’I see now that Meredith belongs to that class of novelists with whom I do not usually get on so well (e.g. Dickens), who create and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters with amusement, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as with Hardy’s people, into whom the author does not inject his own exaggerated characteristics.’

The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died.  What would he not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone stands equal?  But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange company, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in his heart, for other reasons than that the love of the Wessex hills had crept into his blood.  He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in the head by a sniper as he led his company at the ‘hair-pin’ trench near Hulluch.

[JANUARY, 1920.

The Cry in the Wilderness

We have in Mr Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism to deal with a closely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind.  We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever may be our final attitude towards the author’s conclusions, we cannot but regard Rousseau and Romanticism as masterly.  Its style is, we admit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which animates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare that it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared for clarity and depth of thought with Mr Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets.

By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more easily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt’s achievement.  We think that it would be easy to show that in the last generation—­we will go no further back for the moment, though our author’s arraignment reaches at least a century earlier—­criticism has imperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may call appreciation.  The emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the individual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern ‘critic’ has been to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the last resort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminated in the artistic creation of the author examined.  And there modern criticism has stopped.  There has been no indication that it was aware of the necessity of going further.  Many influences went to shape the general conviction that mere presentation was the final function of criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of a scientific terminology.  The word ‘objectivity’ had a great vogue; it was felt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the critic was faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard,