![]() ![]() As for ' anyone ' -especially anyone in the intermediate realm ofprint-feeling the slightest responsibility for the literary or intellectual health of England or of any other nation. There may be to-day some conception of the nation as a whole, but the sense of the nation as a total intellectual organism is, to put it mildly, deficient. When literature is not active when the word is not constantly striving toward precision, the nation decays in its head. Position: there ought to be an active literature for if its literature be not active, a nation will die at the top. I doubt if any of us in 1 9 1 I clearly articulated the pro4 The belief was probably in the phase : tradition. In said milieu arrived Mr Monro with a confused belief that there ought to be literature or, perhaps one should say, national minstrelsy. The sense that the country is ill because it can com prehend neither the revolution of the word nor the rectification of the word, is still alien to English sensi bility. All these were strange and damnable heresies. ![]() The idea chat words should defme what they mention, that good letters have some significance in the health of the State, that poetry was before England, and so forth. The world war startled a few of them into thought, the Russian revolution and the later fiscal calamities have perhaps clouded their declining years with a vague adumbration. His more-esteemed contemporaries have gone on for twenty years in unconsciousness and will die ultimately in their darkness. I make chat statement with no irony and no malice. We used also to say chat Harold would get round to knowing it about f1ve years after he had been cold. These writers were inevitably dull with the dullness of all the Wordsworthian left over. He would come to table one week with the portentous news that Wub babua was a great author, two weeks later Bevidro was a great writer. His gift for admiration was a danger, his earnestness was a danger, co himself chat is. Suspicious, but Harold by reason of his ten drops of Latin blood or his half-pine of Scots idem, was pervaded by a vague uneasiness in his sadness. The rest were unconscious and un' The Criteric>ll, July In 1 9 1 0 or 1 9 1 1, or whenever ic was chat Mr Monro returned from Italy co evangelize his unappreciative nation, we used to distinguish him from most of his circle or from those authors whom he spasmodically admired, by saying that he alone among them suffe red from his stupidity. One's strongest regret is for the passing of an honest man from a milieu where honesty, in the degree he possessed ic, is by no means a matter of course. Monro was ' slightly known ' as an author, widely known as a social worker in his particular line, and moderately, I suppose, known as an editor. ![]() An analysis of the why need not necessarily be taken as an excursion into criticism of pure letters. I doubt if any death in, or in the vicinity of, literary circles could have caused as much general regret as that of Mr Harold Monro, among people who had no exaggerated regard for his writing. It has allowed every parasite and nitwit to present himselfas a critic, and thousands of essayists incapable of understanding a man's work or his genius have found opportunity in a discussion of wash lists. He evil done by Sec Beuve is considerable and incalculable. HAR OLD M ONR01 ' Alas, my broder, so mote it be.' ![]()
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