5. The New Idealism

(1) Nationality

We have now seen something of that power, at once of grip and of detachment with which the dominant poetry of this century faces what it thinks of as the adventure of experience, its plunge into the ever-moving and ever-changing stream of life.  How then, it remains to ask, has it dealt with those ideal aspirations and beliefs which one may live intensely and ignore, which in one sense stand ‘above the battle’, but for which men have lived and died.  With a generation which holds so lightly by tradition, which revises and revalues all accepted values, these aspirations and beliefs might well drop out of its poetry.  On the other hand, these same aspirations and beliefs might overcome the indifference to tradition by ceasing to be merely traditional, by being immersed and steeped in that moving stream of life, and interwoven with the creative energies of men.  The inherited faiths were put to this dilemma, either to become intimately alive and creative in poetry or to be of no concern for it.  Some of them failed in the test.  England has still devotees of Protestantism, but Protestant religion has hardly inspired noble poetry since Milton.  Nationality, on the other hand, has during the last century inspired finer poetry than at any time since the sixteenth, and that because it has been brought down from the region of political abstractions and ideologies into intimate union with heart and brain, imagination and sense.  This is true also of Catholicism and of Socialism, and, if fitfully and uncertainly yet, of the ideal of international fraternity, of humanity.  And to all these ideals, to all ideals, came finally the terrific, the overwhelming test of the War,—­a searching, annihilating, purifying flame, in which some shrivelled away, some were stripped of the illusive glitter that concealed their mass of alloy, and some, purged of their baser constituents, shone out with a lustre unapproached before.

What is the distinctive note of this new poetry of nationality?  And for the moment I speak of the years before the War.  May we not say that in it the ideal of country is saturated with that imaginative grip of reality in all its concrete energy and vivacity which I have called the new realism?  The nation is no abstraction, whether it be called Britannia, or Deutschland ueber Alles.  It is seen, and felt; seen in its cities as well as in its mountains, in the workers who have made it, as well as in the heroes who have defended it; in its roaring forges as well as in its idyllic woodlands and its tales of battles long ago; and all these not as separate strands in a woven pattern, but as waters of different origin and hue pouring along together in the same great stream.

Emile Verhaeren, six years before the invasion, had seen and felt his country, living body and living soul, with an intensity which made it seem unimaginable that she should be permanently subdued.  He well called his book Toute la Flandre, for all Flanders is there.  Old Flanders,—­Artevelde and Charles Temeraire—­whose soul was a forest of huge trees and dark thickets,