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organisation of power on a grand scale and we shall arrive at goodness. For four centuries of travail we have been moving toward the rule of the servant through the organisation of earth-subduing power on an everwidening basis. The modern development of technological industry forces us, even against our will and purpose, to the discovery of the spiritual laws of society.

III

Percival Lowell, sitting with his eye to his great telescope at Flagstaff, Arizona, in absorbed contemplation of the planet Mars, supposed that he was gazing upon a world that was able to sustain its life only by a complete social unity centring in an intense devotion to the practical arts. His theory was that the astonishing network of geometrical lines appearing upon the face of the planet is in fact a system of canals belonging to a prodigious system of irrigation; that the diminishing *moisture in their atmosphere must have forced the Martian people into the finest economy of the forces of life and of nature for the maintenance of a food supply, and must therefore have developed a form of social organisation in which high place and power could be achieved only by those who manifestly excelled in social service.

Now high technology and the Great War are accomplishing on our planet something like what Lowell imagined concerning Mars. The rise of technical science and the machine process, and the consequent grandscale social organisation for work, have left law and morals far behind. Our legal and moral conceptions, our ideas of right, duty, property, punishment, authority and so on, are reminiscent of the Old Testament or of the antique Mediterranean culture cherished in classical schools. We have gone on defining personal and property rights in a mood that has

no relation at all to the need of putting the control of tools into compe. tent hands, or any other consideration of social economy and efficiency.

The war is the explosion of this absurdity. Now for a moment the energy of the machines is turned against the life of the race. There is dearth everywhere and dire extremity. We are reduced to the plight of the planet Mars. There is no exit from such distress except the road that Mr. Lowell suggested. We shall have a new social order in which virtue shall be linked with property and authority, and in which a man's goodness shall be defined in the pragmatic terms of the New Testament: I was cold, hungry, naked-and he produced the fuel, the food and the clothes.

There are several steps in this disentanglement. Substantially as fol lows the record may be expected to run. Germany precipitated the catastrophe because Germany was of all countries the most antique in political morals and the most modern in tools. The Teutons had acquired a differential advantage in tool-power because they had invested a small percentage of their political idealism in a direct effort to advance the industrial arts; while the other great nations, excepting perhaps Japan, had reserved their political idealism for other uses. But idealism when turned earthward becomes formidable. It can fight. Thus Germany made war-a war between industrial systems vitalised by diverse degrees of practical idealism. England, France, Italy begin to invest their moral virtue in the machines. But their available percentage is too low, for the moment. Russia drops out and relapses into feebleness, because she is oriental at heart and cannot put the power of dreams into tools. America girds herself. She has immense reserves of creative strength drawn out of every nation under heaven and nur

tured on the bosom of a fresh conti nent; but her sectarian religion, her party politics, her academic culture, had been aimed at the sky. With one voice they had protested against the abuses of business and had restrained some of them-a little; but they had never cast their passion for beauty and truth and goodness into the engines of industry as fuel and fire. Yet now the day had come in which this must be done!

I say we are living in the grey morning of an apocalyptic day, because I am acquainted with the American people and the peoples of western Europe, and know the largeness of their spiritual reserves. Without that knowledge it would be reasonable to suppose, from the face of the facts, that Germany would prevail. In that case the day of the great change would be postponedand there would be a much longer agony of parturition.

There may indeed be brief pauses, truces, futile diplomacies-but the West will not submit to Central Europe. I expect the great change to be precipitated in the United States, and I think it will come quickly because the only alternative is the universal prevalence, for a generation or so, of the Teutonic political type-entailing wars upon wars with only breathing-spaces be

tween.

But the United States cannot prevail over Teutonism in the near fu ture-cannot compress the worldagony into a narrow compass of time -without committing itself at once to a profound internal renovation that will involve every institution of business, politics, religion and culture. We may continue for a mo. ment to think of these changes as war-measures; but they will be irretractable. The short statement of the case is that we are now obliged to make a permanent investment in physical business of at least fifty-one per cent. of our intellectual and emo

tional energy-most of which has hitherto been used to turn the windmills of an abstract and impotent idealism.

If our national reserves of elemental health prove to be inadequate for the present emergency, if we are not yet able to direct the major part of our idealism to the romance of reality-our failure will postpone, but cannot prevent, the coming of the great change. The postponement can hardly reach beyond the middle of the century. For the very exist. ence of modern grand-scale industry, with its universal credit-accounting and the enforced mutuality of the machine, forces the spiritual issue with an irresistible hand. Grandscale industry is fatal to the rule of abstract idealism-the physically irrelevant kind of goodness or rightness that obtains in our actual churches, schools, courts and chambers of commerce. It is fatal to that rule, not directly and obviously, but in a manner that is none the less decisive.

When industry becomes organised on a national or international scale it drives the rule of abstract idealism to suicide. There is no possibility of escape. The march of the fatality is as irresistible as the movement of an Æschylean play. The economy of small and unintegrated crafts that preceded the machine process, or what is called "the great industry," could manage to exist for a thousand years under the sway of an ancient legalism. For small-scale industry can keep tolerably close to the nat ural laws of life, in spite of the worst that lawyers and politicians may do; it can follow the instinctive law that yields craft-mastership only to those who have proved their fitness. But when the agencies that sustain the life of a great nation become linked in a single indissoluble system, the safe and instinctive rule of the craftmaster is thrown into the background, and the control of the life

sustaining system is committed for weal or woe to such masters as the conventional laws of property and precedence may happen to endue with power.

Thus the great industry challenges the existence of the old transcendental legalism by submitting to it, committing the life of the nation to it, and so exposing its physical feebleness and incompetency. The old juristic order is forced to undertake a work that it is unable to perform, and is therefore driven to self-destruction. Its definitions of personal and property rights are found to be wholly out of drawing with the facts of life.

The discrepancy is first revealed in the yawning of an unbridgable chasm between "labour" and "capital"-between those who live by the natural law of physical function and those who depend for their existence upon the validation of conventional claims. It is discovered that the lowest depths of poverty are reached in the countries that have the highest per capita rate of income, and that the schism between riches and poverty does not tend to close up, but rather to widen, with the increase of documentary wealth. Thereupon it is made evident to competent observers that the self-destruction of the old legal order cannot be postponed in any country save by expan

sion of its credit and commerce to fresh lands. But the international rivalry for the possession of fresh fields must of necessity produce war; and this is the swiftest way of suicide for the powers of transcendental politics. For modern wars are waged primarily with tools; and victory in such warfare must inevitably rest with the contestant who is able to invest the highest percentage of his intellectual and moral force in the practical arts.

These considerations furnish, I think, solid grounds of assurance that the greatest of human events is either close at hand or else will be reached by the mid-century. The world will be delivered at last from the immemorial deadlock between idealism and enterprise; the creative imagination will master the machines in the service of art, and of a finer civility than we have known.

War will come to an end quite incidentally and as a matter of course -with the rise of a great people emotionally devoted to the creative process and therefore sovereign in the realm of chemical and physical force. Such a people will hold the hegemony of a universal allianceby the diffusion of benefits and by the compulsion of power.

War will be stopped by the predominant force of a free people, romantic about realities.

THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY

BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

PART VI

Irish poetry a part of English Literature-common-sense the basis of romanticism—misapprehension_of_the_poetic temperament-passing of the "typical" Irishman.-William Butler Yeats-his education-his devotion to art—his theories—his love poetry-resemblance to Maeterlinck—the lyrical element paramount the psaltery-pure rather than applied poetry.-John M. Synge his mentality-his versatility-a terrible personality-his capacity for hatred his subjectivity—his interesting Preface-brooding on death.A. E.-the Master of the island-his sincerity and influence-disembodied spirits his mysticism homesickness-true optimism.-James Stephenspoet and novelist-realism and fantasy.-Padraic Colum.-Francis Ledwidge. Susan Mitchell.-Thomas MacDonagh.-Joseph Campbell.-Seumas O'Sullivan.-Maurice Francis Egan.-Norreys Jephson O'Conor.-The advance of English poetry in Ireland.

IN WHAT I have to say of the work of the Irish poets, I am thinking of it solely as a part of English literature. I have in mind no political bias whatever, for political questions in the field of art seem to me of subordinate importance. During the last forty years Irishmen have written mainly in the English language, which assures to what is good in their compositions an influence bounded only by the dimensions of the earth. Great creative writers are such an immense and continuous blessing to the world that the locality of their birth pales in importance in comparison with the glory of it, a glory in which we all profit. We need original writers in America; but I had rather have a star of the first magnitude appear in London than a star of lesser power appear in Los Angeles. Everyone who writes good English contributes something to English literature and is a benefactor to English-speaking people. An Irish

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succeeded in writing English so well that they have attracted the attention of the whole world.

Ireland has never contributed to English literature a poet of the first class. By a poet of the first class I mean one of the same grade with the leading half-dozen British poets of the nineteenth century. This dearth of great Irish poets is all the more remarkable when we think of her splendid contributions to Eng. lish prose and to English drama. Possibly, if one had prophecy rather than history to settle the question, one might predict that Irishmen would naturally write more and better poetry than Englishmen; for the common supposition is that the poetic temperament is romantic, sentimental, volatile, reckless. If this were true, then the lovable, careless, impulsive Irish would completely outclass in original poetry the sensible, steady-headed, cautious Englishmen. What are the facts about the so-called poetic temperament?

Milton,

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Gray, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, were in character, disposition, and temperament precisely the opposite of what is superficially supposed to be "poetic." Some of them were deeply erudite; all of them were deeply thoughtful. They were clear-headed, sensible men -in fact, common sense was the basis of their mental life.

And no

one can read the letters of Byron without seeing how well supplied he was with the shrewd common sense of the Englishman. He was more selfish than any one of the men enumerated above-but he was no fool. There is nothing inconsistent in his being at once the greatest romantic poet and the greatest satirist of his age. His masterpiece, Don Juan, is the expression of a nature at the farthest possible remove from sentimentality. And the greatest poet in any language since Shakespeare, the author of Faust, was remarkable

among all the children of men for his poise, balance, calm-in other words, for common sense.

It is by no accident that the British-whom foreigners delight to call stodgy and slow-witted, have contributed to the literature of the world the largest amount of high-class poetry. English literature is instinctively romantic, as French literature is instinctively classic. The glory of French literature is prose; the glory of English literature is poetry.

As the tallest tree must have the deepest roots, so it would seem that the loftiest edifices of verse must have the deepest foundations. Certainly one of the many reasons why American poetry is so inferior to British is because our roots do not go down sufficiently deep. Great poetry does not spring from natures too volatile, too susceptible, too easily swept by gusts of emotion. Landor was one of the most violent men we have on record; he was a prey to uncontrollable outbursts of rage, caused by trivial vexations; but his poetry aimed at cold, classical correctness. In comparison with Landor, Tennyson's reserve was almost glacial-yet out of it bloomed many a gorgeous garden of romance. Splendid imaginative masterpieces seem to require more often than not a creative mind marked by sober reason, logical processes, orderly thinking.

John Morley, who found the management of Ireland more than a handful, though he loved Ireland and the Irish with an affection greater than that felt by any other Englishman of his time, has, in his Recollections, placed on opposite pages-all the more striking to me because so wholly unintentional - illuminating testimony to the difference between the Irish and the British temperament. And this testimony powerfully supports the point I am trying to make that the "typical" logicless, inconsequential Irish mind, so win

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