ing them if they were indeed so worthless.
Actually, they felt, Dale was a great deal more engaged with his
audience than many of the imaginative writers whom he affected to
despise for their sycophancy. And, especially towards the end of his
life when his powers perhaps were weakening, the devices which he
used to arouse the irritation of his contemporaries became more and
more childishly artificial, less and less effective. He was like one
of those actors who feel that they cannot hold the attention of their
audience unless they are always doing something, though nothing is
more monotonous than mannered vivacity.

Dale, then, was a man who was very anxious to be modern, but at the
same time had not wholly succeeded in conquering his aeesthetic sense.
He had constituted himself high priest of the most puritanical and
remote of all creeds, yet there was that in his blood that rebelled
ceaselessly against the intellectual limits he had voluntarily
accepted. The result in terms of art was chaos. Possessed of an
intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost
entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise
his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his
nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger,
and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He
lacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above his
conception. It is in vain to seek in any of his plays or novels,
tracts or prefaces, for the product of inspiration, the divine gift
that enables one man to write with the common pen of humanity. He
could only employ his curiously perfect technique in reproducing the
wayward flashes of a mind incapable of consecutive thought. He never
attempted--and this is a hard saying--to produce any work beautiful
in itself; while the confusion of his mind, and the vanity that never
allowed him to ignore the effect his work might produce on his
audience, prevented him from giving clear expression to his creed.
His work will appeal rather to the student of men than to the
student of art, and, wantonly incoherent though it often is, must be
held to constitute a remarkable human document.

It is strange to reflect that among his contemporary admirers Dale
was credited with an intellect of unusual clarity, for the
examination of any of his plays impresses one with the number and
mutual destructiveness of his motives for artistic expressio