The Movement of Modern Literature – 2 119greater part of his work. It is doubtful whether we have not
altogether lost the old faculty of impersonal self-effacement in
the creation which was so common in the ancient and mediaeval
ages when many men working in one spirit could build great uni-
versal works of combined architecture, painting and sculpture
or in literature the epic or romantic cycles or lyric cycles like the
Vedic Mandalas or the mass of Vaishnava poetry. Even when
there are definite schools marked by a common method, we do
not find, as in the old French romance writers or the Elizabethan
dramatists or the poets of the eighteenth century, a spiritual
resemblance which overshadows individual differences; in the
moderns the technical method may have in all similar motives,
but difference of subjective treatment so stresses its values as to
prevent all spiritual unity. There is here a gain which more than
compensates any loss; but we have to note the cause, a growth
of subjectivism, an enhanced force, enrichment and insistence of
the inner personality.
This trend, though for some time held back from its full
development by the aim at the objective method, betrays itself
in that love of close and minute psychological observation which
pervades the work of the time. There too the modern mind has
left far behind all the preceding ages. Although most prominent
in fiction and drama, the characteristic has laid some hold too
on poetry. Compared with its work all previous creation seems
psychologically poor both in richness of material and in subtlety
and the depth of its vision; half the work of Shakespeare in spite
of its larger and greater treatment hardly contains as much on
this side as a single volume of Browning. Realism has carried
this new trend to the farthest limit possible to a professedly
objective method, stressing minute distinctions, forcing the em-
phasis of extreme notes, but in so doing it has opened to the
creative mind of the age a door of escape from realism. For, in
the first place, while in the representation of outward objects,
of action, of character and temperament thrown out in self-
expressive movement we may with success affect the method of
a purely objective observation, from the moment we begin to
psychologise deeply, we are at once preparing to go back into