without awakening any protest among persons under fifty say that it was
a "sort of social crime" to impose such balderdash as the verse of
Sully-Prudhomme on the public.

It is not needful to quote other living critics, who may think such
prolongation of their severities ungraceful. But a single contrast will
suffice. When, in 1881, Sully-Prudhomme was elected to the French
Academy, expert opinion throughout the Press was unanimous in admitting
that this was an honour deservedly given to the best lyric poet of the
age. In 1906, when a literary journal sent out this question, "Who is
the poet you love best?" and was answered by more than two hundred
writers of verse, the diversity of opinion was indeed excessive; such
poets as Sainte-Beuve, as Brizeux, as Rodenbach, received votes, all the
great masters received many. But Sully-Prudhomme, alone, received not
one vote. A new generation had arisen, and one of its leaders, with
cruel wit, transferred to the reputation of the author his own most
famous line:--"N'y touchez pas, il est brisé."

It is necessary to recollect that we are not dealing with the phenomenon
of the inability of very astute literary people to recognise at once a
startling new sort of beauty. When Robert Browning lent the best poems
of Keats to Mrs. Carlyle, she read them and returned them with the
remark that "almost any young gentleman with a sweet tooth might be
expected to write such things." Mrs. Carlyle was a very clever woman,
but she was not quite "educated up to" Keats. The history of letters is
full of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of great
art which has not yet been "classed." But we are here considering the
much stranger and indeed extremely disconcerting case of a product which
has been accepted, with acclamation, by the judges of one generation,
and is contemptuously hooted out of court by the next. It is not, on