“Let it be plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a great genius half way. It must be all or nothing. If you lack the courage, or the variability, to _go all the way_ with very different masters, and to let your constructive consistency take care of itself, you may become, perhaps, an admirable moralist; you will never be a Clairvoyant critic. All this having been admitted, it still remains that one has a right to draw out from the great writers one loves certain universal aesthetic tests, with which to discriminate between modern productions. “But even such tests are personal and relative. They are not to be foisted on one’s readers as anything ‘ex cathedra’. One such test is the test of what has been called ‘the grand style’—that grand style against which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our race beats in vain! I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting my devotion to the ‘grand style’ into an academic ‘narrow way,’ through which I would force every writer I approach. Some most winning and irresistible artists never come near it. “And yet—what a thing it is! And with what relief do we return to it, after the ‘wallowings’ and ‘rhapsodies,’ the agitations and prostitutions, of those who have it not. “And what are the elements, the qualities, that go to make up this ‘grand style’? “Let me first approach the matter negatively. There are certain things that _cannot_—because of something essentially ephemeral in them—be dealt with in the grand style. “Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problem of Sex. We may be Feminists or Anti-Feminists—what you will—and we may be able to throw interesting light on these complicated relations, but we cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in the grand style, because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because, with all its gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimately matter! “Such, to take another example, are our elaborate arguments about the interpretation, ethical or otherwise, of Christian Doctrine. We can be very entertaining, very moral, very eloquent, very subtle, in this particular sphere; but we cannot deal with it in the ‘great style,’ because the permanent issues that really count lie out of reach of such discussion and remain unaffected by it. “Let me make myself quite clear. Hector and Andromache can talk to one another of their love, of their eternal parting, of their child, and they can do this in the great style; but if they fell into dispute over the particular sex conventions that existed in their age, they might be attractive still, but they would not be uttering words in the ‘great style’....