The story, as Boon planned it, was to begin with a spacious
Introduction. We were to tell of the profound decadence of letters at
the opening of the Twentieth Century and how a movement of revival
began. A few notes in pencil of this opening do exist among the
Remains, and to those I have referred. He read them over to me....
"'We begin,'" he said, "'in a minor key. The impetus of the Romantic
movement we declare is exhausted; the Race Mind, not only of the
English-speaking peoples but of the whole world, has come upon a
period of lethargy. The Giants of the Victorian age----'"
My eye discovered a familiar binding among the flower-pots. "You have
been consulting the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,'" I said.
He admitted it without embarrassment.
"I have prigged the whole thing from the last Victorian Edition--with
some slight variations.... 'The Giants of the Victorian age had
passed. Men looked in vain for their successors. For a time there was
an evident effort to fill the vacant thrones; for a time it seemed
that the unstinted exertions of Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine,
Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the friends of Mr. Stephen Phillips might go
some way towards obliterating these magnificent gaps. And then, slowly
but surely, it crept into men's minds that the game was up----'"
"You will alter that phrase?" I said.
"Certainly. But it must serve now ... 'that, humanly speaking, it was
impossible that anything, at once so large, so copious, so broadly and
unhesitatingly popular, so nobly cumulative as the Great Victorian
Reputations could ever exist again. The Race seemed threatened with
intellectual barrenness; it had dropped its great blossoms, and stood
amidst the pile of their wilting but still showy petals, budless and
bare. It is curious to recall the public utterances upon literature
that distinguished this desolate and melancholy time. It is a chorus
of despair. There is in the comments of such admirable but ageing
critics as still survived, of Mr. Gosse, for example, and the
venerable Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr. Mumchance, an inevitable
suggestion of widowhood; the judges, bishops, statesmen who are called
to speak upon literature speak in the same reminiscent, inconsolable
note as of a thing that is dead. Year after year one finds the
speakers at the Dinner of the Royal Literary Fund admitting the
impudence of their appeal. I remember at one of these festivities
hearing the voice of Mr. Justice Gummidge break.... The strain, it is
needless to say, found its echo in Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole; he confessed
he never read anything that is less than thirty years old with the
slightest enjoyment, and threw out the suggestion that nothing new
should be published--at least for a considerable time--unless it was
clearly shown to be posthumous....
"'Except for a few irresistible volumes of facetiousness, the reading
public very obediently followed the indications of authority in these
matters, just as it had followed authority and sustained the Giants in
the great Victorian days. It bought the long-neglected
classics--anything was adjudged a classic that was out of
copyright--it did its best to read them, to find a rare smack in their
faded allusions, an immediate application for their forgotten topics.
It made believe that architects were still like Mr. Pecksniff and
schoolmasters like Squeers, that there were no different women from
Jane Austen's women, and that social wisdom ended in Ruskin's fine
disorder. But with the decay, of any intellectual observation of the
present these past things had lost their vitality. A few resolute
people maintained an artificial interest in them by participation in
quotation-hunting competitions and the like, but the great bulk of the
educated classes ceased presently to read anything whatever. The
classics were still bought by habit, as people who have lost faith
will still go to church; but it is only necessary to examine some
surviving volume of this period to mark the coruscation of printer's
errors, the sheets bound in upside down or accidentally not inked in
printing or transferred from some sister classic in the same series,
to realize that these volumes were mere receipts for the tribute paid
by the pockets of stupidity to the ancient prestige of thought....
"'An air of completion rested upon the whole world of letters. A
movement led by Professor Armstrong, the eminent educationist, had
even gone some way towards banishing books from the schoolroom--their
last refuge. People went about in the newly invented automobile and
played open-air games; they diverted what attention they had once
given to their minds to the more rational treatment of their stomachs.
Reading became the last resort of those too sluggish or too poor to
play games; one had recourse to it as a substitute for the ashes of
more strenuous times in the earlier weeks of mourning for a near
relative, and even the sale of classics began at last to decline. An
altogether more satisfying and alluring occupation for the human
intelligence was found in the game of Bridge. This was presently
improved into Auction Bridge. Preparations were made for the erection
of a richly decorative memorial in London to preserve the memory of
Shakespeare, an English Taj Mahal; an Academy of uncreative literature
was established under the Presidency of Lord Reay (who had never
written anything at all), and it seemed but the matter of a few years
before the goal of a complete and final mental quiet would be attained
by the whole English-speaking community....'"