274 The Future Poetry
terrible and baffling in the enigma of our actual human life, find
its deeper aesthesis, disengage what is struggling untransformed
in its outsides and make out of it by poetic sympathy material of
spiritual truth and beauty. This is a strain that has been growing
in recent poetic creation and it suffers as yet too often from an
insufficient fineness of insight and a too crude handling, but,
that immaturity once overcome, must hold a large and assured
place among the great poetic motives. But especially a clearer
and more inspiring vision of the destiny of the spirit in man will
be a large part of the poetry of the future. For the spiritual eye is
not only able to see the divinity in man as he is, the divinity in his
struggle and victory and failure and even in his sin and offence
and littleness, but the spirit is master of the future, its past and
present in time not only the half-formed stuff of its coming ages,
but in a profound sense it is the call and attraction of the future
that makes the past and present, and that future will be more
and more seen to be the growth of the godhead in the human
being which is the high fate of this race that thinks and wills
and labours towards its own perfection. This is a strain that we
shall hear more and more, the song of the growing godhead of
the kind, of human unity, of spiritual freedom, of the coming
supermanhood of man, of the divine ideal seeking to actualise
itself in the life of the earth, of the call to the individual to rise to
his godlike possibility and to the race to live in the greatness of
that which humanity feels within itself as a power of the spirit
which it has to deliver into some yet ungrasped perfect form of
clearness. To embellish life with beauty is only the most outward
function of art and poetry, to make life more intimately beautiful
and noble and great and full of meaning is its higher office, but
its highest comes when the poet becomes the seer and reveals to
man his eternal self and the godheads of its manifestation.
These new voices must needs be the result of the growth of
the power of the spirit on the mind of man which is the promise
of a coming era. It is always indeed the spirit in him that shapes
his poetic utterance; but when that spirit is preoccupied with the
outward life, the great poets are those who make his common
life and action and its surroundings splendid and beautiful and