If in some ways we of to-day seem less than those who have preceded us, in many ways we are more. If we do not loom up in so singular and striking eminences, we strike deeper and have a broader vision. Culture with us seems to be developed largely on the side of our sensibility. We are quickly receptive of impressions, direct and vital, and have tempted writers to meet us on this ground—to break up old forms, to give up old affectations and mannerisms, and, while keeping and even multiplying the veils of art and the illusions of romance, to dispense with masquerade. We invite a more spontaneous and less ornate speech and a less sententious criticism. Our strongest writers have greater simplicity than Addison, whose contrived elegances would repel us. The direct appeal—that is, direct from Life and Nature to our sensibility—is the significant trait of the speech we crave, whether oral or written. We deny ourselves no complexity which belongs to reality, but we reject the unessential. We demand that thought should be well clothed, with all the wealth which is its natural dower, with every fold of vesture belonging to its own involuteness, but without ornament. For our deepest emotions we choose the plainest speech. Lincoln's "few remarks" at Gettysburg were undoubtedly first of all characteristic of the man himself, but as contrasted with the ornate and elaborately elegant oration of Edward Everett, their simplicity marked the turning-point in the expression of an age. This speech signally illustrated that direct appeal which is the distinctive trait of the best literature of our time.
Mr. Alfred Austin thinks the cultivated English audience of to-day less intellectual than that of Pope's time; but we doubt if at any time, in England or America, the intellectual sensibility of cultivated people has ever been as profound, sane, and catholic as it is in this generation. Fortunately we do not know Pope's Essay on Man by heart, or much give our hearts to it, anyway. Did any English poet ever have a wider or heartier appreciation than Tennyson? What is the meaning of the growing popularity in England of Matthew Arnold's poetry?
Is there, as the Poet Laureate asserts, "a growing distaste for the higher forms of poetry"? We have two kinds of intellectual satisfactions, and each is quite distinct from the other. That satisfaction which we derive from the masterpieces of the past (including even Pope's "Essay") is so complete that we do not hunger for their repetition in the present. Our satisfaction from present literature is in its response to the demands of our more developed sensibility and of our newly awakened and manifoldly varied interests. We are just as eager for the new wine, though we do not want it in the old bottles. As to poetry, our cellars are so full of the old wine, pressed from every vintage under heaven and of all time, that we do not make so strong a demand upon our writers for poetry as for good prose, the quintessential virtues of which are a modern discovery. We think that the extensive appreciation of new novelists like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Maurice Hewlett is a very satisfactory test of the intellectuality of our period. If any further proof were sought, it might be found in the fact that it is possible to-day not only for the best books, but for magazines not depending for their interest upon the treatment of timely topics or agitating themes and with no sensational element in their composition, to hold their own against the influences of commercialism, the "newspaper habit," and indiscriminate novel-reading—which are supposed to debase the popular taste,—and even to win for themselves every year a larger acceptance.
Owing to the fact that a supplementary proof-correction by Mrs. Humphry Ward of the July instalment of "The Marriage of William Ashe" reached us too late to be made in the whole edition (a portion of which had already been printed), some of the readers of that number will have a wrong impression as to the chronology of Ashe's courtship of Lady Kitty. In two passages "Saturday" should be "Saturday week." Those who have the uncorrected reading may possibly be perplexed by the chronology of the first meetings between William Ashe and Kitty. In fact, ten days elapsed between their first sight of each other on one of Madame d'Estrées' Tuesdays and the party at Grosville Park.
