movements in art of every kind. Beside Claudel's _Art Poétique_ we have
in England the _New Aestheticism_ of Grant Allen; in Germany the 'new
principle' in verse of Arno Holz. And here again the English innovators
are distinguished by a good-humoured gaiety, if also by a slighter build
of thought, from the French or Nietzschean 'revaluers'. Rupert Brooke
delightfully parodies the exquisite hesitances and faltering half-tones
of Pater's cloistral prose; and Mr. Chesterton pleasantly mocks at the
set melancholy of the aggressive Decadence in which he himself grew up:

'Science announced nonentity, and art adored decay,
The world was old and ended, but you and I were gay.'

Like their predecessors in the earlier Romantic school, the new
adventurers have notoriously experimented with poetic _form_. France,
the home of the most rigid and meticulous metrical tradition, had
already led the way in substituting for the strictly measured verse the
more loosely organized harmonies of rhythmical prose, bound together,
and indeed made recognizable as verse, in any sense, solely by the
rhyme. With the Symbolists 'free verse' was an attempt to capture finer
modulations of music than the rigid frame of metre allowed. With their
successors it had rather the value of a plastic medium in which every
variety of matter and of mood could be faithfully expressed. But whether
called verse or not, the vast rushing modulations of rhythmic music in
the great pieces of Claudel and others have a magnificence not to be
denied. And the less explicitly poetic form permits matter which would
jar on the poetic instinct if conveyed through a metrical form to be
taken up as it were in this larger and looser stride.

In Germany, on the other hand, the rhythmic emancipation of Whitman was
carried out, in the school of Arno Holz, with a revolutionary audacity