tility and social sympathy. Each desires to express himself and yet in
that very act to win the admiration and liking of his fellows. The great
object is to wear the weeds of humanity with a difference. Some authors,
it is true, like timid or lazy dressers, desire only to conform to usage.
But these, as M. Brunetiere remarks in one of his historical essays, are
precisely the authors who do not count. An author who respects himself
is not content if his work is mistaken for another's, even if that other
be one of the gods of his idolatry. He would rather write his own
signature across faulty work than sink into a copyist of merit. This
eternal temper of self-assertion, this spirit of invention, this
determination to add something or alter something, is no doubt the
principle of life. It questions accepted standards, and makes of
reaction from the reigning fashion a permanent force in literature. The
young want something to do; they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom
where no land remains to be taken up, nor will they allow the praise of
the dead to be the last word in criticism. Why should they paraphrase
old verdicts?

The sway of Fashion often bears hardest on a good author just dead, when
the generation that discovered him and acclaimed him begins to pass away.
Then it is not what he did that attracts the notice of the younger sort,
but what he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be no great thinker.
Pope, who, when his star was in the ascendant, was "Mr. Pope, the new
Poet," has to submit to examination by the Headmaster of Winchester, who
decides that he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. Shakespeare
is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree
of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly in clear and
vigorous English, that Shakespeare has no capacity for tragic writing.
Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renaissance, into the Gothic
darkness. So the pendulum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, even
in the shortest of its variable oscillations, to revisit the greatest
writers, who are nearest to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are
raised by one age into the very essentials of good poetry, are denied the
name of poetry by the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is the
exploded vice of another; and Romance comes in and goes out with secular
regularity.

The meaning of Romance will never come home to him who seeks for it in
mode