amatic, not necessarily in the form of what is known as
pure drama, particularly adapted for representation to listening audiences
behind the footlights, but in the increased study of life in its
exhibitions of energy. This may seem to be inconsistent with the tendency,
of which I spoke just now, to withdraw from the world itself, either into
an egotistical isolation or into some cloistered association of more or
less independent figures united only in a rebellious and contemptuous
disdain of public opinion. But the inconsistency may very well be one
solely in appearance. It may well happen that the avoidance of all
companionship with the stereotyped social surfaces of life, the
ignorance,--really, the happy and hieratic ignorance,--of what 'people',
in the fussy sense, are supposed to be saying and doing, may actually help
the poet to come more fruitfully and penetratingly to what lies under the
surface, to what is essential and permanent and notable in the solid earth
of human character. Hence, I think it not improbable that the poetry of
the future may become more and more dramatic, although perhaps by a series
of acts of definite creation, rather than as the result of observation,
which will be left to the ever-increasing adroitness of the brilliant
masters of our prose.

As a result of this obsession in creative drama, I suppose that we may
expect to find in the poetry of the future a more steady hope for mankind
than has up to the present time been exhibited. The result of an excessive
observation of the startling facts of life, a work appropriate to the
violent energy of realistic prose, has been a general exaggeration of the
darker tints, an insistence on that prominence of what was called the
'sub-fuse' colours which art-critics of a century ago judged essential to
sublimity in all art. In Continental literature, and particularly in the
very latest Russian drama, this determination to see blackness and
blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene of existence as a Valley of
the Shadow of Despair, has been painfully frequent. In England we had a
poet of considerable power, whose tragic figure crossed me in my youth, in
whose work there is not a single gleam of hope or dignity for man;--I mean
the unfortunate James Thompson, author of 'The City of Dreadful Night'. I
cannot but believe that the poetry of the future, being more deeply
instructed, will insist less emphatically upon human failure and less
savagely upo