Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

SOME EMINENT VICTORIANS
A Study for the picture of King Cophetua
( Philip Comyns Carr )
By Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart.
PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS IN THE WORLD OF ART AND LETTERS BY J. COMYNS CARR
LONDON DUCKWORTH & CO. MCMVIII

Those of us who have emerged from the Victorian Era with an undiminished reverence for the great names which have made it memorable, must be prepared to endure with patience the pitying tolerance, or even the indulgent rebuke, of the men who herald a younger generation.
It was only a few weeks ago that I ventured to enquire of a cultivated young writer of the newer school if Dickens was now much read by the generation which presumably he had a claim to represent. The question gave him no pause. In a sentence that was dictated solely, as it seemed, by a sincere desire to impart accurate information, he gravely informed me that among young men of culture Dickens was now never read after the age of fourteen. I confess that, despite the coldly judicial tone of this utterance, I was not entirely convinced, for I happen to know even young people who are still so far belated in their taste as to regard Dickens as an incomparable genius. But the statement helped me at any rate to realise how easy it is to grow old-fashioned, and suggested to me that in addressing an age which believes that art, like science, is always advancing, it would be prudent, on the threshold of these reminiscences of some of the men I have known and whose work I have worshipped, to make frank avowal of my own faith, and humbly to confess my limitations.
Let me say, then, that in the region of Art and Literature I am still an impenitent Victorian. I have no desire to disparage the work of those who profess a more modern creed, and I think, although this perhaps may be vainglorious boasting, that I am not unable to appreciate the more instant appeal of a later day. But my talk with younger men, whose comradeship delights me, makes it often abundantly clear to me that I am disqualified, perhaps by age, from sharing to the full measure their more recent enthusiasms. Our occasional divergence of feeling, which it would be idle not to recognise, rests in some cases upon an essential difference in the point of view. The progress of science which, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Gladstone in regard to our revenue, is in our day “advancing by leaps and bounds,” has, I think, set some younger men aglow with the thought that art too is destined, with the passing of the ages, to claim and to inherit a realm correspondingly enlarged.