6 The Future Poetry
special point of view as a distinctive critical and literary temper-
ament, which may be perhaps not so much the whole mind of
the critic as the response to his subject in a mind naturally in
sympathy with it. Mr. Cousins is a little nervous about this in his
preface; he is apprehensive of being labelled as an idealist. The
cut and dried distinction between idealism and realism in litera-
ture has always seemed to me to be a little arbitrary and unreal,
and whatever its value in drama and fiction, it has no legitimate
place in poetry. What we find here is a self-identification with
what is best and most characteristic of a new spirit in the age, a
new developing aesthetic temper and outlook, — or should we
rather say, inlook? Its mark is a greater (not exclusive) tendency
to the spiritual rather than the merely earthly, to the inward and
subjective than the outward and objective, to the life within and
behind than to the life in front, and in its purest, which seems to
be its Irish form, a preference of the lyrical to the dramatic and
of the inwardly suggestive to the concrete method of poetical
presentation. Every distinctive temperament has naturally the
defect of an insufficient sympathy, often a pronounced and in-
tolerant antipathy towards all that departs from its own motives.
Moreover contemporary criticism is beset with many dangers;
there is the charm of new thought and feeling and expression of
tendency which blinds us to the defects and misplaces or mis-
proportions to our view the real merits of the expression itself;
there are powerful cross-currents of immediate attraction and
repulsion which carry us from the true track; especially, there is
the inevitable want of perspective which prevents us from getting
a right vision of things too near us in time. And if in addition one
is oneself part of a creative movement with powerful tendencies
and a pronounced ideal, it becomes difficult to get away from
the standpoint it creates to a larger critical outlook. From these
reefs and shallows Mr. Cousins’ sense of measure and justice
of appreciation largely, generally indeed, preserve him, though
not, I think, quite invariably. But still it is not a passionless, quite
disinterested criticism which we get or want from this book, but
a much more helpful thing, an interpretation of work which
embodies the creative tendencies of the time by one who has