Thus Mr. Swinburne's elder contemporaries and precursors in poetry were all in different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the principal figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy, or caught in the garden with Maud--with intentions strictly honourable in both cases. The treatment of love by Browning and Meredith is chiefly psychological; they are usually concerned with the tragic situations that it can involve, though the comic aspect of sexual infatuation occasionally provokes cynicism. In politics all these poets are no friends to democracy or seething radicalism; they adore liberty, yet they are votaries of law and order; they have a hatred of misrule, and generally a cheerful confidence in the world's evolution toward better things. On social ethics the poets of the mid-Victorian period wrote with philosophic sobriety; they maintained a strict moral standard. In their wildest emotional flights they abstained from irreverence or indecorum. They undoubtedly represented the prevailing cast of thought, the taste and tendencies of the society to which they belonged; the growing scepticism, the influence on established ideas of advancing science and philosophy. Literature had been showing distinct signs of sympathy with these novelties, but in the early 'sixties an open revolt was generally discountenanced.
Mr. Swinburne's first publications were two historic plays, of which something will be said hereafter. In 1864 he turned suddenly from modern history to ancient legend for his dramatic subject, when he aroused immediate attention by _Atalanta in Calydon_, which reproduced the structure and metrical arrangement of a Greek tragedy. The dialogue has the purity of tone, the clear-cut concision that belong to its Hellenic model. At the beginning we have a joyous chant full of sound and colour, gradually changing into the elegiac strain of foreboding, the dread of pitiless divinities, the lamentation for the hero's unmerited fate. The exquisite modulations of the verse, the splendid choral antiphonies captivated all who were susceptible to the enchantment of poetry. The delicate adaptation of the English language to quantitative harmonies in high resonant lyrics showed extraordinary skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in style and character as the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came _Chastelard_, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt, for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions of heroism than that of the love-sick knight who joyfully throws away his life for an hour in his lady's chamber, tears up the warrant reprieving him from execution, and accepts death to save Queen Mary's fragile reputation. But although the keynote of Mr. Swinburne's coming poetry is struck in _Chastelard_--the overpowering enthralment of Love, a joy to live and die for--