It thus earned a right to be considered the complete expression of that
scepticism and sensual sadness into which later Victorian literature was
more and more falling away: a sort of bible of unbelief. For a cold fit
had followed the hot fit of Swinburne, which was of a feverish sort: he
had set out to break down without having, or even thinking he had, the
rudiments of rebuilding in him; and he effected nothing national even in
the way of destruction. The Tennysonians still walked past him as primly
as a young ladies' school--the Browningites still inked their eyebrows
and minds in looking for the lost syntax of Browning; while Browning
himself was away looking for God, rather in the spirit of a truant boy
from their school looking for birds' nests. The nineteenth-century
sceptics did not really shake the respectable world and alter it, as the
eighteenth-century sceptics had done; but that was because the
eighteenth-century sceptics were something more than sceptics, and
believed in Greek tragedies, in Roman laws, in the Republic. The
Swinburnian sceptics had nothing to fight for but a frame of mind; and
when ordinary English people listened to it, they came to the conclusion
that it was a frame of mind they would rather hear about than
experience. But these later poets did, so to speak, spread their soul in
all the empty spaces; weaker brethren, disappointed artists, unattached
individuals, very young people, were sapped or swept away by these
songs; which, so far as any particular sense in them goes, were almost
songs without words. It is because there is something which is after all
indescribably manly, intellectual, firm about Fitzgerald's way of
phrasing the pessimism that he towers above the slope that was tumbling
down to the decadents. But it is still pessimism, a thing unfit for a
white man; a thing like opium, that may often be a poison and sometimes
a medicine, but never a food for us, who are driven by an inner command
not only to think but to live, not only to live but to grow, and not
only to grow but to build.