I may add here in parenthesis that the thirstiness, always so remarkable in the medieval man whether it make him strange to you or help to ingratiate him as a human brother, seems to have followed him even into the Tripos. 'It was not only after a University exercise,' says the historian (Rashdall, Vol. II, p. 687), 'but during its progress that the need of refreshment was apt to be felt…. Many Statutes allude—some by way of prohibition, but not always—to the custom of providing wine for the Examiners or Temptator [good word] before, during, or after the Examination. At Heidelberg the Dean of the Faculty might order in drinks, the candidate not. At Leipsic the candidate is forbidden to treat [facere propinam] the Examinersbeforethe Examination: which seems sound. At Vienna (medical school) he is required to spend a florin "pro confectionibus".'
Now when we come to England—that is, to Oxford and Cambridge, which ever had queer ways of their own—we find, strange to say, for centuries no evidence at all of any kind of examination. As forcompetitiveexaminations like the defunct Mathematical and Classical Triposes here—with Senior Wranglers, Wooden Spoons and what lay between—of all European Universities, Louvain alone used the system and may have invented it. At Louvain the candidates for the Mastership were placed in three classes, in each of which the names were arranged in order of merit. The first class were styledRigorosi(Honour-men), the secondTransibiles(Pass-men), the thirdGratiosi(Charity-passes); while a fourth class, not publicly announced, contained the names of those who could not be passed on any terms. 'Si autem (quod absit!),' says the Statute, 'aliqui inveniantur refutabiles, erant de quarto ordine.' 'These competitive examinations'—I proceed in the historian's words—'contributed largely to raise Louvain to the high position as a place of learning and education which it retained before the Universities were roused from their 15th century torpor by the revival of Learning.' Pope Adrian VI was one of its famousPrimuses,and Jansen another. The College which produced aPrimusenjoyed three days' holiday, during which its bell was rung continuously day and night.
At Oxford and Cambridge (I repeat) we find in their early days no trace of any examination at all. To be sure—and as perhaps you know—the first archives of this University were burned in the 'Town and Gown' riots of 1381 by the Townsmen, whose descendants Erasmus describes genially as 'combining the utmost rusticity with the utmost malevolence.' But no student will doubt that Cambridge used pretty much the same system as Oxford, and the system was this:—When a candidate presented himself before the Chancellor for a License in Arts, he had to swear that he had heard certain books[1], and nine Regent Masters (besides his own Master, who presented him) were required to depose to their knowledge (de scientia) of his sufficiency: and five others to their credence (de credulitate), says the Statute. Only in the School of Theology was no room allowed to credulity: there all the Masters had to depose 'of their knowledge,' and one black ball excluded.
Well, you may urge that this method has a good deal to be said for it. I will go some way to meet you too: but first you must pay me the compliment of supposing me a just man. Being a just man, and there also being presumed in me some acquaintance with English Literature—not indeed much—not necessarily much—but enough to distinguish good writing from bad or, at any rate, real writing from sham, and at least to have an inkling of what these poets and prose-writers were trying to do—why then I declare to you that, after two years' reading with a man and talk with him about literature, I should have a far better sense of his industry, of his capacity, of his performance and (better) of his promise, than any examination is likely to yield me. In short I could sign him up for a first, second or third class, or asrefutabilis,with more accuracy and confidence than I could derive from taking him as a stranger and pondering his three or four days' performance in a Tripos. For some of the best men mature slowly: and some, if not most, of the best writers write slowly because they have a conscience; and the most original minds are just those for whom, in aliteraryexamination, it is hardest to set a paper.
But the process (you will admit) might be invidious, might lend itself to misunderstanding, might conceivably even lead to re-imposition of an oath forbidding the use of a knife or other sharp implement. And among Colleges rivalry is not altogether unknown; and dons, if unlike other men in outward aspect, sometimes resemble them in frailty; and in short I am afraid we shall have to stick to the old system for a while longer. I am sorry, Gentlemen: but you see how it works.
Yet—and I admit it—the main objection abides: that, while Literature deals withWhat Israther than withWhat Knows,Examinations by their very nature test mere Knowledge rather than anything else: that in the hands of a second-rate examiner they tend to test knowledge alone, or what passes for knowledge: and that in the very run of this world most examiners will be second-rate men: which, if we remind ourselves that they receive the pay of fifth-rate ones is, after all, considerably better than we have a right to expect.
We are dealing, mind you, withEnglishLiterature—our own literature. In examining upon a foreign literature we can artfully lay our stress upon Knowledge and yet neither raise nor risk raising the fatal questions 'What is it allabout?' 'What is it, and why is itit?'-since merely to translate literally a chorus of the "Agamemnon," or an ode of Pindar's, or a passage from Dante or Molière is a creditable performance; to translate either well is a considerable feat; and to translate either perfectly is what you can't do, and the examiner knows you can't do, and you know the examiner can't do, and the examiner knows you know he can't do. But when we come to a fine thing in our own language—to a stanza from Shelley's "Adonais" for instance:
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;Envy and calumny and hate and pain,And that unrest which men miscall delight,Can touch him not and torture not again;From the contagion of the world's slow stainHe is secure, and now can never mournA heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
what can you do withthat? How can you examine onthat? Well, yes, you can request the candidate, to 'Write a short note on the wordcalumnyabove,' or ask 'From what is it derived?' 'What does he know of "Blackwood's Magazine?"' 'Can he quote any parallel allusion in Byron?' You can ask all that: but you are not getting within measurable distance ofit.Your mind is not even moving on the right plane. Or let me turn back to some light and artless Elizabethan thing—say to the Oenone duet in Peele's "Arraignment of Paris":
Oenone.Fair and fair and twice so fair,As fair as any may be:The fairest shepherd on our green,A love for any lady.ParisFair and fair and twice so fair,As fair as any may be:Thy love is fair for thee alone,And for no other lady.Oenone.My love is fair, my love is gay,As fresh as bin the flowers in May,And of my love my roundelay,My merry merry merry roundelayConcludes with Cupid's curse:They that do change old love for new,Pray gods they change for worse….My love can pipe, my love can sing,My love can many a pretty thing,And of his lovely praises ringMy merry merry merry roundelays'Amen' to Cupid's curse:They that do change old love for newPray gods they change for worse.Ambo.Fair and fair and twice so fair,As fair as any may be:The fairest shepherd on our green,A love for any lady….
How can anyone examine onthat? How can anyone solemnly explain, in a hurry, answering one of five or six questions selected from a three hours' paper, just why and how that hits him? And yet, if it hit him not, he is lost. If even so simple a thing as that—a thing of silly sooth—do not hit him, he is all unfit to traffic with literature.
You see how delicate a business it is. Examination in Literature, being by its very nature so closely tied down to be a test ofKnowledge,can hardly, save when used by genius, with care, be any final test of that which is better than Knowledge, of that which is the crown of all scholarship, ofunderstanding.
But do not therefore lose heart, even in your reading for strict purposes of examination. Our talk is of reading. Let me fetch you some comfort from the sister and correlative, but harder, art of writing.
I most potently believe that the very best writing, in verse or in prose, can only be produced in moments of high excitement, or rather (as I should put it) in those moments of still and solemn awe into which a noble excitement lifts a man. Let me speak only of prose, of which you may more cautiously allow this than of verse. I think of St Paul's glorious passage, as rendered in the Authorised Version, concluding the 15th chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians. First, as you know, comes the long, swaying, scholastic, somewhat sophisticated argument about the evidence of resurrection; about the corn, 'that which thou sowest,' the vivification, the change in vivification, and the rest. All this, almost purely argumentative, should be read quietly, with none of thebravurawhich your prize reader lavishes on it. The argument works up quietly—at once tensely and sinuously, but very quietly—to conviction. Then comes the hush; and then the authoritative voice speaking out of it, awful and slow, 'Behold, I shew you a mystery' … and then, all the latent emotion of faith taking hold and lifting the man on its surge, 'For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible' … and so, incorruption tolling down corruption, the trumpet smashes death underfoot in victory: until out of the midst of tumult, sounds the recall; sober, measured, claiming the purified heart back to discipline. 'Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.'
I think of that triumphant passage. I think of the sentences with which Isaak Walton ends his life of Donne. I think of the last pages of Motley's "Dutch Republic," with its eulogy on William the Silent so exquisitely closing:
As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.
I think of two great prose passages in Thackeray's "Esmond"; of Landor's "Dream of Boccaccio" … and so on: and I am sure that, in prose or in verse, the best that man can utter flows from him either in moments of high mental excitement or in the hush of thatAltitudoto which high excitement lifts him.
But, first now, observe how all these passages—and they are the first I call to mind—rise like crests on a large bulk of a wave —St Paul's on a labouring argument about immortality; Motley's at the conclusion of a heavy task. Long campaigning brings the reward of Harry Esmond's return to Castlewood, long intrigue of the author's mind with his characters closes that febrile chapter in which Harry walks home to break the news of the death of the Duke of Hamilton—in the early morning through Kensington, where the newsboys are already shouting it:
The world was going to its business again, although dukes lay dead and ladies mourned for them…. So day and night pass away, and to-morrow comes, and our place knows us not. Esmond thought of the courier now galloping on the north road to inform him, who was Earl of Arran yesterday, that he was Duke of Hamilton to-day, and of a thousand great schemes, hopes, ambitions, that were alive in the gallant heart, beating but a few hours since, and now in a little dust quiescent.
And on top of this let me assure you that in writing, or learning to write, solid daily practice is the prescription and 'waiting upon inspiration' a lure. These crests only rise on the back of constant labour. Nine days, according to Homer, Leto travailed with Apollo: but he was Apollo, lord of Song. Iknowthis to be true of ordinary talent: but, supposing you all to be geniuses, I am almost as sure that it holds of genius. Listen to this:
Napoleon I used to say that battles were won by the sudden flashing of an idea through the brain of a commander at a certain critical instant. The capacity for generating this sudden electric spark was military genius…. Napoleon seems always to have counted upon it, always to have believed that when the critical moment arrived the wild confusion of the battlefield would be illuminated for him by that burst of sudden flame. But if Napoleon had been ignorant of the prosaic business of his profession,to which he attended more closely than any other commander,would these moments of supreme clearness have availed him, or would they have come to him at all?
My author thinks not: and I am sure he is right. So, in writing, only out of long preparation can come the truly triumphant flash: and I ask you to push this analogy further, into the business of reading, even of reading for examination. You learn to discipline yourselves, you acquire the art of marshalling, of concentrating, driving your knowledge upon a point: and—for you are young—that point is by no means the final point. Say that it is only an examination, and silly at that. Still you have been learning the art, you have been training yourself to be, for a better purpose, effective.
Yet, and when this has been granted, the crucial question abides and I must not shirk it 'you say that the highest literature deals withWhat Israther than withWhat Knows.It is all very fine to assure us that testing our knowledgeaboutLiterature andaroundLiterature, and on this side or that side of Literature, is healthy for us in some oblique way: but can you examiners examine, or can you not, on Literature in what you call its own and proper category ofWhat Is?'
So I hear the question—the question which beats and has beaten, over and over again, good men trying to construct Schools of English in our Universities.
With all sense of a responsibility, of a difficulty, that has lain on my mind for these five years, I answer, Gentlemen, 'Yes, we ought: yes, we can: and yes, we will.'
But, for the achievement, we teachers must first know how to teach. When that is learned, Examination will come as a consequent, easy, almost trivial matter. I will, for example— having already allowed howhardit is to examine on literature —take the difficulty at its very extreme. I will select a piece of poetry, and the poet shall be Keats—on whom, if on any one, is felt the temptation to write gush and loose aesthetic chatter. A pupil comes to read with me, and I open at the famous "Ode to a Grecian Urn."
(1) We read it through together, perhaps twice; at the second attempt getting the emphasis right, and some, at any rate, of the modulations of voice. So we reach a working idea of the Ode and what Keats meant it to be.
(2) We then compare it with his other Odes, and observe that it is (a) regular in stanza form, (b) in spite of its outburst in the 3rd stanza—'More happy love! more happy, happy love' etc.— much severer in tone than, e.g., the "Ode to a Nightingale" or the "Ode to Psyche," (c) that the emotion is not luscious, but simple, (d) that this simplicity is Hellenic, so far as Keats can compass it, and (e) eminently well-suited to its subject, which is a carven urn, gracious but severe of outline; a moment of joy caught by the sculptor and arrested, for time to perpetuate; yet —and this is the point of the Ode—conveying a sense that innocent gaiety is not only its own excuse, but of human things one of the few eternal—and eternal just because it is joyous and fleeting.
(3) Then we go back and compare this kind of quiet immortal beauty with the passionate immortality hymned in the "Nightingale Ode"
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!No hungry generations tread thee down…
with all the rest of that supreme stanza: from which (with some passages my reading supplies to illustrate the difference) we fall to contrasting the vibrating thrill of the "Nightingale" with the happy grace of the "Grecian Urn" and, allowing each to be appropriate, dispute for a while, perhaps, over the merits of classical calm and romantic thrill.
(4) From this we proceed to examine the Ode in detail line by line: which examination brings up a whole crowd of questions, such as
(a) We have a thought enounced in the first stanza. Does the Ode go on to develop and amplify it, as an Ode should? Or does Pegasus come down again and again on the prints from which he took off? If he do this, and the action of the Ode be dead and unprogressive, is the defect covered by beauty of language? Can such defect ever be so covered?
(b) Lines 15 and 16 anticipate lines 21-24, which are saying the same thing and getting no forwarder.
(c) We come to the lines
What little town by river or sea shore,Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
with the answering lines
And, little town, thy streets for evermoreWill silent be; and not a soul to tellWhy thou art desolate, can e'er return.
and we note Sir Sidney Colvin's suggestion that this breaks in upon an arrest of art as though it were an arrest on reality: and remember that he raised a somewhat similar question over "The Nightingale"; and comparing them, discuss truth of emotion against truth of reality.
We come to the last stanza and lament 'O Attic shape! Fair attitude' for its jingle: but note how the poet recovers himself and brings the whole to a grand close.
I have, even yet, mentioned but a few of the points. For one, I have omitted its most beautiful vowel-play, on which teacher and pupil can dwell and learn together. And heaven forbid that as a teacher I shouldinsisteven on half of those I have indicated. A teacher, as I hold, should watch for what his pupil divines of his own accord; but if, trafficking with works of inspiration, he have no gift to catch that inspiration nor power to pass it on, then I say 'Heaven help him! but he has no valid right on earth to be in the business.'
And if a teacher have all these chances of teaching—mind you, ofaccurateteaching—supplied him by a single Ode of Keats, do you suppose we cannot set in an Examination paper one intelligent question upon it, in its own lawful category?
Gentlemen, with the most scrupulous tenderness for aged and even decrepit interests, we have been trying to liberate you from certain old bad superstitions and silently laying the stones of a new School of English, which we believe to be worthy even of Cambridge.
Our proposals are before the University. Should they be passed, still everything will depend on the loyalty of its teachers to the idea; and on that enthusiasm which I suppose to be the nurse of all studies and know to be the authentic cherishing nurse of ours. We may even have conceded too much to the letter, but we have built and built our trust on the spirit 'which maketh alive.'
[Footnote 1: Why had he to swear this under pain of excommunication, when the lecturer could so easily keep a roll-call? But the amount of oathtaking in a medieval University was prodigious. Even College servants were put on oath for their duties: Gyps invited their own damnation, bed-makers kissed the book. Abroad, where examinations were held, the Examiner swore not to take a bribe, the Candidate neither to give one, nor, if unsuccessful, to take his vengeance on the Examiner with a knife or other sharp instrument. At New College, Oxford, the matriculating undergraduate was required to swear in particular not to dance in the College Chapel.]
It is now, Gentlemen, five years less a term since, feeling (as they say of other offenders) my position acutely, I had the honour of reading an Inaugural before this University and the impudence to loose, in the course of it, a light shaft against a phrase in the very Ordinance defining the duties of this Chair.
'It shall be the duty of the Professor,' says the Ordinance, 'to deliver courses of lectures on English Literature from the age of Chaucer onwards, and otherwise to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study in the University of the subject of English Literature.'
That was the phrase at which I glanced—'the subject of English Literature'; and I propose that we start to-day, for reasons that will appear, by subjecting this subject to some examination.
'TheSubjectof English Literature.' Surely—for a start—there is no such thing; or rather, may we not say that everything is, has been or can be, a subject of English Literature? Man's loss of Paradise has been a subject of English Literature, and so has been a Copper Coinage in Ireland, and so has been Roast Sucking-pig, and so has been Holy Dying, and so has been Mr Pepys's somewhat unholy living, and so have been Ecclesiastical Polity, The Grail, Angling for Chub, The Wealth of Nations, The Sublime and the Beautiful, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Prize-Fights, Grecian Urns, Modern Painters, Intimations of Immortality in early Childhood, Travels with a Donkey, Rural Rides and Rejected Addresses—allthese have been subjects of English Literature: as have been human complots and intrigues as wide asunder as "Othello" and "The School for Scandal"; persons as different as Prometheus and Dr Johnson, Imogen and Moll Flanders, Piers the Plowman and Mr Pickwick; places as different as Utopia and Cranford, Laputa and Reading Gaol. "Epipsychidion" is literature: but so is "A Tale of a Tub."
Listen, for this is literature:
If some king of the earth have so large an extent of dominion, in north, and south, so that he hath winter and summer together in his dominions, so large an extent east and west as that he hath day and night together in his dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy summer out of winter, though thou have no spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons[1].
But listen again, for this also is literature:
A sweet disorder in the dressKindles in clothes a wantonness:A lawn about the shoulders thrownInto a fine distraction:An erring lace, which here and thereEnthrals the crimson stomacher:A cuff neglectful, and therebyRibbons to flow confusedly:A winning wave, deserving note,In the tempestuous petticoat:A careless shoe-string, in whose tieI see a wild civility:Do more bewitch me than when artIs too precise in every part.
Here again is literature:
When I was a child, at seven years old, my friends on a holiday filled my pockets with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children; and being charmed with the sound of a whistle that I met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered him all my money for one. I then came home and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle but disturbing all the family. My brothers and sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth … The reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure. [BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.]
Of a bridal, this is literature:
Open the temple gates unto my love,Open them wide that she may enter in!
But so also is Suckling's account of a wedding that begins
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been.
This is literature:
And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, anda covert from the tempest;As rivers of water in a dry place,As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
But so is this literature:
One circle cannot touch another circle on the outside atmore points than one.For, if it be possible, let the circle ACK touch the circleABC at the points A, C. Join AC.Then because the two points A, C are in thecircumference of the circle ACK the line which joins themfalls within that circle.But the circle ACK is without the circle ABC. Thereforethe straight line AC is without the circle ABC.But because the two points A, C are in the circumference ofABC therefore the straight line AC falls within that circle.Which is absurd.Therefore one circle cannot touch another on the outside atmore points than one.
All thoughts, as well as all passions, all delights
votum, timor, ira, voluptas—
whatsoever, in short, engages man's activity of soul or body, may be deemed the subject of literature and is transformed into literature by process of recording it in memorable speech. It is so, it has been so, and God forbid it should ever not be so!
Now this, put so, is (you will say) so extremely, obvious that it must needs hide a fallacy or at best a quibble on a word. I shall try to show that it does not: that it directly opposes plain truth to a convention accepted by the Ordinance, and that the fallacy lies in that convention.
A convention may be defined as something which a number of men have agreed to accept in lieu of the truth and to pass off for the truth upon others: I was about to add, preferably when they can catch them young: but some recent travel in railway trains and listening to the kind of stuff men of mature years deliver straight out of newspapers for the products of their own digested thought have persuaded me that the ordinary man is as susceptible at fifty, sixty, or even seventy as at any earlier period of growth, and that the process of incubation is scarcely less rapid.
I am not, to be sure, concerned to deny that there may be conventions useful enough to society, serving it to maintain government, order, public and private decency, or the commerce on which it must needs rest to be a civilised society at all— commerce of food, commerce of clothing, and so on, up to commerce in knowledge and ideas. Government itself—any form of it—is a convention; marriage is a convention; money of course is a convention, and the alphabet itself I suppose to contain as many conventions as all the old Courts of Love and Laws of Chivalry put together, and our English alphabet one tremendous fallacy, that twenty-six letters, separately or in combination are capable of symbolising all the sounds produced by an Englishman's organs of speech, let alone the sounds he hears from foreigners, dogs, guns, steam-engines, motor-horns and other friends and enemies to whom we deny the franchise. Also of course it ignores the whole system of musical notes—another convention—which yet with many of the older bards could hardly be separated from the words they used, though now only the words survive and as literature.
But every convention has a fallacy somewhere at the root; whether it be useful and operative, as many a legal fiction is operative, for good; or senile, past service yet tyrannous by custom, and so pernicious; or merely foolish, as certain artistic conventions are traceable, when a Ruskin comes to judgment, back to nothing better than folly: and it becomes men of honest mind, in dealing with anything recognisable as a convention, to examine its accepted fallacy, whether it be well understood or ill understood; beneficent or pernicious or merely foolish or both foolish and pernicious: and this is often most handily done by tracing its history.
Now I shall assume that the framers of the Ordinance regulating the duties of this Chair knew well enough, of their own reading, that English Literature deals with a vast variety of subjects: and that, if any piece of writing miss to deal with its particular subject, so closely that theme and treatment can scarcely be separated, by so much will it be faulty as literature. Milton is fairly possessed with the story of Man's fall, Boswell possessed with Johnson, Shelley with hatred of tyranny in all its manifestations, Mill again with the idea of Liberty: and it is only because we had knowledge presented to us at an age when we thought more attentively of apples, that we still fail to recognise in Euclid and Dr Todhunter two writers who are excellent because possessed with a passion for Geometry.
I infer, then, that the framers of the Ordinance, when they employed this phrase 'the study of the subject of English Literature,' knew well enough that no such thing existed in nature, but adopted the convention that English Literature could be separated somehow from its content and treated as a subject all by itself, for teaching purposes: and, for purposes of examination, could be yoked up with another subject called English Language, as other Universities had yoked it.
I believe the following to be a fair account of how these examinations in English Language and Literature came to pass, and how a certain kind of student came to pass these Examinations. At any rate since the small revolution has happened in my life-time and most of it since I was able to observe, the account here is drawn from my own observation and may be checked and corrected by yours.
Thirty-five or forty years ago—say in the late seventies or early eighties—some preparatory schools, and others that taught older boys but ranked below the great Public Schools in repute, taught so much of English Literature as might be comprised, at a rough calculation, in two or three plays of Shakespeare, edited by Clark and Aldis Wright; a few of Bacon's Essays, Milton's early poems, Stopford Brooke's little primer, a book of extracts for committal to memory, with perhaps Chaucer's "Prologue" and a Speech of Burke. In the great Public SchoolsnoEnglish Literature was studied, save in those which had invented 'Modern Sides,' to prepare boys specially for Woolwich or Sandhurst or the Indian Civil Service; for entrance to which examinations were held on certain prescribed English Classics, and marks mainly given for acquaintance with the editors' notes.
In the Universities, the study of English Classics was not officially recognised at all.
Let us not hastily suppose that this neglect of English rested wholly on unreason, or had nothing to say for itself. Teachers and tutors of the old Classical Education (as it was called) could plead as follows:
'In the first place,' they would say, 'English Literature is tooeasya study. Our youth, at School or University, starts on his native classics with a liability which in any foreign language he has painfully to acquire. The voices that murmured around his cradle, the voice of his nurse, of his governess, of the parson on Sundays; the voices of village boys, stablemen, gamekeepers and farmers—friendly or unfriendly—of callers, acquaintances, of the children he met at Children's Parties; the voices that at the dinner-table poured politics or local gossip into the little pitcher with long ears—all these were English voices speaking in English: and all these were all the while insensibly leading him up the slope from the summit of which he can survey the promised land spread at his feet as a wide park; and he holds the key of the gates, to enter and take possession. Whereas,' the old instructors would continue, 'with the classics of any foreign language we take him at the foot of the steep ascent, spread a table before him (mensa, mensa, mensam…) and coax or drive him up with variations upon amo, "I love" or [Greek: tupto], "I beat," until he, too, reaches the summit and beholds the landscape:
But O, what labour!O Prince, what pain!'
Now so much of truth, Gentlemen, as this plea contains was admitted last term by your Senate, in separating the English Tripos, in which a certain linguistic familiarity may be not rashly presumed of the student, from the Foreign Language Triposes, divided into two parts, of which the first will more suspiciously test his capacity to construe the books he professes to have studied. I may return to this and to the allegedeasinessof studies in a School of English. Let us proceed just now with the reasoned plea for neglect.
These admirable old schoolmasters and dons would have hesitated, maybe, to say flatly with Dogberry that 'to write and read comes by nature … and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.' But in practice their system so worked, and in some of the Public Schools so works to this day. Let me tell you that just before the war an undergraduate came to me from the Sixth Form of one of the best reputed among these great schools. He wished to learn to write. He wished (poor fellow) to write me an essay, if I would set him a subject. He had never written an essay at school. 'Indeed,' said I, 'and there is no reason why you should, if by "essay" you mean some little treatise about "Patriotism" or "A Day in the Country." I will choose you no such subject nor any other upon any book which you have never read. Tell me, what is your Tripos?' He said 'the History Tripos.' 'Then,' said I, 'since History provides quite a large number of themes, choose one and I will try to correct your treatment of it, without offence to your opinions or prejudice to your facts.' 'But,' he confessed, 'at So-and-so'—naming the great Public School—'we neverwroteout an account of anything, or set down our opinions on anything, to be corrected. We just construed and did sums: And when he brought me his first attempt, behold, it was so. He could not construct a simple sentence, let alone putting two sentences together; while, as for a paragraph, it lay beyond his farthest horizon. In short, here was an instance ready to hand for any cheap writer engaged to decry the old Classical Education.
What would the old schoolmasters plead in excuse? Why this, as I suggest—'You cite an extreme instance. But, while granting English Literature to be great, we would point out that an overwhelming majority of our best writers have modelled their prose and verse upon the Greek and Roman classics, either directly or through tradition. Now we have our own languagegratis,so to speak. Let us spend our pains, then, in acquiring Latin and Greek, and the tradition. So shall we most intimately enjoy our own authors; and so, if we wish to write, we shall have at hand the clues they followed, the models they used.'
Now I have as you know, Gentlemen, a certain sympathy with this plea, or with a part of it: nor can so much of truth as its argument contains be silenced by a 'What about Shakespeare?' or a 'What about Bunyan?' or a 'What about Burns?' I believe our imaginary pleader for the Classics could put up a stout defence upon any of those names. To choose the forlornest hope of the three, I can hear him demonstrating, to his own satisfaction if not to yours, that Bunyan took his style straight out of the Authorised Version of our Bible; which is to say that he took it from the styles of forty-seven scholars,plusTyndale's,plusCoverdale's,plusCranmer's—the scholarship of fifty scholars expressed and blended.
But, as a theory, the strict classical argument gives itself away, as well by its intolerance as by its obvious distrust of the genius of our own wonderful language. I have in these five years, and from this place, Gentlemen, counselled you to seek back ever to those Mediterranean sources which are the well-heads of our civilisation: but always (I hope) on the understanding that you use them with a large liberty. They are effete for us unless we add and mingle freely the juice of our own naturalgenius.
And in practice the strict classical theory, with its implied contempt of English, has been disastrous: disastrous not only with the ordinary man—as with my Sixth Form boy who could not put two sentences together, and had read no English authors; but disastrous even to highly eminent scholars. Listen, pray, to this passage from one of them, Frederick Paley, who condescended (Heaven knows why) to turn the majestic verse of Pindar into English Prose—
From the VIIIth Isthmian:
And now that we are returned from great sorrows, let us not fall into a dearth of victories, nor foster griefs; but as we have ceased from our tiresome troubles, we will publicly indulge in a sweet roundelay.
From the IVth Pythian:
It had been divinely predicted to Pelias, that he should die by the doughty sons of Aeolus and an alarming oracle had come to his wary mind, delivered at the central point of tree-clad mother-earth, 'that he must by all means hold in great caution the man with one shoe, when he shall have come from a homestead on the hills.'
And he accordingly came in due time, armed with two spears, a magnificent man. The dress he wore was of a double kind, the national costume of the Magnesians…. Nor as yet had the glossy clusters of his hair been clipped away, but dangled brightly adown his back.
Forward he went at once and took his stand among the people…. Him then they failed to recognise: but some of the reverent-minded went so far as to say, 'Surely this cannot be Apollo!'
It needs no comment, I think. Surelythiscannot be Apollo!
Frederick Paley flourished—if the word be not exorbitant for so demure a writer—in the middle of the last century (he was born in the year of Waterloo and died in the year after Queen Victoria's first jubilee). Well, in that period there grew up a race of pioneers who saw that English Literature—that proud park and rolling estate—lay a tangled, neglected wilderness for its inheritors, and set themselves bravely to clear broad ways through it. Furnivall and Skeat, Aldis Wright, Clark, Grosart, Arber, Earle, Hales, Morris, Ellis and the rest—who can rehearse these names now but in deepest respect? Oh, believe me, Gentlemen! they were wonderful fighters in a cause that at first seemed hopeless. If I presume to speak of foibles to-day, you will understand that I do so because, lightly though I may talk to you at times, I have a real sense of the responsibilities of this Chair. I worship great learning, which they had: I loathe flippant detraction of what is great; I have usually a heart for men-against-odds and the unpopular cause. But these very valiant fighters had, one and all, some very obvious foibles: and because, in the hour of success, these foibles came to infect the whole teaching of English in this country, and to infect it fatally for many years, I shall dare to point them out.
(a) To begin with, then, these valiant fighters, intent on pushing their cause to the front, kept no sense of proportion. All their geese were swans, and "Beowulf" a second "Iliad." I think it scarcely too much to say that, of these men, all so staunch in fighting for the claims of English Literature, not one (with the exception of Dr Hales) appears to have had any critical judgment whatever, apart from the rhyme, verse and inflectional tests on which they bestowed their truly priceless industry. Criticism, as Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold or Pater understood and practised it, they merely misprized.
(b) I think it was of true scholarly desire to vindicate English Literature from the charge of being 'too easy,' that—as their studies advanced—they laid more and more stress on Middle-English and Old English writings than on what our nations of England and Scotland have written since they learned to write. I dare to think also that we may attribute to this dread of 'easiness' their practice of cumbering simple texts with philological notes; on which, rather than on the text, we unhappy students were carefully examined. For an example supplied to Dr Corson—I take those three lines of Cowper's "Task" (Bk I, 86-88):
Thus first necessity invented stools,Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs,And luxury th' accomplish'd SOFA last.
Now in these three lines the word 'accomplish'd' is the only one that needs even the smallest explanation. 'But,' says Dr Corson, 'in two different editions of "The Task" in my library, prepared for the use of the young, no explanation is given of it, but in both the Arabic origin of 'sofa' is given. In one the question is asked what other words in English have been derived from the Arabic.' ('Abracadabra' would be my little contribution.)
(c) These valiant fighters—having to extol what Europe had, wrongly enough, forgotten to count among valuable things—turned aggressively provincial, parted their beards in the Anglo-Saxon fashion; composed long sentences painfully innocent of any word not derivable from Anglo-Saxon, sentences in which the 'impenetrability of matter' became the 'un-go-throughsomeness of stuff (but that may have happened in a parody), and in general comported themselves like the Anglo-Saxons they claimed for their forbears; rightly enough for anything anyone cared, but wrongly enough for the rest of us who had no yearning toward that kinship and went on spelling Alfred with an A.
(d) They were—I suppose through opposition—extremely irascible men; like farmers. Urbanity was the last note in their gamut, the City—urbs quam dicunt Romam—the last of places in their ken. There was no engaging them in dialectic, an Athenian art which they frankly despised. If you happened to disagree with them, their answer was a sturdy Anglo-Saxon brick. If you politely asked your way to Puddlehampton, and to be directed to Puddlehampton's main objects of interest, the answer you would get (see "Notes and Queries"passim) would be, 'Who is this that comes out of Nowhere, enquiring for Puddlehampton, unacquainted with Stubbs? Is it possible at this time of day that the world can contain anyone ignorant of the published Transactions of the Wiltshire Walking Club, Vol. III, p. 159—"Puddlehampton, its Rise and Decline, with a note on Vespasian?"'
(e) These pioneers—pushing the importance of English, but occupied more and more with origins and with bad authors, simply could not see the vital truth; that English Literature is a continuing thing, ten times more alive to-day than it was in the times they studied and belauded. The last word upon them is that not a man of them could write prose in the language they thrust on our study. To them, far more than to the old classical scholars, English was a shut book: a large book, but closed and clasped, material to heighten a desk for schoolmasters and schoolmistresses.
But schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, like chickens and curses, come home to roost. Once set up your plea for a Tripos of English Language and Literature on the lower plea that it will provide for whattheycall a 'felt want,' and sooner or later you give English Language and Literature intotheirhands, and then you get the fallacy full-flowered into a convention. English Literature henceforth is a 'subject,' divorced from life: and what they have made of it, let a thousand handbooks and so-called histories attest. But this world is not a wilderness of class-rooms. English Language? They cannot write it, at all events. They do not (so far as I can discover) try to write it. They talk and write about it; how the poor deceased thing outgrew infantile ailments, how it was operated on forumlaut,how it parted with its vermiform appendix and its inflexions one by one, and lost its vowel endings in muted e's.
And they went and told the sexton,And the sexton toll'd the bell.
But when it comes towriting; to keeping bright the noble weapon of English, testing its poise and edge, feeling the grip, handing it to their pupils with the word, 'Here is the sword of your fathers, that has cloven dragons. So use it, that we who have kept it bright may be proud of you, and of our pains, and of its continuing valiance':—why, as I say, they do not eventry.Our unprofessional forefathers, when they put pen to paper, did attempt English prose, and not seldom achieved it. But take up any elaborate History of English Literature and read, and, as you read, ask yourselves, 'How can one of the rarest delights of life be converted intothis? What has happened to merry Chaucer, rare Ben Jonson, gay Steele and Prior, to Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb?'
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces!
gone into the professional stock-pot! And the next news is that these cooks, of whom Chaucer wrote prophetically
Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde,And turnen substaunce into accident!
have formed themselves into professional Associations to protect 'the study of the subject of English Literature' and bark off any intruder who would teach in another way than theirs.
But I say to you that Literature is not, and should not be, the preserve of any priesthood. To write English, so as to make Literature, may behard.But English Literature isnota mystery,nota Professors' Kitchen.
And the trouble lies, not in the harm professionising does to schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, but in the harm it does 'in widest commonalty spread' among men and women who, as Literature was written for them, addressed to them, ought to find in it, all their lives through, a retirement from mean occupations, a well of refreshment, sustainment in the daily drudgery of life, solace in calamity, an inmate by the hearth, ever sociable, never intrusive—to be sought and found, to be found and dropped at will:
Men, when their affairs require,Must themselves at whiles retire;Sometimes hunt, and sometimes hawk,And not ever sit and talk—
to be dropped at will and left without any answering growl of moroseness; to be consulted again at will and found friendly.
For this is the trouble ofprofessionisingLiterature. We exile it from the business of life, in which it would ever be at our shoulder, to befriend us. Listen, for example, to an extract from a letter written, a couple of weeks ago, by somebody in the Charity Commission:
Sir,With reference to previous correspondence in this matter, Iam to say that in all the circumstances of this case theCommissioners are of the opinion that it would be desirablethat a public enquiry in connection with the Charity shouldbe held in the locality.
And the man—very likely an educated man—having writtenthat,very likely went home and read Chaucer, Dante, or Shakespeare, or Burke for pleasure! That is what happens when you treat literature as a 'subject,' separable from life and daily practice.
I declare to you that Literature wasnotwritten for schoolmasters, nor for schoolmistresses. I would not exchange it for a wilderness of schoolmasters. It should be delivered from them, who, with their sillyAblautsand 'tendencies,' can themselves neither read nor write. For the proof? Having the world's quintessential store of mirth and sharp sorrow, wit, humour, comfort, farce, comedy, tragedy, satire; the glories of our birth and state, piled all at their elbows, only one man of the crowd—and he M. Jusserand, a Frenchman—has contrived to draw out of the mass one interesting well-written history of the 'subject.'
Is there, then, no better way? Yes there is a better way: for the French have it, with their language and literature. In France, as Matthew Arnold noted, a generation ago, the ordinary journey-man work of literature is done far better and more conscientiously than with us. In France a man feels it almost a personal stain, an unpatrioticlâche,to write even on a police-order anything so derogatory to the tradition of his language as our Cabinet Ministers read out as answers to our House of Commons. I am told that many a Maire in a small provincial town in N.E. France, even when overwhelmed—accablé—with the sufferings of his town-folk, has truly felt the iron enter into his soul on being forced to sign a document written out for him in the invaders' French.
Cannot we treat our noble inheritance of literature and language as scrupulously, and with as high a sense of their appertaining to our national honour, as a Frenchman cherisheshislanguage,hisliterature? Cannot we study to leave our inheritance—-as the old Athenian put it temperately, 'not worse but a little better than we found it'?
I think we can, and should. I shall close to-day, Gentlemen, with the most modest of perorations. In my first lecture before you, in January 1913, I quoted to you the artist in "Don Quixote" who, being asked what animal he was painting, answered diffidently 'That is as it may turn out.'
The teaching of our language and literature is, after all, a new thing and still experimental. The main tenets of those who, aware of this, have worked on the scheme for a School of English in Cambridge, the scheme recently passed by your Senate and henceforth to be in operation, are three:—
The first.That literature cannot be divorced from life: that (for example) you cannot understand Chaucer aright, unless you have the background, unless you know the kind of men for whom Chaucer wrote and the kind of men whom he made speak; that is thenationalside with which all our literature is concerned.
The second.Literature being so personal a thing, you cannot understand it until you have some personal under-standing of the men who wrote it. Donne is Donne; Swift, Swift; Pope, Pope; Johnson, Johnson; Goldsmith, Goldsmith; Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb; Carlyle, Carlyle. Until you have grasped those men, as men, you cannot grasp their writings. That is thepersonalside of literary study, and as necessary as the other.
The third.That the writing and speaking of English is a living art, to be practised and (if it may be) improved. That what these great men have done is to hand us a grand patrimony; that they lived to support us through the trial we are now enduring, and to carry us through to great days to come. So shall our sons, now fighting in France, have a language ready for the land they shall recreate and repeople.
[Footnote 1: Donne'sSermon II preached at Pauls upon ChristmasDay, in the Evening.1624.]
I have promised you, Gentlemen, for to-day some observations onThe Value of Greek and Latin in English Literature: a mild, academic title, acamouflagetitle, so to say; calculated to shelter us for a while from the vigilance of those hot-eyed reformers who, had I advertisedThe Value of Greek and Latin in English Lifemight even now be swooping from all quarters of the sky on a suggestion that these dry bones yet were flesh: for the eyes I dread are not only red and angry, but naturally microscopic—and that indeed, if they only knew it, is their malady. Yet 'surely' groaned patient job, 'thereisa path which the vulture's eye hath not seen!'
You, at any rate, know by this time that wherever these lectures assert literature they assert life, perhaps even too passionately, allowing neither the fact of death nor the possibility of divorce.
But let us begin with the first word, 'Value'—'TheValueof Greek and Latin in English Literature.' What do I mean by 'Value'? Well, I use it, generally, in the sense of 'worth'; but with a particular meaning, or shade of meaning, too. And, this particular meaning is not the particular meaning intended (as I suppose) by men of commerce who, on news of a friend's death, fall a-musing and continue musing until the fire kindles, and they ask 'What did So-and-so die worth?' or sometimes, more wisely than they know, 'What did poor old So-and-so die worth?' or again, more colloquially, 'What did So-and-so "cut up" for?' Neither is it that which more disinterested economists used to teach; men never (I fear me) loved, but anyhow lost awhile, who for my green unknowing youth, at Thebes or Athens—growing older I tend to forget which is, or was, which—defined the Value of a thing as its 'purchasing power' which the market translates into 'price.' For—to borrow a phrase which I happened on, the other day, with delight, in the Introduction to a translation of Lucian—there may be forms of education less paying than the commercial and yet better worth paying for; nay, above payment or computation in price[1].
No: the particular meaning I use to-day is that which artists use when they talk of painting or of music. To see things, near or far, in their true perspective and proportions; to judge them through distance; and fetching them back, to reproduce them in art so proportioned comparatively, so rightly adjusted, that they combine to make a particular and just perspective: that is to give things their trueValues.
Suppose yourself reclining on a bank on a clear day, looking up into the sky and watching the ascent of a skylark while you listen to his song. That is a posture in which several poets of repute have placed themselves from time to time: so we need not be ashamed of it. Well, you see the atmosphere reaching up and up, mile upon mile. There are no milestones planted there. But, wave on wave perceptible, the atmosphere stretches up through indeterminate distances; and according as your painter of the sky can translate these distances, he gives his sky what is calledValue.
You listen to the skylark's note rising, spiral by spiral, on 'the very jet of earth':
As up he wings the spiral stair,A song of light, and pierces airWith fountain ardour, fountain play,To reach the shining tops of day:
and you long for the musical gift to follow up and up the delicate degrees of distance and thread the notes back as the bird ascending drops them—on a thread, as it were, of graduated beads, half music and half dew:
That was the chirp of ArielYou heard, as overhead it flew,The farther going more to dwellAnd wing our green to wed our blue;But whether note of joy, or knell,Not his own Father-singer knew;Nor yet can any mortal tell,Save only how it shivers through;The breast of us a sounded shell,The blood of us a lighted dew.
Well in music, in painting, this graduating which gives right proportion and, with proportion, a sense of distance, of atmosphere, is calledValue.Let us, for a minute or two, assay this particular meaning of Value upon life and literature, and first upon life, or, rather upon one not negligible facet of life.
I suppose that if an ordinary man of my age were asked which has better helped him to bear the burs of life—religion or a sense of humour—he would, were he quite honest, be gravelled for an answer. Now the best part of a sense of humour, as you know without my telling you, consists in a sense of proportion; a habit, abiding and prompt at command, of seeing all human, affairs in their just perspective, so that its happy possessor at once perceives anything odd or distorted or overblown to be an excrescence, a protuberance, a swelling, literally ahumour: and the function of Thalia, the Comic Spirit, as you may read in Meredith's "Essay on Comedy," is just to prick these humours. I will but refer you to Meredith's "Essay," and here cite you the words of an old schoolmaster:
It would seem to be characteristic of the same mind to appreciate the beauty of ideas in just proportion and harmonious relation to each other, and the absurdity of the same ideas when distorted or brought into incongruous juxtaposition. The exercise of this sense of humour … compels the mind to form a picture to itself, accompanied by pleasurable emotion; and what is this but setting the imagination to work, though in topsy-turvy fashion? Nay, in such a case, imagination plays a double part, since it is only by instantaneous comparison with ideal fitness and proportion that it can grasp at full force the grotesqueness of their contraries[2].
Let us play with an example for one moment. A child sees such an excrescence, such an offence upon proportion, in an immoderately long nose. He is apt to call attention to it on the visage of a visitor: it intrigues him in Perrault's 'Prince Charming' and many a fairy tale: it amuses him in Lear's "Book of Nonsense":
There was an old man with a Nose,Who said 'If you choose to supposeThat my nose is too longYou are certainly wrong'—
This old man he detects as lacking sense of proportion, sense of humour. Pass from the child to the working-man as we know him. A few weeks ago, a lady—featured, as to nose, on the side of excess—was addressing a North Country audience on the Economic Position of Women after the War. Said she, 'There won't be men to go round.' Said a voice 'Eh, but they'llhave to,Miss!' Pass from this rudimentary criticism to high talent employed on the same subject, and you get "Cyrano de Bergerac." Pass to genius, to Milton, and you find the elephant amusing Adam and Eve in Paradise, and doing his best:
the unwieldy elephant, To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed His lithe proboscis.
Milton, like the elephant, jokes with difficulty, but he, too, is using all his might.
I have illustrated, crudely enough, how a sense of things in their right values will help us on one side of our dealings with life. But truly it helps us on every side. This was what Plato meant when he said that a philosopher must see things as they relatively are within his horizon—[Greek: o synoptikos dialektikos]. And for this it was that an English poet praised Sophocles as one
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
And this of course is what Dean Inge meant when, the other day, in a volume of "Cambridge Essays on Education," he reminded us, for a sensible commonplace, that 'The wise man is he who knows the relative values of things.'
Applying this to literature, I note, but shall not insist here on the fact—though fact it is—that the Greek and Roman 'classical' writers (as we call them) laid more stress than has ever been laid among the subsequent tribes of men upon the desirability of getting all things into proportion, of seeing all life on a scale of relative values. And the reason I shall not insist on this is simply that better men have saved me the trouble.
I propose this morning to discuss the value of the classics to students of English literature from, as the modern phrase goes, a slightly different angle.
Reclining and looking up into that sky which is not too grandiose an image for our own English Literature, you would certainly not wish, Gentlemen, to see it as what it is not—as a cloth painted on the flat. No more than you would choose the sky overarching your life to be a close, hard, copper vault, would you choose this literature of ours to resemble such a prison. I say nothing, for the moment, of the thrill of comparing ours with other constellations—of such a thrill as Blanco White's famous sonnet imagines in Adam's soul when the first night descended on Eden and
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,And lo! Creation widen'd in man's view.Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'dWithin thy beams, O sun!…
No: I simply picture you as desiring to realiseour ownliterature, its depths and values, mile above mile deeper and deeper shining, with perchance a glimpse of a city celestial beyond, or at whiles, on a ladder of values, of the angels—the messengers—climbing and returning.
Well, now, I put it to you that without mental breeding, without at least some sense of ancestry, an Englishman can hardly have this perception of value, this vision. I put to you what I posited in an earlier course of lectures, quoting Bagehot, that while a knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer of English, he should at least have a firm conviction that those two languages existed. I refer you to a long passage which, in one of those lectures, I quoted from Cardinal Newman to the effect that for the last 3000 years the Western World has been evolving a human society, having its bondin a common civilisation—a society to which (let me add, by way of footnote) Prussia today is firmly, though with great difficulty, being tamed. There are, and have been, other civilisations in the world —the Chinese, for instance; a huge civilisation, stationary, morose, to us unattractive; 'butthiscivilisation,' says Newman, 'together with the society which is its creation and its home, is so distinctive and luminous in its character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing in its duration, and so utterly without rival upon the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume for itself the title of "Human Society," and its civilisation the abstract term "Civilisation".'
He goes on:
Looking, then, at the countries which surround theMediterranean Sea as a whole, I see them to be, from timeimmemorial, the seat of an association of intellect and mindsuch as deserves to be called the Intellect and Mind of theHuman Kind.
But I must refer you to his famous book "The Idea of aUniversity" to read at length how Newman, in that sinuous,sinewy, Platonic style of his, works it out—the spread, throughRome, even to our shores, of the civilisation which began inPalestine and Greece.
I would press the point more rudely upon you, and more particularly, than does Newman. And first, for Latin—
I waive that Rome occupied and dominated this island during 400 years. Let that be as though it had never been. For a further 1000 years and more Latin remained the common speech of educated men throughout Europe: the 'Universal Language.' Greek had been smothered by the Turk. Through all that time—through the most of what we call Modern History, Latin reigned everywhere. Is this a fact to be ignored by any of you who would value 'values'?
Here are a few particulars, by way of illustration. More wrote his "Utopia," Bacon wrote all the bulk of his philosophical work, in Latin; Newton wrote his "Principia" in Latin. Keble's Lectures on Poetry (if their worth and the name of Keble may together save me from bathos) were delivered in Latin. Our Vice-Chancellor, our Public Orator still talk Latin, securing for it what attention they can: nor have
The bigots of this iron timeYetcall'd their harmless art a crime.
But there is a better reason why you should endeavour to understand the value of Latin in our literature; a filial reason. Our fathers built their great English prose, as they built their oratory, upon the Latin model. Donne used it to construct his mighty fugues: Burke to discipline his luxuriance. Says Cowper, it were
Praise enough for any private man,That Chatham's language was his mother tongue,And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own.
Well then, here is a specimen of Chatham's language: from his speech, Romanly severe, denouncing the Government of the day for employing Red Indians in the American War of Independence. He is addressing the House of Lords:
I call upon that right reverend bench, those holy ministers of the Gospel, and pious pastors of our Church—I conjure them to join in the holy work, and vindicate the religion of their God. I appeal to the wisdom and the law of this learned bench to defend and support the justice of their country. I call upon the bishops to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn; upon the learned judges to interpose the purity of their ermine, to save us from this pollution. I call upon the honour of your lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the Constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls the immortal ancestor of this noble lord [Lord Suffolk] frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his country. In vain he led your victorious fleet: against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion—theProtestant religion—of this country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition, if these more than Popish cruelties and inquisitorial practices are let loose among us—to turn forth into our settlements, among our ancient connexions, friends, and relations, the merciless cannibal, thirsting for the blood of man, woman, and child! to send forth the infidel savage—-against whom? against your Protestant brethren; to lay waste their country, to desolate their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name, with these horrible hell-hounds of savage war!—hell-hounds, I say, of savage war! Spain armed herself with blood-hounds to extirpate the wretched natives of America, and we improve on the inhuman example even of Spanish cruelty; we turn loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberties, and religion, endeared to us by every tie that should sanctify humanity….
My lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor reposed my head on my pillow, without giving this vent to my eternal abhorrence of such preposterous and enormous principles.
That was Chatham. For Wolfe—he, as you know, was ever reading the classics even on campaign: as Burke again carried always a Virgil in his pocket.Abeunt studia in mores.Moreover can we separate Chatham's Roman morality from Chatham's language in the passage I have just read? No: we cannot. No one, being evil, can speak good things with that weight;'for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.'We English (says Wordsworth)
We must be free or die, who speak the tongueThat Shakespeare spake….
You may criticise Chatham's style as too consciously Ciceronian. But has ever a Parliamentary style been invented which conveys a nobler gravity of emotion? `Buskined'?—yes: but the style of a man. 'Mannered'?—yes, but in the grand manner. 'Conscious'?— yes, but of what? Conscious of the dignity a great man owes to himself, and to the assembly he addresses. He conceives that assembly as 'the British Senate'; and, assuming, he communicates that high conception. The Lords feel that they are listening as Senators, since it is only thus a Senate should be addressed, as nothing less than a Senate should be addressed thus.