Platform Monologues

MELBOURNE THOMAS C. LOTHIAN 1914 PRINTED IN ENGLAND Copyright. First Edition May, 1914.
The following monologues were given as public addresses, mostly to semi-academical audiences, and no alteration has been made in their form. Their common object has been to plead the cause of literary study at a time when that study is being depreciated and discouraged. But along with the general plea must go some indication that literature can be studied as well as read. Hence some of the articles attempt—what must always be a difficult task—the crystallizing of the salient principles of literary judgment.
The present collection has been made because the publisher believes that a sufficiently large number of intelligent persons will be interested in reading it. On the whole that appears to be at least as good a reason as any other for printing a book.
The addresses on The Supreme Literary Gift, The Making of a Shakespeare, and Literature and Life, have appeared previously as separate brochures. Those on Two Successors of Tennyson and Hebraism and Hellenism were printed in the Melbourne Argus at the time of their delivery, and are here reproduced by kind permission of that paper. The talk upon The Future of Poetry has not hitherto appeared in print.
Though circumstances have prevented any development of the powers and work of the two Successors of Tennyson, there is nothing either in the criticism of those writers or in the principles applied thereto which seems to call for any modification at this date. For the rest, it is hoped that the lecture will be read in the light of the facts as they were at the time of its delivery.
When we have been reading some transcendent passage in one of the world's masterpieces we experience that mental sensation which Longinus declares to be the test of true sublimity, to wit, our mind undergoes a kind of proud elation and delight, as if it had itself begotten the thing we read. We are disposed by such literature very much as we are disposed by the Sistine Madonna or before the Aphrodite of Melos. Things like these exert a sort of overmastering power upon us. Our craving for perfection, for ideal beauty, is for once wholly gratified. Our spirit glows with an intense and complete satisfaction. It would build itself a tabernacle on the spot, for it recognizes that it is good to be there. We do not analyse, we do not criticize, we simply deliver over our souls to a proud elation and delight. Nay, at the moment when we are in the midst of such spontaneous and exquisite enjoyment, we should, in all likelihood, resent any attempt to make us realize exactly why this particular creation of art so fills up our souls down to the last cranny of satisfaction while another stops short of that supreme effect.