l romance of the future
is the true poetic function of women. It is their own realm, in which
they will doubtless achieve yet unimagined triumphs. Men, revolting
from this polite and monotonous world, are trying desperate expedients.
But they are all wrong; the age is against it. Try to get out of
modern democratic uniformity and decorum and you may as well try to get
out of your skin. Mr. Stevenson was driven to playing at Robinson
Crusoe in the Pacific, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling once seemed bent on
dying in a tussle with Fuzzy-Wuzzy in the Soudan. But it is no good.
A dirty savage is no longer a romantic being. And as to the romance of
the wigwam, it reminds me of the Jews who keep the Feast of Tabernacles
by putting up some boughs in a back yard.

Let us have no nonsense, no topsy-turvy straining after new effects,
which is so wearisome to those who love the racy naturalism of Parson
Adams and Edie Ochiltree. But let us have no pessimism also. The age
is against the romance of colour, movement, passion, and jollity. But
it is full of the romance of subtle and decorous psychology. It is not
the highest art: it is indeed a very limited art. But it is true art:
wholesome, sound, and cheerful. The world does not exist in order to
supply brilliant literature; and the march of democratic equality and
of decorous social uniformity is too certain a thing, in one sense too
blessed a thing, to be denied or to be denounced. An age of colour,
movement, variety, and romantic beauty will come again one day, we know
not how. There will be then a romance of passion and incident, of
strenuous ambition and mad merriment. But not to-day nor to-morrow.
Let us accept what the dregs of the nineteenth century can give us,
without murmuring and repining for what it cannot give and should not
seek to give.

In this little series of studies, I shall make no attempt to estimate
the later literature of the Victorian Age, nor will I at all refer to
any living writer. Nor shall I deal with social and moral philosophy,
poetry, art, or religion. I propose to look back, from our present
point of view, on the literature, in the narrower sense of the term,
produced in the earlier part of the Queen's reign.

II

THOMAS CARLYLE

It is now for about half a century that the world has had all that is
most masterly in the work of Thomas Carlyle. And a time has arrived
when we may very fairly seek to weigh the sum total of influen