Old and New Masters

I. DOSTOEVSKY THE SENSATIONALIST II. JANE AUSTEN: NATURAL HISTORIAN III. MR. G.K. CHESTERTON AND MR. HILAIRE BELLOC (1) THE HEAVENLY TWINS (2) THE COPIOUSNESS OF MR. BELLOC (3)...

Miss Austen has even been accused of irreverence, and we occasionally find her in her letters as irreverent in the presence of death as Mr. Shaw. "Only think," she writes in one...

Mr. Chesterton has spoken of Mr. Belloc as one who "did and does humanly and heartily love England, not as a duty but as a pleasure, and almost an indulgence." And _The Four Men...

"Wordsworth's connection," he writes, "with the English 'Jacobins,' with the most extreme element opposed to the war or actively agitating in favour of making England a republic...

Sir Sidney Colvin deserves praise for the noble architecture of the temple he has built in honour of Keats. His great book, _John Keats: His Life and Poetry; His Friends, Critic...

That is the essential Henry James--the collector of impressions and vibrations. "Almost anywhere would do": that is what makes some of his stories just miss being as insipid as...

Thus the reminiscences are, in a sense, extraordinarily egotistic. This is, however, not to condemn them. Henry James is, as I have already said, his own greatest character, and...

But, after all, it is not Synge's characters or his plots, but his language, which is his great contribution to literature. I agree with Mr. Howe that the question how far his l...

There may have been a case for neglecting Pope before Mr. Elwin and Mr. Courthope edited and annotated him--though he had been edited well before--but their monumental edition h...

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense--it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the...

It is in referring to the sonnets for Hélène that M. Jusserand calls attention to the realism of Ronsard's poetry. He points out that one seems to see the women Ronsard loves fa...

Mr. Masefield, as a poet, has the secret of popularity. Has he also the secret of poetry? I confess his poems often seem to me to invite the admirably just verdict which Jeffrey...

Why should I blame her, that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways. Or hurled the little streets against the gr...

And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time--first from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of lime-trees.... At this point I was ove...

Most of us have, at one time or another, fallen under the spell of Swinburne owing to the genius with which he turned into music the enthusiasm of the heretic. He fluttered thro...

We were bewildered at school to be told that walking was a perpetual falling. But life is, in a far more significant way, a perpetual dying. Death is not an eccentricity, but a...

Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that Mr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist. No one but an inland child could, perhaps, ha...

Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed, Go, bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild-- Yo...

Mr. Hardy's genius is essentially that of a man who "used to notice such things" as the fluttering of the green leaves in May, and to whom the swift passage of a night-jar in th...