132 The Future Poetry
from the Time-Spirit. His hasty vehement personality caught up
and crowded into its work in a strong though intellectually
crude expression an extraordinary number of the powers and
motives of the modern age. The passion for liberty found in him
its voice of Tyrrhenian bronze. The revolt and self-assertion of
the individual against the falsities and stifling conventions of
society, denial, unbelief, the scorn of the sceptic for established
things, the romance of the past, the restlessness of the present,
the groping towards the future, the sensuous, glittering, artificial
romance of the pseudo-East, the romance of the solitary, the
rebel, the individual exaggerated to himself by loneliness, the
immoral or amoral superman, all that flawed romanticism,
passionate sentimentalism, insatiable satiety of sensualism, cyn-
icism, realism which are the chaotic fermentation of an old world
dying and a new world in process of becoming, — a century and
a half’s still unfinished process, — caught hold of his mood and
unrolled itself before the dazzled, astonished and delighted eyes
of his contemporaries in the rapid succession of forcibly ill-
hewn works impatiently cut out or fierily molten from his single
personality in a few crowded years from its first rhetorical and
struggling outburst inChilde Haroldto the accomplished ease
of its finale inDon Juan. Less than this apparent plenitude
would have been enough to create the rumour that rose around
the outbreak of this singular and rapid energy. No doubt, his
intellectual understanding of these things was thin and poverty-
stricken in the extreme, his poetic vision of the powers that
moved him had plenty of force, but wanted depth and form and
greatness. But he brought to his work what no other poet could
give and what the mentality of the time, moved itself by things
which it had not sufficient intellectual preparation to grasp, was
fitted to appreciate, the native elemental force, the personality,
the strength of nervous and vital feeling of them which they
just then needed and which took the place of understanding
and vision. To this pervading power, to this lava flood of
passion and personality, were added certain preeminent gifts,
a language at first of considerable rhetorical weight and drive,
afterwards of great nervous strength, directness, precision, force