a crude form
of the hobgoblin and bogey business.

In all the ages of great productive work there were intense
individuality, great freedom, and plenty of failures. _Tom Jones_
delighted the town which was satiated with gross absurdities, some of
them, alas! from the pen of Fielding himself. Shakespeare wrote
happily before criticism had invented the canons of the drama, and Sir
Walter's stories had no reviews to expose his historical blunders. In
the great romance age which began to decline some forty years ago,
there was not a tithe of such good average work as we get now;
criticism had not become a fine art; every one was free to like what he
pleased, and preposterous stuff was written and enjoyed. Of course it
cannot be good to like preposterous stuff, and an educated taste ought
to improve literature. But it is almost a worse thing when general
culture produces an artificial monotony, when people are taught what
they ought to like, when to violate the canons of taste is far worse
than to laugh at the Ten Commandments.

With a very high average of fairly good work, an immense mass of such
work, and an elaborate code of criticism, the production of brilliant
and inimitable successes is usually arrested in every field. Having
thousands of graceful verse-writers, we have no great poet; in a
torrent of skilful fiction, we have no great novelist; with many
charming painters, who hardly seem to have a fault, we have no great
artist; with _mises-en-scene_, make-up costumes, and accessories for
our plays such as the world never saw before, we have no great actor;
and with ten thousand thoughtful writers, we have not a single genius
of the first rank. Elaborate culture casts chill looks on original
ideas. Genius itself is made to feel the crudeness and extravagance of
its first efforts and retires with shame to take a lower place. We are
all so fastidious about form and have got such fixed regulation views
about form, we are so correct, so much like one another, such good boys
and girls, that the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the inventive
spirit are taught from childhood to control themselves and to conform
to the decorum of good society. A highly organised code of culture may
give us good manners, but it is the death of genius.

There are other things which check the flow of a really original
literature, though perhaps a high average culture and a mechanical
system of education may be the most potent.