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 torrent of skilful fiction, we have no great novelist; with many charming painters, who hardly seem to have a fault, we have no great artist; with mises-en-scene, make-up costumes, and accessories for our plays such as the world never saw before, we have no great actor; and with ten thousand thoughtful writers, we have not a single genius of the first rank.  Elaborate culture casts chill looks on original ideas.  Genius itself is made to feel the crudeness and extravagance of its first efforts and retires with shame to take a lower place.  We are all so fastidious about form and have got such fixed regulation views about form, we are so correct, so much like one another, such good boys and girls, that the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the inventive spirit are taught from childhood to control themselves and to conform to the decorum of good society.  A highly organised code of culture may give us good manners, but it is the death of genius.

There are other things which check the flow of a really original literature, though perhaps a high average culture and a mechanical system of education may be the most potent.  Violent political struggles check it:  an absorption in material interests checks it:  uniformity of habits, a general love of comfort, conscious self-criticism, make it dull and turbid.  Now our age is marked by all of these.  From the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the French genius produced almost no imaginative work of really European importance until it somewhat revived again with Chateaubriand in the present century.  Nor in England can we count anything of a like kind from the death of Goldsmith until we reach Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth after an interval of forty years.  In the United States the great eras of imaginative production have been those which were free from political and military struggles.