The Critical Game

No page of "Hail and Farewell" is flat; no opinion of Mr. Moore's leaves you quite indifferent. The most interesting pages, more interesting than his portrait of himself as a lo...

If we had to lose one part or the other of Maeterlinck's work, I think we should less reluctantly surrender the plays than the essays. The essays are richer in substance than th...

It is no wonder that Whitman, revolutionary in substance and form, perplexes the genteel and the cloistered. But it is a wonder that Shelley, whose form is classic and whom a ce...

"Marriage" contains twenty short stories of married life, so many variations of Strindberg's thesis against the institution. So regarded, the book leaves one rather sore than en...

I come back gladly to the analogy of the game. We have, I believe, made progress in one direction. In the direction of fair play. We cannot write like Hazlitt, but we will not h...

As a matter of fact, America does not stand for any such thing and Whitman does not stand for America. He is a revolutionist in revolt against the American fact and celebrating...

He was an instinctive democrat and was always on the side of what, in his social environment, was the unpopular minority. Like Whitman, of whom he often speaks with admiration,...

Then if our habit of judging new poets by old ones still dominates us, let us take any passage describing the sea in "Dauber" and put it beside any of the thousand years of Engl...

In Russia prose fiction has been for a century the vehicle of the soberest reflections upon contemporary problems. It was dangerous for a Russian radical to express his beliefs...

The lover who finds fault with his sweetheart because he is so proud of her is perfectly human and also perfectly logical. So my reason for dwelling on Mr. Conrad's shortcomings...

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The resolution should be read in the light of the fact that Stella was eighteen years old, a grown and comely woman. But the interpretation of it depends much more closely on th...

It is more than thirty years since Nietzsche's work was finished and darkness fell upon that mighty intellect. In 1917, Mr. W. M. Salter, who certainly knows the bibliography of...

In a prefatory note to "Desperate Remedies," dated February, 1896, Hardy lets fall a casual phrase which indicates that he and others had noted his kinship to the French, but th...

Well, then, Aaron's rod is doubly symbolic. His rod which, in the Biblical phrase, bloomed, blossomed and yielded almonds, is a flute. And the symbol is also phallic, as, indeed...