The National Evolution of Poetry 43direct and heightened awakening that our faculty of poetic ap-
preciation becomes at once surest and most intense. It is, we may
say, the impersonal enjoyer of creative beauty in us responding
to the impersonal creator and interpreter of beauty in the poet.
For it is the impersonal spirit of Truth and Beauty that is seeking
to express itself through his personality; and it is that and not his
personal intelligence which finds its own word and seems itself
to create through him in his highest moments of inspiration.
And this Impersonal is concerned only with the creative idea
and the motive of beauty which is seeking expression; its sole
purpose is to find the perfect expression, the inevitable word
and the rhythm that reveals. All else is subordinate, accidental,
the crude material and the conditioning medium of this essential
endeavour.
Still there is also the personality of the poet and the per-
sonality of the hearer; the one gives the pitch and the form of
the success arrived at, the other determines the characteristic
intellectual and aesthetic judgment to which its appeal arrives.
The correspondence or the dissonance between the two decides
the relation between the poet and his reader, and out of that
arises whatever is personal in our appreciation and judgment
of his poetry. In this personal or time element there is always
much that is merely accidental and this rather limits and de-
flects our judgment than helps usefully to form it. How much
it interferes can be seen when we try to value contemporary
poetry.^1 It is a matter of continual experience that even critics
of considerable insight and sureness of taste are yet capable of
the most extraordinarily wrong judgments, whether on the side
of appreciation or of depreciation, when they have to pass a
verdict on their contemporaries. And this is because a crowd of
accidental influences belonging to the effect of the time and the
mental environment upon our mentality exercise an exaggerated
domination and distort or colour the view of our mental eye
(^1) Or even the poetry that has just preceded us, e.g. the nineteenth century’s contemptu-
ous estimate of the eighteenth or the twentieth century’s equally contemptuous dismissal
of the fallen Victorian demigods.