But there was something more than this.  Mr Arnold’s poetic ambition, as we have seen, did not aim at very long and elaborate works.  His forte was the occasional piece—­which might still suggest itself and be completed—­which, as we shall see, did sometimes suggest itself and was completed—­in the intervals, the holidays, the relaxations of his task.  And if these lucid and lucent intervals, though existent, were so rare, their existence and their rarity together suggest that something more than untoward circumstance is to blame for the fact that they did not show themselves oftener.  A full and constant tide of inspiration is imperative; it will not be denied; it may kill the poet if he cannot or will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient of repression—­quietly content to appear now and then, even on such occasions as the deaths of a Clough and a Stanley.  Nor is it against charity or liberality, while it is in the highest degree consonant with reason and criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold’s poetic vein was not very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to indulge it, that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his master’s phrases, was not exactly “inevitable,” despite the exquisiteness of its quality on occasion.

It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest part of Mr Arnold’s life is so fertile in poetry, for otherwise, in the dearth of information, it would be a terribly barren subject.  The thirty years of life yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the first, with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is perhaps the most interesting.  At the Trafalgar Square riots of March 1848 the writer is convinced that “the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck”; sees “a wave of more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over us”; and already holds that strange delusion of his that “the French are the most civilised of European peoples.”  He develops this on the strength of “the intelligence of their idea-moved classes” in a letter to his sister; meets Emerson in April; goes to a Chartist “convention,” and has a pleasant legend for Miss Martineau that the late Lord Houghton “refused to be sworn in as a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic at a moment’s notice.”  He continues to despair of his country as hopelessly as the Tuxford waiter;[6] finds Bournemouth “a very stupid place”—­which is distressing; it is a stupid place enough now, but it was not then:  “a great moorland covered with furze and low pine coming down to the sea” could never be that—­and meets Miss Bronte, “past thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though.”  The rest we must imagine.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically puzzling word “landing-stage.”  But unless I mistake, a “kempshott,” “campshed,” or “campshedding” is not a landing-stage (though it helps to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes and planks, put to guard the bank against floods, the wash of barges, &c.