An editor--one, that is, of a race suspect to my species; for, as the herbivores fear the carnivores, so is it with the likes of me and of him--an editor, I say, has lately spread his nets before me, inviting me to “a symposium of well-known poets and critics.” A banquet, I fear, like that last one of Polonius, “not where he eats but where he is eaten.” The subject of our symposium, the staple of our feast, was to be “What poets since Wordsworth, _especially what living poets_, and which one or two of their poems ... should be given a place in the Golden Treasury of English poetry.” Excellent, i’ faith! Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly. I am by this time a fly getting on in years. I dine out as little as may be, and have developed something of an intuitive sense which tells me whether I am to dine or to be dined upon. So I decline the invitation in the following terms:
“Dear Sir,--I deprecate such proposals as yours, because I cannot think them intended seriously, or (even if they are) likely to be taken so. It seems to me that you are inviting me less to a symposium than to an exhibition, in which I am to be an exhibit. You are asking me, among others, to grant immortality, or deny it, to certain living persons, many of whom are my friends or acquaintances. Entry into a Golden Treasury is the hall-mark of no less a thing, the end and aim of every poet in the world. Once there, a poet is a peer, a knight of a round table. And you expect me to make of myself a Fountain of Honour, to dub knights, deal round coronets? No, indeed, my dear sir. I am many bad things, but I hope not so arrogant, nor such an ass. No man living can predict immortality for his friend, though he may dearly wish that he could.
“It is not possible to be sure of current literature for the plain reason that local and temporary interests must inevitably bias the judgment. I don’t mean by that one’s interest in one’s friend. At this hour the war of 1914-18 is the most portentous thing we know or can think of. I would not mind staking a round sum upon the probability of nine out of ten of your banquetters selecting recent war poems by recent young warriors. And yet how many war poems are there in the existing Golden Treasury? _The Burial of Sir John Moore_, of course; but what others? And yet again, is it not only too possible that, before your new Golden Treasury were in the printer’s hands, another war would be burning out the memory of its forerunner, and wringing from us new war poems whose appositeness would make immortality more obviously theirs than of any which you had in type? You see? That is one of the difficulties in which you would land me, supposing that you were serious.”