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 expression.  A noted debater, he made frequent use of the device of attacking the weakness of the other man’s speech, rather than the weakness of the other man’s argument.  His prose was good, though at its best so impersonal that it recalled the manner of an exceptionally well-written leading article.  At its worst it was marred by numerous vulgarities and errors of taste, not always, it is to be feared, intentional.  His attitude on this point was typical of his strange blindness to the necessity of a pure artistic ideal.  He committed these extravagances, he would say, in order to irritate his audience into a condition of mental alertness.  As a matter of fact, he generally made his readers more sorry than angry, and he did not realise that even if he had been successful it was but a poor reward for the wanton spoiling of much good work.  He proclaimed himself to be above criticism, but he was only too often beneath it.  Revolting against the dignity, not infrequently pompous, of his fellow-men of letters, he played the part of clown with more enthusiasm than skill.  It is intellectual arrogance in a clever man to believe that he can play the fool with success merely because he wishes it.