188 The Future Poetry
inspiration. When we try to put a name on it, — a thing which
the poet himself seldom does successfully, for the creative instinct
does not usually care to burden itself with a too intellectual self-
consciousness, — we can see that this is an attempt to return
to the fullness and the awakening turn of the direct intuitive
expression on a subtler and more ethereal level. The clarified
intellect observing life from above is in itself a higher thing than
the vital and emotional mind which responds more immediately
and powerfully to life, but is caught in its bonds; and if the
direct intuitive power can be got to work on the level just above
the ordinary thinking mind where that mind opens through the
full intuitive intelligence to a greater supra-intellectual mass and
subtlety of light, it will bring in the revelation and inspiration of
mightier and profounder things than when it works from behind
the mind — even the vividly thinking mind of life and its vital
sight and feeling. For here, on the lower level, we get at most,
as in Shakespeare, at the spirit in life with all its power of vital
thought and its potency of passion and emotion; but there we
shall get the greater spirit which embraces life, but shows us
too all that is behind it, all that it dimly means and strives in
embarrassed act and thought to bring into expression. Of this
effort and this new thing we get magical first indications in the
pre-Victorian poets, as in Wordsworth’s
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face,or see the first motion towards it, the first seeking for a suitable
style, as in Keats’
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon and eve’s one star,but also though less often, a sudden leaping out of the thing
itself, —
Solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,