Chapter XII · (continued 2)

But few, however, I think, appear here without more or less right of admission to the mind-map of the century's literature which a well-furnished mind should at this moment contain. That such a mind-map, quite irrespective of examinations and lecture-courses, and of literary bread-study generally, is a valuable thing, I have no doubt. And I think, without wishing to magnify mine office, that the general possession of it might do something to counteract these disastrous influences which have been referred to a little earlier. A man should surely be a little less apt to take the pinchbeck poetry of his own day for gold when he remembers the Della Cruscans and Sentimentalists, the Montgomerys and the Tuppers; the terror-novel and the Minerva Press should surely be useful skeletons to him at his feast of fiction in kinds which it would be beyond my province to describe more particularly. He will not clamour, as I have known very excellent persons clamour, for the "raising of English to a new power" when he has before him the long procession of ingenious jargonists whose jargon has been in its turn hailed as a revelation and dismissed as an old song. And he will neither overexalt the dignity of literature, nor be a self-tormentor and a tormentor of others about its approaching decline and fall, when he sees how constantly, how incessantly, the kissed mouth has renewed its freshness, the apparently dying flower has shed seed and shot suckers for a new growth.