The Victorian Poets 157dreamers, always original, vigorous, inexhaustible; with a great
range of interests, a buoyant hold on life, a strong and clear
eye, an assured belief and hope but no traditional convention-
ality, he alone adequately represents the curious, critical, eager,
exploring mind of the age. He has depth and force and abun-
dance of a certain kind of thought, which if not of the very first
greatness and originality, is open to all manner of questioning
and speculation and new idea. His regard ranges over history
and delights in its pictures of the stir and energy of life and
its changing scenes, over man and his thought and character
and emotion and action, looks into every cranny, follows every
tortuous winding, seizes on each leap and start of the human
machine. He is a student, critic, psychologist, thinker. He seeks
to interpret, like certain French poets, the civilisations and the
ages. His genius is essentially dramatic; for though he has written
in many lyrical forms, the lyric is used to represent a moment in
the drama of life or character, and though he uses the narrative,
his treatment of it is dramatic and not narrative, as when he takes
an Italianfait-diversand makes each personage relate or discuss
it in such a way as to reveal his own motive, character, thought
and passion. He does not succeed except perhaps once as a
dramatist in the received forms because he is too analytic, too
much interested in the mechanism of temperament, character,
emotion and changing idea to concentrate sufficiently on their
results in action; but he has an unrivalled force in seizing on a
moment of the soul or mind and in following its convolutions
as they start into dramatic thought, feeling and impulse. He of
all these writers has hold of the substance of the work marked
out for a poet of the age. And with all these gifts we might have
had in him the great interpretative poet, one might almost say,
the Shakespeare of his time. But by the singular fatality which
so often pursues the English poetical genius, the one gift needed
to complete him was denied. Power was there and the hold of
his material; what was absent was the essential faculty of artistic
form and poetic beauty, so eminent in his contemporaries, a fatal
deficiency. This great creator was no artist; this strength was too
robust and direct to give forth sweetness. There was no lack of