284 The Future Poetry
and discovering and realising its spiritual relations with others
will be the vision and intention of a dramatic poetry fully reflec-
tive of the now growing intuitive mind of the future. All drama
must be a movement of life and of action because its mode of
presentation is through the speech of living beings and the inter-
action of their natures, but equally the real interest except in the
least poetic kinds is an internal movement and an action of the
soul because dramatic speech is poetically interesting only when
it is an instrument of human self-expression and not merely a
support for a series of stirring incidents. The drama of the future
will differ from the romantic play or tragedy because the thing
which dramatic speech will represent will be something more
internal than the life soul and its brilliant pageant of passion
and character. The external web of events and action, whether
sparing or abundant, strongly marked or slight in incidence,
will only be outward threads and indices and the movement
that will throughout occupy the mind will be the procession of
the soul phases or the turns of the soul action: the character,
whether profusely filled in in detail in the modern fashion or
simply and strongly outlined in the purer ancient method, will
not be mistaken for the person, but accepted as only an inner
life notation of the spirit: the passions, which have hitherto
been prominently brought forward as the central stuff of the
drama, will be reduced to their proper place as indicative colour
and waves on the stream of spiritual self-revelation. And this
greater kind will differ too from the classical tragedy of which
the method was some significant and governing idea working
out its life issues, because the idea will only be to a larger
human mind better instructed in the secret of existence the self-
view by the soul of its own greater and more intimate issues
and of the conscient turns of its existence. The personage of
the play will be the spirit in man diversified or multitudinous in
many human beings whose inner spiritual much more intimately
than their external life relations will determine the development,
and the culminations will be steps of solution of those spiritual
problems of our existence which after all are at the root of and
include and inform all the others. The drama will be no longer an