I have said that the struggle was lifelong, but it must be added that
it was always unequal. The knowledge that in his secret heart he
desired this quality, the imperfection of imperfections, only served
to make Dale's attack on the complacency of his contemporaries more
bitter. He ridiculed their achievements, their ambitions, and their
love with a fury that awakened in them a mild curiosity, but by no
means affected their comfort. Moreover, the very vehemence with
which he demanded their contempt deprived him of much of his force as
a critic, for they justly wondered why a man should waste his
lifetime in attacking them if they were indeed so worthless. Actually, they felt, Dale was a great deal more engaged with his
audience than many of the imaginative writers whom he affected to
despise for their sycophancy. And, especially towards the end of his
life when his powers perhaps were weakening, the devices which he
used to arouse the irritation of his contemporaries became more and
more childishly artificial, less and less effective. He was like one
of those actors who feel that they cannot hold the attention of their
audience unless they are always doing something, though nothing is
more monotonous than mannered vivacity. Dale, then, was a man who was very anxious to be modern, but at the
same time had not wholly succeeded in conquering his æesthetic sense. He had constituted himself high priest of the most puritanical and
remote of all creeds, yet there was that in his blood that rebelled
ceaselessly against the intellectual limits he had voluntarily
accepted. The result in terms of art was chaos. Possessed of an
intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost
entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise
his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his
nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger,
and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He
lacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above his
conception. It is in vain to seek in any of his plays or novels,
tracts or prefaces, for the product of inspiration, the divine gift
that enables one man to write with the common pen of humanity. He
could only employ his curiously perfect technique in reproducing the
wayward flashes of a mind incapable of consecutive thought. He never
attempted--and this is a hard saying--to produce any work beautiful
in itself; while the confusion of his mind, and the vanity that never
allowed him to ignore the effect his work might produce on his
audience, prevented him from giving clear expression to his creed. His work will appeal rather to the student of men than to the
student of art, and, wantonly incoherent though it often is, must be
held to constitute a remarkable human document. It is strange to reflect that among his contemporary admirers Dale
was credited with an intellect of unusual clarity, for the
examination of any of his plays impresses one with the number and
mutual destructiveness of his motives for artistic expression. A
noted debater, he made frequent use of the device of attacking the
weakness of the other man's speech, rather than the weakness of
the other man's argument. His prose was good, though at its best
so impersonal that it recalled the manner of an exceptionally
well-written leading article. At its worst it was marred by
numerous vulgarities and errors of taste, not always, it is to be
feared, intentional. His attitude on this point was typical of his
strange blindness to the necessity of a pure artistic ideal. He
committed these extravagances, he would say, in order to irritate
his audience into a condition of mental alertness. As a matter of
fact, he generally made his readers more sorry than angry, and he
did not realise that even if he had been successful it was but a
poor reward for the wanton spoiling of much good work. He
proclaimed himself to be above criticism, but he was only too
often beneath it. Revolting against the dignity, not infrequently
pompous, of his fellow-men of letters, he played the part of clown
with more enthusiasm than skill. It is intellectual arrogance in a
clever man to believe that he can play the fool with success
merely because he wishes it. There is no need for me to enter into detail with regard to Dale's
personal appearance; the caricaturists did him rather more than
justice, the photographers rather less. In his younger days he
suggested a gingerbread man that had been left too long in the sun;
towards the end he affected a cultured and elaborate ruggedness that
made him look like a duke or a market gardener. Like most clever men,
he had good eyes. Nor is it my purpose to add more than a word to the published
accounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in that
last desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the account
of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed--cold,
epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. And
once more it was his fate to make us rather sorry than angry. In the third scene of the second act of "Henry V.," a play written
by an author whom Dale pretended to despise, Dame Quickly describes
the death of Falstaff in words that are too well known to need
quotation. It was thus and no otherwise that Dale died. It is thus
that every man dies. Blue Blood

He sat in the middle of the great café with his head supported
on his hands, miserable even to bitterness. Inwardly he cursed the
ancestors who had left him little but a great name and a small and
ridiculous body. He thought of his father, whose expensive
eccentricities had amused his fellow-countrymen at the cost of his
fortune; his mother, for whom death had been a blessing; his
grandparents and his uncles, in whom no man had found any good. But
most of all he cursed himself, for whose follies even heredity might
not wholly account. He recalled the school where he had made no
friends, the University where he had taken no degree. Since he had
left Oxford, his aimless, hopeless life, profligate, but
dishonourable, perhaps, only by accident, had deprived even his title
of any social value, and one by one his very acquaintances had
left him to the society of broken men and the women who are anything
but light. And these, and here perhaps the root of his bitterness
lay, even these recognised him only as a victim for their mockery, a
thing more poor than themselves, whereon they could satisfy the anger
of their tortured souls. And his last misery lay in this: that he
himself could find no day in his life to admire, no one past dream to
cherish, no inmost corner of his heart to love. The lowest tramp, the
least-heeded waif of the night, might have some ultimate pride, but
he himself had nothing, nothing whatever. He was a dream-pauper, an
emotional bankrupt. With a choked sob he drained his brandy and told the waiter to bring
him another.