76 The Future Poetry
practice comes, if at all, only rarely, imperfectly and by a sort of
accident. Shakespeare himself seems to have divined these condi-
tions or contained them in the shaping flame of his genius rather
than perceived them by the artistic intelligence. The rest have
ordinarily no light of interpretative vision, no dramatic idea.
Their tragedy and comedy are both oppressively external; this
drama presents, but does not at all interpret; it is an outward pre-
sentation of manners and passions and lives by vigour of action
and a quite outward-going speech; it means absolutely nothing.
The tragedy is irrational, the comedy has neither largeness nor
subtlety of idea; they are mixed together too without any artistic
connection such as Shakespeare manages to give to them so as to
justify thoroughly their coexistence. The characters are not living
beings working out their mutual Karma, but external figures of
humanity jostling each other on a crowded stage, mere tossing
drift of the waves of life. The form of the drama too is little more
than a succession of speech and incident,^1 as in a story, with a
culminating violent or happy ending, which comes not because
psychologically it must, but because a story has to have a release
of ending, or, if tragic, its point of loud detonation. To make up
for their essential defects these poets have to heap up incident
and situation and assail us with vehement and often grossly
exaggerated speech and passion, frequently tearing the passion
into glaringly coloured tatters, almost always overstraining or
in some way making too much of it. They wish to pile on us
the interest of life in whose presentation their strength lies, to
accumulate in a mass, so as to carry us away, things attracting,
things amusing, things striking, things horrible; they will get at
us through the nerves and the lower emotional being, — and
in this they succeed eminently, — since they cannot get at us
through a higher intellectual and imaginative appeal. The evolu-
tion of the action is rather theatrically effective than poetic, the
spirit and the psychology melodramatic rather than dramatic.
(^1) Ben Jonson is an exception. He has the idea of construction, but his execution is
heavy and uninspired, the work of a robustlyconscientious craftsman rather than a
creative artist.