110 The Future Poetry
minute and delicate eye and touch in place of the large, strong
and simply beautiful or telling effects which satisfied an earlier
imagination. But where it goes beyond that fine outwardness, it
has brought us a whole world of new vision; working sometimes
by a vividly suggestive presentation, sometimes by a separation
of effects and an imaginative reconstruction which reveals as-
pects the first outward view had hidden in, sometimes by a
penetrating impressionism which in its finest subtleties seems to
be coming back by a detour to a sensuously mystical treatment, it
goes within through the outward and now not so much presents
as recreates physical Nature for us through the imaginative vi-
sion.^1 By that new creation it penetrates through the form nearer
to the inner truth of her being.
But the direct subjective approach to Nature is the most
distinctly striking characteristic turn of the modern mentality.
The approach proceeds from two sides which constantly meet
each other and create between them a nexus of experience be-
tween man and Nature which is the modern way of responding
to the universal Spirit. On one side there is the subjective sense
of Nature herself as a great life, a being, a Presence, with im-
pressions, moods, emotions of her own expressed in her many
symbols of life and stressing her objective manifestations. In the
poets in whom this turn first disengages itself, that is a living
conscious view of her to which they are constantly striving to
give expression whether in a large sense of her presence or in a
rendering of its particular impressions. On the other side there
is a sensitive human response, moved in emotion or thrilling in
sensation or stirred by sheer beauty or responsive in mood, a
response of satisfaction and possession or of dissatisfied yearn-
ing and seeking, in the whole an attempt to relate or harmonise
the soul and mind and sensational and vital being of the human
individual with the soul and mind and life and body of the visible
and sensible universe. Ordinarily it is through the imagination
(^1) I am speaking here of Western literature. Oriental art and poetry at any rate in the
far East had already in a different way anticipated this more intimate and imaginative
seeing.