56 The Future Poetry
something beyond itself and behind life through the intensities
of creative sight. It brings in a look upon Nature which pierces
beyond her outsides and her external spirit and lays its touch
on the mysteries of her inner life and sometimes on that in her
which is most intimately spiritual. It awakens rare outbreaks of
mysticism, a vein of subtler sentiment, a more poignant pathos;
it refines passion from a violence of the vital being into an in-
tensity of the soul, modifies vital sensuousness into a thing of
imaginative beauty by a warmer aesthetic perception. It carries
with it a seeking for exquisite lyrical form, touches narrative
poetry to finer issues, throws its romantic beauty and force
and fire and its greater depth of passion across the drama and
makes it something more than a tumultuous external action and
heavily powerful character-drawing. At one period it strives to
rise beyond the English mould, seems about to disengage itself
and reveal through poetry the Spirit in things. In language and
music it is always a quickening and refining force; where it can
do nothing more, it breathes a more intimate energy; where it
gets its free characteristic movement, it creates that intensity of
style and rhythm, that sheer force of imaginative vision and that
peculiar unseizable beauty of turn which are the highest qualities
of English poetry.
The varied commingling and separating of these two ele-
ments mark the whole later course of the literature and present as
their effect a side of failure and defect and a side of achievement.
There are evidently two opposite powers at work in the same
field, often compelled to labour in the same mind at a com-
mon production; and when two such opposites can coalesce,
seize each other’s motives and, fusing them, become one, the
very greatest achievement becomes possible. For each fills in the
other’s deficiencies; they light each other up with a new light
and bring in a fresh revelation which neither by itself could have
accomplished. The greatest things in English poetry have come
where this fusion was effected in the creative mind and soul of
the poet. But that could not always be done and there results
from the failure a frequent uncertainty of motive, a stumbling
unsureness of touch, an oscillation, a habit of too often falling