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Literature is a phase of life: if one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if
one approaches it familiarly, what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive
when they are true; the opaque allusion — the simulated flight
upward — accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment but is
otherwise re-
warding? that James is all that has been said of him but is not profound? It is not Hardy
the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man
"interpreting life through the medium of the emotions." If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the
critic should know what he likes. Gordon Craig with his "this is I" and "this is mine," with his three
wise men, his "sad French greens" and his Chinese cherries — Gordon Craig, so
inclinational and unashamed — has carried the precept of being a good critic, to the last extreme. And
Burke is a
psychologist — of acute, raccoon- like curiosity. Summa diligentia;
to the humbug whose name is so amusing — very young and ve-
ry rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps on the "top of a diligence." We are not daft about the meaning but this
familiarity
with wrong meaning puzzles one. Humming- bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying
that you have a badger — remember Xenophon; only the most rudimentary sort of behaviour is necessary
to put us on the scent; a "right good salvo of barks," a few "strong wrinkles" puckering the
skin between the ears, are all we ask.
with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral; with voices — one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept — the criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal shores — contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions: and France, the "chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly" in whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally one's object — substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability, all of museum quality: and America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proof-readers, no silk- worms, no digressions; the wild man's land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country — in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter "a" in psalm and calm when pronounced with the sound of "a" in candle, is very noticeable but why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no con- clusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter, is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able to say, "'I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more fish than I do,'" — the flower and fruit of all that noted superi- ority — should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one imagine that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.