Conclusion 303poetic speech must be the completion of an as yet only initial
spiritualised turn of our general human feeling and intelligence.
At present the human mind is occupied in passing the borders
of two kingdoms. It is emerging out of a period of active and
mostly materialistic intellectualism towards a primary intuitive
seeking to which the straining of the intellect after truth has
been brought in the very drive of its own impulse by a sort of
slipping over unexpected borders. There is therefore an uncer-
tain groping in many directions some of which are only valuable
as a transitional effort and, if they could be the end and final
movement, might land us only in a brilliant corruption and
decadence. There is a vitalistic intuitivism sometimes taking a
more subjective, sometimes a more objective form, that lingers
amid dubious lights on the border and cannot get through its
own rather thick and often violent lustres and colours to a finer
and truer spiritual vision. There is an emotional and sensational
psychical intuitivism half emerging from and half entangled in
the vitalistic motive that has often a strange beauty and bril-
liance, sometimes stained with morbid hues, sometimes floating
in a vague mist, sometimes — and this is a common tendency
— strained to an exaggeration of half vital, half psychic motive.
There is a purer and more delicate psychic intuition with a spir-
itual issue, that which has been brought by the Irish poets into
English literature. The poetry of Whitman and his successors
has been that of life, but of life broadened, raised and illumined
by a strong intellectual intuition of the self of man and the large
soul of humanity. And at the subtlest elevation of all that has yet
been reached stands or rather wings and floats in a high interme-
diate region the poetry of Tagore, not in the complete spiritual
light, but amid an air shot with its seekings and glimpses, a
sight and cadence found in a psycho-spiritual heaven of subtle
and delicate soul experience transmuting the earth tones by the
touch of its radiance. The wide success and appeal of his poetry
is indeed one of the most significant signs of the tendency of
the mind of the age. At the same time one feels that none of
these things are at all the whole of what we are seeking or
the definite outcome and issue. That can only be assured when