244 The Future Poetry
down to participate in their struggle which makes the greatness
of the Iliad and not merely the action and stir of battle. The
outward form of Shakespeare’s work is a surge of emotion and
passion and thought and act and event arising out of character
at ferment in the yeast of feeling and passion, but it is its living
interpretation of the truth and powers of the life-soul of man
that are the core of greatness of his work and the rest without
it would be a vain brute turmoil. The absence or defect of this
greater element makes indeed the immense inferiority of the
rest of Elizabethan dramatic work. And whatever the outward
character or form of the poetry, the same law holds that poetry is
a self-expressive power of the spirit and where the soul of things
is most revealed in its very life by the rhythmic word, there is
the fullest achievement of the poet’s function.
And so long as the poet’s medium is the outward life of
things or the surface inward life of the passions and emotions,
he is moving in a strong and fresh natural element and in an
undivided wholeness of the inner and outer man, and his work,
given the native power in him, has all the vitality of a thing fully
felt and lived. But when intellectual thought has begun its reign
in the mind of a more cultured race, the poet’s difficulty also
begins and increases as that reign becomes more sovereign and
imperative. For intellectual thought makes a sort of scission in
our being and on one side of the line is the vital urge carrying on
life and on the other side the deliberate detached reason trying
to observe it, take an intelligent view and extract from it all its
thought values. The poet, as a child of the age and one of its
voices, is moved to follow this turn. He too observes life, extracts
the thought values of his theme, criticises while attempting to
create, or even lingers to analyse his living subject, as Browning
is constantly doing with the thinking and feeling mind of his
characters. But this can only be done without detriment to the
vital power of the poetic spirit and the all-seizing effect of its
word, when there is a balance maintained between thought and
life, the life passing into self-observing thought and the thought
returning on the life to shape it in its own vital image. It has been
remarked that the just balance between thought and the living