puts them together in the wrong way, and that is why it is so confusing and interesting; but there is no reason to be depressed about it. Only iconoclasm need annoy us. In histories of English literature too often you find the same attitude when the writer comes to a period which he dislikes. Restoration Comedy is often said to be a period of debasement, and with Tennyson the young student is given to understand that English literature ceased altogether. But perhaps there are more modern text-books where the outlook is less gloomy. If, instead of reading the history of literature, you read the literature itself, you will find plenty of instances of writers at the most brilliant periods complaining of decay.
George Putman, in the Art of English Poesy, published in 1589, when English poetry was starting on a particularly glorious period, says, ‘In these days all poets and poesy are despised, they are subject to scorn and derision,’ and ‘this proceeds through the barbarous ignorance of the time—in other ages it was not so.’ Then Jonson, in his ‘Discoveries,’ lamenting the decline of literature,
says, ‘It is the disease of the age, and no wonder if the world, growing old, begins to be infirm.’ There are hundreds of others which will immediately occur to you, from Chaucer to Tennyson, though Pope made noble protests on behalf of his contemporaries. You have only got to compare these lachrymose observations with the summary of the year’s literature in any newspaper—‘literary output’ is the detestable expression always used—and you will find the same note of depression. ‘The year has not produced a single masterpiece. Glad as we have been to welcome Mr. Blank’s verse, “Larkspurs” cannot be compared with his first delicious volume, “Tealeaves,” published thirty years ago.’ Then turn to the review in the same paper of ‘Tealeaves’ thirty years ago. ‘Coarse animalism draped in the most seductive hues of art and romance, we will not analyse these poems, we will not even pretend to give the reasons on which our opinion is based.’ Or read the incisive ‘Musings without Method,’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, on contemporary literature and contemporary things generally.
Again, every painter is told that his work
is not as good as last year, and that we have no one like Titian or Velasquez. The Royal Academy is always said to be worse than usual. I have known the summer exhibitions at Burlington House for twenty years. Let me assure you throughout that period they have always been quite as bad as they are now. But we do not want painters like Titian or Velasquez; we want something else. If painters were like Titian or Velasquez they would not be artists at all. When Velasquez went to Rome he was told he ought to imitate Raphael; had he done so should we regard him as the greatest painter in the world? If Rossetti had merely been another Fra Angelico or one of the early artists from whom he derived such noble inspiration, should we regard him as we do, as even the fierce young modern art student does, as one of the greatest figures in English art of the nineteenth century? In the latter part of that century I think he is the greatest force in English painting. I would reserve for him the largest print in my manual of English art. But have we declined since the death of Rossetti? On the contrary, I think we have advanced and are
advancing. You must not think I am depreciating the past. The past is one of my witnesses. The past was very like our present; it nearly always depreciated itself intellectually and materially.
We all of us think of Athens in the fifth century as a golden period of great men, when every genius was appreciated, but you know that they put Pheidias in prison. And take the instance of Euripides. The majority of his countrymen said he was nothing to the late Aeschylus. He was chiefly appreciated by foreigners, as you will remember if you are able to read ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’ (so much more difficult than Euripides in the original Greek). Listen to what Professor Murray says:—
His contemporary public denounced him as dull, because he tortured them with personal problems; as malignant, because he made them see truths they wished not to see; as blasphemous and foul-minded, because he made demands on their religious and spiritual natures which they could neither satisfy nor overlook. They did not know whether he was too wildly imaginative or too realistic, too romantic or too prosaic, too childishly simple or too philosophical—Aristophanes says he was all these things at once. They only knew that he made them angry and that they could not help listening to him.
Does not that remind you a little of what was said all over England of Mr. Bernard Shaw? Of what is still said about him in many London houses to-day? If some one praises him, the majority of people will tell you that he is overrated. Does it not remind you of the reception which Ibsen’s plays met when they were first produced here: when they gave an impetus to that new English drama which I understand is decaying, though it seems to me to be only beginning—the new English Drama of Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. Housman, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Galsworthy, and Mr. Masefield?
Every year the patient research of scholars by the consultation of original documents has caused us to readjust our historical perspective. Those villains of our childhood, Tiberius, Richard III., Mary Tudor, and others, have become respectable monarchs, almost model monarchs, if you compare them with the popular English view of the present King of the Belgians, the ex-Sultan of Turkey, and the present Czar of Russia. It is realised