In this way much modernist poetry, in attempting to justify itself to civilization, which is always the civilization of the average intelligent person, succeeds so well that it is rejected by him as _too_ advanced; when it turns to a smaller audience or to no audience at all, consoling itself with its advancement. For as the average intelligent person has no real sympathy with low life except from vague humanitarian principles, so he is only interested in civilization as a sentimental idea; he does not want to think harder or work harder; he does not want to advance, but to be flatteringly reminded that he belongs to the twentieth century. Nor does he have, or want to have, new or different feelings. The poet formally devoted to modernism, on the other hand, generally has or affects historically new feelings about things. And so the space between the general reader and the poet who is responding to the demands of this imaginary client becomes wider and wider. Take, as a single instance of this breach, the conception of Destiny. To the Greek dramatists it was the strongest of the gods, the dark power behind the thrones of Olympus. To the poets of the Romantic Revival it was the greatest and blindest motive power; it transcended Love, Religion and Knowledge. But Miss Sitwell can write to-day (or perhaps yesterday): Now from the countrysides where people know That Destiny is wingless and bemired With feathers dirty as a hen’s too tired To fly-- Then follows a reference to Darkness, one of the grandest of traditionally poetical concepts: --where old pig-snouted Darkness grovels For life’s mired rags among the broken hovels-- The general reader, however, will be out of sympathy with this: Destiny to him is not as oppressive as it was to Euripides or Byron, but it is still a force to be reckoned with, though he only calls it “Luck” or “Joss”; and Darkness is still respected in spite of the electric illuminations of Science.