rodigious periods of incubation for a type of which we turn
automatically to the age that saw the last infirmity of Roman
imperialism and of Hellenistic culture. About Victorian men and
movements there is something uneasy. It is as though, having seen a
shilling come down "tails," one were suddenly to surprise the ghost of a
head--you could have sworn that "heads" it was. It doesn't matter, but
it's disquieting. And after all, perhaps it does matter. Seen from odd
angles, Victorian judges and ministers take on the airs of conspirators:
there is something prophetic about Mr. Gladstone--about the Newcastle
programme something pathetic. Respectable hypotheses are caught implying
the most disreputable conclusions. And yet the respectable classes
speculate while anarchists and supermen are merely horrified by the
card-playing and champagne-drinking of people richer than themselves.
Agnostics see the finger of God in the fall of godless Paris.
Individualists clamour for a large and vigilant police force.

That is how the nineteenth century looks to us. Most of the mountains
are in labour with ridiculous mice, but the spheres are shaken by storms
in intellectual teacups. The Pre-Raffaelites call in question the whole
tradition of the Classical Renaissance, and add a few more names to the
heavy roll of notoriously bad painters. The French Impressionists
profess to do no more than push the accepted theory of representation to
its logical conclusion, and by their practice, not only paint some
glorious pictures, but shake the fatal tradition and remind the more
intelligent part of the world that visual art has nothing to do with
literature. Whistler draws, not the whole, but a part of the true moral.
What a pity he was not a greater artist! Still, he was an artist; and
about the year 1880 the race was almost extinct in this country.[22]

Through the fog of the nineteenth century, which began in 1830, loom
gigantic warnings. All the great figures are ominous. If they do not
belong to the new order, they make impossible the old. Carlyle and
Dickens and Victor Hugo, the products and lovers of the age, scold it.
Flaubert points a contemptuous finger. Ibsen, a primitive of the new
world, indicates the cracks in the walls of the old. Tolstoi is content
to be nothing but a primitive until he becomes little better than a
bore. By minding his own business, Darwin called in question the
business of everyone else. By hammering new sparks out