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Prefatory Note

THE majority of these essays originally appeared in The Times Literary Supplement; others in the Nation and Athenæum, the London Mercury, the Dial, and the New Republic. I have to thank the editors of these periodicals for permission to reprint them.

Many of them were written on the occasion of anniversaries. There is something arbitrary, therefore, in grouping them in a single volume; and yet perhaps their association is not really quite so accidental as may at first sight appear. The year 1821, in which Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Amiel were born, was obviously a crucial moment in the spiritual history of the nineteenth century; and these four men, animated by a similar spirit of disillusion, are best understood in relation to one another. Dostoevsky, it is true, is treated only incidentally in this volume: but I may be allowed to refer the reader to my earlier book, Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study.

The two essays on Shakespeare, the one as general as the other is particular, deal with what is essentially the same subject; while the two essays on Clare and Collins are complementary, as exhibiting two directly contrasted types of poetic sensibility.

Underlying all the essays in this volume is a theory of the psychology of literary creation, which is expounded in greater detail in a series of lectures

. on The Problem of Style,' recently published. A few shorter essays are included, either because they are examples of the application of this theory or because they make clear my conviction that a theory of this kind, whether mine or another, is necessary to literary criticism, if it is not to be incoherent and spasmodic.

Two objections were frequently made by reviewers to the volume of essays, Aspects of Literature, to which this is the successor: first, that the principles on which it was based were not more elaborately and philosophically expounded; second, that it contained relatively little criticism of contemporary writers. The answer to both these objections is the same. A professional critic is almost entirely at the mercy of occasion. There are many things he would like to do which he cannot afford to do; instead, he spends a great deal of his life writing brief criticisms in which he is forced to mutilate his own opinions, theories, and ideals. This condition of things may easily seem more deplorable than it actually is; for, though it is pleasant to dream of a time when the exhaustive discussion of literary theory and practice will find an eager and appreciative audience, when the critic's tacit assertion that fine books and fine poems are not produced every week will no longer be thought to prove that he is lacking in sympathy, or even in common human kindness, the fact remains that compulsion has produced far more good literary work of every kind than the unembarrassed pursuit of an artistic ideal has ever

done. And though it would be extravagant to urge that the struggle against arbitrary limitations in which a modern critic is engaged is the same as that exhilarating contest with a stringent literary form which is the condition of some of the greatest triumphs of literature, the likeness between them is sufficient to enable the critic to feel that, on the whole, he gains more than he loses by the effort.

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