The Victorian Poets 149less elevated interests, the substitution of a more curious but less
impetuous movement. The rich beauty of Keats is replaced by
the careful opulent cultivated picturesqueness of Tennyson, the
concentrated personal force of Byron by the many-sided intel-
lectual robustness and energy of Browning, the intense Nature
poetry and the strong and grave ethical turn of Wordsworth by
the too intellectually conscious eye on Nature and the cultured
moralising of Arnold, the pure ethereal lyricism of Shelley by
Swinburne’s turgid lyrical surge and all too self-conscient fury
of foam-tossing sound, and in place of the supernatural visions
of Blake and Coleridge we have the mediaeval glamour and
languorous fields of dream of Rossetti and Morris. There is a
considerable gain, but a deep loss; for this poetry has a more
evolved richness, but in that greater richness a greater poverty.
The gain is in fullness of a more varied use of language, a more
conscious and careful art, a more informed and varied range of
thought and interest; but the loss is in spiritual substance and the
Pythian height of inspiration. There is a more steady working,
but with it a clogged and heavier breath; a wealth of colour and
nearer strain of thinking, but a lower flame of the spirit. This
labour is assured and careful enough in its workmanship but,
less inspired, it has a paucity of greatness and a too temperate
impulsion.
The intellectual preparation of the previous poetry, the
depth and wealth of experience which must found the greatest
and most successful audacities of spiritual vision, had been
insufficient, coming as it did after a shallow and superficial age
of the acute, but limited cult of Reason. The work of the middle
nineteenth century was to prepare anew the intellectual ground
and to lead up to a more conscious, enriched and careful artistic
execution. But it was a tract of intellectual effort in which there
was much width of a kind and considerable invention, but a
very insufficient height and profundity. In England there was
the added misfortune of a reign of rampant philistinism. The
Victorian period for all its activity and fruitfulness was by no
means one of those great intellectual humanistic ages which the
world will look back to with a satisfied sense of clarity or of