64 The Future Poetry
or high intellectuality rather than into the native utterance of
imaginative vision adventuring beyond the normal bounds of
a high poetic intelligence. We see in modern French creation a
constant struggle with this limitation: even we find a poet like
Mallarme driven to break the mould of French speech in his ́
desperate effort to force it to utter what is to its natural clear
lucidity almost unutterable. No such difficulty presents itself in
English poetry; the depths, the vistas of suggestion, the power
to open the doors of the infinite are already there, ready to hand
for the mind rightly gifted to evoke them, waiting and almost
asking to be used for the highest purposes. Much less naturally
fitted for fine prose utterance, this language has developed all
the close lights and shades, the heights and depths, the recesses
of fathomless sense needed by the poet.
It has to be seen how this has come about; for it has not
been accomplished at all easily, but only by much seeking and
effort. We observe first that English poetry has covered the rising
field that lies before the genius of poetry by strictly successive
steps, and these steps have followed the natural ascending order
of our developing perceptions as the human consciousness rises
from the first physical view of things through the more inward
life-vision, through the constructing and pondering intellect and
last through a vivid or a brooding intuition to the gateways of
the spirit. The English creative genius began by a quite external,
a clear and superficial substance and utterance. It proceeded
to a deeper vital poetry, a poetry of the power and beauty and
wonder and spontaneous thought, the joy and passion and pain,
the colour and music of Life, in which the external presentation
of life and things was taken up, but heightened, exceeded and
given its full dynamic and imaginative content. From that it
turned to an attempt at mastering the secret of the Latins, the
secret of a clear, measured and intellectual dealing with life,
things and ideas. Then came an attempt, a brilliant and beautiful
attempt to get through Nature and thought and the veiled mind
in life and Nature and its profounder aesthetic suggestions to
some large and deep spiritual truth behind these things. This
attempt did not come to perfect fruition; it stopped short partly