108 The Future Poetry
and whatever deeper mystery may lie hidden behind their first
appearances and suggestions. And now it is culminating in some-
thing that promises to go beyond it, to bring about a new futurist
rather than modernist age in which the leader of the march shall
be intuition rather than the reasoning and critical intelligence.
The long intellectual search for truth that went probing always
deeper into the physical, the vital and the subjective, into the
action of body and life, into the yet ill-grasped motions of mind
and emotion and sensation and thought, is now beginning to
reach beyond these things or rather through their subtlest and
strongest intensities of sight and feeling towards the truths of
the Spirit. The soul of the Renascence was a lover of life and an
amateur of knowledge; but the modern spirit has been drawn
rather by the cult of a clear, broad and minute intellectual and
practical Truth: the dominating necessity of its being is a strain-
ing after knowledge and a power of life founded on the power of
knowledge. Poetry in the modern age has followed intellectually
and imaginatively the curve of this great impulse.
Continental literature displays the mass of this movement
with a much more central completeness and in a stronger and
more consistent body and outline than English poetry. In the
Teutonic countries the intellectual and romantic literature of
the Germans at the beginning with its background of transcen-
dental philosophy, at the end the work of the Scandinavian
and Belgian writers with their only apparently opposite sides
of an intellectual or a sensuous realism and a sentimental or a
psychological mysticism, the two strands sometimes separate,
sometimes mingled, among the Latins the like commencement
in the work of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Chenier, Hugo, the ́
intermediate artistic development of most of the main influences
by the Parnassians, the like later turn towards the poetry of
Mallarme, Verlaine, D’Annunzio, stigmatised by some as the ́
beginning of a decadence, give us a distinct view of the curve. In
English poetry the threads are more confused, the work has on
the whole a less clear and definite inspiration and there is in spite
of the greatness of individual poets an inferior total effectivity;
but at the beginning and the end it has one higher note, a lifting