“The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea—­”

he is thinking of man, not of the ocean:  and the mood seems ancient rather than modern, the feeling of a Greek, just as the sound of the waves to him is always Aegean.

In treating of man’s life, which must be the main thing in any poet’s work, Arnold is either very austere or very pessimistic.  If the feeling is moral, the predominant impression is of austerity; if it is intellectual, the predominant impression is of sadness.  He was not insensible to the charm of life, but he feels it in his senses only to deny it in his mind.  The illustrative passage is from ’Dover Beach’:—­

         “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.”

This is the contradiction of sense and thought, the voice of a regret grounded in the intellect (for if it were vital and grounded in the emotions it would become despair); the creed of illusion and futility in life, which is the characteristic note of Arnold, and the reason of his acceptance by many minds.  The one thing about life which he most insists on is its isolation, its individuality.  In the series called ‘Switzerland,’ this is the substance of the whole; and the doctrine is stated with an intensity and power, with an amplitude and prolongation, that set these poems apart as the most remarkable of all his lyrics.  From a poet so deeply impressed with this aspect of existence, and unable to find its remedy or its counterpart in the harmony of life, no joyful or hopeful word can be expected, and none is found.  The second thing about life which he dwells on is its futility; though he bids one strive and work, and points to the example of the strong whom he has known, yet one feels that his voice rings more true when he writes of Obermann than in any other of the elegiac poems.  In such verse as the ‘Summer Night,’ again, the genuineness of the mood is indubitable.  In ‘The Sick King of Bokhara,’ the one dramatic expression of his genius, futility is the very centre of the action.  The fact that so much of his poetry seems to take its motive from the subsidence of Christian faith has set him among the skeptic or agnostic poets, and the “main movement” which he believed he had expressed was doubtless that in which agnosticism was a leading element.  The unbelief of the third quarter of the century was certainly a controlling influence over him, and in a man mainly intellectual by nature it could not well have been otherwise.