Chapter VIII

The Character of English Poetry – 2

W

HAT KIND or quality of poetry should we natu-
rally expect from a national mind so constituted? The
Anglo-Saxon strain is dominant and in that circum-
stance there lay just a hazardous possibility that there might
have been no poetical literature at all. The Teutonic nations
have in this field been conspicuous by their silence or the rarity
of their speech. After the old rude epics, saga or Nibelungenlied,
we have to wait till quite recent times for poetic utterance, nor,
when it came, was it rich or abundant. In Germany, so rich
in music, in philosophy, in science, the great poetic word has
burst out rarely: one brief and strong morning time illumined
by the calm, large and steady blaze of Goethe’s genius and the
wandering fire of Heine, afterwards a long unlighted stillness.
In the North here or there a solitary genius, Ibsen, Strindberg.
Holland, another Teutonic country which developed an art of
a considerable but almost wholly objective power, is mute in
poetry.^1 It would almost seem that there is still something too
thick and heavy in the strength and depth of the Teutonic com-
position for the ethereal light and fire of the poetic word to
make its way freely through the intellectual and vital envelope.
What has saved the English mind from a like taciturnity? It
must have been the mixture of other racial strains, sublimating
this strong but heavy material temperament with a quicker and
more impetuous element; the submerged Celtic genius must have
pushed the rest from behind, intervening as a decisive force to
liberate and uplift the poetic spirit. And as a necessary aid we
have the fortunate accident of the reshaping of a Teutonic tongue

(^1) I do not include here any consideration of contemporary names; it would be unsafe
to go by the great reputations of today which may sink tomorrow to a much lower
status.