silencing for a moment, with the arrogance of fame, the furious reveilles of the world-wide war, he is finding in England and elsewhere men and women to repeat the centenary formulas of love and admiration, each according to his rite and his power, by erudition or exclamation, by rhetoric or anecdote. But we are by no means sure that a hundred years from now Shakespeare will be as dominant in human consciousness as habit and tradition have made him for our own generation.
Nor does it avail to say that Shakespeare is modern and eternal, that his restlessness is our restlessness, that his fear is our fear. For we are changing, and those who are to come after us will change still more. Day by day we are becoming harder to satisfy, more refined, more discontented. Fewer things give us pleasure, and fewer still will please us as time goes on: a painful condition, but a condition that is inevitable if we are to create more than we have found, if we are to add new treasure to the inheritance we have received from those who, though dead, are yet immortal.
We are growing away from Shakespeare. That terrible old dramatic world of his, compact of grandeur and nocturnal dread, is beginning to make us smile. There is too much machinery and scene-painting in his work. We of today want things in essence. His fancy, even when it soars most wildly, is fashioned and controlled
