a bourgeois sort of civilisation, but
it is not a particularly fine or fruitful civilisation, because it
deals so exclusively with material things. I do not wish to decry the
race, because it has force, toughness, and fine working qualities; but
we do not know what to do with our prosperity when we have got it; we
can make very little use of leisure; and our idea of success is to
have a well-appointed house, expensive amusements, and to distribute a
dull and costly hospitality, which ministers more to our own
satisfaction than to the pleasure of the recipients.

There really can be few countries where men are so contented to be
dull! There is little speculation or animation or intelligence or
interest among us, and people who desire such an atmosphere are held
to be fanciful, eccentric, and artistic. It was not always so with our
race. In Elizabethan times we had all the inventiveness, the love of
adventure, the pride of dominance that we have now; but there was then
a great interest in things of the mind as well, a lively taste for
ideas, a love of beautiful things and thoughts. The Puritan uprising
knocked all that on the head, but Puritanism was at least preoccupied
with moral ideas, and developed an excitement about sin which was at
all events a sign of intellectual ferment. And then we did indeed
decline into a comfortable sort of security, into a stale classical
tradition, with pompous and sonorous writing on the one hand, and with
neatness, literary finish, and wit rather than humour on the other.
That was a dull, stolid, dignified time; and it was focussed into a
great figure of high genius, filled with the combative common-sense
which Englishmen admire, the figure of Dr. Johnson. His influence, his
temperament, portrayed in his matchless biography, did indeed dominate
literary England to its hurt; because the essence of Johnson was his
freshness, and in his hands the great rolling Palladian sentences
contrived to bite and penetrate; but his imitators did not see that
freshness was the one requisite; and so for a generation the pompous
rotund tradition flooded English prose; but for all that, England was
saved in literature from mere stateliness by the sudden fierce
interest in life and its problems which burst out like a spring in
eighteenth-century fiction; and so we come to the Victorian era, when
we were partially submerged by prosperity, scientific invention,
commerce, colonisation. But the great figures of