150 The Future Poetry
uplifting. The great flood of free thinking, free inquiry, scientific
and artistic vivacity, the rapid breaking of fresh ground, the
noble political enthusiasms which stirred France and Germany
and Italy and created a new force of democratic humanism
in Russia, swept in vain past the English shores defended by
their chalk cliffs and downs of self-content or only broke across
them in a few insignificant waves. It is the most unlovely
and uninspiring period of the English spirit. Never was the
aesthetic sense so drowned in pretentious ugliness, seldom
the intelligence crusted in such an armoured imperviousness
to fine and subtle thinking, the ebb of spirituality so far out
and low. It was a period of smug commercial middle-class
prosperity, dull mechanism, hard utilitarianism and a shoddy
liberalism bursting and running over with self-content in its
narrow practical rationality, spiritual poverty and intellectual
ineptitude. Unteachable, it bore with a scornful complacency
or bewildered anger or a listening ear of impervious indulgence
the lightning shafts of Arnold’s irony, the turbid fulminations of
Carlyle, the fiery raids of Ruskin or saw unaffected others of its
fine or great spirits turn for refuge to mediaevalism or socialistic
utopias. The work of these forerunners was done in a wilderness
of intellectual commonness and busy mediocre energy; it bore
fruit afterwards, but only when the century was in its wane and
other infant powers of the immenser future were beginning to
raise their heads of cloud and light.
But this work of revolt and preparation was done chiefly in
prose. Poetry flourishes best when it is the rhythmical expression
of the soul of its age, of what is greatest and deepest in it, but
still belongs to it, and the poetry of this period suffers by the
dull smoke-laden atmosphere in which it flowered; though it
profited by the European stir of thought and seeking around
and held its own, achieved beauty, achieved in one or two po-
ets a considerable energy, some largeness, occasional heights,
there is still something sickly in its luxuriance, a comparative
depression and poverty in its thought, a lack in its gifts, in its
very accomplishment a sense of something not done. It cannot
compare in power, wing, abundance of genius and talent with