New Birth or Decadence? 209properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake’s command
of the inner psychic realms. Only in drama was there, owing
to the prestige of Shakespeare, an attempt at pure romanticism,
and therefore in this domain nothing great and living could be
done, but only a record of failures. Realism is a more native
turn of this kind of intelligence, and it invades poetry too to
a certain extent, but if it dominates, then poetry must decline
and cease. The poetry of an age of many-sided intellectualism
can live only by its many-sidedness and by making everything
as it comes a new material for the aesthetic creations of the
observing, thinking, constructing intelligence.
But then comes the now vital question in this cultural evolu-
tion, — in what is this intellectualism to culminate? For if it leads
to nothing beyond itself, it must end, however brilliant its work,
in a poetic decadence, and that must come nearer, the more intel-
lect dominates the other powers of our being. The intellect moves
naturally between two limits, the abstractions or solving analy-
ses of the reason and the domain of positive and practical reality;
its great achievements are in these two fields or in a mediation
between them, and it can do most and go farthest, can achieve
its most native and characteristic and therefore its greatest and
completest work either in philosophy or in Science. The age of
developed intellectualism in Greece killed poetry; it ended in the
comedy of Menander, the intellectual artificialities of Alexandri-
anism, the last flush of beauty in the aesthetic pseudo-naturalism
of the Sicilian pastoral poetry; philosophy occupied the field. In
the more rich and complex modern mind this result could not
so easily come and has not yet come. At the same time the really
great, perfect and securely characteristic work of the age has
not been in the field of art and poetry, but in critical thought
and science. Criticism and science, by a triumphant force of
abstraction and analysis turned on the world of positive fact,
have in this period been able to become enormously effective
for life. They have been able to reign sovereignly, not so much
by their contributions to pure knowledge, but by their practical,
revolutionary and constructive force. If modern thought with
its immense scientific achievement has not enriched life at its