46 The Future Poetry
and images proper to the simplest physical life and the most ex-
ternal customary mentality converting them into physical sym-
bols of the supraphysical and then, by a rapid liberation, in its
own proper voice, so producing the sacred poetry of the Veda
and Upanishads. An Italy with the Graeco-Roman past in its
blood could seize intellectually on the motives of catholic Chris-
tianity and give them a precise and supremely poetic expression
in Dante, while all Germanised Europe was still stammering its
primitive thoughts in the faltering infantile accents of romance
verse or shadowing them out in Gothic stone, successful only
in the most material form of the spiritual. In another direction,
when it seized upon the romantic life-motive, the meeting-place
of the Teuton and the Celt, we see it losing entirely the mystically
sentimental Celtic element, Italianising it into the sensuousness
of Tasso, and Italianising the rest into an intellectualised, a half
imaginative, half satiric play with the superficial motives of ro-
mance, — the inevitable turn of the Italianised Roman spirit.
On the other hand the English spirit, having got rid of the Latin
culture and holding the Celtic mind for a long time at bay, exiled
into the Welsh mountains or parked beyond the pale in Ireland,
followed with remarkable fidelity the natural curve and stages
of the psychological evolution of poetry, taking several centuries
to arrive at the intellectual motive and more to get at something
like a spiritual turn still too intellectualised to find any absolute
intensity of the spirit, only the first shimmerings of an outbreak
of vision.
Generally, every nation or people has or develops a spirit
in its being, a special soul-form of the human all-soul and a
law of its nature which determines the lines and turns of its
evolution. All that it takes from its environment it naturally
attempts to assimilate to this spirit, transmute into stuff of this
soul-form, make apt to and governable by this law of its nature.
All its self-expression is in conformity with them. And its poetry,
art and thought are the expression of this self and of the greater
possibilities of its self to which it moves. The individual poet and
his poetry are part of its movement. Not that they are limited
by the present temperament and outward forms of the national