I am not denying the poetry of romance, but we should remember that this too, has its roots in reality. Even the most imaginative works must be based, in the last analysis, on the real. Take for instance such works as Poe’s. Poe despised realism. His best work is about half imagination and half form. Yet when he succeeds in rousing in us the mingled emotions of fear and horror on which so many of his effects depend he is using for his purposes what was once a defensive mechanism of the human organism, causing it to shrink from and avoid the real things--wild beasts, enemies, the forces of nature--that were striving continually to overwhelm and destroy it. Without the survival of this defensive mechanism of fear and horror, Poe’s tales would have no dominion over the human mind. In fact, the main difference between what we call realism and romanticism is that while both have their relations with the real facts of life, the facts on which romanticism depends are unfamiliar, distant and distorted, while realism deals with that which is near at hand and familiar. Knights in armor, distressed damsels, donjon keeps and forests of spears were once as everyday affairs as aeroplanes are now, or gas attacks, or the British tanks. These all have in them the elements of romance; and when they too have passed, as God grant they may, they will doubtless take their place in the equipment of the poetical romanticist. Not these realities that pass, but those that are with us always, are the ones that inspire verse like Riley’s. Those who love to study group-psychology, and who realize that we have in the motion-picture audience one of the most wonderful places to observe it that ever has been vouchsafed to mortals, may see every night the hold that this kind of realism has over the popular mind. Armed hosts may surge across the screen, volcanoes may belch and catastrophe may be piled on catastrophe. The eyes of the spectators may bulge and their mouths may gape, but they remain untouched. But let a little dog appear with his tongue out and his tail awag; let a small babe lie in its cradle and double up its tiny fists and yell, and at once you have evidence that the picture has penetrated the skin of the house and got down to the quick. Homely realities make an appeal that neither the knights in armor of the fourteenth century nor the tanks in armor of the twentieth are able to exert. Gilbert, who wrote many a truth in the guise of jest, never said a truer thing than when he made Bunthorne proclaim that in all Nature’s works “something poetic lurks”-- Even in Colocynth and Calomel. That is the poet’s mission--to show us the poetry in the things that we had never looked upon as within poetry’s sphere. They are all doing it now--Noyes, Masefield and all the rest, and the public has risen at them as one man.