LITERARY "STONES"

A recent English critic has flayed the present literature of his country, and has advised the new writers to cast their eyes backward at the glorious work which was being produced half a century ago. The public cries for bread, he declares, and in return England's young modernists are giving them literary stones. Prose, writers turn out drab, boorish novels, and pseudo poets concoct yards and yards of verse, written "with one eye on Mammon and the other on the Charwoman's Elastic sided Boots". All that remains of a splendid past is an attenuated Hardy in the flesh, and faint memories of Francis Thompson and Swinburne.

Although there is a large measure of truth in his remarks, this critic, who happens to be Basil MacDonald Hastings, the playwright, may possibly be a trifle severe. Certainly, if what he says is so, it is fortunate for the average American's sense or national pride that he has confined his slings and arrows to his own country. Deterred, no doubt, by a press or other material, he has so far refrained from even mentioning the grim realists of the American school, who have made their happy hunting ground the fancied dullness of the Middle West.

Mr. Hastings, however, in urging a return to the standards of the past, seems to have forgotten that the public taste, in large measure, see the standards of the present; he must take it upon himself to say that these are better or worse than what have gone before. The eccentricities of style and the general morbidness of subject matte that seems to characterize most authors of the present day probably reflect a prevailing restlessness in the public mind. Although these peculiarities may not now seem to lead toward any definite goal, it is unfair to condemn them in the mass on the sole ground of non-conformity. They may be striving toward a new school of literary thought, and though their methods may appear strange to one trained in the ways of Shakespeare and Milton, their sincerity, at least, is unquestioned.