mitations of fashionable
garments crowd the shop windows and decorate the bodies of the
vulgar--then the wise know that this fashion will shortly change. And
certainly something similar may be observed in literature to-day.
Cacophony jostles preciousness in novel and newspaper; attempts at
contorted epigram appear side by side with slips showing that the writer
has not the slightest knowledge of the classics in the old sense, and
knows exceedingly little of anything that can be called classic in the
widest possible acceptation of the term. Tyrannies cease when the
cobblers begin to fear them; fashions, especially literary fashions,
when the cobblers take them up.

Yet the production of what must or may be called literature is now so
large, and in consequence of the spread of what is called education the
appetite so largely exceeds the taste for it, that it is not so easy as
it would once have been to forecast the extent and validity of any
reaction that may take place.

If, without undue praising of times past, without pleading guilty to
the prejudices sometimes attributed to an academic education, and also
without trespassing beyond the proper limits of this book, it may be
permitted to express an opinion on the present state of English
literature, that opinion, while it need not be very gloomy, can hardly
be very sanguine. And one ground for discouragement, which very
especially concerns us, lies in the fact that on the whole we are now
_too_ "literary." Not, as has been said, that the general taste is too
refined, but that there is a too indiscriminate appetite in the general;
not that the actual original force of our writers is, with rare
exceptions, at all alarming, but that a certain amount of literary
craftsmanship, a certain knowledge of the past and present of
literature, is with us in a rather inconvenient degree. The public
demands quantity, not quality; and it is ready, for a time at any rate,
to pay for its quantity with almost unheard of returns, both, as the
homely old phrase goes, in praise and in pudding. And the writer, though
seldom hampered by too exact an education in form, has had books, as a
rule, too much with him. Sometimes he simply copies, and knows that he
copies; oftener, without knowing it, he follows and imitates, while he
thinks that he is doing original work.

And worse than all this, the abundance of reading has created an
altogether artificial habit--a habit quite as artificial as a