Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/160

130 art. Their early leaders, such as the young Tennyson and Rossetti in England, and Gautier in France, effected a potent, a charming, a sorely needed restoration of the beautiful. But the Laureate has lived to see another example of his own saying that a good fashion may corrupt the world. The French Parnassiens, the English-writing Neo-Romanticists, are more constructive than spontaneous, and decorative most of all. They have so diffused the technic of finished verse that the making of it is no Fin de siècle. more noteworthy than a certain excellence in piano playing. They plainly believe, with Schopenhauer, that "everything has been sung. Everything has been cursed. There is nothing left for poetry but to be the glowing forge of words."

This curious, seemingly impersonal poetry, composed Latter-day verse. with set purpose, finds a counterpart in some of the bewildering recent architecture. How rarely can we say of the architect and his work,

The artist and the builder are too seldom one. The poet just quoted, when on a trip to New Hampshire, found a large building going up in a country town. "Who is the architect?" he said. "Oh, there isn't any architect settled upon as yet," was the reply; "I'm just a-building it, you see, and there's a chap coming from Boston next month to put the architecture into it." So it is with a good deal of our