The Poets of the Dawn – 2 133of movement, a power of narrative and of vivid presentation,
and always, whatever else might lack, an unfailing energy. It
was enough for the immediate thing he had to do, though not
at all enough for the highest assured immortality.
These things which Byron more or less adequately ex-
pressed, were the ferment of the mind of humanity in its first
crude attempt to shake off the conventions of the past and
struggle towards a direct feeling of itself and its surrounding
world in their immediate reality. But behind it there is something
else which seems sometimes about to emerge vaguely, an element
which may be called spiritual, a feeling of the greatness of man
the individual spirit commensurate with Nature and his world,
man in communion with the greatness of Nature, man able
tostandintheworldinhisownstrengthandpuissance,man
affirming his liberty, the claim to freedom of a force as great
within as the forces which surround and seem to overwhelm
him. One feels oneself as if in the presence of a Titan striving
to be born, a Titanism of the spirit of man awake in its soul of
desire, in a passion of seeking without conquest of finding, in
revolt, not in self-possession, man the fallen archangel, not man
returning to godhead: but it reposes on, it is the obscure side of
a spiritual reality. He could not break through the obstructions
of his lower personality and express this thing that he felt in its
native tones of largeness and power. If he could have done so, his
work would have been of a lasting greatness. But he never found
the right form, never achieved the liberation into right thought
and speech of the Daemon within him. The language and
movement he started from were an intellectual and sentimental
rhetoric, the speech of the eighteenth century broken down,
melted and beaten into new shape for stronger uses; he went on
to a more chastened and rapid style of great force, but void of
delicacy, subtlety and variety; he ended in a flexible and easy
tongue which gave power to even the most cynical trivialities
and could rise to heights of poetry and passion: but none of these
things, however adapted to his other gifts, was the style wanted
for this greater utterance. Art, structure, accomplished mould
were needs of which he had no idea; neither the weight of a deep