Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are excellent things, but they are the death of romance.  The essence of romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the unconventional.  Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all romantic types of life.  The England of Fielding and the Scotland of Scott were breezy, boisterous, disorderly, picturesque, and jolly worlds, where gay and hot spirits got into mischief and played mad pranks as, in the words of the old song, “They powlered up and down a bit and had a rattling day.”  Laws, police, total abstinence, general education, and weak digestions have put an end to pranks, as we are all proud to say.  The result is that Romance, finding little of romance in the real world, has taken two different lines in the desperate effort to amuse us somehow.  The virtuous line is the phonographic reproduction of everyday life in ordinary situations.  The disreputable line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced, unreal, unlovely, and hysterical sensationalism.

It cannot be more than a paradox to pretend that fin de siecle has anything to do with it.  But it is a curious coincidence how the last decade of modern centuries seems to die down in creative fertility.  The hundred millions who speak our English tongue have now no accepted living master of the first rank, either in verse or in prose.  In 1793 there was not one in all Europe.  In 1693, though Dryden lingered in his decline, it was one of the most barren moments in English literature.  And so in 1593, though the Faery Queen was just printed, and Shakespeare had begun to write, there were nothing but the first streaks which herald the dawn.  But this is obviously a mere coincidence; nor can an artificial division of time affect the rise or fall of genius.  It may be that, in these latter days, when our age is the victim of self-conscious introspection, the close of a century which has shown such energy may affect us in some unconscious way.  Perhaps there is a vague impression that the world is about to turn over a new page in the mighty ledger of mankind, that it is now too late to do much with the nineteenth century, and that we will make a new start with the twentieth.

The world is growing less interesting, less mysterious, less manifold, at any rate to the outer eye.  The mise-en-scene of external life is less rich in colour and in contrast.  Magnificence, squalor, oddity, historic survivals, and picturesque personalities grow rarer year by year.  Everybody writes a grammatical letter in conventional style, wears the clothes in fashion, and conforms to the courtesies of life.  It is right, good, and wise:  but a little dull.  It is the lady-like age, the epoch of the dress-coat, of the prize lad and the girl of the period.  Mr. Charles Pearson, in his remarkable