Chapter XXIV

New Birth or Decadence?

A

T THIS point we stand in the evolution of English po-
etry. Its course, we can see, is only one line of a common
evolution, and I have singled it out to follow because, for
two reasons, it seems to me the most complete and suggestive. It
follows most faithfully the natural ascending curve of the human
spirit in this kind of rhythmic imaginative self-expression and,
again, because of all the modern European languages it has the
largest freest poetic energy and natural power, it responds on the
whole most directly of all of them — in spite of certain serious
limitations of the English mind — to the fountain motives, the
essential impetus of the soul of poetry in its ascent and shows
them, if not always in their greatest or most perfect, yet almost
always in their most characteristic and revealing form. Poetry
like everything else in man evolves. Its fundamental nature, func-
tion and law are no doubt always the same, because each thing
and each activity too in our being must be faithful to the divine
idea in it, to its dharma, and can try to depart from it only on
peril, whatever momentarily it may seem to gain, of eventual
inferiority and futility, or even of disintegration and death. But
still there is an evolution within this law of its being. And evolu-
tion means a bringing out of new powers which lay concealed in
the seed or the first form; the simple develops to the more com-
plex, — more complex even in some apparent simplicity, — the
superficial gives place to the more and more profound, the lesser
gives place to the greater nature of the common manifestation.
But poetry is a psychological phenomenon, the poetic impulse
a highly charged force of expression of the mind and soul of
man, and therefore in trying to follow out its line of evolution
it is the development of the psychological motive and power, it
is the kind of feeling, vision, mentality which is seeking in it for
its word and idea and form of beauty and it is the power of