Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/36

 which pretended to be religious. It was a not unnatural reaction from a school which looked on passion in love as unworthy of a true philosophy of life, or from a school which made it into pretty sentiment. The senses, the appetites are part of human nature. They also are to be presented in poetry, but there, if art represents their base extremes, such art has ceased to be art, and has passed into the science of morbid conditions.

Another element in this poetry was an over-assertive individuality. Each of these poets, to his own thinking, contained all nature and all human nature. To investigate and represent the finity of themselves was their deepest interest, and ought to be the deepest interest of the world. Some even seem to think that they ought to have in their hands all knowledge and all power; the poet, they declare, is the true governor of the world. Each,,at least, believed himself to be the first of poets. / Their egotism is unlimited, but it is the product of their time./ Individualism, as in all periods of quickened life in a nation, had now become one of the ruling ideas of public and personal life. It appears, but modified by true genius, in Paracelsus and Sordello, and in many poems of Tennyson. It continued, and very fully, to display itself in the work of Clough and Arnold; nor did it lessen much till Morris and Rossetti carried poetry into another atmosphere, in which the personal soul was made of less importance. Moreover, it was quite in