Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/37

 harmony with the whole drift of political and social opinion. The glorification of individual freedom to act as it pleased, independent of the interests of the whole—the opposite doctrine to that of collectivism— ruled the internal politics of the State, of trade, and of all social questions from 1832 to 1866, when the first blow was concisely administered to individualism. These poems were the exaggerated exposition in art of this individualism.

Then again, this claim of the poets to absolute freedom of self-development made them claim full freedom for national development and for the overthrow of all oppression. The democratic ideas, scarcely represented by Tennyson or Browning, were ever since 1832 quite awake in England. They grew hotter as the years went on. The reactionary work of the French monarchy, the oppression of North Italy by Austria, the condition of Rome and Naples, the treatment of Poland, the state of the poor and the working men of England, multiplied the power of those ideas. They broke into fierce revolt in 1848; and they were represented by these poets. Sydney Dobell's Roman, published in 1849, an indictment of Austria's villainies in Italy, and a claim for a united Italy, with Rome as its centre, ran from edition to edition, and was only one example of poetry filled with sympathy for the struggle for freedom on the Continent. Clough shared in this excitement. Arnold receded from it.

But even more than by fame, love and freedom, these