Charles Stephen Dale, the subject of my study, was a dramatist
and, indeed, something of a celebrity in the early years of the
twentieth century. That he should be already completely forgotten is
by no means astonishing in an age that elects its great men with a
charming indecision of touch. The general prejudice against the
granting of freeholds has spread to the desired lands of fame; and
where our profligate ancestors were willing to call a man great in
perpetuity, we, with more shrewdness, prefer to name him a genius for
seven years. We know that before that period may have expired fate
will have granted us a sea-serpent with yet more coils, with a
yet more bewildering arrangement of marine and sunset tints, and the
conclusion of previous leases will enable us to grant him undisputed
possession of Parnassus. If our ancestors were more generous they
were certainly less discriminate; and it cannot be doubted that many
of them went to their graves under the impression that it is possible
for there to be more than one great man at a time! We have altered
all that. For two years Dale was a great man, or rather the great man, and it
is probable that if he had not died he would have held his position
for a longer period. When his death was announced, although the
notices of his life and work were of a flattering length, the
leaderwriters were not unnaturally aggrieved that he should have
resigned his post before the popular interest in his personality was
exhausted. The Censor might do his best by prohibiting the
performance of all the plays that the dead man had left behind him;
but, as the author neglected to express his views in their columns,
and the common sense of their readers forbade the publication of
interviews with him, the journals could draw but a poor
satisfaction from condemning or upholding the official action. Dale's
regrettable absence reduced what might have been an agreeable clash
of personalities to an arid discussion on art. The consequence was
obvious. The end of the week saw the elevation of James Macintosh,
the great Scotch comedian, to the vacant post, and Dale was
completely forgotten. That this oblivion is merited in terms of his
work I am not prepared to admit; that it is merited in terms of his
personality I indignantly wish to deny. Whatever Dale may have been
as an artist, he was, perhaps in spite of himself, a man, and a man,
moreover, possessed of many striking and unusual traits of character. It is to the man Dale that I offer this tribute. Sprung from an old Yorkshire family, Charles Stephen Dale was yet
sufficient of a Cockney to justify both his friends and his enemies
in crediting him with the Celtic temperament. Nevertheless, he was
essentially a modern, insomuch that his contempt for the writings of
dead men surpassed his dislike of living authors. To these two
central influences we may trace most of the peculiarities that
rendered him notorious and ultimately great. Thus, while his Celtic
æstheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he
mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the
barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him
an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men
might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect
their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest
conviction should have its place in the formation of his character. Conversely, he was nothing without a reason. These may seem small things to which to trace the motive forces of a
man's life; but if we add to them a third, found where the truth
about a man not infrequently lies, in the rag-bag of his enemies, our
materials will be nearly complete. "Dale hates his
fellow-human- beings," wrote some anonymous scribbler, and, even
expressed thus baldly, the statement is not wholly false. But he
hated them because of their imperfections, and it would be truer to
say that his love of humanity amounted to a positive hatred of
individuals, and, _pace_ the critics, the love was no less sincere
than the hatred. He had drawn from the mental confusion of the darker
German philosophers an image of the perfect man--an image differing
only in inessentials from the idol worshipped by the Imperialists as
"efficiency." He did not find--it was hardly likely that he would
find--that his contemporaries fulfilled this perfect conception, and
he therefore felt it necessary to condemn them for the possession of
those weaknesses, or as some would prefer to say, qualities, of which
the sum is human nature. I now approach a quality, or rather the lack of a quality, that is in
itself of so debatable a character, that were it not of the utmost
importance in considering the life of Charles Stephen Dale I should
prefer not to mention it. I refer to his complete lack of a sense of
humour, the consciousness of which deficiency went so far to detract
from his importance as an artist and a man. The difficulty which I
mentioned above lies in the fact that, while every one has a clear
conception of what they mean by the phrase, no one has yet
succeeded in defining it satisfactorily. Here I would venture to
suggest that it is a kind of magnificent sense of proportion, a
sense that relates the infinite greatness of the universe to the
finite smallness of man, and draws the inevitable conclusion as to
the importance of our joys and sorrows and labours. I am aware that
this definition errs on the side of vagueness; but possibly it may be
found to include the truth. Obviously, the natures of those who
possess this sense will tend to be static rather than dynamic, and it
is therefore against the limits imposed by this sense that
intellectual anarchists, among whom I would number Dale, and poets,
primarily rebel. But--and it is this rather than his undoubted
intellectual gifts or his dogmatic definitions of good and evil that
definitely separated Dale from the normal men--there can be no doubt
that he felt his lack of a sense of humour bitterly. In every word he
ever said, in every line he ever wrote, I detect a painful striving
after this mysterious sense, that enabled his neighbours, fools as he
undoubtedly thought them, to laugh and weep and follow the faith of
their hearts without conscious realisation of their own
existence and the problems it induced. By dint of study and strenuous
observation he achieved, as any man may achieve, a considerable
degree of wit, though to the last his ignorance of the audience whom
he served and despised, prevented him from judging the effect of his
sallies without experiment. But try as he might the finer jewel lay
far beyond his reach. Strong men fight themselves when they can find
no fitter adversary; but in all the history of literature there is no
stranger spectacle than this lifelong contest between Dale, the
intellectual anarch and pioneer of supermen, and Dale, the poor
lonely devil who wondered what made people happy.