“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.