Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Meredith Revisited and Other Essays
The following twelve essays, written at different times in the last eight years, deal with very different writers representative of very different literatures. At first sight there is very little resemblance between Homer and Ibsen, Meredith and Newman, Cicero and Mr. J. D. Beresford. But any method of criticism which is based on really sound foundations must arrive at some general conclusions which it should be possible to apply to writers even as distantly related as those whose works are treated of in these pages. Criticism, to be successful, must not be one-sided. It should view with sympathy or attempt to view with sympathy, writers of every clime and every age, and though it must be far from sitting on the fence, it must regard with impartial favour the combatants in the secular struggle between the ancients and the modems, neither contemning the ancients as passe or effete because they are ancient, nor refusing modems the privileges of genius because they were born in the nineteenth (or twentieth!) century. It must not Shirk the difficult task of appraising those who have not received the testamur of many ages, though it must not make a cult of the dernier cri. And, therefore, there may be some justification - one hopes-for including in a single volume so many different names besides the plea which Samuel Butler wittily advances for publishing that of which the world seems in no urgent need, particularly in an age when conditions seem to have conspired for the destruction of the writer unless he be a novelist. Some of the essays herein included were papers originally put together for a private society at Gloucester (the XII). The essay on two plays of Aristophanes The Acharnians and The Clouds) appeared originally in the Gloucester journal on the occasion of the. Production by boys of the Crypt School, in 1912 and 1913, of selections from the two plays in the original Greek. The essays were later modified and expanded and now are combined into one longer essay.
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