I do not ask you to adopt the habit against which Matthew Arnold directed one of his witty essays, the habit of expressing a too unctuous satisfaction with the age and time in which we are living.  That was the intellectual error of the Eighteenth Century.  There are problems of poverty, injustice, disease, and unhappiness, which should make the most prosperous and most selfish of us chafe; but I do urge that we should not suspect the art and literature of our time, the intellectual manifestations of our age, whether scientific or literary.  I urge that we do not sit on the counter in order to cry ‘stinking fish,’ and observe that this is merely an age of commerce.  An overweening modesty in us seems to persuade us that it is quite impossible we should be fortunate enough to be the contemporaries of great men.  The fact that we know them personally sometimes undermines our faith; contemporary contempt for a great man is too often turned on the contemporaries.  Do not let us look upon genius, as Schopenhauer accused some people of doing, ’as upon a hare which is good to eat when it has been killed and dressed up, but so long as it is alive only good to be shot at.’  And if our intellectuals are not all Brobdingnagians, they are not all Liliputians.  It seems to me ungenerous to make sweeping and deprecating assertions about our own time; it is also dangerous.  The contemporary praise of unworthy work, ephemeral work—­there is always plenty of that, we know—­is forgotten; and (though it does not decay) perishes with the work it extolled.  But unsound criticism and foolish abuse of great work is remembered to the confusion of the critics.  Think of the reception accorded to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Rossetti, and Swinburne.

I remember that excellent third-rate writer, W. E. H. Lecky, making a speech at a dinner of the Authors’ Society, in which he said that he was sorry to say there were no great writers alive, and no stylists to compare with those who had passed away.  A few paces off him sat Walter Pater, George Meredith, and Mr. Austin Dobson.  Tennyson, though not present at the banquet, was president of the Society, and Ruskin was still alive.  When Swinburne’s ‘Atalanta in Calydon’ appeared, another third-rate writer, James Russell Lowell, assured the world that its author was no poet, because there was no thought in the verse.  Four years ago, at a provincial town in Italy, when one of the Italian ministers, at the opening of some public building, said that united Italy owed to the great English poet Swinburne a debt which it could never forget, the inhabitants cheered vociferously.  This was no idle compliment; every one in Italy knows who Swinburne was.  I will not hazard to guess the extent of the ovation which the names of Lowell and Lecky would receive, but I think the incident is a fair sign that English poetry has not decayed.