To say that the age of literature was dead would be to parody Burke, and to caricature the truth. Yet it must strike the most superficial observer that great writers disappear and leave no worthy successors behind them. If this were merely an accident, it would hardly be worth considering. Just before Spenser, and not long before Shakespeare, began to write, Sir Philip Sidney lamented the decease of poetry, as if it were final. But I suppose no one will deny that the twentieth century, so far as it has gone, is in the old sense of words unimaginative, preferring facts to fancies, and exalting substance over form. Of course, I do not mean or wish to suggest that literature is mere style, though even so exquisite a critic as Matthew Arnold seems to have fallen into that paradox when he glorified Bolingbroke. The Elizabethan age, like the Augustan, was teeming with thought and splendid in action. As anger makes verse, and rage supplies arms, so ideas will find expression for themselves, while no mastery of expression can fill the place of ideas. The decline of literature cannot be due to any want of verbal clothing. It must be connected with some phase, permanent or ephemeral, of the human mind. Маterialism is a good, mouth-filling word, upon which any one in search of an explanation may seize. What, it might be asked, can you expect of a generation which speaks of the British flag as an "asset"? Who would now reject even a small portion of the world for fear of losing his own soul? But we must not confound the magnitude of wealth with the worship of it. Because there are more millionaires than there ever have been before, we must not assume that the

spiritual element in man has decayed. Suppose that a miracle happened and that another Shakespeare arose tomorrow. Is it certain that he would not be recognized for what he was? In the history of English literature the reign of Anne is often coupled with the later years of Elizabeth for literary renown, although the opening of the eighteenth century was materialistic enough. There was not much romance in Swift and Pope, or even in Addison and Steele. There was, to be sure, no vulgarity. Bigness was not mistaken for greatness. There was no sensual idolatry of mere size. Perhaps there is not room in the same world for the German Emperor and a man of genius. That singular missionary of empire seems to crush sentiment with his mailed fist as Hercules strangled serpents in his cradle.

He

is the Philistine incarnate, and the Socialists had no David to send against him. Impervious to ridicule, and blind to notions, he stands for the crassness of unidealized prosperity.

The eighteenth century has been called the age of reason, and reason saved it. The greatest Bishop of the English Church (for Berkeley was of the Irish) said boldly that by reason alone could man judge even of revelation itself. Whether reason was destroyed by the Christian revelation, or by the French Revolution, or whether it still lurks in the recesses of obscure minds, no one would now call it a formidable enemy either to literature or to anything else. Laudatur etalget. At least the second verb is appropriate. Ours is not the intellectual materialism of Hume and Gibbon. It is the repudiation of other than material tests, the cult of the obvious, the demand for large profits and quick re

turns. Eccentricity is popular enough, but there is nothing original in eccentricity. It is only a variation of the commonplace, and most attractive to the commonest minds, as perfect simplicity is to the rarest. One great writer, Count Tolstoy, survives, not accessible to most of us in his own language, but in French or even in English, precious, massive, and splendid. Tolstoy belongs to an old world, to the Russian aristocracy of Crimean days. But in reality he is much older than that. He is often called a Socialist, and Socialism is supposed to be new. Socialism is not new, and Tolstoy is not correctly described as a Socialist. He is a primitive Christian, born out of due time, a remnant of the past, and not a harbinger of the future. As a man of pre-eminent and incontestable genius, he belongs to the ages, not to the age. No other novelist has quite such a power of crowding his pages with perfectly unmistakable characters, all different, all consistent, each as finished as any solitary portrait. The art of Anna Karenina is consummate. The moral force of Resurrection, the beauty of the girl's nature which cannot be degraded even by vice, are more wonderful, as they are more noble, than any art. But Tolstoy is following the gleam, and passing from our ken. He is at war with modern society, out of all sympathy with its idols, and entirely contemptuous of its passions. It may be that in the far distant future he will stand out as one of the few landmarks of the nineteenth century. But he had nothing in common with it, except the accident of birth.

It is at least a plausible view that education fosters mediocrity. Education levels up. Does it also level down? Dean Gaisford, in his celebrated sermon on verbs in μ, observed that classical scholarship had no greater advantage than the pleas

ure of looking down upon those who lacked it. We have travelled far from Gaisford, and nothing is now more despised by the intellectual high-fliers than the scholarship in which he revelled. But they cannot share all his enjoyment, because there is not quite the old gulf. The schoolmaster has been too long abroad in the land. You can almost hear the scratching of his pen. The broad and general results of his activity are beyond all question beneficent, Pope was the last man who ought to have said that a little learning was ȧ dangerous thing, for he had very little himself. He did not drink deep, he tasted the Pierian spring, and yet his literary reputation, if not so high as Milton's, is a good deal higher than Bentley's. In the works of a greater even than Milton we read that there is no darkness but ignorance. And though we must not attribute to Shakespeare the casual sayings of those who mocked Malvolio, this particular phrase seems to bear a personal stamp. It makes for the greatest happiness of the greatest number that elementary teaching should be universally diffused. But the greatest happiness of the greatest number has nothing to do with genius. What sort of education had Keats? There is a familiar law in physical science known as the conservation of energy, according to which the amount of force in the world is always the same, though it is differently distributed at different times. Can the same or a similar principle be applicable to the human mind? Did the production of Comus require that there should be a number of mute, inglorious Miltons, who never found their meaning out, but died with all their music in them? Or is criticism unfavorable to originality? Our last great literary critic, Matthew Arnold, happened also to be a poet, not perhaps a great poet, but a true one.

There never was a greater critic, there has seldom been a greater poet, than Goethe. Unless criticism be mere fault-finding, in which case it is worse than useless, it must be improved by sympathy, and sympathy is fostered by experience. Here, however, we are dealing with masters of the art. It does not follow that a large number of small critics, reading books to find out the mistakes in them, are favorable to the growth of literary genius. The one indispensable quality for the appreciation of genius is reverence, and unfortunately reverence is the last thing taught in the sixth standard. Reverence is the other side of humor. Wit has only one side. I do not think that any one would call this a reverent age. Cynicism is not necessarily irreverent. The cynicism of Rochefoucault is really the indignant protest of an outraged sentimentalist, disappointed by the baseness of mankind. The cynicism of Swift is misanthropic, horrible, tragical, but not contemptible or vulgar. What does militate against all nobility of mind or soul, against all possibility of even realizing greatness, is the cheap cynicism that sees fun in everything and humor in nothing, that finds its highest expression in the wearisome monotony of the mechanical jester. Burne-Jones in one of his letters explains what he calls the "three laughters of the fool. He laughs at what is good, he laughs at what is bad, and he laughs at what he does not understand." Nothing degrades public taste more than this perpetual giggle, this irrepressible grin. With real humor it has no relation at all. When Polonius says to Hamlet, "My honorable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you," Hamlet replies, "You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal," and we smile in easy amusement. But what follows? "Except my life, except my life, except

my life." is, how deep it goes, how closely it is bound up with the most serious things. Carlyle was a true humorist. Was he the last? His most eager disciple, Ruskin, not a humorist of any recognized type, was an eloquent preacher of reverence so long as his mental powers were unimpaired. Where is Ruskin's successor? His style may have been sometimes too rhetorical, his prose too poetical, his descriptions too pictorial, his eulogy and invective too unrestrained. But in his way he was great. He had the note of distinction, largeness of purpose, breadth of view. Quando ullum inveniemus parem? May not the decline of literature, or at least its general levelling down, be associated with the combined decay of reverence and humor? There is wit enough, and to spare. Much of it, indeed, is mere flippancy, as boring as dullness itself. Some of it is of a very high order indeed. M. Anatole France is almost as witty as Voltaire. The salt which keeps M. France himself sound and wholesome is his passionate love of truth and justice. But the school to which he belongs, the sceptical and mocking school, is not favorable to genius. It conduces rather to parody, the monkey's elysium. A good parody of a bad poem is amusing enough. A bad parody of a good poem is the most loathsome depth to which literature can sink.

Then we see what humor

If ever a man kept up the dignity of literature, it was Tennyson. But though Tennyson has not been dead fifteen years, he seems almost mediæval in his remoteness. I do not mean that his best poetry is dead, or can ever die. It is his conception of his task that seems obsolete. Although he made good bargains with the booksellers, he did seriously devote his whole life to the highest literary productions of which he was capable.

Morbidly sensitive to criticism as he was, he felt also that genius had its duties as well as its rights, and conscientiously discharged them. We have no Tennyson now. What should we make of him if we had him? Reverence is the keynote of "In Memoriam," as is humor of the "Northern Farmer." Browning, too, a subtler thinker, though a less melodious poet, had both qualities in abundance. What has become of poetry? It has not disappeared. A very large quantity of very good verse is turned out in English between the first of January and the thirty-first of December. It is good, but it is not great. Do we miss the greatness? That is the point. In the history of all civilized communities there are periods destitute of great literary names. Our peculiarity is that we seem to get on so very well without them. That emptiest of all shallow catchwords, nil admirari, which never yet, in spite of Horace, either made any one happy, or kept him so, is an attitude of mind fatal to originality of genius. If philosophy begins in wonder, criticism ends in lack of admiration, and the strongest proof of mediocrity is always to give moderate praise. To say that literature is lowered by criticism may be to put the cart before the horse. But, on the other hand the two phenomena may have a common cause. Flatness and stagnation may go together.

Most critics, if asked who was the best writer of English now living, would probably answer, "Mr. Goldwin Smith." But Mr. Goldwin Smith is advanced in years, and has long made his home in Canada. Who is there now that can write like Froude? Of Froude's historical reputation this is not the place to speak. What made him great was his mastery of style and thought. We have plenty of excellent writers. Indeed they are too numerous to name. Respectable stature is

common enough. It is the giants that have departed. The symptom is not peculiar to England. It is true of France, of Germany, of the United States. There is no Hawthorne, no Mommsen, no Victor Hugo. Some people put it all down to Democracy. The obvious retort is that Athens was a Democracy, and that to Athens Western literature traces its source. But the Athenian Democracy was a very aristocratic one. It consisted of citizens who were also soldiers. It rejected mechanics, as well as slaves. What has to be proved is that modern Democracy does not respect mental distinction. The evidence is the other way. Some, again, contend that the decline of faith accounts for the decline of literature. It certainly was not so in the days of Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon. But for my part I do not believe in the decline of faith. The fall of dogma is a very different thing. But a theological discussion would be irrelevant here. More profitably might one ask whether the reign of literature is over, and the reign of science begun. Readers of that fascinating book, Mr. Francis Darwin's Life of his father, will remember that the illustrious naturalist at the close of his career was unable to take any interest in literature at all. Even Shakespeare no longer gave him any satisfaction. Was this merely a matter of individual temperament, or did it imply that science is enough, and that the world is tired of verbal exercise? In favor of the first interpretation may be cited the case of Sir Isaac Newton, who abandoned science in middle life for theology and the interpretation of Scripture. But science in Newton's time was an infant compared with science now, and the scientific future is full of exciting possibilities, for which mere literature can offer no equivalent. A scientific professor was once asked whether there was any hostility be