with any safety. Yet
the study of the present always, so to speak, includes and overlaps
something of the future, and by comparison at least of other presents we
can discern what it is at least not improbable that the future may be.
What, then, is the present of literature in England?

It can be described with the greater freedom that, as constantly
repeated, we are not merely at liberty _ex hypothesi_ to omit references
to individuals, but are _ex hypothesi_ bound to exclude them. And no
writer, as it happens rather curiously, of anything like great promise
or performance who was born later than the beginning of the fifties has
died as yet, though the century is so near its close. Yet again, all the
greatest men of the first quarter of the century, with the single
exception of Mr. Ruskin, are gone; and not many of the second remain. By
putting these simple and unmistakable facts together it will be seen, in
a fashion equally free from liability to cavil and from disobliging
glances towards persons, that the present is at best a stationary state
in our literary history. Were we distinctly on the mounting hand, it is,
on the general calculation of the liabilities of human life, certain
that we must have had our Shelley or our Keats side by side with our
Wordsworth and our Coleridge. That we have much excellent work is
certain; that we have much of the absolutely first class not so. And if
we examine even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in
much of it two notes or symptoms--one of imitation or exaggeration, the
other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty--which have been
already noted above as signs of decadence or transition.

Whether it is to be transition or decadence, that is the question. For
the solution of it we can only advance with safety a few considerations,
such as that in no literary history have periods of fresh and first-rate
production ever continued longer than--that they have seldom continued
so long as--the period now under notice, and that it is reasonable, it
is almost certain, that, though by no means an absolutely dead season,
yet a period of comparatively faint life and illustration should
follow. To this it may be added as a consideration not without
philosophical weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the
fears, perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of the
literary production of this generation, together with the literary forms
in which, a