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middleclass audience of which the remnant still survives. But Grub
Street, as Pope prophesied, made continuous inroads. In the nine–
teenth century the history of the man of letters, as admirably told by
John Gross in his book
The Rise and Fall
of
the Man of Letters
(1969) is
largely a civic history; the great reviews we associate with London or
Edinburgh or Boston, and not with universities; the grandest and
most useful and influential editors, the Leslie Stephenses, may have
had university connections but lived near the marketplace. They
catered to the audience described by George Saintsbury as "the gen–
eral congregation of decently educated and intelligent people ." At
this time the bookman could make a better living than at any other.
And as Gross suggests, nothing more surely indicated the coming
changes than the translation of Saintsbury to the Regius Chair at
Edinburgh University, and of Sir Arthur Quiller Couch to the New
King Edward VII Chair at Cambridge.
For the literary profession, and the literary world, were about
to divide and reform in a fashion we can recognize as our own.
There were two developments that seem decisive . One was the
growth in authority of what, for want of a better word, I call the
avant-garde.
I have spoken of Bennett , a man who went to no univer–
sity but read widely in English and other literatures because it seemed
to him part of his mystery to do so . But I also mentioned Arthur
Symons : he was interested in Jacobean drama, but also in Wagner,
in music hall, in French Symbolist poetry, in a great many other
things, about all of which he wrote incessantly. He was a poet, a
verse dramatist, an editor, the friend and counselor of Yeats, ac–
quainted with all the significant figures of the age. His most
celebrated book,
The Symbolist Movement in Literature,
appeared as it
were on cue in 1899 . He wrote more subtle books, but none more in–
fluential. T. S. Eliot is well known to have remarked that
The Sym–
bolist Movement,
which he acquired while at Harvard University, "af–
fected the course of his life"; it was the work that introduced him to
that French poetry which, in a highly personal blend with Dante and
the metaphysical poets and the Jacobean dramatists, formed the pro–
gram for Eliot's critiCism and poetry. Indeed there are poems of
Symons that sound like pre-echoes of "Prufrock." And with his in–
terest in dancing and music hall, his perhaps short-lived respect for
Wagner, as well as in the ways I have already suggested, Eliot is a
little like an updated and of course superior Symons. Some of the
more decadent tones he happily missed, perhaps by being an
American and a pupil of Babbitt and Royce. And certainly
The
