Changes in literary methods are brought about very slowly and permeate more slowly still into the taste of the more or less unlettered classes who make up the bulk of the desirable readers for an author. As a rule the process begins with the younger writers who find tiresome or ludicrous the accepted work of their day; a little later the more experienced of readers, tiring in their turn of accepted methods in the works they consume, turn with relief to the younger writers, the professorial and established critics still thundering violently against the younger schools. For, everywhere but in England, schools establish themselves as soon as restlessnesses betray themselves in artistic circles. The more experienced readers, in spite of the critics, spreading abroad amongst the larger classes of the relatively unlettered the taste for the newer modes, at first that larger class become converts and then the professional critics whose bread and butter depends on their following the public taste. So a school is established and for a time holds its own. Then it gives place to other modes. That is the quite invariable process with all the products and all the methods, of all the arts. But naturally, as the arts grow older, their practitioners have a better chance of evolving newer and sounder methods, for the number of their predecessors has inevitably increased. Bunyan must evolve his method for himself; Defoe could study Bunyan; Richardson, Bunyan and Defoe; Diderot, Richardson and his predecessors; Stendhal could draw on the experience of four generations; Flaubert on that of five; Conrad on that of six. This of course is a source of danger to weaker brethren, for in each generation an enormous amount of insipid art is turned out by inferior students receiving their instruction at the hands of academic instructors. That cannot be helped. But the fact remains that to a real master possessed of a real individuality the study of the methods of his predecessors must be of enormous use. Anyone at all instructed, reading the work of Conrad, must find evidence of an almost lifelong and almost incredibly minute study of writers preceding him and the amount of reading and of study--for they are not the same thing--that must have gone to the making of the author of _Ulysses_, who is certainly the greatest of all prose virtuosi of the word--that beggars the imagination!