of pure poetry—­of love and death and old age and the passing of beauty and all the sorrows that have been since the world began and will be till the world ends.  If Mr. Kipling is of the earth earthy, if the clangour and rush of the world is in everything he writes, Mr. Yeats and his school live consciously sequestered and withdrawn, and the world never breaks in on their ghostly troubles or their peace.  Poetry never fails to relate itself to its age; if it is not with it, it is against it; it is never merely indifferent.  The poetry of these men is the denial, passionately made, of everything the world prizes.  While such a denial is sincere, as in the best of them, then the verses they make are true and fine.  But when it is assumed, as in some of their imitators, then the work they did is not true poetry.

But the literary characteristic of the present age—­the one which is most likely to differentiate it from its predecessor, is the revival of the drama.  When we left it before the Commonwealth the great English literary school of playwriting—­the romantic drama—­was already dead.  It has had since no second birth.  There followed after it the heroic tragedy of Dryden and Shadwell—­a turgid, declamatory form of art without importance—­and two brilliant comic periods, the earlier and greater that of Congreve and Wycherley, the later more sentimental with less art and vivacity, that of Goldsmith and Sheridan.  With Sheridan the drama as a literary force died a second time.  It has been born again only in our own day.  It is, of course, unnecessary to point out that the writing of plays did not cease in the interval; it never does cease.  The production of dramatic journey-work has been continuous since the re-opening of the theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully as ever at this present time.  Only side by side with it there has grown up a new literary drama, and gradually the main stream of artistic endeavour which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself with the novel almost to the exclusion of other forms of art, has turned back to the stage as its channel to articulation and an audience.  An influence from abroad set it in motion.  The plays of Ibsen—­produced, the best of them, in the eighties of last century—­came to England in the nineties.  In a way, perhaps, they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly less than by their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart they taught men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new and freer dramatic technique.  Where plays had been constructed on a journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou—­mid-nineteenth century writers in France—­a plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness, false correspondences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a quite unreal complexity and elaboration, they become bolder and less artificial, more close to the likelihoods of real life.  The gravity of the problems with which they set themselves to deal heightened their influence.