Briefly, the developments which account for the historical effort which has characterized the period are these. Poetry in the past had found it expedient to accept barbaric philosophical or religious ‘ideas’ and to cast itself within the limits imposed by them. They were barbaric ideas because they were large but definite; infinite, yet fixed by the way that they fixed man; crude and unshaded but incontestable--such as the barbaric idea of God as compared with the civilized idea of God (who is contestable if only in small points, while in barbaric God there are no small points). A barbaric view or order depends on the underlying conception of a crude, undifferentiated, infinite, all-contemporaneous time, and of a humanity co-existent with this time, a humanity consolidated as a mass and not composed of individuals. But when the idea of humanity as a consolidated mass was discredited by the Renaissance, the idea of gross contemporaneousness--of barbaric time--also fell to pieces. Gross time was superseded by relative time--the sense of many times going on at once; as we talk of the suburbs being five years behind the town, of the country being ten years behind the suburbs, of the colonies being ten years behind the country, of the primitive community in Africa being a thousand years behind the colonies; of an inventor being fifty years ahead of commercial recognition. Living, in fact, in different communities of time, or more than this, in different personalities of time, means the same degree of freedom that living in barbaric time does. The poet in the first case need make no historical effort because he has such perfect control over time; he need make none in the second case because time has such perfect control over him. Intense differentiation of time is romanticism, strict uniformity and stabilization of time is classicism. And it would be thought, considering that these distinctions, however contradictory in appearance, did not affect the poetry-making faculties in the poet himself, but only the look of poetry as a whole, that criticism could go on using them without prejudice; as verbal conveniences, for example, for describing the general character of all poetry-making during a particular period--chaotic and individualistic, or orderly and severely conventionalized, as the case might be.