The Form and the Spirit 281outward movements and changes: these can only rightly come
in as a modulation of the constant essential music. This double
need may possibly be met by a very skilful free movement, but
not so easily, straightforwardly and simply as in a fidelity, much
more really natural than these overdone niceties, to the once
discovered fixed cadence. And besides the bare truth of the vital
intuition is not that inmost truth of things our minds are striving
to see; that is something much greater, profounder, more infinite
in its content and unending in its suggestion; not our identity in
sight and spiritual emotion with the limited subconscient inten-
tion of life, but rather a oneness with something in it at once
superconscient, immanent and comprehensive of which that is
only a blind index will be the moving power of a greater utter-
ance. And until we have found, whether by spiritual experience
or poetic insight, this identity and its revelations in ourselves
and in things, we shall not have laid a sound and durable basis
for the future creation.
The essential and decisive step of the future art of poetry will
perhaps be to discover that it is not the form which either fixes
or reveals the spirit but the spirit which makes out of itself the
form and the word and this with so sure a discovery, once we can
live in it and create out of it without too much interference from
the difficult and devising intellect, that their movement becomes
as spontaneously inevitable as the movements and their mould
as structurally perfect as the magical formations of inconscient
Nature. Nature creates perfectly because she creates directly
out of life and is not intellectually self-conscious, the spirit will
create perfectly because it creates directly out of self and is
spontaneously supra-intellectually all-conscious. It is no doubt
this truth of a spiritually just and natural creation that some of
the present ideas and tendencies are trying to adumbrate, but
not as yet as understandingly as one could desire. The decisive
revealing lyrical outburst must come when the poet has learnt to
live creatively only in the inmost spiritual sight and identity of
his own self with the self of his objects and images and to sing
only from the deepest spiritual emotion which is the ecstasy of
feeling of that identity or at least of some extreme nearness to