our
times, and to consider how far Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie was right the
other day when he claimed, on the first page of his brilliant study of
Thomas Hardy, that 'the right to such a position is not to be disputed;
for here, as elsewhere, the right to a position is no more than the
power to maintain it.' You may agree with that or you may not; you may
or may not deplore the forms that literature is choosing now-a-days; but
there is no gainsaying that it is still very much alive. And I would say
to you, Gentlemen, 'Believe, and be glad that Literature and the English
tongue are both alive.' Carlyle, in his explosive way, once demanded of
his countrymen, 'Shakespeare or India? If you had to surrender one to
retain the other, which would you choose?' Well, our Indian Empire is
yet in the making, while the works of Shakespeare are complete and
purchasable in whole calf; so the alternatives are scarcely _in pari
materia_; and moreover let us not be in a hurry to meet trouble half
way. But in English Literature, which, like India, is still in the
making, you have at once an Empire and an Emprise. In that alone you
have inherited something greater than Sparta. Let us strive, each in his
little way, to adorn it.

But here at the close of my hour, the double argument, that Literature is
an Art and English a living tongue, has led me right up to a fourth
principle, the plunge into which (though I foresaw it from the first) all
the coward in me rejoices at having to defer to another lecture. I
conclude then, Gentlemen, by answering two suspicions, which very likely
have been shaping themselves in your minds. In the first place, you will
say, 'It is all very well for this man to talk about "cultivating an
increased sensibility," and the like; but we know what that leads to--to
quackery, to aesthetic chatter: "Isn't this pretty? Don't you admire
that?"' Well, I am not greatly frightened. To begin with, when we come to
particular criticism I shall endeavour to exchange it with you in plain
terms; a manner which (to quote Mr Robert Bridges' "Essay on Keats") 'I
prefer, because by obliging the lecturer to say definitely what he means,
it makes his mistakes easy to point out, and in this way the true
business of criticism is advanced.' But I have a second safeguard, more
to be trusted: that here in Cambridge, with all her traditions of austere
scholarship, anyone who indulges in loose distinct talk will be quickly
recalled to his te