in the
world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind;
and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the
intrusion of any other considerations whatever. This is an instinct for
which there is, I think, little original sympathy in the practical English
nature, and what there was of it has undergone a long, benumbing period of
check and suppression in the epoch of concentration which followed the
French Revolution.

But epochs of concentration cannot well endure forever; epochs of
expansion, in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of
expansion seems to be open here in England. In the first place, all danger
of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long
disappeared; like the traveler in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear
our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of
Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though in
infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our own notions. Then,
too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutalizing
influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to me
indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in
the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man, after he has
made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to do
with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the
mind may be made the source of great pleasure. I grant it is mainly the
privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to our railways, our
business, and our fortune-making; but we shall see if, here as elsewhere,
faith is not in the end the true prophet. Our ease, our traveling, and our
unbounded liberty to hold just as hard and securely as we please to the
practice to which our notions have given birth, all tend to beget an
inclination to deal a little more freely with these notions themselves, to
canvass them a little, to penetrate a little into their real nature.
Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign sense of the word, appear amongst
us, and it is in these that criticism must look to find its account.
Criticism first; a time of true creative activity, perhaps,--which, as I
have said, must inevitably be preceded amongst us by a time of
criticism,--hereafter, when criticism has done its work.

It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern
what rules f