ABSTRACT
The decline in the old Greek and Italian influences, which had set in before the end of the Victorian era, has accelerated in our own; and now the Mediterranean heritage which the English had once so highly prized has become more and more devalued. The modern scientific and technological revolution has been absorbing the best of our aspirations and the best minds. In the early 1900s, virtually the only challenge to the traditional values came from a small avant-garde minority, whose ideas admittedly contained a startling preview of the revolutionary changes that were to come. Classical scholarship was still contributing to the formation of literary taste and, apart from a handful of brilliant exceptions, artists generally continued to conform to the humanistic conventions inherited from the Italian Renaissance. For their part, British educationalists remained faithful to their cherished belief that for any member of the ruling political and intellectual classes, character was more important than learning.
