The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty 265in the lucid and clear nobility and beauty of an uplifting of life
and an aesthetic sense of the humanity and divinity of man; the
later art and poetry interpreted to Athens her religious ideas, her
thought, her aesthetic instincts, the soul of grandeur and beauty
of her culture.
And in all these instances, as in others like the art and po-
etry of Japan and of China, a more or less profoundly intuitive
creation from the depths and expression through poetic delight
of the soul of a people has been the secret of this effect and this
power of creation or influence. But in other times and places
poetry has been more a servant of aesthetic pleasure than a
creative master of life and great spiritual agent; when it is at
all great, it cannot fail to be that to a certain extent, but it
has not so acted as a whole, centrally, in the same large and
effective way or with the same high conscience of its function.
It has leaned too much on the surface or external interests of
life for the pleasure of the intellect and imagination and failed
too much to create life from within by a deeper delight in the
power of vision of the soul and spirit. The high energy of English
poetry has done great and interesting things; it has portrayed life
with charm and poetic interest in Chaucer, made thought and
character and action and passion wonderful to the life soul in us
in Shakespeare, seen and spoken with nobility and grandeur of
vision and voice in Milton, intellectualised vigorous or pointed
commonplace in Pope and Dryden, played with elegance and
beauty on the lesser strings with the Victorians or cast out here
and there a profounder strain of thought or more passionate
and aspiring voice, and if the most spiritual strains have been
few, yet it has dreamed in light in Shelley or drawn close in
Wordsworth to the soul in Nature. And it may seem hard to
say in the face of all this splendour and vigour and glow and
beauty and of the undeniable cultural influence, that something
was too often lacking which would have made the power of this
poetry more central and intimate and a greater direct force on
the life of the people, and yet this is, I think, true in spite of
exceptions, not only here, but of almost all the later European
literature. To get back to a profounder centre, to create from