They form no school, their derivation is various, and their allegiance divided. ...

They form no school, their derivation is various, and their allegiance divided.

But there is a spiritual bond between them in the sense of personal value. A Socratic search for the good had begun again, to replace ideals which were toppling as their religious foundations cracked: we can count the schools that will come out of it, and name their manifestoes: An Agnostic's Apology, the Renaissance, the Essay on Comedy, News from Nowhere.

And crowding into the picture are the pessimists and the pagans, the strenuous and the decadent, strong, silent men, and not so silent feminists, Celts and aesthetes, spiritualists and theosophists, Whistlers and

Wildes and Beardsleys, all

the fads and all the fancies into which the compact and domestic philosophy of Victorian England dissolved. But if, again, we seek a clue to this phantasmagoria of a late afternoon, we shall find it best, I think, in Meredith.

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