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 architecture 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 dramatic, 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-fusc" colours which art-critics of a century
ago judged essential to sublimity in all art. In Cont