discreetly in front of an indiscreet marble Wordsworth and asserting that the British Government had no intention of being left out of the national rejoicings about the immortality of “The Prelude”!  A spectacle that surely Americans would pay to see!  On Sunday, at the Francais, Hugo was being declaimed from one o’clock in the afternoon till midnight, with only an hour’s interval.  And it rained violently nearly all the time.

ARTISTS AND CRITICS

[21 Oct. ’09]

There is a one-sided feud between artists and critics.  When a number of artists are gathered together you will soon in the conversation come upon signs of that feud.  I admit that the general attitude of artists to critics is unfair.  They expect from critics an imaginative comprehension which in the nature of the case only a creative artist can possess.  On the other hand, a creative artist cannot do the work of a critic because he has neither the time nor the inclination to master the necessary critical apparatus.  Hence critical work seldom or never satisfies the artist, and the artist’s ideal of what critical work ought to be is an impossible dream.  I find confirmation of my view in other arts than my own.  The critical work of Mr. Bernhard Berenson, for instance, seems to me wonderful and satisfying.  But when I mention Mr. Berenson to a painter I invariably discover that that painter’s secret attitude towards Mr. Berenson is—­well, aristocratic.  The finest, and the only first-rate, criticism is produced when, by an exceptional accident, a creative artist of balanced and powerful temperament is moved to deal exhaustively with a subject.  Among standard critical works the one that has most impressed me is Lessing’s “Laocoon”—­at any rate the literary parts of it.  Here (I have joyously said to myself) is somebody who knows what he is talking about!  Here is some one who has been there.

RUDYARD KIPLING

[4 Nov. ’09]

After a long period of abstention from Rudyard Kipling, I have just read “Actions and Reactions.”  It has induced gloom in me; yet a modified gloom.  Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since “Plain Tales from the Hills” delighted first Anglo-Indian, and then English society.  There was nothing of permanent value in that book, and in my extremest youth I never imagined otherwise.  But “The Story of the Gadsbys” impressed me.  So did “Barrack-room Ballads.”  So did pieces of “Soldiers Three.”  So did “Life’s Handicap” and “Many Inventions.”  So did “The Jungle Book,” despite its wild natural history.  And I remember my eagerness for the publication of “The Seven Seas.”  I remember going early in the morning to Denny’s bookshop to buy it.  I remember the crimson piles of it in every bookshop in London.  And I remember that I perused it, gulped it down, with deep joy.  And I remember the personal anxiety which I felt when