WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 369 



already noted as a main mark of Elizabethan utterance, led 

 thus to unity of style. The way in which classical master- 

 pieces were then studied, conduced to the same result. Those 

 perennial sources of style were enjoyed in their entirety, 

 absorbed, assimilated, reproduced with freedom. They were 

 not closely scrutinised, examined with the microscope, studied 

 with the view of emphasising this or that peculiarity a 

 single critic found in them. And the same holds good 

 about contemporary foreign literatures. Everything which 

 these literatures contained was grist for the English mill ; not 

 models to be copied, but stuff to be used. 



Now compare the intellectual conditions of the Victorian 

 age. Take language first. Instead of having no literary 

 past, except Chaucer, Skelton, the English Bible, and Sir 

 Thomas Malory behind our backs, we have the long 

 self-conscious period between Dryden and Byron, during 

 which our mother tongue was carefully elaborated upon 

 a definite system. Victorian poetry has to reckon with 

 Elizabethan poetry and the poetry of Queen Anne for 

 English people call their epochs by the names of queens. 

 This constitutes at the outset a great difference, making for 

 diversity in style. A writer has more models to choose from, 

 more openings for the exercise of his personal predilections. 

 And the mental attitude has altered also. We are highly 

 conscious of our aims, profoundly analytical. All study of 



i literature has become critical and comparative. The scientific 

 spirit makes itself powerfully felt in the domain of art. 

 It is impossible for people of the present to be as fresh and 

 native as the Elizabethans were. Such a mighty stream, 

 novies Styx interfusa, in the shape of accumulated erudition, 

 grave national experiences, spirit-quelling doubts, insurgent 

 philosophies, and all too aching pressing facts and fears, 

 divides the men of this time from the men of that. It is 

 enough now to have indicated these points. The argument 



! will return to some of them in detail. For the moment 

 we may safely assert that a prominent note of Elizabethan 

 as distinguished from Victorian literature is unity of tone, 



B B 



