Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/34

 mate, runs through its seriousness as a secondary not as a principal part of life. The interlude, between the two parts of the drama, is a well-wrought study of a woman who had loved too much and too often for her peace; a creature of impulse and fire, with a born obliquity in her nature. Its lyric form, its natural description of Italy, its revelation of a wildered woman's soul, and her pathetic self-judgment, is the best poetry in the book. In it Taylor let his imagination loose; in the drama he curbed it so closely that it lost charm. He subordinated his poetry to his intellect, and his other dramas are subject to a similar criticism.

Another school of poets which arose in this excited time was the school to which was afterwards given the nickname of Spasmodic by persons who were incapable of writing its poetry. It had a great vogue. Bailey's Festus was praised, and justly, by excellent judges. Sydney Dobell's alder, and The Roman, and the Poems of Alex. Smith received ovations in their day. After fully fifteen years, Professor Aytoun's Firmilian, a Spasmodic Tragedy, exaggerating grossly the faults of the school, killed it. But Festus still continues to claim our admiration for its high poetic qualities. It was published in 1839; and was begun when Bailey was twenty years old. He enlarged it till he died. It embodied a new theology, neither of Newman nor of Maurice, but a layman's theology freed from the limits of authority, of tradition, and of conventional morality. The unbridled thinking, and unmixed self-con-