The liberal mind, which I believe in, though I hesitate to define it, has too much work before it to umpire in a dispute over the relative taste of the decayed and the raw. In literature, as in pretty much everything else, the central problem is not the struggle of the old with the new; it is the endless combat of civilization (which is old _and_ new) against barbarism. Under which banner our writers are enlisting is the vital question. Whether they are radical or conservative will always in the view of history be interesting, but may be substantially unimportant. And the function of the liberal mind, with its known power to dissolve illiberal dogmatism, is to discover the barbarian wherever he raises his head, and to convert or destroy him. The Greeks had a short way of defining the barbarian which we can only envy. To them, all men not Greeks were barbarians. By this they meant that only the Greeks had learned to desire measure in all things, liberty safeguarded by law, and knowledge of the truth about life. Men not desiring these things were barbarous, no matter how noble, how rich, and how honest. The ancient and highly conservative Egyptians were barbarous; the youthful and new- fangled Gauls were barbarous. An Egyptian in nothing else resembled a Gaul, but both in the eyes of the Greek were barbarians. Evolution and devolution have intervened. The Gaul has become one of the standards of civilization; the Egyptian has died of his conservatism; but the problem of the barbarian remains the same. There are neo-Gauls to-day and neo-Egyptians. These gentry do not belong to the welter of vulgar barbarism, the curse of a half educated, half democratized age. They are found among the upper classes of the intellect, and can rightly be called by such names as conservative or radical, which show that they are part of the minority that thinks. Indeed, they are not barbarous at all in the harsh modern sense of the word; yet the Greeks would have condemned them. The barbarism of the neo-Gaul is unrestraint ("punch" is the nearest modern equivalent). The neo-Gaul is an innovator and this is his vice. It is a byproduct of originality and a symptom of a restless desire for change. The realist who makes a poem, not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a good current example. The novelist who shovels undistinguished humanity, just because it is human, into his book is another. The versifier who twists and breaks his rhythm solely in order to get new sounds is a third. A fourth is the stylist who writes in disjointed phrases and expletives, intended to represent the actual processes of the mind.