262 The Future Poetry
and do not consent to sink themselves in the spiritual emotion
of the seeing of truth and the abiding spiritual experience. The
mental and vital interest, pleasure, pain of thought, life, action
is not the source of poetic delight and beauty and can be turned
into that deeper thing only when they have sunk into the soul
and been transmuted in the soul’s radiant memory into spiritual
experience, — that perhaps was what the Greeks meant when
they made Mnemosyne the eternal mother of the muses; the
passions can only change into poetic matter when they have been
spiritualised in the same bright sources and have undergone the
purification, thekatharsis, spoken of by the Greek critic; the life
values are only poetic when they have come out heightened and
changed into soul values. The poetic delight and beauty are born
of a deeper rapture and not of the surface mind’s excited interest
and enjoyment of life and existence.
The ancient Indian critics defined the essence of poetry as
rasaand by that word they meant a concentrated taste, a spiri-
tual essence of emotion, an essential aesthesis, the soul’s pleasure
in the pure and perfect sources of feeling. The memory of the soul
that takes in, broods over and transmutes the mind’s thought,
feeling and experience, is a large part of the process which comes
by this aesthesis, but it is not quite the whole thing; it is rather
only a common way by which we get at something that stands
behind, the spiritual being in us which has the secret of the
universal delight and the eternal beauty of existence. That which
we call genius works or comes out from something deep within
which calls down the word, the vision, the light and power from
a level above the normal mind and it is the sense of the inrush
from above which makes the rapture and the enthusiasm of
illumination and inspiration. That source, when we know better
the secrets of our being, turns out to be the spiritual self with
its diviner consciousness and knowledge, happier fountains of
power, inalienable delight of existence. The cultures that were
able directly or indirectly to feel the joy of this self and spirit, got
into the very strain of their aesthesis the touch of its delight, its
Ananda, and this touch was the secret of the generalised instinct
for beauty which has been denied to a later mind limited by