onal and creative a thing as ever was written;
and the best expression of a bad mood, a mood that may, for all I know,
be permanent in Persia, but was certainly at this time particularly
fashionable in England. In the technical sense of literature it is one
of the most remarkable achievements of that age; as poetical as
Swinburne and far more perfect. In this verbal sense its most arresting
quality is a combination of something haunting and harmonious that flows
by like a river or a song, with something else that is compact and
pregnant like a pithy saying picked out in rock by the chisel of some
pagan philosopher. It is at once a tune that escapes and an inscription
that remains. Thus, alone among the reckless and romantic verses that
first rose in Coleridge or Keats, it preserves something also of the wit
and civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like "a Muezzin from
the tower of darkness cries," or "Their mouths are stopped with dust"
are successful in the same sense as "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane"
or "Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways." But--

"Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before
I swore; but was I sober when I swore?"

is equally successful in the same sense as--

"Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer
And without sneering teach the rest to sneer."

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