The Victorian Poets 159the conventionality and platitude which constantly meets us in
Tennyson’s thinking; he can achieve the strongest effects, even
the romantic effect without the overwrought romantic colour
of Rossetti, Swinburne’s overpitch or Tennyson’s too frequent
overcharge and decorative preciosity of expression. We are at
ease with him and can be sure that he will not say too much but
just what the true poet in him has to say and no more. For this
reason he was able to bring into Victorian poetry the expres-
sion of the most characteristic trains of thought expressing the
contemporary mind and temperament at its highest and best.
Tennyson voices the conventional English mind, Swinburne a
high-pitched cry of revolt or a revolutionary passion for freedom
or even for licence; Rossetti and Morris take refuge in mediae-
valism as they saw it: Arnold strikes out the more serious notes
of contemporary thinking. He fails however to look beyond to
the future. In one respect of literary workmanship he does how-
ever anticipate future trends; for he makes a departure towards
certain tendencies of modernist forms of verse. He made the
first attempt at any regular free verse and thus anticipated the
modernist departure from metrical forms. He attempted also an
imitation of the Greek dramatic form but not with Swinburne’s
originality and the success achieved inAtalanta in Calydon.
This is the balance of the Victorian epoch; a considerable
intellectual and artistic endeavour, contradicting, overcoming
but still hampered by an ungenial atmosphere; two remarkable
poets held back from the first greatness, one by imperfection of
form, the other by imperfection of substance; four artists of less
range, but with work of an accomplished, but overpitched or
thin or languorous beauty; an enrichment and strengthening of
the language which makes it more capable of fine and varied
and curious thought, and the creation of an artistic conscience
which may impose in the future a check on the impulse of an
overabundant energy to imperfection of eager haste and vagary
in execution. If the promise of the coming age is fulfilled, it may
be remembered as a fine, if limited period of preparation for the
discovery of new, more beautiful and grander fields of poetry.