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