An age must always decry
itself and extol its forbears. The unwritten history of every Art will
show us that. Consider the novel--that most recent form of Art! Did not
the age which followed Fielding lament the treachery of authors to the
Picaresque tradition, complaining that they were not as Fielding and
Smollett were? Be sure they did. Very slowly and in spite of opposition
did the novel attain in this country the fulness of that biographical
form achieved under Thackeray. Very slowly, and in face of condemnation,
it has been losing that form in favour of a greater vividness which
places before the reader's brain, not historical statements, as it were,
of motives and of facts, but word-paintings of things and persons, so
chosen and arranged that the reader may see, as if at first hand, the
spirit of Life at work before him. The new novel has as many bemoaners
as the old novel had when it was new. It is no question of better or
worse, but of differing forms--of change dictated by gradual suitability
to the changing conditions of our social life, and to the ever fresh
discoveries of craftsmen, in the intoxication of which, old and equally
worthy craftsmanship is--by the way--too often for the moment
mislaid. The vested interests of life favour the line of least
resistance--disliking and revolting against disturbance; but one must
always remember that a spurious glamour is inclined to gather around what
is new. And, because of these two deflecting factors, those who break
through old forms must well expect to be dead before the new forms they
have unconsciously created have found their true level, high or low, in
the world of Art. When a thing is new how shall it be judged? In the
fluster of meeting novelty, we have even seen coherence attempting to
bind together two personalities so fundamentally opposed as those of
Ibsen and Bernard Shaw dramatists with hardly a quality in common; no
identity of tradition, or belief; not the faintest resemblance in methods
of construction or technique. Yet contemporary; estimate talks of them
often in the same breath. They are new! It is enough. And others, as
utterly unlike them both. They too are new. They have as yet no label
of their own then put on some one else's!

And so--I thought it must always be; for Time is essential to the proper
placing and estimate of all Art. And is it not this feeling, that
contemporary judgments are apt to turn out a little ludicrous,