Our hopes, in battling acts embodied, dare

Proclaim that we have paved a way for feet

Now stumbling; air less cavernous, and air

That feeds the soul, we breathe; for more entreat.

What figures will be shown the century hence ?
What lands intact? We do but know that Power
From Piety divorced, though seen immense,

Shall sink on envy of a wayside flower1.

Tantum ferro quantum pietate potentes stamus, sang the poet of Imperial Rome; and to us, entering on our inheritance of the new liberties of the soul, the same warning is addressed, lest we drag old liberties in chains.

Fiction, the second great vehicle of artistic expression, is less perilous to the prophet. Le roi s'amuse, and, though Mr. Bernard Shaw always laughs at our amusement, filling admirably the privileged part of King's Jester to King Demos, and though Mr. Gilbert Chesterton tries to make us break into philosophy 2, in the spirit of Molière's satire on Monsieur Jourdain's prose, we persist in demanding entertainment of the immemorial kind in which children most delight. We must have stories about ourselves, just a little idealized and heightened, so that the moral is not too plain, and at times just a little above our heads. Air that feeds the soul we breathe', and, in these days of the science

1 Il y a Cent Ans: from The Flag, published by The Daily Mail, May, 1908.

* He culls blossoms of philosophy from common things. The same fanciful inversiveness and a like whimsicality of wit and plausibility of observation distinguish the Breakfast-table books of Oliver Wendell Holmes, especially, perhaps, the Professor volume.

of psychology and of emancipated emotions, we continue to explore the real with the aim of attaining the ideal. The heirs of Robert Louis Stevenson, using their inheritance in different ways, are employed in manipulating the material. At the bottom are the mere sensationalists, of whom no more need be said. At the top are writers like Mr. Joseph Conrad, a Slav by descent, who, like Rossetti, owes much to the un-English strain in his blood. Further and further he adventures on the infinite ocean of feeling from the secure moorings of proven fact, yet returns to them again with the spoils of the sea made probable. This pursuit of fancy, though it resemble at times a mere will o' the wisp chase, and though it lead literature on strange odysseys, among which we may mention the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, is yet a source of strength and opens the door to higher knowledge; and a growing taste for such adventures marks a line of literature's advance.

To dip deeper into the present would be too hazardous a quest, and it is more appropriate to look back. The century of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Keats and Shelley, of Byron and Carlyle, of Browning and George Meredith, of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, of Rossetti and Swinburne, of Ruskin and William Morris, of Dickens and Thackeray, of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, of Patmore and Pater, is the forest of enchantment which we have traversed. Of all its beauty we are not yet sensible, of all its truth we are not yet conscious, of all its wisdom we are not yet freemen.

And thus, uninformed still with the whole of its spiritual power, we may seek our conclusion from the Conclusion poem which was an invocation to the

to the

age:

This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist
Without Imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
This faculty hath been the feeding source
Of our long labour: we have traced the stream
From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard
Its natal murmur; followed it to light
And open day; accompanied its course
Along the ways of Nature, for a time
Lost sight of it bewildered and engulphed;
Then given it greeting as it rose once more
In strength, reflecting from its placid breast
The works of man and face of human life;
And lastly, from its progress have we drawn
Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought
Of human Being, Eternity, and God.

WORDSWORTH, The Prelude, xiv.

INDEX

Auguries of Innocence, quoted, Bowles, William Lisle, 145.