From the FOREWORD.
I APPROACH a task which requires a courage, and is beset by dangers, of which I cannot be ignorant. It is to ascertain which of the great poets and writers of the last century a thoughtful observer may justly blame for that state of intellectual disturbance, of moral listlessness, of public unrest, in which so many of our young men seem to find at once a source of pleasure and a ground of lament.
And the first objection that will be raised is that one invests literature with an exaggerated importance when one casts the responsibility for this situation upon the men who make books. To that I reply, simply, that from the dawn of historical time until our own day books have been the sole means of preserving and transmitting the moral treasures of the race. All that we know about past ages has been learned from the men who wrote in them. All education is but a commentary upon written works. Civilisation and literature are indispensable to each other. Without letters, indeed, our life would tend to be a ceaseless repetition of the same experiences and the same blunders; we could not compare our age with its predecessors.
The soul which animates us to-day was moulded by the poets, the historians, the thinkers whose voices come to us out of the tomb of the last six thousand years; and something of what we write to-day will pass into the soul of generations to come. We should, were we fully conscious of our power to cloud or to illumine the mind of the advancing race, almost tremble with emotion whenever we publish a new page.
Not all classes of books have equal influence, however and, of all the forms in which the thought of man ma; clothe itself, the best and the worst, the most terrible an< the most beneficent, is the form presented to us in work: of imagination — "poetry."
