There were many reasons why the whole character of the twentieth century should be very different from that of the nineteenth. The great wave of vitality and national expansions, which, during the Victorian Period, swept both England and America to a high wa-ter-mark of national prosperity, left in its ebb a highly developed industrial civilization and a clear path of all the currents of scientific and mechanistic thought which were to flood the new century. But literature, which had been nourished by the general vigor of the time, and not at all by the practical interests of the period, declined as the spirit itself dispersed.The great age of groups and "movements" began. The eighteenth century poets did not call themselves classicists, nor the nineteenth century poets call themselves romanti-cists; their poetic coloring was simply the quality of their whole response to the whole of life. But the literary history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is full of theories and "isms" which provided artist creeds for artist groups, and set the individual artists apart form the community in the popular opinion. According to the speaker, at the close of the Victorian Period, English and American literature was ().

A. prosperous.
B. homogeneous.
C. on the wane.
D. vitally energetic.