The Course of English Poetry – 2 73his lustre. Spenser and Marlowe are poets of a high order, great
in spite of an eventual failure. But the rest owe their stature to an
uplifting power in the age and not chiefly to their own intrinsic
height of genius; and that power had many vices, flaws and
serious limitations which their work exaggerates wilfully rather
than avoids, so that it is only exceptionally free from glaring
flaws. The gold of this golden age of English poetry is often very
beautifully and richly wrought, but it is seldom worked into
a perfect artistic whole; it disappears continually in masses of
alloy, and there is on the whole more of a surface gold-dust than
of the deeper yield of the human spirit.
The defect of this Elizabethan work is most characteristic
and prominent in that part of it which has been vaunted as its
chief title to greatness, its drama. Shakespeare and Marlowe can
be looked at in their separate splendours; but the rest of Eliz-
abethan dramatic work is a brilliantly smoky nebula, powerful
in effort rather than sound and noble in performance. All its
vigorous presentation of life has not been able to keep it alive;
it is dead or keeps only “the dusty immortality of the libraries”,
and this in spite of the attention drawn to it in quite recent times
by scholars and critics and the hyperbolic eulogies of two or
three eminent writers. This is not to say that it has not merits
and, in a way, very striking merits. The Elizabethan playwrights
were men of a confident robust talent; some of them had real,
if an intermittent genius. They had too the use of the language
of an age in which the power of literary speech was a common
possession and men were handling the language with delight as
a quite new and rich instrument, lavishly and curiously, turning
it this way and that, moulding and new-moulding it, exulting
in its novel capacities of expression. The first elements of the
dramatic form, the temper and some of the primary faculties
which go to make dramatic creation possible were there in the
literary spirit of the age, and all these writers in more or less
degree possessed these things and could use them. A certain
force of vital creation was common to them all, a vigorous
turn for the half romantic, half realistic reproduction of life and
manners. The faculty of producing very freely a mass or a stream