ame is partial, local, sectional, compared to
the fame of Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray.

What is the cause? I do not hesitate to say it is that we have
over-trained our taste, we are overdone with criticism, we are too
systematically drilled, there is far too much moderate literature and
far too fastidious a standard in literature. Everyone is afraid to let
himself go, to offend the conventions, or to raise a sneer. It is the
inevitable result of uniformity in education and discipline in mental
training. Millions can write good grammar, easy and accurate
sentences, and imitate the best examples of the age. Education has
been driven at high pressure into literary lines, and a monotonous
correctness in literary taste has been erected into a moral code. Tens
of thousands of us can put the finger on a bit of exaggeration, or a
false light in the local colour, or a slip in perfect realism. The
result is a photographic accuracy of detail, a barren monotony of
commonplace, and the cramping of real inventive genius. It is the
penalty of giving ourselves up to mechanical culture.

If another Dickens were to break out to-morrow with the riotous
tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a
thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash.
Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The
_House of the Seven Gables_ would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine,
and _Jane Eyre_ would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the
enormous growth of the _Kodak_ school of romance--the snap-shots at
everyday realism with a hand camera. We know how it is done. A woman
of forty, stout, plain, and dull, sits in an ordinary parlour at a
tea-table, near an angular girl with a bad squint. "Some tea?" said
Mary, touching the pot. "I don't mind," replied Jane in a careless
tone; "I am rather tired and it is a dull day." "It is," said Mary, as
her lack-lustre eyes glanced at the murky sky without. "Another cup?"
And so the modern _romance_ dribbles on hour by hour, chapter by
chapter, volume by volume, recording, as in a phonograph, the minute
commonplace of the average man and woman in perfectly real but entirely
common situations. To this dead level of correctness literary purism
has brought romance. The reaction against the photographic style, on
the other hand, leads to spasmodic efforts to arouse the jaded interest
by forced sensationalism, physiological bestialities, and