SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 157 



SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES, 



ARE we really, then, to believe the newspapers for once, and 

 to doff our critical nightcaps, in which we have comfort 

 ably overslept many similar rumours and false alarms, to wel 

 come the advent of a new poet ? New poets, to our thinking, 

 are not very common, and the soft columns of the press often 

 make dangerous concessions, for which the marble ones of 

 Horace s day were too stony-hearted. Indeed, we have some 

 well-grounded doubts whether England is precisely the country 

 from which we have a right to expect that most precious of gifts 

 just now. There is hardly enough fervour of political life there 

 at present to ripen anything but the fruits of the literary forcing- 

 house, so fair outwardly and so flavourless compared with those 

 which grow in the hardier open air of a vigorous popular senti 

 ment. Mere wealth of natural endowment is not enough; there 

 must be also the co-operation of the time, of the public genius 

 roused to a consciousness of itself by the necessity of asserting 

 or defending the vital principle on which that consciousness 

 rests, in order that a poet may rise to the highest level of his 

 vocation. The great names of the last generation Scott, 

 Wordsworth, Byron represent moods of national thought and 

 feeling, and are therefore more or less truly British poets ; just 

 as Goethe, in whose capacious nature, open to every influence 

 of earth and sky, the spiritual fermentation of the eighteenth 

 century settled and clarified, is a European one. A sceptic 

 might say, we think, with some justice, that poetry in England 

 was passing now, if it have not already passed, into one of those 

 periods of mere art without any intense convictions to back it, 

 which lead inevitably, and by no long gradation, to the mannered 

 and artificial. Browning, by far the richest nature of the time, 

 becomes more difficult, draws nearer to the all-for-point fashion 

 of the concettisti, with every poem he writes ; the dainty trick of 

 Tennyson cloys when caught by a whole generation of versifiers, 

 as the style of a great poet never can be; and we have a fore 

 boding that Clough, imperfect as he was in many respects, and 

 dying before he had subdued his sensitive temperament to the 

 sterner requirements of his art, will be thought a hundred years 

 hence to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral 

 and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards 

 settled convictions, of the period in which he lived. To make 

 beautiful conceptions immortal by exquisiteness of phrase, is to 



