ENGLISH LITERATURE 189 



Founded by Ford Madox Hueffer (b. 1873) a versatile and inventive writer, authoi 

 of a tour deforce of historical picturing in fiction entitled Ladies -whose Bright Eyes, dealing 

 with the England of Edward II the English Review has discovered and brought into 

 notice (under Mr. Austin Harrison's editorship in its later period) some short story 

 writers of exceptional accomplishment and force, among them Richard Middleton 

 ( The Ghost Ship, and The Day before Yesterday), a writer whose unhappy end cut short 

 prematurely a career of unmistakable promise and partial achievement. A writer of 

 philosophic originality in fiction has also been revealed in the person of Prof. L. P. Jacks 

 (b. 1860; editor of the Hibbert Journal), whose Mad Shepherds disclosed a power of 

 discernment beneath the surface comparable to that of Mark Rutherford 1 and Thomas 

 Hardy. Work of singular promise has been published by J. P. Beresford, author of 

 Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, and by Mr. Compton Mackenzie, whose Carnival was one 

 of the most commented on novels of 1912. Mr. Farnol, Mr. Oliver Onions, Mr. 

 " George Birmingham " and Mr. De Vere Stackpole have also done distinguished work 

 in the variant avenues of fiction, the level of which has been maintained steadily without 

 much to stimulate prophecy or to provoke astonishment. The tendency most worthy 

 of remark upon the confines of the novel proper has been the unceasingly sincere and 

 sympathetic interpretation of the life, thought, and habit of the predominant poor. The 

 country peasant has found a loyal and constant spokesman in Mr. George Bourne, who 

 has completed the series of Bettesworth books, and Mr. W. H. Hudson, whose Shepherd's 

 Life has impressed his many admirers as perhaps the truest and most attaching of all 

 his exquisite prose pastorals. The longshore fisherman has discovered a spokesman of 

 shrewd vigour and outspokenness in Mr. Stephen Reynolds (b. 1881), whose Poor 

 Man's House is one of the outstanding books. Mr. Pett Ridge 2 and Mr. Barry Pain, 3 

 whose work retains all its old vivacity, have also found recruits in the observation of 

 struggling city workers and outcasts, in Mr. Harold Begbie (b. 1871), Mr. Neil Lyons, 

 and Mr. Robert Halifax. The studies of these social observers and poignant reporters 

 merit attention. Excellent prose, at times brilliant, rejoices the honorable minority of 

 essay readers in the collective work of H. Belloc (This and Thai), E. V. Lucas (London 

 Lavender), G. S. Street, H. W. Nevinson, and G. K. Chesterton. 4 That arch-anthologist 

 Mr. Lucas has done an anthology of his own writings, modestly entitled A Little of 

 Everything. 



The English critics of the past few years have not been much marked because little 

 observed by public opinion. But their work has been of a high order and has lost 

 little, perhaps gained in certain respects, by the fact that it is done in demi-obscurity. 

 Of the older school who combine synthetic and analytic methods, Sir Sidney Colvin, 5 

 J. W. Mackail (b. 1859), Augustine Birrell, 6 Herbert Paul (b. 1853), Edward Dowden, 7 

 remain on the active list along with Mr. Edmund Gosse, 8 who has put forth a fine 

 blossom in his Portraits and Sketches, enshrining a kit-cat of Swinburne which has a rare 

 quality of humanism and literary experience. Like Andrew Lang, 9 he is at his best when 

 displaying his capacities as a featherweight. Of the polyphonic writers of the period 

 Lang will probably rank first, and his loss has : been felt as almost a personal one by 

 hundreds of refined readers. There was certainly too much of the rainbow about his 

 literary palette in later days. At his best he wrote English prose of the purest and most 

 flawless. But a capricious literary fairy presided at his christening, who decreed that 

 whenever he laboured, researched, documented and dogmatised he should be mediocre, 

 but that whenever he improvised in careless mood, pearls, real pearls should drop from 

 his pen. His two last efforts, his History of English Literature and Shakespeare-Bacon, 

 are not among the most prosperous productions of this fascinating polymath. A great 

 loss has ensued to this branch of English letters by the health-enforced silence of Arthur 

 Symons, 10 the first of adepts in literary impressionism, though his place may be partially 



1 See E. B. xxiii, 940. 6 B.. 1850; see E. B. iii, 989. 



2 B. 1864; see E. B. xxiii, 317. 7 B. 1843; see E. B. viii, 456. 



3 B. 1867; see E. B. xx, 456. 8 B. 1849; see E. B. xii, 268. 



4 B. 1874; E. B. vi, in. 9 B. 1844; d. 1912; see E. B. xvi, 171. 

 6 B. 1845; see E. B, vi, 748; knighted 1911. 10 B. 1865; see E. B. xxvi, 287. 



