ing it borne in on you
that they are great because they are alive, and traffic not with cold
celestial certainties, but with men's hopes, aspirations, doubts, loves,
hates, breakings of the heart; the glory and vanity of human endeavour,
the transience of beauty, the capricious uncertain lease on which you and
I hold life, the dark coast to which we inevitably steer; all that amuses
or vexes, all that gladdens, saddens, maddens us men and women on this
brief and mutable traject which yet must be home for a while, the
anchorage of our hearts? For an instance:--

Here lies a most beautiful lady,
Light of step and heart was she:
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes, beauty passes,
However rare, rare it be;
And when I crumble who shall remember
That lady of the West Country?

(Walter de la Mare.)

Or take a critic--a literary critic--such as Samuel Johnson, of whom we
are used to think as of a man artificial in phrase and pedantic in
judgment. He lives, and why? Because, if you test his criticism, he never
saw literature but as a part of life, nor would allow in literature what
was false to life, as he saw it. He could be wrong-headed, perverse;
could damn Milton because he hated Milton's politics; on any question of
passion or prejudice could make injustice his daily food. But he could
not, even in a friend's epitaph, let pass a phrase (however well turned)
which struck him as empty of life or false to it. All Boswell testifies
to this: and this is why Samuel Johnson survives.

Now let me carry this contention--that all Literature is personal and
therefore various--into a field much exploited by the pedant, and fenced
about with many notice-boards and public warnings. _'Neologisms not
allowed here,' 'All persons using slang, or trespassing in pursuit of
originality....'_

Well, I answer these notice-boards by saying that, literature being
personal, and men various--and even the "Oxford English Dictionary" being
no Canonical book--man's use or defiance of the dictionary depends for
its justification on nothing but his success: adding that, since it takes
all kinds to make a world, or a literature, his success will probably
depend on the occasion. A few months ago I found myself seated at a
bump-supper next to a cheerful youth who, towards the close, suggested
thoughtfully, as I arose to make a speech, t