Universities to begin their careers are going up there now. Other men who would have had five years' practice in literature are beginning their apprenticeship. The result is chaos and confusion, which will not vanish for some time. I think three years more must elapse before we can with any certainty reckon how we stand and bewail our poverty, or rejoice in our wealth, of good writers. And not before that time can we say what the young generation is going to do.
Prophecies on this point are by no means infrequent. The young generation, it is proclaimed by both young men and old men, in varying accents of delight and terror, is going to kick over the traces, revolt against all authority, spit on grammar and drag down the grey hairs of metre in ignominy to the grave. In a word, literature is "going red." But there are so many ways of looking at these things. Mr. Jones, a respectable and learned critic, aged sixty-four, sees in front of him young Smith, who likes experimenting in new metres, and young Robinson, who begins his poems with such lines as "Vriii—boum—boum—iiiii." Smith thinks Robinson a sensational idiot and Robinson, outraged by the fact that Smith's newly invented stanzas both scan and rhyme, denounces him as an academic imbecile. Mr. Jones drops a tear over the pair of them and deplores the revolutionary tendencies of the young. Both Smith and Robinson take refuge in historical analogy and tell themselves and the world that the old have always opposed innovation, that Romanticism triumphed over the effete Augustans and so forth and so on. But it would be curious if justifiable innovations had a monopoly of the opposition of the old. The world is full of fools and some of these fools, it must be allowed, will sometimes attempt such reforms in art and literature as are consonant with their natures. It is a distressing and perplexing business; and even posterity, apart from the fact that we shall not live to see it, generally delivers an obscure and uncertain verdict. As Rupert Brooke said to the man who demanded a fixed canon of merit in art—"What we want, of course, is a volume of initial essays by God."
