all appear
to have the same tastes. This year it is Croce; last year it was
Bergson; the year before that it was William James; the year before
that it was Nietzsche. In advanced circles you can already say what
you like about Bergson. You will hardly dare to be frank about Croce
till after midsummer. It is the same in literature as in philosophy.
Twenty years ago we were all swearing that Stevenson and Kipling were
two such artists as England had never seen before. We did not say
they were greater than Dickens and Shakespeare. We simply accepted
them as incomparable. To-day, no one who is not middle-aged speaks of
Mr Kipling as an artist, and one is humoured as a fogey by boys and
girls if one mentions Stevenson seriously in a discussion on
literature. Nor can we blame this popular changeableness as entirely
dishonest. We may love an author for his novelty for a time, as we
loved Swinburne for his novel metres and Mr Kipling for his novel
brutalities; and after a while, when the novelty has faded, we may see
that there is little enough left--too little, at any rate, to justify
our primrose praises. It is an ignominious confession to make that we
have been taken in by a new kind of powder and paint, but, as
everybody else has been taken in and afterwards disillusioned in the
same way and in the same hour, that does not trouble us. We do not
mind being ignominious in regiments. It is the refusal to
right-about-face and to march at the public word of command that would
be the difficult thing. We had rather go wrong with the crowd than be
solitary and conspicuous in our rectitude. In the Sunday-school we
used to sing "Dare to be a Daniel," but we sang it with a thousand
voices. The lion's den was an acclaimed resort for the childish
imagination at the moment. In one's surroundings, as a matter of
fact, one could have achieved resemblance to Daniel only by some such
extreme step as casting doubt upon his historical existence. Had one
done so, the commiteee of the school would quickly have made it clear
that Daniel in short breeches and a white Sunday tie was a most
undesirable person. It has always been as great a crime to behave like
Daniel as it has been an act of piety to praise him.

It is because there are so few who are willing to face the terrors of
isolation that any one who will do so gains an easy notoriety. A man
has only to confess quite honestly that he has individual tastes and
failings in order to take a pla