The National Evolution of Poetry 45through the things of the mind, through art and thought and
poetry. These things of the mind do not indeed form or express
the whole of the movement, even as they do not make up the
whole of the life of the people; they represent its highest points,
— or in the two or three peoples that have powerfully developed
the spiritual force within, the highest with the exception of the
spiritual summit. In these few we can best see the inner character
and aim of any one line of the movement, — whether it be the
line of poetry, the line of art or the line of religious and spiritual
endeavour.
This general evolution has its own natural periods or ages;
but as with the stone, bronze and other ages discovered by the
archaeologists, their time periods do not always correspond,
are not the same for all the peoples which have evolved them.
Moreover, they do not always follow each other in quite the same
rigorous order; there are occasional reversals, extraordinary an-
ticipations, violent returns; for in things psychological the Spirit
in the world varies its movements more freely than in physical
things. There, besides, the spirit of the race can anticipate the
motives of a higher stratum of psychological development while
yet it lives outwardly the general life of a lower stratum. So too
when it has got well on to a higher level of development, it may
go strongly back to a past and inferior motive and see how that
works out when altered and uplifted or enlarged or even only
subtilised by the motives and powers of the superior medium.
There is here, besides, a greater complexity of unseen or half-
seen subconscient and superconscient tendencies and influences
at work upon the comparatively small part of us which is con-
scious of what it is doing. And very often a nation in its labour
of self-expression is both helped and limited by what has been
left behind from the evolution of a past self which, being dead,
yet lives.
Thus, the Indian spirit could seize powerfully the spiritual
motive in an age in which the mass of the people lived a strenuous
external life and was strongly outward-going and objective in its
normal mentality. It succeeded in expressing the supreme spiri-
tual experiences, so difficult to put at all into speech, in forms