The Character of English Poetry – 2 55romanticism. We should have perhaps much poetical thinking
or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate or
vigorous, prompt and direct or robustly powerful, but not the
finer and subtler poetic thought which comes easily to the clear
Latin intellect. Form too of a kind we might hope for, though
we could not be quite sure of it, but at best bright and plain or
strongly balanced and not those greater forms in which a high
and deep creative thought presides or those more exquisite of
which a delicate sense of beauty or a subtle poetic intuition is
the magic builder. Both the greater and more profound depths
and magnitudes and the subtler intensities of style and rhythm
would be absent; but there would be a boldly forcible or a
well-beaten energy of speech and much of the more metallic
vigours of verse. This side of the national mind would prepare
us for English poetry as it was until Chaucer and beyond, for
the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama, the work of Dryden
and Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper,
Scott, Wordsworth in his more outward moments, Byron with-
out his Titanism and unrest, much of the lesser Victorian verse,
Tennyson without his surface aestheticism and elaborate finesse,
the poetry of Browning. For this much we need not go outside
the Anglo-Norman temperament.
That also would give, but subject to a potent alchemy of
transformation, the basic form and substance of most English
poetry. That alchemy we can fairly attribute to the submerged
Celtic element which emerges, as time goes on, in bright up-
streamings and sometimes in exceptional outbursts of power. It
comes up in a blaze of colour, light, emotion and imaginative
magic; in a passionate hungering for beauty in its more sub-
tle and delicately sensuous forms, for the ideal which escapes
definition and yet has to be seized and cast into interpretative
lines; in a lyrical intoxication; in a charm of subtle romance.
It casts into the mould a higher urge of thought than the vital
common sense of the Saxon can give, not the fine, calm and
measured poetical thinking of the Greeks and the Latin races
which deals sovereignly with life within the limits of the intellect
and the inspired reason, but an excitement of thought seeking for