after all, but one attitude to life among many. It happens to be the one
which will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for all
ill-usage. But hard wear is not the only purpose which an attitude may
serve. We may demand of an attitude that it should enable us to exact
the utmost from ourselves. To refuse to accommodate oneself to the
angularities of life or to make provision beforehand for its
catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly. It is, at
all events, a folly to which poets incline. But poets are not wise;
indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best,
be but dimly imagined. Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largest
inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an
aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of no
account. To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to
have acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with an
imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no
ecstasy remains, one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublime
self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of
destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which
have overwhelmed us.

Whether the present generation will produce great poetry, we do not
know. We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. It is
too conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. Some may seek
that ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others,
who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may
try to shake the dust of life from off their feet. Neither will be wise.
But precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company of
wise men. Their own attitude will not wear. The ecstasy will fail, the
will to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one to
escape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and the