point of a victorious conclusion, we have
suffered heavily through past neglect and present nescience of
our literature, which is so much more European, so much more
catholic, a thing than either our politics or our national
religion: that largely by reason of this neglect and this
nescience our statesmen have again and again failed to foresee
how continental nations would act through failing to understand
their minds; and have almost invariably, through this lack of
sympathetic understanding, failed to interpret us to foreign
friend or foe, even when (and it was not often) they interpreted
us to ourselves. I note that America--a country with no
comparable separate tradition of literature--has customarily
chosen men distinguished by the grace of letters for ambassadors
to the Court of St James--Motley, Lowell, Hay, Page, in our time:
and has for her President a man of letters--and a Professor at
that!--whereas, even in these critical days, Great Britain,
having a most noble cause and at least half-a-hundred writers and
speakers capable of presenting it with dignity and so clearly
that no neutral nation could mistake its logic, has by preference
entrusted it to stunt journalists and film-artistes. If in these
later days you have lacked a voice to interpret you in the great
accent of a Chatham, the cause lies in past indifference to that
literary tradition which is by no means the least among the
glories of our birth and state.

VIII

Masterpieces, then, will serve us as prophylactics of taste, even
from childhood; and will help us, further, to interpret the
common mind of civilisation. But they have a third and yet nobler
use. They teach us to lift our own souls.

For witness to this and to the way of it I am going to call an
old writer for whom, be it whim or not, I have an almost 18th
century reverence--Longinus. No one exactly knows who he was;
although it is usual to identify him with that Longinus who
philosophised in the court of the Queen Zenobia and was by her,
in her downfall, handed over with her other counsellors to be
executed by Aurelian: though again, as is usual, certain bold bad
men affirm that, whether he was this Longinus or not, the
treatise of which I speak was not written by any Longinus at all
but by someone with a different name, with which they are
unacquainted. Be this as it may, somebody wrote the treatise and
its first editor, Francis Robertello of Basle, in 1554 called him
Dionysius Lo