The Breath of Greater Life 249have been to the vision of the gods. Shakespeare’s greatness lies
not in his reproduction of actual human events or men as they
appear to us buttoned and cloaked in life, — others of his time
could have done that as well, if with less radiant force of genius,
yet with more of the realistic crude colour or humdrum drab
of daily truth, — but in his bringing out in his characters and
themes of things essential, intimate, eternal, universal in man
and Nature and Fate on which the outward features are borne
as fringe and robe and which belong to all times, but are least
obvious to the moment’s experience: when we do see them, life
presents to us another face and becomes something deeper than
its actual present mask. That is why the poet oftenest instinc-
tively prefers to go away from the obsession of a petty actuality,
from the realism of the prose of life to his inner creative self or
an imaginative background of the past or the lucent air of myth
or dream or on into a greater outlook on the future. Poetry may
indeed deal with the present living scene, at some peril, or even
with the social or other questions and problems of the day, — a
task which is now often laid on the creative mind, as if that were
its proper work; but it does that successfully only when it makes
as little as possible of what belongs to the moment and time
and the surface and brings out their roots of universal or eternal
interest or their suggestion of great and deep things. What the
poet borrows from the moment, is the most perishable part of
his work and lives at all only by being subordinated and put
into intimate relation with less transient realities. And this is so
because it is the eternal increasing soul of man and the intimate
self of things and their more abiding and significant forms which
are the real object of his vision.
The poetry of the future can least afford to chain itself to the
outward actualities which we too often mistake for the whole
of life, because it will be the voice of a human mind which
is pressing more and more towards the very self of the self of
things, the very spirit of which the soul of man is a living power
and to a vision of unity and totality which is bound to take note
of all that lies behind our apparent material life. What man sees
and experiences of God and himself and his race and Nature