We write no longer as we did in pre-war days. We express ourselves more drastically, go straighter to the point than before. If art has lost something in the process, truth has, on the whole, gained. Flung in lean years upon reality, we ourselves nave grown in some ways harder and more brutal, in others, simpler and more sincere. The moving spirit of the times has made us impatient of devious ways in life, of compromise. We take short cuts to our meaning when we have a meaning at all. Weak work, “pretty” work, mawkish work, is frankly disregarded by all but the most incompetent or immature critic. The price of paper, the expense of transport and the increased rates of library subscriptions make us chary of accumulating purely ephemeral stuff. There is, I suppose, in the hearts of most of us, some sense of shortened time, of lessened opportunity, to make us instinctively value what seems powerful and strong in these uncertain hours which Bolshevism or some other power may lay waste when we know not.

Writers who once held us through cheap means, or whose work had nothing to recommend it but some trick of graceful phrasing, have either learned to think, or dropped out of the widened literary circle altogether, because they could not meet the demands it made upon them. The writers of the past who still move us to-day are men who always had something to say that was worth hearing, and said it with a certain virility and strength.