In the slow fermentation of human societies, as fresh elements work their way to the top and for a time give their flavor to history, the new arrival is likely to herald himself in some such terms in a protest against the art which, because he has as yet no share in it, seems to him old and worn out, and in a cry for original expression which to those with a longer memory of the world will be quite familiar. There have been new arrivals before, and their wish to start fresh is the cause rather than the result of decadence. For it is only in a figure of speech that art declines or prospers—it is the artists who are less competent or more so than their predecessors, and the poet who tells us that the period before him is at an end, is really proclaiming that he cannot improve upon it, and if the other poets are like himself, the preceding period is indeed ended. There is no other reason why the great moments of literature were not prolonged. Shakespeare was better than his predecessors, but he was not perfection; why did not the drama continue to develop? Ben Jonson, being himself a new arrival, and being, for all his book learning, outside the spiritual regions which Elizabethan drama had mainly portrayed, thought of course that a new kind of art was needed. He is in danger now of sharing the ignominy of all writers who coming after greater men pay homage through jealousy. Tennyson was not the greatest of poets; why did not his successors treat him as though he were a Greene or a Marlowe, and make Shakespearean improvements in him? To hear the critics of today rail against his art, one might suppose he had hopelessly damaged the language by using it, or that rhyme and meter had come to a bad end at his hands. The poet who talks this way about his predecessors is never the one who is conscious of the power to swallow them up. If Shakespeare had been a little man, he would have taken one look at Marlowe’s _Faustus_, and given up the Elizabethan drama as a creaking and antiquated machine for moral doctrine. Had he been really ignorant of the long-stored-up energies and impulses which were coming to action in his marvellous hour, had he lacked the instinct to recognize them even when badly expressed, and to express them better, he might have walked the streets of London as the oriental arrival walked in Athens, or as the invader from the north walked in Rome—with a conviction that the day of this sort of thing was over. Nothing would remain but to be original.