44 The Future Poetry
upon its object. But apart from this disabling intrusion there is
always something essential to our present personality which is
of more value and has a right to be heard. For we are all of us
souls developing our unfinished nature in a constant endeavour
to get into unity with the spirit in life through its many forms
of manifestation and on many different lines. And as there is in
Indian Yoga a principle of varying capacity,adhikara ̄ , something
in the immediate power of a man’s nature that determines by its
characteristics his right to this or that way of Yoga, of union
with the Divine, which, whatever its merits or its limitations,
is his right way because it is most helpful to him personally, so
in all our activities of life and mind there is this principle of
adhikara ̄. That which we can appreciate in poetry and still more
the way in which we appreciate it, is that in it and us which
is most helpful to us and therefore, for the time being at least,
right for us in our attempt to get into union either with universal
or transcendent Beauty through the revealing ideas and motives
and suggestive forms of poetic creation.
This is the individual aspect of the personal or time ele-
ment. But there is also a larger movement to which we belong,
ourselves and the poet and his poetry; or rather it is the same
movement of the general soul of mankind in the same endeavour
as the individual’s and towards the same objective. In poetry
this shows itself in a sort of evolution from the objective to
the inward and from the inward to the inmost, the spiritual,
— an evolution which has many curves and turns and cycles,
many returns upon past motives and imperfect anticipations of
future motives, but is on the whole and up to a certain point a
growth and progress, a constant labour of self-enlargement and
self-finding. It is a clear idea of this evolution which may most
helpfully inform the historical element in our judgment and ap-
preciation of poetry; it is a judgment of it from the viewpoint of
the evolution of the human spirit and the subtler consciousness
and larger experience which that progress brings. We can see this
general movement working itself out in different forms and on
different lines through the souls of the nations and peoples, not
so many after all, who have arrived at a strong self-expression