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io FOREWORD
But if by Mr. Bennett's standards we are to
give Marivaux his due, what is there left to
say about Shakespeare ?
Provincialism in time is as fatal to judgment
as the more notorious sort, and a defective
sense of proportion is at the root of both.
Consider English novelists of the last hundred
years. Who but a fool dare predict confidently
for any living Englishman, save Hardy, so
much immortality as belongs to Gait's " Annals
"
of the Parish," or Mrs. Oliphant's Be-
leagured City " ? Now what figure, think you,
would a critic cut who besprinkled these writers
with such compliments as Mr. Bennett peppers
his contemporaries withal ? You need not
answer. Mr. Bennett is a friend of the firm.
Had Mr. Bennett lost his head about
contemporaries who were attempting to solve
new artistic problems I could understand it.
writers wax over-enthusiastic about
Young
Laforgue and Charles-Louis Philippe both
of whom, by the way, died some years ago
and are not much to blame on that account ;
neither should I have the least difficulty in
were it to turn out as it will
forgiving myself
not that I had said too much in
praise
of
Matisse or Picasso. The artist who even
appears to have discovered or rediscovered an
instrument of expression or to have extended
by one semitone the gamut of aesthetic ex-