practices of
the Society of Rosicrucians, of whom it was said, 'Our House of the Holy
Ghost, though a hundred thousand men should have looked upon it, is yet
doomed to remain untouched, imperturbable, out of sight, and unrevealed to
the whole godless world for ever.' If I am sure of anything, it is that
the Poets of the Future will look upon massive schemes of universal
technical education, and such democratic reforms as those which are now
occupying the enthusiasm and energy of our friend the Lord Chancellor, as
peculiarly hateful expositions of the godlessness of a godless world.

To turn to another branch of our subject, it appears to me very likely
that sexual love may cease to be the predominant theme in the lyrical
poetry of the future. Erotic sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied the
imaginative art of the past. In particular, the poets of the late
nineteenth century were interested to excess in love. There was a sort of
obsession of sex among them, as though life presented no other phenomenon
worthy of the attention of the artist. All over Europe, with the various
tincture of differing national habit and custom, this was the mark of the
sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately and craftily exhibited,
but often, as in foreign examples which will easily occur to your memory,
rankly, as with the tiresome persistence of a slightly stale perfume, an
irritating odour of last night's opopanax or vervain. And this is the one
point, almost I think the only point, in which the rather absurd and
certainly very noisy and hoydenish manifestoes of the so-called Futurists,
led by M. Marinetti and his crew of iconoclasts, are worthy of our serious
attention. It is a plank in their platform, you know, to banish eroticism,
of the good kind and of the bad, from the practice of the future. I do
not, to say the truth, find much help for the inquiry we have taken up
to-day, in the manifestoes of these raucous young gentlemen, who, when
they have succeeded in flinging the ruins of the leprous palaces of
Venice into its small stinking canals, will find themselves hard put to it
to build anything beautiful in the place of them. But in their reaction
against 'the eternal feminine', they may, I think, very possibly be
followed by the serious poets of the future.

Those who have watched rather closely the recent developments of poetry in
England have been struck with the fact that it tends more and more in the
direction of the dr