Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/38

 poets were moved by theology, and into their theology each intruded his own special individuality. The theological excitement had begun in and about 1830 in the Universities, and had now extended over the whole of religious England. Tennyson and Browning shared in it, but with a dignity of genius that separated them from the rest. Clough and Arnold were closely involved in it, and all the minor poets of this time took part in the battle. But these poets, whom I now discuss, represented it in separate, individual, unchartered forms—as it expressed itself in the excited souls of laymen who owned no authority of church or sect, and followed no especial form of creed. They made theology in its relation to life, even more than love, the subject-matter of their poetry. But they were not temperate, concise, or conscious of the limitations of thought, like the greater poets; they were sensational, endlessly fluent, and claimed to be at home in regions of thought beyond the sight of man, The problems of theology are discussed by them at such portentous length that one can only explain the great vogue of these poems by a universal excitement on the subject in religious society. The best of them was Festus. It opens, like Goethe's Faust, with God and Satan in colloquy, and Satan is allowed to tempt Festus. It ends with Festus being made King of all humanity and with the immediate destruction of the whole human race. He has, before this, visited with Lucifer Heaven itself and Hell, and all the inhabited planets, and is the