n the public unheard, we are
compelled to ask of him: Have you given to this material a form which
it will accept? Have you addressed the public in a language which has
a wide human appeal? Are you, in fact, a master of that higher
technique which implies an understanding, not only of the fine
essences of truth, but the broad, common facts of human nature? It is
just because they are not masters of this higher technique that many
exponents of so-called "intellectual fiction" and "intellectual drama"
are doomed to failure.

I am well aware that such arguments as this must be qualified. For I
have not forgotten that what are now the commonplaces of culture were
once the unintelligible obscurities of a sage. Much that we now
apprehend at a glance, all that makes our cultural birthright, was
only acquired by slow and arduous processes, in which the pioneers
were laughed to scorn. The original mind sees things in a new light,
and his language is to us strange and unfamiliar, and we do not learn
it till our eyes and ears have become accustomed. And there are others
who do not stand conspicuously in the main stream of mental progress,
who, nevertheless, remote and perhaps secluded as they are, have a
vision rarefied, subtle, strange not only in their own times, but for
all times. Those men have their own communication to make to those
anxious to add to the fineness of their perception, or merely perhaps
to the oddness of experience. If some sting of truth reaches the mind
through writing obscure to the general, through language which may be
barbarous in form, an author has justified himself; and it would be
idle to follow Mr. Brander Matthews in his quotation from the
ever-pleasing Lord Chesterfield: "Speak the language of the company
you are in; speak it purely and unloaded with any other." For, after
all, is it not open to the author to choose his company? If his
receptions are ill-attended, that may not reflect ill on those who
accept the invitation. Not everyone will read the poems of Mr.
Doughty; Mr. Doughty has made it hard for them; but if they do, they
are repaid. Not everyone will tolerate the finesse of Mr. Henry James;
but among those who can understand him, assuredly Mr. James is in very
good company.

VI

SPECIALISM IN PHILOSOPHY AND JUSTICE

In the play called _Justice_, Mr. Galsworthy attacked the professional
mechanism of English law in much the same way as the late William
James attacked professi