Page:Under Dispute (1924).pdf/50

 "Why should I pay twelve francs for an umbrella when I can buy a bock for six sous?"

The most hopeful symptom of our times (so fraught with sullenness and peril) is the violent hostility developed some years ago between rival schools of verse. There have always been individual critics as sensitive to contrary points of view as are the men who organize raids on Carnegie Hall whenever they disagree with a speaker. Swinburne was a notable example of this tyranny of opinion. It was not enough for him to love Dickens and to hate Byron, thus neatly balancing his loss and gain. He was impelled by the terms of his nature ardently to proclaim his love and his hate, and intemperately to denounce those who loved and hated otherwise.

That so keen and caustic a commentator as Mr. Chesterton should have been annoyed because he could not