8 The Future Poetry
symbol and a fount of images; even when it soars into invisible
worlds, it is from the earth that it soars; but equally all art worth
the name must go beyond the visible, must reveal, must show
us something that is hidden, and in its total effect not reproduce
but create. We may say that the artist creates an ideal world
of his own, not necessarily in the sense of ideal perfection, but
a world that exists in the idea, the imagination and vision of
the creator. More truly, he throws into significant form a truth
he has seen, which may be truth of hell or truth of heaven or
an immediate truth behind things terrestrial or any other, but is
never merely the external truth of earth. By that ideative truth
and the power, the perfection and the beauty of his presentation
and utterance of it his work must be judged.
Some occasional utterances in this book seem to spring from
very pronounced idiosyncrasies of its distinctive literary temper-
ament or standpoint and cannot always be accepted without
reservation. I do not myself share its rather disparaging attitude
towards the dramatic form and motive or its comparative cold-
ness towards the architectural faculty and impulse in poetry.
When Mr. Cousins tells us that “its poetry and not its drama,
will prove to be the thing of life” in Shakespeare’s work, I feel
that the distinction is not sound all through, that there is a truth
behind it, but it is overstated. Or when still more vivaciously
he dismisses Shakespeare the dramatist to “a dusty and reverent
immortality in the libraries” or speaks of the “monstrous net of
his life’s work” which but for certain buoys of line and speech
“might sink in the ocean of forgetfulness,” I cannot help feeling
that this can only be at most the mood of the hour born of
the effort to get rid of the burden of its past and move more
freely towards its future, and not the definitive verdict of the
poetic and aesthetic mind on what has been so long the object
of its sincere admiration and a powerful presence and influence.
Perhaps I am wrong, I may be too much influenced by my own
settled idiosyncrasies of an aesthetic temperament and being
impregnated with an early cult for the work of the great builders
in Sanskrit and Greek, Italian and English poetry. At any rate,
this is true that whatever relation we may keep with the great