th' inevitable hour;
The paths of glory lead but to the grave,

or when Keats casually drops us such a line as

The journey homeward to habitual self,

or, to come down to our own times and to a living poet, when I open on a
page of William Watson and read

O ancient streams, O far descended woods,
Full of the fluttering of melodious souls!...

'why then (will say the initiated one), why worry me with any definition
of the Grand Style in English, when here, and here, and again here--in
all these lines, simple or intense or exquisite or solemn--I recognise
and feel the _thing_?'

Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie just here.
Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be
applied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal
persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive.

(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with me to Plato's
wayfarers, whom we have left so long under the cypresses; and loth as we
must be to lay hands on our father Parmenides, I feel we must treat the
gifted Athenian stranger to a little manhandling. For did you not
observe--though Greek was a living language and to his metropolitan mind
the only language--how envious he showed himself to seal up the well, or
allow it to trickle only under permit of a public analyst: to treat all
innovation as suspect, even as, a hundred odd years ago, the Lyrical
Ballads were suspect?

But the very hope of this Chair, Sir (as I conceive it), relies on the
courage of the young. As Literature is an Art and therefore not to be
pondered only, but practised, so ours is a living language and therefore
to be kept alive, supple, active in all honourable use. The orator can
yet sway men, the poet ravish them, the dramatist fill their lungs with
salutary laughter or purge their emotions by pity or terror.
The historian 'superinduces upon events the charm of order.'
The novelist--well, even the novelist has his uses; and I would warn you
against despising any form of art which is alive and pliant in the hands
of men. For my part, I believe, bearing in mind Mr. Barrie's "Peter Pan"
and the old bottles he renovated to hold that joyous wine, that even
Musical Comedy, in the hands of a master, might become a thing of
beauty. Of the Novel, at any rate--whether we like it or not--we have to
admit that it does hold a commanding position in the literature of