Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and historicism

era, he says, when "modern problems have presented themselves." "[W]e
hear already the doubts," Arnold adds, when "we witness the discourage-
ment, of Hamlet and of Faust." His Empedocles is based on the Greek
poet-philosopher who lived in Sicily circa 440 BC but his profound sense of
spiritual exile and his alienated self-consciousness owe much to the
Romantic poet George Gordon Byron. Empedocles's dystopic world is one
where "Heaven is with earth at strife" (MA I. 122), and in which "we feel,
day and night, / The burden of ourselves" (I. 127-28). Uncannily prescient
of the alienating cultural dislocations of the nineteenth century, this poet-
philosopher announces: "we are strangers here; the world is from of old"
(181). "To tunes we did not call," he declares, "our being must keep chime"
(I. 196). As Peter Allan Dale points out, "Empedocles on Etna" "is at least
as much a poem about history and historical process as it is about the
dialogue of a mind with itself." 14 Like his spiritual heirs, Empedocles looks
in vain to the past for redemption:

And we shall fly for refuge to past times,

Their soul of unworn youth, their breath of greatness;

And the reality will pluck us back,

Knead us in its hot hand, and change our nature. (II. 383-86)

Arnold himself was plucked back from these "past times" by the critical
essays that came to dominate his career as a writer from the 1860s onward.
Following his resolution to emulate instead the "grand style" and "the
calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity" of "the great monu-
ments of early Greek genius" ("Preface," I, 5, 1), his muse deserted him,
and he thereafter endorsed the Hellenic cultural ideal chiefly in prose.
"Empedocles on Etna" was not reprinted until New Poems (1867). In his
review of the volume, the younger poet Swinburne praised the poem,
saying of the songs that the harpist Callicles plays to soothe Empedocles:
"No poet has ever come so near the perfect Greek; he has strung with a
fresh chord the old Sophoclean lyre." 15 In the same essay, however,
Swinburne (who had recently gained notoriety as a controversial critic and
poet) has a fictitious French writer complain of the English "ils ont la manie
de vouloir reconcilier les choses irreconciliables" ('they always want to
reconcile things irreconcilable' [57, 59]). Swinburne clearly has little time
for Arnold's endeavors in other poems to reconcile the irreconcilable -
rationalism and religion, art and morality - within a moralized form of
Hellenism:

Elsewhere... Mr. Arnold also has now and then given signs of an inclination

for that sad task of sweeping up dead leaves fallen from the dying tree of

belief; but has not wasted much time or strength on such sterile and stupid

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