IV

THE HARDENING OF CONVENTIONS, AND REVOLT ART moves from stage to stage, as we have seen, by two opposing paths: the way of constructive acceptance, and the way of revolt. The one is the road of the builders; the other of the adventurers and pioneers. You may prefer one path, and I the other. We shall certainly not all agree on either. But what Chaucer wrote to his little son Lewis is still to the point: "diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte wey to Rome." And there will always be these two great highways to a common goal, whatever may be your preference or mine. It is because human beings are what they are that the world advances, now by the creative transmutation of the old, now by the discovery and conquest of the new, and now through both together.

For behind our differing attitudes towards conventions stand two fundamental human bents, that between them comprehend the world. There are always souls, the salt of the earth, who say: "So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when

I shall grow old" who could, and do, wish their days to be bound each to each by natural piety. There are always, on the other hand, restless spirits, who rejoice that man is hurled from change to change unceasingly, his soul's wings never furled. And it is n't to be wondered at that those who live to watch wild ecstasies mature into a sober pleasure, and those who spend their passionate lives in leaps all day to reach the sun, seldom see eye to eye. But the unsolicitous spectator of the game sees both, and sees each as a factor in the paradox of human progress. It would be, I fear, a dull world that developed without break of continuity; it would surely be a mad world that progressed by leaps alone. Neither Wordsworth nor Browning (from whom I strung together my opposing phrases) saw the thing whole. The world and art alike move on through what, in the main, is a continuous evolution, punctuated by the sudden flaming or flowering of a crucial moment now and then. For in poetry, as in the State, it is after all a constitutional régime, tempered by occasional revolution, that remains the least objectionable mode that has been found of muddling through. The amazing scheme of things of which we find ourselves a part demands both conserva

tives and radicals as indispensable instruments of its unfolding.

We have dealt with the constructive acceptance of the old. And this creative assimilation of what is handed down constitutes the great conservative force in poetry. But the radical attitude towards the old must be reckoned with too. And that attitude is apt to be twofold. It is destructive, because it is tired of the old, and frequently proceeds without compunction to consign it to the scrap-heap. It is also constructive, because it wants the new, and sets forth, not without a cheerful flourish of trumpets now and then, to find it. It is sometimes justified in both procedures; it is usually extreme; and it is always interesting. And without it poetry would indubitably be the poorer.

I propose, then, to consider the radical temper as the complement, no less than the antithesis, of the conservative trend in poetry. But I wish to make my immediate purpose clear. It so happens that we are at the moment in the midst of a period of revolt in poetry. I shall not, however, in this chapter, deal primarily with the idiosyncracies of this particular insurgent movement. Those will be matter for consideration later, for what is going on has quite enough

significance to be taken seriously. But it can't be taken seriously, if it is proclaimed as something sui generis. It is very far from that. It is an old familiar friend, revisiting, with punctual observance of its period, the glimpses of the moon. And it is this periodic aspect, this background with a long perspective, that is too frequently overlooked. Revolt is perennial, and the best aid to reflection on its meaning now is some acquaintance with its previous behavior. It is with the phenomena of revolt in general, accordingly, that we have immediately to do. The current insurgence will concern us only indirectly.

Let us return for a moment to the type of originality that has already been discussed. It consists, essentially, in a remoulding in fresh forms of old materials. It discovers the new, in other words, as latent in the old, and it finds in existing forms no check upon its own freedom to recreate. Its cachet is its power to call breath from the four winds, and breathe upon the valley of dry bones, and make them live. The temper of mind which we have now to analyze finds in the old, on the other hand, a hindrance rather than a help to freedom, and for it the new lies without, not within, the confines of the familiar. Poetry, as

the radicals react to it, is shackled by a mass of inherited conventions- dead rhymes, dead metres, dead diction, dead stock ideas. They would play the rôle of Perseus to a new Andromeda, and set the starry prisoner free. Life in poetry, as they conceive it, is a continual sloughing off of chrysalids and trying of new wings. Over against the transmutation of old conventions is sharply set their repudiation in favor of the new. The radical attitude, then, is both negative and positive; not iconoclastic only, but in its way creative too. And it is necessary to regard it from both angles.

We may consider the negative aspect first. The insurgent temper rebels against what it feels to be the dead hand of convention. And it may be granted at once that its revolt is often warranted. We have seen something of the ways of genius in dealing with conventions. But conventions by no means always fall into the hands of genius. More often than not it is poetry's journeymen who ply their trade with them, and then the worst is apt to happen. Let us consider very briefly, then, some of the conditions out of which revolt takes its rise.

The path of least resistance has always shared honors with the primrose way. And the history of conventions offers no exception to the rule.