It is, indeed, a hopeful sign of the times, a mark of the revival of social as contrasted with merely individualistic instincts that a younger generation of poets, at least in France, tend to form themselves into small groups, held together not merely by eccentricities of language or garb, but by some deep inner conviction strongly held in common.  Such a unity of spirit is seen in the works of the latter group of thinkers and writers known as Unanimists.  They tried and failed to found a community.  Their doctrine, if doctrine convictions so fluid can be called, is strangely like the old group-religion of the common dance, only more articulate.  Of the Unanimist it might truly be said, “il buvait l’indistinction.”  To him the harsh old Roman mandate Divide et impera, “Divide men that you may rule them,” spells death.  His dream is not of empire and personal property but of the realization of life, common to all.  To this school the great reality is the social group, whatever form it take, family, village or town.  Their only dogma is the unity and immeasurable sanctity of life.  In practice they are Christian, yet wholly free from the asceticism of modern Christianity.  Their attitude in art is as remote as possible from, it is indeed the very antithesis to, the aesthetic exclusiveness of the close of last century.  Like St. Peter, the Unanimists have seen a sheet let down and heard a voice from heaven saying:  “Call thou nothing common nor unclean.”

Above all, the Unanimist remembers and realizes afresh the old truth that “no man liveth unto himself.”  According to the Expressionist’s creed, as we have seen, the end of art is to utter and communicate emotion.  The fullest and finest emotions are those one human being feels towards another.  Every sympathy is an enrichment of life, every antipathy a negation.  It follows then, that, for the Unanimist, Love is the fulfilling of his Law.

It is a beautiful and life-giving faith, felt and with a perfect sincerity expressed towards all nature by the Indian poet Tagore, and towards humanity especially by M. Vildrac in his Book of Love ("Livre d’Amour").  He tells us in his “Commentary” how to-day the poet, sitting at home with pen and paper before him, feels that he is pent in, stifled by himself.  He had been about to re-tell the old, old story of himself, to set himself once more on the stage of his poem—­the same old dusty self tricked out, costumed anew.  Suddenly he knows the figure to be tawdry and shameful.  He is hot all over when he looks at it; he must out into the air, into the street, out of the stuffy museum where so long he has stirred the dead egotist ashes, out into the bigger life, the life of his fellows; he must live, with them, by them, in them.

    “I am weary of deeds done inside myself,
    I am weary of voyages inside myself,
    And of heroism wrought by strokes of the pen,
    And of a beauty made up of formulae.