Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie just here.  Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be applied.  It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author’s skill to give as on ours to receive.

(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with me to Plato’s wayfarers, whom we have left so long under the cypresses; and loth as we must be to lay hands on our father Parmenides, I feel we must treat the gifted Athenian stranger to a little manhandling.  For did you not observe—­though Greek was a living language and to his metropolitan mind the only language—­how envious he showed himself to seal up the well, or allow it to trickle only under permit of a public analyst:  to treat all innovation as suspect, even as, a hundred odd years ago, the Lyrical Ballads were suspect?

But the very hope of this Chair, Sir (as I conceive it), relies on the courage of the young.  As Literature is an Art and therefore not to be pondered only, but practised, so ours is a living language and therefore to be kept alive, supple, active in all honourable use.  The orator can yet sway men, the poet ravish them, the dramatist fill their lungs with salutary laughter or purge their emotions by pity or terror.  The historian ‘superinduces upon events the charm of order.’  The novelist—­well, even the novelist has his uses; and I would warn you against despising any form of art which is alive and pliant in the hands of men.  For my part, I believe, bearing in mind Mr. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” and the old bottles he renovated to hold that joyous wine, that even Musical Comedy, in the hands of a master, might become a thing of beauty.  Of the Novel, at any rate—­whether we like it or not—­we have to admit that it does hold a commanding position in the literature of our times, and to consider how far Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie was right the other day when he claimed, on the first page of his brilliant study of Thomas Hardy, that ’the right to such a position is not to be disputed; for here, as elsewhere, the right to a position is no more than the power to maintain it.’  You may agree with that or you may not; you may or may not deplore the forms that literature is choosing now-a-days; but there is no gainsaying that it is still very much alive.  And I would say to you, Gentlemen, ’Believe, and be glad that Literature and the English tongue are both alive.’  Carlyle, in his explosive way, once demanded of his countrymen, ’Shakespeare or India?  If you had to surrender one to retain the other, which would you choose?’ Well, our Indian Empire is yet in the making, while the works of Shakespeare are complete and purchasable in whole calf; so the alternatives are scarcely in pari materia; and moreover let us not be in a hurry to meet trouble half way.  But in English Literature, which, like India, is still in the making, you have at once an Empire and an Emprise.  In that alone you have inherited something greater than Sparta.  Let us strive, each in his little way, to adorn it.