452 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



intellectuals ; and it is too corrupt to have more than a brief and surrepti- 

 tious existence. But what concerns us all and most urgently demands 

 consideration is the appalling fact that our metropolitan criticism should 

 have treated the works of Mr. Joyce seriously as worlcs of genius simul- 

 taneously with the condemnation of some of our noblest literature. There 

 is some ground for believing — as the Quarterly Review points out — that 

 the book is the particularly unclean joke of a man in the last stage of 

 physical and mental decay. A leading French critic has said : " With 

 this book Ireland makes a sensational re-entry into the high literature of 

 Europe." And many of those metropolitan journals which are responsible 

 for the formation of opinion in this country and allow their literary columns 

 to advocate what they editorially condemn, accepted the statement with the 

 characteristic respect which these literary rebels against authority will 

 pay to every authority on earth except that of truth and right. The result 

 is deadly to literature, for it confuses all real values in the minds of the 

 new generation. It is not the young ; it is not the new generation in revolt 

 that is responsible for this confusion. The confusion is produced by the 

 C)mical, sophisticated, middle-aged or elderly pseudo-intellectual, sitting 

 in London, and stimulating his jaded senses with the abnormal and the 

 corrupt. They tell the young that these things are the hall-mark of genius, 

 and the young are bewildered. 



Genius ! What do these men know of genius ? — the clear water of the 

 spring at the door, the water stirred by the wing of the angel, the spirit 

 moving where it listeth, and speaking, not through the lips of those whom 

 the sophisticated would choose, but through the lips of the child, and the 

 lover, and the poet. I open the pages of one of the poets whom they delight 

 to dishonour, ao having no word for our own time, and I read : 



" The year's at the Spring, 

 The day's at the Morn, 

 Morning's at seven. 

 The hill-side's dew-pearled, 

 The lark's on the wing. 

 The snail's on the thorn. 

 God's in His heaven. 

 All's right with the world." 



That is genius ! The power, in eight lines, to reintegrate a disordered 

 world, by relating all its scattered and fragmentary tones to the central and 

 eternal harmony. 



That basis of the universe in an ultimate harmony is the first postulate 

 of all thought, all science, all art, all literature. Without it there is nothing 

 left to us that has the slightest meaning. And, indeed, a large part of our 

 modern literature does seem to have reached that final stage of negation. 

 It has reduced the world to dust and ashes and left it there. It has turned 

 from the world in its completeness ; turned from the world that contains 

 love and faith, and insisted on pointing us to the dust and ashes in which 

 it iays these things end. In other words, it has turned from the things 

 which we do know about the greatness of human life, those great factors 

 which can only be referred to something greater than themselves, some 

 divine power at the heart of the universe, and has declared that all these 

 things are illusion ; while, in the name of realism, it has occupied itself 

 with the dust of which we know nothing, except that, under the scrutiny 

 of science, it does indeed become an insubstantial pageant. 



Some of the most notable figures in contemporary literature have been 

 telling us or basing all their work on the assumption that the world is an 

 accident ; and it has been made one of the tests of a man's power in art 

 and literature that he should be able to state a negative and despairing 



