54 The Future Poetry
by French and Latinistic influences which gave it clearer and
more flowing forms and turned it into a fine though difficult
linguistic material sufficiently malleable, sufficiently plastic for
Poetry to produce in it both her larger and her subtler effects,
but also sufficiently difficult to compel her to put forth her great-
est energies. A stuff of speech which, without being harsh and
inapt, does not tempt by too great a facility, but offers a certain
resistance in the material, increases the strength of the artist by
the measure of the difficulty conquered and can be thrown into
shapes at once of beauty and of concentrated power. That is
eminently the character of the English language.
At any rate we have this long continuity of poetic pro-
duction. And once supposing a predominantly Anglo-Saxon or,
more strictly an Anglo-Norman national mind moved to express
itself in poetry, we should, ignoring for a moment the Celtic
emergence, expect the groundwork to be a strong objective po-
etry, a powerful presentation of the forms of external life, a ready
and energetic portrayal of action and character in action, the
pleasant or the melancholy outsides of Nature, the robust play
of the will and the passions, a vigorous flow of a strenuous vital
and physical verse creation. Even we might look for a good deal
of deviation into themes and motives for which prose will always
be the more adequate and characteristic instrument; we should
not be surprised to meet here a self-styled Augustan age which
makes these things the greater part of its realm and indulges with
a self-satisfied contentment in a confident and obvious “criti-
cism” of external life, preferring to more truly poetic forms and
subjects the poetry of political and ecclesiastical controversy,
didactic verse, satire. There would be in this Anglo-Norman
poetry a considerable power of narrative and a great energy in
the drama of character and incident; but any profounder use
of the narrative and dramatic forms we would not look for, —
at most we might arrive in the end at some powerful dramatic
analysis of character. The romantic element would be of an
external Teutonic kind sensational and outward, appealing to
the life and the senses; there would be no touch of the delicate
and beautiful imaginative, mystic and almost spiritual Celtic