80 The Future Poetry
motive Shakespeare never really either rises up above life or gets
behind it; he neither sees what it reaches out to nor the great
unseen powers that are active within it. At one time, in two or
three of his tragedies, he seems to have been striving to do this,
but all that he does see then is the action of certain tremendous
life-forces, which he either sets in a living symbol or indicates
behind the human action, as inMacbeth, or embodies, as in
King Lear, in a tragically uncontrollable possession of his human
characters. Nevertheless, his is not a drama of mere externalised
action, for it lives from within and more deeply than our external
life. This is not Virat, the seer and creator of gross forms, but
Hiranyagarbha, the luminous mind of dreams, looking through
those forms to see his own images behind them. More than any
other poet Shakespeare has accomplished mentally the legendary
feat of the impetuous sage Vishwamitra; his power of vision has
created a Shakespearian world of his own, and it is, in spite of
its realistic elements, a romantic world in a very true sense of
the word, a world of the wonder and free power of life and
not of its mere external realities, where what is here dulled and
hampered finds a greater enlarged and intense breath of living,
an ultra-natural play of beauty, curiosity and amplitude.
It is needful in any view of the evolution of poetry to note the
limits within which Shakespeare did his work, so that we may fix
the point reached; but still within the work itself his limitations
do not matter. And even his positive defects and lapses cannot
lower him, because there is an unfailing divinity of power in
his touch which makes them negligible. He has, however much
toned down, his share of the Elizabethan crudities, violences,
extravagances; but they are upborne on a stream of power and
end by falling in into the general greatness of his scheme. He has
deviations into stretches of half prosaic verse and vagaries of
tortured and bad poetic expression, sometimes atrociously bad;
but they are yet always very evidently not failures of power, but
the wilful errors of a great poet, more careful of dramatic truth
and carried on by his force of expression than bound to verbal
perfection. We feel obliged to accept his defects, which in an-
other poet our critical sense would be swift to condemn or reject,