authorities, a tacit assumption that everything, by whatever length of tradition consecrated, must come before the bar of the new century to be judged by its new mind.  ‘Youth is knocking at the door,’ as it is said of Hilda in the symbolical Master Builder, and doubtless in every generation the philistines or Victorians in possession have had occasion to make that remark.  The difference in our time is rather that youth comes in without knocking, and that instead of having to work slowly up to final dominance against the inertia of an established literary household, it has spontaneously, like Hilda Wrangel, taken possession of the home, rinding criticism boundlessly eulogistic, the public inexhaustibly responsive, and philosophy interpreting the universe, as we have seen, precisely in sympathy with its own naive intuitions.  No wonder that youth at twenty is writing its autobiography or having its biography written, and that at twenty-five it makes a show of laying down the pen, like Max Beerbaum, with the gesture of one rising sated from the feast of life:  ‘I shall write no more.’

The fact that youth finds itself thus at home in the world explains the difference in temper between the new poets of freedom and the old.  The wild or wistful cry of Shelley for an ideal state emancipated from pain and death is as remote from their poetry as his spiritual anarchy from their politics; they can dream and see visions, in Scott’s phrase, ’like any one going’, but their feet are on the solid ground of actuality and citizenship, and the actuality comes into and colours their poetry no less than their vision.  When Mr. Drinkwater looks out of his ’town window’ he dreams of the crocus flaming gold in far-off Warwick woods; but he does not repudiate the drab inglorious street nor the tramway ringing and moaning over the cobbles, and they come into his verse.  And I find it significant of the whole temper of the new poetry to ordinary life no less than that of ordinary men and women to the new poetry, that he has won a singularly intimate relationship with a great industrial community.  He has not fared like his carver in stone.  But then the eagles of his carving, though capable of rising, like Shelley’s, to the sun, are the Cromwells and Lincolns who themselves brought the eagle’s valour and undimmed eye into the stress and turmoil of affairs.

No doubt a fiercer note of revolt may be heard at times in the poetry of contemporary France, and that precisely where devotion to some parts of the heritage of the past is most impassioned.  The iconoclastic scorn of youth’s idealism for the effeteness of the ‘old hunkers’, as Whitman called them, has rarely rung out more sharply than in the closing stanzas of Claudel’s great Palm Sunday ode.  All the pomp and splendour of bishops and cardinals is idle while victory yet is in suspense:  that must be won by youth in arms.