Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/120

 material glory; each alike has heard the cry of degeneracy raised against it, the wail of emulous impotence set up against the weakness of the age; Dante's generation and Shakespeare's, Milton's and Shelley's, have all been ages of poetic decay in their turn, as the age of Hugo is now; there as here no great man was to be seen, no great work was to be done, no great cry was to be heard, no great impulse was to be felt, by those who could feel nothing, hear nothing, do nothing, and see nothing. To them the poor present has always been pitiable or damnable, the past which bore it divine. And other men than these have swelled the common cry of curs: Byron, himself in his better moments a witness against his own words, helped the fools of his hour to decry their betters and his own, by a pretence of wailing over the Augustan age of Anne, when "it was all Horace with us; it is all Claudian now." His now has become our then, and the same whine is raised in its honour; for the cant of irritation and insincerity, hungry vanity and starving spite, can always be caught up and inherited by those who can inherit nothing of a strong man's but his weakness, of a wise man's but his folly; who can gather at a great man's board no sustenance from the meats and wines, but are proud to pilfer the soiled napkins and cracked platters from under his side-table. Whether there be any great work doing in our time, or any great man living, it is not worth while to debate; but if there be not, it is certain that no man living can know it; for to pass judgment worth heeding on any age and give sentence that shall last on any generation, a man must himself be great; and if no man on earth be great in our day, who on earth can