The Course of English Poetry – 4 99impeccable excellence. Moreover some work was done espe-
cially by Dryden which even on the higher levels of poetry can
challenge comparison with the work of the Elizabethans and the
greater poets of later times. Even the satire of Pope and Dryden
rises sometimes into a high poetic value beyond the level they
normally reached and they have some great outbursts which
have the power not only to please or delight by their force and
incisiveness or their weight of thought or their powerful presen-
tation of life, but to move to emotion, as great poetry moves us.
It is not necessary here to say more in vindication of the excelling
work of these writers; their fame abides and no belittling can
successfully depreciate their work or discount its excellence. We
are concerned here only with their place in the development,
and mainly, the psychological development of English poetry.
Its place there, its value is mostly in the direction of a sheer
intellectuality concerned with the more superficial aspects of
thought and life deliberately barren of emotion except the more
superficial; lyricism has run dry, beauty has become artificial
where at all it survives, passion is replaced by rhetoric, the heart
is silent, life has civilised, urbanised, socialised and stylised itself
too much to have any more a very living contact with Nature. As
the literature of an age of this kind this poetry or this powerful
verse has an enormous merit of its own and could hardly be
better for its purpose. Much more perhaps than any other age of
intellectual writing it has restricted itself to its task; in doing so
it has restricted its claims to poetic greatness of the highest kind,
but it has admirably done its work. That work is not faultless;
it has too much of the baser lead of rhetoric, too frequent a
pomposity and artifice, too little of Roman nobility and too
little of English sincerity to be of the first value. But it stands out
well enough on its own lower summit and surveys well enough
from that inferior eminence a reach of country that has, if not
any beauty, its own interest, order and value. There we may
leave it and turn to the next striking and always revolutionary
outburst of this great stream of English poetic literature.