ABSTRACT
The chief items on the agenda of literary-critical discussion in the period between 1890 and 1918 can be summarized briefly under three heads. The new consensus against moralizing judgement of literary works, and against overt moral didacticism in art, was, then, a broad one. The literary principle that was carried away from the break-up of the Decadent movement was above all the suspicion of moralizing and rhetorical traditions. Bradley has another claim to importance as a mediator between aesthet-icism and academic criticism. And, even more urgently than Bradley, it is a direct contact with the playwright's omniscient mind that Raleigh seeks, for its unparalleled knowledge of the 'eternal truths of human nature'. Henry James's critical writing is a good deal less combative. Along with Henry James, Yeats provided the early modernist critics with a vital example of a late-Victorian and now twentieth-century literary artist dedicated to freeing his craft from the encumbrances of Victorian conventions.
