It is needless to dwell upon the affinity between this temper of adventure in poetry and the teaching of Bergson. That the link is not wholly fortuitous is shown by the interesting Art Poétique (1903) of his quondam pupil, Claudel, a little treatise pervaded by the idea of Creative-evolution.
It was natural in such a time to assume that any living art of poetry must itself be new, and in fact the years immediately before and after the turn of the century are crowded with announcements of 'new' 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 beyond the example even of Claudel. Holz states with great clearness and trenchancy what he calls his 'new principle of lyric'; one which 'abandons all verbal music as an aim, and is borne solely by a rhythm made vital by the thought struggling through it to expression'. Rhyme and strophe are given up, only rhythm remains.
Of our Georgian poetry, it must suffice to note that here, too, the temper of adventure in form is rife. But it shows itself, characteristically, less in revolutionary innovation than in attempts to elicit new and strange effects from traditional measures by deploying to the utmost, and in bold and extreme combinations, their traditional resources and variations, as in the blank verse of Mr. Abercrombie and Mr. Bottomley. This, and much beside in Georgian verse, has moods and moments of rare beauty. But, on the whole, verse-form is the region of poetic art in which Georgian poetry as a whole is least secure.
3. The New Realism
We see then how deeply rooted this new freedom is in the passion for actuality; not the dream but the waking and alert experience throbs and pulses in it. We have now to look more closely into this other aspect of it. Realism is a hard-worked term, but it may be taken to imply that the overflowing vitality of which poetry is one expression fastens with peculiar eagerness upon the visible and tangible world about us and seeks to convey that zest in words. Our poets not only do not scorn the earth to lose themselves in the sky; they are positive friends of the matter-of-fact, and that not in spite of poetry, but for poetry's sake; and Pegasus flies more freely because 'things' are 'in the saddle' along with the poet.
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 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 dream of eternal beauty, which a Greek urn or a nightingale's song brought to Keats, and the fatal word 'forlorn', bringing back the light of common day, dispelled. The old ethical and aesthetic canons are submerged in a passion for life which finds a good beyond good and evil, and a beauty born of ugliness more vital than beauty's self. 'The worth of a drama is measured', said D'Annunzio, 'by its fullness of life', and the formula explains, if it does not justify, those tropical gardens, rank with the gross blooms of 'superhuman' eroticism and ferocity, to which he latterly gave that name. And we know how Maeterlinck has emerged from the mystic dreams and silences of his recluse chamber to unfold the dramatic pugnacities of Birds and Bees.