ch
"pluralism" in his natural temper, or the writers he can respond to
will be very few!

Let it be quite plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a
great genius halfway. It is a case of 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!

It is--one must recognize that--the thing, and the only thing, that, in
the long run, _appeals._ It is because of the absence of it that one
can read so few modern writers _twice!_ They have flexibility,
originality, cleverness, insight--but they lack _distinction_--they
fatally lack distinction.

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
c