WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 373 



tive theology, doubts and difficulties of all kinds. Religious 

 liberty in this age consists more in the right to disbelieve as 

 we think best than to believe according to our conscience. 

 Pessimism, already strong in Byron, has grown and gathered 

 strength with introspection until we find it lurking in nearly 

 all the sincerest utterances of the present. We are oppressed 

 with social problems which admit of no solution, due to the 

 vast increase of our population, to the industrial changes 

 which have turned England from an agricultural into a 

 manufacturing country, to the unequal distribution of wealth, 

 the development of huge, hideous towns, the seething multi- 

 tudes of vicious and miserable paupers which they harbour. 

 We watch the gathering of revolutionary storm-clouds, hear 

 the grumbling of thunder in the distance, and can only sit 

 meanwhile in darkness so gigantic and unmanageable are 

 the forces now in labour for some mighty birth of time. Who 

 can be optimistic under these conditions ? ' Merry England ' 

 sounds like a mockery now. Instead of merry England the 

 Victorian poet has awful, earnest, grimly menacing London 

 Jo sing in. His temptation, especially in the third period of 

 our century, is to retire from the world into an artificial 

 paradise of art, and there, among exotic fragrances and foreign 

 airs, to seek a refuge from the sombre problems forced upon 

 him by the actualities of life. These things were not felt so 

 much at the beginning of the century ; they are bringing it to 

 a close in sadness and strong searchings of soul. 



Ill 



Elizabethan genius found its main expression in the drama. 

 No epic worthy of the name was produced in the sixteenth 

 century, for Spenser's ' Faery Queen ' has not the right to be 

 so styled. But every great national epoch which attains to 

 utterance through art has a specific clairvoyance, and England 

 in the age we call Elizabethan was clairvoyant for the drama ; 

 that is to say, men wrought with an unerring instinct in this 

 field, and the lesser talents were lifted into the sphere of the 

 greater when they entered it. After the drama, and closely 



