Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/71

 tenacity of duty, a stern resolution to fight on, were the heavens themselves to fall; and this makes his poetry dear and useful to men and women even now who may still be in his condition, But the condition did not develop his art, as it might have been developed in a happier world. Absence of joy limited, it even maimed, his creative energy. It repressed in him the powers of faith and hope. And the want of these powers, without which creativeness is weak, prevented him all his life long from being as complete or as great a poet as either Tennyson or Browning.

Without the full energy of these powers, his poetry suffers in melody, in charm, in unconsciousness, in natural exquisiteness of expression (there is some art-exquisitiveness of expression), in imaginative ardour, except when he was writing mournfully. In the elegy, where his genius was quite at ease, he is excellent. Nothing better has been done in that way for two centuries than the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. Indeed, all his best verse has this elegiac note, or nearly all. I should like, among a few others, to except the Strayed Reveller, into the inconsequence of whose enchanted intoxication I wish he had oftener wandered.

It was a pity, then, he was so unfortunate in the time at which he began and continued to write, for had he not been burdened with its fierce questionings and turmoil, had he found himself in an age of sweetness and light, when life was keen and keen for high things, he had been a greater poet. He might then