The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty 261is powerfully attracted by the stir of the outward passion and
excitement, the stress of immediate thought, life and action,
hastens to embody it in speech or in deed and has no leisure
to transmute life into those greater abiding values of which the
soul in its depths is alone capable. But the higher faculties are
given us as keys to a deeper experience; the seer, the poet, the
artist, the children of the spirit’s light and intuition are only true
to themselves when they live in the depths of the soul, refuse to
be hurried away by the surface call of mind and life and wait
rather for their own greater voices. The poetry which insists
on an external effectiveness, on immediate thought and life and
experience, may seize very powerfully the ear of the moment,
but is singularly frail in its affectation of power and even if it has
strength of body, is hollow and null inside; it fails because it is
concerned with immediately vital things perhaps, but not with
that which is immortal. That is just why patriotic poetry, war
poetry or poetry of the occasion and the moment are so difficult
to write greatly and, although it would seem that these things
are among the most dynamic and should move most easily to
powerful utterance, are oftenest poor in poetic substance and
inferior in value. For life they may be dynamic, but they are not
so readily dynamic for art and poetry, and precisely because the
vital interest, the life attraction is so strong that it is difficult
to draw back from the external to the spiritual delight and the
spiritual significance. A great poet may do it sometimes, because
the constant instinct of his genius is to look beyond the surface
and the moment to that which is universal and eternal behind
the personal experience and the occasion is only for him an
excuse for its utterance. The drama of action and mere passion
is for the same reason short-lived in its gusto of vitality, fades in
a century or less into a lifeless mask, while the drama of the soul
abides, because it gets near to the subtler eternal element, the
soul’s essential aesthesis, the spirit’s delight in self-creation and
experience. Philosophical and religious poetry too fails so often
by a neglect of the same fine distinction, because the interest of
the thought pursued by the intellectual activity, the interest of the
mind in its surface religious ideas and feelings get the upper hand