Raphaelite, shows a tendency towards Liberalism. (Nevertheless, his lecture on Pope is worth reading.)
The Gentleman in a Library has dignity; he lacks, to put it in the crudest way, "punch." This the Liberal endeavours to provide. For the former, Literature is a pleasure for the more cultivated upper classes; for the latter, it is Education for the Million. Mr Clutton-Brock really does, I think, try to improve the Million up to the pleasantness and peace of the William Morris way of life; I believe he is a Christian Socialist. The great weakness of our Liberal Practitioners is that they have abandoned a safe position without having the skill to prepare another. The Liberal is merely a drifting Conservative, and much more obstructive to genuine innovation in the Arts than the firm Conservative, because he persuades the public that he is himself modern, and that anything more original than himself is not modernity but madness.
No. For a Professor of Poetry I believe that I should choose an American, Professor Irving Babbitt. Not that I agree with all of Mr Babbitt's opinions: but partly that there are few writers so well worth disagreeing with. There is no doubt that Mr Babbitt is a far more serious writer than any of the Englishmen I have mentioned. He is more learned—or, to be more precise, better equipped; he has strong convictions; and he has just that valuable and rare academic originality which we seek. In Mr Babbitt's mind the classical culture is active; he is perfectly honest; and he does not forget that Homer, Virgil, and Dante have each certain qualities not so well represented in Shakespeare.
Shakespeare has been a subject of attention lately, owing to two books, Mr Robertson's Shakespeare Canon, and Mr Clutton-Brock's Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both discussions are really due to Mr Robertson; he wrote an essay on Hamlet several years ago which I reviewed, and his essay and my review appear to have provided the impulse to Mr Brock. Mr Brock's argument I have not read; it may be a very good one. It is difficult to tell, from the reviews, what Mr Brock's argument is; for they have seized merely on one or two sentences, of my own or of Mr Robertson's, and neglected discussion of the issue: which is not whether other plays of Shakespeare are "greater" or "better" than Hamlet, but whether that play is a perfect artistic whole, and whether Shakespeare succeeded completely in expressing the content of emotion.
