Here, indeed, is the weakness of all artistic criticism: the critic is as greatly influenced by atmosphere, fashion and the æsthetic limitations of a period as the creator; sometimes it is the same atmosphere, and each new novel by George Eliot was acclaimed a classic because her critics believed as strongly in her formula as she did; sometimes the atmosphere is different, and readers in this generation may praise Wordsworth and belittle Byron as vehemently as another generation praised Byron and belittled Wordsworth. Will it never be understood that in æsthetic taste there can be no finality? There is little harm in awarding a Nobel or a Hawthornden prize if we remember that the judges are breathing the same atmosphere as the candidates and that their verdict concerns an author of their own generation; in forty years' time their taste may seem as grotesquely perverted as that of the mid-Victorians who exhausted their superlatives on George Eliot or of the assassin who struck down Keats. That is the price exacted of the critic by posterity for the infallibility which he enjoys in his lifetime. The harm is done when these verdicts are accepted at second-hand by a public which has not read the evidence nor heard the trial. It is neither practicable nor desirable that the work of to-day should be pusillanimously referred to the judgement of to-morrow; but an artistic assessment, to have any value, must be the sum of individual and independent opinions. That independence would disappear with the birth of a literary London. The propaganda of a coterie, the direction of critics, the explanations of authors and the herd-voice of literary society narrow artistic sympathy and stunt artistic originality. Long may England be spared the unofficial Academy. CHAPTER XIII POLITICS IN A DISSOLVING VIEW Often when warring for he wist not what, An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak, Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek, And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot; Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot The deed of grace amid the roar and reek; Yet larger vision than the tongue can speak He there has reached, although he has known it not For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act Over the throes of artificial rage, Has thuswise muffled victory's peal of pride, Rended to ribands policy's specious page That deals but with evasion, code, and pact, And war's apology wholly stultified. 1915. THOMAS HARDY: "_Often When Warring._" I