in its
own shibboleths which has seized the cocksure pompous society in which
he disported himself. The rhetoric of a Gladstone based upon the
"eternal truths" which constituted always the foundations of his
political appeals would fail to affect the masses to-day with any
other feeling than that of ridicule. We have already arrived at the
"Twilight of the Idols" at least so far as "eternal truths" are
concerned. They still find however an insecure roosting place in the
pulpits of the protestant sects.

If blows have been showered upon the political "eternal truths" in the
name of which the present epoch came into existence social and ethical
ideals have by no means escaped attack. Revolt has been the watchword
of artist and theologian alike. The pre-Rafaelite school, a not
altogether unworthy child of the Chartist movement, raised the cry of
artistic revolt against absolutism and the revolt spread in ever
widening circles until it has exhausted itself in the sickly egotism
of the "art nouveau." Even Engels, with all his independence and
glorification of change as a philosophy, can find an opportunity to
fling a sneer at Wagner and the "music of the future." The remnants of
early Victorianism cling persistently to Engels. He cannot release
himself altogether from the bonds of the bourgeois doctrine which he
is so anxious to despise. He is in many respects the revolutionist of
'48, a bourgeois politician possessed at intervals by a proletarian
ghost, such as he says himself ever haunts the bourgeois. The younger
generation without any claims to revolutionism has gone further than
he in the denunciation of authority and without the same self
consciousness. The scorn of Bernard Shaw for the moguls of the
academies and for social ideals is greater than the scorn of Engels
for "eternal truths." Says Mr. Shaw, "The great musician accepted by
his unskilled listener is vilified by his fellow musician. It was the
musical culture of Europe that pronounced Wagner the inferior of
Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. The great artist finds his foes among the
painters and not among the men in the street. It is the Royal Academy
that places Mr. Marcus Stone above Mr. Burne Jones. It is not rational
that it should be so but it is so for all that. The realist at last
loses patience with ideals altogether and finds in them only something
to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us.
Something whereby instead of resisting dea