194 The Future Poetry
not an abrupt turn or a casting away of the immediate past
from which it was born, but a rapid development of new view-
points, a shedding of restrictions and limitations and husks and
externalities, a transformation by the entrance of a new force
of the soul into possession of the gains of the intellectual age
and a swift completion and filling of them out in a new flood
of light and an at once nearer and more extended sense of their
meaning. The whole view and sense of existence has deepened
into a greater subjectivity. For the subjectivity of the nineteenth
century was a matter of the temperament, an activity of the
strongly marked psychological individuality turned upon things
held under the lens as an object of the intelligence; but now
there are coming a universal subjectivity of the whole spirit, an
attempt towards closeness and identity, a greater community
of the individual with the universal soul and mind. The wider
interest in Man has not lessened in breadth, but it is changing
its character. More strenuous than before, it is less concentrated
on his outer life and creation, and even where it deals with
them, it opens more understandingly to his future and to his
inner possibilities, to the psychological and the spiritual sense
of his past, to the deeper significance of his present, to his self-
creation. The profounder ranges of his being are now sounded
and there is an initial feeling and even some actual seeing of
the greater individual and the communal or universal self of our
kind. Nature is seen more in her hidden suggestions and soul
meanings and in the finer impressions by which we enter into
them and establish with her a spiritual relation or identity. The
things that lie behind the material world are almost for the first
time being touched and seen with a close and revealing intimacy.
The communion of the human soul with the Divine is becoming
once more a subject of thought and utterance, not now limited to
the old religious and personal form, but enlightened by a sense
of the Infinite and Eternal which has arisen from and vivified
the larger cosmic sense for which the thinking and discovery
of the last century was a training. This change amounts to a
revolution of the whole attitude of man towards existence, but
it is commencing by an extension of the intellectual stress and a