70 The Future Poetry
things human,nihil humani alienum,^1 but at first a barbarised
Hellenism, unbridled and extravagant, riotous in its vitalistic
energy, too much overjoyed for restraint and measure.
Elizabethan poetry is an expression of this energy, passion
and wonder of life, and it is much more powerful, disorderly and
unrestrained than the corresponding poetry in other countries;
for it has neither a past traditional culture nor an innate taste
to restrain its extravagances. It springs up in a chaos of power
and of beauty in which forms emerge and shape themselves by
a stress within it for which there is no clear guiding knowledge
except such as the instinctive genius of the age and the individual
can give. It is constantly shot through with brilliant threads of
intellectual energy, but is not at all intellectual in its innate spirit
and dominant character. It is too vital for that, too much moved
and excited; for its mood is passionate, sensuous, loose of rein;
its speech sometimes liquid with sweetness, sometimes vehement
and inordinate in pitch, enamoured of the variety of its own
notes, revelling in image and phrase, a tissue of sweet or violent
colours, of many-hued fire, of threads of golden and silver light.
It bestowed on the nation a new English speech, rich in ca-
pacity, gifted with an extraordinary poetic intensity and wealth
and copiousness, but full also of the excesses of new formation
and its disorder. A drama exultant in action and character and
passion and incident and movement, a lyric and romantic poetry
of marvellous sweetness, richness and force are its strong fruits.
The two sides of the national mind threw themselves out for the
first time, each with its full energy, but within the limits of a vital,
sensuous and imaginative mould, fusing into each other and
separating and alternating in outbursts of an unrestrained joy
of self-expression, an admirable confusion of their autonomous
steps, an exhilarating and stimulating licence. The beauty and
colour of one was dominant in its pure poetry, the vigour of the
other took the lead in its drama, but both in Shakespeare were
welded into a supreme phenomenon of poetic and dramatic ge-
nius. It is on the whole the greatest age of utterance, though not
(^1) Nothing human is alien to me.