His contemporary public denounced him as dull, because he tortured them with personal problems; as malignant, because he made them see truths they wished not to see; as blasphemous and foul-minded, because he made demands on their religious and spiritual natures which they could neither satisfy nor overlook.  They did not know whether he was too wildly imaginative or too realistic, too romantic or too prosaic, too childishly simple or too philosophical—­Aristophanes says he was all these things at once.  They only knew that he made them angry and that they could not help listening to him.

Does not that remind you a little of what was said all over England of Mr. Bernard Shaw?  Of what is still said about him in many London houses to-day?  If some one praises him, the majority of people will tell you that he is overrated.  Does it not remind you of the reception which Ibsen’s plays met when they were first produced here:  when they gave an impetus to that new English drama which I understand is decaying, though it seems to me to be only beginning—­the new English Drama of Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. Housman, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Galsworthy, and Mr. Masefield?

Every year the patient research of scholars by the consultation of original documents has caused us to readjust our historical perspective.  Those villains of our childhood, Tiberius, Richard III., Mary Tudor, and others, have become respectable monarchs, almost model monarchs, if you compare them with the popular English view of the present King of the Belgians, the ex-Sultan of Turkey, and the present Czar of Russia.  It is realised that contemporary journalism gave a somewhat twopence coloured impression of Kings and Queens, who were only creatures of their age, less admirable expressions of the individualism of their time.  And just as historical facts require readjustment by posterity, so our critical estimate of intellectual and aesthetic evolution requires strict revision.  We must not accept the glib statement of the historian, especially of the contemporary historian, that at certain periods intellectual activity and artistic expression were decaying or did not exist.  If a convention in one field of intellectual activity is said by the historian or chronicler to be approaching termination or to be decaying, as he calls it, we should test carefully his data and his credentials.  But, assuming he is right, there will always be found some compensating reaction in another sphere of intellectual activity which is in process of development; and through which, by some divine alchemy, providence, or nature, call it what you will, a new manifestation will be made to the world.  The arts which we suppose to have perished, of which, indeed, we write affecting epitaphs, are merely hibernating; the intellect which is necessary for their production and nutrition is simply otherwise employed; while, of course, you must make allowances for the appreciations of posterity,