may seem to follow as a matter of course; but
it corresponds with the most radical of the distinctions between our
realism and that of Wordsworth. When Mr. Wells tells us that his most
comprehensive belief about the universe is that every part of it is
ultimately important, he is not expressing a mystic pantheism which
feels every part to be divine, but a generous pragmatism which holds
that every part _works_. The idea of shaping and adapting will, of
energy in industry, of mere routine practicality in office or household,
is no longer tabooed, or shyly evaded; not because of any theoretic
exaltation of labour or consecration of the commonplace, but because
merely to use things, to make them fulfil our purposes, to bring them
into touch with our activities, itself throws a kind of halo over even
very humble and homely members of the 'divine democracy of things'.
Rupert Brooke draws up a famous catalogue of the things of which he was
a 'great lover'. He loved them, he says, simply _as being_. And no
doubt, the simple sensations of colour, touch, or smell counted for
much. But compare them with the things that Keats, a yet greater lover
of sensations, loved. You feel in Brooke's list that he liked doing
things as well as feasting his passive senses; these 'plates', 'holes in
the ground,' 'washen stones,' the cold graveness of iron, and so forth.
One detects in the list the Brooke who, as a boy, went about with a book
of poems in one hand and a cricket-ball in the other, and whose left
hand well knew what his right hand did.[16] That takes us far from the
dream of eternal beauty, which a Greek urn or a nightingale's song
brought to Keats, and the fatal word 'forlorn', bringing back the light
of common day, dispelled. The old ethical and aesthetic canons are
submerged in a passion for life which finds a good beyond good and evil,
and a beauty born of ugliness more vital than beauty's self. 'The worth
of a drama is measured', said D'Annunzio, 'by its fullness of life', and
the formula explains, if it does not justify, those tropical gardens,
rank with the gross blooms of 'superhuman' eroticism and ferocity, to
which he latterly gave that name. And we know how Maeterlinck has
emerged from the mystic dreams and silences of his recluse chamber to
unfold the dramatic pugnacities of Birds and Bees.

Even the downright foulness and ugliness which some people find so
puzzling in poets with an acute delight in beauty, like Mr. Mase