ed that the performance of the
central years of the Victorian Age was splendid. With those who deny
merit to the writers and artists of the last half century it is
difficult to reach a common ground for argument. What is to be the
criterion of taste if all the multiform exhibitions of it which passed
muster from 1840 to 1890 are now to be swept away with contumely?
Perhaps indeed it is only among those extravagant romanticists who are
trying to raise entirely new ideals, unrelated to any existing forms of
art and literature, that we find a denial of all merit to the Victorian
masters. Against this caricature of criticism, this Bolshevism, it would
be hopeless to contend. But there is a large and growing class of more
moderate thinkers who hold, in the first place, that the merit of the
leading Victorian writers has been persistently over-estimated, and that
since its culmination the Victorian spirit has not ceased to decay,
arriving at length at the state of timidity and repetition which
encourages what is ugly, narrow, and vulgar, and demands nothing better
than a swift dismissal to the dust-bin.

Every stratum of society, particularly if it is at all sophisticated,
contains a body of barbarians who are usually silent from lack of
occasion to express themselves, but who are always ready to seize an
opportunity to suppress a movement of idealism. We accustom ourselves to
the idea that certain broad principles of taste are universally
accepted, and our respectable newspapers foster this benevolent delusion
by talking habitually "over the heads," as we say, of the majority of
their readers. They make "great music for a little clan," and nothing
can be more praiseworthy than their effort, but, as a matter of fact,
with or without the aid of the newspapers, the people who really care
for literature or art, or for strenuous mental exercise of any kind, are
relatively few. If we could procure a completely confidential statement
of the number of persons to whom the names of Charles Lamb and
Gainsborough have a distinct meaning, and still more of those who can
summon up an impression of the essays of the one and of the pictures of
the other, we should in all probability be painfully startled. Yet since
these names enjoy what we call a universal celebrity, what must be the
popular relation to figures much less prominent?

The result of this tyranny of fame, for so it must appear to all those
who are inconvenienced by the expres