ncy to dissociate modern writing from the continuous stream of
English and world literature. Incidentally the didacticism of modern
writers, and their absorption in the affairs of the moment, have not
only served to make a breach between themselves and English literature
as a whole, to the detriment of their perspective, but have also set a
gulf between themselves and those of another school, for whom world
literature is more important than the literature of to-day, for whom
erudition and interest in the past are not to be lightly dismissed as
academicism. I can imagine no greater disaster to letters than a
breach between the literary originator and the man of learning. Such a
breach can only mean that learning is cast back upon itself, loses
humanity, and becomes academic; and that the author who despises or
ignores erudition, and with it the sense of human continuity and
permanence for which it ought to stand, tends to become opinionative
and shallow. His work must lack the imaginative range, the mellowness,
the beauty which cannot take form through instinct alone, which cannot
be expressed by those who have not lovingly studied the models of
antiquity and our own literature, who have not sought contact with the
life of other times as well as with the life of to-day.

The great gain to literature in recent years is that it is more
closely related to action and those general ideas which lead to
action. Its great corresponding defect--and this is immeasurable--is
its loss in form, in universality, in that disinterestedness which is
essential to art. Erudition, when it is humane, and even when it is
merely academic, has, at any rate, always that disinterestedness which
is essential alike to science and art. If it is humane--as it was, on
the whole, in the Elizabethan age--its whole moral support, vast in
this age of idol-worshippers, will be on the side of disinterested art
and literature. We do not hope, or wish, that all authors should be
men of learning--they should be of all sorts. But if authors and men
of learning continue to be removed in sympathy, interests, and ideals,
it is a sign that both are in a bad way.

II

PROFESSIONAL POLITICS

"Take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you
wish: that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds
of much worse matter in his composition." These words were written by
an irresponsible fellow before the days of "responsibility"