Introduction: ‘A Future Feeling’

Abstract

It is very tempting to begin by paraphrasing D. C. Muecke on irony and say that so many critics have already not defined Modernism that there seems to be little point in not defining it all over again. Equal circumspection about its beginnings would then be enjoined upon one as a matter of course. The trouble is that the argument against such an elegant evasion of the issue has been compellingly set out by Stevenson himself. In a devastating review of J. Clarke Murray’s The Ballads and Songs of Scotland he writes: ‘Now, modesty is a good thing in itself; but the same modesty which withholds a man from resolving a question, should certainly keep him back from publishing the fact of his indecision to the world in more than two hundred pages of type.’

Since we have explored the maze so long without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental water. How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue?

‘Crabbed Age and Youth’

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Friedrich Schlegel

…to break a butterfly on the wheel, or make it walk the plank.

Alastair Fowler