d which has anything like the same hold on the stage. For
more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate
actor. Though men of real genius have in these sixty years laboured at
the higher drama, they have hardly achieved even such measures of
success as fell to Byron and Shelley with _Manfred_ and the _Cenci_.
With all its lyric and psychologic power, with all its energy and its
learning, the Victorian Age has not quite equalled the age of Goethe.
It is as if its scientific spirit checked the supreme imagination: as
if its social earnestness produced a distaste for merely dramatic
passion.

One of the most striking facts about our modern literature is the
preponderance of the "subjective" over the "objective." The interest
in external events, as the subject of imaginative work, quite pales
before the interest in analysis of mental and moral impulse.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Jane Austen, have completely dominated our age,
and have displaced the epic and legendary themes of Scott, Byron,
Campbell, and Southey. _The Two Voices_, _In Memoriam_, _The Ring and
the Book_, _Silas Marner_, _Vanity Fair_, _Bleak House_, dissect brain
and heart, but do not make their prime motive in any thrilling history.
The crisis of modern romance goes on in the conscience, not in the
outside world. Hence the enormous multiplication of the psychologic
novel, a form of art which the eighteenth century would have viewed
with wonder and perplexity. The curious part of this is the striking
abatement of taste for the historical romance, in spite of the immense
extension of historical study and archaeological revival. We know far
more about the past, both within and without, than did our fathers; and
we are always seeking to realise to ourselves the habits, ideas,
aspect, the very clothes and furniture of ages of old, which we study
with sympathetic zeal and in the minutest detail. Yet the historical
romance appears only at intervals. _Harold_ and _Esmond_ are both more
than forty years old, _Romola_ more than thirty years old. They are
none of them quite unqualified successes; and no later historical
romance has approached these three in power and interest. Why is it,
that, in an age pre-eminently historical, in an age so redundant of
novels, the historical novel is out of fashion? Partly, no doubt, our
romancers shun comparison with the mighty Wizard of the North; partly,
the analytic genius of our time so greatly exc