ENGLISH LITERATURE 



SECTION III. ART AND LITERATURE 



."-;' ' i ' ***"*!*. i r "* t " ' j * 



ENGLISH LITERATURE f 



In literature as in politics and arms the tendency in all old civilizations is to repose 

 an undue faith in the achievements of ancestors and to harp with an uncritical accent 

 upon the great Elizabethans and great Victorians. Discernment of the new elements 

 in English imaginative literature is confined to a narrowing circle of organs of opinion. 

 There is nothing more difficult at the present than for the great mass of readers to 

 discover what competent judges consider to be the really vital literature of our time. 

 Fortunately there are still some book advocates whose love of literature prevents 

 them praising anything they know to be bad. It is by the diligent pursuit of these 

 alone that the booklover may learn to discover the new corn in ear. 



To this higher criticism in Great Britain the weekly " Literary Supplement " of the 

 London Times has in the course of its ten years of existence established itself as on the 

 whole the surest guide. A file of the " Supplement " supplies a corpus of English criti- 

 cism without a rival in any contemporary literature, and of this periodical alone among 

 its literary rivals today it may be said with certainty vires acquirit eundo. Young as it 

 is, the " Literary Supplement " is a veteran among those very few English organs which 

 make any claim to stimulate cultivated opinion by means of new ideas and vivid writing, 

 e.g. The Nation, The New Age (1908), The English Review (1909), The Round Table 

 (1910), The Eye-Witness (1911), The New Witness (1912). Increasingly difficult to 

 please, the journal readers of today are correspondingly fatigued no less by the literary 

 barrenness and denudation of ideas of the older journals, perpetually masticating the 

 dogmas of a dowdy age, than by their newborn reticence in domestic criticism and their 

 lack of tonic quality in matters of national concern. 2 



Belles Lettres. The tendencies in England during the past two or three years 

 have not been at all clearly marked. There has been no severance in continuity the 

 general aspect of the ripples on the stream has nevertheless insensibly changed. 



The Irish movement has found certainly no authorised exponent, but a chronicler 

 of candour with a gift of revelation that almost if not quite amounts to genius, in Mr. 

 George Moore. 3 His two incontinently communicative volumes Hail and Farewell 

 exhibit a movement which among all the doublings and turnings of the human harle- 

 quinade is perhaps the most interesting of the present day. Mr. W. B. Yeats, 4 who, 

 inspired by his Egeria, Lady Gregory, was believed to incarnate the Irish movement, 

 in Mr. Moore's pages takes on the semblance of a corvine prophet, seriously immersed 

 in poetical incantations over a caldron from which genuine poetic wreaths are dispersed 

 from Ireland; and a rival protagonist to the movement has been found in J. Millington 

 Synge (1871-1909), the dramatist of Shadows of the Glen, Riders to the Sea and The Play- 

 boy of the Western World, whose Poems and Translations (issued in 1910) exhibit a quality 

 of vivid energy and life comparable to that of A. E. Housman's Shropshire Lad. The 

 best of his poems as of his prose connect with the peasant life of the Aran Islands. Reality 

 and joy are at their highest in " Beg-Innish," but some of the ballads have rarely been 

 surpassed since ballad-making became an anachronism. Vivid personal record, local 

 patriotism, the homing instinct, folk sentiment, the desolation of wild glen and moun- 

 tain earth, and the spume of mist and rain in the mild island climate breathe through 

 these poetic emanations The Shadowy Waters of Yeats, The Wild Earth of Padraic 

 Colum, the dialect poems of Moira O'Neill, the Deirdre poems of Yeats, Synge, Herbert 



1 Sec E. B. ix, 607 et seq. 



2 It has yet to be seen whether the newly constituted Academic Committee, brought into 

 being in 1910-11 in connection with the reorganisation of the Royal Society of Literature 

 (previously a body of no particular importance) will establish its influence as a critical 

 authority. It began boldly by awarding in 1911 to Mr. W. De la Mare, and in 1912 to Mr. 

 John Masefield, the first two annual prizes of 100 (founded by the Princesse de Polignac) 

 for the best original work of the previous year. 



3 B. 1853; see E. B. xviii, 808. 4 B. 1865; see E. B. xxviii, 909. 



