Why is this? Why is the Elizabethan era? Why should the age that glowed with the deathless flames of Shakespeare's genius, that echoed with Ben Jonson's lyric laughter, that was pierced by the poignant music of Robert Southwell, the martyred Jesuit poet, be named after Elizabeth, the persecutor of the saints, the vain and selfish and cruel woman who then occupied England's throne, to England's lasting shame?
And why are we to-day considering, in Swinburne and Francis Thompson, two Victorian poets? Why Victorian? Of course, Queen Victoria was a good wife and mother, a noble gentlewoman. I think that we all like everything that we know about Queen Victoria except perhaps her politics.
But why should the name of this estimable woman be used to designate the intellectual and spiritual life of the time during which she ruled, a life from which she was as remote as was the Queen of Sheba? Why should we give the placid name Victorian to that time of violent sin and violent virtue, of passionate infidelity and passionate faith, that time which produced the Darwinian theory, and the Oxford Movement, which produced the cruel reign of dogmatic science and the Catholic renascence, which produced the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the poetry of Francis Thompson?
The combination of these two names may strike you as unusual. You know that Swinburne was what is called a Pagan, that he hated all forms of Christianity and especially the Catholic Church. You know also that Francis Thompson was the Church's poet-laureate, the greatest Catholic poet of modern times. And you wonder why Swinburne and Francis Thompson should be mentioned in the same breath.
Well, great as are the differences between these poets, the resemblances are striking. It is true that when Swinburne was at the height of his fame, Francis Thompson was running errands and holding horses in the London streets, his genius practically unknown. Yet he was famous before Swinburne's death, and there are other points of contact beside that of time between this militant pagan and this militant Christian.
In the first place, both were poets. Both had genuine talent, and both had a strong desire to do the work of the poet, that is, to find beauty and to bind beauty with a chain of linked rhyme.
Now the poet's search for beauty often is difficult, and it was especially difficult in London in the latter days of the nineteenth century. All the poets were seeking for beauty, but the scientists had been industriously trying to drive beauty out of the world. Of course, they had not succeeded, any more than the French Atheist succeeded a few years ago in carrying out his blasphemous threat of putting out that light in the heavens. But they had thrown a veil over the face of beauty, and made beauty hard to see except for those who looked with the strong eyes of faith.
How the poets worried! Where had beauty flown? Browning thought that beauty was in humanity. So he searched for beauty in humanity, and in his search made many interesting and noble poems. Tennyson, that magnificent artist in words, thought that beauty was somewhere in evolution. And he at last descended to the most supine of intellectual attitudes, his philosophy being merely that somehow good would be the final goal of all, that everything would come out all right in the end. And he uttered the most absurd statement ever made by any poet in the history of the world when he said "There lies more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."
All the poets were seeking after beauty. When Swinburne, full of Greek and Latin and talent and conceit, left Oxford University to begin a military career, he was seeking for beauty. And when Francis Thompson was selling matches and shoestrings in the London gutters, he was seeking for beauty.
Swinburne knew that the life around him was dull and materialistic. The scientists had said that the old ethical and spiritual values were dead. There could be no beauty in religion, for the scientists had killed religion, putting up in its place their own artificial dogma. Beauty and light had gone out of life.