Their carefully drawn still wine tastes insipidly after
the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" of romance. They are fastidious
and academic; they lack the authentic fire; their poetry is "made"
poetry like Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's. On their comparative merits
a deal of critical ink has been spilt, Arnold's characterisation of Gray
is well known--"he never spoke out." Sterility fell upon him because he
lived in an age of prose just as it fell upon Arnold himself because he
lived too much immersed in business and routine. But in what he wrote he
had the genuine poetic gift--the gift of insight and feeling. Against
this, Swinburne with characteristic vehemence raised the standard of
Collins, the latchet of whose shoe Gray, as a lyric poet, was not worthy
to unloose. "The muse gave birth to Collins, she did but give suck to
Gray." It is more to our point to observe that neither, though their
work abounds in felicities and in touches of a genuine poetic sense, was
fitted to raise the standard of revolt. Revolution is for another and
braver kind of genius than theirs. Romanticism had to wait for Burns and
Blake.
In every country at any one time there are in all probability not one
but several literatures flourishing.
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