any rate ensure their dignity.

* * * * *

Yet another example is Professor Walter Raleigh. Fifty per cent. of you
will leap up and say that I am being perverse. But I am not. It has been
demonstrated to me satisfactorily, by contact with Liverpool people, that
Professor Raleigh's personal influence at that university in certain ways
made for righteousness. Nevertheless, Professor Raleigh has himself
demonstrated to me that, wherever the root of the matter may be, it is not
in _him_. One must remember that he is young, and that his underived
opinions are therefore less likely to clash with the authoritative
opinions of living creative artists on their contemporaries and
predecessors than if he were of the same generation as the Collinses and
the Saintsburys. But wait a few years. Wait until something genuinely new
and original comes along and you will see what you will see. If he wished
not to ruin his reputation among artists, among people who really create
things, he ought not to have published his books on "Style" and on
"Shakespere." He ought to have burnt them. For they are as hollow as a
drum and as unoriginal as a bride-cake: nothing but vacuity with an icing
of phrases. I am brought back again to the anecdote of the musician. No
one who had the least glimmering of an individual vision of what style
truly is could possibly have tolerated the too fearfully ingenious mess of
words that Professor Raleigh courageously calls a book on "Style." The
whole thing is a flagrant contradiction of every notion of style. It may
not be generally known (and I do not state it as a truth) that Professor
Raleigh is a distant connexion of the celebrated family of Pains,
pyrotechnicians. I would begin to go to the Empire again if I could see on
the programme: "10.20. Professor Raleigh, in his unique prestidigitatory
performance with words." Yes, I would stroll once more into the hallowed