The healthy school is played out in England; all that could be said has been said; the successors of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot have no ideal, and consequently no language; what can be more pudding than the language of Mr Hardy, and he is typical of a dozen other writers, Mr Besant, Mr Murray, Mr Crawford? The reason of this heaviness of thought and expression is that the avenues are closed, no new subject matter is introduced, the language of English fiction has therefore run stagnant. But if the realists should catch favour in England the English tongue may be saved from dissolution, for with the new subjects they would introduce new forms of language would arise.
"Carmen Sylva!" How easy it is to divine the æstheticism of any one signing, "Carmen Sylva."
In youth the genius of Shelly astonished me; but now I find the stupidity of the ordinary person infinitely more surprising.
That I may die childless--that when my hour comes I may turn my face to the wall saying, I have not increased the great evil of human life--then, though I were murderer, fornicator, thief, and liar, my sins shall melt even as a cloud. But he who dies with children about him, though his life were in all else an excellent deed, shall be held accursed by the truly wise, and the stain upon him shall endure for ever.
I realize that this is truth, the one truth, and the whole truth; and yet the vainest woman that ever looked in a glass never regretted her youth more than I, or felt the disgrace of middle-age more keenly. She has her portrait painted, I write these confessions; each hopes to save something of the past, and escape somehow the ravening waves of time and float into some haven of remembrance. St Augustine's Confessions are the story of a God-tortured, mine of an art-tortured, soul. Which subject is the most living? The first! for man is stupid and still loves his conscience as a child loves a toy. Now the world plays with "Robert Elsmere." This book seems to me like a suite of spacious, well distributed, and well proportioned rooms. Looking round, I say, 'tis a pity these rooms are only in plaster of Paris.
"Les Palais Nomades" is a really beautiful book, and it is free from all the faults that make an absolute and supreme enjoyment of great poetry an impossibility. For it is in the first place free from those pests and parasites of artistic work--ideas. Of all literary qualities the creation of ideas is the most fugitive. Think of the fate of an author who puts forward a new idea to-morrow in a book, in a play, in a poem. The new idea is seized upon, it becomes common property, it is dragged through newspaper articles, magazine articles, through books, it is repeated in clubs, drawing-rooms; it is bandied about the corners of streets; in a week it is wearisome, in a month it is an abomination. Who has not felt a sickening feeling come over him when he hears such phrases as "To be or not to be, that is the question?" Shakespeare was really great when he wrote "Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly?" not when he wrote, "The apparel oft proclaims the man." Could he be freed from his ideas what a poet we should have! Therefore, let those who have taken firsts at Oxford devote their intolerable leisure to preparing an edition from which everything resembling an idea shall be excluded. We might then shut up our Marlowes and our Beaumonts and resume our reading of the bard, and the witless foists would confer happiness on many, and crown themselves with truly immortal bays. See the fellows! their fingers catch at scanty wisps of hair, the lamps are burning, the long pens are poised, and idea after idea is hurled out of existence.