The Present Age--From 1914

MR. MUIR is a very cautious writer. In his final chapter he says that he has tried to trace the literary developments of the present century, but that in doing so he has had to rely on conjecture rather than evidence. One would have thought that the literature itself provided the evidence. He sees the ideas of the age as in a phase when they have not yet been related to any central conception, but he emphasizes the disintegration of the old tradition far more than the positive results already apparent from new interpretations of the nature of life and society. The appraisement of individual writers is sound and witty, —’Barrie began with great gifts and evaded them one by one,’— but his generalizations are often strange, — ‘The novel has become typically a picture of the middle classes,’ — and his extreme wariness of approach makes his criticism lack adventure and animation.