him more than a few words of perfunctory
encouragement: natural that when Virginia Woolf, the best of our younger
novelists, and Middleton Murry published works of curious imagination
and surprising subtlety, critics, worn in the service of Mr. Bennett of
the Propaganda Office and our Mr. Wells, should not have noticed that
here were a couple of artists: but is it not as strange as sad that our
patriot geese, time out of mind a nation's oracles, should still be
unable to tell us whether Lieutenant Brooke, Captain Nicholls, Major
Grenfell, or Lieut.-Colonel Maurice Baring is the greatest poet of this
age?

And in painting and music things are no better. Even our old prejudices
are gone. All is welcome now, except real art; and even that gets
splashed in the wild outpour of adulation. To admire everything is,
perhaps, a more amiable kind of silliness than to admire nothing: it is
silliness all the same. Also, it has brought taste to such a pass that,
except the Russian ballet, there was not last winter [R] in London one
entertainment at which a person of reasonable intelligence could bear
to spend an hour. As for the ballet, it was a music-hall turn, lasting
fifteen minutes, which the public seemed to like rather better than the
performing dogs and distinctly less than the ventriloquist. The public
accepted it because it accepts whatever is provided. Nevertheless, the
subtler of our music-hall comedians have obviously been ordered to
coarsen their methods or clear out, and the rare jokes that used to
relieve the merry misery of our revues and plays are now dispensed with
as superfluous.

[Footnote R: The winter 1918-19.]

The war is not entirely to blame: the disease was on us long before
1914. War, however, created an atmosphere in which it was bound to
prevail. Active service conditions are notoriously unfavourable to the
critical spirit. The army canteen need not tempt its customers: neither
need the ordinary shop under a rationing system: and, it must be
confessed, the habit of catering for colonial soldiers has not tended to
make our public entertainments more subtle or amusing. But the disease
of which taste is sick unto death has been on us these fifty years. It
is the emporium malady. We are slaves of the trade-mark. Our tastes are
imposed on us by our tradesmen, under which respectable title I include
newspaper owners, booksellers' touts, book-stall keepers, music-hall
kings, opera syndicates, picture-dealers