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.

Even the downright foulness and ugliness which some people find so puzzling in poets with an acute delight in beauty, like Mr. Masefield, come into it not from any aesthetic obtuseness, but because these uglinesses are full of the zest of drama, of things being done or made, of life being lived.  When Masefield sounded his challenge to the old aesthetics: 

    ’Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
     Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth’,

he knew well, as The Everlasting Mercy and The Widow of Bye Street showed, that dirt and dross, if wrought into tragedy, can win a higher beauty than the harmonies of idyll.  Even the hideous elder women in Mr. Bottomley’s Lear’s Wife, or his Regan—­an ill-conditioned girl, sidling among the ‘sweaty, half-clad cook-maids’ after pig-killing, ‘smeary and hot as they’, participate in this beauty and energy of doing.

Poetry, in these cases, wins perhaps at most a Pyrrhic victory over reluctant matter.  It is otherwise with the second of the great Belgian poets.