That is why, and here I come to a point that is often surprisingly ignored, they honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows. But surely these instances are enough - I need not further labour the point that highbrows, for some reason or another, are wholly incapable of dealing successfully with what is called real life. Then there was Scott - he went bankrupt, and left, together with a few magnificent novels, one house, Abbotsford, which is perhaps the ugliest in the whole Empire. Charlotte Brontë again - I have been assured on good authority that Charlotte Brontë was, with the possible exception of Emily, the worst governess in the British Isles. Look at Keats, loving poetry and Fanny Brawne so intemperately that he pined and died of consumption at the age of twenty-six. Take Shelley - what a mess he made of his life! And Byron, getting into bed with first one woman and then with another and dying in the mud at Missolonghi. And, though I would cheerfully lay myself down in the dust and kiss the print of their feet, no person of sense will deny that this passionate preoccupation of theirs - riding across country in pursuit of ideas - often leads to disaster. To be a highbrow, a complete and representative highbrow, a highbrow like Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Scott, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Hardy or Henry James - to name a few highbrows from the same profession chosen at random - is of course beyond the wildest dreams of my imagination.

Some of my relations have been highbrows and some, but by no means all, of my friends. That is why, if I could be more of a highbrow I would. That is why I have always been so proud to be called highbrow. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. Now there can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. But since larger issues are involved, since the Battle of the Brows troubles, I am told, the evening air, since the finest minds of our age have lately been engaged in debating, not without that passion which befits a noble cause, what a highbrow is and what a lowbrow, which is better and which is worse, may I take this opportunity to express my opinion and at the same time draw attention to certain aspects of the question which seem to me to have been unfortunately overlooked?

His answer to these questions, though of real value to me, is of no possible interest to the public at large. SIR: Will you allow me to draw your attention to the fact that in a review of a book by me your reviewer omitted to use the word Highbrow? The review, save for that omission, gave me so much pleasure that I am driven to ask you, at the risk of appearing unduly egotistical, whether your reviewer, a man of obvious intelligence, intended to deny my claim to that title? I say “claim,” for surely I may claim that title when a great critic, who is also a great novelist, a rare and enviable combination, always calls me a highbrow when he condescends to notice my work in a great newspaper and, further, always finds space to inform not only myself, who know it already, but the whole British Empire, who hang on his words, that I live in Bloomsbury? Is your critic unaware of that fact too? Or does he, for all his intelligence, maintain that it is unnecessary in reviewing a book to add the postal address of the writer?

Highbrow person crossword