Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/47

 urged him beyond it to find the rest in perfection. He was the image and the expression of thousands who lived in that disturbed time, when criticism and science set the battle in array against the old theology. It is the image and the expression, even now, after the battle has raged for sixty years, of the condition of a number of persons who are impassioned to find a truth by which they can live, who desire to believe but are unable, who are equally unable to find peace in unbelief. Thus moving, like a Hamlet, through the strifes of theology and religion, he resembles Hamlet in another way. When the Prince is suddenly flung into the storm of action, he takes momentarily a fierce part in it, and enjoys it, till overthinking again seizes on him, Clough repeats this in his life, and his poetry is touched with it.

These are the causes of the pleasure with which we read Clough's earlier poetry—its clear image of a certain type of men and women in a spiritually troubled time, its close contact with and intimate expression of the constantly debating soul, its truthfulness, its sanity amid scepticism, its statement of all sides of the matter in hand, its personal humanity, and its sympathy with man, its self-mastery and its clear aim. There is also plenty of good matter of thought and of emotion worthily controlled—great things in poetry, provided they are expressed poetically. But the poetry itself is not of a high quality; its level is only a third of the way towards greatness; it is imaginative, but the imagination in it never soars and never is on fire,