Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/131

 which the most serious poet, telling the severest tale, might be only too happy to have invented. At other times the examples are frequent in the probably rehandled chronicle-plays—he will take another man's phrase which is not grand at all, and 'grandee' it—equip it with the Orders of the King, and the qualifications necessary to justify them—by a stroke or two of added or altered diction. Constantly it seems as though a sort of whim took him to be grand or as if (in the words of one of his own characters who is too graceless for the strictly Grand Style, though grand enough in his own fashion) &apos;'grandeur lay in his way and he found it '. Some of these characters—Hamlet for one, of course, and Macbeth for another—would speak habitually in it if they had not more grace of congruity than to do so. There is no one who has it more perfectly than Antony—unless it be Cleopatra—when either chooses; and Othello at his best excels almost all others. Once more, if his last words be not in the Grand Style, where are we to look for it?

But the old aporia—the old curious fallacy-objection—recurs. 'These things are grand—but there is so. much else that is not grand.' To this there is, once more, only the old answer to all fallacy-objections of the kind. 'Why not?' I suspect that the fallacy arises, as so many aesthetic fallacies do, from a confusion of Arts. It is sometimes forgotten that literature, especially in some of its forms, is much more of a macrocosm than any of its sister species of Imitation. The greater epic, the novel, and especially the drama, have got to face and reproduce life, character, action, circumstance, in all their varieties, foul as well as fair, trivial as well as dignified, commonplace as well as exceptional. To attempt to clothe all this in the same Grand Style, or in the Grand Style at all, is to offend against the sumptuary laws of Art itself. The so-called classical drama of modern time has made this attempt; and the wiser judgement of the best periods of criticism has decided that it has failed.