culture produces an artificial monotony, when people are taught what
they ought to like, when to violate the canons of taste is far worse
than to laugh at the Ten Commandments.

With a very high average of fairly good work, an immense mass of such
work, and an elaborate code of criticism, the production of brilliant
and inimitable successes is usually arrested in every field. Having
thousands of graceful verse-writers, we have no great poet; in a
torrent of skilful fiction, we have no great novelist; with many
charming painters, who hardly seem to have a fault, we have no great
artist; with _mises-en-scène_, make-up costumes, and accessories for
our plays such as the world never saw before, we have no great actor;
and with ten thousand thoughtful writers, we have not a single genius
of the first rank. Elaborate culture casts chill looks on original
ideas. Genius itself is made to feel the crudeness and extravagance of
its first efforts and retires with shame to take a lower place. We are
all so fastidious about form and have got such fixed regulation views
about form, we are so correct, so much like one another, such good boys
and girls, that the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the inventive
spirit are taught from childhood to control themselves and to conform
to the decorum of good society. A highly organised code of culture may
give us good manners, but it is the death of genius.

There are other things which check the flow of a really original
literature, though perhaps a high average culture and a mechanical
system of education may be the most potent. Violent political
struggles check it: an absorption in material interests checks it:
uniformity of habits, a general love of comfort, conscious
self-criticism, make it dull and turbid. Now our age is marked by all
of these. From the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the French