96 The Future Poetry
could never fail in greatness and power, nor could he descend, as
did Wordsworth and others, in style, turn and rhythm below his
well-attained high poetical level; but the supreme vitalising fire
has sunk. The method and idea retain sublimity, but the deeper
spirit has departed.
Much greater, initial and essential was the defect in the po-
etry that followed this strong beginning. Here all is unredeemed
intellectuality and even the very first elements of the genuine
poetic inspiration are for the most part, one might almost say,
entirely absent. Pope and Dryden and their school, except now
and then and as if by accident, — Dryden especially has lines
sometimes in which he suddenly rises above his method, — are
busy only with one aim, with thinking in verse, thinking with a
clear force, energy and point or with a certain rhetorical pomp
and effectiveness, in a well-turned and well-polished metrical
system. That seems to have been their sole idea of “numbers”,
of poetry, and it is an idea of unexampled poverty and fal-
sity. No doubt this was a necessary phase, and perhaps, the
English creative mind being what it then was, rich and strong
but confused and lawless and always addicted in its poetry to
quite the reverse of a clear intellectual method, it had to go to
an opposite extreme. It had to sacrifice for a time many of its
native powers in order to learn as best it could how to arrive at
a firm and straightforward expression of thought in a just, well-
harmonised, precise and lucid speech; an inborn gift in all the
Latin tongues, in a half-Teutonic speech attacked by the Celtic
richness of imagination this power had to be acquired even at
a cost. But the sacrifice made was immense and entailed much
effort of recovery in the later development of the language. The
writers of this rationalising age got rid of the Elizabethan lan-
guage with its opulent confusion, its often involved expression,
its lapses into trailing and awkward syntax, its perplexed turn
in which ideas and images jostle and stumble together, fall into
each other’s arms and strain and burden the expression in a way
which is sometimes stimulating and exhilarating, but sometimes
merely embarrassing and awkward; they got rid of the crudeness
and extravagance but lost all the rich imagination and vision, the