i88 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



as sparing in verse as prolific in prose, strikes the lyre now of Tyrtaeus, now of Theoc- 

 ritus, and again of Martial, in his slender but memorable tome of Verses. The issue 

 of a collective edition of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's 1 poems has awakened many glorious 

 echoes. Mr. Gosse's Collected Poems has stirred some memories. Mr. Thomas Hardy 2 

 in his Time's Laughing Stocks has assured the world of a depth of reflection and a stock 

 of vigour and modernity of feeling as yet wholly unclouded and uneclipsed. A splendid 

 anthology of Victorian Verse has been chosen by Sir A. T. Quiller- Couch, 3 the new Liter- 

 ature Professor at Cambridge. 



In imaginative prose the place of honour falls to George Meredith's posthumous work, 

 a fragment merely of his long incubated novel Celt and Saxon, in which Meredith 4 groups 

 many of his standing ideas on the racial contrasts of the Anglo-Celtic family. The story 

 is one of several that he had planned at a much earlier period of his career; it embodied 

 much of an earlier design to write a study of the activities of the modern journalist and 

 publicist in the great days of journalistic independence as illustrated by such a type as 

 Frederick Greenwood. 5 Several stories had simultaneously been on the stocks. Lack 

 of sympathy with his public had led to their being discarded. Celt and Saxon remains, 

 a trumpet through which Meredith executes some of his finest and most characteristic 

 fantasias, but not in any sense a finished example of his art. Of far greater value as a 

 legacy to posterity are the two volumes of Meredith's Letters, edited by his son. These 

 exhibit for the first time in its full grandeur the splendour of a noble mind struggling 

 through adversity towards expression of that aristocratic philosophy of living which 

 seems likely to form the main substance of Meredith's contribution to literature. The 

 high literary ideals and ambitions enshrined in the vibrating prose of these letters con- 

 stitutes them the first and most majestic literary monument of the new age. Next to 

 them in historic and documentary interest one might be inclined to place the strangely 

 revelatory Note-books of Samuel Butler (i835-igo2), 6 a " philosophical writer " whose 

 Way of All Flesh has perhaps made more way in the minds of thoughtful people during 

 the last decade than any other work of fiction. Butler's mind is peculiarly, and one 

 might almost say exclusively English, and there is often in his style something remi- 

 niscent of the hammer and, at times, of the tintack. But the saw-like rasp of his obser- 

 vation has penetrated the wooden complacency of the nation, and the sound of it is 

 heard in the most unexpected places. 



Since Mr. Hardy has refrained from the laying on of hands in fiction, the primacy 

 has fallen upon two writers whose closeness in age, ambition, energy, writing power and 

 friendly rivalry is likely to impress the future. After passing through a period of 

 extraordinary imaginative fertility culminating in 1910 respectively in The New Machi- 

 avelli and Clayhanger, Mr. H. G. Wells 7 and Mr. Arnold Bennett (b. 1867) have in 1911- 

 12 produced interim novels, the former writer Marriage and the latter writer Hilda 

 Lessways. Mind as usual is more conspicuous in the work of the first, method in that 

 of the second; yet both novels, dictated though they may have been in a measure by 

 the necessity de reculcr pour mieux sauter, are representative of their writers and of the 

 full-blooded and realistic manner which holds its own far better in England than else- 

 where in Europe. Mr. Bennett's wonderful Old Wives Tale (1908), following as it did 

 a rapid succession of sketches of the romance underlying the life of the midland pottery 

 district (his " Five Towns "), made his work the chief new interest to novel-readers dur- 

 ing 1909-11. Other established favourites in literary fiction such as Rudyard Kipling, 

 Mrs. Humphry Ward, 8 Mr. Galsworthy, Henry James, 9 Joseph Conrad, 10 R. S. Hichens 

 (b. 1864), De Morgan, 11 Anthony Hope 12 and Maurice Hewlett 13 have done nothing nota- 

 bly to add to their reputation. 



1 B. 1865; see E. B. xy, 825. 8 B. 1851 ; see E. B. xxviii, 320. 



2 B. 1840; see E. B. xii, 946. 9 B. 1843; see E. B. xv, 143. 



3 B. 1863; see E. B. xxii, 750. i" B. 1856; see E. B. vi, 968. 



4 See E. B. xviii, 160. B. 1839; see E. B. viii, loa. 



6 See E. B. xii, 554. B. 1863; see E. B. vi, 682. 

 See E. B. iv, 8870. B. 1861; see E. B. vi, 417. 



7 B. 1866; see E. B. xxviii, 514. 



