May, 1920.

Contents

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 1

THE RELIGION OF ROUSSEAU 15

THE POETRY OF EDWARD THOMAS 29

MR YEATS’S SWAN SONG 39

THE WISDOM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 46

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 52

THE PROBLEM OF KEATS 62

THOUGHTS ON TCHEHOV 76

AMERICAN POETRY 91

RONSARD 99

SAMUEL BUTLER 107

THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY 121

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ENGLISH POETRY 139

THE NOSTALGIA OF MR MASEFIELD 150

THE LOST LEGIONS 157

THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS 167

POETRY AND CRITICISM 176

COLERIDGE’S CRITICISM 184

SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM 194

The Function of Criticism

It is curious and interesting to find our younger men of letters actively concerned with the present condition of literary criticism.  This is a novel preoccupation for them and one which is, we believe, symptomatic of a general hesitancy and expectation.  In the world of letters everything is a little up in the air, volatile and uncrystallised.  It is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite of outward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half a dozen years ago.  Then one had a tolerable certainty that the new star, if the new star was to appear, would burst upon our vision in the shape of a novel.  To-day we feel it might be anything.  The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand might even be, like Trigorin’s in ‘The Sea-gull,’ like a piano; it has no predetermined form.

This sense of incalculability, which has been aroused by the prodigious literary efflorescence of late years, reacts upon its cause; and the reaction tends by many different paths to express itself finally in the ventilation of problems that hinge about criticism.  There is a general feeling that the growth of the young plant has been too luxuriant; a desire to have it vigorously pruned by a capable gardener, in order that its strength may be gathered together to produce a