❐ Write a short critical note on The Scholar Gipsy.
Ans. :- There is a dreamlike quality in the verses, in the direct tradition of Keats' 'Odes', and an elegiac note deriving from Il Penseroso and Gray's Elegy. In the Ode to a Nightingale Keats wills his entry into an ideal world ("Away, away, for I will fly to thee'), and re-creates the song of the nightingale as a symbol of eternal beauty. But though the vision is positive one, it still belongs to poetry, not to life. The word 'forlorn' recalls the poet to reality, to the world.
Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes,
Nor new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
The nightingale of the vision can reveal the bitterness of life in time, but cannot provide an escape; it belongs to art, not to life. 'The fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.' The nightingale's song is vital and real as a symbol of what men desire, but has no reality beyond this. Similarly, Keats's Grecian Urn has a life and vitality which, since it belongs to art, is more enduring than the experience of men in time : but this is attained only because it is not itself 'alive', and because it is not, outside the world of 'fancy', relevant to those who are. The happy lovers will never despair or fade, but neither will they kiss. The urn is a vision of fullness, but at the cost of being also 'Cold Pastoral'. The scholar gypsy is similar in his symbolic function to the nightingale's song and the Grecian urn. He is there to reveal the predicament of man's place in time, the ironic gulf between what man can dream of as possible and what, he knows, can possibly be. Arnold is no more confused between fact and fiction than Keats was, and to interpret the scholar gypsy as a 'programme' is the most basic mistake that can be made about the poem. The scholar-gypsy's uselessness to the nineteenth century on a practical level is underlined, however, by his associations with magic and the pre-scientific world; and the choice of such a central figure was not made by the poet in any arbitrary spirit.
Arnold writes in The Study of Poetry, 'In poetry, as a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find its consolation and stay. But the consolation and stay will be of power in proportion to the power in proportion as the poetry conveying it is excellent rather than untrue or half-true.' Judged from the point of view, The Scholar Gipsy is a true criticism of life and this criticism of life is rendered in poetry of iridescent beauty. The poem voices Arnold's disgust with modern life, its feverish and fickle activity and lack of strong determination. The people of Arnold's contemporary Waste Land are debilitated by.
... "this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts ... ... "
Our modern hectic life of perpetual strivings and the ups and downs of life siphon off our energies and destroy us. We have no aim and purpose in life. We have never been successful to translate out faith in action because we have never shown any consistency in our strivings. We try to face our troubles in a stoic resignation but without any radiant hope.
Mr. V. S. Seturaman points out that we can not ignore the influence of Hindu literature and thought upon Arnold, and argues that The Scholar Gipsy proposes the supreme step of The Bhagavad Gita, the rejection of action and all its fruits. He sees The Scholar Gipsy as essentially Oriental, in reaction against the west. He quotes from a letter written by Arnold in 1848, to Clough to whom he had lent a copy of the Bhagavad Gita : 'I am disappointed the Oriental wisdom, God grant it were mine, pleased you not. To the Greeks, foolishness. But if the poem is subjected to a critical scrutiny it will appear that the poem is striving towards a fusion of two traditions, Western and Eastern. The Hellenism of Arnold as dealt with in Culture and Anarchy is in fact close to the doctrine of the Bhagavad Gita in setting knowing above doing, and this aspect of both Hellenism and 'The Oriental wisdom' can be recognised in the scholar gipsy. But The Scholar Gipsy has also the qualities of Hebraism or doing. So the supreme step was a 'joint force of right thinking and strong doing.'
But the real pleasure and power of the poem lies in the poet's description of the landscape, Oxford scenes, "Such English-coloured verse,' says Swinburne, 'no poet has written since Shakespeare.' The Hurst with fir trees in spring, the lonely ale-house in the Berkshire moors, the high-field's dark corner, the boat moored by the cool river-side under Cumnor hills, the merry Oxford riders crossing the ferry on a summer night, the maidens dancing round the May-pole, the glittering Thames haunted by swallows, the children wandering over for water-cresses, the skirts of Bagley Wood with the gipsy tents, Thessaly where the blackbird picks his food, Hinksey with its wintry ridges, the line of festal light in Christ-church hall are described with Keastian sensuousness and charm.