126 The Future Poetry
immense intellectual development and an excessive, almost
over-cultivated refinement, but still that too was a poetry
of the life-spirit. In spite of a broad gulf of difference we
yet find an extraordinary basic kinship between these two
very widely separated great ages of poetry, though there was
never any possibility of contact between that earlier oriental
and this later occidental work, — the dramas of Kalidasa and
some of the dramatic romances of Shakespeare, plays like
the SanskritSeal of Rakshasa andTo y - C a r t and Elizabethan
historic and melodramatic pieces, the poetry of the Cloud-
Messengerand erotic Elizabethan poetry, the romantically vivid
and descriptive narrative method of Spenser’sFaerie Queene
and the more intellectually romantic vividness and descriptive
elaborateness of the Line of Raghu, the tone and manner
of Drayton and that of the much greater work of Bharavi.
This kinship arises from the likeness of essential motive and
psychological basic type and emerges and asserts itself in spite
of the enormous cultural division. A poetry of spiritual vision
and the sense of things behind life and above the intellect
must similarly develop from its essence a characteristic voice,
cry, mould of speech, natural way of development, habits of
structure.
The great poets of this earlier endeavour had all to deal with
the same central problem of creation and were embarrassed by
the same difficulty of a time which was not ready for work
of this kind, not prepared for it by any past development, not
fitted for it by anything in the common atmosphere of the age.
They breathed the rarity of heights lifted far beyond the level of
the contemporary surrounding temperament, intellect and life.
But each besides had an immense development of that force of
separate personality which is in art at least the characteristic
of our later humanity. Each followed his own way, was very
little influenced by the others, was impelled by a quite distinct
spiritual idea, worked it out in a quite individual method and,
when he fell away from it or short of it, failed in his own way and
by shortcomings peculiar to his own nature. There is nothing of
that common aim and manner which brings into one category