As I see it, the function of the nineteenth century was to ...

As I see it, the function of the nineteenth century was to disengage the disinterested intelligence, to release it from the entanglements of party and sect-one might almost add, of sex-and to set it operating over the whole range of human life and circumstance.

In England we see this spirit issuing from, and often at war with, a society most stoutly tenacious of old

ways and forms, and yet most

deeply immersed in its new business of acquisition. In such a warfare there is no victory, only victories, as something is won and held against ignorance or convention or prejudice or greed; and in such victories our earlier and mid-Victorian time is rich.

Not so the later.

Much may be set to the account of accident, the burden and excitement of Empire, the pressure and menace of foreign armaments, the failure of individual genius, the distraction of common attention. But, fundamentally, what failed in the late Victorian age, and its flash Edwardian epilogue, was the Victorian public, once so alert, so masculine, and so responsible.

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