118 The Future Poetry
the strong subjective personality shaping everything into a mask-
reflection of its own characteristic moods; the attempt to live
in the thoughts and feelings of other men, other civilisations
betrays itself as only the multiple imaginative and sympathetic
extension of the poet’s own psychology. This peculiarity of the
age is noticeable even in many creators whose aim is deliberately
realistic or their method founded upon a minute psychological
observation, Ibsen or Tolstoy and the Russian novelists. The self
of the creator very visibly overshadows the work, is seen ev-
erywhere like the conscious self of Vedanta both containing and
inhabiting all his creations. Shakespeare succeeds, as far as a poet
can, in veiling himself behind his creatures; he gives us at least
the illusion of mirroring the world around him, a world univer-
sally represented rather than personally and individually thought
and imaged, and at any rate the Life-spirit sees and creates in
him through a faithful reflecting instrument, quite sufficiently
universal and impersonal for its dramatic purpose even in his
personality. Browning, the English poet who best represented the
spirit of the age in its temperament of curious observation and
its aim at a certain force of large and yet minute reality, who was
eminently a poet of life observed and understood and of thought
playing around the observation, as Shakespeare was the poet of
life seen through an identity of feeling with it and of thought
arising up out of the surge of life, — Browning, though he seems
to have considered this self-concealment especially admirable
and the essence of the Shakespearian method of creation, fails
himself to achieve it in anything like the same measure. The
self-conscious thinking of the modern mind which brings into
prominent relief the rest of the mental personality and stamps
the whole work with it, gets into his way; everywhere we feel
the presence of the creator bringing forward his living puppets,
analysing, commenting, thinking about them or else about life
through a variation of many voices so that they become as much
his masks as his creations.
Thus both the subjective personality of the man and the
artistic personality of the creator tend to count for much more
in modern work than at any previous time; the poet is a much