The realist poet, so the Greeks would have said, lacks measure. He destroys the balance of his art by asking your attention for the strangeness of his subject. It is as if a sculptor should make a Venus of chewing gum. The novelist lacks self-restraint. Life interests him so much that he devours without digesting it. The result is like a moving picture run too fast. The versifier also lacks measure. He is more anxious to be new than to be true, and he seeks effects upon the reader rather than forms for his thought. The bizarre stylist misses truth by straining too much to achieve it. Words are only symbols. They never more than roughly represent a picture of thought. A monologue like this, as the heroine goes to shop: Chapel Street...the old hardware shop...scissors, skates glittering, moonlight on the ice...old Dr. Brown's head, like a rink. Rink...a queer word! Pigeons in the air above the housetops--automobiles like elephants. Was her nose properly powdered?... Had she cared to dance with him after all? is not absolutely true: it is not the wordless images that float through the idle mind, but only a symbol of them, more awkward and less informative than the plain English of what the heroine felt and thought. All these instances are barbarous in the Greek sense, and their perpetrators, no matter how cultivated, how well-meaning, how useful sometimes as pioneers and pathbreakers, are barbarians. Some of them should be exposed; some chided; some labored with, according to the magnitude and the nature of their offense. The critics who uphold and approve them should be dealt with likewise. And it is the reader with the liberal mind who is called to the task. He is in sympathy, at least, with change, and knows that the history of civilization has been a struggle to break away from tradition and yet not go empty-handed; he can understand the passion to express old things in a new and better way, or he is not intellectually liberal. It takes a liberal mind to distinguish between barbarism and progress. Next there is the _rigor mortis_ of the neo-Egyptians, the barbarism of the dead hand, called by the unkind and the undiscriminating, academic barbarism.