98 The Future Poetry
leaves the attempt at a Gallicised refinement, finds its own robust
vigour and arrives at a brutal, but still a genuine and sometimes
really poetic vigour and truth of expression. Energy and driving
force, the English virtues, are, indeed, a general merit of the verse
of Pope and Dryden and in this respect they excel their French
exemplars. Their expression is striking in its precision; each cou-
plet rings out with a remarkable force of finality and much coin
of their minting has passed into common speech and citation. If
there is not much gold of poetry here, there is at least much well-
gilt copper coin of a good currency, useful for small purchases
and petty traffic. But in the end one is tired of a monotonous
brilliance of language, wearied out by the always repeated trick
of decisiveness and point of rhythm. This verse has to be read
by couplets and passages; for each poem is only a long string of
them and, except in one or two instances, the true classical gift,
the power of structure is absent. There is an almost complete
void of the larger genuine thought-power which is necessary for
structure. This intellectual age of English poetry did its work,
but, as was inevitable with so pronounced a departure from the
true or at least the higher line, that work gives the impression,
if not of a resonant failure, at least of a fall or a considerable
descent to lower levels. This Augustan age not only falls in-
finitely far below the Roman from which it drew so much of
its inspiration, but gives an impression of great inferiority when
compared with the work of the Victorians and one is tempted
to say that a little of the work of Wordsworth and Keats and
Shelley has immeasurably more poetic value than all this silver
and tin and copper and the less precious metals of these workers
whose superficiality of workmanship was a pride of this age.
But although this much has to be said, it would be by itself
too one-sided and depreciative a view of the work of what is
after all a period of the most brilliant and energetic writing and
a verse which in its own way and its own technique is most
carefully wrought and might even claim a title to a supreme
craftsmanship: nor can we ignore the fact that in certain types
such as satire, the mock heroic, the set didactic poem these
writers achieved the highest height of a consummate and often