210 The Future Poetry
base or given it a higher and purer action, — it has only cre-
ated a yet unrealised possibility in that direction by its idealistic
side, — it has wonderfully equipped it with powerful machinery
and an imposing paraphernalia and wrought conspicuous and
unprecedented changes in its superstructure. But poetry in this
atmosphere has kept itself alive not by any native and sponta-
neous power born of agreement between its own essential spirit
and the spirit of the age, but by a great effort of the imagination
and aesthetic intelligence labouring for the most part to make
the best of what material it could get in the shape of new thought
and new view-points for the poetic criticism or the thoughtful
presentation of life. It has been an aesthetic byplay rather than
a leading or sometimes even premier force in the cultural life
of the race such as it was in the ancient ages and even, with a
certain limited action, in more recent times.
That a certain decline, not of the activity of the poetic mind,
but of its natural vigour, importance and effective power has
been felt, if not quite clearly appreciated in its causes, we can
see from various significant indications. Throughout the later
nineteenth century one observes a constant apprehension of ap-
proaching aesthetic decadence, a tendency to be on the look-out
for it and to find the signs of it in innovations and new turns in
art and poetry. The attempt to break the whole mould of poetry
and make a new thing of it so that it may be easier to handle
and may shape itself to all the turns, the high and low, noble and
common, fair or unseemly movements of the modern mind and
its varied interest in life, is itself due to a sense of some difficulty,
limitation and unease, some want of equation between the fine
but severely self-limiting character of this kind of creative power
and the spirit of the age. At one time indeed it was hardily
predicted that since the modern mind is increasingly scientific
and less and less poetically and aesthetically imaginative, poetry
must necessarily decline and give place to science, — for much
the same reason, in fact, for which philosophy replaced poetry
in Greece. On the opposite side it was sometimes suggested that
the poetic mind might become more positive and make use of
the materials of science or might undertake a more intellectual