The mischief lay in the addiction to what was less excellent so ...

The mischief lay in the addiction to what was less excellent so long as it was less known, to mere paradox and mere perversity.

But the movement furnished its

own corrective in the comedy which it created or provoked. We may easily forget how deeply our picture of the Victorian age is coloured by its satire, and how much that we call Victorian is known to us only because the Victorians laughed at it;

how persistently, in the classes accessible

to comedy, defective types and false postures were ridiculed into a sulky self-suppression; worn-out fashions blown away, and new attitudes approved.

And, whether for censure or encouragement, few of the Victorian satirists were so timely or so effective as Wilde, Du Maurier, and the Gilbert of Patience. But while in art, and now in literature, we were becoming a suburb of Paris, in other ways we were falling into an unexpected dependence on Germany, a dependence resulting in part from the sincere respect of the educated classes, in part from the equally sincere alarm of the business classes.

The establishment of the German Empire in 1870 had stripped off a film of insular self-confidence which was very imperfectly replaced by the glittering panoply of Imperialism. It is not only in the light of later events that we are constantly impelled to measure England against Germany: the compact, authoritative structure of the one, with the indolent fabric of custom and make-believe here called a Constitution and an Empire.

...next page >>