Word: modernism
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...skinned? At royal courts the function of the king's fool was to rush in where statesmen feared to tread. It was recognized as one needful to the safety of monarchy itself. The true word spoken in jest might be the salvation of the throne. Shall opinion in a modern university be more autocratic than monarchy, and revoke the jester's license...
...even easier Hardy, of course, would begin, and we might follow him with Doughty (also in line for his poetry) Conrad, and W. H. Hudson. Bear in mind that these are popular and "sell" and also that they are "classics"--beyond a human doubt. De Morgan is your modern Dickens and in place of Charles Lamb there is Max Beerbohm and a worthy modern equivalent he is. Follow him with James Stephens, possibly Machen, and Aldous Huxley. Hudson leads us to Cunninghame, Graham, and Shaw. For Jane Austen we shall have (let us hope) David Garnett and for Leslie Stephen...
...have not named Henry James, possibly the greatest of modern English language novelists and possibly greater than that. A victorian in "The American" but a contemporary modern (and a model impossible to copy) in "The Golden Bowl" and the "Wings of the Dove"! All modern English writers have copied him and aped him without success. The which has made many of them damn him! After him come Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf. And possibly, too, Marcel Proust, as great but in a limited sphere and another tongue...
...this point it occurs to me that I have named forty authors and I have but scratched the surface. It is good, I think, to scan this panorama occasionally. It is a tolerably good answer to those who wail about modern literature (and who don't read it). Most of these authors should be collected in their original bindings and the lady will, of course, have to do over her library. There will be many cloth books in bright colors and paper labels and the decorator will have to use uncommon skill. Somehow I cannot see Barbellion in calf...
With his questioning of the modern mechanistic trend of our higher education Dr. Muzzey has added his voice to the already appalling number of educators who advocate either directly or by implication, as Dr. Muzzey does, that we should return to the educational method used a century ago. Such criticism has brought to the fore a controversy as old as education itself...