III. 'CREATIVE EVOLUTION'

1. _Philosophic Analogies_

Nothing is more symptomatic of the incipient twentieth century than the
drawing together of currents of thought and action before remote or
hostile. The Parnassians were an exclusive sect, the symbolists an
eccentric and often disreputable coterie; Claudel, D'Annunzio, Rudyard
Kipling, speak home to throngs of everyday readers, are even national
idols, and our Georgians contrive to be bought and read without the
least surrender of what is most poetic in their poetry. And the
analogies between philosophic thinking and poetic creation become
peculiarly striking. Merely to name Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson,
and Benedetto Croce is to become vividly aware of these analogies and
of the common bent from which they spring. All three--whether with
brilliant rhetoric, or iron logic, or a blend of both--use their
thinking power to deride the theorizing intelligence in comparison with
the creative intuition which culminates in poetry. To define the scope
and province of this intuition is the purport of Croce's epoch-making
_Aesthetics_, the basis and starting-point of his illumining work, in
_Critica_, as a literary critic. Bergson is the dominant figure in a
line of French thinkers possessed with the conviction that life, a
perpetual streaming forth of creative energy, cannot be caught in the
mechanism of law, adapted to merely physical phenomena, which at best
merely gives us generalizations and lets the all-important
particulars--the individual living thing--slip through the meshes;
whereas intuition--the eye fixed on the object--penetrates to the very
heart of this individual living thing, and only drops out the skeleton
framework of abstract laws. Philosophy, in these thinkers, was deeply
imbued with the analogies of artistic creation. 'Beauty,' said