312 The Future Poetry
for the purpose for which these essays were put together, his
criticism has one great fault, — there is too little of it. The first
part deals with four contemporary poets, three of them of the
first importance, and a group; the second deals with five recent
poets and a dramatist and of these writers three again are of
the first importance; but this slender volume of 135 pages is
a small pedestal for so many figures. To catch the eye of the
Indian reader [he tries] to give the greater of these something
like life size, while putting the rest in smaller proportions —
after a convention familiar to Indian art. Each essay is indeed
excellent in itself; that on Emerson is a masterpiece of fullness
in brevity, for it says perfectly in a few pages all that need be
said about Emerson the poet and nothing that need not be said;
others are quite full and conclusive enough for their purpose,
for instance the admirable “defence” of Alfred Austin; and in all
the essential things are said and said finely and tellingly. There is
quite enough for the experienced reader of English poetry who
can seize on implications and follow out suggestions; but the
Indian reader is inexperienced and has not ordinarily a well-
cultivated critical faculty or receptiveness; he needs an ampler
treatment to familiarise him with the subject and secure his
permanent interest. The essays do act admirably as finger-posts;
but finger-posts are not enough for him, he needs to be carried
some miles along the road before he will consent to follow it.
APPENDIX II
The poetry of the future will be unlike that of the past in one
very important circumstance that in whatever languages it may
be written, it will be more and more moved by the common mind
and motives of all the human peoples. Mankind is now being
drawn to a fundamental unity of thought and culture among all
its racial and national differences to which there has been no
parallel