SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 211 



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 convic- 

 tions 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 Tenny- 

 son cloys when caught by a whole generation of versi- 

 fiers, 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 sen- 

 sitive 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 intellec- 

 tual 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 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 " Chastelard, a Tragedy," 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 experience 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 ve- 

 hement grasping after thought. The hand is the hand 



