embraces the whole of Christianity and actually creates the foundation of a new synthetic philosophy of ethics and social life.

I must say a few words as to the possible causes of Marriott's lack of popularity in England. That his positive revolt from the commercial type of novel, and his difficult office of interpreting life in its fourth-dimensional terms, must secure him only a limited appreciation, is obvious. But there are, I think, other reasons. You cannot "place" his work, and the public, that submits to being led by the nose, likes to know where it is. His master in the indicative method of writing is Henry James. His recognition of the supreme philosophy of love, joy and youth, his determination to pierce through the crust of social life into the genuine realities and his frank welcome to the earth (Cornwall is the spiritual foster-mother of nearly all his novels) to some extent cast the Meredithian toga upon him. But his work is really totally different from Meredith's glittering egoism. Then again his method of construction is heterodox. Its close correspondence to the theme and its elimination of waste are more acceptable in France than in England. His cumulative manner again, the way in which he throws the whole weight of his books into the climax is apt to disconcert (justifiably in the earlier novels) the impatient reader. Lastly, there is a curious lack of personality in his style. It is not amenable to extracts because there is nothing of passionate virility to quote. His style is sunk in his material and his ideas. And in its subordination to the absolute demands of his artistic purpose there is perhaps an affinity to his theories (vide Subsoil) of restraining and enlarging the functions of the artistic

impulse to a corporate rather than an individual significance. At any rate, the result is a high level of workmanship and a disciplined presentment of the many things he has to say.

P

XXVIII

ON THE ELIZABETHANS AND OURSELVES

MY DEAR X,

I divine that you are a little impatient at the way I thrust the Elizabethans, Jacobeans, and Carolines in front of your nose; you complain that with Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Carew Hazlitt, Swinburne, Symonds and others ahead of me I might show a little more originality. I feel you observe with justice that I hardly mention the Middle Ages or the nineteenth century. So that I suppose you are inclined to expect an apology. Well I have no syllogisms or ratiocinations to present you. I have hardly analysed the matter myself. It is partly because I collect books and like 'em old and rare. It is partly because I am intrigued by the period, its enthusiasms, discoveries, pedantry, crudities, quaintnesses, strength, sweetness, terrors, furies, ecstasies, youth, gravity, penetration, literary passion, zest, merriment, plain-spokenness, labyrinths of thought, curiosities, naïvetés, freshness, freakishness, fandangoes-yes, even its excesses, puerilities, archaics, grotesqueries, and stuffiness. I like the old people personally, and there is an end of it.

Then again, I think that in spite of the scholarship and pains devoted to them, they are still an unfamiliar,

if not an unknown quantity in literature. Text-books still repeat old fallacies and shibboleths about them; still call the author of "Nimphidia" a dullard and Burton's closely knit medical treatise a thing of shreds and patches -fallacies as foolish in their way as Arnold's " ineffectual angel" stuff upon the author of "The Masque of Anarchy"; an age which prefers Quick Returns, Businesslike Results, and tinned Knowledge, has no use for anything but their names.

Yet I confess another reason for my allegiance is their remoteness. "Hey nonny no "-how distant, how strange, how incomprehensible, how appealing! As a factory girl goes to a Lyceum melodrama, so I to them— to escape from the intolerable pressure of Now-I hatch myself out of the egg of the present, that slays the spirit with the flesh, that is the victim of the Dance of Death, not of skeletons, but clanging and maddened machinesto escape from a democracy that is cajoled, swindled and coerced by an incompetent bureaucracy for which it toils and clamours, and from an autocracy of quacks, demagogues, money-hunters, and muddlers that treats the democracy as it almost deserves to be treated. Anguish of the present, in which the spirit is the shrivelled babe that rides upon the blast!

Yet are we so different from the Elizabethans? I quote Camden :

"All things runne round, and as the seasons of the yeare, so men's manners have their revolutions. . . . Our age is not onely faulty, our ancestors have complained, we complaine, and our posterity will complaine, that manners are corrupted, and naughtinesse raigneth, and all things waxe worse and worse. But those things doe stay and shall stay, onely tossed a little to

and fro, even as the billowes of the sea. In one age there will be more adulterers, in another time excessive riot in banquetting, another while strange garmenting of the body, not without deformity of the minde. . . . There will be alwaies tyrants, murderers, thieves, adulterers, extortioners, church robbers, traitours, and others of the same rabblement."

This grave reproof to his contemporaries for their extravagant apparel may serve as well for ours for the lack of it. Yet we English must have travelled some road, even if to an undiscovered bourn, from our Elizabethan ancestors, since it is incredible that, say, Harrison, who wrote "The Description of Britayne" in Holinshed's "Chronicles" of 1577, would have understood why we talked, dressed, drove, worked, played, built, learned, fought, and wrote as we actually do. What is it then that differentiates one age from another?—a trick of dress, a trick of thought, a trick of looking at the world, discarded habits of moralizing? Would the Elizabethans looking at us shudder or rejoice? Do we look at them with our curious confusion of emotions-eagerness, regret, curiosity, impatience, patronage, virtuosity, pride, dutifulness-because Shakespeare has penetrated to the suburbs, because eld has a sneaking regard for the caperings of youth, or because they were the first to unbolt the gates for the entry of that uncertain monster, Modernism, half-angel and half-brute?

For do not forget that theirs was the key. Patriotism was invented in 1588; the Church accomplished her final compromise; the State was realizing its concept of sovereignty; the world stretched its confines nearly as far as they could go; the earth began to revolve about the sun (John Dee, who captured Elizabeth's interest if