The second, best seen in the French Symbolists, was directly hostile to
science. But they repelled its confident analysis of material reality in
the name of a part of reality which it ignored or denied, an immaterial
world which they mystically apprehended, which eluded direct
description, frustrated rhetoric, and was only to be come at by the
magical suggestion of colour, music, and symbol. It is most familiar to
us in the 'Celtic' verse of Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.'.

The third, still about us, and too various and incomplete for final
definition, is in closer sympathy with science, but, in great part, only
because science has itself found accommodation between nature and
spirit, a new ideality born of, and growing out of, the real. If the
first found Beauty, the end of art, in the plastic repose of sculpture,
and the second in the mysterious cadences of music, the poetry of the
twentieth century finds its ideal in life, in the creative evolution of
being, even in the mere things, the 'prosaic' pariahs of previous
poetry, on which our shaping wills are wreaked. We know it in poets
unlike one another but yet more unlike their predecessors, from
D'Annunzio and Dehmel and Claudel to our Georgian experimenters in the
poetry of paradox and adventure.


I. POETIC NATURALISM

The third quarter of the nineteenth century opened, in western Europe,
with a decided set-back for those who lived on dreams, and a
corresponding complacency among those who throve on facts. The political
and social revolution which swept the continent in 1848 and 1849, and
found ominous echoes here, was everywhere, for the time, defeated. The
discoveries of science in the third and fourth decades, resting on