sion of it, is to rouse a sullen
tendency to attack the figures of art and literature whenever there
arrives a chance of doing that successfully. Popular audiences can
always be depended upon to cheer the statement of "a plain man" that he
is not "clever" enough to understand Browning or Meredith. An assurance
that life is too short to be troubled with Henry James wakes the lower
middle class to ecstasy. An opportunity for such protests is provided by
our English lack of critical tradition, by our accepted habit of saying,
"I do hate" or "I must say I rather like" this or that without reference
to any species of authority. This seems to have grown with dangerous
rapidity of late years. It was not tolerated among the Victorians, who
carried admiration to the highest pitch. They marshalled it, they
defined it, they turned it from a virtue into a religion, and called it
Hero Worship. Even their abuse was a kind of admiration turned inside
out, as in Swinburne's diatribes against Carlyle, who himself fought
against the theory of Darwin, not philosophically, but as though it were
a personal insult to himself. Such violence of taste is now gone out of
fashion; every scribbler and dauber likes to believe himself on a level
with the best, and the positive criterion of value which sincere
admiration gave is lost to us. Hence the success of Mr. Lytton Strachey.

But the decline of ardour does not explain the whole position, which we
have to face with firmness. Epochs come to an end, and before they have
their place finally awarded to them in history they are bound to endure
much vicissitude of fortune. No amount of sarcasm or of indignant
protest will avail to conceal the fact that we stand to-day at the
porch, that much more probably we have already penetrated far into the
vestibule, of a new age. What its character will be, or what its
principal products, it is absolutely impossible for us as yet to
conjecture. Meanwhile the Victorian Age recedes, and it loses size and
lustre as we get further and further away from it. When what was called
"Symbolism" began to act in urgent and direct reaction to the aims of
those still in authority, the old order received its notice to quit, but
that was at least five and twenty years ago, and the change is not
complete. Ages so multiform and redundant and full of blood as the
Victorian take a long time to die; they have their surprising recoveries
and their uncovenanted convalescences. But eve