the witty and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or
ten years, which runs through such works of a real though varying
ingenuity as "Dodo," or "Concerning Isabel Carnaby," or even "Some
Emotions and a Moral," may be expressed in various ways, but to most of
us I think it will ultimately amount to the same thing. This new
frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an
unuttered joy. The men and women who exchange the repartees may not
only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them
might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next. They are
joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of
the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh. Even when they talk pure
nonsense it is a careful nonsense--a nonsense of which they are
economical, or, to use the perfect expression of Mr. W. S. Gilbert in
"Patience," it is such "precious nonsense." Even when they become
light-headed they do not become light-hearted. All those who have read
anything of the rationalism of the moderns know that their Reason is a
sad thing. But even their unreason is sad.

The causes of this incapacity are also not very difficult to indicate.
The chief of all, of course, is that miserable fear of being
sentimental, which is the meanest of all the modern terrors--meaner
even than the terror which produces hygiene. Everywhere the robust and
uproarious humour has come from the men who were capable not merely of
sentimentalism, but a very silly sentimentalism. There has been no
humour so robust or uproarious as that of the sentimentalist Steele or
the sentimentalist Sterne or the sentimentalist Dickens. These
creatures who wept like women were the creatures who laughed like men.
It is true that the humour of Micawber is good literature and that the
pathos of little Nell is bad. But the kind of man who had the courage
to write so badly in the one case is the kind of man who would have the
courage to write so well in the other. The same unconsciousness, the
same violent innocence, the same gigantesque scale of action which
brought the Napoleon of Comedy his Jena brought him also his Moscow.
And herein is especially shown the frigid and feeble limitations of our
modern wits. They make violent efforts, they make heroic and almost
pathetic efforts, but they cannot really write badly. There are
moments when we almost think that they are achieving the effect, but
our