on literature is
not only felt by our contemporaries, but has affected the literature
of all times; that it is the function of men of letters to be ahead of
their contemporaries and to initiate ideas which are productive of
change; that the history of literature is the history of the progress
of thought and imagination; and that therefore the present age does
not differ in this respect from others. To which I would reply that
whilst other literatures have represented or initiated change, there
has never been a time when so many of the best creative intellects
have consciously concerned themselves with this process, making change
of conditions either their artistic subject or their deliberate
practical object. The reason, of course, is obvious; there never has
been a time when the world was undergoing such a startling and rapid
transformation. It is true, the economic, material, scientific, and
moral changes in the Athens of the fifth century came about quickly
and drastically, and the reconstitution of intellectual and moral
ideas mooted by the Sophists found a profound expression in the
dialectic of the drama. How far the Elizabethans were influenced by
the revival of learning and science, the discovery of the new world
and the expansion of commerce, is a question I need not embark upon.
But it will not be disputed that the face of the world has never in
any known period of history been so changed out of all recognition as
it has been by the scientific and industrial revolutions of the
nineteenth century. The barbarian invasions which put an end to
Imperial Rome can have had no outward and visible effect comparable
to that of the invasion of the machine. What wonder that the
superficial, hurried reader of to-day finds little to satisfy him in
the literature of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, the former
so much concerned either with religion or pleasure, the latter with
the moral virtues or their opposites!

The Renaissance did not reach its moral consummation till the time of
the French Revolution, its intellectual consummation till the
nineteenth century, its material consummation till the twentieth
century and thereafter. The growth of science first affected the
imagination, for it was an emancipating idea; its first offspring was
Romanticism and the idea of liberty and democracy. But science as it
progressed in the nineteenth century came, first with the machine and
the whip, then with the machine and the