I said nothing. I am a placid person; I dislike quarrels. This, though, is what, if I were fashioned differently, I might have said: “My good, my very good friend,” I would have said, “you despise your own generation. You are content to appeal to posterity. You place your faith in the traditions that have been handed down to you by great writers in the past. Very good, but let me remind you of this--that Matthew Arnold too despised his generation and made his appeal to posterity. It was his hope that in 1923 he would receive the commendation of Robert Lynd, of J. C. Squire, and of Edward Shanks. What was good enough for Matthew Arnold should be good enough for you. The judgments of posterity are likely to be no more profound than those of 1923. For one day this posterity that you so worship will be to-day, and in this club and in that armchair will be sitting a disgruntled poet telling an indifferent friend how much better things were done in 1923. We are no better and no worse than other generations. We are a little different, that is all. And, because we are a little different, what you, my friend, are writing now may be more readily understood in 1950 than it is to-day. But, for that reason, your work will be of no higher quality than that of Walter de la Mare, whose verses give us such pleasure now. If you are popular in 1950 you will be little read in 1980. For that is the way things happen, and your talk about Matthew Arnold is a mixture of vanity and of snobbishness; let me hear no more of it.” I should like to believe that there is to be found somewhere a standard of literary criticism, but the power to appreciate beauty is a quality relative to ourselves: and there are times when it seems to me to be as vain to search for a standard of beauty in literature as it would be to search for one in woman. We respond to a certain type of beauty. And we say of other types: “I am sure, my dear fellow, that she is perfectly delightful. I am not in the least surprised that you are desperately enraptured. But, for myself, as I said, she leaves me cold.” We make no attempt to explain or adjudge a beauty in woman that we cannot understand. Why, then, should we speak so dogmatically of a beauty in literature that does not touch us; why should we deny the existence of a beauty to which we are insensible?