The Course of English Poetry – 1 69of any deepening of this new original note we have to put
up with thePrincess andEnoch Ardenand the picturesque
triviality of theIdylls of the Kingwhich give us the impres-
sion of gentlemen and ladies of Victorian drawing-rooms mas-
querading as Celtic-mediaeval knights and dames. If there is
a meaning of some kind in it all, that does not come home
to us because it is lost in a falsetto mimicking of the exter-
nal strains of life. Certainly, it is useless to quarrel with na-
tional tendencies and characteristics which must show them-
selves in poetry as elsewhere; but English poetry had opened
the gates of other powers and if it could always have lifted
up the forms of external life by these powers, the substance
of its work might then have meant much more to the world
and the strength of its vision of things might constantly have
equalled the power and beauty of its utterance. As it is, even
poets of great power have been constantly drawn away by this
tendency from the fulfilment of their more characteristic po-
tentialities or misled into throwing them into inapt forms, and
to this day there continues this confusion and waste of poetic
virtue.
The new light and impulse that set free the silence of the
poetic spirit in England for its first abundant and sovereign
utterance, came from the Renaissance in Italy and Spain and
France. The Renaissance meant many things and it meant too
different things in different countries, but one thing above all
everywhere, the discovery of beauty and joy in every energy of
life. The Middle Ages had lived strongly and with a sort of deep
and sombre force, but, as it were, always under the shadow of
death and under the burden of an obligation to aspire through
suffering to a beyond; their life is bordered on one side by the
cross and on the other by the sword. The Renaissance brings
in the sense of a liberation from the burden and the obligation;
it looks at life and loves it in excess; it is carried away by the
beauty of the body and the senses and the intellect, the beauty of
sensation and action and speech and thought, — but of thought
hardly at all for its own sake, but thought as a power of life.
It is Hellenism returning with its strong sense of humanity and