hese people were called Tories8 in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious9 term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politician

they became restive under this treatment.

This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back

t is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls.

fathers

It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.

we”, “us”, “they” and “you”?

wo years after the Compromise of 1850, which included a strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Act—which bolstered the ability of Southern planters to retrieve escaped slaves in the North—Douglass praised American political principles while excoriating the country for ways in which slavery made a mockery of these very same ideals.

remind us that there is no limit to the horizon, and that nothing — no ‘method’, no experiment, even of the wildest —is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence.

More accurately indeed we might speak of the inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation

, or ‘that is tragic’, nor are we certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.

e has to have the courage to say that what interests him is no longer ‘this’ but ‘that’: out of ‘that’ alone must he construct his work. For the moderns ‘that’, the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors.

ain.

In contrast with those whom we have called materialists, Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is con- cerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to pre- serve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see.

hat it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important.

n what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

trace the pattern, however disconnected

even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist.

some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr James Joyce®

it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this un- known and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or com- plexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and

semi-transparent

ind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday,’ the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’.

as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of prob- ability embalming the whole so impeccable

writer seems constrained,

labour thrown away

ceases to resemble the vision in our minds.

If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things;

taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings.

is characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for?

e can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a draught b

writers are materialists.

r Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do.

accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whisper- ing that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us.

We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinna- cle.

compare their opportunities with ours! Their masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity.

modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old.