tea-table, near an angular girl with a bad squint. "Some tea?" said
Mary, touching the pot. "I don't mind," replied Jane in a careless
tone; "I am rather tired and it is a dull day." "It is," said Mary, as
her lack-lustre eyes glanced at the murky sky without. "Another cup?"
And so the modern _romance_ dribbles on hour by hour, chapter by
chapter, volume by volume, recording, as in a phonograph, the minute
commonplace of the average man and woman in perfectly real but entirely
common situations. To this dead level of correctness literary purism
has brought romance. The reaction against the photographic style, on
the other hand, leads to spasmodic efforts to arouse the jaded interest
by forced sensationalism, physiological bestialities, and a crude form
of the hobgoblin and bogey business.
In all the ages of great productive work there were intense
individuality, great freedom, and plenty of failures. _Tom Jones_
delighted the town which was satiated with gross absurdities, some of
them, alas! from the pen of Fielding himself. Shakespeare wrote
happily before criticism had invented the canons of the drama, and Sir
Walter's stories had no reviews to expose his historical blunders. In
the great romance age which began to decline some forty years ago,
there was not a tithe of such good average work as we get now;
criticism had not become a fine art; every one was free to like what he
pleased, and preposterous stuff was written and enjoyed. Of course it
cannot be good to like preposterous stuff, and an educated taste ought
to improve literature. But it is almost a worse thing when general
culture produces an artificial monotony, when people are taught what
they ought to like, when to violate the canons of taste is far worse
than to laugh at the Ten Commandments.
With a very high average of fairly good work, an immense mass of such
work, and an elaborate code of criticism, the production of brilliant
and inimitable successes is usually arrested in every field. Having
thousands of graceful verse-writers, we have no great poet; in a
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