bareness and bleakness--all this in reference to the voices that have
most proved their command of the ear of time, and with the various
examples added of those claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter
attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing in
how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the
torch could still be carried. It is not of course for the countrymen of
Byron and of Tennyson and Swinburne, any more than for those of Victor
Hugo, to say nothing of those of Edmond Rostand, to forget the
occurrence on occasion of high instances in which the dangers all seem
denied and only favour and facility recorded; but it would take more of
these than we can begin to set in a row to purge us of that prime
determinant, after all, of our affection for the great poetic muse, the
vision of the rarest sensibility and the largest generosity we know kept
by her at their pitch, kept fighting for their life and insisting on
their range of expression, amid doubts and derisions and buffets, even
sometimes amid stones of stumbling quite self-invited, that might at any
moment have made the loss of the precious clue really irremediable.
Which moral, so pointed, accounts assuredly for half our interest in the
poetic character--a sentiment more unlikely than not, I think, to
survive a sustained succession of Victor Hugos and Rostands, or of
Byrons, Tennysons and Swinburnes. We quite consciously miss in these
bards, as we find ourselves rather wondering even at our failure to miss
it in Shelley, that such "complications" as they may have had to reckon
with were not in general of the cruelly troublous order, and that no
stretch of the view either of our own "theory of art" or of our vivacity
of passion as making trouble, contributes perceptibly the required
savour of the pathetic. We cling, critically or at least experientially
speaking, to our superstition, if not absolutely to our approved
measure, of this grace and proof; and that truly, to cut my argument
short, is what sets us straight down before a sudden case in which the