SOURCE: “Arnold's ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’: The Use and Abuse of History,” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 149-74.

[In the following essay, Grob contends that Arnold's later poetry and his prose represent a fundamental break from a “predominantly metaphysical mode … of explanation” of the human condition to a philosophy of cyclical history that was closely aligned with prevailing Victorian intellectual tendencies.]

After the publication in 1849 of The Strayed Reveller, And Other Poems, Arnold's poetry conceptually underwent something of a midcourse correction, a tentatively taken turn from predominantly metaphysical modes of explanation for our unhappy human predicament to what clearly seems a more overtly historicist analysis of our situation, a turn, it should be added, that brought Arnold as poet and later as prose writer more closely in line with the prevailing intellectual tendencies of the Victorian age. In “Resignation,” a kind of philosophic summing up and position paper for those poems of negation and despair that largely fill Arnold's volume of 1849, he had plainly ascribed our sufferings to an apparently atemporal cosmic agency, a “something that infects the world” (l. 278), which in its blind but all-encompassing indifference destructively afflicts nature as well as ourselves. To mitigate the effects of this metaphysically conceived source of infection he had counseled resignation, withdrawal, and even a renouncing of the very life of consciousness itself—he enjoins Fausta, indeed, to emulate those who would “Draw homeward to the general life” (l. 252), a mode of existence characterized earlier in “Resignation” by its chillingly austere minimalness:

That life, whose dumb wish is not missed
If birth proceeds, if things subsist;
The life of plants, and stones, and rain.

(ll. 193-195)¹

Elsewhere I have argued that “Resignation” provides us with what is philosophical most original and fundamental in Arnold's poetry, that it is the most clearly articulated statement in Victorian poetry of nineteenth-century metaphysical pessimism, a poetic analogue to the philosophy of Schopenhauer (a likeness, I hasten to add, that is the result of a shared Weltanschauung rather than any direct influence by the philosopher upon the poet).² For Arnold, like Schopenhauer, the world oppositionally divides into noumenal will and phenomenal idea, with an overridingly omnipotent blind cosmic impulse metaphysically determining our human fate to our ultimate detriment. Such a conception of metaphysical agency, I would add, helps shape not only the poems that appear in The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems, but many of those written afterwards, even poems as different as “Human Life,” “The Buried Life,” “To Marguerite—Continued” and Empedocles on Etna.

Nonetheless, as some of Arnold's most prominent critics have noted, not long after the publication of the 1849 volume, a discernible and in many ways contradictory turn to history is evident, a turn that would provide the governing intellectual paradigm not only for most of Arnold's later prose but even for some of the most notable poems written in the immediately ensuing years—“Dover Beach,” “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” and “The Scholar-Gipsy.”³ In these poems we are led to believe that we are as we unhappily are, not because some metaphysically determining cause mandates unremitting misery but because unluckily we are temporarily caught between worlds, born to dwell in the bottoming out of a historical cycle that has only one direction in which to move. Thus, while the poetry of historicism might lament present circumstances, it should contain the seeds of an inherent optimism and be amenable to hopes that present misery will be alleviated in that better future that awaits us when the historical cycle reverses itself, when a now withdrawing Sea of Faith cyclically turns shoreward as the logic of the figure dictates it must, or a spark from heaven finally falls or the world now powerless to be born completes its period of gestation and comes into being. Yet as readers of Arnold's poetry know, “Dover Beach,” “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” and “The Scholar-Gipsy,” for all of their historically implicit cyclical expectancy, convey little optimism and belong no less than “Resignation” or the “Marguerite” poems to Arnold's poetry of negation, carrying forward much of the melancholy and anxiety from that metaphysical pessimism that Arnoldian historicism might be thought to have supplanted.

“The Scholar-Gipsy” is a striking case in point. Born in a better and happier phase of the historical cycle, “when wits were fresh and clear, / And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames” (ll. 201-202), provided with a seeming exemption from the historically determined evils of the unhappy present—at least for as long as he remains faithful to his quest—and granted the possibility of surviving into that better and happier future to be called into being when “the spark from heaven” (l. 171) shall fall, the poem's title character should stand as a beacon of hope, a guide beckoning us toward that inevitable improvement necessarily mandated by the foreordained reversal of the historical cycle. Yet by poem's end the most resonant notes finally struck in “The Scholar-Gipsy” express nothing so much as desperation, denial, and despair, with any progressively conceived historical expectations repeatedly undermined and undone by the strategies and tactics of Arnoldian representation.

Though born “when wits were fresh and clear, / And life” (ll. 201-202) still gay, the scholar-gipsy had apparently presciently fled society at virtually the very point when the historical cycle began its downward turn toward a grim and dreary modernity. As we know from Arnold's subsequent prose, the mid-seventeenth century is the appropriate starting point for our historical epoch of cyclical decline and therefore an especially fortuitous moment for just such a flight from the prevailing culture as, we are told by Glanvill, the scholar-gipsy had chosen. It was then that Renaissance Hellenism with its free play of intellect and spontaneity of consciousness, its clarity of wit and gaiety of life, received a seemingly fatal check in England from the Hebraizing spirit of Puritanism; and an essentially Protestant Philistinism, with its twin impulses (as we have learned from Weber and Tawney) toward strictness of conscience and the making of money, began to dominate English life, so that one who was born when “life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames” (l. 202) and who has become “tired of knocking at preferment's door” (l. 35) might well choose to leave behind him a society increasingly Protestant and acquisitive. Moreover at the same historical moment a scientifically grounded skepticism had begun to put in question the supernatural tenets of a Christianity that even in the early phases of the Renaissance served as the basis for much of the seeming cohesiveness of European culture. Apparently foreseeing the future that these culturally dispiriting changes would produce, on the one hand, the rise of a socially stultifying Protestant Philistinism and, on the other, the emergence of that scientifically generated “languid doubt” (l. 164) that would typify the intellectual life of modernity, the young Oxford scholar had chosen to opt out of this transitional epoch, this unhappy, between-worlds span of history, and to keep himself in readiness instead for the reversal of the cycle, the advent of that happier age waiting to be born.

As to when that better world will be born and what it will be like, Arnold tells us very little. But as with any cyclically conceived historicism, the future we await should come about not through any merely contingent human endeavor but by the workings of some immanent necessity, inexorable historical laws that no individual or individuals can hasten, impede, or alter. The triggering signal for the upward turn of the historical cycle is to be the fall of a “spark from heaven” (l. 171), a heralding event that would seem to perform the same kind of annunciatory function in the cyclical changes of “The Scholar-Gipsy” that the birth of a god does in the regular and necessary two-thousand-year reversals of the Yeatsian gyre. Yet human agency does apparently collaborate in this Arnoldian schema of change, with the scholar-gipsy himself assigned a leading role in the working out of this historically transformative process. When the “heaven-sent moments” (l. 50) come he “will to the world impart” (l. 49) the arts he has learned from the gipsies, arts presumably indispensable to humanity's long awaited betterment but which until now had remained a closely guarded secret supposedly possessed by the gipsies alone who are apparently under no like obligation to disseminate it to humanity at large.

From Arnold's earliest considerations of the scholar-gipsy as a subject for poetry, the special and secret art he had acquired from the gipsies—hypnotism or mesmerism as the Victorians termed it—had been a principal reason for the poet's interest in the little known tale from Glanvill; indeed, as a notebook entry of 1848 tells us, the title originally contemplated by Arnold for a poem on the scholar-gipsy was “The first mesmerist.”⁴ Taken literally, the scholar-gipsy's explanation of what he will do with “the secret” of the gipsy's “art” (l. 48)—that is, mesmerism—at that critical juncture when the new world stands on the verge of being born is that he will “impart” it “to the world” (l. 49): he will transmit the secret of the gipsies to everyone, thereby apparently making all humans mesmerists. But since the end of mesmerism for those possessed of hypnotic powers is “to rule as they desired / The workings of men's brains” (ll. 45-46) so that “they can bind them to what thoughts they will” (l. 47), it is more likely that it is submission to rather than the acquisition of such powers by the generality of humankind that is to be culturally transformative. To have all humans mesmerized rather than all humans mesmerists—figuratively speaking—would thus seem the goal implicit in this admittedly imprecise formulation of that better future called into being by the fall of “the spark from heaven” (l. 171).

Since Glanvill himself attributes the hypnotic wonders performed by the gipsies to “the power of imagination” (Poems, p. 357), it seems reasonable, following Culler, to take the story of the scholar-gipsy as Arnold retells it a step further and read it as “a myth of the Romantic imagination.”⁵ And taking our hint from Arnold himself, we may further infer that the cultural function Arnold speculatively contemplated for the mesmerizing imagination at that momentous point at which the historical cycle begins its upward turn is probably much like that high destiny he will later assign to poetry itself in “The Study of Poetry.” There he tells us that at a date not far in the future “most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry” (CPW, 9:162), a poetry that will then be employed “to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” (CPW, 9:161), as religion and philosophy had once done. Caught on the horns of one of the nineteenth-century intellectual's major dilemmas, certain that the metaphysical explanations of Christianity had been exploded once and for all by the scientific rationalism and philosophic skepticism of the Enlightenment, and yet hopeful, as many nineteenth-century historicists were, that the unity of culture which Christianity had once fostered might be reconstituted under essentially secular auspices, Arnold apparently saw in a poetry more generally disseminated to a better educated public a vehicle for restoring that cultural and ultimately spiritual cohesiveness now lost. In “The Scholar-Gipsy” too these later conclusions are already intimated: that is, when the falling of “the spark from heaven” (l. 171) signals the emergence of a new epoch, the human community shall find its “thoughts” again bound into cohesiveness, this time by succumbing to the mesmerizing powers acquired by the scholar-gipsy, which themselves symbolically represent those powers widely ascribed in the nineteenth century to the poetic imagination, especially given its axiomatically assumed mythopoeic capabilities.

One major feature of “The Scholar-Gipsy” long noted by commentators is its strong though uncharacteristic resemblance to the great odes of Keats, especially “Ode to a Nightingale.”⁶ In “The Scholar-Gipsy” Arnold imitates both the meter and stanzaic form of the odes, and the first half of his poem displays an atypical lushness of natural description of a kind usually associated with Keats. But the most semantically interesting of Arnold's borrowings from the odes in “The Scholar-Gipsy” is his appropriation of their highly distinctive dramatic design, that process in which the desiring self imaginatively reaches out towards empathic communion with some implicitly sacralized symbolic object, a nightingale or a Grecian urn, only to find its efforts ultimately thwarted because the imagination has ascribed to those objects attributes and powers that cannot be empirically justified or because it has wildly overestimated its own power and reliability. Thus at poem's end the desiring speaker is essentially returned to the “sole self” (“Ode to a Nightingale,” l. 72) wiser perhaps but immeasurably sadder and more “forlorn,” though the reader is finally left with a highly problematized hope that things may be otherwise through the interrogatory possibilities raised in the closing lines of “Ode to a Nightingale” and the encapsulated summation with which the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” ventriloquistically concludes. For the first half of “The Scholar-Gipsy,” Arnold's argument too follows a roughly Keatsian trajectory. Having invested the scholar-gipsy with special mesmerizing powers of inestimable future usefulness, the speaker, anxious to claim these benefits for himself and his own age, embarks on an imagined pursuit that culminates with surprising ease in his astonishingly improbable claim to having “once, in winter,” (l. 121) actually seen the scholar-gipsy on a “wooden bridge” (l. 123) near Oxford, thereby achieving for himself something analogous to the empathic union with the symbolic object that is the comparable goal of the desiring self in the odes of Keats. But in Arnold, as in Keats, the empathic trajectory concludes with the admission of the wishful imagination's defeat, vanquished in this case by acknowledgment of the brute fact of human mortality, the limited life span allotted mortal man which renders any sighting of the scholar-gipsy by the speaker utterly impossible because “Two hundred years are flown / Since first thy story rang through Oxford halls” (ll. 131-132).

But the most radical departure by Arnold from his Keatsian precursors is in the remarkable unqualifiedness of his denial, his sudden reversal of that seemingly common-sense conclusion that since “Two hundred years are flown” (l. 131), the scholar-gipsy, presumably a mortal man like all others, must now be “in some quiet churchyard laid” (l. 137). Going far beyond the problematic but tentatively hopeful closings of the great odes, Arnold, in the parallel recovery of “The Scholar-Gipsy,” simply flies in the face of the seeming fact of human finitude and, wholly reversing himself, declares that the scholar-gipsy “hast not felt the lapse of hours” (l. 141) like the rest of us but rather possesses “an immortal lot” (l. 157). And because he has never died but is presumably destined to live forever, he can have been seen not many winters past and perhaps can be seen again by and even give instruction to the speaker and that modernity he represents.

Yet more seems less in this case and, despite the bold assurance with which Arnold asserts the immortality of the scholar-gipsy, his is a claim that implies considerably less than what is usually attached to such a claim in nineteenth-century poetry. For it is a strange and ultimately inconsequential immortality that emerges from “The Scholar-Gipsy,” and no critic and perhaps no reader either has probably ever taken its argument for immortality very seriously, at least in anything like the sense in which it is a serious and central concern of other major Victorian poems. Surely none of us reads “The Scholar-Gipsy” as we read In Memoriam and “Cleon,” for example, where the claim that the soul of Hallam now lives, or the intimation that the spirits of Cleon and Protos might continue to exist even after their deaths through the saving grace of Christ, is implicitly understood to have general human applicability, to be crucial evidence for the larger, essentially theological claim that the human soul survives beyond the grave. Nor does Arnold even go as far as Keats, who, by leaving open the speculative possibility that the nightingale might be an “Immortal Bird” (“Ode to a Nightingale,” l. 61) or the Grecian urn (and possibly even the individuals depicted there) might endure forever plainly encourages us to draw noumenal inferences, crucial conclusions about the possible eternality of the ultimately real, conclusions from which humanity, by extension, can derive for itself the hope of a life after death.⁷

But in “The Scholar-Gipsy” the prospect of immortality is obviously confined to the scholar-gipsy himself. His “immortal lot” (l. 157) is not by inference our “immortal lot,” an instance of the general laws governing our ultimately human destiny but is rather an apparently unique case of one man's exemption from these otherwise general laws of human mortality. Moreover, “The generations of thy peers” (l. 155), men who, like the scholar-gipsy, were “born in days when wits were fresh and clear, / And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames” (ll. 201-202) have certainly been granted no such exemption and are, as Arnold delicately puts it, “fled” (l. 155), gone to the grave and presumably to that death which is extinction. And alluding to the members of his own generation, Arnold ominously adds, “we ourselves shall go” (l. 156). (Nor does he ever offer the slightest hint that the inhabitants of the world that is to be born with assistance from the scholar-gipsy's mysteriously acquired arts shall be spared the mortality that, apart from the poem's one critical exception, seems the inescapable destiny of every human individual.)

Thus, the significance of this extravagantly asserted claim of immortality derives, I would suggest, not from its applicability to the essentially religious problem of death and the life hereafter but from its usefulness as a vehicle for carrying forward Arnold's argument about history. What the scholar-gipsy seems to have gained by remaining alive though “Two hundred years are flown” (l. 131) is for the poem's purposes not eternal life but a longevity sufficient to bridge the positive phases in the cyclical movement of a highly deterministic historical process, if only he can keep himself free from that inevitably fatal contamination by the contagiously tainting modernity that comes between these phases. And to achieve that narrower and implicitly fictive end of establishing the scholar-gipsy's exceptional longevity, Arnold, it would appear, does not feel that he needs anything like the complexly elaborated evolutionary arguments of Tennyson in In Memoriam nor even the scriptural authority that Browning draws upon in “Cleon.” In this case all that would seem required is the authorizing presence of a literary precedent of incontestable greatness, Keats's odes, which recollected by Arnold's reader might at least encourage him to suspend disbelief momentarily and by an act of poetic faith accept at something like face value Arnold's asserted but virtually unargued analogous claim that Arnold's scholar-gipsy, like the nightingale of Keats, was “not born for death” (“Ode to a Nightingale,” l. 61), but possessing an “immortal lot” (l. 157) remains similarly “exempt from age / And living as thou livs't on Glanvill's page” (ll. 158-159).

But there is another and perhaps more pertinent reason for Arnold's connecting the matter of “The Scholar-Gipsy” with the figure and poetry of Keats. As Culler has shown, the scholar-gipsy displays manifest symbolic affinities with other representatives of a recurrent Arnoldian type, especially figures like Callicles and the strayed reveller (the general designation which Culler applies to this Arnoldian type). While Arnold's strayed revellers are usually known by the symbolic locale associated with them, the shaded grove, and by their general disposition toward solitude and even reclusiveness, two of them, Callicles and the strayed reveller himself, are identified as poets and given songs to sing or poems to recite of a very special character. Unlike Arnold's other and greater poets, Sophocles and Shakespeare, sages who dwell upon seemingly impregnable mountain-tops from which they are able to comprehend life either in its vastness or to its depths, the strayed reveller as poet is essentially a celebrator of natural magic and concomitantly a purveyor of myth, a teller of quasi-religious tales designed to render human existence with all of its enigma and pain somehow intelligible, if possible bearable, and, at rare moments perhaps, even pleasurable as it would seem to have become in the orgiastic bacchic celebrations with which “The Strayed Reveller” itself concludes. (Probably nowhere in Arnold's poetry is the mythopoeic disposition and power of the strayed reveller as poet more strikingly displayed than in Callicles' great hymn to Apollo which follows the suicide of Empedocles in Empedocles on Etna, for by the poet's mythopoeic sleight-of-hand, Callicles manages to produce an explanation and ordering of the most inexplicable and painful of cosmic mysteries, converting them into a scenario not only of meaning but beauty.)

Of the poets who meant most to Arnold, Keats was clearly the one most closely associated with natural magic and the mythmaking imagination, thus with the poet as strayed reveller. (Even before Culler proposed his dramatis personae of basic Arnoldian types, Leon Gottfried in Matthew Arnold and the Romantics had astutely entitled his chapter on Keats and Arnold, “The Strayed Reveller: Keats.”)⁸ Admittedly, in the 1853 preface Arnold does single out Keats's Isabella, or the Pot of Basil as a bad example, a modern instance of the harmful influence of Shakespeare upon modern poetry, an influence Arnold saw as the precipitating cause of its misguided emphasis upon felicity of expression and its no less misguided disregard of “Architectonicè in the highest sense; that power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes” (CPW, 1:9). But as that homage which is imitation in “The Scholar-Gipsy” clearly shows, by 1853 Arnold also had almost certainly already recognized that quality in Keats on which he would base his 1880 encomium: “that in one of the two great modes by which poetry interprets, in the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare” (CPW, 9:214).⁹

Magic, indeed natural magic, its possession by those most profoundly in contact with the natural order, the gipsies, whose magical art of mesmerism can control “The workings of men's brains” and ultimately “bind them to what thoughts they will”; its acquisition by the Oxford scholar who would apparently keep it wholly to himself until he could direct it to socially useful ends; and finally its projected deployment by him at a propitious and seemingly sanctified moment for the sake of a new cultural cohesiveness: these in a sense constitute the greater subject and conceptually generate the principal action in “The Scholar-Gipsy.” And even as the figure of the scholar-gipsy possesses certain discernible affinities with Keats, so too, as I have already suggested, does the magic the scholar-gipsy has acquired bear a certain obvious likeness to the poetic imagination at its most magical, that is, as it manifests itself in poems like those in which Keats himself most brilliantly employed it. Carrying this same analogy a step further, I would maintain too that just as the magic of mesmerism will be imparted by the scholar-gipsy “to the world” (l. 49) at a moment designated by heaven for its deployment, so too, at a similarly fated moment, will the signified counterpart to his gipsy magic, the poet's power of imagination, be similarly deployed to bind men to the poet's imaginative will and bring humankind into that new cultural and spiritual cohesiveness that awaits it in that coming epoch whose unifying agency shall be not religion but poetry.

Thus it is to fulfill the high destiny assigned to poetry and the poetic imagination in the world that is to be born that the scholar-gipsy has been exempted from death and granted immortality (though a longevity sufficient to bridge the cycles might have sufficed). To keep the imagination inviolate, to preserve intact for the future those powers handed down from the past for their designated employment in that culturally transformative “project” that in his closely guarded solitude he nurses “in unclouded joy” (l. 199)—it is for these ends that the scholar-gipsy has chosen to lead a life apart and flee those who would seek him out to persuade him to disseminate his magic prematurely, before the arrival of the “heaven-sent moments” when the secrets of his art are to be imparted. From the very first, the scholar-gipsy would seem to have already adopted the artist's self-alienating strategy of “silence, exile, and cunning” as his way of guarding his special and ultimately indispensable powers. With the least sophisticated, those most like the gipsies in their relationship with nature, he may maintain a certain contact, remaining apparently unperturbed at being observed by the housewife who quietly darns “At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills” (l. 101) or by the “Children, who early range these slopes / And late for cresses from the rills” (ll. 105-106) and even handing flowers to “Maidens, who from distant hamlets come / To dance around the Fyfield elm in May” (ll. 82-83). But on these occasions, the scholar-gipsy keeps essentially to himself, remaining “pensive and tongue-tied” (l. 54), maintaining that self-imposed state of alienation, the artist's exile projected in his bearing. And when those he encounters are at all likely to upset that equanimity, to draw him away from his chosen pensiveness and silence, whether they are noisy shepherds at some lonely country alehouse or “Oxford riders blithe” (l. 72), his strategy is already one that shall become even more pronounced in the poem's second half, an even more urgent flight into a still deeper solitude.

In fact, in the poem's second half the scholar-gipsy is never again seen with another person but is either depicted in solitary flight or encouraged to continue so; hence David Riede's suggestion that we look upon the second part of “The Scholar-Gipsy” as a “misreading” of the first part, resulting in an all-too-arbitrary transformation of the scholar-gipsy's character from “happy wanderer” to “zealous quester.”¹⁰ What is most remarkable though about the second half of “The Scholar-Gipsy” is not any change in the scholar-gipsy's character but that after the poem's great reversal—the denial and then reassertion of the scholar-gipsy's immortality—it is the self-designated pursuer himself, the speaker whose ruminations during the poem's first half were only intended to pass the time until nightfall when he could “again begin the quest,” who most strenuously exhorts the scholar-gipsy to persist in a flight that must leave the goals of the speaker's quest unattained if its object were to heed his counsel. For success by the speaker in overtaking the scholar-gipsy would mean not the imparting of a special wisdom by that exemplary figure to his would-be disciple, but its destruction before its possessor could fulfill the special purpose of his mission to the future; and for the scholar-gipsy personally, success in the quest would mean exposure to the fatal contagion of modernity—its feverishness and, above all, “the infection of our mental strife” (l. 222)—endangering one who up to this time had remained free of that contagion by living (at least for the duration of the modern period) within a natural order that seemingly stands outside the historical process altogether. While the speaker may be compelled by his own historical predicament to persist in his quest after the scholar-gipsy, he knows that the least he can do if he truly is concerned with the scholar-gipsy's well-being is to warn him away, implore him to “fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!” (l. 221). And if the scholar-gipsy were to be unlucky enough to come within sight of his ardent pursuers, he is urged to remain “Averse” (l. 208), to “Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!” (l. 210) because contact would mean transmission of that endemic and inevitably fatal ailment, “this strange disease of modern life” (l. 203), with the result that “thy glad perennial youth would fade, / Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours” (ll. 229-230).

At this point, it is probably useful to reconsider our governing analogy which connects “The Scholar-Gipsy,” its titular figure, and his mesmerizing magic with Keats and poetry and the poetic imagination. And carrying that analogy to its logical conclusion, we would undoubtedly wish to argue that just as success by the speaker in his quest, his overtaking of the scholar-gipsy and appropriation of his powers, would fatally impair the efficacy of those magical powers whose proper application is to make the world now waiting to be born as healthy and whole as that better world which existed prior to modernity, so too would the allegorically comparable pursuit of poetry by the modern poet (and most especially by Arnold himself) impair the analogously magical powers of the poetic imagination and prevent it from realizing the high destiny that awaits it in that better future which it will help to bring about. In fact, a danger very much like this would seem to have been on Arnold's mind in the preface to the Poems of 1853, an essay probably written in the same year as “The Scholar-Gipsy” and Arnold's first full-scale prose attempt at literary criticism. While written largely to admonish his critics in their preference for subject matter from the present age over imitation of the ancients, that preface also contains a substantial element of self-admonishment, especially in his strictures against his own Empedocles on Etna, which, though his most ambitious poem until now, was to be excluded from the Poems of 1853. And in the closing paragraphs of his essay he explains that his purpose in commending the ancients as the best model for the modern poet is not so that the modern poet may equal them in excellence but that he may do as little harm as possible to the art with which he has, for so brief a time, been entrusted before turning it over to those generations that will succeed his.

Not the advancement of poetry but its transmission undamaged and intact to the coming epoch is thus the most satisfactory outcome Arnold can foresee for the poets of his own age (among whom he must doubtlessly include himself), those who because of their historical situation, “these damned times,” can never become more than dilettanti. Appealing to Goethe as the final authority on the question of modernism, Arnold writes:

Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that the first does the most harm to art, and the last to himself.”

(CPW, 1:15)

For Arnold, that the poets of his time, living as they do in “an age wanting in moral grandeur” (CPW, 1:14) and amid “bewildering confusion” (CPW, 1:14), cannot be anything other than dilettanti seems indisputable; and therefore the only real choice they are allowed, that is, which of the two kinds of dilettanti they are to become, should be decided not by what they perceive to be their own private desires or interests but by what Arnold takes to be their larger obligations to their art and to that posterity who shall be its future practitioners and beneficiaries:

If we must be dilettanti: if it is impossible for us, under the circumstances amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate firmly: if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great artists;—let us, at least, have so much respect for our art as to prefer it to ourselves. Let us not bewilder our successors; let us transmit to them the practice of poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again, perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the influence of their eternal enemy, caprice.”

(CPW, 1:15)

Reading these cautionary instructions to modern poets from the contemporaneous preface back into the figurative argument of “The Scholar-Gipsy” requires surprisingly little modification. The speaker himself provides a self-rebuking admission of what must be judged his own dilettantism, of his having been condemned by the historical process, by “the circumstances amidst which we live,” to that waywardness and “caprice” inherent in a modernity in which “each strives, nor knows for what he strives, / And each half-lives a hundred different lives” (ll. 168-169). Though doubtlessly inclined to seek another way, to aspire to the “spirituality and feeling” the scholar-gipsy apparently enjoys, the speaker understands that his own obligation to the future mandates restraint, compels him to sound the warning signal and urge the object of his pursuit to speedier flight, to more cunning evasions. Here too we sense a fear that the good that the scholar-gipsy carries forward for dissemination when the time is ripe will be fatally impaired if he should unluckily come into contact with any of those unhappily condemned by the circumstances of history to an age to which moral grandeur has been denied. To take the final leap, we may say that “The Scholar-Gipsy” itself may be read as a set of self-constraining instructions to poets lest they spoil the future, the upward phase of the historical cycle, and, more poignantly, it may be read as a set of self-constraining instructions which Arnold, engaged “in the dialogue of the mind with itself” (CPW, 1:1), addresses to himself as well, instructions that can be seen to have taken hold in that petering out of Arnold as modern poet in the years that follow the writing of “The Scholar-Gipsy.” Indeed, what Arnold as poet and the poets of his own poetically ill-starred age have been entrusted to do, according to the preface of 1853, is ensure that no harm befalls poetry in their own unpoetical age, that what has been handed on to them from a more inspiriting and morally superior past will be passed on intact—uncontaminated by the modern poet's own hunger for “spirituality and feeling”—to that more inspiriting and morally superior future which paradoxically, and perhaps contradictorily, will make possible the very poetry whose emergence shall serve as enabling agency for bringing that future into being. And yet it is clear from all that has been said in “The Scholar-Gipsy” that if these modern poets (and most especially Arnold himself) do persist in pursuing their vocation, the probable outcome will be not just failure in their obligation to the future but the very ruin of its hopes.

But to account for a disease so pandemically contagious and devastatingly virulent that contact with those who carry it must undo the seemingly inexorable course of historical necessity and prevent the poetry and society of the future from coming into being, the reader conditioned by the personal and private melancholy of Arnold's earlier poetry is probably best advised to seek the ultimate source of that disease not in history per se, in any event or events, no matter how momentous, but in deeper and more primal longings, in the latent psychological conflicts and anxieties that determine so much of the manifest content of Arnold's poetry prior to 1853. (Certainly the cataclysmic infectedness in “Resignation,” whose source Arnold traces to an unspecified metaphysical “something” [l. 278], has significant psychological connections with the family relationships with sister and father that provide the autobiographical context of that poem.) And in “The Scholar-Gipsy” just as in Arnold's earlier poetry, that latently determining psychological matter would seem to lie closest to the surface of consciousness in just such troublingly unassimilable materials as the two notoriously perplexing similes with which “The Scholar-Gipsy” closes.

In the first of these, the scholar-gipsy is implored to turn away from his pursuers from modernity as absolutely as Virgil's Dido had turned away from Aeneas, the man who, having wronged her and driven her to suicide, would, nonetheless, in the netherworld call her back:

Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
          Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
          From her false friend's approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!

(ll. 207-210)

Commentators on “The Scholar-Gipsy,” following the lead of G. Wilson Knight, have been quick and correct in seeing in this a reassertion of the most basic thematic oppositions in Arnold's poem and a reaffirmation of its most fundamental values in its siding with Dido, “a figure of feminine appeal and oriental glamour” who, in a final, heroic show of integrity, rebuffs the young Aeneas, even then on his way to “fulfilling his destiny as the founder, through Rome, of western efficiency and organization.”¹¹ But Arnold's sympathy for Dido almost surely carries implications that resonate far beyond the poem's manifest cultural oppositions and choices.

With that Rome and its values, Arnold would almost certainly have associated his father as scholar and teacher and advocate, an association that may help to understand why at so crucial a moment in his own poem Arnold would recall the Aeneid. “The Scholar-Gipsy” had, of course, been written at what would seem to have been a highly stressful moment in Arnold's life, when the decision to marry and to work as a school inspector would have stood most obviously in opposition to his diminishing hopes for himself as a poet, so that this particular episode from the Aeneid in which he had doubtlessly been thoroughly drilled as a schoolboy must have presented itself to him as a psychologically compelling way of expressing such conflict. On the one hand, there was the figure of Aeneas, the embodiment of the masculine spirit and its associated values of duty to and involvement in the world, the idea of Rome, a notion forever identified for Arnold with his father and his father's teachings; on the other, Dido, clearly associated here with a countervailing and deeply seductive image of poetry that to Arnold's discomfort presented itself to him as not merely unmanly but dangerously feminized. Yet Arnold's own inclinations seem abundantly clear, with the paternally identified Aeneas castigated as “false friend” (l. 209) and the injured and abandoned Dido granted an austere and defiant integrity that leaves little doubt where our sympathies are to lie. But a second and psychologically still more disturbing resonance can be seen to attach itself to this encounter, through its framing context, the larger love story of Dido and Aeneas themselves, a narrative which in all of its compulsions, resistances, interweavings, and overdeterminations provides one of the most complexly rich instances in all of literature of the scarcely displaced oedipal masterplot.

The love story of Dido and Aeneas is above all else a tale of primal sexual transgression and contamination. Initially it is the widowed Dido herself who insists that self-pollution and desecration must follow if her dead husband were to be supplanted in a marriage bed in which love now would be trespass. Though Aeneas may be the “only one” since her husband's death “who has stirred my senses and sapped / My will” (4.22-23),¹² the divine ordinance which commands sexual abstinence in widowhood must, Dido knows, still be obeyed:

I feel once more the scars of the old flame.
But no, I would rather the earth should open and
          swallow me
Or the Father of heaven strike me with lightning down
          to the shades
The pale shades and deep night of the Underworld—
          before
I violate or deny pure widowhood's claim upon me.

(4.23-27)

And never questioning the rightness of that divine ordinance, Dido herself reiterates the inviolability of the claim of her first and therefore only husband: “He who first wedded me took with him, when he died, / My right to love: let him keep it, there, in the tomb, for ever” (4.28-29).

Taboos against the desecration of widowhood are themselves, as Freud tells us in Totem and Taboo, readily assimilable to fantasized oedipal prohibitions against killing off and then supplanting the mother's husband in that position of privilege he occupies as her sexual partner. But even more germane to the oedipal scenario are the night terrors Aeneas himself recounts after attaining his sexual ends and becoming Dido's lover, the appearance to him of “the troubled ghost of my father, Anchises” (4.352), who “Comes to me in my dreams, warns me and frightens me” (4.353). Only after Aeneas has entered upon that love which so troubles the ghost of his father does Virgil, in fact, mention those political and patriotic responsibilities to the founding of Rome which we are accustomed to regard as the real grounds for the abandonment of Dido by Aeneas. And even this act of duty on behalf of the state is rooted in more narrowly patrilinear obligations passed on to him from his father and which Aeneas, in his turn, believes he owes to his son, Ascanius. “Disturbed no less by the wrong I am doing Ascanius” (4.354), Aeneas fears he is “Defrauding him of his destined realm in Hesperia” (4.355) by dallying for the sake of a pleasure desired (and indeed enjoyed) but impermissible.

All of this, of course, forms the overarching context for the encounter in Hades between Aeneas and the ghost of Dido alluded to in “The Scholar-Gipsy,” and it must have been a context deeply etched into the cultural memory of Arnold's educated readers, since study of the Aeneid had been so prominent a staple of their early education and especially that of Arnold himself, the son of the schoolmaster. Moreover, that scene of encounter in Hades itself picks up many of the compulsions, inhibitions, and pained ambivalences seen earlier in Book 4 of the Aeneid, undoubtedly complicating and, to some degree, undermining the manly and patriotic resolution that apparently had been negotiated earlier with the flight of Aeneas and the seeming removal by death of the temptation Dido represents. Pained at seeing the ghost of Dido, Aeneas tearfully insists in “tender, loving tones” (6.455) that the decision to leave her “was not of my own will” (6.460) but was rather an involuntary yielding to some implacable external agency, “Heaven's commands” (6.461) that “drove me / Imperiously from your side” (6.462-463). (It is an explanation worthy of the Marguerite poems, where that speaker too seeks to exonerate himself from the charge of disloyalty to his former lover by attributing his apparent forsaking of her to the overruling of love by the seemingly arbitrary ordinances of a god.) But when Aeneas tearfully pleads with Dido to “let me see you a little longer” (6.465), Dido, contemptuous of his excuses, coldly rejects him and returns to the husband she had earlier forsworn:

She would not turn to him; she kept her gaze on the
          ground,
And her countenance remained as stubborn to his
          appeal
As if it were carved from recalcitrant flint or a crag of
          marble.
At last she flung away, hating him still, and vanished
Into the shadowy wood where her first husband,
          Sychaeus,
Understands her unhappiness and gives her an equal
          love.

(6.469-474)

Thus Arnold introduces into his narrative of his poet-speaker's feared betrayal of the scholar-gipsy (represented as the unintended though unavoidable consequence of impersonal historical forces) a disquieting and undermining subtext in which the poet-speaker's figurative counterpart, Aeneas, clearly must bear personal responsibility for a seemingly analogous betrayal, whose apparent source, however, is not history but the inevitable transgressiveness that resides in the deepest recesses of the sexual life. And giving that unanticipated and seemingly anomalous allusion a still more personal reference is its striking resemblance to that paradigmatically shaping sequential structure found repeatedly in the Marguerite poems, where the poet as lover on the very verge of embracing the loved object, reaches out only to find fulfillment almost instantaneously thwarted by what often seem oedipally charged prohibitions. Sometimes the impeding obstacle would seem to be the corruptness that resides in sexuality itself, and especially in the passions of women—“things that live and move / Mined by the fever of the soul” (“A Farewell,” ll. 21-22)—a passionateness likely to have flowed over into a contaminating infidelity as in “Parting” where the speaker as lover, his arms stretched to embrace, finds himself compelled to draw back from imminent gratification, immobilized as lover by the fact of Marguerite's alleged past debasement: “To the lips, ah! of others / Those lips have been pressed” (ll. 67-68). And in other poems in the sequence, that impeding obstacle presents itself to the speaker in even more overtly oedipal terms as the inhibiting presence of the superego, projected through that strange Arnoldian God whose “tremendous voice” (“Meeting,” l. 11) in ireful tones commands the lovers to “Be counselled, and retire” (“Meeting,” l. 12) or whose severing ordinance “bade betwixt their shores to be / The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea” (“To Marguerite—Continued,” ll. 23-24).

Moreover, that profoundly troubling apprehension of desire aroused and frustrated in near simultaneity, what Arnold will term “a longing like despair” (“To Marguerite—Continued,” l. 13) in his most memorably encapsulating formulation of that experience, in displaced form infiltrates other texts as well, poems built around significant but presumably less libidinally charged relationships. So in “Shakespeare,” for example, the speaker who imploringly “ask[s] and ask[s]” (l. 2) knows, even as he reaches toward, that the special wisdom the smilingly enlightened Shakespeare possesses is a knowledge transcendently “Out-topping knowledge” (l. 3), and therefore destined forever to remain inaccessibly beyond the speaker's grasp. And in “To a Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore,” despite hints of mutual recognition—“With eyes that sought thine eyes thou did converse, / And that soul-searching vision fell on me” (ll. 15-16)—the ardently searching speaker similarly knows from the outset that the empathic communion he seeks will never take place: because by comparison with the earth-enhancing glooms of the gipsy child, his own shallow glooms are “Moods of fantastic sorrow, nothing worth” (l. 18), he immediately recognizes that the grim visionary understanding granted the precociously enlightened gipsy child—this infant Shakespeare—lies far beyond the speaker's own limited depths of comprehension. (It is clearly worth noting that these two early poems in which some exemplary character possessed of a special and saving knowledge is zealously but unsuccessfully pursued by a diffidently unworthy Arnoldian speaker share obvious affinities with “The Scholar-Gipsy.”)

These narratives of desire aroused only to trigger almost instantaneously a counter-narrative of desire thwarted, perhaps the most fundamental of Arnoldian scenarios, would seem strikingly to conform in major respects to Freud's enduringly influential final formulation of the concept of anxiety. In the relatively late Symptoms, Inhibitions, and Anxiety Freud had concluded that anxiety was not to be understood as undischarged libido, as he had earlier believed, but rather in its functional role as a warning signal (hence the designation of this account of anxiety as the theory of “signal anxiety”), a signal alerting the ego helpless in the face of an “accumulation of excitation”¹³ to the presence of danger from that excitation against which it must mobilize those familiar defenses—repression, regression, isolation, undoing—defenses that often dictated neurotic flight from or neurotic transformation of the source of instinctual danger. Nor should we be surprised that anxiety so conceived generally occurs, according to Freud, as a reoccurrence of “affective states” that “have been incorporated into the mind as precipitates of primaeval traumatic experiences” (p. 93). And predictably these experiences are most likely to have arisen during our earliest relations with our mother—on occasions “of missing someone who is loved and longed for” (a condition that Freud will break down even more finely into those closely resembling situations of anxiety he terms the loss of the loved object and fear of the loss of the loved object's love), occasions in which, as a result of our oedipal fantasies, we are prone to blame our own guilty desires for that loss (p. 137).

In “The Scholar-Gipsy,” then, we have a primary narrative that is itself an enactment of the scenario of anxiety, the familiar Arnoldian gesture of reaching toward by the poet-speaker being in reality a signal of warning, a set of instructions to the imagined object longed for and pursued (though in reality a set of instructions to the ego itself), urging that defenses be mobilized, that the appropriate response to the quester's desires be aversion and flight. And inserted into that narrative is a reinforcing simile that in effect reiterates the scenario of anxiety, presenting in the tale of Dido and Aeneas in Hades another episode of reaching toward that similarly concludes in aversion and flight, but in this case with the psychosexual and oedipal origins of that scenario, by its Virgilian context, more overtly exposed. But that reinforcing simile, even as it reiterates, also undermines the primary narrative's manifest content. It unmistakably insinuates that history alone, these “damned times,” cannot explain Arnold's surely traumatic decision to put his career as a poet behind him so that he might pursue other less psychologically equivocal goals. Indeed the regendering of the scholar-gipsy through the figure of Dido in the course of that simile can only lead one to suspect that the Arnoldian speaker's frantic urging of the scholar-gipsy to flee modernity's fatally contaminating infectedness is itself a precipitate of “primaeval traumatic experiences,” a means of reinscribing in adult life a guilt-laden childhood encounter whose sexual overtones had come to be identified with the mother or some surrogate for her. And extrapolating still further from that simile and allusion which, with its oedipal resonances, both amplifies and undermines, one can also reasonably infer that to forsake that vocation as poet for which the scholar-gipsy apparently imaginatively stands is for Arnold not just to keep faith with his obligations to poetry and the better future it makes possible but, more compellingly, to obey a dead father's repressed but now remembered wishes and commands and to avoid once again putting at risk a loved and idealized maternal presence.

The more extended simile of the Tyrian trader similarly provides a kind of mirroring image of the poem's primary narrative that more closely observed also discloses undermining traces of the psychologically transformative. Plainly the ostensible intent of the simile is to have us regard the flight by the Tyrian trader from the advancing civilization of the Greeks and his heroic voyage to the edge of the world and to the margins of culture in quest of some unspecified form of traditional wisdom as a historically distant but essentially parallel enactment of the poem's primary narrative, the scholar-gipsy's abandonment of seventeenth-century Oxford to live with and like the imaginatively empowered gipsies, acquiring and husbanding their arts until he can use them for socially beneficial ends at that eagerly awaited moment when the cycle of history reverses itself once more. By insinuating a figurative likeness between the Tyrian trader voyaging “O’er the blue Midlands water with the gale” (l. 244) and, beyond that, “To where the Atlantic raves” (l. 246) and the scholar-gipsy as he wanders in the tame woods of the Oxford countryside, Arnold might at first glance seem to be doing little more than endowing a very timid referent with something of the heroic character of the seafarer's courage. Moreover, in identifying the story of the Tyrian trader with that of the scholar-gipsy, Arnold also lends credibility to the primary narrative's claim that an essentially cyclical history does repeat itself and, by extension, to the hope that the distressful present of modernity shall give way to a better future when the spark from heaven falls, just as the irreverent science and demoralizing skepticism of Antiquity finally gave way to the epoch of Christian faith, an epoch that Arnold would perhaps have us believe was prepared for by transmission of something like the traditional faith of the shy Iberians.

Yet from that preliminary assertion of likeness stipulated by the “As” (l. 232) of the simile, we might logically expect each of the major figures in the primary narrative to have a clearly resembling counterpart within the simile: that the scholar-gipsy, for example, can be matched with the Tyrian trader (as, in fact, they grammatically are by the connecting subordinating conjunction of the simile); the inhabitants of a now ascendant modernity from whom the scholar-gipsy flees similarly matched with those “young light-hearted masters of the waves” (l. 241), the encroaching Greeks; and, rounding out the design, the aloofly reclusive gipsies with the still more mysterious inhabitants of the little-known regions beyond the western straits, those “shy traffickers, the dark Iberians” (l. 249).

Yet while the Iberians and gipsies, both of whom lead traditional lives close to nature, seem enough alike to make sense of the simile, neither of the other two parallels really holds. Even Culler, while strongly committed to the simile's expressly stated logic of likeness, is forced to admit that the scholar-gipsy, “as we originally knew him, more closely resembles the Grecian coaster than the Tyrian trader” (p. 191). Indeed, the figure from the primary narrative that the “grave Tyrian trader” (l. 232) seems most to resemble is not the scholar-gipsy in his “glad perennial youth” (l. 229) to whom he is expressly likened but the speaker himself, similarly grave in his forebearance, in his “Sad patience, too near neighbor to despair.” Nor finally do “The young light-hearted masters of the wave” (l. 241) who man the “merry Grecian coaster” (l. 237) in the concluding simile seem at all like their tacitly designated counterparts from the primary narrative, those neurasthenic moderns who in their wretchedness and misery exemplify Arnold's own phase of the historical cycle, which, following the logic of the simile, is supposedly the phase that most closely parallels the epoch of Greek ascendancy.

What these intimations of difference amid claims of a signifying likeness suggest is that what Arnold has given us by means of this simile is not a mirroring narrative but a covert counterplot, not merely divergent but, in truth, oppositional. But that is not too surprising, since in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” a poem written not very long before “The Scholar-Gipsy,” he had used his closing simile in much the same way, to undermine, indeed even to undo, those implicitly historicist premises which that simile had been ostensibly designed to elaborate. There his strategy had been to take his speaker and those for whom he purports to speak, the between-worlds generation forlornly awaiting that cyclical reversal through which “may dawn an age, / More fortunate, alas! than we” (ll. 157-158), and, in the most unexpected of transformations, reconstitute them literally as children, desiring and perhaps destined to live out their lives in regressive changelessness “Beneath some old-world abbey wall” (l. 170). And standing in opposition to the speaker and the “we” he speaks for in the simile's reconceptualizing of the argument of the primary narrative of “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” are a surprisingly attractive set of very different figures, men of action, apparently able to live successfully in the world and who, with banners flying, vigorously step forward in quick time “To life, to cities, and to war” (l. 180). Nor are those thus able to live in the world therefore men of the future, beneficiaries of that reversal of the historical cycle which shall free humanity from the burden imposed by its downward turn; instead, they are plainly men of the present, living cheerfully in the here and now, seemingly unconstrained by the between-worlds limitations of historical circumstance which Arnold and those for whom he speaks must passively endure, unless they choose that implicitly neurotic course of an immobilizingly regressive flight.

In the coda to “The Scholar-Gipsy” there are also suggestions of regressive flight but a flight more complex, more highly displaced, and less fully effectuated than the immediate and absolute transformation of speaker into child that we find in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.” The regressive implications of the voyage of the Tyrian trader do not in this case manifest themselves by the reversion to childhood of the voyager himself. They are rather to be found in the object of his voyage, in his projected transaction with the reclusive and presumably childlike Iberians from whom the Tyrian trader apparently hopes to acquire, as a return for his own unspecified offerings, some good that bespeaks their own innocently uncorrupted nature, some profoundly elemental antidote to the spiritually devastating effects of a dangerously encroaching civilization. Of course, whether there is to be a successful outcome to the trader's heroic voyaging remains highly problematic. Whereas in the poem's initial and far more confidently viewed quest, the scholar-gipsy had made contact with those he sought out, had gleaned what their crucial secret was, and had begun instruction in their art, in the concluding lines the Tyrian trader does no more than set out the commodities he would barter, uncertain whether or not the contents of his “corded bales” (l. 250) will prove acceptable items of trade to these “shy traffickers” (l. 249) and, more important, whether those greatly desired goods (though goods never identified nor seen) he has come so far and through such dangers to obtain will be offered in exchange. Thus that desperate yearning to return to and to recapture origins, the presumptive object of that regressive impulse, is represented in the heroic voyage of the closing simile as both desperately sought after and yet uncertain of attainment.

But the more striking and significant point of likeness between the similes is the prominence in both of a set of resembling figures, light-hearted, adventuresome, and seemingly masterful men, the “passing troops” (l. 177) whose entreaties the children of “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” refuse and, correspondingly, the Grecian sailors of “The Scholar-Gipsy” from whose intrusion the Tyrian trader actually takes flight. They are, of course, figures for whom there is no real precedent within the primary narratives to which the similes refer and whose presence therefore is probably our most promising clue to that counterargument to the original that the simile covertly puts forward. Where the poet-speaker in each poem had initially cast himself as spokesman for his generation, those listlessly unhappy men and women accidentally cast adrift in the between-worlds circumstances that are the inescapable lot of everyone born into the joylessly transitional epoch of modernity, the similes seem to alter drastically that historically deterministic argument. The passing troops and Grecian sailors are clearly members of the child-speaker's and Tyrian trader's own generation and yet they still manage to exhibit energy in abundance, an energy enabling them to create history rather than passively remain its wholly suffering victims. In fact, the real contrast in the concluding similes of the two poems is not between hypothesized representatives of two diametrically opposed phases of the historical cycle, but rather between two sharply differentiated segments of contemporary humanity, the strivers and doers and makers of the world, whether soldiers or seafarers, and those who find themselves held in check from any commitment to action by an innate diffidence, remaining wary and anxious, desirous only of evading or escaping the claims upon them of life and the world.

In effect, in the similes Arnold seems to put the assumptions of historicism behind him, to rule out the cyclical movements of the Zeitgeist as the ultimate determinant of human behavior in a process that renders all individuals alike who at any given time fall under—as they necessarily must—its inescapable causal influence. Instead, he seems to indicate that human behavior must inevitably depend upon the intrinsic attributes and characteristics each individual brings to the historical circumstances under which he lives. Thus, in these two final similes, the Arnoldian speaker, who up to that point in these poems has represented himself as spokesman for the unhappy collective humanity of the transitional epoch, suddenly and unexpectedly reverts to type, becoming once again—whether he depicts himself as child or trader—that melancholy, solitary “I” so often observed in Arnold's earlier poetry. Essentially isolated and estranged from others, not for reasons of history but from causes that we can assume lie within, he too seems beset by the usual Arnoldian amalgam of desire and anxiety, the prospect of contact with another calling forth the stock psychological defenses of regression or flight. Moreover, with the appearance of “the merry Grecian coaster” (l. 237) manned by “The young light-hearted masters of the waves” (l. 241) there are intimations that the earlier theory of history with its despairing sense of the present and its relegation of hope to an unattainable future was badly misconceived. From the confidence and evident mastery of these heroic voyagers, we would guess that the future is now, that the turn that advances civilization has, in fact, already been taken by these men of action (whose similarly confident and similarly masterful Victorian counterparts Arnold was only too well aware of), and that it is from the men of his own time who most resemble them, those who are most likely to be agents of progress and potential benefactors of their society, that the speaker of “The Scholar-Gipsy” is actually and perhaps culpably most profoundly estranged.¹⁴

Thus, the simile with which “The Scholar-Gipsy” closes, in effect, impels the poem in radically new directions, revising its apparently historicist and forward looking referent in ways that actually bring “The Scholar-Gipsy” into intellectual and psychological alignment with what is bleakest and most personally painful in Arnold's earlier and avowedly pessimistic poetry. With the Tyrian trader having displaced the speaker as the poem's point of subjective reference, human life is once again imagined as a solitary voyage as it was in “Human Life” and “A Summer Night.” And even if, unlike the madman of “A Summer Night,” this particular voyager averts shipwreck in his desperately headlong and incautious journey, and even if journey's end proves to be not “some false, impossible shore” (“A Summer Night,” l. 69) but those lands beyond the Pillars of Hercules, “where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, / Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come” (ll. 248-249), nevertheless, the outcome of the trader's heroic voyaging remains highly problematic, with the Tyrian trader uncertain whether or not what is contained within his “corded bales” (l. 250) will prove acceptable items of trade to these “shy traffickers” (l. 249) and, more important, whether they will offer in exchange those desired goods he has undergone such dangers to obtain. And taking the assumed parallel between simile and referent a step further, we are entitled to read this account of the Tyrian trader in terms of that quasi-allegory that seemingly follows from the narrative of the scholar-gipsy, an allegory of poetry and myth (or a poetry that is myth) collaboratively working to effect at a historically propitious moment nothing less than the imaginative regeneration of humanity. But from the fact that, unlike the scholar-gipsy, the Tyrian trader never actually completes his crucial transaction with those he has abandoned civilization to seek out, we can only conclude that by poem's end Arnold has, if not renounced, at least drawn back from his earlier faith that the shattered culture of historical man shall, through the imaginative magic of poetic myth, be restored again to something approaching its lost unity or, still worse, that he has come to doubt that the poet will ever really affect a world that is ruled over by men of energy and power, “The young light-hearted masters of the waves” (l. 241).

But while these two major similes put much in question, they do in one major respect reiterate and amplify what is already present in the narrative of the quest for the scholar-gipsy, its psychologically underlying plot of reaching toward that is thwarted, of desire forestalled by anxiety's arousal of the ego's defenses. Indeed, viewed sequentially, the two concluding similes of Dido and the Tyrian trader provide an almost textbook illustration of signal anxiety: a reaching out toward the loved object, an object implicitly feminized by the allusion to Dido and therefore a suitable substitute for some yearned-for lost original, with that movement toward the object immediately short-circuited by fears that success will bring only feelings of debasement and shame. It is this preemptive anxiety which impels the Arnoldian speaker in the Marguerite poems to flight, his only effective recourse against instinctual danger, a flight whose necessity and urgency is surely reflected in the Tyrian trader's abruptly undertaken and frenetically driven voyage beyond “the western straits” (l. 247). Moreover, at the center of this triad of narratives, standing between the story of the scholar-gipsy and that of the Tyrian trader as the fulcrum upon which the reiterated plots of signal anxiety turn, is the recollected tale of Aeneas and Dido, Rome and Carthage, a legendary evocation of male responsibility and female enticements which Arnold more than likely associated with childhood memories of his father as teller and as modern-day advocate of the Roman virtues and, deeper still, with that family romance which lies at the heart of our earliest childhood impulses and anxieties.

And reading back from this simile of transgression and betrayal in love with its deeply oedipal resonances, we are surely encouraged to impute other, more intrinsically private and disturbingly regressive origins than simply modernity to the speaker's fear in the primary narrative that he carries a fatal contagiousness that would undo the mission that the scholar-gipsy has embarked upon in behalf of a world waiting to be born. It is as if Arnold, by employing the simile, had determined to say manifestly what had been latently present in the tale of the scholar-gipsy all along: that to quest after the scholar-gipsy is to abdicate manly responsibilities, to violate a father's wishes by pursuing a goal inimical to the need to work in the world. And considering the identification of the scholar-gipsy with the Romantic imagination and the idea of poetry, we should not be surprised if one of the unstated objects of these implicitly paternal strictures is poetry itself, a vocation that from a father's perspective might be looked upon as mere dalliance, a self-indulgent abdication of obligations to assist in the work of reconstituting the world not at the hypothesized end of some far-fetched historical cycle dependent upon poetry for its spiritual health but during one's own lifetime, indeed at this very moment. Given this latent counterargument surreptitiously compounded of the most troubling elements of the primary narrative and the materials of the two equally troubling closing similes, “The Scholar-Gipsy” can be seen finally for what it proves to be: a kind of valedictory to the major part of Arnold's poetic career, a turning away from a poetry that until now has primarily been made out of the profoundly conflicted but courageously authentic products of “the mind's dialogue with itself” (CPW, 1:1) and a turning instead toward a poetry and prose more responsible, more dedicated to ameliorating the social needs of the larger community, more in keeping with paternal wishes and commands.

Notes

1. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott (New York: Longmans, 1979). All subsequent quotations from Arnold's poems are to this edition, hereafter cited in the text. All quotations from Arnold's prose are from The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960-77), hereafter cited as CPW.

2. Alan Grob, “The Poetry of Pessimism: Arnold's ‘Resignation,’” VP [Victorian Poetry] 26 (1988): 25-44.

3. For a fuller discussion of Arnold's historicism, see Fraser Nieman, “The Zeitgeist of Matthew Arnold,” PMLA 72 (1957): 977-996; Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 91-168; A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 122-151; and especially David DeLaura, “Matthew Arnold and the Nightmare of History” in Victorian Poetry, Stratford-upon-Avon Series 15 (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 37-57.

4. See the headnote by Kenneth Allott to “The Scholar-Gipsy” in Poems, p. 356.

5. A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 182.

6. Culler, in fact, chooses the famous penultimate line of “Ode to a Nightingale” as an epigraph for his chapter on “The Scholar-Gipsy” in Imaginative Reason, p. 178. For a searching and sensitive examination of Keats as precursor poet for Arnold in “The Scholar-Gipsy,” see William A. Ulmer, “The Human Seasons: Arnold, Keats and ‘The Scholar-Gipsy,’” VP 22 (1984): 247-261.

7. For a discussion of Keats, immortality, and metaphysics see my essay “Noumenal Inferences: Keats as Metaphysician,” in Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), pp. 292-317.

8. Leon Gottfried, Matthew Arnold and the Romantics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 116-150.

9. As early as 1862, in “Maurice de Guérin,” Arnold had already said that in Keats “the natural magic is perfect” (CPW, 3:34).

10. David G. Riede, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1988), p. 142.

11. G. Wilson Knight, “The Scholar-Gipsy,” in Matthew Arnold, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 65.

12. The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952). All quotations from The Aeneid are from this edition.

13. James Strachey, intro. to Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, in Complete Psychological Works, 24 vols., ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 20:81. Anxiety seems to me the shaping psychological issue in Arnold's poetry. For a good discussion of anxiety in Arnold's poetry in relation to his audience and particularly to his female readers, see Mary Ellis Gibson, “Dialogue on the Darkling Plain: Genre, Gender, and Audience in Matthew Arnold's Lyrics,” in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, ed. Anthony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 30-48.

14. Robert Langbaum, in Mysteries of Identity (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), also suggests that these “joyous Greeks could stand well enough for modern men of action” (p. 60).