right word when he said--marking him off from
the great contemplative, listening poets of the past--'His music was not
the still sad music of humanity; it was never still, rarely sad, always
intrepid.' And we know how Kipling, after sanctioning the mischievous
superstition that 'East and West can never meet', refuted it by
producing his own 'two strong men'.

5. _The New Idealism_

(1) _Nationality_

We have now seen something of that power, at once of grip and of
detachment with which the dominant poetry of this century faces what it
thinks of as the adventure of experience, its plunge into the
ever-moving and ever-changing stream of life. How then, it remains to
ask, has it dealt with those ideal aspirations and beliefs which one may
live intensely and ignore, which in one sense stand 'above the battle',
but for which men have lived and died. With a generation which holds so
lightly by tradition, which revises and revalues all accepted values,
these aspirations and beliefs might well drop out of its poetry. On the
other hand, these same aspirations and beliefs might overcome the
indifference to tradition by ceasing to be merely traditional, by being
immersed and steeped in that moving stream of life, and interwoven with
the creative energies of men. The inherited faiths were put to this
dilemma, either to become intimately alive and creative in poetry or to
be of no concern for it. Some of them failed in the test. England has
still devotees of Protestantism, but Protestant religion has hardly
inspired noble poetry since Milton. Nationality, on the other hand, has
during the last century inspired finer poetry than at any time since the
sixteenth, and that because it has been brought down from the region of
political abstractions and ideologies into intimate union with heart and
brain, imagination and sense. This is true also of Catholicism and of
Socialism, and, if fitfully and uncertainly yet, of the ideal of
international fraternity, of humanity. And to all these ideals, to all
ideals, came finally the terrific, the overwhelming test of the War,--a
searching, annihilating, purifying flame, in which some shrivelled away,
some were stripped of the illusive glitter that concealed their mass of
alloy, and some, purged of their baser constituents, shone out with a
lustre unapproached before.

What is the distinctive note of this new poetry of nationality? And for
the moment I speak of the years before the War. May