Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/188

158 certain of the latest physicists claim that "deduced facts"—that is, the objects inferred from our sensations—are the true substantialities; that only our perception of them is transient; that the world of subjective feelings is the chimera, not the objective matters which excite perception.

One question you very properly may ask: "Why Where danger lies. not take all this for granted, and go on? Join either side, and the result is the same. Eclipses were calculated readily enough upon the Ptolemaic method." Not so. The theory that beauty is a chimera leads to an arrogant contempt for it on the part of many artists and poets, who substitute that which is bizarre and audacious for that which has enduring charm. It begins with irreverence, and leads to discordant taste; to something far beneath the excellence of noble literatures and of great plastic and poetic eras.

The tentative revolts that break forth in art and "The old order changeth." letters are against methods to which, however fine they be and grounded in nature, the world has become too servile. Movements in poetry, like those of Blake and Whitman and Lanier for greater rhythmical freedom, of the Rossettians for a study of Preraphaelite methods, of Banville and Dobson for a restoration of attractive forms; movements in art like those of Monticelli and Claude Monet,—all these are to some extent the quest for values so long unwonted that they seem new; and