Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/116

 His theory then faded away before the pressure on his modern soul of the modern time, the modern pain. But the present, at least at first, seized on him in the wrong way. Afterwards, in poems which we may call poems of transition, his self-isolation was modified. But now, the present did not urge him outside of himself to live in the thoughts and emotions of the movement which surged around him. It drove him into his own soul to consider and reconsider what thoughts and emotions the movement outside awakened into life within himself—what his soul suffered from it, what hatreds, what fears, what clashing! And he closed the windows of the inner house, that he might not hear or see that which disturbed his peace. I will know myself, he thought, alone, and then I may be able to understand and help the world. This was his early mistake as a poet. It was putting the cart before the horse.

I have said that had he lived with the movements of his time, with some hope and faith, and with some joy in the strife, he would have been a greater poet. But here there is a special thing to say, in this connection, with regard to the poems he wrote on the great ancient subjects. Had he not been too self-involved to enter with living interest into the movement of the world around him, he would have treated those great subjects with a fuller mastery. They are treated with a certain remoteness and coldness which can only be explained by the tyranny which the storms and woes of the time