---

Contents
Illustrations
Index

SOME EMINENT VICTORIANS

{v}

All rights reserved

PREFACE

Those of us who have emerged from the Victorian Era with an undiminishedreverence for the great names which have made it memorable, must beprepared to endure with patience the pitying tolerance, or even theindulgent rebuke, of the men who herald a younger generation.

It was only a few weeks ago that I ventured to enquire of a cultivatedyoung writer of the newer school if Dickens was now much read by thegeneration which presumably he had a claim to represent. The questiongave him no pause. In a sentence that was dictated solely, as it seemed,by a sincere desire to impart accurate information, he gravely informedme that among young men of culture Dickens was now never read after theage of fourteen. I confess that, despite the coldly judicial tone ofthis utterance, I was not entirely convinced, for I happen to know evenyoung people who are still so far belated in their taste as to regardDickens as an incomparable genius. But the statement helped me at anyrate to realise how easy it is to grow old-fashioned, and suggested tome that in addressing an age which{vi} believes that art, like science, isalways advancing, it would be prudent, on the threshold of thesereminiscences of some of the men I have known and whose work I haveworshipped, to make frank avowal of my own faith, and humbly to confessmy limitations.

Let me say, then, that in the region of Art and Literature I am still animpenitent Victorian. I have no desire to disparage the work of thosewho profess a more modern creed, and I think, although this perhaps maybe vainglorious boasting, that I am not unable to appreciate the moreinstant appeal of a later day. But my talk with younger men, whosecomradeship delights me, makes it often abundantly clear to me that I amdisqualified, perhaps by age, from sharing to the full measure theirmore recent enthusiasms. Our occasional divergence of feeling, which itwould be idle not to recognise, rests in some cases upon an essent

BU KİTABI OKUMAK İÇİN ÜYE OLUN VEYA GİRİŞ YAPIN!

Sitemize Üyelik ÜCRETSİZDİR!