framed, the bare and sober truth. Hence the frequency, in our new
poetry, of pieces founded deliberately upon, as Mr. McDowall points out,
paradox: the breaking in of some utter surprise upon a humdrum society,
as in Mr. de la Mare's _Three Jolly Farmers_, or Mr. Abercrombie's _End
of the World_, or Mr. Munro's _Strange Meetings_.

Moreover, in this incessantly created reality we are ourselves
incessantly creative. That may seem to follow as a matter of course; but
it corresponds with the most radical of the distinctions between our
realism and that of Wordsworth. When Mr. Wells tells us that his most
comprehensive belief about the universe is that every part of it is
ultimately important, he is not expressing a mystic pantheism which
feels every part to be divine, but a generous pragmatism which holds
that every part _works_. The idea of shaping and adapting will, of
energy in industry, of mere routine practicality in office or household,
is no longer tabooed, or shyly evaded; not because of any theoretic
exaltation of labour or consecration of the commonplace, but because
merely to use things, to make them fulfil our purposes, to bring them
into touch with our activities, itself throws a kind of halo over even
very humble and homely members of the 'divine democracy of things'.
Rupert Brooke draws up a famous catalogue of the things of which he was
a 'great lover'. He loved them, he says, simply _as being_. And no
doubt, the simple sensations of colour, touch, or smell counted for
much. But compare them with the things that Keats, a yet greater lover
of sensations, loved. You feel in Brooke's list that he liked doing
things as well as feasting his passive senses; these 'plates', 'holes in
the ground,' 'washen stones,' the cold graveness of iron, and so forth.
One detects in the list the Brooke who, as a boy, went about with a book
of poems in one hand and a cricket-ball in the other, and whose left
hand well knew what his right hand did.[16] That takes us far from the