That this matter-of-factness is loved by poets, for poetry's sake, marks
it off once for all from the photographic or 'plain' realism of Crabbe.
But it is also clearly distinct from the no less poetic realism of
Wordsworth. Wordsworth's mind is conservative and traditional; his
inspiration is static; he glorifies the primrose on the river brink by
seeing its transience in the light of something far more deeply
interfused which does not change nor pass away. Romance, in a high
sense, lies about his greatest poetry. But it is a romance rooted in
memory, not in hope--the 'glory of the grass and splendour of the
flower' which he had seen in childhood and imaginatively re-created in
maturity; a romance which change, and especially the intrusions of
industrial man, dispelled and destroyed. Whereas the romance of our new
realism rests, in good part, precisely in the sense that the _thing_ so
vividly gripped is not or need not be permanent, may turn into something
else, has only a tenancy, not a freehold, in its conditions of space and
time, a 'toss-up' hold upon existence, as it were, full of the zest of
adventurous insecurity. A pessimistic philosophy would dissipate this
romance, or strip it of all but the mournful poetry of doom. Mr.
Chesterton glorifies the dust which may become a flower or a face,
against the Reverend Peter Bell for whom dust is dust and no more, and
Hamlet who only remembers that it once was Caesar. If our realism is
buoyant, if it had at once the absorbed and the open mind, this is, in
large part, in virtue of the temper which finds reality a perpetual
creation. Every moment is precious and significant, for it comes with
the burden and meaning of something that has never completely been
before; and goes by only to give place to another moment equally curious
and new. This is the deeper ground of our present fashion of paradox;
what Mr. Chesterton, its apostle, means when he says that 'the great
romance is reality'; for paradox, the unexpected, is, in a reality so