for the sterile fleurs du mal of youth. Lastly, SwinApplication. burne has been said to lack application, but ten years of profuse and consecutive labors refute the charge. Works like his are not produced without energy and long industrious hours. If done at a heat, the slow hidden fire has never ceased its burning. Who shall dictate to a poet his modes and tenses, or his choice of work? But all this matters nothing; the entire host of traditional follies need not abash us if, with their coming, we have a revival of the olden passion and the olden power. Retrospec tive summary. The Georgian era: 1790-1824. period. DURING the Georgian era a romantic sentimentalism, exalted to passion in the utterance of Byron, was the dominating spirit of British verse. The more subtile but slowly maturing influence of the Lake school, and that of the idealists Shelley and Keats, did not lay firm hold upon the immediate generation. Their effect was not wholly apparent until the beginning of our own time. Nevertheless, a few poets, among whom Hunt and Procter were notable, extended it over a A transition transition period, and finally saw it become a general and potent force. The reader now has observed the technical finish, the worship of pure beauty, and the revival of classical taste, discernible, before the work. of Keats, in the artistic method of Landor, a poet who so recently ended his career. These constituents, more fully developed by the exquisite genius of Keats, were to mark the outward features of English metrical literature during the refined era whose poets have been included under this review; whose spirit, moreover, suggested that contemplative method which rose to imagination in the high discourse of Wordsworth, Victorian poets. RETROSPECTIVE SUMMARY. and too often sinks to didacticism in the perplexed and timorous strains of his disciples. verse. 413 The present situation and outlook. drama: Queen Mary," 1875. After passion, reflection, taste, repose; and such. have been the qualities displayed by numbers of the Victorian poets in the contemplation of beauty and knowledge, and in the production of their composite At last a Neo-Romantic school, of which Browning and Rossetti have been leaders, is engaged in a nervous effort to reunite beauty and passion in rhythmical art. Swinburne, beyond the rest, having carried expression to its farthest extreme, obeys a healthful impulse, seeking to renew the true dramatic vigor and thus begin another cycle of creative song. Even Tennyson, in the mellow ripeness of his fame, Tennyson's perceives that the mission of the idyllist is ended, and extends to the latest movement his adherence and practical aid. Going outside his special genius and lifelong wont, he now-through sheer intellectual force, and the skill made perfect by fifty years of practice-See page 191. has composed, with deliberate forethought and consummate art, a drama that does not belie the name. Without much imaginative splendor, it is at least objective and adapted to the fitness of things, and thus essentially different from Browning's essays toward a revival of the dramatic mould. On the other hand, it also differs from the work of the Elizabethan dramatists, in that it is the result of a forced effort, while the models after which it is shaped were in their day an intuitive form of expression, the natural outgrowth of a thoroughly dramatic age. The very effort, however, is alike honorable to England's Laureate and significant of the present need. Wisdom, beauty, and passion-The constita blended trinity-constitute the poetic strength of uents of every imaginative era, and memorably that of Shake-matic verse. great dra speare's time. So long as the true critic's faith, hope, and charity abide (and the greatest of these is charity), he will justify every well-timed, masterly effort to recall the triune spirit of Britain's noblest and most enduring song. |