R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

202 Frederick S. Boasaltogether into feminine hands. It may be long before the advocatesof woman's rights will conquer other provinces of labour; butthey have already monopolised to a great extent the immensenovel manufacturing industry of Great Britain.Had Stephen lived till our day he would have seen thatthe advocates of woman's rights (how out of date thephrase sounds!) had secured their position in nearlyevery province of labour, not to speak of their triumphin the political sphere. But in spite of this, perhaps partlyon account of it, there seems less prospect than ever oftheir monopolising the realm of fiction. We have verydistinguished women novelists in this generation—someof them are among the most eminent Fellows of thisSociety—but (to say the least) they have not playedMr Wells, Mr Galsworthy and Mr Arnold Bennett off thestage. And these are only a few of the masculine namesthat will occur to everyone. Here at least is one anticipationby a singularly cool-headed critic in the 'seventies ofwhich Time has made a laughing stock. 1But it may seem surprising that I have got so farwithout mentioning, except as a poet, the most famousand influential of mid-Victorian critics, Matthew Arnold.The reason is that the decade of the 'seventies is, in aremarkable way, a watershed between the two streams,the earlier and the later, of Arnold's literary criticism.During his ten years' occupancy, 1857-67, of the OxfordChair of Poetry, he had published his Lectures on TranslatingHomer (1861-2), the first series of Essays inCriticism (1865), and the Lectures on the Study of CelticLiterature (1867). Needless to say that each of these is inits own way a classic, even the last, though Arnold knewno Celtic tongue. Essays in Criticism is one of the booksto which the hackneyed epithet of ' epoch-making' maybe truly applied in its own sphere. The second series of1 Stephen himself seems to have afterwards modified his view for thepassage is omitted in the 1892 revised edition.