Chapter VII

The Word and the Spirit

A

DEVELOPMENT of the kind of which we are speaking
must affect not only the frames of poetry, but initiate
also a subtle change of its word and rhythmic movement.
The poetic word is a vehicle of the spirit, the chosen medium
of the soul’s self-expression, and any profound modification of
the inner habit of the soul, its thought atmosphere, its way of
seeing, its type of feeling, any change of the light in which it lives
and the power of the breath which it breathes, greatening of its
elevations or entry into deeper chambers of its self must reflect
itself in a corresponding modification, changed intensity of light
or power, inner greatening and deepening of the word which it
has to use, and if there is no such change or if it is not sufficient
for the new intention of the spirit, then there can be no living
or no perfect self-expression. The old habits of speech cannot
contain the new spirit and must either enlarge and deepen them-
selves and undergo a transformation or else be broken up and
make way for another figure. The conservatism of the human
mind stands in the way of the transforming force and insists for a
time on the authority of traditional or already current standards
of literary and poetic perfection, but the eternally self-renewing
spirit must have eventually its way or else there will come a
petrifaction, a decay by too much stability, which is a much
worse danger than the decadence predicted by the purist when
faced by what seems to him a morbid strangeness and distortion
of the poetic moulds of speech or a perilous departure from safe
and enduring rules of perfection. A change of this kind very
considerable in its magnitude and force of renovation has been
for some time at work in most living literatures.
I have already suggested that the governing spirit and in-
tention of this change, not always very clearly envisaged even
by those who are most active in bringing it about, is a turn