278 The Future Poetry
with the most adaptable freedom and variety its own essential
motives and cadences, first forms and simpler structures before
it works out victoriously its greater motions or ampler figures in
narrative and drama.
The freshest and most spontaneous liquidities of song ut-
terance abounded in past literature at times when the direct
movement of the life-spirit, whether confined to simple primary
emotion and experience or deepening to the more vivid probings
of its own richer but still natural self-aesthesis, has been the
fountain-head of a stirred poetic utterance. It is then that there
come the pure lyric outbursts and the poet is content to sing
and let the feeling create its own native moulds of music. The
thought satisfied with its own emotion is not too insistent to
elaborate the lyrical form for its more intricate purposes or to
give it certainly a weightier but almost inevitably a less simply
rapturous movement. The intellectual ages sing less easily. It is
their care to cut and carve the lyrical form with a self-conscious
and considering art and their practice arrives at measures and
movements of a consummate literary perfection, much power
of modulation, a moved thinking and sentiment deliberately
making the most of its own possibilities; but except in the voices
of the one or two who are born with the capacity and need of
the pure lyrical impulse, the too developed intellect cannot often
keep or recover life’s first fine careless rapture or call the memory
of it into its own more loaded tones and measures. The lyric
poetry of the ancient classical tongues is largely of this character
and we find it there confined to a certain number of highly
developed forms managed with a perfect and careful technique,
and the movement of poetic feeling, sometimes grave, sometimes
permitted a lighter and more rapid impulsion, is chastened and
subdued to the service of the reflective poetic intelligence. The
absolute simplicities and spontaneities of the soul’s emotion
which were the root of the original lyric impulse get only an
occasional opportunity of coming back to the surface, and in
their place there is the movement of a more thoughtful and
often complex sentiment and feeling, not freshets of song, but
the larger wave of the chant and elegy and ode: the flowers