Ferment (1863-1870)
Literature, submerged in this flood of doubt and livid rage, paused irresolutely as at a cross-road. Literature, one may say, almost came to a standstill. Writers of the older order were dead or as good as dead; and the newer order had not yet found its voices. Tennyson had given his best, and now went on, beautifully embodying a lifeless chivalric ideal in the lavender verses of the Idylls. Browning was doing little better: "All's right with the world!" scarcely sufficed to check the world's anxious search for truth, even if unpalatable; Rabbi Ben Ezra and The Ring and the Book were merely interesting continuations of a curiously tortured optimistic reaction to tragic life; few people found themselves able to collect faith through blind energy. Arnold, ceaselessly smiting the Philistines with his polished battle-axes, aroused a larger quantity of aspiration—but his aspiration was sunk up to its chin in placidity.
It was not until 1866 that the smoldering heat of poetic revolt burst out into the liquid fire of Swinburne's first Poems and Ballads, to be followed in 1870 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Latinesque searchings for voluptuous beauty, while conventional morals withered by his wayside.
The more vigorous of the older fictional spirits were also dying out. Charlotte Brontë was dead, Thackeray died in 1863, Mrs. Gaskell two years later. Dickens, having completed his effective career with Our Mutual Friend, shuffled off this mortal coil in 1870. The stage was held by a troupe of second-raters: Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope. Mrs. Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman was feeding the bourgeoisie with
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