s to morality, politics, industry, science, philosophy, or
religion. It is not necessarily injurious to poetry, at least of the
lower flight. But it is adverse to high art. And it is asphyxiating
to romance.

The novelist must draw from the living model and he must address the
people of his own age. He cannot write for posterity, nor can he live
in a day-dream world of his own. The poet is often lost to his own
contemporaries. It may need two or three, five or six, generations to
reveal him, as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth may remind
us. But the novelist must live in his generation, be of it most
intensely, and if he is to delight at all, like the actor, he must
delight his own age. What sons of their own time were Fielding, Scott,
Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope: how intensely did they drink with both
hands from the cup of life. George Eliot, George Meredith, Louis
Stevenson, Howells, James, look on life from a private box. We see
their kid gloves and their opera-glass and we know that nothing could
ever take them on to the stage and ruffle it with the world of the day,
like men of the world who mean to taste life. There is no known
instance of a great novelist who lived obscure in a solitary retreat or
who became famous only after the lapse of many generations.

It is the lady-like age: and so it is the age of ladies' novels. Women
have it all their own way now in romance. They carry off all the
prizes, just as girl students do in the studios of Paris. Up to a
certain point, within their own limits, they are supreme. Half the
modern romance, and many people think the better half, is written by
women. That is perfectly natural, an obvious result of modern society.
The romance to which our age best lends itself is the romance of
ordinary society, with delicate shades of character and feeling in
place of furious passion or picturesque incident. Women are by nature
and training more subtle observers of these social _nuances_ and
refined waverings of the heart than any others but men of rare genius.
The field is a small and home-like area, the requirements are mainly
those of graceful intuition, the tone must be pure, lady-like, subdued.
In this sphere it is plain that women have a marked superiority; it is
the sphere in which Jane Austen is the yet unapproached queen. But we
may look for more Jane Austens, and on wider fields with a yet deeper
insight into far grander characters. The socia