emancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a King
alone can give it....

When in its turn this latest reign comes at last to its reckoning, what
will the sum of its achievement be? What will it leave of things
visible? Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it but
add abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and masses
of ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradation
of the Victorian period? Will a great constellation of artists redeem
the ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find their
fitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our literature escape at
last from pretentiousness and timidity, our philosophy from the foolish
cerebrations of university "characters" and eminent politicians at
leisure, and our starved science find scope and resources adequate to
its gigantic needs? Will our universities, our teaching, our national
training, our public services, gain a new health from the reviving
vigour of the national brain? Or is all this a mere wild hope, and shall
we, after perhaps some small flutterings of effort, the foundation of
some ridiculous little academy of literary busybodies and hangers-on,
the public recognition of this or that sociological pretender or
financial "scientist," and a little polite jobbery with picture-buying,
relapse into lassitude and a contented acquiescence in the rivalry of
Germany and the United States for the moral, intellectual and material
leadership of the world?

The deaths and accessions of Kings, the changing of names and coins and
symbols and persons, a little force our minds in the marking off of
epochs. We are brought to weigh one generation against another, to
reckon up our position and note the characteristics of a new phase. What
lies before us in the next decades? Is England going on to fresh