as pure and powerful as any in the whole range of our literature; we
have tens of thousands of men and women who write a perfectly correct
and intelligent prose. And yet out of a million books, we find so very
few which even aim at being works of art in the sense that _Tom Jones_
is a work of art, and the _Decline and Fall_ is a work of art.

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,