The Character of English Poetry – 2 57short of the mark. It does not prevent great triumphs of poetic
power, but it does prevent a high equality and sustained perfec-
tion of self-expression and certainty of form. We must expect
inequality in all human work, but not necessarily on this scale
nor with so frequent and extensive a sinking below what should
be the normal level.
To the same uncertainty may be attributed the rapid starts
and turns of the course of English poetry, its want of conscious
continuity, — for there is a secret, underground and inevitable
continuity which we have to dig for and disengage. It takes a
very different course from the external life of the nation which
has always been faithful to its inner motive and spirit and es-
caped from the shattering and suddenly creative changes that
have at once afflicted and quickened the life of other peoples.
The revolutions of the spirit of English poetry are extreme and
violent, astonishing in their decisiveness and abruptness. We can
mark off first the early English poetry which found its solitary
greater expression in Chaucer; indeed it marks itself off by an
absolute exhaustion and cessation, a dull and black Nirvana.
The magnificent Elizabethan outburst has another motive, spirit
and manner of expression which seem to have nothing to do with
the past; it is a godhead self-born under the impulse of a new age
and environment. As this fades away, we see standing high and
apart the lonely figure of Milton with his strenuous effort at an
intellectual poetry cast in the type of the ancients. The age which
succeeds, hardly linked to it by a slender stream of Caroline
lyrics, is that of a trivial intellectuality which does not follow
the lead of Milton and is the exact contrary of the Elizabethan
form and spirit, the thin and arid reign of Pope and Dryden.
Another violent and impatient breaking away, a new outburst
of wonderful freshness gives us the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats,
Shelley, Blake with another spirit and another language of the
spirit. The Victorian period did not deny their influences; it felt
them in the first form of its work, and we might have expected
it to have gone nobly forward and brought to some high or
beautiful issue what had been only a great beginning that did not
arrive at its full fruition. But it did nothing of the kind; it deviated