52 The Future Poetry
and initiative by the Scandinavian and Celtic elements. This
mixture has made a national mind remarkably dynamic and
practical, with all the Teutonic strength, patience, industry, but
liberated from the Teutonic heaviness and crudity, yet retaining
enough not to be too light of balance or too sensitive to the
shocks of life; therefore, a nation easily first in practical intel-
ligence and practical dealing with the facts and difficulties of
life. Not, be it noted, by any power of clear intellectual thought
or by force of imagination or mental intuition, but rather by a
strong vital instinct, a sort of tentative dynamic intuition. No
spirituality, but a robust ethical turn; no innate power of the
thought and the word, but a strong turn for action; no fine play
of emotion or quickness of sympathy, but an abundant energy
and force of will. This is one element of the national mind; the
other is the submerged, half-insistent Celtic spirit, gifted with
precisely the opposite qualities, inherent spirituality, the gift of
the word, the rapid and brilliant imagination, the quick and
luminous intelligence, the strong emotional force and sympathy,
the natural love of the things of the mind and still more of those
beyond the mind, left to it from an ancient mystic tradition
and an old forgotten culture, forgotten in its mind, but still
flowing in its blood, still vibrant in its subtler nerve-channels. In
life a subordinate element, modifying the cruder Anglo-Saxon
characteristics, breaking across them or correcting their excess,
sometimes refining and toning, sometimes exaggerating the en-
ergy of the Norman and the Scandinavian strength and drive,
we may perhaps see it emerging at its best, least hampered, least
discouraged, in English poetry, coming there repeatedly to the
surface and then working with a certain force and vehement but
still embarrassed power, like an imprisoned spirit let out for a
holiday but within not quite congenial bounds and with an un-
adaptable companion. From the ferment of these two elements,
from the vigorous but chaotic motion created by their fusion
and their clash, arise both the greatness and the limitations of
English poetry.