The Breath of Greater Life 245word was found by the Greeks and not again. That is perhaps
an excessive affirmation, but certainly a just balance between
observing thought and life is the distinctive effort of classical
poetry and that endeavour gave it its stamp whether in Athens
or Rome or in much of the epic or classical literature of ancient
India. But this balance is easily lost, a difficult thing, and, once it
has gone, thought begins to overweight life which loses its power
andelan and joy, its vigorous natural body and its sincere and ́
satisfied passion and force. We get more of studies of life than
of creation, thought about the meaning of character and emo-
tion and event and elaborate description rather than the living
presence of these things. Passion, direct feeling, ardent emotion,
sincerity of sensuous joy are chilled by the observing eye of
the reason and give place to a play of sentiment, — sentiment
which is an indulgence of the intelligent observing mind in the
aesthesis, therasaof feeling, passion, emotion, sense thinning
them away into a subtle, at the end almost unreal fineness. There
is then an attempt to get back to the natural fullness of the vital
and physical life, but the endeavour fails in sincerity and success
because it is impossible; the mind of man having got so far can-
not return upon its course, undo what it has made of itself and
recover the glad childhood of its early vigorous nature. There
is instead of the simplicity of spontaneous life a search after
things striking, exaggerated, abnormal, violent, new, in the end
a morbid fastening on perversities, on all that is ugly, glaring and
coarse on the plea of their greater reality, on exaggerations of
vital instinct and sensation, on physical wrynesses and crudities
and things unhealthily strange. The thought-mind, losing the
natural full-blooded power of the vital being, pores on these
things, stimulates the failing blood with them and gives itself an
illusion of some forceful sensation of living. This is not the real
issue, but the way to exhaustion and decadence.
The demand for life, for action, the tendency to a pragmatic
and vitalistic view of things, a certain strenuous and even strident
note has been loud enough in recent years. Life, action, vital
power are great indispensable things, but to get back to them by
thinking less is a way not open to us in this age of time, even if