The Movement of Modern Literature – 1 113force of new truth and power, much exceedingly great work was
done, the view of the imagination was immensely widened and
an extraordinary number of new motives brought in which the
later nineteenth century developed with a greater care and finish
and conscientious accuracy, but with crudities of its own and
perhaps with a less fine gust of self-confident genius and large
inspiration.
The recoil from these primary tendencies took at first the
aspect of a stress upon artistic execution, on form, on balance
and design, on meticulous beauty of language and a minute
care and finished invention in rhythm. An unimpassioned or
only artistically impassioned portraiture and sculpture of scene
and object and idea and feeling, man and Nature was the idea
that governed this artistic and intellectual effort. A wide, calm
and impartial interest in all subjects for the sake of art and a
poetically intellectual satisfaction, — this poise had already been
anticipated by Goethe, — is the atmosphere which it attempts to
create around it. There is here a certain imaginative reflection
of the contemporary scientific, historic and critical interest in
man, in his past and present, his creations and surroundings,
a cognate effort to be unimpassioned, impersonal, scrupulous,
sceptically interested and reflective. In poetry, however, it loses
the cold accuracy of the critical intellect and assumes the artistic
colour, emphasis, warmth of the constructive imagination: but
even here there is the same tendency to a critical observation of
man and things and world tendencies and a reflective judgment
sometimes overweighting the natural tendency of poetry to the
living and creative presentation which is its native power. There
is amidst a wide atmosphere of sceptical or positive thinking an
attempt to enter into the psychology of barbaric and civilised,
antique, mediaeval, and modern, occidental and oriental human-
ity, to reproduce in artistic form the spirit of the inner truth and
outer form of its religions, philosophic notions, societies, arts,
monuments, constructions, to reflect its past inner and outer
history and present frames and mentalities. This movement too
was brief in duration and soon passed away into other forms
which arose out of it, though they seemed a revolt against its