ... we mortal millions live alone'. An unplumbed, salt, estranging sea rolls between one soul and another. Not humanity alone but even the great powers of Nature themselves have the same loneliness: Alone the sun rises, and alone spring the great streams'.
A Glimmer of Hope and Optimism Underlying the Spirit of Melancholy: Arnold's melancholy is not however, a melancholy that detects and depresses, a melancholy that robs us of our strength and spirit and fills us with despair. Rather it is a wistful feeling that attempts to discover a secret way out of the forlorn, lonely and forsaken miasma around that seeks 'fugitive and gracious light, why to illumine', that finds "The aids to noble life are all within" and that realises the truth to 'resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery'.
Arnold's melancholy and scepticism thus, is not without sunshine; his sadness not without gladness. Tinged with sorrow and touched with despair - he yet points to the reddening East heralding a happier day:
Conclusion: Arnold was ever haunted by that undertone in human life which to the reflective and meditative temperament is so apt to throb with perpetual melancholy. Amidst the universal rejoicings of the Victorian age, Arnold seems to be a supreme anachronism. He strikes a discordant note of melancholy. That explains Arnold's lack of popularity in his age. But though the ache is always there at the heart of Arnold's poetry, there is yet about it a cheerful and irradiating gladness, a gleam that helps the groping man of his way along the destined road.