2. _The New Freedom_

No reader of the poetry of our time can mistake the kinship of its
prevailing temper with that which lies at the root of these
philosophies. Without trying to fit its infinite variety to any finite
formula, we may yet venture to find in it, as Mr. McDowall has found in
our Georgian poetry in particular, a characteristic union of grip and
detachment; of intense and eager grasp upon actuality as it breaks upon
us in the successive moments of the stream of time, and yet an inner
independence of it, a refusal to be obsessed by its sanctions and
authorities, a tacit assumption that everything, by whatever length of
tradition consecrated, must come before the bar of the new century to be
judged by its new mind. 'Youth is knocking at the door,' as it is said
of Hilda in the symbolical _Master Builder_, and doubtless in every
generation the philistines or Victorians in possession have had occasion
to make that remark. The difference in our time is rather that youth
comes in without knocking, and that instead of having to work slowly up
to final dominance against the inertia of an established literary
household, it has spontaneously, like Hilda Wrangel, taken possession of
the home, rinding criticism boundlessly eulogistic, the public
inexhaustibly responsive, and philosophy interpreting the universe, as
we have seen, precisely in sympathy with its own naïve intuitions. No
wonder that youth at twenty is writing its autobiography or having its
biography written, and that at twenty-five it makes a show of laying
down the pen, like Max Beerbaum, with the gesture of one rising sated
from the feast of life: 'I shall write no more.'

The fact that youth finds itself thus at home in the world explains the