68 The Future Poetry
movement and the diffuse prolixity of its form. Chaucer’s poetic
method has no such great conscious idea or natural uplifting
motive or spirit. Whether the colour he gives happens to be
realistic or romantic, it falls within the same formula. It is the
clear and vivid reflection of external life, with sometimes just a
first tinge of romantic illumination, in an observing mind that
makes itself a shining poetic mirror.
The spirit of English poetry thus struck its first strong note,
a characteristic English note, got as far as the Anglo-Saxon
mind refined by French and Italian influence could go in its
own proper way and unchanged nature, and then came sud-
denly to a pause. Many outward reasons might be given for
that abrupt cessation, but none sufficient; for the cause lay
deeper in the inner destiny of this spirit. The real cause was
that to have developed upon this line would have been to wan-
der up and down in a cul-de-sac; it would have been to an-
ticipate in a way in poetry the self-imprisonment of Dutch
art in a strong externalism, of a fairer kind indeed, but still
too physical and outward in its motive. English poetry had
greater things to do and it waited for some new light and
more powerful impulse to come. Still this external motive and
method are native to the English mind and with many mod-
ifications have put their strong impress upon the literature.
It is the ostensible method of English fiction from Richard-
son to Dickens; it got into the Elizabethan drama and pre-
vented it, except in Shakespeare, from equalling the nobler
work of other great periods of dramatic poetry. It throws its
limiting shade over English narrative poetry, which after its
fresh start in the symbolism of theFaerie Queeneand the vi-
tal intensity of Marlowe ought either to have got clear away
from this first motive or at least to have transmuted it by
the infusion of much higher artistic motives. To give only one
instance in many, it got sadly in the way of Tennyson, who
yet had no real turn for the reproduction of life, and pre-
vented him from working out the fine subjective and mystic
vein which his first natural intuitions had discovered in such
work as theLady of Shalottand theMorte d’Arthur.Instead