New Birth or Decadence? 213sign of decadence; they see in it a morbid brilliance, a phospho-
rescence of decay or the phosphorescence which we observe on
the sea when the sun has gone down and night occupies the
waters. But this is to suppose that poetry can only repeat what
it has done in the past and can accomplish no new and great
thing and that a clear, strong or brilliant dealing with the outer
mind and world is its last word and the one condition of its
healthy creativeness. There is much that is morbid, perverse or
unsound in some recent poetry; but this comes from an artificial
prolongation of the past or a temporary mixed straining, it does
not belong to that element in the new poetry which escapes
from it and turns firmly to the things of the future. Decadence
arrives when in the decline of a culture there is nothing more
to be lived or seen or said, or when the poetic mind settles
irretrievably into a clumsy and artificial repetition of past forms
and conventions or can only escape from them into scholastic or
aesthetic prettinesses or extravagance. But an age which brings
in large and new vital and spiritual truths, truths of our being,
truths of the self of man and the inner self of Nature and opens
vast untrod ranges to sight and imagination, is not likely to be
an age of decadence, and a poetry which voices these things,
— unless its creative power has been fatally atrophied by long
conventionalism, and that is not at present our case, — is not
likely to be a poetry of decadence.
The more perfectly intuitive poetry of the future, supposing
it to emerge successfully from its present incubation, find itself
and develop all its possibilities, will not be a mystic poetry re-
condite in expression or quite remote from the earthly life of
man. Some element of the kind may be there; for always when
we open into these fields, mysteries more than the Orphic or
the Eleusinian revive and some of them are beyond our means
of expression; but mysticism in its unfavourable or lesser sense
comes when either we glimpse but do not intimately realise the
now secret things of the spirit or, realising, yet cannot find their
direct language, their intrinsic way of utterance, and have to use
obscurely luminous hints or a thick drapery of symbol, when
we have the revelation, but not the inspiration, the sight but