New Birth or Decadence? 207a vivid half outward half inward turn of mind his thought and
action and self and world and Nature, man begins to feel more
sensitively the passion and power of life, its joy and pain, its
wonder and terror and beauty and romance, to turn everything
into moved thought and sentiment and sensation of the life-soul,
the desire soul in him which first forces itself on his introspection
when he begins to go inward. Poetry too takes this turn, rises
and deepens to a new kind of greatness; and at the summit in
this kind we have Shakespeare.
This way of seeing and creating, in which thought is in-
volved in life and the view is that of the life-spirit feeling,
thinking, imagining, carried forward in its own surge of self,
cannot permanently hold the greater activities of the mental
being. He ceases to identify himself entirely with the passion,
the emotion, the thought-suggestions of life; for he needs to
know from a freer height what it is and what he is, to get a clear
detached idea of its workings, to dominate his emotions and
vital intuitions and see with the calm eye of his reason, to probe,
analyse, get at the law and cause and general and particular
rule of himself and Nature. He does this at first on large and
comparatively bare lines dwelling only on the salient details for
a first strong and provisionally adequate view. Poetry following
this movement takes on the lucid, restrained, intellectual and
ideal classic form, in which high or strong ideas govern and
develop the presentation of life and thought in an atmosphere
of clear beauty and the vision of the satisfied intelligence; that is
the greatness of the Greek and Latin poets. But afterwards the
intelligence sets more comprehensively to work, opens itself to
all manner of the possibilities of truth and to a crowding stream
and mass of interests, a never satisfied minuteness of detail, an
endless succession of pregnant generalisations. This is the type
of modern intellectualism.
The poetry which arises from this mentality is full of a teem-
ing many-sided poetic ideation which takes up the external and
life motives not for their own sake, but to make them food for
the poetic intelligence, blends the classical and romantic motives,
adds to them the realistic, aesthetic, impressionist, idealistic