in the direction marked by
the two main currents I have described. Nowhere else is the succession
of phases so sharp and clear as in France. But since France does reflect
more sensitively than any other country the movement of the mind of
Europe, and since her own mind has, more than that of any other country,
radiated ideas and fashions out over the rest of Europe, these phases
are in fact traceable also, with all kinds of local and national
variations, in Italy and Spain, Germany and England, and I propose to
take this fact as the basis of our present very summary and diagrammatic
view. The three phases of the sixty years are roughly divided by the
years 1880 and 1900.

The first, most clearly seen in the French Parnassians, is in close, if
unconscious, sympathy with the temper of science. Poetry, brought to the
limit of expressive power, is used to express, with the utmost veracity,
precision, and impersonal self-suppression, the beauty and the tragedy
of the world. It sought Hellenic lucidity and Hellenic calm--in the
example most familiar to us, the Stoic calm and 'sad lucidity' of
Matthew Arnold.

The second, best seen in the French Symbolists, was directly hostile to
science. But they repelled its confident analysis of material reality in
the name of a part of reality which it ignored or denied, an immaterial
world which they mystically apprehended, which eluded direct
description, frustrated rhetoric, and was only to be come at by the
magical suggestion of colour, music, and symbol. It is most familiar to
us in the 'Celtic' verse of Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.'.

The third, still about us, and too various and incomplete for final
definition, is in closer sympathy with science, but, in great part, only
because science has itself found accommodation between nature and
spirit, a new ideality born of, and growing out of, the real. If the
first found Beauty, the end of art, in the plastic repose of sculpture,
and the second in the mysterious cadences of music, the poetry of the
twentieth century finds its ideal in life, in the creative evolution of
being, even in the mere things, the 'prosaic' pariahs of previous
poetry, on which our shaping wills are wreaked. We know it in poets
unlike one another but yet more unlike their predecessors, from
D'Annunzio and Dehmel and Claudel to our Georgian experimenters in the
poetry of paradox and adventure.

I. POETIC NATURALISM

The third quarter of the nineteenth century opened