Boon Author:Herbert George Wells Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE GREAT SLUMP, THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS, AND THE GARDEN BY THE SEA THE story, as Boon planned it, was to begin with a spacious Introdu... more »ction. We were to tell of the profound decadence of letters at the opening of the Twentieth Century and how a movement of revival began. A few notes in pencil of this opening do exist among the Remains, and to those I have referred. He read them over to me. . . . " 'We begin,' " he said, " 'in a minor key. The impetus of the Romantic movement we declare is exhausted; the Race Mind, not only of the English-speaking peoples but of the whole world, has come upon a period of lethargy. The Giants of the Victorian a£ My eye discovered a familiar binding among the flower-pots. "You have been consulting the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' " I said. He admitted it without embarrassment. "I have prigged the whole thing from the last Victorian Edition—with some slight variations. . . . 'The Giants of the Victorian age had passed. Men looked in vain for their successors. For a time there was an evident effort to fill the vacant thrones; for a time it seemed that the unstinted exertions of Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the friends of Mr. Stephen Phillips might go some way towards obliterating these magnificent gaps. And then, slowly but surely, it crept into men's minds that the game was up ' " "You will alter that phrase?" I said. "Certainly. But it must serve now . . . 'that, humanly speaking, it was impossible that anything, at once so large, so copious, so broadly and unhesitatingly popular, so nobly cumu- lative as the Great Victorian Reputations could ever exist again. The Race seemed threatened with intellectual barrenness; it had dropped its great blossoms, and stood amidst the pile...« less