Chapter XII

The Course of English Poetry – 4

I

N THE work of the intellectual and classical age of English
poetry, one is again struck by the same phenomenon that we
meet throughout, an extraordinary force for achievement
limited by a characteristic defect which turns in the actual ex-
ecution to half-success or a splendid failure. A big streak of
rawness somewhere, a wrong turn of the hand or an imperfect
balance of the faculties wastes the power spent and makes the
total result much inferior to what it should have been with so
much nerve of energy to speed it or so broad a wing of genius
to raise it into the highest empyrean heights. The mind of this
age went for its sustaining influence and its suggestive models
to Greece, Rome and France. That was inevitable; for these
have been the three typically intellectual nations of Europe. It is
these three literatures that have achieved, each following its own
different way and peculiar spirit, the best in form and substance
that that kind of inspiration can produce. The English mind, not
natively possessed of any inborn intellectual depth and subtlety,
not trained to a fine classical lucidity and sure aesthetic taste,
had to turn to these sources, if the attempt was to be made at all.
Steeping itself in these sources, it might hope to blend with the
classical clarity and form its own masculine force and strenuous-
ness, its strong imagination, its deeper colour and profounder
intuitive suggestiveness and so arrive at something new and great
to which the world could turn as another supreme element of
its aesthetic culture. But the effect actually obtained did not
answer to the possibility offered. To arrive at this perfection,
this new turn of poetry ought to have kept, transmuted but not
diminished, all that was best in the Elizabethan spirit and to
have coloured, enriched and sweetened with its magic touch the
classical form and the intellectual motive. There was instead
a revolutionary departure, a breaking away, decisive rejection,