t great act which had inaugurated
this millennium. Except for individual instances the tragic intensities
of life were over now and done with; there was no more need for heroes
and martyrs; for the generality of humanity the phase of genial comedy
had begun. There might be improvements and refinements ahead, but
social, political and economic arrangement were now in their main
outlines settled for good and all; nothing better was possible and it
was the agreeable task of the artist and the man of letters to assist
and celebrate this establishment. There was to be much editing of
Shakespear and Charles Lamb, much delightful humour and costume romance,
and an Academy of refined Fine Writers would presently establish
belles-lettres on the reputable official basis, write _finis_ to
creative force and undertake the task of stereotyping the language.
Literature was to have its once terrible ferments reduced to the quality
of a helpful pepsin. Ideas were dead--or domesticated. The last wild
idea, in an impoverished and pitiful condition, had been hunted down and
killed in the mobbing of, "The Woman Who Did." For a little time the
world did actually watch a phase of English writing that dared nothing,
penetrated nothing, suppressed everything and aspired at most to Charm,
creep like a transitory patch of sunlight across a storm-rent universe.
And vanish....

At no time was it a perfectly easy task to pretend that the crazy
makeshifts of our legal and political systems, the staggering accidents
of economic relationship, the festering disorder of contemporary
philosophy and religious teaching, the cruel and stupid bed of King Og
that is our last word in sexual adjustment, really constituted a noble
and enduring sanity, and it became less and less so with the acute
disillusionments that arose out of the Boer War. The first decade of the
twentieth century was for the English a decade of badly sprained
optimism. Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amidst
the jeering contempt of the whole world--and we felt it acutely for
several years. We began to question ourselves. Mr. Brumley found his gay
but entirely respectable irresponsibility harder and harder to keep up
as that decade wore on. And close upon the South African trouble came
that extraordinary new discontent of women with a woman's lot which we
have been observing as it reached and troubled the life of Lady Harman.
Women who had hitherto so passively made the