with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its         cathedral; 
with voices -- one voice perhaps, echoing through the         transept -- the 
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal      shores -- contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness         has been 


extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of         modified illusions: 
and France, the "chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly" in 
whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was         originally one's      object -- substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its         emotional 


shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its         imperturbability, 
all of museum quality: and America where there 
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are         smoked on the      street in the north; where there are no proof-readers, no silk-        worms, no digressions; 
the wild man's land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country --         in which letters are written 
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand 

Literature is a phase of life: if     one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if 
one approaches it familiarly,     what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive 
when they are true; the opaque allusion -- the simulated flight 


upward -- accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact     that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment but is 
      otherwise re-
warding? that James is all that has been     said of him but is not profound? It is not Hardy 
the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man 


"interpreting life through the medium of the     emotions." If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the 
critic should know what he likes. Gordon     Craig with his "this is I" and "this is mine," with his three 
wise men, his "sad French greens" and his Chinese cherries --     Gordon Craig, so 


inclinational and unashamed -- has carried     the precept of being a good critic, to the last extreme. And 
      Burke is a 
psychologist -- of acute, raccoon-    like curiosity. Summa diligentia; 
to the humbug whose name is so amusing -- very young and ve-
ry rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps on the "top of a     diligence." We are not daft about the meaning but this 
      familiarity