212 The Future Poetry
spirit manifests even amidst the fullest or austerest labour of its
creation.
But this incompatibility is not the last word of the matter.
The truth which poetry expresses takes two forms, the truth of
life and the truth of that which works in life, the truth of the
inner spirit. It may take its stand on the outer life and work
in an intimate identity, relation or close dwelling upon it, and
then what it does is to bring some light of intuitive things, some
power of revelation of the beauty that is truth and the truth that
is beauty into the outer things of life, even into those that are
most common, obvious, of daily occurrence. But also it may get
back into the truth of the inner spirit and work in an intimate
identity, relation or close dwelling upon it, and then what it will
do is to give a new revelation of our being and life and thought
and Nature and the material and the psychical and spiritual
worlds. That is the effort to which it seems to be turning now
in its most characteristic, effective and beautiful manifestations.
But it cannot fully develop in this sense unless the general mind
of the age takes that turn. There are signs that this will indeed
be the outcome of the new direction taken by the modern mind,
not an intellectual petrifaction or a long spinning in the grooves
of a critical intellectualism, but a higher and more authentic
thinking and living. The human intelligence seems on the verge
of an attempt to rise through the intellectual into an intuitive
mentality; it is no longer content to regard the intellect and
the world of positive fact as all or the intellectual reason as a
sufficient mediator between life and the spirit, but is beginning
to perceive that there is a spiritual mind which can admit us to a
greater and more comprehensive vision. This does not mean any
sacrifice of the gains of the past, but a raising and extending of
them not only by a seeking of the inner as well as the outer truth
of things, but also of all that binds them together and a bringing
of them into true relation and oneness. A first opening out to
this new way of seeing is the sense of the work of Whitman
and Carpenter and some of the recent French poets, of Tagore
and Yeats and A. E., of Meredith and some others of the English
poets. There are critics who regard this tendency as only another