That so keen and caustic a commentator as Mr. Chesterton should have been annoyed because he could not turn back the tide of popular enthusiasm which surged and broke at Rudyard Kipling’s feet was natural enough. He assured the British public that “Recessional” was the work of a “solemn cad”; and the British public--quite as if he had not spoken--took the poem to its heart, wept over it, prayed over it, and dilated generally with emotions which it is good for a public to feel. The looker-on was reminded a little of Horace Walpole fretfully explaining to Paris that a Salisbury Court printer could not possibly know anything about the habits of the English aristocracy; and of Paris replying to this ultimatum by reading “Clarissa Harlowe” with all its might and main, and shedding torrents of tears over the printer’s matchless heroine. The asperity of a solitary critic is, however, far less impelling than the asperity of a whole school of writers and of their opponents. Just when the ways of the world seemed darkest, and its nations most distraught, the _literati_ effected a welcome diversion by quarreling over rules of prosody. The lovers of rhyme were not content to read rhyme and to write it; the lovers of polyphonic prose were not content to read polyphonic prose and to write it; but both factions found their true joy in vivaciously criticizing and counselling their antagonists. Miss Amy Lowell was right when she said, with her customary insight and decision, that the beliefs and protests and hates of poets all go to prove the deathless vigour of the art. Unenlightened outsiders took up the quarrel with pleasure, finding relief in a dispute that threatened death and disaster to no one. Few contentions are so innocent of ill-doing. The neighbours whom we counsel most assiduously are the nations of the world and their governments, which might well be doubtful, seeing that they stumble at every step; but which perhaps stand more in need of smooth roads than of direction. It is true that M. Stéphane Lauzanne, editor of “Le Matin,” assured us in the autumn of 1920 that France did not seek American gold, or ships, or guns, or soldiers--“only counsels.” This sounded quite in our line, until the Frenchman, with that fatal tendency to the concrete which is typical of the Gallic mind, proceeded to explain his meaning: “We ask of the country of Edison and of the Wrights that it will present us with a system for a league of nations that will work. If there were nothing needed but eloquence, the statesmen of old Europe would have been sufficient.”