It is, no doubt, this preponderance of the practical, scientific, and social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest imaginative and dramatic genius.  With all its achievements in lyric and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean of song.  In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley conceived his Prometheus, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of invention.  Since the School for Scandal (1777) no English drama has been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage.  For more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate actor.  Though men of real genius have in these sixty years laboured at the higher drama, they have hardly achieved even such measures of success as fell to Byron and Shelley with Manfred and the Cenci.  With all its lyric and psychologic power, with all its energy and its learning, the Victorian Age has not quite equalled the age of Goethe.  It is as if its scientific spirit checked the supreme imagination:  as if its social earnestness produced a distaste for merely dramatic passion.

One of the most striking facts about our modern literature is the preponderance of the “subjective” over the “objective.”  The interest in external events, as the subject of imaginative work, quite pales before the interest in analysis of mental and moral impulse.  Wordsworth, Coleridge, Jane Austen, have completely dominated our age, and have displaced the epic and legendary themes of Scott, Byron, Campbell, and Southey. The Two Voices, In Memoriam, The Ring and the Book, Silas Marner, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, dissect brain and heart, but do not make their prime motive in any thrilling history.  The crisis of modern romance goes on in the conscience, not in the outside world.  Hence the enormous multiplication of the psychologic novel, a form of art which the eighteenth century would have viewed with wonder and perplexity.  The curious part of this is the striking abatement of taste for the historical romance, in spite of the immense extension of historical study and archaeological revival.  We know far more about the past, both within and without, than did our fathers; and we are always seeking to realise to ourselves the habits, ideas, aspect, the very clothes and furniture of ages of old, which we study with sympathetic zeal and in the minutest detail.  Yet the historical romance appears only at intervals. Harold and Esmond are both more than forty years old, Romola more than thirty years old.  They are none of them quite unqualified successes; and no later historical romance has approached these three in power and interest.  Why is it, that, in an age pre-eminently historical, in an age so redundant of novels, the historical novel is out of fashion?  Partly, no doubt, our romancers