ABSTRACT
They are probably the two most gifted critics of their generation: by my historical scale a well-marked generation-the first that escaped any direct scathing by the war of 1914-18. That scuppered me, though I took no direct part in it, but worked in the security of the War Office: and, rightly or wrongly, I have always felt that there was a gulf between those who experienced the last war and those who didn’t. That experience gave my thinking the bias of a religious quest, turned me from a fairly promising literary critic into ‘primarily a moralist.’ T.S.Eliot once described me thus to myself. I was surprised, and rather chagrined at the moment; but on rumination found the label apt-and therefore helpful. That was in the days of the brief revival of The Athenæum (1919-1921) over which I presided-really as a fish out of water. I well remember the shock of astonishment when, a year or two later, I read Mr Raymond Mortimer’s death sentence upon me. Writing in the New Statesman he said that many had regarded me as the coming leader of the intelligentsia; ‘but waking no such matter.’ I had been unconscious of the role for which I had been cast, and when I slipped
out of it, in order to become what I was, I was as relieved as everybody else must have been.
