Chapter II: Dream and Symbol (1)

The rise of French symbolism towards the end of the 'seventies was a symptom of a changed temper of thought and feeling traceable in some degree throughout civilized Europe. Roughly, it marked the passing of the confident and rather superficial security of the 'fifties into a vague unrest, a kind of troubled awe. As if existence altogether was a bigger, more mysterious, and intractable thing than was assumed, not so easily to be captured in the formulas of triumphant science, or mirrored and analysed by the most consummate literary art.

Political and social conditions contributed to the change. France stood on the morrow of a shattering catastrophe. The complacency of mid-Victorian England began to be disturbed by menaces from the workshops of industry. And it was precisely in triumphant Germany herself that revolutionary Socialism found, in Karl Marx, its first organizing mind and authoritative exponent. The millennium was not so near as it had seemed; the problems of society, instead of having been solved once for all, were only, it appeared, just coming into view.

In the secluded workshops of Thought, subtler changes were silently going on. The dazzling triumphs of physical science, which had led poetry itself to emulate the marble impassivity of the scientific temper, were undiminished; but they were seen in a new perspective, their authority ceased to be exclusive, the focus of interest was slowly shifting from the physical to the psychical world. Lange, writing the history of _Materialism_ in 1874, virtually performed its obsequies; and Tyndall's brilliant effort, in 1871, to equip primordial Matter with the 'promise and the potency' of mind, unconsciously confessed that its cause was lost. Psychology, after Fechner, steadily advanced in prestige and importance from the outlying circumference of the sciences to their very centre and core.

But it was not merely particular doctrines that lost ground; the scope and validity of scientific method itself began to be questioned. In the most varied fields of thought there set in that 'idealistic reaction against science' which has been described in one of the most penetrating books of our time. Most significant of all, science itself, in the person of Mach, and Pearson, has abandoned the claim to do more than provide descriptive formulas for phenomena the real nature of which is utterly beyond its power to discover.

Of this changed outlook the growth of Symbolism is the most significant literary expression. It was not confined to France, or to poetry. We know how the drama of Ibsen became charged with ulterior meanings as the fiery iconoclast passed into the poet of insoluble and ineluctable doubt. But by the French symbolists it was pursued as a creed, as a religion. If the dominant poetry of the third quarter of the century reflected the prestige of science, the dominant poetry of the fourth reflected the idealistic reactions against it, and Villiers de l'Ile Adam, its founder, came forward proclaiming that 'Science was bankrupt'. And so it might well seem to him, the visionary mystic inhabiting, as he did, a world of strange beauty and invisible mystery which science could not unlock. The symbolists had not all an explicit philosophy; but they were all aware of potencies in the world or in themselves which language cannot articulately express, and which are yet more vitally real than the 'facts' which we can grasp and handle, and the 'respectable' people whom we can measure and reckon with. Sometimes these potencies are vaguely mysterious, an impalpable spirit speaking only by hints and tokens; sometimes they are felt as the pulsations of an intoxicating beauty, breaking forth in every flower, but which can only be possessed, not described; sometimes they are moods of the soul, beyond analysis, and yet full of wonder and beauty, visions half created, half perceived. Experiences like these might have been described, as far as description would go, by brilliant artificers like the Parnassians. Verlaine and Mallarme did not discover, but they applied with new daring, the fact that an experience may be communicated by words which, instead of representing it, suggest it by their colour, their cadences, their rhythm, their verbal echoes and inchoate phrases. All the traditional artistry of French poetic speech was condemned as both inadequate and insincere. 'Take eloquence and wring her neck! Nothing but music and the nuance--all the rest is "Literature", mere writing--futile verbosity!' that was the famous watchword of Verlaine's creed.[12]

The strength of symbolism lay in this demand for a complete sincerity of utterance. Its revolt against science was at the same time a vindication of truth, an effort to get nearer to reality both by shedding off the incrustations of habitual phrase and by calling into play the obscure affinities by which it can be magically evoked. In the subtleties of suggestion latent in sensations the symbolists were real discoverers. But the way had already been pointed in famous verses by Baudelaire:

'Earth is a Temple, from whose pillared mazes
Murmurs confused of living utterance rise;
Therein Man thro' a forest of symbols paces,
That contemplate him with familiar eyes.

As prolonged echoes, wandering on and on,
At last in one far tenebrous depth unite,
Impalpable as darkness, and as light,
Scents, sounds, and colours meet in unison.'

There Baudelaire had touched a chord that was to sound loud and long; for what else than this thought of all the senses meeting in union inspired the music drama of Wagner?--only one of his points of kinship, as we shall see, with symbolism.

Thus the symbolists, in quest of reality, touched it only through the inner life. There they are, in their fashion, realists. 'A landscape', said Albert Samain, 'is a state of soul.' The landscape may be false, but the state of soul is veracious. What interests them in life is the image of life, not lucidly reflected but exquisitely transformed. Yet the vision of the world caught in that transforming mirror was not without strange revealing glimpses, invisible, like stars mirrored in a well, to the plain observer. They could hear the music of the spheres; or in the language of Samain's sonnet

'Feel flowing through them, like a pouring wave,
The music-tide of universal Soul;
Hear in their heart the beating pulse of heaven.'[13]

In the earlier poetry of Maurice Maeterlinck, the inner life imposes a more jealous sway. The poet sits not before a transforming mirror, where the outer world is disguised, but in a closed chamber, where it is only dreamed of, and it fades into the incoherence and the irrelevance of a dream. But the chamber is of rare beauty, and in its hushed and perfumed twilight, dramas of the spirit are being silently and almost imperceptibly enacted, more tragic than the loud passion and violence of the stage. He has written an essay on Silence,--silence that, like humility, holds for him a 'treasure' beyond the reach of eloquence or of pride; for it is the dwelling of our true self, the spiritual core of us, 'more profound and more boundless than the self of the passions or of pure reason.' And so there is less matter for drama in 'a captain who conquers in battle or a husband who avenges his honour than in an old man, seated in his arm-chair waiting patiently with his lamp beside him, giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting without comprehending, the silence of door and window, and the quivering voice of the light; submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny.'

It is on this side that symbolism discloses its kinship with the Russian novel,--with the mystic quietism of Tolstoy and the religion of self-sacrifice in Dostoievsky; and its sharp antagonism to the Nietzschean gospel of daemonic will and ruthless self-assertion, just then being preached in Germany. The two faiths were both alive and both responded to deep though diverse needs of the time; but the immediate future, as we shall see, belonged to the second. They had their first resounding encounter when Nietzsche held up his once venerated master Wagner to scorn as the chief of 'decadents' because he had turned from the superhuman heroism of Siegfried and the boundless passion of Tristram to glorify the mystic Catholicism of the Grail and the loveliness of the 'pure fool' Parzifal.

Outside France symbolism found eager response among young poets, but rather as a literary than as an ethical doctrine. In Germany Dehmel, the most powerful personality among her recent poets, began as a disciple of Verlaine; in Italy, D'Annunzio wove esoteric symbols into the texture of the more than Nietzschean supermanliness of his supermen and superwomen. More significant than these, however, was the symbolism of what we call the Celtic school of poets in Ireland. For here both their artistic impressionism and their mystic spirituality found a congenial soil. The principal mediating force was Mr. Arthur Symons, friend of Verlaine and of Yeats, and himself the most penetrating interpreter of Symbolism, both as critic and as poet.[14] And to the French influence was added that of Blake, a poet too great to be included in any school, but allied to symbolism by his scorn for 'intellect' and for rhetoric, and by his audacities of figured speech. But Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.', the leaders of the 'Celtic' group, are in no sense derivation voices. They had the great advantage over the French of a living native folklore and faery lore. Hence their symbolism, no less subtle, and no less steeped in poetic imagining, has not the same air of literary artifice, of studio fabrication, of cultured Bohemianism; it breathes of the old Irish hills, holy with old-world rites, and the haunted woods, and the magical twilight and dewy dawns. And beneath all the folklore, and animating it, is the passion for Ireland herself, the mother, deathless and ever young, whom neither the desolation of the time nor the decay of hope can touch:

'Out-worn heart in a time out-worn
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Tho' hope fall from you and love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill;
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.'

For that, the French had only the Fauns of a literary neo-classicism. The passion for France was yet indeed to find a voice in poetry. But this was reserved for the more trumpet-tongued tones of the contemporary phase to which I now turn.

III. 'CREATIVE EVOLUTION'

1. _Philosophic Analogies_

Nothing is more symptomatic of the incipient twentieth century than the drawing together of currents of thought and action before remote or hostile. The Parnassians were an exclusive sect, the symbolists an eccentric and often disreputable coterie; Claudel, D'Annunzio, Rudyard Kipling, speak home to throngs of everyday readers, are even national idols, and our Georgians contrive to be bought and read without the least surrender of what is most poetic in their poetry. And the analogies between philosophic thinking and poetic creation become peculiarly striking. Merely to name Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Benedetto Croce is to become vividly aware of these analogies and of the common bent from which they spring. All three--whether with brilliant rhetoric, or iron logic, or a blend of both--use their thinking power to deride the theorizing intelligence in comparison with the creative intuition which culminates in poetry. To define the scope and province of this intuition is the purport of Croce's epoch-making _Aesthetics_, the basis and starting-point of his illumining work, in _Critica_, as a literary critic. Bergson is the dominant figure in a line of French thinkers possessed with the conviction that life, a perpetual streaming forth of creative energy, cannot be caught in the mechanism of law, adapted to merely physical phenomena, which at best merely gives us generalizations and lets the all-important particulars--the individual living thing--slip through the meshes; whereas intuition--the eye fixed on the object--penetrates to the very heart of this individual living thing, and only drops out the skeleton framework of abstract laws. Philosophy, in these thinkers, was deeply imbued with the analogies of artistic creation. 'Beauty,' said Ravaisson, 'and especially beauty in the most divine and perfect form, contains the secret of the world.'[15] And Bergson's _Creative Evolution_ embodied a conception of life and of the world profoundly congenial to the artistic and poetic temper of his time. For he restated, it has been well said, the two great surviving formulas of the nineteenth century, evolution and the will to live, in terms precisely suited to the temper of the age just dawning. The will to live became a formula of hope and progress; evolution became a formula of vital impulse, of creative purpose, not of mechanical 'struggle for existence'.

The idea that aesthetic experience gives a profounder clue than logical thought to the inner meaning of things was as old as Plato. It was one of the crowning thoughts of Kant; it deeply coloured the metaphysics of Schelling. And Nietzsche developed it with brilliant audacity when in his _Birth of Tragedy_ (1872) he contrasted scornfully with the laboured and ineffectual constructions of the theoretic man, even of Socrates the founder of philosophy, the radiant vision of the artist, the lucid clarity of Apollo. 'His book gave the lie to a thousand years of orderly development', wrote the great Hellenist Wilamowitz, Nietzsche's old schoolfellow, indignant at his rejection of the labours of scholastic reason. But it affirmed energetically the passion of his own time for immediate and first-hand experience.

And it did more. Beside and above Apollo, Nietzsche put Dionysus; beside vision and above it, _rage_. Of the union of these two Tragedy was born. And Nietzsche's glorification of this elemental creative force also responded to a wider movement in philosophy, here chiefly German. His Dionysiac rage is directly derived from that will in which Schopenhauer saw the master faculty of man and the hidden secret of the universe; and the beginning of Schopenhauer's fame, about 1850, coincides with a general rehabilitation of will as the dominant faculty in the soul and in the world, at the cost of the methodic orderly processes of understanding; a movement exhibited in the psychological innovations of Wundt and Muensterberg, in the growth of the doctrine that what a thing is is determined by what it _can_; that value is in fact the measure, and even the meaning, of existence; that will can arm impotence, create faith, and master disease; and in the call of the colossal will-power which created the German empire and launched her on the career of industrial greatness. Nietzsche's Superman is, above all, a being of colossal and masterful will, and Zarathustra, the prophet of superhumanity, is only an incarnation of the will that for Schopenhauer moved the world. The moment at which the prestige of will began definitely to overcome that of reasoning is marked, as Aliotta has pointed out, by the appearance of James's _Will to Believe_, just when agnosticism seemed triumphant.

Nietzsche and Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the philosophic reason to those 'irrational' elements of mind which reach their highest intensity in the vision and 'rage' of the poet. James's vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was not the least symptomatic passage of his great book. And both concurred, however remote their methods or their speech, in conceiving reality as creation, creation in which we take part--a conception which again, in the hands of the constructive religious thinker, led directly to the type of faith announced in that last--the Jamesian--'Variety' of religious experience, which represents us as indispensable fellow-workers and allies of a growing and striving God.

2. _The New Freedom_

No reader of the poetry of our time can mistake the kinship of its prevailing temper with that which lies at the root of these philosophies. Without trying to fit its infinite variety to any finite formula, we may yet venture to find in it, as Mr. McDowall has found in our Georgian poetry in particular, a characteristic union of grip and detachment; of intense and eager grasp upon actuality as it breaks upon us in the successive moments of the stream of time, and yet an inner independence of it, a refusal to be obsessed by its sanctions and authorities, a tacit assumption that everything, by whatever length of tradition consecrated, must come before the bar of the new century to be judged by its new mind. 'Youth is knocking at the door,' as it is said of Hilda in the symbolical _Master Builder_, and doubtless in every generation the philistines or Victorians in possession have had occasion to make that remark. The difference in our time is rather that youth comes in without knocking, and that instead of having to work slowly up to final dominance against the inertia of an established literary household, it has spontaneously, like Hilda Wrangel, taken possession of the home, rinding criticism boundlessly eulogistic, the public inexhaustibly responsive, and philosophy interpreting the universe, as we have seen, precisely in sympathy with its own naive intuitions. No wonder that youth at twenty is writing its autobiography or having its biography written, and that at twenty-five it makes a show of laying down the pen, like Max Beerbaum, with the gesture of one rising sated from the feast of life: 'I shall write no more.'

The fact that youth finds itself thus at home in the world explains the difference in temper between the new poets of freedom and the old. The wild or wistful cry of Shelley for an ideal state emancipated from pain and death is as remote from their poetry as his spiritual anarchy from their politics; they can dream and see visions, in Scott's phrase, 'like any one going', but their feet are on the solid ground of actuality and citizenship, and the actuality comes into and colours their poetry no less than their vision. When Mr. Drinkwater looks out of his 'town window' he dreams of the crocus flaming gold in far-off Warwick woods; but he does not repudiate the drab inglorious street nor the tramway ringing and moaning over the cobbles, and they come into his verse. And I find it significant of the whole temper of the new poetry to ordinary life no less than that of ordinary men and women to the new poetry, that he has won a singularly intimate relationship with a great industrial community. He has not fared like his carver in stone. But then the eagles of his carving, though capable of rising, like Shelley's, to the sun, are the Cromwells and Lincolns who themselves brought the eagle's valour and undimmed eye into the stress and turmoil of affairs.

No doubt a fiercer note of revolt may be heard at times in the poetry of contemporary France, and that precisely where devotion to some parts of the heritage of the past is most impassioned. The iconoclastic scorn of youth's idealism for the effeteness of the 'old hunkers', as Whitman called them, has rarely rung out more sharply than in the closing stanzas of Claudel's great Palm Sunday ode. All the pomp and splendour of bishops and cardinals is idle while victory yet is in suspense: that must be won by youth in arms.

'To-morrow the candles and the dais and the bishop with his clergy
coped and gold embossed,
But to-day the shout like thunder of an equal, unofficered host
Who, led and kindled by the flag alone,
With one sole spirit swollen, and on one sole thought intent,
Are become one cry like the crash of walls shattered and gates rent:
'Hosanna unto David's son!'

Needless the haughty steeds marble-sculptured, or triumphal arches, or
chariots and four,
Needless the flags and the caparisons, the moving pyramids and towers,
and cars that thunder and roar,--
'Tis but an ass whereon sits Christ;
For to make an end of the nightmare built by the pedants and the
pharisees,
To get home to reality across the gulf of mendacities,
The first she-ass he saw sufficed!

Eternal youth is master, the hideous gang of old men is done with, we
Stand here like children, fanned by the breath of the things to be,
But victory we will have to-day!
Afterwards the corn that like gold gives return, afterwards the gold
that like corn is faithful and will bear,
The fruit we have henceforth only to gather, the land we have
henceforth only to share,
But victory we will have to-day!'

In the same spirit Charles Peguy--like Claudel, be it noted, a student of Bergson at the Ecole Normale--found his ideal in the great story of the young girl of Domremy who saved France when all the pomp and wisdom of generals had broken down. And in our own poetry has not Mr. Bottomley rewritten the Lear story, with the focus of power and interest transferred from the old king--left with not an inch of king in him--to a glorious young Artemis-Goneril?

But among our English Georgians this tense iconoclastic note is rare. Their detachment from what they repudiate is not fanatical or ascetic; it is conveyed less in invective than in paradox and irony; their temper is not that which flies to the wilderness and dresses in camel hair, but of mariners putting out to the unknown and bidding a not unfriendly good-bye at the shore. The temper of adventure is deeply ingrained in the new romance as in the old; the very word adventure is saturated with a sentiment very congenial to us both for better and worse; it quickens the hero in us and flatters the devil-may-care.

In its simplest form the temper of adventure has given us the profusion of pleasant verses which we know as the poetry of 'vagabondage' and 'the open road'. The point is too familiar to be dwelt on, and has been admirably illustrated and discussed by Mr. McDowall. George Borrow, prince of vagabonds, Stevenson, the 'Ariel', with his 'Vagabond-song'--

'All I seek the heaven above,
And the road below me',

and a few less vocal swallows, anticipated the more sustained flights and melodies of to-day, while Borrow's wonderful company of vagabond heroes and heroines is similarly premonitory of the alluring gipsies and circus-clowns of our Georgian poetry. Sometimes a traditional motive is creatively transformed; as when Father Time, the solemn shadow with admonitory hour-glass, appears in Mr. Hodgson's poem as an old gipsy pitching his caravan 'only a moment and off once again'.

Elsewhere a deeper note is sounded. It is not for nothing that Jeanne d'Arc is the saint of French Catholic democracy, or that Peguy, her poet, calls the Incarnation the 'sublime adventure of God's Son'. That last adventure of the Dantesque Ulysses beyond the sunset thrills us to-day more than the Odyssean tale of his triumphant home-return, and D'Annunzio, greatly daring, takes it as the symbol of his own adventurous life. Francis Thompson's most famous poem, too, represents the divine effort to save the erring soul under the image of the hound's eager chase of a quarry which may escape; while Yeats hears God 'blowing his lonely horn' along the moonlit faery glades of Erin. And Meredith, who so often profoundly voiced the spirit of the time in which only his ripe old age was passed, struck this note in his sublime verses on revolutionary France--

'soaring France
That divinely shook the dead
From living man; that stretched ahead
Her resolute forefinger straight
And marched toward the gloomy gate
Of Earth's Untried.'

It is needless to dwell upon the affinity between this temper of adventure in poetry and the teaching of Bergson. That the link is not wholly fortuitous is shown by the interesting _Art Poetique_ (1903) of his quondam pupil, Claudel, a little treatise pervaded by the idea of Creative-evolution.

It was natural in such a time to assume that any living art of poetry must itself be new, and in fact the years immediately before and after the turn of the century are crowded with announcements of 'new' movements in art of every kind. Beside Claudel's _Art Poetique_ we have in England the _New Aestheticism_ of Grant Allen; in Germany the 'new principle' in verse of Arno Holz. And here again the English innovators are distinguished by a good-humoured gaiety, if also by a slighter build of thought, from the French or Nietzschean 'revaluers'. Rupert Brooke delightfully parodies the exquisite hesitances and faltering half-tones of Pater's cloistral prose; and Mr. Chesterton pleasantly mocks at the set melancholy of the aggressive Decadence in which he himself grew up:

'Science announced nonentity, and art adored decay,
The world was old and ended, but you and I were gay.'

Like their predecessors in the earlier Romantic school, the new adventurers have notoriously experimented with poetic _form_. France, the home of the most rigid and meticulous metrical tradition, had already led the way in substituting for the strictly measured verse the more loosely organized harmonies of rhythmical prose, bound together, and indeed made recognizable as verse, in any sense, solely by the rhyme. With the Symbolists 'free verse' was an attempt to capture finer modulations of music than the rigid frame of metre allowed. With their successors it had rather the value of a plastic medium in which every variety of matter and of mood could be faithfully expressed. But whether called verse or not, the vast rushing modulations of rhythmic music in the great pieces of Claudel and others have a magnificence not to be denied. And the less explicitly poetic form permits matter which would jar on the poetic instinct if conveyed through a metrical form to be taken up as it were in this larger and looser stride.

In Germany, on the other hand, the rhythmic emancipation of Whitman was carried out, in the school of Arno Holz, with a revolutionary audacity beyond the example even of Claudel. Holz states with great clearness and trenchancy what he calls his 'new principle of lyric'; one which 'abandons all verbal music as an aim, and is borne solely by a rhythm made vital by the thought struggling through it to expression'. Rhyme and strophe are given up, only rhythm remains.

Of our Georgian poetry, it must suffice to note that here, too, the temper of adventure in form is rife. But it shows itself, characteristically, less in revolutionary innovation than in attempts to elicit new and strange effects from traditional measures by deploying to the utmost, and in bold and extreme combinations, their traditional resources and variations, as in the blank verse of Mr. Abercrombie and Mr. Bottomley. This, and much beside in Georgian verse, has moods and moments of rare beauty. But, on the whole, verse-form is the region of poetic art in which Georgian poetry as a whole is least secure.

3. _The New Realism_

We see then how deeply rooted this new freedom is in the passion for actuality; not the dream but the waking and alert experience throbs and pulses in it. We have now to look more closely into this other aspect of it. Realism is a hard-worked term, but it may be taken to imply that the overflowing vitality of which poetry is one expression fastens with peculiar eagerness upon the visible and tangible world about us and seeks to convey that zest in words. Our poets not only do not scorn the earth to lose themselves in the sky; they are positive friends of the matter-of-fact, and that not in spite of poetry, but for poetry's sake; and Pegasus flies more freely because 'things' are 'in the saddle' along with the poet.

That this matter-of-factness is loved by poets, for poetry's sake, marks it off once for all from the photographic or 'plain' realism of Crabbe. But it is also clearly distinct from the no less poetic realism of Wordsworth. Wordsworth's mind is conservative and traditional; his inspiration is static; he glorifies the primrose on the river brink by seeing its transience in the light of something far more deeply interfused which does not change nor pass away. Romance, in a high sense, lies about his greatest poetry. But it is a romance rooted in memory, not in hope--the 'glory of the grass and splendour of the flower' which he had seen in childhood and imaginatively re-created in maturity; a romance which change, and especially the intrusions of industrial man, dispelled and destroyed. Whereas the romance of our new realism rests, in good part, precisely in the sense that the _thing_ so vividly gripped is not or need not be permanent, may turn into something else, has only a tenancy, not a freehold, in its conditions of space and time, a 'toss-up' hold upon existence, as it were, full of the zest of adventurous insecurity. A pessimistic philosophy would dissipate this romance, or strip it of all but the mournful poetry of doom. Mr. Chesterton glorifies the dust which may become a flower or a face, against the Reverend Peter Bell for whom dust is dust and no more, and Hamlet who only remembers that it once was Caesar. If our realism is buoyant, if it had at once the absorbed and the open mind, this is, in large part, in virtue of the temper which finds reality a perpetual creation. Every moment is precious and significant, for it comes with the burden and meaning of something that has never completely been before; and goes by only to give place to another moment equally curious and new. This is the deeper ground of our present fashion of paradox; what Mr. Chesterton, its apostle, means when he says that 'the great romance is reality'; for paradox, the unexpected, is, in a reality so framed, the bare and sober truth. Hence the frequency, in our new poetry, of pieces founded deliberately upon, as Mr. McDowall points out, paradox: the breaking in of some utter surprise upon a humdrum society, as in Mr. de la Mare's _Three Jolly Farmers_, or Mr. Abercrombie's _End of the World_, or Mr. Munro's _Strange Meetings_.

Moreover, in this incessantly created reality we are ourselves incessantly creative. That may seem to follow as a matter of course; but it corresponds with the most radical of the distinctions between our realism and that of Wordsworth. When Mr. Wells tells us that his most comprehensive belief about the universe is that every part of it is ultimately important, he is not expressing a mystic pantheism which feels every part to be divine, but a generous pragmatism which holds that every part _works_. The idea of shaping and adapting will, of energy in industry, of mere routine practicality in office or household, is no longer tabooed, or shyly evaded; not because of any theoretic exaltation of labour or consecration of the commonplace, but because merely to use things, to make them fulfil our purposes, to bring them into touch with our activities, itself throws a kind of halo over even very humble and homely members of the 'divine democracy of things'. Rupert Brooke draws up a famous catalogue of the things of which he was a 'great lover'. He loved them, he says, simply _as being_. And no doubt, the simple sensations of colour, touch, or smell counted for much. But compare them with the things that Keats, a yet greater lover of sensations, loved. You feel in Brooke's list that he liked doing things as well as feasting his passive senses; these 'plates', 'holes in the ground,' 'washen stones,' the cold graveness of iron, and so forth. One detects in the list the Brooke who, as a boy, went about with a book of poems in one hand and a cricket-ball in the other, and whose left hand well knew what his right hand did.[16] That takes us far from the dream of eternal beauty, which a Greek urn or a nightingale's song brought to Keats, and the fatal word 'forlorn', bringing back the light of common day, dispelled. The old ethical and aesthetic canons are submerged in a passion for life which finds a good beyond good and evil, and a beauty born of ugliness more vital than beauty's self. 'The worth of a drama is measured', said D'Annunzio, 'by its fullness of life', and the formula explains, if it does not justify, those tropical gardens, rank with the gross blooms of 'superhuman' eroticism and ferocity, to which he latterly gave that name. And we know how Maeterlinck has emerged from the mystic dreams and silences of his recluse chamber to unfold the dramatic pugnacities of Birds and Bees.

Even the downright foulness and ugliness which some people find so puzzling in poets with an acute delight in beauty, like Mr. Masefield, come into it not from any aesthetic obtuseness, but because these uglinesses are full of the zest of drama, of things being done or made, of life being lived. When Masefield sounded his challenge to the old aesthetics:

'Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth',

he knew well, as _The Everlasting Mercy_ and _The Widow of Bye Street_ showed, that dirt and dross, if wrought into tragedy, can win a higher beauty than the harmonies of idyll. Even the hideous elder women in Mr. Bottomley's _Lear's Wife_, or his Regan--an ill-conditioned girl, sidling among the 'sweaty, half-clad cook-maids' after pig-killing, 'smeary and hot as they', participate in this beauty and energy of doing.

Poetry, in these cases, wins perhaps at most a Pyrrhic victory over reluctant matter. It is otherwise with the second of the great Belgian poets.

In the work of Verhaeren, the modern industrial city, with its spreading tentacles of devouring grime and squalor, its clanging factories, its teeming bazaars and warehouses, and all its thronging human population, is taken up triumphantly into poetry. Verhaeren is the poet of 'tumultuous forces', whether they appear in the roar and clash of 'that furnace we call existence', or in the heroic struggles of the Flemish nation for freedom. And he exhibits these surging forces in a style itself full of tumultuous power, Germanic rather than French in its violent and stormy splendour, and using the chartered licence of the French 'free verse' itself with more emphasis than subtlety.

4. _The Cult of Force_

In Verhaeren, indeed, we are conscious of passing into the presence of power more elemental and unrestrained than the civil refinement of our Georgians, at their wildest, allows us to suspect. The tragic and heroic history of his people, and their robust art, the art of Rembrandt, and of Teniers, vibrates in the Flemish poet. He has much of the temperament of Nietzsche, and if not evidently swayed by his ideas, or even aware of them, and with a generous faith in humanity which Nietzsche never knew, he thinks and imagines with a kindred joy in violence:

'I love man and the world, and I adore the force
Which my force gives and takes from man and the universe.'

And it is no considerable step from him to the poets who in this third phase of our period have unequivocally exulted in power and burnt incense or offered sacrifice before the altar of the strong man. The joy in creation which, we saw, gives its romance to so much of the realism of our time, now appears accentuated in the fiercer romance of conflict and overthrow. Thanks largely to Nietzsche, this romance acquired the status of an authoritative philosophy--even, in his own country, that of an ethical orthodoxy.

The German people was doubtless less deeply and universally imbued with this faith than our war-prejudice assumes. But phenomena such as the enormous success of a cheap exposition of it, _Rembrandt als Erzieher_ (1890) by a fervent Bismarckian, and of the comic journal _Simplicissimus_ (founded 1895) devoted to systematic ridicule of the old-fashioned German virtues of tenderness and sympathy, indicated a current of formidable power and compass, which was soon to master all the other affluents of the national stream.

But older, and in part foreign, influences concurred to colour and qualify, while they sustained, the Nietzschean influence,--the daemonic power of Carlyle, the iron intensity and masterful reticence of Ibsen. This was the case especially, as is well known, in the drama. Gerhardt Hauptmann, who painted the tragedy of the self-emancipated superman,--as Mr. Shaw about the same time showed us his self-achieved apotheosis,--was no doubt the most commanding (as Mr. Shaw was the most original) figure in the European drama of the early century.

In poetry, the contributory forces were still more subtly mingled, and the Nietzschean spirit, which blows where it listeth, often touched men wholly alien from Nietzsche in cast of genius and sometimes stoutly hostile to him. Several of the most illustrious were not Germans at all. Among the younger men who resist, while they betray, his spell, is the most considerable lyric poet of the present generation in Germany. Richard Dehmel's vehement inspiration from the outset provoked comparison with Nietzsche, which he warmly resented.

He began, in fact, as a disciple of Verlaine, and we may detect in the unrestraint of his early erotics the example of the French poet's _fureur d'aimer_. But Dehmel's more strongly-built nature, and perhaps the downright vigour of the German language, broke through the tenuities of _la nuance_. It was not the subtle artistry of the Symbolists, but the ethical and intellectual force of the German character, which finally drew into a less anarchic channel the vehement energy of Dehmel. Nietzsche had imagined an ethic of superhuman will 'beyond good and evil'. The poet, replied Dehmel, had indeed to know the passion which transcends good and evil, but he had to know no less the good and evil themselves of the world in and by which common men live. And if he can cry with the egoism of lawless passion, in the _Erloesungen_, 'I will fathom all pleasure to the deepest depths of thirst, ... Resign not pleasure, it waters power',--he can add, in the true spirit of Goethe and of the higher mind of Germany, 'Yet since it also makes slack, turn it into the stuff of duty!'

If Nietzsche provoked into antagonism the sounder elements in Dehmel, he was largely responsible for destroying such sanity as the amazing genius of Gabriele D'Annunzio had ever possessed. In D'Annunzio the sensuality of a Sybarite and the eroticism of a Faun go along with a Roman tenacity and hardness of nerve. The author of novels which, with all their luxurious splendour, can only be called hothouses of morbid sentiment, has become the apostle of Italian imperialism, and more than any other single man provoked Italy to throw herself into the great adventure of the War. Unapproached in popularity by any other Italian man of letters, D'Annunzio discovered Nietzsche, and hailed him--a great concession--as an equal. When Nietzsche died, in 1900, D'Annunzio indicted a lofty memorial ode to the Titanic Barbarian who set up once more the serene gods of Hellas over the vast portals of the Future. Nietzsche indeed let loose all the Titan, and all consequently that was least Hellenic, in the fertile genius of the Italian; his wonderful instinct for beauty, his inexhaustible resources of style are employed in creating orgies of superhuman valour, lust, and cruelty like some of his later dramas, and hymns intoxicated with the passion for Power, like the splendid Ode in which the City of the Seven Hills is prophetically seen once more the mistress of the world, loosing the knot of all the problems of humanity. His poetic autobiography, the first _Laude_ (1901)--counterpart of Wordsworth's _Prelude_ and its very antipodes--culminates in a prayer 900 lines long to Hermes, god of the energy which precipitates itself on life and makes it pregnant with invention and discovery, of the iron will 'which chews care as a laurel leaf'--the god of the Superman. And so he discovers the muse of the Superman, the Muse of Energy, a tenth Muse whose first poet he modestly disclaims to be, if he may only be, as he would have us interpret his name, her Announcer.

If D'Annunzio emulates Nietzsche, the two great militant poets of Catholic France would have scorned the comparison. Charles Peguy's brief career was shaped from his first entrance, poor and of peasant birth, at a Paris Lycee, to his heroic death in the field, September 1914, by a daemonic force of character. His heroine, glorified in his first book, was Jeanne d'Arc, who attempted the impossible, and achieved it. In writing, his principle--shocking to French literary tradition--was to speak the brutal truth _brutalement_. As a poet he stood in the direct lineage of Corneille, whose _Polyeucte_ he thought the greatest of the world's tragedies. As a man, he embodied with naive intensity the unsurpassed inborn heroism of the French race.

Claudel, even more remote as a thinker from Nietzsche than Peguy, exhibits a kindred temper in the ingrained violence of his art. His stroke is vehement and peremptory; he is an absolutist in style as in creed. It is the style of one who apprehends the visible world with an intensity as of passionate embrace, such as the young Browning expresses in _Pauline_. 'I would fain have seen everything,' he cries, 'possessed and made it my own, not with eyes and senses only, but with mind and spirit.' And after he was converted he saw and painted supernatural things with the same carnal and robust incisiveness. The half-lights of Symbolist mysticism are remote from his hard glare. As a dramatist he drew upon and exaggerated that which in Aeschylus and Shakespeare seems to the countrymen of Racine nearest to the limit of the terrible and the brutal permissible in art: a princess nailed by the hands like a sparrow-hawk to a pine by a brutal peasant; the daughter of a noble house submitting to a loathed marriage with a foul-mouthed plebeian in order to save the pope.

And if we look, finally, for corresponding phenomena at home, we find them surely in the masculine, militant, and in the French sense _brutal_ poetry of W.E. Henley and Rudyard Kipling. If any modern poets have conceived life in terms of will, and penetrated their verse with that faith, it is the author of 'I am the Captain of my Soul', the 'Book of the Sword', and 'London Voluntaries', friend and subject of the great kindred-minded sculptor Rodin, the poet over whose grave in St. Paul's George Wyndham found the right word when he said--marking him off from the great contemplative, listening poets of the past--'His music was not the still sad music of humanity; it was never still, rarely sad, always intrepid.' And we know how Kipling, after sanctioning the mischievous superstition that 'East and West can never meet', refuted it by producing his own 'two strong men'.

5. _The New Idealism_

(1) _Nationality_

We have now seen something of that power, at once of grip and of detachment with which the dominant poetry of this century faces what it thinks of as the adventure of experience, its plunge into the ever-moving and ever-changing stream of life. How then, it remains to ask, has it dealt with those ideal aspirations and beliefs which one may live intensely and ignore, which in one sense stand 'above the battle', but for which men have lived and died. With a generation which holds so lightly by tradition, which revises and revalues all accepted values, these aspirations and beliefs might well drop out of its poetry. On the other hand, these same aspirations and beliefs might overcome the indifference to tradition by ceasing to be merely traditional, by being immersed and steeped in that moving stream of life, and interwoven with the creative energies of men. The inherited faiths were put to this dilemma, either to become intimately alive and creative in poetry or to be of no concern for it. Some of them failed in the test. England has still devotees of Protestantism, but Protestant religion has hardly inspired noble poetry since Milton. Nationality, on the other hand, has during the last century inspired finer poetry than at any time since the sixteenth, and that because it has been brought down from the region of political abstractions and ideologies into intimate union with heart and brain, imagination and sense. This is true also of Catholicism and of Socialism, and, if fitfully and uncertainly yet, of the ideal of international fraternity, of humanity. And to all these ideals, to all ideals, came finally the terrific, the overwhelming test of the War,--a searching, annihilating, purifying flame, in which some shrivelled away, some were stripped of the illusive glitter that concealed their mass of alloy, and some, purged of their baser constituents, shone out with a lustre unapproached before.

What is the distinctive note of this new poetry of nationality? And for the moment I speak of the years before the War. May we not say that in it the ideal of country is saturated with that imaginative grip of reality in all its concrete energy and vivacity which I have called the new realism? The nation is no abstraction, whether it be called Britannia, or _Deutschland ueber Alles_. It is seen, and felt; seen in its cities as well as in its mountains, in the workers who have made it, as well as in the heroes who have defended it; in its roaring forges as well as in its idyllic woodlands and its tales of battles long ago; and all these not as separate strands in a woven pattern, but as waters of different origin and hue pouring along together in the same great stream.

Emile Verhaeren, six years before the invasion, had seen and felt his country, living body and living soul, with an intensity which made it seem unimaginable that she should be permanently subdued. He well called his book _Toute la Flandre_, for all Flanders is there. Old Flanders,--Artevelde and Charles Temeraire--whose soul was a forest of huge trees and dark thickets,

'A wilderness of crossing ways below,
But eagles, over, soaring to the sun,'--

Van Eyck and Rubens--'a thunder of colossal memories'; then the great cities, with their belfries and their foundries, and their warehouses and laboratories, their antique customs and modern ambitions; and the rivers, the homely familiar Lys, where the women wash the whitest of linen, and the mighty Scheldt, the Escaut, the 'hero sombre, violent and magnificent', 'savage and beautiful Escaut', whose companionship had moulded and made the poet, whose rhythms had begotten his music and his best ideas[17].

None of our English poets have rendered England in poetry with the same lyric intensity in its whole compass of time and space, calling up into light and music all her teeming centuries and peopled provinces. Yet the present generation has in some respects made a nearer approach to such achievement than its predecessors. A century of growing historic consciousness has not passed over us in vain; and if any generic distinction is to be found between our recent, often penetrating and beautiful, poetry of the English countryside and the Nature description of Wordsworth or of Ruskin, it is in the ground-tone of passion and memory that pervades it for England herself. Wordsworth wrote magnificently of England threatened with invasion, and magnificently of the Lake Country, Nature's beloved haunt. But the War sonnets and the Lake and mountain poetry come from distinct strains in his genius, which our criticism may bring into relation, but our feeling insists on keeping apart. His Grasmere is a province of Nature--her favoured province--rather than of England; it is in the eye of Nature that the old Cumberland beggar lives and dies; England only provides the obnoxious workhouses to which these destitute vagrants were henceforth to be consigned. Is it not this that divides our modern local poetry from his? Mr. Belloc's Sussex is tenderly loved for itself; yet behind its great hills and its old-world harbours lies the half-mystic presence of historic England. And in Edward Thomas's wonderful old Wiltshireman, Lob, worthy I think to be named with the Cumberland Beggar,

'An old man's face, by life and weather cut
And coloured,--rough, brown, sweet as any nut,--
A land face, sea-blue eyed,'--

you read the whole lineage of sterling English yeomen and woodlanders from whom Lob springs.

This note is indeed relatively absent from the work of the venerable master who has made 'Wessex' the most vividly realized of all English provinces to-day, and whose prose Egdon Heath may well be put at the head of all the descriptive poetry of our time. But Mr. Hardy, in this respect, belongs to an earlier generation than that into which he happily survives.

Sometimes this feeling is given in a single intense concentrated touch. When Rupert Brooke tells us of

'Some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,'

do we not feel that the solidarity of England with the English folk and of the English folk with the English soil, is burnt into our imaginations in a new and distinctive way?

But the poetry of shires and provinces reacts too upon the poetry of nationality. It infuses something of the more instinctive and rudimentary attachments from which it springs into a passion peculiarly exposed to the contagion of rhetoric and interest. Some of the most strident voices among living nationalist poets have found an unexpected note of tenderness when they sang their home province. Mr. Kipling charms us when he tells, in his close-knit verse, of the 'wooded, dim, Blue goodness of the Weald'. And the more strident notes of D'Annunzio's patriotism are also assuaged by the tenderness and depth of his home feeling. We read with some apprehension his dedication of _La Nave_ to the god of seas:

'O Lord, who bringest forth and dost efface
The ocean-ruling Nations, race by race,
It is this living People, by Thy grace
Who on the sea
Shall magnify Thy name, who on the sea
Shall glorify Thy name, who on the sea
With myrrh and blood shall sacrifice to Thee
At the altar-prow,
Of all earth's oceans make our sea, O Thou!
Amen!

But he dedicated a noble drama, the _Figlia d'Iorio_, in a different tone, 'To the land of the Abruzzi, to my Mother, to my Sisters, to my brother in exile, to my father in his grave, to all my dead and all my race in the mountains and by the sea, I dedicate this song of the ancient blood.'

(2) _Democracy_

The growth of democratic as of national feeling during the later century naturally produced a plentiful harvest of eloquent utterance in verse. With this, merely as such, I am not here concerned, even though it be as fine as the Socialist songs of William Morris or Edward Carpenter. But the Catholic Socialism of Charles Peguy,--itself an original and, for most of his contemporaries, a bewildering combination--struck out a no less original poetry,--a poetry of solidarity. Peguy's Socialism, like his Catholicism, was single-souled; he ignored that behind the one was a Party, and behind the other a Church. It was his bitterest regret that a vast part of humanity was removed beyond the pale of fellowship by eternal damnation. It was his sublimest thought that the solidarity of man includes the damned. In his first version of the Jeanne d'Arc mystery, already referred to, he tells how Jesus, crucified,

Saw not his Mother in tears at the cross-foot
Below him, saw not Magdalen nor John,
But wept, dying, only for Judas' death.
The Saviour loved this Judas, and though utterly
He gave himself, he knew he could not save him.

It was the dogma of damnation which for long kept Peguy out of its fold, that barbarous mixture of life and death, he called it, which no man will accept who has won the spirit of collective humanity. But he revolted not because he was tolerant of evil; on the contrary to damn sins was for him a weak and unsocial solution; evil had not to be damned but to be fought down. Whether this vision of Christ weeping because he could not save Judas was un-Christian, or more Christian than Christianity itself, we need not discuss here; but I am sure that the spirit of a Catholic democracy as transfigured in the mind of a great poet could not be more nobly rendered.

(3) _Catholicism_