120 The Future Poetry
ourselves. For it is only through our own psychology, through
its power of response to and of identification with the mind
and soul in others that we can know their inner psychology;
for the most part our psychological account of others is only an
account of the psychological impressions of them they produce
in our own mentality. This we see even in the realistic writers
in the strongly personal and limited way in which they render
the psychology of their creatures in one or two always recurring
main notes upon which they ring minute variations. In the end
the creative mind could not fail to become conscious of this self
within which was really doing the whole work and to turn to
it for a theme or for the mould of its psychological creations,
to a conscious intimate subjectivism. Again, the emphasising of
extreme notes brings us to a point where to go farther we have
to go within and to make ourselves a sort of laboratory of new
psychological experiment and discovery.
This is the turn we get in the poetry of Verlaine which is
throughout a straining after an intimate and subtle experience
of the senses, vital sensations, emotions pushed beyond ordi-
nary limits into a certain vivid and revealing abnormality, in
the earlier work of Maeterlinck which is not so much an action
of personalities as the drama of a childlike desire-soul uttering
half inarticulate cries of love and longing, terror and distress
and emotion, in the work of Mallarme where there is a constant ́
seeking for subjective symbols which will reveal to our own soul
the soul of the things that we see. The rediscovery of the soul is
the last stage of the round described by this age of the intellect
and reason. It is at first mainly the perceptions of a desire-soul,
a soul of sense and sensation and emotion, and an arriving
through them at a sort of psychological mysticism, a psychism
which is not yet true mysticism, much less spirituality, but is still
a movement of the lower self in that direction. The movement
could not stop here: the emergence of the higher perceptions of
a larger and purer psychical and intuitive entity in direct contact
with the Spirit could not but come, and this greater impulse is
represented by the work of the Irish poets. It is the sign of the
end, now in sight, of a purely intellectual modernism and the