But there is no genuine philosophic ground for detaching the work of these heroes from that of their successors. The writers of emi nence, who have exclusive right to the epithet Nineteenth Century or Victorian, prove after allowance has been made for individual idiosyn crasies which in great literature count for much, to belong in spirit to the age of their immediate predecessors. They sought expression for their thought in forms not essentially different from those to which their predecessors devoted energies, and their thought showed no new de parture. It still breathed that faith in the dig nity of mankind, in its inalienable right of ra tional liberty and in the greatness of the human destiny which was the outcome of the French Revolutionary spirit, at the same time as it paid respectful homage to surviving tradition of the great art and literature of a more distant past.
Tennyson (1809-92) who shares with Robert Browning (1812-89) the first place in the poetry of Victorian England, is nearly at all points Wordsworth's successor. Like Wordsworth he was in sympathy, through his prime, with the political and philosophic enlightenment of his era. It was this which he sought to interpret in his verse. He was a careful observer and a sympathetic expositor of inanimate nature. He had Wordsworth's command of poetic diction and melody, and also, it is to be admitted, Wordsworth's tendency to bathos and common place, in spite of his keen ear and sense of form. Browning — the twin-peak with Tennyson in the range of Victorian poetry—presents a stronger individuality. He is less closely allied to the writers who flourished in his early youth. But in many of his most striking characteristics,—in the subtlety of his power of psychological analy sis, in his robust optimism, in the universality and activity of his interest in current life and literature, in his predilection for study of past history and biography, and even in his indiffer ence to the graces of form which degenerated with him at times into a barbarous grotesque ness — in one or other of these regards Brown ing betrayed kinship with Coleridge, Byron, Landor and Scott.
Third in the list of those Victorian writers of the imagination, whose lives wholly belonged to the 19th century, stands Matthew Arnold (1822-88). As a poet Arnold marched under the banners of Wordsworth and Shelley; as a critic in prose he was at some points' more subtle and less sympathetic, and at other points clearer-eyed and less prejudiced than Lamb or Hazlitt. But the distinctions between Arnold and the earlier essayists of the century are due not so much to difference of epoch or of innate temperament. They are attributable rather to the idiosyncrasies that come of accidental di vergences in youthful training and environment. Arnold's native heritage of genius bore an aca demic impress owing to his association with Rugby, a great public school of which his father was a distinguished headmaster, and with Ox ford, the University whose traditions and tem per he permanently assimiliated as a young man.
Had Lamb and Hazlitt enjoyed Arnold's youth ful experiences, their style and sentiment are likely to have worn Arnold's colors. They were at one with each other in their ultimate concep tion that the esthetic sense was the sense best worth developing in human life and thought.
The three poets whose genius first blossomed midway through Queen Victoria's reign, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), William Morris (1834-96) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (b. 1837), all to some extent inherited and de veloped the tradition of Keats. Rossetti and Morris were painters as well as poets. The former was a leader of the pre-Raphaelite move ment, which sought to reproduce in art the simple beauty which distinguished pictorial ef fort of the early Middle Ages. As poets, Ros setti and his friend Morris sought their affinity in the sphere of medieval romance, whence both Keats and Sir Walter Scott had drawn with differing motives much inspiration. Ros setti was almost as great a master of the sonnet as his teachers Wordsworth and Keats, and he and Swinburne improved on Keats's and Tennyson's aptitude to suggest in metre new and subtle harmonies of music. Swinburne, at the opening of his career, seemed to graft on the sensuous influences of Keats the voluptuous temper of Byron. He cherished the wild as pirations which were bred of the French Rev olution. The poetry of Swinburne's youth ranks among the century's literary glories. He alone of his poetic school still survives. But his late work has hardly sustained the promise of his rebellious early years. The unimagina tive spirit of the second half of the century would seem to have discouraged and repressed his poetic development.
The seventh great master of Victorian liter ature, whose work in spite of the varied aim may best be classed with literary products of the imagination, was John Ruskin (1819-1900), who in that field survived all masters of his gen eration, save Swinburne. Ruskin has, like Rossetti and his friends, some claim to be num bered with the disciples of Keats. He devoted himself to expounding an aesthetic philosophy, the germ of which is discernible in Keats's poetry. He gave a very wide interpretation to the attributes of beauty, which he identified with excellence in every kind of human endeavor. In his voluminous writings he sought to define the place that beauty and its manifestation in art ought to fill in human economy. His clarity of style,. imaginative insight, and assertive per sonality invested all his literary work with fas cination. But he owes his chief importance in the history of the 19th century thought and literature to his masterly interpretation, analysis and application of the esthetic principles which underlie the most characteristic achievements of the great writers belonging to the generation that preceded or was coincident with the date of his own birth.