Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/158

 nature and human nature. "Let us escape," they cry, "into a lovelier earth, a purer air, a simpler and more natural life."

We can trace, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the beginnings of such a cry in Arnold's passing endeavour to find his subjects in Greek, Norse, and medieval story, in his reiterated longing for beauty and calm, apart from the noise of warring thought and low desires. We have looked back to the time when in the fifties and sixties of the last century the old faiths and theories of life were thrown into the hissing furnace of scientific and historical criticism, and no one knew what would emerge when the amalgam had cooled. We have seen how this confused world, and the tossed world of his own heart, were too much for Arnold. He could not escape from the trouble when he was young. He never quite escaped from it. But Rossetti did, and so did Morris.

The history of their poetry repeats the history of the poetry of Keats. It had no connexion with the thoughts concerning man and the war around them which so deeply influenced poetry from Blake to Shelley. The ideas Shelley sought to revive, those also which Byron drove at the heads of men, made the slightest possible impression on Keats. He does not, on the whole, seem to be aware of their existence. The controversies, furies, and passions which had collected round them in the realms of social, political, and religious thought, and which had lashed Byron and Shelley into poetic