Chapter XIII

The Course of English Poetry – 5

W

HEN a power of poetry in a highly evolved language
describes so low a downward curve as to reach this
dry and brazen intellectualism, it is in danger of losing
much of its vitality and flexibilities of expression and it may even,
if it has lived too long, enter into a stage of decadence and perish
by a dull slow decay of its creative force. That has happened
more than once in literary history; but there can always be a
saving revulsion, a return of life by a shock from without or a
liberating impulse from within. And this saving revulsion, when
it comes, is likely, if bold enough, to compensate for the past
prone descent by an equally steep ascension to an undreamed-
of novelty of revealing vision and illumined motive. This is the
economy of Nature’s lapses in the things of the mind no less
than in the movements of life. For when the needed energy
is within, these falls are an obscure condition for an unprece-
dented elevation, these emptyings a preface to large inrushes of
plenty. In the recoil, in the rush or upwinging to the opposite
extreme, some discovery is made which would otherwise have
been long postponed or not have arrived at all; doors are burst
open which might have been passed by unseen or would have
resisted any less vehement or rapidly illumined effort to unlock
them. On the other hand it is a frequent disadvantage of these
revolutions or these forced rapidities of evolution, that they carry
in them a premature light and an element of quick unripeness
and a subsequent reaction and return to lower levels becomes
inevitable. For the contemporary mind is not really ready for
the complete implanting of this new seed or stock; and what
is accomplished is itself rather an intuitive anticipation than a
firmly based knowledge or an execution of the thing seen equal
to its true significance. All these familiar phenomena are visible
in the new swift and far-reaching upward curve, which carries