r Time 226
A Pinch of Salt 227
I Wonder What It Feels Like to be Drowned? 228
The Last Post 229

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND POEMS 231

INTRODUCTORY

_The New Influences and Tendencies_

Mere statistics are untrustworthy; dates are even less dependable.
But, to avoid hairsplitting, what we call "modern" English literature
may be said to date from about 1885. A few writers who are decidedly
"of the period" are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat
earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods.
They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely
decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy,
(3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in
Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism in art,
(6) John Masefield and the return of the rhymed narrative, (7) The war
and the appearance of "The Georgians." It may be interesting to trace
these developments in somewhat greater detail.

THE END OF VICTORIANISM

The age commonly called Victorian came to an end about 1885. It was an
age distinguished by many true idealists and many false ideals. It
was, in spite of its notable artists, on an entirely different level
from the epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, in the main, not
universal but parochial; its romanticism was gilt and tinsel; its
realism was as cheap as its showy glass pendants, red plush, parlor
chromos and antimacassars. The period was full of a pessimistic
resignation (the note popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam) and a
kind of cowardice or at least a negation which, refusing to see any
glamour in the actual world, turned to the Middle Ages, King Arthur,
the legend of Troy--to the suave surroundings of a dream-world instead
of the hard contours of actual experience.

At its worst, it was a period of smugness, of placid and pious
sentimentality--epitomized by the rhymed sermons of Martin Farquhar
Tupper, whose _Proverbial Philosophy_ was devoured with all its
cloying and indigestible sweetmeats by thousands. The same tendency is
apparent, though far less objectionably, in the moralizing lays of
Lord Thomas Macaulay, in the theatrically emotionalized verses of
Robert Buchanan, Edwin Arnold and Sir Lewis Morris--even in the lesser
later work of Alfred Tennyson.

An