208 The Future Poetry
ways of seeing and thinking, makes many experiments and com-
binations, passes through many phases. The true classic form is
then no longer possible; if it is tried, it is not quite genuine, for
what informs it is no longer the classic spirit; it is too crowded
with subtle thought-matter, too brooding, sensitive, responsive
to many things; no new Parthenon can be built whether in the
white marble subdued to the hand or in the pure and lucid
spacings of the idea and the word: the mind of man has become
too full, complex, pregnant with subtle and not easily express-
ible things to be capable of that earlier type of perfection. The
romantic strain is a part of this wider intelligence, but the pure
and genuine romanticism of the life-spirit which cares nothing
for thought except as it enriches its own being, is also no longer
possible. If it tries to get back to that, it falls into an affectation,
an intellectual pose and, whatever genius may be expended upon
it, this kind cannot remain long alive. That is the secret of the
failure of modern romanticism in Germany and France. In Ger-
many, Goethe and Heine alone got away from this falsity and
were able to use this strain in its proper way as one enriching
chord serving the complex harmonic purpose of the intelligence;
the rest of German literary creation of the time is interesting
and suggestive in its way, but very little of it is intimately alive
and true, and afterwards Germany failed to keep up a sustained
poetic impulse; she turned aside to music on the one side and
on the other to philosophy and science for her field. The French
mind got away very soon from romanticism and, though greatly
enriched by its outbreak into that phase, went on to a more
genuine intellectual and intellectually aesthetic form of creation.
In England with the greater spontaneity of its poetic spirit the
mistake never went so far. The poetry of the time of Wordsworth
and Shelley is sometimes called romantic poetry, but it was not
so in its essence, but only in certain of its moods and motives.
It lives really by its greater and more characteristic element, by
its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth’s force of ethical thought
and communion with Nature, by Shelley’s imaginative transcen-
dentalism, Keats’ worship of Beauty, Byron’s Titanism and force
of personality, Coleridge’s supernaturalism or, as it should more