When Decadence decayed and was succeeded by the spurious healthiness of the country-rambler, the beer-drinker and the earlier patriotic soldier-poet, and this in turn broke down, the spirit of scepticism began seriously to invade poetry. It had found expression before in the poems of Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman; but with certain important conservative reservations in the former, while in the latter it was confused with the shy or aggressive anti-religiousness of the eighteen-nineties. Modern scepticism was of a different order. The conscious bravado of anti-social or anti-idealistic writing disappeared. The poet did not feel cut off from his fellow-men by the loss of his more bigoted convictions, for he could assume that an increasingly large section of the educated classes was in agreement with him. At the time of the Romantic Revival, though the debaucheries of Byron could be sympathetically discounted because of his rank, a confessed atheist like Shelley was not admitted into polite society: it was assumed that every reader at least professed allegiance to Christianity, however lax his private life. The modernist poet assumes that his readers owe no trite emotional allegiance to any religious or social or national institution, even that they have emerged from the combative stages of mere ‘doubt’ or ‘naughtiness’ and are organizing their lives more intellectually; that to them the consistent and humane atheism of Shelley, or the consistent and humane saintliness of Traherne or Blake is preferable to the vulgarly incongruous lives of Byron and Wilde, as reflected in their poetry. The school-room may still remain the citadel of convictions; and Byron and Wilde may be morally whitewashed because their poetry abounds in old-fashioned convictions. But the modernist poet does not write for the school-room: if for anything at all, for the university. This refinement of conviction, this maturing of social purposiveness, contributes more than any other cause to the raising of the barriers of poetical monotony. The poet may admit spiritual elevation as one possible personal ‘tone’ of poetry and spiritual depression as another; or an evenness of spiritual temper or a rapid alternation between depression and exaltation--the poeticizing of bathos and anticlimax--as further alternatives. But poetry ceases to be the maintenance of a single idealistic tone; it has a less obvious, a more complicated consistency. It is a broader intellectual exercise than before; even at its most pedantic it is still an intellectual exercise.