112 The Future Poetry
all his ever-changing history and variety, came in the form of an
eager poetic and romantic valuing of all that had been ignored
and put aside as uncouth and barbarous by the older classical or
otherwise limited type of mentality. It sought out rather all that
was unfamiliar and attractive by its unlikeness to the present;
its imagination was drawn towards the primitive, the savage,
to mediaeval man and his vivid life and brilliant setting, to the
Orient very artificially seen through a heavily coloured glamour,
to the ruins of the past, to the life of the peasant or the solitary,
the outlaw, to man near to Nature undisguised by conventions
and uncorrupted by an artificial culture or man in revolt against
conventions: there is a willed preference for these strange and
interesting aspects of humanity, as in Nature for her wild and
grand, savage and lonely scenes or her rich and tropical haunts
or her retired spots of self-communion. On one side a senti-
mental or a philosophic naturalism, on the other a flamboyant
or many-hued romanticism, superficial mediaevalism, romanti-
cised Hellenism, an interest in the fantastic and the supernatural,
tendencies of an intellectual or an ideal transcendentalism, are
the salient constituting characters. They make up that brilliant
and confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished liter-
ature, stretching from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo
and taking on its way Goethe, Schiller and Heine, Wordsworth,
Byron, Keats and Shelley, which forms a hasty transition from
the Renascence and its after-fruits to the modernism of today
which is already becoming the modernism of yesterday. Much
of it we can now see to have been ill-grasped, superficial and
tentative; much, as in Chateaubriand and in Byron, was arti-
ficial, a pose and affectation; much, as in the French Roman-
ticists, merely bizarre, overstrained and overcoloured; a later
criticism condemned in it a tendency to inartistic excitement,
looseness of form, an unintellectual shallowness or emptiness,
an ill-balanced imagination. It laid itself open certainly in some
of its more exaggerated turns to the reproach, — not justly to be
alleged against the true romantic element in poetry, — that the
stumbling-block of romanticism is falsity. Nevertheless behind
this often defective frontage was the activity of a considerable