THE LATE SIR EDWIN ARNOLD

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1681, 18 May 1904, Page 2

THE LATE SIR EDWIN ARNOLD

HIS LIFE AND WORE.

(By Arthur Waugh.)

The announcement of Sir Edwin Arnold's death can scarcely he said to come upon us unexpectedly, since it has long been known that the veteran poet was in feeble health, and that some while ago he was stricken down by a grievous and almost inconsolable infirmity. The lo'ss of sight is in any case perhaps the most cruel misfortune that can fall to the lot of man; but. bitter as its suffering always is, it is emphasised a hundredfold in the cate of one to whom clear vision and the moving panorama of life and colour had meant so much, as it did to the keen observation and jrich pictorial talent of the author of “The Light of Asia.” While sympathising, therefore, with the loss which the death of Sir Edwin Arnold inflicts upon his family and /upon the interests of English literature, it is impossible not to feel that in this “happy issue out of all his afflictions” there is something also that speaks of consolation, in the sense of a long pilgrimage restfully ended, and a busy life honourably closed. Siir Edward Arnold was bom at Gravelsend on June 10, 1832, and was therefore nearing the close of his sev-enty-second year. His father was Air Robert Coles Arnold', J.F., of Framfield. Sussex. In his day Sir Edwin has been a, great traveller, and has seen many aspects ofmodeim life in many distant lands. He was educated at King’s School, Rochester, and King’s College. London, and at the end of his school career won a scholarship at University College, Oxford. At the University he already showed a faculty for literary work, and in his second year won the Newdiga'te prize tfbr English . versd, his subject being “The Fall of Belshazzar.” HIS INDIAN EXPERIENCE.

After leaving Oxford, be became a master at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and while there he was ap- ' pointed, in 1856, to the Principalship of the Government Deccan College at Poona, Bombay. Here, of course, he got his first experience -of Indian life and religion, and laid the groundwork for the poem by which he will principally be remembered, “The Light of Asia.” He lived five years in India and then returned to London; where lie joined the staff of the “Daily Telegraph/’ To the service of this paper he gave the best years of his life, travelling in its interest over the whole race of the globe, and contributing to its columns an incalculable volume of material, historical, descriptive and imaginative, which, whatever its.faults of occasional excess in decoration or garish ness of taste, is nevertheless worthy to. rank with the very best journalistic work of sts. generation. Ho received several Indian honours and distinctions, and was knighted in 1888. At the death of Tennyson there were many political enthusiasts who hoped to see him created Poet, Laureate, on the giound! that his appointment would be particularly popular both among the native princes of India and also throughout the whole field of AngloIndian. activity. Of course, it is as the poet of the Indian faith that Sir Edwin Arnold made his reputation, and it may safely be said that few single poems of his generation have enjoyed so wide a vogue as “The Light of Asia.” Many things helped in its success®; but, above all other considerations, it was peculiarly happy in the moment of its conception. It appeared at a time when the concerns of our Indian Empire were conspicuously before the public; and it taught the insular British mind (or the insular British mind believed that it taught it, which is much the same tiling) to sympathise with an alien religion, and to trace in i'ts philosophy a singular likeness to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. to was immediately and amazingly successful. Thousands of people, to whom its rather turgid rhetoric must have been a mystical confusion, added tt to their bookshelves, as “a book that nobody should be without,” and it is safe to say that a hundred times more copies were bought than read. Those who really care for poetry mulst confess, however, that its. qualities are poetically superficial. It owes almost everything to the splendour of its subject, and while it certainly makes full and even brilliant use of certain aspects of that subject, the use is, after all. artistically elementally. Its warmth, its colour, the rich mystical imagery and luscious opulence of many of its passages arei indisputable; but, as a study of Buddhism, it is essentially on the surface. .It is, as was inevitable, an outsider’s fetudy, a piece—shall we say?—of glittering journalism, disguised in a brocaded robe of decorative verse. AN INSPIRED JOURNALIST.

A piece' of glittering journalism! That, after all, is the secret of a'll Sir Edwin Arnold’s Work, He was an inspired ijoumalisb,. with just the typical journalist’® talent for hitting upon, the effective or showman's side of his siuV jecib ; but also with all the typical' journalist’s insensibility to delicate spiritual

! influences or sensitive' graditaons of feeling and emotion. How little he really felt of the inward spirit of a- religion was ah too dearly, shown when he followed up “The Light of Asia” by “The Light of the World.” Here he had to deal with a story familiar to every reader; the glamour of the unknown, the artifice of decoration were powerless to add anything to the plain but lyrical narrative of the Gospels; and the consequence was that worthy people who rushed to the library in the hope of securing a new aid to sensuous devotion in the shape of a poetical version of St. John, were alarmed and' amazed by the tawdry over-enipliasiis and" (occasionally distressingly false taste which seemed to obscure the simplicity and divine significance of the unostentation's life of Christ.

Sir Edwin Arnold, then, can hardly bo assigned a place among the great Victorian poets; and it must even be confessed that much of his later work, with its recurring “tags” of Brahmin lore and too, pretentious, meretricious verbiage, was ve;\y far from being poetry of any kinder hat ever. He wrote far too much, and he was ready to publish almost everything lie wrote; the gift of reticence or selfcriticism was all but absent in his composition. Yet, even in poetry, he had his inspired moments, and there is a certain copy of verses to a pair of old Egyptian shoes in a mum:; ay case which has the poignant ring of true emotion, the elo-. quent v'Oiie° of “old. far-off forgotten .u .gs,” expressed in a degree which transcends me eloquence of his more ambitious epics, and shows him to have had, somewhere hidden at hfc heart, the indefinable spirit of art which separates the fit from the unfit, the chosen from the rejected. Probably the truth is that he was a true poet spoilt—-.spoilt by the rush of obligation's that flows from cur crowded modern Life; spoilt, t&o, by the facility with which modern conditions permit the man who has made one popular success to> fallow it up, - almost un criticised, by a stream of inferior imitations, and thoughtless repetitions. But at least lie was a great- journalist. The very faculty of quick and superficial observation which blurred his poetry give a vivid and triumphing actuality to his swift, glittering descriptions of the externa] aspects of life aryl action.

His brothers of the pen may well regret the extinction of an ability that •was always devoted to high causes and true loyalty, and that wielded a pen swift in its condemnation of evil, and instinctively unable to “sign the page that registered a lie.”