institutional furniture handed down from the past." The man, who yields
to the lure of Socialism, must sooner or later effect a revolution
within his own mind; if he does not, he will sooner or later return to
his Doll's House, or make an excursion into some field of "pragmatic
romance" where he will build himself a new doll's house.

Granted the truth of historical materialism, how will future
generations look on the literature of to-day and yesterday? To a
generation wholly untrained in theological, metaphysical and dualistic
modes of thought how much meaning will there be in the poetry of
Tennyson and Browning? For my part, I never read Browning now without
being unpleasantly reminded of the aphorism Nietzsche put into the mouth
of Zarathustra: "Alas, it is true I have cast my net in their (poets')
seas and tried to catch good fish; but I always drew up the head of some
old God."

But I am glad to believe that the matchless melody and the chiseled
beauty of Tennyson's verse will charm the senses of men to whom his
curious mixture of pantheism and Broad Church theology, which the middle
classes of England and America in the latter decades of the nineteenth
century welcomed as the ultimate massage of philosophy, will not be
ridiculous only because it will be meaningless. But I am unable to think
of the men of the future deriving any pleasure from our greatest poet,
Browning. On the other hand it is not impossible that the fame of
Swinburne will stand higher in the twenty-first century than it does in
this opening decade of the twentieth.

The men and women of the future will, I am sure, feel themselves akin
to Shelley. They will probably enjoy Byron too, so far as they
understand him; but men and women, who have never known any relationship
between the sexes but that of independence and equality, will be bored
and baffled by that great bulk of Byron's verse which shocked his
contemporaries.

When we turn to the drama, it appears probable that the revolution in
the relations of the sexes will convert into mere materials for the
historian even our greatest plays, such as Ibsen's "The Doll's House,"
Sudermann's "The Joy of Living," Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna," and Shaw's
"Mrs. Warren's Profession."

Are the "educated and professional" socialists prepared to accept gladly
such tremendous changes? They are confronted by a momentous question. It
was of their class William Morris was thinking when he wrote:

"I