The Course of English Poetry – 2 77Nor are these radical dramatic defects atoned for by any great
wealth of poetry, for their verse has more often some formal
merit and a great air of poetry than its essence, — though there
are exceptions as in lines and passages of Peele and Webster. The
presentation of life with some surface poetic touch but without
any transforming vision or strongly suffusing power in the poetic
temperament is the general character of their work. It is neces-
sary to emphasise these defects because indiscriminate praise
of these poets helps to falsify or quite exclude the just artistic
view of the aim of sound dramatic creation, and imitation of
the catching falsities of this model has been the real root of the
inefficacy of subsequent attempts in the dramatic form even by
poets of great gifts. It explains the failure of even a mind which
had the true dramatic turn, a creator like Browning, to achieve
drama of the first excellence.
Marlowe alone of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists stands
apart from his fellows, not solely by his strong and magnificent
vein of poetry, but because he knows what he is about; he alone
has some clearly grasped dramatic idea. And not only is he
conscious of his artistic aim, but it is a sound aim on the higher
levels of the dramatic art. He knows that the human soul in
action is his subject and Karma the power of the theme, and he
attempts to create a drama of the human will throwing itself on
life, the will egoistic and Asuric, conquering only to succumb to
the great adversary Death or breaking itself against the forces
its violence has brought into hostile play. This is certainly a high
and fit subject for tragic creation and his boldly coloured and
strongly cut style and rhythm are well-suited for its expression.
Unhappily, Marlowe had the conception, but not any real power
of dramatic execution. He is unable to give the last awakening
breath of life to his figures; in the external manner so common
in English poetry and fiction he rather constructs than evolves,
portrays than throws out into life, paints up or sculptures from
outside than creates from within, — and yet it is this other in-
ward way that is the sole true method of poetic or at least of
dramatic creation. He has not, either, the indispensable art of
construction; only in one of his tragedies does he vitally relate