The Movement of Modern Literature – 2 121coming of a new age of creation, intellectualism fulfilled ceasing
by a self-exceeding in a greater motive of intuitive art and poetry.
Thus this wide movement of interests, so many-sided and
universal, in man past and present after embracing all that at-
tracts the observing eye in his life and history and apparent
nature comes back to a profounder interest in the movements of
his deeper self which reveals itself to an extended psychological
experience and an intuitive sense. But an insistent interest in
future man has been the most novel, the most fruitfully distin-
guishing characteristic of the modern mind. Once limited to the
far-off dream of religions or the distant speculation of isolated
thinkers, the attempt to cast a seeing eye as well as a shaping
will on the future is now an essential side of the human outlook.
Formerly the human mentality of the present lived in the great
shadow thrown on it by its past, nowadays on the contrary it
turns more to some image of coming possibility. The colour of
this futurism has changed with the changes of modern intellec-
tualism. At first it came in on the wave of a partly naturalistic,
partly transcendentalist idealism, a reverie of the perfected indi-
vidual and the perfected society, and was commonly associated
with the passion for civic or the idea of a spiritual and personal
liberty. A more sober colouring intervened, the intellectual con-
structions of positivism, liberalism, utilitarian thought which
were soon in their turn followed by broader democratic and
socialistic utopias. Touched sometimes with an aesthetic and
idealistic colouring, they have grown for a time more scientific,
economic, practical with the advance of realism and rationalism.
But the new force of subjectivism will have probably the effect
of rehabilitating the religious and spiritually idealistic element
in our vision of the future of the race. Poetry, which has been
less able to follow this stream of thought than prose literature,
will find its account in the change; for it will be the natural
interpreter of this more inner and intuitive vision. The futurist
outlook has never been more pronounced than at the present
day; on all sides, in thought, in life, in the motives and forms
of literary and artistic creation, we are swinging violently away
from the past into an unprecedented adventure of new teeming