Excerpt from On Contemporary Literature
For permission to reprint the essays in this volume, I am indebted to the Editor of The Nation. Since their original appearance they have been revised and in several instances greatly enlarged.
I have been accused of being a besotted "Victorian" - a kind of creature which ought to be extinct, very obnoxious to the younger critics, yet still so numerous as to constitute a not negligible element in the procession of our days. To give a certain color to the charge I have included an essay on Alfred Austin, whom I regard as the most amusing of the Victorian poets.
Mr. Henry Holt asks me to allay, if possible, the resentment of those who may inquire why Shakespeare has been smuggled, like a Joseph's cup, into the corn of a volume on contemporary literature. Shakespeare is here because I find him the most interesting and suggestive of living writers. His presence helps one to distinguish the values of his competitors. His humanism serves as a measure of the degrees of their naturalism. Reflective readers will perceive, I hope, that the object, if not the ostensible subject, of the essay on Shakespeare is also the object of the essays on Mr. Wells, for example, and Mr. Dreiser and Mr. George Moore.
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