I say that I may do you no grave injustice in supposing that, confronted with those famous passages and having it suddenly demanded of you 'Is this classical? or romantic? -Under which king, Besonian? speak, or die!'-you would hesitate, might be inclined to temporise, might even save your life by admitting that, all things considered, there was a little bit of both about them.

Well, that is a useful admission! It concedes that the two epithets describe things which may be contraries, but are at any rate not contradictories, are not mutually exclusive, may meet in the same work, may blend in a line or phrase even, and so as to be hard to distinguish.

II

But let us go a little further. These epithets—'romantic' and 'classical'—vague and indeterminate as we have found their frontiers to be, are still epithets, adjectives by which we qualify real things. We say, for example, of The Faerie Queene, that it is 'romantic,' of Samson Agonistes that it is 'classical' and, The Faerie Queene and Samson Agonistes being things, good nouns concrete and substantive, poems actually printed in ink upon paper, we can bring our epithets to the test. They are not epithets like 'blue' or 'wine-dark' (of the sea), like 'acid' (of the taste of lemon), like 'deafening' (of the explosion of a shell), like 'penetrating' (of the effect of a bullet). They are not epithets of sense, but of concept. They belong to the realm of opinion. If you say of a bullet that it is penetrating, you appeal to the evidence of sense, and the description cannot be denied. If you say of the German behaviour in Belgium that it has been beastly, you appeal to opinion: and a German will say it has been humane, not godlike.

Still your epithet-'romantic' or 'classical'-is, how

ever indeterminate, referable to a real thing, and can be corrected by it.

But when we go a step further yet, and convert our epithets of opinion-classical,' 'romantic'-into abstract nouns-classicism,' 'romanticism'-I would point out to you with all the solemnity at my command that we are at once hopelessly lost: lost, because we have advanced a vague concept to the pretence of being a thing; hopelessly lost, because we have removed our concept out of range of the thing; which is not only what matters, but the one and single test of our secondary notions. "The play's the thing.' Hamlet, Lycidas or The Cenci is the thing. Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley did not write 'classicism' or 'romanticism.' They wrote Hamlet, Lycidas, The Cenci.

III

Gentlemen, I would I could persuade you to remember that you are English, and to go always for the thing, casting out of your vocabulary all such words as 'tendencies,' 'influences,' 'revivals,' 'revolts.' 'Tendencies' did not write The Canterbury Tales; Geoffrey Chaucer wrote them. 'Influences' did not make The Faerie Queene; Edmund Spenser made it: as a man called Ben Jonson wrote The Alchemist, a man called Sheridan wrote The Rivals, a man called Meredith wrote The Egoist.

Now it is the weakness of Germans in criticism that, not having a literature of their own to rank with the great, but being endowed as a race with an unusual talent for philosophising, they habitually think and talk of a literary masterpiece-which is a work of art achieved in the way of practice as though it were a product, or at any rate a by-product, of philosophy, producible by the methods of philosophy. And the reason, I believe, why the Germans have never had, nor are likely to have, a literature com

parable with the best does not lie in the uncouthness of their language. Our English tongue was uncouth enough. until, in their varied ways Chaucer and Wyat and Spenser; the early translators and Tindale; Sidney, Hooker; Milton, Waller and Dryden; Browne and Clarendon and Berkeley; Pope, Addison, Swift, Gibbon, Johnson (to go no further) practised and polished it. But these men, and specially, of course, the earlier ones, saw the difficulty of their task as a condition of overcoming it. You can scarcely open a preface of the old translators, or of an early collection of Songs and Sonnets, but your eye falls on some passage of pathetic apology for our unmusical and barbarous tongue, in which nevertheless the poor fellow affirms that he has done his best

To find out what you cannot do,
And then-to go and do it...

That was the way of the men who made English Literature exquisite.

Now the Germans would seem never, or rarely, to have felt that humility of mind before the great masterpieces, that prostration in worship, that questioning and almost hopeless self-distrust, out of which, by some divine desire of emulation yet persistent in him, the artist is raised to win the crown. Yes, I do assure you, Gentlemen, that George Herbert's loveliest lyric, though it speak of holier things, may be applied in parable, and scarcely with exaggeration, to the attitude of the true artist before his art. Let me remind you of it:

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here':
Love said, "You shall be he.'

'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.'

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
'Who made the eyes but I?'

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.'

'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'
'My dear, then I will serve.'

'You must sit down,' says Love, and taste my meat.'
So I did sit and eat.

IV

Apparently (I say) the Germans feel no such humility of soul before other peoples' great literature: and by consequence-it may seem a strange thing to assert of themthey don't take pains enough; they don't take the trouble because they don't see it. They are at ease in other peoples' Sions: but they cannot build one, and moreover it is not Sion. Literature being literature, and philosophy philosophy, you can never understand or account for literature-still less can you produce literature-by considering it in terms of philosophy; that is, by being wise about it in a category to which it does not happen to belong.

So when a German, cultivating his own bent, bemuses himself with a theory that Wordsworth (we will say) wrote naturalism, or that naturalism wrote Wordsworth, it matters which even less than it matters to us what the German thinks he means. For we know that what Wordsworth wrote was Tintern Abbey, while what naturalism wrote was nothing at all: for it never existed but as a concept in somebody's mind, an abstract notion. God

made man in His image. Germans make generalisations in theirs. That is all, and that is just the difference.

To men who really practise writing as an Art-to every true man of letters in France, in England, in Russia, in Belgium-to an Anatole France, to a Rostand, to a Rolland, to a Thomas Hardy, to a Maxim Gorky, to a Maurice Maeterlinck, these abstract notions are about as useful as the wind in the next street; and the more you practise good actual writing, the more composedly you will ignore them.

But they do confuse and nullify criticism all over Europe, even among men of strong mind who happen to be critics only, and have never undergone the discipline of creative writing. For example-yesterday I took down a volume by that man of really powerful mind, Dr George Brandes. I opened it quite at random, and read:

The strongest tendency even of works like Byron's Don Juan and Shelley's Cenci...

Do

you know any works 'like' these, by the way?

The strongest tendency even of works like Byron's Don Juan and Shelley's Cenci is in reality Naturalism. In other words Naturalism is so powerful in England that it permeates Coleridge's Romantic supernaturalism, Wordsworth's Anglican orthodoxy, Shelley's atheistic spiritualism, Byron's revolutionary liberalism...

-ism, -ism, -ism! 'Omm-jective and summ-jective!' I open at another page, again at haphazard:

Keats's poetry is the most fragrant flower of English Naturalism. Before he appeared, this Naturalism had had a long period of continuous growth. Its active principle had been evolved by Wordsworth....Coleridge provided it with the support of a philosophy of nature which had a strong resemblance