258 The Future Poetry
beauty of life, but upon the stress of its results and circumstances,
which in themselves have only an incidental and no satisfying
and harmonious meaning, and on the agitating or attractive
turmoil of the mind excited by their contact or their siege.^1
This difference results in a fundamental difference of aesthesis.
The pure aesthetic spirit ought to be left free, trusted in, made
master of its own action and creation and it will then create
with greatness and beauty, in a calm and satisfied ecstasy, and
yet safely harmonise its action with the other spiritual powers
of our existence, the need of the life-soul, the insistent seeking
of the thought-mind, the demand of the active will and the
senses. But we now make the aesthetic sense and intelligence a
servant of these other powers; it is condemned to serve first and
foremost our external interest in life or our interest in thought or
in troubled personality or the demand of the senses or passions
and bidden to make them beautiful or vivid to us by an active
aesthetic cerebration and artistic manufacture of the word or
a supply of carefully apt or beautiful forms and measures. The
secondary things are put in the first rank, the primary, the one
thing needful has to get in as best it can to give some firm base
to the creation. This aesthesis aided by the vast curiosity of the
modern intelligence has done some great and much interesting
work, but it arrives with difficulty at the readily fused harmonies
and assured stamp of the perfect way of spiritual creation.
There is a profound intrinsic delight and beauty in all things
and behind all experience whatever face it wears to the surface
mind, which makes it to a spirit housed within us other than
its first appearance, makes it, that is to say, no longer a thing
exciting mental interest, pain, pleasure, but rather a revelation
of the truth and power and delight of being and our feeling of it a
form of the universal Ananda of the old philosophical thinkers,
the calm yet moved ecstasy with which the spirit of existence
(^1) This is the result perhaps of an ill-assimilated Christian influence intervening on
the external vitalism of the Teutonic temperament and on Latin intellectualism, and
bringing in new needs and experiences which disturbed the mind and emotions without
possessing the soul with peace or arriving at a harmony of spiritual emotion and spiritual
self-knowledge.