The Superior
Person we have always with us. He is, in his essence, a Prig; but when,
as occasionally happens, his heart and intelligence ripen, he loses the
characteristics which once made him a superior person. Whilst he holds
his native status his special art is not to admire anything which common
people find admirable. A year or two ago it became the shibboleth of his
class that they couldn't read Dickens. We met suddenly a host of people
who really couldn't stand Dickens. Most of them (of course) were 'the
people of whom crowds are made,' owning no sort of mental furniture
worth exchange or purchase. They killed the fashion of despising Dickens
_as_ a fashion, and the Superior Person, finding that his sorrowful
inability was no longer an exclusive thing, ceased to brag about it.
When a fashion in dress is popular on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday
festivals, the people who originally set the fashion discard it, and set
another. In half a generation some of our superiors, for the mere sake
of originality in judgment, will be going back to the pages of that
immortal master-immortal as men count literary immortality--and will
begin to tell us that after all there was really something in him.

It was Mr. W. D. Howells, an American writer of distinguished ability,
as times go, who set afloat the phrase that since the death of Thackeray
and Dickens fiction has become a finer art. If Mr. Howells had meant
what many people supposed him to mean, the saying would have been merely
impudent He used the word 'finer' in its literal sense, and meant only
that a fashion of minuteness in investigation and in style had come upon
us. There is a sense in which the dissector who makes a reticulation of
the muscular and nervous systems of a little finger is a 'finer' surgeon
than the giant of the hospitals whose diagnosis is an inspiration, and
whose knife carves unerringly to the root of disease. There is a sense
in which a sculptor, carving on cherrystones likenesses of commonplace
people, would be a 'finer' artist than Michael Angelo, whose custom it
was to handle forms of splendour on an heroic scale of size. In that
sense, and in the hands of some of its practitioners, fiction for a
year or two became a finer art than it had ever been before. But the
microscopist was never popular, and could never hope to be. He is dead
now, and the younger men are giving us vigorous copies of Dumas, and
Scott, and Edgar Allan Poe, and some of them a