Facts
He is before all things else a writer to be studied. He wrote for the world at large and to the end that he might be read eternally. His matter, his manner, the terms of his philosophy, the quality of his ideals, the nature of his achievement, proclaim him universal. Like Scott, like Cervantes, like Shakespeare, he claims not merely our acquaintance but an intimate and abiding familiarity. He has no special public, and to be only on nodding terms with him is to be practically dead to his attraction and unworthy his society. He worked not for the boys and girls of an age but for the men and women of all time; and both as artist and as thinker he commands unending attention and lifelong friendship. He is a great inventor, an unrivalled craftsman, a perfect master of his material. His achievement is the result of a life-time of varied experience, of searching and sustained observation, of unwearying intellectual endeavour. The sound and lusty types he created have an intellectual flavour peculiar to themselves. His novels teem with ripe wisdom and generous conclusions and beneficent examples. As Mr. Stephen tells you, ‘he has the undeniable merit of representing certain aspects of contemporary society with a force and accuracy not even rivalled by any other writer’; and it is a fact that not to have studied him ‘is to be without a knowledge of the most important documents of contemporary history.’ More: to contrast those fair, large parchments in which he has stated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter-day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer is to know the difference between the artist in health and the artist possessed by an idiosyncrasy as by a devil.