CULTURINE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXV, Issue 48, 26 February 1908, Page 4

CULTURINE.

An American moralist and philosopher has detected in the earnest pursuit of culture at any cost a sort of pseudo-in-tellectuality that he ca!!s "Cuiturine" — its most vicious manifestations taking tho v form of conversational poso and piffle with a by-product of near literature. It is, therefore, instructive and cheering ,says New York Life, to note the recent remarks of a London jonrnalist, Mr. Clement Shorter, who assures ns that the "conceit of culture" which caught the few in tho seventies and eighties has now caught tho many, so that "the man in the street" is precisely the man who is reading the novels of George Eliot. In Mr. Shorter's opinion "Romola" and the rest were produced by an industry and intellectual culture that had not a spark of genius ; and ho calls upon Mr. Augustine Birrell to re-read "Adam Bede" and "Middlemarch" and reverse the general judgment By issuing an obiter dictum that shall brand them, finally and forever, as "mighty dull." Curiously enough it was Carlyle, if memory serves us, who was similarly affected by George Eliot; only, disdaining Mir. Sbottor's adverbial Americanism, ho called 6er simply dull. Is it- possible that Criticism and popular taste will repeat .themselves in tho case, say, of Mrs. Humphrey 'Ward, nnd that "Robert Elsmere" will be redevoured in tho face of a certain prophetic generalisation by Matthew Arnold, and despite the senso of dreariness uppermost in a few readers of such fiction?