Poetic Vision and the Mantra 37be a mechanical construction and putting together, not a living
creation.
Sheer objectivity brings us down from art to photography;
and the attempt to diminish the subjective view to the vanishing-
point so as to get an accurate presentation is proper to science,
not to poetry. We are not thereby likely to get a greater truth or
reality, but very much the reverse; for the scientific presentation
of things, however valid in its own domain, that of the senses and
the observing reason, is not true to the soul. It is not the integral
truth or the whole vision of things, for it gives only their process
and machinery and mechanic law, but not their inner life and
spirit. That is the error in realism, — in its theory, at least, for
its practice is something other than what it intends or pretends
to be. Realistic art does not and cannot give us a scientifically
accurate presentation of life, because Art is not and cannot be
Science. What it does do, is to make an arbitrary selection of
motives, forms and hues, here of dull blues and greys and browns
and dingy whites and sordid yellows, there of violent blacks and
reds, and the result is sometimes a thing of power and some-
times a nightmare. Idealistic art makes a different selection and
produces either a work of nobly-coloured power or soft-hued
beauty or else a high-pitched and false travesty or a specious
day-dream. In these distinctions there is no safety; nor can any
rule be laid down for the poet, since he must necessarily go by
what he is and what he sees, except that he should work from
the living poetic centre within him and not exile himself into
artificial standpoints.
From our present point of view we may say that the poet
may do as he pleases in all that is not the essential matter.
Thought-matter may be prominent in his work or life-substance
predominate. He may proceed by sheer force of presentation or
by direct power of interpretation. He may make this world his
text, or wander into regions beyond, or soar straight into the
pure empyrean of the infinite. To arrive at the Mantra he may
start from the colour of a rose, or the power or beauty of a
character, or the splendour of an action, or go away from all
these into his own secret soul and its most hidden movements.