192 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 



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 foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in 

 many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sensi 

 tive 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 con 

 victions, of the period in which he lived. To make beauti 

 ful conceptions immortal .by exquisiteness of phrase, is to 

 be a poet, no doubt ; but to be a new poet is to feel and to 

 utter that immanent life of things without which the utmost 

 perfection of mere form is at best only wax or marble. He 

 who can do both is the great poet. 



Over &quot; Chastelard, a Tragedy,&quot; we need not spend much 

 time. It is at best but the school exercise of a young poet 

 learning to write, and who reproduces in his copy-book, 

 more or less travestied, the copy that has been set for him 

 at the page s head by the authors he most admires. Grace 

 and even force of expression are not wanting, but there is 

 the obscurity which springs from want of definite intention; 

 the characters are vaguely outlined from memory, not 

 drawn firmly from the living and the nude in actual ex 

 perience of life; the working of passion is an a priori 

 abstraction from a scheme in the author s mind ; and there 

 is no thought, but only a vehement grasping after thought. 

 The hand is the hand of Swinburne, but the voice is the 

 voice of Browning. With here and there a pure strain of 



