against it.  Try to get out of modern democratic uniformity and decorum and you may as well try to get out of your skin.  Mr. Stevenson was driven to playing at Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling once seemed bent on dying in a tussle with Fuzzy-Wuzzy in the Soudan.  But it is no good.  A dirty savage is no longer a romantic being.  And as to the romance of the wigwam, it reminds me of the Jews who keep the Feast of Tabernacles by putting up some boughs in a back yard.

Let us have no nonsense, no topsy-turvy straining after new effects, which is so wearisome to those who love the racy naturalism of Parson Adams and Edie Ochiltree.  But let us have no pessimism also.  The age is against the romance of colour, movement, passion, and jollity.  But it is full of the romance of subtle and decorous psychology.  It is not the highest art:  it is indeed a very limited art.  But it is true art:  wholesome, sound, and cheerful.  The world does not exist in order to supply brilliant literature; and the march of democratic equality and of decorous social uniformity is too certain a thing, in one sense too blessed a thing, to be denied or to be denounced.  An age of colour, movement, variety, and romantic beauty will come again one day, we know not how.  There will be then a romance of passion and incident, of strenuous ambition and mad merriment.  But not to-day nor to-morrow.  Let us accept what the dregs of the nineteenth century can give us, without murmuring and repining for what it cannot give and should not seek to give.

In this little series of studies, I shall make no attempt to estimate the later literature of the Victorian Age, nor will I at all refer to any living writer.  Nor shall I deal with social and moral philosophy, poetry, art, or religion.  I propose to look back, from our present point of view, on the literature, in the narrower sense of the term, produced in the earlier part of the Queen’s reign.

II

THOMAS CARLYLE

It is now for about half a century that the world has had all that is most masterly in the work of Thomas Carlyle.  And a time has arrived when we may very fairly seek to weigh the sum total of influence which he left on his own and on subsequent generations.  We are now far enough off, neither to be dazzled by his eloquence nor irritated by his eccentricities.  The men whom he derided and who shook their heads at him are gone:  fresh problems, new hopes, other heroes and prophets whom he knew not, have arisen.  Our world is in no sense his world.  And it has become a very fair question to ask—­What is the residuum of permanent effect from these great books of his, which have been permeating English thought for half a century and more?