conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself
by insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. The
value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives
and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of
the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be
epic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few
conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet
may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a
hundred influences, or he may work a single sham personality threadbare
or render piecemeal an undigested influence. What he may not do, or do
only at the risk of being unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call,
for the lack of a better word, the logical progression of an _oeuvre_.
One has no sense of the rhythm of an achievement. There is an output of
scraps, which are scraps, not because they are small, but because one
scrap stands in no organic relation to another in the poet's work.
Instead of lending each other strength, they betray each other's
weakness.

Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not
peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. If it were, we might be
accused of mere querulousness. The rhythm of personality is hard,
indeed, to achieve. The simple mind and the single outlook are now too
rare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering
a mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy
one. The desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were
probably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is a
little preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see
life steadily and see it whole. We happen to have been born into an age
without perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet and
prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age.