This sort of thing was encouraging at the time, and kept our lads in good heart; but, in the long run, it has proved demoralizing to our critics as well as to their clients.  For, now that the war is over, those who so loyally proclaimed that any bugle-boy was a better musician than any fiddler find themselves incapable of distinguishing, not only between fiddlers, but even between buglers.  Perhaps it was natural that when, during the war, T.S.  Eliot, about the best of our young poets—­if ours I may call him—­published Prufrock, no English paper, so far as I know, should have given him more than a few words of perfunctory encouragement:  natural that when Virginia Woolf, the best of our younger novelists, and Middleton Murry published works of curious imagination and surprising subtlety, critics, worn in the service of Mr. Bennett of the Propaganda Office and our Mr. Wells, should not have noticed that here were a couple of artists:  but is it not as strange as sad that our patriot geese, time out of mind a nation’s oracles, should still be unable to tell us whether Lieutenant Brooke, Captain Nicholls, Major Grenfell, or Lieut.-Colonel Maurice Baring is the greatest poet of this age?

And in painting and music things are no better.  Even our old prejudices are gone.  All is welcome now, except real art; and even that gets splashed in the wild outpour of adulation.  To admire everything is, perhaps, a more amiable kind of silliness than to admire nothing:  it is silliness all the same.  Also, it has brought taste to such a pass that, except the Russian ballet, there was not last winter [R] in London one entertainment at which a person of reasonable intelligence could bear to spend an hour.  As for the ballet, it was a music-hall turn, lasting fifteen minutes, which the public seemed to like rather better than the performing dogs and distinctly less than the ventriloquist.  The public accepted it because it accepts whatever is provided.  Nevertheless, the subtler of our music-hall comedians have obviously been ordered to coarsen their methods or clear out, and the rare jokes that used to relieve the merry misery of our revues and plays are now dispensed with as superfluous.

[Footnote R:  The winter 1918-19.]

The war is not entirely to blame:  the disease was on us long before 1914.  War, however, created an atmosphere in which it was bound to prevail.  Active service conditions are notoriously unfavourable to the critical spirit.  The army canteen need not tempt its customers:  neither need the ordinary shop under a rationing system:  and, it must be confessed, the habit of catering for colonial soldiers has not tended to make our public entertainments more subtle or amusing.  But the disease of which taste is sick unto death has been on us these fifty years.  It is the emporium malady.  We are slaves of the trade-mark.  Our tastes are imposed on us by our tradesmen, under which respectable title I include newspaper owners, booksellers’ touts, book-stall keepers, music-hall kings, opera syndicates, picture-dealers, and honest bagmen.