Chapter XVI

The Poets of the Dawn – 1

T

HE SUPERIORITY of the English poets who lead the way
into the modern age is that sudden almost unaccountable
spiritual impulse, insistent but vague in some, strong but
limited in one or two, splendid and supreme in its rare moments
of vision and clarity, which breaks out from their normal po-
etic mentality and strives constantly to lift their thought and
imagination to its own heights, a spirit or Daemon who does
not seem to trouble at all with his voice or his oestrus the
contemporary poets of continental Europe. But they have no
clearly seen or no firmly based constant idea of the greater work
which this spirit demands from them; they get at its best only
in an inspiration over which they have not artistic control, and
they have only an occasional or uncertain glimpse of its self mo-
tives. Thus they give to it often a form of speech and movement
which is borrowed from their intellect, normal temperament or
culture rather than wells up as the native voice and rhythm of
the spirit within, and they fall away easily to a lower kind of
work. They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan
poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness
of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence be-
tween substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare
and Spenser.
This failure to grasp the conditions of a perfect intuitive
and spiritual poetry has not yet been noted, because the at-
tempt itself has not been understood by the critical mind of
the nineteenth century. That mind was heavily intellectualised,
sometimes lucid, reasonable and acute, sometimes cloudily or
fierily romantic, sometimes scientific, minutely delving, analytic,
psychological, but in none of these moods and from none of
these outlooks capable of understanding the tones of this light
which for a moment flushed the dawning skies of its own age