184 The Future Poetry
some superior power born of the excitement of the higher posses-
sion, but also some alloy too of our mortality. And the character,
value and force of the word of the poet vary according to the
action of those parts of our mentality which dominate in the
change, — the vital mind, the emotional temperament, the imag-
inative or reflective intellect or the higher intuitive intelligence.
The Tantric theory of Speech, the inspired seeing and creative
goddess enthroned in our various soul-centres in her several
forms and with her higher and higher stations, becomes here an
actual and luminously perceptible truth of our being. But also
there is in us a direct medium between that divine and this human
mentality, an intuitive soul-mind supporting the rest, which has
its share both in the transmission and the formal creation, and
it is where this gets out into overt working, discloses its shaping
touch or makes heard its transmitting voice that we get the really
immortal tones of speech and heights of creation. And it is the
epochs when there is in the mind of a race some enthusiastic
outburst or some calm august action of this intuitive power,
intermediary of the inspirations of the spirit or its revelations,
that make the great ages of poetry.
In English literature this period was the Elizabethan. Then
the speech of poetry got into it a ring and turn of direct intuitive
power, a spontaneous fullness of vision and divine fashion in
its utterance which it had not at all before and has hardly had
afterwards. Even the lesser poets of the time are touched by
it, but in Shakespeare it runs in a stream and condenses to a
richly-loaded and crowding mass of the work and word of the
intuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be
measured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets
almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level
and feeling the effect on the poetic listener in our own intuitive
being. We take Chaucer with his easy adequate limpidity, —
He was a very parfit gentle knight,and then pass on to Shakespeare’s rapid seizing of the intuitive
inevitable word and the disclosing turn of phrase which admits
us at once to a direct vision of the thing he shows us, —