The Form and the Spirit 283of the idea-power that is made to work itself out in the life
movement, lay its hold on the soul’s motions, create the type,
use the character and the passion for its instruments and at
its highest tension appear as an agent of the conflict of ideal
forces that produce the more lofty tragedies of human action.
The paucity of great creation in the modern drama after one
very considerable moment of power and vision has been due
largely to an inability to decide between these two motives or to
discover a great poetic form for the drama of the idea or effect
in the poetic imagination some fusion of the intellectual and
the life motive which would be an effective dramatic rendering
of the modern way of seeing man and his life. The only recent
vital and effective dramatic writing has been in prose and that
has taken the questionable shape of the problem play which is
peculiarly congenial to the dominating interests of the highly
intellectualised but always practical mind of humanity today.
The poetic form has long been for the most part a reproduction
of past moulds and motives without any roots of vitality in
the living mind of the age; but recently there has been a more
inward and profounder movement which promises some chance
of replacing this sort of unsatisfying imitation by a novel and
a sincerer kind of dramatic poetry. An attempt has been initi-
ated to create an inner drama of the soul with the soul itself
for the real stage. There is in the spirit and the forms of this
endeavour a predominance as yet of the lyrical rather than the
dramatic motive, an insufficient power of making the characters
living beings rather than unsubstantial types or shadows of soul
movements or even the figures of a veiled allegory and parable;
and there is needed perhaps for a greater vitality a freer and
more nobly aesthetic stage which would not be limited by the
external realism that now stands in the way of a living revival
of the poetic and artistic theatre. Nevertheless this attempt is a
true though not a complete index of the direction the creative
mind must take in the future.
The soul of man, a many-motioned representative of the
world-spirit, subsisting and seeking for itself and its own mean-
ings amid the laws and powers and moving forces of the universe