Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/17

Rh World. Fifty years hence this will be plain to all. To-day it is hidden from many, and from none more perhaps than from the victorious children of Yesterday, to whom we owe all the hope and the trust of To-morrow.

Why, however, should we any longer hesitate to attempt the treatment of the later brood with the same fearless curiosity as the earlier? The parentage is the same: the habitat the same. Both have fought the good fight and won, each in their special manner. The hour has come in which the keen desire to know and express the truth about them all must be satisfied. They interest, they concern us too deeply for us to palter any longer with half views of them. We shall best show our admiration and reverence for what they have done by resolutely striving to see them—not as our fathers saw them—not as they saw or see themselves—but as they really were and are.

We too often speak of the poetical movement of the opening of the century as if we did not realise that it consisted of two phases remarkably distinct from one another. The principal writers of the first of these phases survived their successors, and thus helped to confuse the significance of the movement