122 The Future Poetry
possibilities. Never has the past counted so little for its own
sake, — its tradition is still effectual only when it can be made
a power or an inspiration for the future; never has the present
looked so persistently and creatively forward.
But Nature and man in his active, intellectual and emotional
life and physical environment are not the whole subject of man’s
thought or of his creative presentment of his mind’s seeings
and imaginings. He has been even more passionately occupied
by the idea of things beyond, other worlds and an after life,
symbols and powers of that which exceeds him or of his own
self-exceeding, the cult of gods of nature and supernature, the
belief in or the seeking after God. On this side of the human
mind modern literature, though not a blank, has been during
the greater part of the nineteenth century inferior in its matter
and in its power, because it has been an age of scepticism and of
denial or else of a doubtful and tormented, a merely intellectual
or a conventional clinging to the residuum of past beliefs. They
have not formed a real and vital part of its inner life and what
is not real or vital to thought, imagination and feeling cannot
be powerfully creative. At first this ebb of positive faith was to
some extent compensated by the ideal element of a philosophic
transcendentalism, vague and indefinite but with its own large
light and force of inspiration. As scepticism became more posi-
tive, this light fades, the most poetic notes of the age which deal
with the foundations of life are either the poignant expression of
a regretful scepticism, or a defiant atheism exulting in the revolt
of the great denial, the hymn of the Void, an eternal Nihil which
has taken the place of God, or else the large idea of Nature as a
universal entity, the Mother of our being. To Science this Nature
is only an inconscient Force; the poetic mind with its natural turn
for finding a reality even behind what are to the intellect abstract
conceptions, has passed through this conception to a new living
sense of the universal, the infinite. It has even evolved from it
now and then a vivid pantheism. The difficult self-defence or
reaction of the old faiths against the prevalent scepticism and
intellectualism has given too some minor notes; but these are
the greater voices of negation and affirmation in this sphere