suggest
our only sage attitude to be one of always watching for his inevitable
arrival, ready to put grateful lips to the waters of Hippocrene as soon
as ever they bubble from the blow of his hoof.

[Footnote 8: Address delivered before the English Association, May 30,
1913.]

THE AGONY OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

For a considerable time past everybody must have noticed, especially in
private conversation, a growing tendency to disparagement and even
ridicule of all men and things, and aspects of things, which can be
defined as "Victorian." Faded habits of mind are lightly dismissed as
typical of the Victorian Age, and old favourite poets, painters, and
musicians are treated with the same scorn as the glued chairs and glass
bowls of wax flowers of sixty years ago. The new generation are hardly
willing to distinguish what was good from what was bad in the time of
their grandmothers. With increasing audacity they repudiate the
Victorian Age as a _saeclum insipiens et infacetum_, and we meet
everywhere with the exact opposite of Montaigne's "Je les approuve tous
Tun apres l'autre, quoi qu'ils disent." Our younger contemporaries are
slipping into the habit of approving of nothing from the moment that
they are told it is Victorian.

This may almost be described as an intellectual and moral revolution.
Every such revolution means some liberation of the intellect from
bondage, and shows itself first of all in a temper of irreverence; the
formulas of the old faith are no longer treated with respect and
presently they are even ridiculed. It is useless to close our eyes to
the fact that a spirit of this kind is at work amongst us, undermining
the dignity and authority of objects and opinions and men that seemed
half a century ago to be more perennial than bronze. Successive orators
and writers have put the public in possession of arguments, and
especially have sparkled in pleasantries, which have sapped the very
foundations of the faith of 1850. The infection has attacked us all, and
there is probably no one who is not surprised, if he seriously reflects,
to realise that he once implicitly took his ideas of art from Ruskin and
of philosophy from Herbert Spencer. These great men are no longer
regarded by anybody with the old credulity; their theories and their
dogmas are mined, as were those of the early eighteenth century in
France by the Encyclopaedists, by a select class of destructive critics,
in whose wake the whole p