256 The Future Poetry
through the aesthetic sense is the constant sense of Indian art, as
it is also the inspiring motive of a great part of the later religion
and poetry. Japan and China, more especially perhaps southern
China, for the north has been weighted by a tendency to a more
external and formal idea of measure and harmony, had in a
different way this fusion of the spiritual and aesthetic mind and
it is a distinguishing stamp of their art and culture. The Persian
had a sort of sensuous magic of the transforming aesthesis born
of psychic delight and vision. Ancient Greece did all its work of
founding European civilisation by a union of a subtle and active
intelligence with a fine aesthetic spirit and worship of beauty.
The Celtic nations again seem always to have had by nature a
psychic delicacy and subtlety united with an instinctive turn for
imaginative beauty to which we surely owe much of the finer
strain in English literature. But there these spontaneous miracles
of fusion end and in the mind of later peoples who come in and
take possession with a less innate, a more derivative culture, the
sense of beauty works with a certain effort and is clogged by
many heavier elements which are in conflict with and prevent
the sureness of the aesthetic perception. There is in their cruder
temperament and intelligence a barbaric strain which worships
rudely the power and energy of life and is not at home with the
delight of beauty, an ethical and puritanic strain which looks
askance at art and beauty and pleasure, a heavy scholastic or a
dry scientific intellectual strain which follows after truth with a
conscientious and industrious diligence but without vision and
fine aesthesis. And the modern mind, inheritor of all this past,
is a divided and complex mind which strives at its best to get
back at the old thing on a larger scale and realise some oneness
of its many strands of experience, but has not yet found the
right meeting-place; and it is besides still labouring under the
disadvantage of its aberration into a mechanical, economical,
materialistic, utilitarian civilisation from which it cannot get
free, though it is struggling to shake off that dullest side of it for
which a naked and unashamed riot of ugliness could be indulged
in without any prickings of the spiritual conscience but rather
with a smug self-righteousness in the hideous, the vulgar and the