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| Mill near the Grande Chartreuse, watercolour (c. 1812-15) by J.M.W Turner |
Matthew Arnold is my favourite Victorian poet. It's silly to have favourites, and I'm mainly saying this to suggest the shallowness of my engagement with Victorian poetry.
My favourite Victorian poet used to be Robert Browning, but that was back in the days when I was more interested in the surface feel of a poem than in having any meaningful communication with it. (I'm sure it's possible to have a conversation with Browning, but my experience is that it doesn't start up so naturally.) Anyway, this post is a kind of conversation with one of Arnold's poems.
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse
(by Matthew Arnold, written 1851-1854?, first published in
Fraser's Magazine, April 1855. First appeared in book form, lightly revised, in
New Poems, 1867 (where it was the penultimate poem, followed by
Obermann Once More). There were further revisions in the 1881
Poems by Matthew Arnold, and the 1885
Poems by Matthew Arnold. Like
Poetry Foundation and
PoemHunter I'm quoting the 1885 text. I've noted substantive changes, but not the numerous differences of punctuation, capitalization, etc. I've also numbered the stanzas for ease of reference; they were not numbered by the poet.
(1)
Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused
With rain, where thick the crocus blows,
Past the dark forges long disused,
The mule-track from Saint Laurent goes.
The bridge is cross'd, and slow we ride,
Through forest, up the mountain-side.
The stanza form is six tetrameters, rhyming ababcc -- A swifter variant of rhyme royal. The rhyme scheme ababcc is the same as in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, but the lines there are pentameters (in The Rape of Lucrece and The Lover's Complaint, Shakespeare switched to rhyme royal (ababbcc)). Wordsworth used tetrameter ababcc in "I wandered lonely as a cloud", but that consists of only four stanzas; Arnold's poem has 35 stanzas.
As in Venus and Adonis, the initial promise is of exciting narrative with an energetic forward momentum.
crocus: Probably Colchicum autumnale, an autumn-flowering crocus relative. The date of Arnold's visit was 7 September 1851.
Saint Laurent: Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, towards the west of the Massif de Chartreuse.
(2)
The autumnal evening darkens round,
The wind is up, and drives the rain;
While, hark! far down, with strangled sound
Doth the Dead Guier's stream complain,
Where that wet smoke, among the woods,
Over his boiling cauldron broods.
When you ascend the small river Guiers, in Isère, it branches into the Guiers Mort and the Guiers Vif. Compare Wordsworth in the passage from the Prelude given below: "along their several beds, / Murmured the sister streams of Life and Death".
far down: The Guiers Mort is mainly set in a deep gorge.
For Susan E. Lorsch, nature here is "designified": it carries no message other than what humans themselves project onto it; in marked contrast with Wordsworth's lines on the same scene in Book 6 of The Prelude (quoted below). "This is perhaps the only poem in the Arnold canon that shows a concern with the method of landscape depiction itself as a reflector of a particular conception of nature. In 'Stanzas' Arnold seems to realize that the theme of nature's designification must have technical implications for the poetry that embodies that theme" (p. 46).... "... Arnold's unease with the process of metaphorizing nature is clear. On the one hand, Arnold seems reluctant falsely to infuse designified, unmeaning nature with meaning, that is, to metaphorize it. On the other hand, he resists relegating landscape description to the role of background, for it has such a powerful impact on modern humanity's consciousness" (p. 49).
Susan E. Lorsch, Where Nature Ends: Literary Responses to the Designification of Landscape (1983), pp. 46-49.
(For another instance of designified nature in an Alpine context, see the extract from David Copperfield quoted below.)
(3)
Swift rush the spectral vapours white
Past limestone scars with ragged pines,
Showing—then blotting from our sight!—
Halt—through the cloud-drift something shines!
High in the valley, wet and drear,
The huts of Courrerie appear.
Swift: 1867 and later. "Fast" (1855).
(4)
Strike leftward! cries our guide; and higher
Mounts up the stony forest-way.
At last the encircling trees retire;
Look! through the showery twilight grey
What pointed roofs are these advance?—
A palace of the Kings of France?
(5)
Approach, for what we seek is here!
Alight, and sparely sup, and wait
For rest in this outbuilding near;
Then cross the sward and reach that gate.
Knock; pass the wicket! Thou art come
To the Carthusians' world-famed home.
The poem continues to ascend higher, arriving at the Grande Chartreuse, head monastery of the Carthusian order (founded 1084 CE). In Matthew Arnold's day travellers were still admitted, as described in the poem. That's not the case now. Instead there's a museum for passing tourists, two kilometers away from the actual monastery.
According to an informative article by Gerald Roberts (
"Faith and Dejection: Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" and Hopkins's Wreck of the Deutschland" ), Arnold and his new wife stayed overnight at the Grande Chartreuse (Sunday 7th September - Monday 8th September 1851) during their honeymoon. Their marriage had become possible because Arnold had been appointed an Inspector of Schools in April 1851: a very onerous job in its early years, involving constant travel across England. They married two months later (July), but the honeymoon was delayed until September.
The poem largely leaves women out of it: a bit like the monastery itself. The near presence of Arnold's wife in its narrative (e.g. in the "outbuilding" of this stanza) is pretty well hidden.
Here's what Frances Lucy Arnold wrote in a letter:
... The Grande Chartreuse I was not going to turn my back upon: as women are not admitted I was lodged in a small house not far from the monastery where I spent rather an uncomfortable time as it was bitterly cold. Matt was allowed to have supper with me, but at 1/2 past 7 he was turned out & went into the monastery where he had a cell to sleep in. He got up at 11 and went to the Chapel & heard midnight mass, which he said was very striking, the monks chaunting the service in a low monotonous tone, each holding a taper: indeed every man had one and the Chapel was lighted in that way. In the morning I went to a small chapel: also for ladies, where I heard mass, the Père Superieur of the Chartreuse officiating. The situation of the monastery is very fine & the size immense, but it looked dreadfully gloomy. The weather was bad as there was a fog the whole time we were there & it was raw cold.
(6)
The silent courts, where night and day
Into their stone-carved basins cold
The splashing icy fountains play—
The humid corridors behold!
Where, ghostlike in the deepening night,
Cowl'd forms brush by in gleaming white.
(7)
The chapel, where no organ's peal
Invests the stern and naked prayer—
With penitential cries they kneel
And wrestle; rising then, with bare
And white uplifted faces stand,
Passing the Host from hand to hand;
no organ's peal: Carthusian houses forbid the use of any musical instruments.
There are some difficulties with reconciling Arnold's account with real Carthusian practice, and for a while it was even supposed that Arnold made up his details and perhaps didn't know or care what actually happened at the Grande Chartreuse. Actually his wife's letter shows that he did attend services, though she was not accurate in referring to "midnight mass". The details are discussed by Charles T. Dougherty in "What Arnold Saw and Heard at La 'Grande Chartreuse'" (Victorian Poetry, vol. 18 no. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 393-399):
"The more likely schedule is that Arnold got to bed around 8:00 p.m. He rose at 11:00 p.m. and, holding a candle in his hand, attended the Night Vigil and heard the monks chanting Matins and Lauds. He would be back in bed at about 2:00 a.m. He would rise again about 5:30 a.m. and go to the church for Prime of the canonical office, which would be followed by a Mass. At this Mass Arnold would have seen the passing of the pax brede and might easily have mistaken it for the passing of a Host from hand to hand. ... Arnold rendered with fidelity what he saw, or thought he saw, and heard that night at la Grande Chartreuse." (Dougherty, p. 399).
(8)
Each takes, and then his visage wan
Is buried in his cowl once more.
The cells!—the suffering Son of Man
Upon the wall—the knee-worn floor—
And where they sleep, that wooden bed,
Which shall their coffin be, when dead!
As Dougherty points out, the monks being buried in their beds (or coffins) when they die is incorrect. But it was a widely circulated tale, and Arnold probably believed it was true.
(9)
The library, where tract and tome
Not to feed priestly pride are there,
To hymn the conquering march of Rome,
Nor yet to amuse, as ours are!
They paint of souls the inner strife,
Their drops of blood, their death in life.
(10)
The garden, overgrown—yet mild,
See, fragrant herbs are flowering there!
Strong children of the Alpine wild
Whose culture is the brethren's care;
Of human tasks their only one,
And cheerful works beneath the sun.
See, fragrant herbs: 1881 and later. "Those fragrant herbs" (1855, 1867).
Presumably referring to the manufacture of the liqueur that sustains the order's finances. Today the liqueur is produced at a nearby distillery: around a million bottles per year. The herbal base is still prepared within the Grande Chartreuse, its secret known to just two monks.
children: the first appearance of a word whose use becomes increasingly prominent (considering that real children are entirely absent), and increasingly complex. See especially Stanzas 14 and 29ff.
(11)
Those halls, too, destined to contain
Each its own pilgrim-host of old,
From England, Germany, or Spain—
All are before me! I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere!
—And what am I, that I am here?
(12)
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,
Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?
purged: 1867 and later. "prun'd" (1855).
trimm'd: 1867 and later. "quench'd" (1855).
high, white:1867 and later. "pale cold" (1855).
living tomb: referring back to Stanzas 8 and 9.
(13)
Forgive me, masters of the mind!
At whose behest I long ago
So much unlearnt, so much resign'd—
I come not here to be your foe!
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth;
Not to deny, anyway. Arnold lost his faith in his teens (I read somewhere) and he stuck to that position until his death. Religion contained morality and emotion, he said, but not facts. The poem, however, registers an inner conflict.
(14)
Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone—
For both were faiths, and both are gone.
Not as their friend, or child, I speak: And yet, later in the poem, he does conceive himself and his generation as children reared beneath an abbey wall (Stanza 29), and he does speak for these imagined children (Stanzas 33 - 35).
So, does the analogy work like this? The Greek in a foreign land = Arnold in the Alps; the Greek's own gods = the Protestantism/Anglicanism of Arnold’s upbringing; the fallen Runic Stone = Chartreuse, relic of a different yet equally fading faith (Catholicism) ? I think that's the general idea, but it highlights some contradictions. Chartreuse was after all not a ruin (like the "fallen Runic stone") but a functioning monastery. If it was in some sense a "living tomb" (Stanza 12) the death in question was not the death of faith but, on the contrary, the death of the world to the faithful. At the same time, you can see why this atavistic Carthusianism, this handful of pallid and wasted forms, might affect Arnold emotionally as a mad remnant of a bygone era, the Age of Faith in a stricter sense.
The poem here, and later, is much occupied with the paradox that people and practices that are older than us are in another sense younger; they belong to a younger age, whereas we who are young in years belong to an older age.
In a less restricted sense, both Protestantism and Catholicism were booming in 1851; in terms of church building, in terms of sheer numbers of adherents... . It's in Arnold's own post-religious mind that Protestantism and Catholicism are dying faiths.
(And another point occurs to me, though it's not exactly a contradiction: why does Arnold's analogy seem to be anxiously justifying his visit to fellow Protestants, quite as much as to the "masters of the mind" -- secular humanists presumably? )
(15)
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.
(16)
Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again;
Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control!
Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,: 1867 and later. "Invest me, steep me, fold me round," (1855).
(17)
For the world cries your faith is now
But a dead time's exploded dream;
My melancholy, sciolists say,
Is a pass'd mode, an outworn theme—
As if the world had ever had
A faith, or sciolists been sad!
sciolists: pretentious, superficial or amateur scholars.
(18)
Ah, if it be pass'd, take away,
At least, the restlessness, the pain;
Be man henceforth no more a prey
To these out-dated stings again!
The nobleness of grief is gone—
Ah, leave us not the fret alone!
fret: 1867 and later. "pang" (1855).
(19)
But—if you cannot give us ease—
Last of the race of them who grieve
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent—the best are silent now.
(20)
Achilles ponders in his tent,
The kings of modern thought are dumb;
Silent they are, though not content,
And wait to see the future come.
They have the grief men had of yore,
But they contend and cry no more.
Achilles: An odd inclusion in this context, the petulant Achilles sulking in his tent. I feel I'm missing something here. It's been suggested that Arnold might have been referring sympathetically to the much-criticized Lord Raglan in 1854 (See Neff, D.S. "The Times, the Crimean War, and 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.' (influences of the London Times on poet Matthew Arnold)." Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, spring 1997, pp. 169+).
(21)
Our fathers water'd with their tears
This sea of time whereon we sail,
Their voices were in all men's ears
Who pass'd within their puissant hail.
Still the same ocean round us raves,
But we stand mute, and watch the waves.
Our fathers: 1867 and later. "Their fathers" (1855)
Who pass'd: 1855 and later. "We pass'd" (presumably a typo) on Poetry Foundation and PoemHunter.
But we stand mute: 1867 and later. "But they stand mute" (1855)
Our fathers, i.e. the immediately preceding generation, conceived as more openly tearful than Arnold's own.
(22)
For what avail'd it, all the noise
And outcry of the former men?—
Say, have their sons achieved more joys,
Say, is life lighter now than then?
The sufferers died, they left their pain—
The pangs which tortured them remain.
achieved: 1855, restored in 1881 and later. "obtain'd" (1867).
(23)
What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart,
Through Europe to the Ætolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?
The three authors that exemplify the "outcry" (Stanza 22) are united by the open expression of their anguish, and also by a basically anti-religious outlook. Their several agonies weren't the same as Arnold's, though; at least I don't recall any of them expressing any sadness about the passing of faith.
The first is Byron, wearing his suffering on his sleeve. With particular reference to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818), the expression of a mood of world-weariness that struck a chord right across Europe.
pageant: Arnold critically noting the element of exhibitionism in Byron.
Ætolian shore: Byron died in Missolonghi on 19 April 1824. Close to the ancient region of Aetolia, though strictly speaking it's in Acarnania.
(24)
What boots it, Shelley! that the breeze
Carried thy lovely wail away,
Musical through Italian trees
Which fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay?
Inheritors of thy distress
Have restless hearts one throb the less?
Which fringe: 1881 and later. "That fringe" (1855, 1867).
soft blue: 1867 and later. "dark blue" (1855).
Spezzian bay: The bay of La Spezia, on the NW coast of Italy (half-way between Genoa and Livorno), where Shelley made his last home and where he drowned.
(25)
Or are we easier, to have read,
O Obermann! the sad, stern page,
Which tells us how thou hidd'st thy head
From the fierce tempest of thine age
In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau,
Or chalets near the Alpine snow?
Obermann, the semi-fictional letter-writer of Senancour's Obermann, a book that meant a lot to Arnold. I wrote more about it here:
I'm not sure if it's relevant to Arnold's poem, but in Obermann the subject of the Grande Chartreuse crops up in Letter XXI.
J’étais bien différent dans ces temps où il était possible que j’aimasse. J’avais été romanesque dans mon enfance et alors encore j’imaginai une retraite selon mes goûts. J’avais faussement réuni, dans un point du Dauphiné, l’idée des formes alpestres à celles d’un climat d’oliviers, de citronniers ; mais enfin le mot de Chartreuse m’avait frappé : c’était là, près de Grenoble, que je rêvais ma demeure. Je croyais alors que des lieux heureux faisaient beaucoup pour une vie heureuse ; et que là, avec une femme aimée, je posséderais cette félicité inaltérable dont le besoin remplissait mon cœur trompé.
Mais voici une chose bien étrange, dont je ne puis rien conclure, et dont je n’affirmerai rien, sinon que le fait est tel. Je n’avais jamais rien vu, rien lu, que je sache, qui m’eût donné quelque connaissance du local de la Grande Chartreuse. Je savais uniquement que cette solitude était dans les montagnes du Dauphiné. Mon imagination composa, d’après cette notion confuse et d’après ses propres penchants, le site où devait être le monastère, et, près de lui, ma demeure. Elle approcha singulièrement de la vérité. Voyant longtemps après une gravure qui représentait ces mêmes lieux, je me dis, avant d’avoir lu : Voilà la Grande Chartreuse ; tant elle me rappela ce que j’avais imaginé. Et quand il se trouva que c’était elle effectivement, cela me fit frémir de surprise et de regret ; il me sembla que j’avais perdu une chose qui m’était comme destinée. Depuis ce projet de ma première jeunesse, je n’entends point sans une émotion pleine d’amertume ce mot Chartreuse.
Translation (mostly by Google Translate):
I was very different in those times when I could possibly have loved. I had been romantic in my childhood and now once more I imagined a retreat according to my tastes. I had falsely united, in respect of the Dauphiné, the idea of alpine forms with those of a climate of olive trees, lemon trees; but in the end, the word "Chartreuse" struck me: it was there, near Grenoble, that I dreamed of making my home. I believed then that happy places did a lot for a happy life; and that there, with a beloved woman, I would possess that unalterable happiness whose need filled my deceived heart.
But here is a very strange thing, from which I cannot conclude anything, and from which I will not affirm anything, except that such is the fact. I had never seen or read anything I know of that would have given me any knowledge of the premises of the Grande Chartreuse. I only knew that this solitude was in the Dauphiné mountains. My imagination composed, according to this confused notion and according to its own inclinations, the site where the monastery was to be, and, near it, my abode. I approached the truth to a surprising degree. Seeing, a long time after, an engraving which represented this same spot, I said to myself, before having read the title: That's the Grande Chartreuse; it reminded me of what I had imagined. And when it turned out that this was indeed the case, it made me shudder with surprise and regret; it seemed to me that I had lost something that was meant to be mine. Since this project of my early youth, I have never heard the word Chartreuse without an emotion full of bitterness.
Obermann subsequently refers to his own remote alpine chalet as a "chartreuse" in Letters LXVII and LXVIII.
And in Letter LXXXII he plans to finally visit the Grande Chartreuse.
(26)
Ye slumber in your silent grave!—
The world, which for an idle day
Grace to your mood of sadness gave,
Long since hath flung her weeds away.
The eternal trifler breaks your spell;
But we—we learned your lore too well!
Ye... your... your... your: 1867 and later. "They", "their", "their", "their" (1855)
flung: 1867 and later. "thrown" (1855)
Ye: the plural form, so Arnold is addressing all three dead writers. Byron's vast popularity might seem rather more than the grace of an idle day (at any rate compared with Arnold's niche reading of Obermann), but Arnold's point is that, in any case, the shallow world has moved on from all of them.
The eternal trifler: the ever-recurring figure of the mocker; mocking, in particular, what was once revered.
(27)
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,
More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
Sons of the world, oh, speed those years;
But, while we wait, allow our tears!
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age: 1881 and later. "There may, perhaps, yet dawn an age" (1855, 1867).
speed those years: 1881 and later. "haste those years" (1855, 1867)
But, while we wait, : 1881 and later. "But, till they rise," (1855, 1867)
Perhaps one place this age may have dawned was in Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879); at least according to Sarah Barnette. Stevenson quotes "And what am I, that I am here?" (Stanza 11) as a chapter epigraph."Yet Stevenson, I think, poses Arnold’s question quite differently—not in a spirit of mournfulness or pity, but in one of buoyant expectation. Arnold’s narrator is 'forlorn' and despairing, whereas there lingers about Stevenson’s journey an atmosphere of lightheartedness and hope."
Sarah Barnette, "A 'Brave Reading' of One's Faith: Robert Louis Stevenson's Spiritual Travels" (Renovatio, 22 June 2021).
(Stevenson, like Arnold, was negotiating the loss of his childhood faith.)
(28)
Allow them! We admire with awe
The exulting thunder of your race;
You give the universe your law,
You triumph over time and space!
Your pride of life, your tireless powers,
We laud them, but they are not ours.
We laud them: 1885. "They awe us" (1855). "We mark them" (1867). "We praise them" (1881). Arnold got there eventually. "We mark them" is too cold; "We praise them" seems to imply outright acclaim, and thus risks sounding sarcastic. "We laud them" has just the right balance: paying due tribute, but without real enthusiasm.
(29)
We are like children rear'd in shade
Beneath some old-world abbey wall,
Forgotten in a forest-glade,
And secret from the eyes of all.
Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves,
Their abbey, and its close of graves!
Via an adroit "like", Arnold's poem slips away into an analogical scene, a sunny greenwood scene with an old abbey and a stream, and remains there. The new scene differs markedly from the Grande Chartreuse locus in various ways, e.g in being sunny, and notably in being purely imaginary. Comparable to the way Arnold ends "The Scholar-Gipsy", with its extended analogy of the "Tyrian trader".
Yet this analogical scene also glimmeringly resembles the Grande Chartreuse: e.g. its abbey shadowing the monastery, its stream shadowing the "Dead Guiers". Moreover, the Grande Chartreuse is in fact surrounded by woods, though not closely (the "encircling trees" of Stanza 4). And the "passing troops" here strangely recall those who came to expel the Carthusian monks in 1790, as recounted by Wordsworth (see below).
Dougherty (see note on Stanza 7) describes this new scene as "distant recollections of Rugby Chapel and St. Mary's" (p. 394). Doubtless those personal memories play a part, but surely the new scene is not a real place. The physical location of the first half of the poem is transmuted into a psychological dreamscape, with its characteristic blend of surface illogic and deeper consonance.
(30)
But, where the road runs near the stream,
Oft through the trees they catch a glance
Of passing troops in the sun's beam—
Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance!
Forth to the world those soldiers fare,
To life, to cities, and to war!
Forth to the world those soldiers fare,: 1867 and later. "Forth to the mighty world they fare" (1855).
This imaginary scene has a timeless romantic quasi-medieval character: these plumes and pennons and lances could indeed be the accoutrements of modern soldiers even in 1851 (it was the First World War that really ended the use of lances); but the atmosphere is more like the romanticized history of a Scott poem (e.g. Lay of the Last Minstrel, Harold the Dauntless...)
(31)
And through the wood, another way,
Faint bugle-notes from far are borne,
Where hunters gather, staghounds bay,
Round some fair forest-lodge at morn.
Gay dames are there, in sylvan green;
Laughter and cries—those notes between!
wood: 1881 and later. "woods" (1855, 1867)
fair forest-lodge: 1885. "old forest-lodge" (1855, 1867, 1881).
(32)
The banners flashing through the trees
Make their blood dance and chain their eyes;
That bugle-music on the breeze
Arrests them with a charm'd surprise.
Banner by turns and bugle woo:
Ye shy recluses, follow too!
their ... their ... them: "They" are the children of Stanza 29. (And not the immediately precedent "gay dames", who could hardly be surprised by bugle-music from their own hunting party.)
(33)
O children, what do ye reply?—
"Action and pleasure, will ye roam
Through these secluded dells to cry
And call us?—but too late ye come!
Too late for us your call ye blow,
Whose bent was taken long ago.
O children: i.e. the children of Stanza 29.
Perhaps it's all part of the dream illogic, but it's odd that they are presented as children, yet the argument they deploy is from the settled habit of age ("too late ye come" ... "long ago" ...): You can't teach an old dog new tricks, so to speak. These "shy recluses", these hauntingly superannuated, inactive "children" (representing the thirty-ish Matthew Arnold among others) are a case of arrested development: a rather characteristic Victorian image. The truly young people in the poem are the "sons of the world" (Stanza 27); those who accept the present for what it is and who actively engage in its works and pleasures, and thus develop into adulthood: represented here as the enthusiastic soldiers (Stanza 30) and the gay dames in the hunting party (Stanza 31).
(34)
"Long since we pace this shadow'd nave;
We watch those yellow tapers shine,
Emblems of hope over the grave,
In the high altar's depth divine;
The organ carries to our ear
Its accents of another sphere.
Emblems of hope over the grave,: 1867 and later. "Emblems of light above the grave" (1855)
organ: another marked difference with the earlier locus. At the Grande Chartreuse there is no organ (see Stanza 7).
The poem treads a fine line along the very edge of faith, or superstition. The children watch the yellow tapers, "emblems of hope over the grave"; it doesn't mean they share the hope itself, but it does suggest that they experience an obscure second-hand comfort from contemplating the emblem of hope set by others. Likewise their response to the organ music is about its evocation of the "accents of another sphere". How can their deep involvement in this music be reconciled with a firm belief that, all the same, the other sphere has no existence?
It's a paradox that continues to puzzle just as much in 2021 as in 1851; for instance, for the many people (mainly highly educated) who are passionate about religious art and music, yet don't hold religious beliefs. Do we in fact know what we believe, especially on these biggest and most mysterious questions of existence and life and death? That would be my question, but it was not Arnold's. Since his time it has come to seem more apparent, more familiar anyway, that our idea of the self is to some degree a construct. The same may be said of the supposed body of core beliefs that defines each of us and our position. Like our inner selves, these beliefs become quite elusive as soon as we try to inspect them honestly: we find heaps of beliefs and half-beliefs, often contradicting each other, and dating from different stages in our development. Which of those beliefs prevails in a given moment depends more on the present stimulus than on a fixed hierarchy.
(35)
"Fenced early in this cloistral round
Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,
How should we grow in other ground?
How can we flower in foreign air?
—Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease;
And leave our desert to its peace!"
And leave our desert to its peace!: 1867 and later. "And leave our forest to its peace" (1855).
The "forest" of 1855 straightforwardly referred back to the "forest-glade" and "greenwood" of Stanza 29. The altered ending offers a covert glance back to the Grande Chartreuse: the remote valley where it stands is known as the "le désert de chartreuse". This is "désert" in the old medieval sense of waste land (as in the Green Knight's real name, Bertilak de Hautdesert).
*
The Grande Chartreuse was both remote and yet somewhere a literary or artistic person might well go. Perhaps especially in the Romantic period, on which Arnold's poem looks back.
Visits to the Grande Chartreuse had been stimulated by Thomas Gray's account from 1739: "one of the most romantic, and most astonishing scenes I ever beheld". In 1802 J.M.W. Turner was up there, making sketches.
Arnold noticeably doesn't mention Wordsworth's visit to the Grande Chartreuse: he wants to make space for his own poem. But Wordsworth was one of his heroes, and the background is relevant.
Wordsworth visited the Grande Chartreuse in 1790, shortly before revolutionary troops expelled the monks. (They returned in 1838.) Dorothy wrote in a letter that the visit made a great impression on her brother. The forcible expulsion of the monks gave Wordsworth a few early misgivings about the revolution, which he initially overcame. He wrote about it in Descriptive Sketches (1793) and then in "The Tuft of Primroses" (1808), an unfinished draft for the abortive Recluse. Finally the topic found a place in Book VI of the 1850 Prelude : it was Wordsworth's last major addition to his poem.
This information comes from Joseph F. Kishel, The Wordsworth Circle vol. 12 no. 1 (Winter 1981), pp. 82-88.
Here's the Chartreuse passage in Descriptive Sketches (1793):
But lo! the Alps ascending white in air,
Toy with the sun and glitter from afar.
And now, emerging from the forest's gloom,
I greet thee, Chartreuse, while I mourn thy doom.
Whither is fled that Power whose frown severe
Awed sober Reason till she crouched in fear?
'That' Silence, once in deathlike fetters bound,
Chains that were loosened only by the sound
Of holy rites chanted in measured round?
The voice of blasphemy the fane alarms,
The cloister startles at the gleam of arms.
The thundering tube the aged angler hears,
Bent o'er the groaning flood that sweeps away his tears.
Cloud-piercing pine-trees nod their troubled heads,
Spires, rocks, and lawns a browner night o'erspreads;
Strong terror checks the female peasant's sighs,
And start the astonished shades at female eyes.
From Bruno's forest screams the affrighted jay,
And slow the insulted eagle wheels away.
A viewless flight of laughing Demons mock
The Cross, by angels planted on the aerial rock.
The "parting Genius" sighs with hollow breath
Along the mystic streams of Life and Death.
Swelling the outcry dull, that long resounds
Portentous through her old woods' trackless bounds,
Vallombre, 'mid her falling fanes, deplores,
For ever broke, the sabbath of her bowers.
And here's the Chartreuse passage in the 1850 Prelude:
Taking leave
Of this glad throng, foot-travellers side by side,
Measuring our steps in quiet, we pursued
Our journey, and ere twice the sun had set
Beheld the Convent of Chartreuse, and there
Rested within an awful solitude:
Yes, for even then no other than a place
Of soul-affecting solitude appeared
That far-famed region, though our eyes had seen,
As toward the sacred mansion we advanced,
Arms flashing, and a military glare
Of riotous men commissioned to expel
The blameless inmates, and belike subvert
That frame of social being, which so long
Had bodied forth the ghostliness of things
In silence visible and perpetual calm.
—"Stay, stay your sacrilegious hands!"—The voice
Was Nature's, uttered from her Alpine throne;
I heard it then and seem to hear it now—
"Your impious work forbear, perish what may,
Let this one temple last, be this one spot
Of earth devoted to eternity!"
She ceased to speak, but while St. Bruno's pines
Waved their dark tops, not silent as they waved,
And while below, along their several beds,
Murmured the sister streams of Life and Death,
Thus by conflicting passions pressed, my heart
Responded; "Honour to the patriot's zeal!
Glory and hope to new-born Liberty!
Hail to the mighty projects of the time!
Discerning sword that Justice wields, do thou
Go forth and prosper; and, ye purging fires,
Up to the loftiest towers of Pride ascend,
Fanned by the breath of angry Providence.
But oh! if Past and Future be the wings
On whose support harmoniously conjoined
Moves the great spirit of human knowledge, spare
These courts of mystery, where a step advanced
Between the portals of the shadowy rocks
Leaves far behind life's treacherous vanities,
For penitential tears and trembling hopes
Exchanged—to equalise in God's pure sight
Monarch and peasant: be the house redeemed
With its unworldly votaries, for the sake
Of conquest over sense, hourly achieved
Through faith and meditative reason, resting
Upon the word of heaven-imparted truth,
Calmly triumphant; and for humbler claim
Of that imaginative impulse sent
From these majestic floods, yon shining cliffs,
The untransmuted shapes of many worlds,
Cerulean ether's pure inhabitants,
These forests unapproachable by death,
That shall endure as long as man endures,
To think, to hope, to worship, and to feel,
To struggle, to be lost within himself
In trepidation, from the blank abyss
To look with bodily eyes, and be consoled."
Not seldom since that moment have I wished
That thou, O Friend! the trouble or the calm
Hadst shared, when, from profane regards apart,
In sympathetic reverence we trod
The floors of those dim cloisters, till that hour,
From their foundation, strangers to the presence
Of unrestricted and unthinking man.
Abroad, how cheeringly the sunshine lay
Upon the open lawns! Vallombre's groves
Entering, we fed the soul with darkness; thence
Issued, and with uplifted eyes beheld,
In different quarters of the bending sky,
The cross of Jesus stand erect, as if
Hands of angelic powers had fixed it there,
Memorial reverenced by a thousand storms;
Yet then, from the undiscriminating sweep
And rage of one State-whirlwind, insecure.
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David Copperfield was serialized in 1849-1850 (just before Arnold wrote this poem). It was a novel that Arnold greatly admired. Towards the end the bereaved David finds himself in crisis, in an alpine landscape that seems at first to withhold its speech from him (compare the note on Stanza 2 above). I'm not suggesting this passage is a source for Arnold's poem but it's a fascinating analogue, both for its similarities and for its differences.
I was in Switzerland. I had come out of Italy, over one of the great passes of the Alps, and had since wandered with a guide among the by-ways of the mountains. If those awful solitudes had spoken to my heart, I did not know it. I had found sublimity and wonder in the dread heights and precipices, in the roaring torrents, and the wastes of ice and snow; but as yet, they had taught me nothing else.
I came, one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where I was to rest. In the course of my descent to it, by the winding track along the mountain-side, from which I saw it shining far below, I think some long-unwonted sense of beauty and tranquillity, some softening influence awakened by its peace, moved faintly in my breast. I remember pausing once, with a kind of sorrow that was not all oppressive, not quite despairing. I remember almost hoping that some better change was possible within me.
I came into the valley, as the evening sun was shining on the remote heights of snow, that closed it in, like eternal clouds. The bases of the mountains forming the gorge in which the little village lay, were richly green; and high above this gentler vegetation, grew forests of dark fir, cleaving the wintry snow-drift, wedge-like, and stemming the avalanche. Above these, were range upon range of craggy steeps, grey rock, bright ice, and smooth verdure-specks of pasture, all gradually blending with the crowning snow. Dotted here and there on the mountain’s-side, each tiny dot a home, were lonely wooden cottages, so dwarfed by the towering heights that they appeared too small for toys. So did even the clustered village in the valley, with its wooden bridge across the stream, where the stream tumbled over broken rocks, and roared away among the trees. In the quiet air, there was a sound of distant singing—shepherd voices; but, as one bright evening cloud floated midway along the mountain’s-side, I could almost have believed it came from there, and was not earthly music. All at once, in this serenity, great Nature spoke to me; and soothed me to lay down my weary head upon the grass, and weep as I had not wept yet, since Dora died!
(From David Copperfield, Chapter 58)
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Here's another post I enjoyed reading while preparing this post:
Yuval Ben-Ami, "A Journey to the Impenetrable Monastery Where Monks Live in Isolation and Silence" (Haaretz, 9 January 2020):
*
On Matthew Arnold's The Scholar-Gipsy:
On Matthew Arnold's Balder Dead:
...
Labels: Charles Dickens, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Matthew Arnold, William Wordsworth
