ABSTRACT
In the Eighteenth Century, wigged, silkstockinged, and rapiered, stands gazing with pained eyes at its imagined successor a shadowy, etiolated replica of its own self, the decadent ghost of an achieved perfection. The literary critic is usually anxious to disclaim the possession of any fortune-telling ability. An octopus would be a better image than a snake, and a tree is perhaps the best of all. Poets and original writers are the growing points of this tree. Forking and ramification are not a calamity, but a condition of health. It is his power to present this agony, towards the new morality, that makes Mr Lawrence so significant. An instance of influence, powerful, permanent, but unobtrusive, is the growing interest in psychology. One result of the subordination of reason to feeling may be the state of affairs which I took Mr Huxley to illustrate, feelings too slight and too shifting to dictate any steady or consistent view of life.
