To us it is difficult to believe that it will not: unless the nervous unrest, the absence of leisure and of the inclination so to employ leisure, are worse even than we suppose them to be. We see in much of the work of the younger men a vigour, a passion, a catholicity of interest, a zest for all life, that nothing but the most ambitious tasks could satisfy. But when we ask of what nature such works are likely to be we cannot answer. This one observation may be made: the demand for long poems is commonly coupled with a demand for doctrine. The poets are to add to scientific knowledge or to contribute new notions towards political or moral development: they are to dogmatise, to enlighten, to direct. Well, poets have done such things. But not all poets have considered it their business to be religious teachers, political liberators, or contentious intellectuals. The question: What did Shakespeare stand for? is disputed to this day. They have read many theories into him but got very few out of him. That he admired fidelity, hated cruelty, believed in honour, and loved his country, might be postulated of him; but the truths he stated there were old truths, and he stated them only incidentally: he did not write his plays with the primary object of illustrating principles, above all principles invented by himself. Milton has been called the poet of Puritanism, and Shelley the poet of Liberalism, but there is no "ism" for Shakespeare, and a very, very small one for Keats. The very persons who most insistently demand "ismatic" poetry are most contemptuous of the didactic, informative and disputatious parts of the works of the late Lord Tennyson, who began as a pure Keatsiam poet. Non omnia possumus omnes: and, over and above this, it is most important to remember that poets, like other men, are affected by the intellectual conditions of their own times. If there is a clear tendency some of the poets will be caught up in it. But the men are very rare who generate their own spiritual revelations in some secluded corner of an antipathetic world. Wordsworth and Shelley were what is called "philosophic poets," but their age was the age of Rousseau and Godwin, of the Libertarian movements that were part cause and part effect of the French Revolution. If the human spirit is moving in one definite direction at this moment we can only say that we do not know what that is. A generation of thorough and often conscienceless scepticism, followed by a breakdown of civilisation, has produced a mental and moral chaos, a welter of doubt amid which numbers of the doubters make random and mutually contradictory affirmations. Something concrete will, if the race is to live, emerge; but we are not yet in a position to see it. Nor are we, as mere holders up of the mirror of nature, in a position as yet to see the vast events in our own material world. For the great philosophic poem we have probably still many years to wait; for the epic of the German war we may have a century to wait; for a great drama we may arguably, owing to the peculiar conditions of the theatre, have to wait for a generally accepted scale of values which does not at present exist. But the imaginative temper is abroad, and the next generation may be a great era in English literature.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
THE announcement of a new and especially sumptuous edition of the works of Mr. Thomas Hardy, to be known as the Mellstock, reminds us that there are other authors to whom the same process might be applied with equal benefit to themselves and to their readers. The collected edition presents a writer's career in an orderly shape and in proper perspective: it first permits a sober and probable judgment to be passed on his achievement. We understand that the works of Mr. Joseph Conrad will shortly be collected and issued as a whole; and this will certainly reveal in a definite manner what is now vaguely felt as to his greatness. We believe also that a definitive issue of the writings of Mr. Max Beerbohm is in contemplation. It is to be hoped that it will be found possible to include the full list of his drawings, in some shape not too incompatible with the rest of the volumes. The Collected Poems of Mr. Walter de la Mare have been announced as in preparation; and this will, we think, mark a definite stage in the career of a poet whose real value is not yet fully appreciated. But there are authors, concerning whom no announcement is made, who might be added to the list with advantage. What might be called "selected-collected" editions of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton would very likely secure for these writers a much higher place in contemporary literature than current opinion is always ready to give them.
Mr. Chesterton will shortly start for the Holy Land. He intends to write a book about it. The book may, and probably will, be his best, for obvious reasons. It is commonly remarked even by those who think him one of the greatest natural geniuses and, at bottom, one of the wisest men of our time that he has never yet written the books of which he is capable. His best books, such as The Ballad of the White Horse and A Short History of England, are, for all their fine qualities, too slight to give his powers full room for display. As a rule, though he cannot be accused of a lack of energy, he has seemed never to put into a whole book that last effort which is necessary if a work is to be completely satisfactory; he has bothered too little, content to waste his imaginative largesse on hastily-written romances and polemical articles. How good The Flying Inn might have been had a little more trouble been taken with it! In Palestine, away from politics and journalism, with a new and romantic landscape around him, in the home of our religion and on the fields of the Crusades, he may provide the last answer to those who do not see an artist in him.
Mr. Percy Lubbock's edition of Henry James's letters will, it is expected, be published in the spring. Mr. Edmund Gosse, with the letters as a starting-point, has written his memories of James. These will be published, in two instalments, in the London Mercury.