The Course of English Poetry – 2 81because they are part of his force, just as we accept the vigorous
errors of a great personality. His limitations are very largely the
condition of his powers. Certainly, he is no universal revealer,
as his idolators would have him be, — for even in the life-soul
of man there are a multitude of things beyond him; but to have
given a form so wonderful, so varied, so immortally alive, in so
great a surge of the intensest poetical expression, to a life-vision
of this kind and this power, is a unique achievement of poetic
genius. The future may find for us a higher and profounder, even
a more deeply and finely vital aim for the dramatic form than
any Shakespeare ever conceived; but until that has been done
with an equal power, grasp and fullness of vision and an equal
intensity of revealing speech, he keeps his sovereign station. The
claim made for him that he is the greatest of poets may very
well be challenged, — he is not quite that, — but that he is first
among dramatic poets cannot well be questioned.
So far then the English poetic spirit had got in the drama,
and it has never got any farther. And this is principally be-
cause it has allowed itself to be obsessed by the Elizabethan
formula; for it has clung not merely to the Shakespearian form,
— which might after due modification still be used for certain
purposes, especially for a deeper life-thought expressing itself
through the strong colours of a romantic interpretation, — but
to the whole crude inartistic error of that age. Great poets,
poets of noble subjective power, delicate artists, fine thinkers
and singers, all directly they turn to the dramatic form, begin
fatally to externalise; they become violent, they gesticulate, they
press to the action and forget to have an informing thought, hold
themselves bound to the idea of drama as a robust presentation
of life and incident and passion. And because this is not a true
idea and, in any case, it is quite inconsistent with the turn of
their own genius, they fail inevitably. Dryden stumbling heavily
through his rhymed plays, Wordsworth of all people, the least
Elizabethan of poets, penning with a conscientious dullness his
Borderers, Byron diffusing his elemental energy in bad blank
verse and worse dramatic construction, Keats turning from his
unfinishedHyperionto wild schoolboy imitations of the worst