I

I take up my parable for a few words more upon the point at which I broke off last week—the essential greatness of Dickens. For greatness is a quality in some few men: indefinable perhaps, but yet to be recognised; a certain thing and, by those of us who would traffic with life or literature, not to be overlooked or denied save at our soul’s peril, no matter what standard of artistry or of refined scholarship we may set up: a quality in itself, moreover, and not any addition or multiplication or raising of talent by industry. For an illustration of the peril: I was reading, the other day, a history of French Literature by the late M. Ferdinand Brunetière, and, coming to the time of Alexandre Dumas the elder, I found that the historian, disapproving of Dumas, has just left him out! Now that, I contend (saving M. Brunetière’s eminence), is to write oneself down a pedant, outside the catholic mind. Dumas lived a scandalous life, wrote much execrable French, and encouraged—even employed—some of his fellows to write worse. But the author of The Three Musketeers, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, La Reine Margot—Dumas, “the seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven,” is not to be treated so, by your leave: or only so, I repeat, at the critic’s peril. Or let me take an Englishman—John Dryden. I suspect I shall not misrepresent or misreport the attitude of many in this room towards Dryden when I say that we find a world of slovenly sorry stuff in his dramas, and in his poems a deal of wit and rhetoric which our later taste—such as it is, good or bad, true or false—refuses to pass for poetry at all. Now if I merely wanted to prove to you that Dryden at his best could write finely, exquisitely—that out of the strong could come forth sweetness—I could content myself with asking you to listen to these verses:

No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour,

Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;

My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,

I can die with her, but not live without her

One tender sigh of her, to see me languish,

Will more than pay the price of my past anguish;

Beware, O cruel fair, how you smile on me,

’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.

Love has in store for me one happy minute,

And she will end my pain, who did begin it;

Then no day, void of bliss, of pleasure, leaving,

Ages shall slide away without perceiving:

Cupid shall guard the door, the more to please us,

And keep out Time and Death, when they would seize us:

Time and Death shall depart, and say in flying,

“Love has found out a way to live—by dying.”

There, obviously, is a virtuoso who commands his keyboard. But if I were talking about Dryden to you for your soul’s good, I should rather show you the man with all his imperfections on his head, then turn and challenge you to deny his greatness. Why, you can scarcely read a page, even of his prose—say, for choice, the opening of his Essay of Dramatic Poesy—without recognising the tall fellow of his hands, the giant among his peers,

ψυχἠ ...

... μακρὰ βιβᾶσα κατ’ ἀσφοδελὸν λειμῶνα,

“pacing with long stride the asphodel meadow” where, let us say, Samuel Johnson walks, and Handel, and Hugo, nor are they abashed to salute the very greatest—Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare.

I repeat, Gentlemen, that at all risk of appearing exorbitant I should preach this to you for your souls’ good. For I do most earnestly want you, before all else, to recognise this quality of greatness and respond to it. In so far as, in your fleeting generation, you give me your confidence and honour me (shall I say?) with a personal hope for A or B or C, I would warn you of what I have experimentally proved to be true of my contemporaries—that the man is most fatally destined to be great himself who learns early to enlarge his heart to the great masters; that those have steadily sunk who cavilled at Caesar with Cassius, or over a cigarette chatted admiringly of the rent which envious Casca made: that anyone with an ear learns very surely to distinguish the murmur of the true bee from the morose hum of the drone who is bringing no honey, nor ever will, to the hive. In my own time of apprenticeship—say in the ’nineties—we were all occupied—after the French novelists—with style: in seeking the right word, le mot juste, and with “art for art’s sake,” etc. And we were serious enough, mind you. We cut ourselves with knives. To-day, if I may diagnose your more youthful sickness, you are occupied rather with lyricism, curious and recondite sensations, appositions of unrelated facts with magenta-coloured adjectives. The craze has spread to the shop-fronts, to curtains, bedspreads, as the craze for Byronic collars spread in its day: and “Hell is empty!” cried Ferdinand, plunging overboard: but you can still find psycho-analysis rampant, with any amount of Birth Control, among the geese on Golder’s Green. But if from this desk I have preached incessantly on a text, it is this—that all spirit being mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact: and that therefore we shall grow the greater and better critics as we surrender ourselves to the great writers and without detraction, at least until we have, in modesty of mind, proved them: since, to apply a word of Emerson’s:

Heartily know—

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.