forecast of National Life and Character, warned us how the universal levelling of modern democracy must end in a certain monotony and a lowered vitality.  We live longer, but in quiet, comfortable, orderly ways.  This is not at all injurious to morality, politics, industry, science, philosophy, or religion.  It is not necessarily injurious to poetry, at least of the lower flight.  But it is adverse to high art.  And it is asphyxiating to romance.

The novelist must draw from the living model and he must address the people of his own age.  He cannot write for posterity, nor can he live in a day-dream world of his own.  The poet is often lost to his own contemporaries.  It may need two or three, five or six, generations to reveal him, as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth may remind us.  But the novelist must live in his generation, be of it most intensely, and if he is to delight at all, like the actor, he must delight his own age.  What sons of their own time were Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope:  how intensely did they drink with both hands from the cup of life.  George Eliot, George Meredith, Louis Stevenson, Howells, James, look on life from a private box.  We see their kid gloves and their opera-glass and we know that nothing could ever take them on to the stage and ruffle it with the world of the day, like men of the world who mean to taste life.  There is no known instance of a great novelist who lived obscure in a solitary retreat or who became famous only after the lapse of many generations.

It is the lady-like age:  and so it is the age of ladies’ novels.  Women have it all their own way now in romance.  They carry off all the prizes, just as girl students do in the studios of Paris.  Up to a certain point, within their own limits, they are supreme.  Half the modern romance, and many people think the better half, is written by women.  That is perfectly natural, an obvious result of modern society.  The romance to which our age best lends itself is the romance of ordinary society, with delicate shades of character and feeling in place of furious passion or picturesque incident.  Women are by nature and training more subtle observers of these social nuances and refined waverings of the heart than any others but men of rare genius.  The field is a small and home-like area, the requirements are mainly those of graceful intuition, the tone must be pure, lady-like, subdued.  In this sphere it is plain that women have a marked superiority; it is the sphere in which Jane Austen is the yet unapproached queen.  But we may look for more Jane Austens, and on wider fields with a yet deeper insight into far grander characters.  The social romance of the future is the true poetic function of women.  It is their own realm, in which they will doubtless achieve yet unimagined triumphs.  Men, revolting from this polite and monotonous world, are trying desperate expedients.  But they are all wrong; the age is