He is like the
Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an
obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man
of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic
fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no
Rembrandt, no Balzac, no greater Tolstoi in English letters? I want to
liberate Englishmen so far as I can from the tyranny of Shakespeare's
greatness. For the new time is upon us, with its new knowledge and new
claims, and we English are all too willing to live in the past, and so
lose our inherited place as leader of the nations.
The French have profited by their glorious Revolution: they trusted
reason and have had their reward; no such leap forward has ever been
made as France made in that one decade, and the effects are still
potent. In the last hundred years the language of Moliere has grown
fourfold; the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of
the engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for
special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may
deal easily with the new thoughts.
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