delivered a Lamb discourse. Among these guests were Mr. Birrell, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. E. Gosse (as he then was), Sir W. Raleigh, and Sir H. Newbolt. Mr. Gosse described the centenary dinner organized by Swinburne in memory of Lamb ('the only occasion on which he organized anything') in 1875. Mr. Lucas's essay on Lamb and Cambridge is a valuable summary of all the known and probable facts. There are several fine portraits-Hazlitt's, Lamb, George Dyer, William Frend, and Mary Lamb.

XII

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER

II

[By H. V. ROUTH]

It must, of course, be merely a coincidence of publishing dates that the weight of literary opinion seems to fluctuate year by year between two points of view. On some former occasions we have noticed that commentators and exponents were inclining towards an adventurous line of interpretation. They seemed to realize that a new world was opening before us on every hand and that we must follow the wildest flights of our poets and humanists among these novel experiences and speculations. But this year the voices of reaction are making themselves heard with more than usual impressiveness. It is being urged that the spirit in its deepest and fullest sense responds only to the ideals and emotions which have always swayed mankind since literature became a force in civilization, and that therefore we are more likely to save what is best and noblest in life, if we keep to the example of our earlier prophets and poets, and follow them in their knowledge of human nature and in their presentment of beauty. In other words the classicists are, for the thousandth time, turning on the romantics. It is no business of the present survey to enter upon this unending controversy (centuries older than the appearance of Lyrical Ballads or the Preface to Cromwell), but it seems to be impossible to review the critical work of the last year without watching the books and articles range themselves under one banner or the other.

Let us begin with the second edition of Mr. Harold Williams's Modern English Writers,1 all the more since it first appeared in

1 Modern English Writers: Being a Study of Imaginative Literature, 1890– 1914, by Harold Williams. Sidgwick & Jackson. pp. xii +532. 168.

1918 before our annual survey had been started. Mr. Williams's volume must be the most comprehensive and detailed work yet published on the period. While Professor Cunliffe confined himself to the most conspicuous names, Mr. Williams has succeeded in mentioning nearly every author, and has compressed a vast amount of appropriate information into what are generally short notices. Besides, he employs the art of quotation with judgement as well as knowledge. The author has also had the wisdom not to treat his period as if it stood out in abrupt isolation, sundered from the past. The work of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been used for comparison, and it is also interesting to find that French influences are more specifically alluded to than is usual. The chapters on the poets and poetesses seem perhaps to be somewhat lacking in sympathy, but those on the novelists, and especially on the playwrights, are written with insight and are full of suggestive ideas. The views on the conflict of dramatic tendencies, especially on the rise of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and on the genius of Synge, are particularly well worth reading.

And yet one somehow feels that the book has appeared too soon to attain to its full usefulness. The writer does not think so. 'I am told', he says, 'that, as it stands, the book is now more up to date than shortly after its publication.' Whether the reader agrees with him depends on the school to which he belongs. Mr. Williams is unmistakably reactionary. He has several times stated his creed. He declares, 'poetry is always poetry; the distinction between major and minor poetry is a fallacy of the Philistines'. Or again, literature consists not in the use of language to express ideas, but in the use of a language that is invested by context and analogy with a special power, an unexpected significance'. And once more, Art has no direct concern with passing problems in politics, moral and social economics; its foundations are fixed upon the unchanging in human nature-the emotional reaction to experience'. We cannot be too grateful for such principles, but when we come to study their application, some readers will inevitably call to mind the altered perspectives of the twentieth century. Imaginative literature should not primarily be concerned with institutions. Yet how much of the modern study of institutions (from The

Pillars of Society to The New Machiavelli) arises from the discovery that the human spirit is, or ought to be, something altogether alien and inadaptable to these social overgrowths. How often does a contemporary writer anatomize some oldestablished conventionality or newly arisen tendency, in order to lay bare and extricate the individual urges half-smothered beneath ! Are we not, at any rate in some degree, engaged in salvaging primitive human nature from beneath the debris of collapsed or collapsing civilizations? Is it not such prospects as these which render the twentieth century so many-sided and endue even second-rate literature with a special significance? Does Mr. Williams realize the present urgency of these problems? Although he claims that his book is 'a means of study and inquiry, not a dogmatic assignation of values', yet the progressives will find his point of view rather exclusively judicial and academic for the needs of to-day. He claims that the function of the poet is to help us to realize our world, yet his pronouncements seem to be overinfluenced by such old-fashioned considerations as choice of metre, ' end-stopped lines', 'the handling of the octo-syllabic couplet', the melody, the colouring, 'the craftsmanship in words', 'the level of literary accomplishment'. When we pass on to other chapters we find that he seems hardly to understand the possibilities of internationalism in literature, or of the so-called Ibsen school. Nor does he realize that Conrad's studies of twentieth century manhood would hardly have been possible in any but an age of science. He seems particularly prejudiced against Shaw, Galsworthy, and Oscar Wilde. In fact, the book does not sufficiently allow for the illusions and disillusionments of the present. It is written more from the view-point of the past and so will come into its full usefulness in the future.

But these are suggestions; subjects for discussion. One can pay no greater compliment to a book of criticism than to question some of its views, after having read every page with interest. Besides, no one will deny that Mr. Williams has treated the more imaginative and emotional writers with admirable sympathy and insight, and that is impossible to close his survey without an ardent desire to turn at once to the originals.

If the reader wishes to understand the full depth and point of the present-day reaction, he must turn to Mr. Noyes's Some

Aspects of Modern Poetry. Mr. Noyes dwells on many qualities worth praising in various modern writers, for instance the cosmic range of intellect in Mrs. Meynell's perfect verse; the undertones of Emerson's poetry and the extent of his influence on later writers; Henley's gift of portraiture; Dobson's mastery of metrical effects; self-revelation in Stevenson's child poems; the simplicity and directness of Swinburne's tragedies; the faultlessness and felicity of Tennyson's work. But it will be noticed that none of these writers really belongs to our own time. In fact, Mr. Noyes fears for the present and trembles for the future. For him, contemporary civilization seems to be like a number of conflicting forces which will end in destroying each other. So the problem before us is to search for the unifying principle in life to make some synthesis or we shall find ourselves wandering through a world without meaning'. Or again, 'our optimists are shutting their eyes to the suffering of the world and bidding us worship Apollo and Aphrodite. Our pessimists are shutting their eyes to the joy of the world and bidding us abuse an eyeless Blunderer'. In this respect the essay entitled 'Acceptances' is the most significant in the volume. Mr. Noyes claims that there are certain traditional postulates which are the essence of our civilization, the foundations of life, thought, art, literature, and religion; and he seems to suggest that these qualities are to be sought through the writings of the older poets and to be perpetuated by copying their methods. Without this discipline, this conformity to law, we shall lose touch with beauty, nay more, with forces which may yet bring harmony into the chaos of modern life. Like Mr. A. M. Clark, he fears that the younger generation may completely lose its way for lack of reverence and humility, but unlike the author of The Realistic Revolt in Modern Poetry (1922) 3 he does not stop to ask the causes of this recklessness nor seek for the possibility of its justification.

By the side of these more serious speculations there is little space to discuss Mr. Symons's agreeable but rather disconnected

2 Some Aspects of Modern Poetry, by Alfred Noyes. Hodder & Stoughton. pp. ix +288. 7s. 6d.

3 See The Year's Work, vol. iii, pp. 204–6.