r has it been so true that fact is stranger
than fiction. Never have the flights of the poets been so evenly matched
by the flights of science. All great engineers, chemists, physiologists,
physicists work in the realm of imagination, of imagination that
projects the unknown from the known. Almost do we think that the
Roentgen ray, the wireless telegraphy, the analysis of the light of the
stars, the serum control of disease are the product of what we might
call pure fancy. The very utilities and conquests of modern society are
the results of better imagination than the world has yet known. If it is
true that the desire to measure and to analyze is now an established
trait, equally is it true that it directs the mind into far and untried
reaches; and if we have not yet found this range of inspiration in what
is called artistic literature, it must be because literary criticism has
not accepted the imagery of the modern world and is still looking for
its art to the models of the past.

The models of the past are properly the standards for the performances
of their time, but this does not constitute them the standards of all
time or of the present time. Perhaps the writing of language for the
sake of writing it is losing its hold; but a new, clear, and forceful
literature appears. This new literature has its own criteria. It would
be violence to judge it only by standards of criticism founded on
Elizabethan writings. We do not descend into crude materialism because
we describe the materials of the cosmos; we do not eliminate imagination
because we desire that it shall have meaning; we do not strip literature
of artistic quality because it is true to the facts and the outlook of
our own time.

It may be admitted that present literature is inadequate, and that we
are still obliged to go to the former compositions for our highest
artistic expressions. Very good. Let us hope that we shall never cease
to want these older literatures. Let us hope that we shall never be
severed from our past. But perhaps the good judge in a coming
generation, when the slow process of elimination has perfected its
criticism, will discover something very noble and even very artistic in
the abundant writing of our day. Certainly he will note the recovery
from the first excess of reaction against the older orders, and he will
be aware that at this epoch man began anew to express his social sense
in a large way, as a result of all his painstaking stud