showed them, in there exoteric side, sordid, ugly and bloody;--
and then, on the top of that showing, tried to twist them round
to the symbolic impersonal plane again; and so left a discord
not properly solved, an imperfect harmony; a sense of loss
rather than gain; of much torn down, and nothing built up to
take its place. The truth was that the creative forces had
flowed downward until the organs of spiritual vision were no
longer open; and poetry and art, the proper vehicles of the
higher teaching in any age approximately golden, could no longer
act as efficient channels for the light.

To turn to England again: Tennyson was, generally speaking, most
successful when most he was content to be merely the artist in
words, and least so when he assumed the office of Teacher;
because almost all he found to teach was brain-mind scientific
stuff; which was what the age called for, and the desired diet
of Mid-Victorian England. Carlyle, who was a far greater poet
essentially, and a far greater teacher actually, fitted himself
to an age when materialism had made unpoetic; and eschewed
poetry and had no use for it; and would have had others eschew
it also. In our own time we have realists like Mr. Masefield.
They are called realists because they work on the plane which has
come, in the absence of anything spiritual, to seem that of the
realities; the region of outside happenings, of the passions in
all their ugly nakedness, of sorrow, misery, and despair. Such
men may be essentially noble; we may read in them, under all the
ugliness and misery they write down, just one quality of the
Soul;--its unrest in and distaste for those conditions; but the
mischief of it is that they make the sordidness seem the reality;
and the truth about them is that their outlook and way of writing