The Movement of Modern Literature – 1 109of sight beyond the stress of the intellect and the senses, which
is reached either not at all or much less directly realised with
a less pure vision in the more artistically sound and sufficient
poetry of the Continent. Still the principal identical elements
are distinguishable, sometimes very strongly pronounced and
helped to some fullest expression by the great individual energy
of imagination and force of character which are the most distinct
powers of the English poetic mind. Often they thus stand out
all the more remarkable by the magnificent narrowness of their
self-concentrated isolation.
Earliest among these many new forces to emerge with dis-
tinctness is an awakening of the eye to a changed vision of
Nature, of the imagination to a more perfect and intimate vi-
sualisation, of the soul to a closer spiritual communion. An
imaginative, scrutinising, artistic or sympathetic dwelling on the
details of Nature, her sights, sounds, objects, sensible impres-
sions is a persistent characteristic of modern art and poetry; it is
the poetic side of the same tendency which upon the intellectual
has led to the immeasurable development of the observing and
analysing eye of Science. The poetry of older times directed an
occasional objective eye on Nature, turning a side glance from
life or thought to get some colouring or decorative effect or a nat-
ural border or background for life or something that illustrated,
ministered to or enriched the human thought or mood of the
moment, at most for a casual indulgence of the imagination and
senses in natural beauty. But the intimate subjective treatment of
Nature, the penetrated human response to her is mostly absent
or comes only in rare and brief touches. On the larger scale her
subjective life is realised not with an immediate communion, but
through myth and the image of divine personalities that govern
her powers. In all these directions modern poetry represents a
great change of our mentality and a swift and vast extension of
our imaginative experience. Nature now lives for the poet as an
independent presence, a greater or equal power dwelling side by
side with him or embracing and dominating his existence. Even
the objective vision and interpretation of her has developed,
where it continues at all the older poetic method, a much more