And where shall we look for the successors of the Mills and ...

And where shall we look for the successors of the Mills and Ruskins and Tennysons? Or of the public for which they wrote? The common residual

intelligence is becoming impoverished for

the benefit of the specialist, the technician, and the aesthete: we leave behind us the world of historical iron-masters and banker historians, geological divines and scholar tobacconists, with its genial watchword: to know something of everything and everything of something: and through the gateway of the Competitive Examination we go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting. The shrinkage of native genius, or the cooling of native ardour, or the dying down, perhaps, of the old austerer impulses: Protestantism, Self-improvement, Respectability: had left the English mind open to fresh stimulation from without, from France in one way, Germany in another, from Russia, even from Norway.

The first Romantic generation had fed, with equal zest, on German fantasy and German philosophy.

The next was less susceptible to foreign influences; and the poetry and fiction, the history, art, and economics of mid-Victorian England have all a

racy home-made flavour.

Some lines of contact were, of course, kept open: through the Austins, for example, with Germany; through Mill and the Grotes with France; and the influence of Mazzini might repay some study.

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