The Star in the West

22 THE STAR IN THE WEST frenzy : “ The man must be prurient and lecherous as a dog -faced baboon in rut to have aught of passion excited by either.” This is all true enough , but I must call a halt . I had not intended here to write a series of apologetics , for I leave that to the poet and his pen , who can well look after themselves ; but what I wished to point out was the deplorable state into which our literature has fallen . Its ever increasing demand for sensation has been its destruction ; everyone now is a mental Trimalchio whose appetite has to be awakened by the most piquant and fantastic of dishes . Scott , Dickens , and Thackeray are still (I believe ) read by an ever decreasing number of school - girls ; Flaubert , Gautier and Balzac — who would have shocked the youthful years of our parents -- have become dull and tedious ; a few cranks praise Tourgenief , Tolstoi and Gorky , whilst one out of every hundred thousand may know that there was such a man as Dostoieffsky . And poetry , O greatest of the Muses , thy fate is truly a sad one ! Much verse is produced which might be placed with last year's store lists — you know where ; some is distinctly good , but it is soon lost in the raging sea of poetic dialect , and hackneyed naïveté . Here and there we come across a charming lyric , which the carping whisky - and - water critic will at once demolish as weak , troubled , vague , etc. , etc. Not long ago my eyes lit on the following which I considered a charming verse from a poetic point of view , if not from that of a morbid anatomist : Look down into the river . Can you see The mingled images the water shows ? So lies my soul in yours . As close as lie The folded petals in an unblown rose .