New Birth or Decadence? 211though always poetic criticism of life and might fill the place
of philosophy and religion which were supposed for a time to
be dead or dying powers in human nature; but this came to
the same thing, for it meant a deviation from the true law of
aesthetic creation and only a more protracted decadence.
And behind these uneasy suggestions lay the one fact that
for causes already indicated an age of reason dominated by
the critical, scientific or philosophic intelligence is ordinarily
unfavourable and, even when it is most catholic and ample,
cannot be quite favourable to great poetic creation. The pure
intellect cannot create poetry. The inspired or the imaginative
reason does indeed play an important, sometimes a leading
part, but even that can only be a support or an influence; the
thinking mind may help to give a final shape, a great and large
form,sammahem ̇ aman ̄ ̄ıs.aya ̄, as the Vedic poets said of the
Mantra, but the word must start first from a more intimate
sense in the heart of the inner being,hr.datas ̄ .t.am; it is the spirit
within and not the mind without that is the fount of poetry.
Poetry too is an interpreter of truth, but in the forms of an
innate beauty, and not so much of intellectual truth, the truths
offered by the critical mind, as of the intimate truth of being.
It deals not so much with things thought as with things seen,
not with the authenticities of the analytic mind, but with the
authenticities of the synthetic vision and the seeing spirit. The
abstractions, generalisations, minute precisions of our ordinary
intellectual cerebration are no part of its essence or texture; but
it has others, more luminous, more subtle, those which come
to us after passing through the medium and getting drenched
in the light of the intuitive and revealing mind. And therefore
when the general activity of thought runs predominantly into
the former kind, the works of the latter are apt to proceed
under rather anaemic conditions, they are affected by the per-
vading atmosphere; poetry either ceases or falls into a minor
strain or takes refuge in virtuosities of its outer instruments
and aids or, if it still does any considerable work, lacks the
supreme spontaneity, the natural perfection, the sense of abun-
dant ease or else of sovereign mastery which the touch of the