(1) The books should be re-arranged in their right order, so far as this can be ascertained (and much of it has been ascertained). I am told, and I can well believe, that this would at a stroke clear away a mass of confusion in strictly Biblical criticism. But that is not my business. I know that it would immensely help ourliterarystudy.
(2) I should print the prose continuously, as prose is ordinarily and properly printed: and the poetry in verse lines, as poetry is ordinarily and properly printed. And I should print each on a page of one column, with none but the necessary notes and references, and these so arranged that they did not tease and distract the eye.
(3) This arrangement should be kept, whether for the Tripos we prescribe a book in the Authorised text or in the Revised. As a rule, perhaps—or as a rule for some years to come—we shall probably rely on the Authorised Version: but for some books (and I instance "Job") we should undoubtedly prefer the Revised.
(4) With the verse we should, I hold, go farther even than the Revisers. As you know, much of the poetry in the Bible, especially of such as was meant for music, is composed in stanzaic form, or in strophe and anti-strophe, with prelude and conclusion, sometimes with a choral refrain. We should print these, I contend, in their proper form, just as we should print an English poem in its proper form.
I shall conclude to-day with a striking instance of this, with four strophes from the 107th Psalm, taking leave to use at will the Authorised, the Revised and the Coverdale Versions. Each strophe, you will note, has a double refrain. As Dr Moulton points out, the one puts up a cry for help, the other an ejaculation of praise after the help has come. Each refrain has a sequel verse, which appropriately changes the motive and sets that of the next stanza:
(i)
They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; They found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, Their soul fainted in them.Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble,And he delivered them out of their distresses.He led them forth by a straight way, That they might go to a city of habitation.Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness,And for his wonderful works to the children of men!For he satisfieth the longing soul, And filleth the hungry soul with goodness.
(ii)
Such as sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, Being bound in affliction and iron; Because they rebelled against the words of God, And contemned the counsel of the most High: Therefore he brought down their heart with labour; They fell down, and there was none to help.Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble,And he saved them out of their distresses.He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, And brake their bands in sunder.Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness,And for his wonderful works to the children of men!For he hath broken the gates of brass, And cut the bars of iron in sunder.
(iii)
Fools because of their transgression, And because of their iniquities, are afflicted, Their soul abhorreth all manner of meat; And they draw near unto death's door.Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble,And he saveth them out of their distresses.He sendeth his word and healeth them, And delivereth them from their destructions.Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness,And for his wonderful works to the children of men!And let them offer the sacrifices of thanksgiving, And declare his works with singing:
(iv)
They that go down to the sea in ships,That do business in great waters;These see the works of the Lord,And his wonders in the deep.For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind,Which lifteth up the waves thereof.They mount up to the heaven,They go down again to the depths;Their soul melteth away because of trouble.They reel to and fro,And stagger like a drunken man,And are at their wits' end.Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble,And he bringeth them out of their distresses.He maketh the storm a calm,So that the waves thereof are still.Then are they glad because they be quiet;So he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness,And for his wonderful works to the children of men!Let them exalt him also in the assembly of the people,And praise him in the seat of the elders!
[Footnote 1: I borrow the verse and in part the prose ofProfessor W. Rhys Roberts' translation.]
My task to-day, Gentlemen, is mainly practical: to choose a particular book of Scripture and show (if I can) not only that it deserves to be enjoyed, in its English rendering, as a literary masterpiece, because it abides in that dress, an indisputable classic for us, as surely as if it had first been composed in English; but that it can, for purposes of study, serve the purpose of any true literary school of English as readily, and as usefully, as the Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales" or "Hamlet" or "Paradise Lost." I shall choose "The Book of Job" for several reasons, presently to be given; but beg you to understand that, while taking it for a striking illustration, I use it but to illustrate; that what may be done with "Job" may, in degree, be done with "Ruth," with "Esther," with the "Psalms," "The Song of Songs," "Ecclesiastes;" with Isaiah of Jerusalem, Ezekiel, sundry of the prophets; even with St Luke's Gospel or St Paul's letters to the Churches.
My first reason, then, for choosing "Job" has already been given. It is the most striking illustration to be found. Many of the Psalms touch perfection as lyrical strains: of the ecstacy of passion in love I suppose "The Song of Songs" to express the very last word. There are chapters of Isaiah that snatch the very soul and ravish it aloft. In no literature known to me are short stories told with such sweet austerity of art as in the Gospel parables—I can even imagine a high and learned artist in words, after rejecting them as divine on many grounds, surrendering in the end to their divine artistry. But for high seriousness combined with architectonic treatment on a great scale; for sublimity of conception, working malleably within a structure which is simple, severe, complete, having a beginning, a middle and an end; for diction never less than adequate, constantly right and therefore not seldom superb, as theme, thought and utterance soar up together and make one miracle, I can name no single book of the Bible to compare with "Job."
My second reason is that the poem, being brief, compendious and quite simple in structure, can be handily expounded; "Job" is what Milton precisely called it, 'a brief model.' And my third reason (which I must not hide) is that two writers whom I mentioned in my last lecture Lord Latymer and Professor R. G. Moulton—have already done this for me. A man who drives at practice must use the tools other men have made, so he use them with due acknowledgment; and this acknowledgment I pay by referring you to Book II of Lord Latymer's "The Poet's Charter,' and to the analysis of "Job" with which Professor Moulton introduces his "Literary Study of the Bible.'
But I have a fourth reason, out of which I might make an apparent fifth by presenting it to you in two different ways. Those elders of you who have followed certain earlier lectures 'On the Art of Writing' may remember that they set very little store upon metre as a dividing line between poetry and prose, and no store at all upon rhyme. I am tempted to-day to go farther, and to maintain that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, the more impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that this impertinence increases in a sort of geometrical progression as you advance from monosyllabic to dissyllabic and on to trisyllabic rhyme. Let me put this by a series of examples.
We start with no rhyme at all:
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first born!Or of the Eternal coeternal beamMay I express thee unblamed? since God is light,And never but in unapproached lightDwelt from eternity.
We feel of this, as we feel of a great passage in "Hamlet" or "Lear," that here is verse at once capable of the highest sublimity and capable of sustaining its theme, of lifting and lowering it at will, with endless resource in the slide and pause of the caesura, to carry it on and on. We feel it to be adequate, too, for quite plain straightforward narrative, as in this passage from "Balder Dead":
But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose,The throne, from which his eye surveys the world;And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rodeTo Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven,High over Asgard, to light home the King.But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart;And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came.And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rangAlong the flinty floor of Asgard streets,And the Gods trembled on their golden beds—Hearing the wrathful Father coming home—For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came.And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and leftSleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall:And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.
Now of rhyme he were a fool who, with Lycidas, or Gray's "Elegy," or certain choruses of "Prometheus Unbound," or page after page of Victor Hugo in his mind, should assert it to be in itself inimical, or a hindrance, or even less than a help, to sublimity; or who, with Dante in his mind, should assert it to be, in itself, any bar to continuous and sustained sublimity. But languages differ vastly in their wealth of rhyme, and differ out of any proportion to their wealth in words: English for instance being infinitely richer than Italian in vocabulary, yet almost ridiculously poorer in dissyllabic, or feminine rhymes. Speaking generally, I should say that in proportion to its wonderful vocabulary, English is poor even in single rhymes; that the words 'love,' 'truth,' 'God,' for example, have lists of possible congeners so limited that the mind, hearing the word 'love,' runs forward to match it with 'dove' or 'above' or even with 'move': and this gives it a sense of arrest, of listening, of check, of waiting, which alike impedes the flow of Pope in imitating Homer, and of Spenser in essaying a sublime and continuous story of his own. It does well enough to carry Chaucer over any gap with a 'forsooth as I you say' or 'forsooth as I you tell': but it does so at a total cost of the sublime. And this (I think) was really at the back of Milton's mind when in the preface to "Paradise Lost" he championed blank verse against 'the jingling sound of like endings.'
But when we pass from single rhymes to double, of which Dante had an inexhaustible store, we find the English poet almost a pauper; so nearly a pauper that he has to achieve each new rhyme by a trick—which tricking is fatal to rapture, alike in the poet and the hearer. Let me instance a poem which, planned for sublimity, keeps tumbling flat upon earth through the inherent fault of the machine—I mean Myers's "St Paul"—a poem which, finely conceived, pondered, worked and re-worked upon in edition after edition, was from the first condemned (to my mind) by the technical bar of dissyllabic rhyme which the poet unhappily chose. I take one of its most deeply felt passages—that of St Paul protesting against his conversion being taken for instantaneous, wholly accounted for by the miraculous vision related in the "Acts of the Apostles":
Let no man think that sudden in a minuteAll is accomplished and the work is done;—Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin itScarce were it ended in thy setting sun.
Oh the regret, the struggle and the failing!Oh the days desolate and useless years!Vows in the night, so fierce and unavailing!Stings of my shame and passion of my tears!
How have I seen in Araby Orion,Seen without seeing, till he set again,Known the night-noise and thunder of the lion,Silence and sounds of the prodigious plain!
How have I knelt with arms of my aspiringLifted all night in irresponsive air,Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring,Blank with the utter agony of prayer!
'What,' ye will say, `and thou who at DamascusSawest the splendour, answeredst the Voice;So hast thou suffered and canst dare to ask us,Paul of the Romans, bidding us rejoice?'
You cannot say I have instanced a passage anything short of fine. But do you not feel that a man who is searching for a rhyme to Damascus has not really the time to cry 'Abba, father'? Is not your own rapture interrupted by some wonder 'How will he bring it off'? And when he has searched and contrived to `ask us,' are we responsive to the ecstacy? Has he not—if I may employ an Oriental trope for once—let in the chill breath of cleverness upon the garden of beatitude? No man can be clever and ecstatic at the same moment[1].
As for triple rhymes—rhymes of the comedian who had a lot o' news with many curious facts about the square on the hypotenuse, or the cassiowary who ate the missionary on the plains of Timbuctoo, with Bible, prayer-book, hymn-book too—they are for the facetious, and removed, as far as geometrical progression can remove them, from any "Paradise Lost" or "Regained."
It may sound a genuine note, now and then:
Alas! for the rarityOf Christian charityUnder the sun!Oh, it was pitiful!Near a whole city full,Home she had none!
But not often: and, I think, never but in lyric.
So much, then, for rhyme. We will approach the question of metre, helped or unhelped by rhyme, in another way; and a way yet more practical.
When Milton (determined to write a grand epic) was casting about for his subject, he had a mind for some while to attempt the story of "Job." You may find evidence for this in a MS preserved here in Trinity College Library.
You will find printed evidence in a passage of his "Reason ofChurch Government":
'Time serves not now,' he writes, 'and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model …'
Again, we know "Job" to have been one of the three stories meditated by Shelley as themes for great lyrical dramas, the other two being the madness of Tasso and "Prometheus Unbound." Shelley never abandoned this idea of a lyrical drama on Job; and if Milton abandoned the idea of an epic, there are passages in "Paradise Lost" as there are passages in "Prometheus Unbound" that might well have been written for this other story. Take the lines
Why am I mock'd with death, and lengthen'd outTo deathless pain? How gladly would I meetMortality my sentence, and be earthInsensible! how glad would lay me downAs in my mother's lap! There I should restAnd sleep secure;…
What is this, as Lord Latymer asks, but an echo of Job's words?—
For now should I have lien down and been quiet;I should have slept; then had I been at rest:With kings and counsellers of the earth,Which built desolate places for themselves …There the wicked cease from troubling;And there the weary be at rest.
There is no need for me to point out how exactly, though from two nearly opposite angles, the story of Job would hit the philosophy of Milton and the philosophy of Shelley to the very heart. What is the story of the afflicted patriarch but a direct challenge to a protestant like Milton (I use the word in its strict sense) to justify the ways of God to man? It is the very purpose, in sum, of the "Book of Job," as it is the very purpose, in sum, of "Paradise Lost": and since both poems can only work out the justification by long argumentative speeches, both poems lamentably fail as real solutions of the difficulty. To this I shall recur, and here merely observe thatqui s' excuse s' accuse: a God who can only explain himself by the help of long-winded scolding, or of long-winded advocacy, though he employ an archangel for advocate, has given away the half of his case by the implicit admission that there are two sides to the question. And when we have put aside the poetical ineptitude of a Creator driven to apology, it remains that to Shelley the Jehovah who, for a sort of wager, allowed Satan to torture Job merely for the game of testing him, would be no better than any other tyrant; would be a miscreant Creator, abominable as the Zeus of the "Prometheus Unbound."
Now you may urge that Milton and Shelley dropped Job for hero because both felt him to be a merely static figure: and that the one chose Satan, the rebel angel, the other chose Prometheus the rebel Titan, because both are active rebels, and as epic and drama require action, each of these heroes makes the thing move; that Satan and Prometheus are not passive sufferers like Job but souls as quick and fiery as Byron's Lucifer:
Souls who dare use their immortality—Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant inHis everlasting face, and tell him thatHis evil is not good.
Very well, urge this: urge it with all your might. All the while you will be doing just what I desire you to do, using "Job" alongside "Prometheus Unbound" and "Paradise Lost" as a comparative work of literature.
But, if you ask me for my own opinion why Milton and Shelley dropped their intention to make poems on the "Book of Job," it is that they no sooner tackled it than they found it to be a magnificent poem already, and a poem on which, with all their genius, they found themselves unable to improve.
I want you to realise a thing most simple, demonstrable by five minutes of practice, yet so confused by conventional notions of what poetry is that I dare say it to be equally demonstrable that Milton and Shelley discovered it only by experiment. Does this appear to you a bold thing to say of so tremendous an artist as Milton? Well, of course it would be cruel to quote in proof his paraphrases of Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi: to set against the Authorised Version's
When Israel went out of Egypt,The house of Jacob from a people of strange language
such pomposity as
When the blest seed of Terah's faithful sonAfter long toil their liberty had won—
or against
O give thanks….To him that stretched out the earth above the waters:for his mercy endureth for ever.To him that made great lights:for his mercy endureth for ever
such stuff as
Who did the solid earth ordainTo rise above the watery plain;For his mercies aye endure,Ever faithful, ever sure.Who, by his all-commanding might,Did fill the new-made world with light;For his mercies aye endure,Ever faithful, ever sure.
verses yet further weakened by the late Sir William Baker for "Hymns Ancient and Modern."
It were cruel, I say, to condemn these attempts as little above those of Sternhold and Hopkins, or even of those of Tate and Brady: for Milton made them at fifteen years old, and he who afterwards consecrated his youth to poetry soon learned to know better. And yet, bearing in mind the passages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" which paraphrase the Scriptural narrative, I cannot forbear the suspicion that, though as an artist he had the instinct to feel it, he never quite won toknowingthe simple fact that the thing had already been done and surpassingly well done: he, who did so much to liberate poetry from rhyme—he—even he who in the grand choruses of "Samson Agonistes" did so much to liberate it from strict metre never quite realised, being hag-ridden by the fetish that rides between two panniers, the sacred and the profane, that this translation of "Job" already belongs to the category of poetry,ispoetry, already above metre, and in rhythm far on its way to the insurpassable. If rhyme be allowed to that greatest of arts, if metre, is not rhythm above both for her service? Hear in a sentence how this poem uplifts the rhythm of the Vulgate:
Ecce, Deus magnus vincens scientiam nostram; numerus annorumejus inestimabilis!
But hear, in a longer passage, how our English rhythm swings and sways to the Hebrew parallels:
Surely there is a mine for silver,And a place for gold which they refine.Iron is taken out of the earth,And brass is molten out of the stone.Mansetteth an end to darkness,And searcheth out to the furthest boundThe stones of thick darkness and of the shadow of death.He breaketh open a shaft away from where men sojourn;They are forgotten of the footthat passeth by;They hang afar from men, they swing to and fro.As for the earth, out of it cometh bread:And underneath it is turned up as it were by fire.The atones thereof are the place of sapphires,And it hath dust of gold.That path no bird of prey knoweth,Neither hath the falcon's eye seen it:The proud beasts have not trodden it,Nor hath the fierce lion passed thereby.He putteth forth his hand upon the flinty rock;He overturneth the mountains by the roots.He cutteth out channels among the rocks;And his eye seeth every precious thing.He bindeth the streams that they trickle not;And the thing that is hid bringeth he forth to light.But where shall wisdom be found?And where is the place of understanding?Man knoweth not the price thereof;Neither is it found in the land of the living.The deep saith, It is not in me:And the sea saith, It is not with me.It cannot be gotten for gold,Neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof.It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir,With the precious onyx, or the sapphire.Gold and glass cannot equal it:Neither shall the exchange thereof be jewels of fine gold.No mention shall be made of coral or of crystal:Yea, the price of wisdom is above rubies.The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it,Neither shall it be valued with pure gold.Whence then cometh wisdom?And where is the place of understanding?Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living,And kept close from the fowls of the air.Destruction and Death say,We have heard a rumour thereof with our ears.God understandeth the way thereof,And he knoweth the place thereof.For he looketh to the ends of the earth,And seeth under the whole heaven;To make a weight for the wind;Yea, he meteth out the waters by measure.When he made a decree for the rain,And a way for the lightning of the thunder:Then did he see it, and declare it;He established it, yea, and searched it out.And unto man he said,Behold, the fear of the Lord,thatis wisdom;And to depart from evil is understanding.
Is that poetry? Surely it is poetry. Can you improve it with the embellishments of rhyme and strict scansion? Well, sundry bold men have tried, and I will choose, for your judgment, the rendering of a part of the above passage by one who is by no means the worst of them—a hardy anonymous Scotsman. His version was published at Falkirk in 1869:
His hand on the rock the adventurer puts,And mountains entire overturns by the roots;New rivers in rocks are enchased by his might,And everything precious revealed to his sight;The floods from o'er-flowing he bindeth at will,And the thing that is hid bringeth forth by his skill.
But where real wisdom is found can he shew?Or the place understanding inhabiteth? No!Men know not the value, the price of this gem;'Tis not found in the land of the living with them.It is not in me, saith the depth; and the seaWith the voice of an echo, repeats, Not in me.
(I have a suspicion somehow that what the sea really answered, in its northern vernacular, was 'Me either.')
Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the placeUnderstanding hath chosen, since this is the case?…
Enough! This not only shows how that other rendering can be spoilt even to the point of burlesque by an attempt, on preconceived notions, to embellish it with metre and rhyme, but it also hints that parallel verse will actually resent and abhor such embellishment even by the most skilled hand. Yet, I repeat, our version of "Job" is poetry undeniable. What follows?
Why, it follows that in the course of studying it as literature we have found experimentally settled for us—and on the side of freedom—a dispute in which scores of eminent critics have taken sides: a dispute revived but yesterday (if we omit the blank and devastated days of this War) by the writers and apostles ofvers libres.'Can there be poetry without metre?' 'Is free verse a true poetic form?' Why, our "Book of Job" being poetry, unmistakable poetry, of course there can, to be sure it is. These apostles are butting at an open door. Nothing remains for them but to go and writevers libresas fine as those of "Job" in our English translation. Or suppose even that they write as well as M. Paul Fort, they will yet be writing ancestrally, not as innovators but as renewers. Nothing is done in literature by arguing whether or not this or that be possible or permissible. The only way to prove it possible or permissible is to go and do it: and then you are lucky indeed if some ancient writers have not forestalled you.
Now for another question (much argued, you will remember, a few years ago) 'Is there—can there be—such a thing as a Static Theatre, a Static Drama?'
Most of you (I daresay) remember M. Maeterlinck's definition of this and his demand for it. To summarise him roughly, he contends that the old drama—the traditional, the conventional drama— lives by action; that, in Aristotle's phrase, it represents men doing, [Greek: prattontas], and resolves itself into a struggle of human wills—whether against the gods, as in ancient tragedy, or against one another, as in modern. M. Maeterlinck tells us—
There is a tragic element in the life of every day that is far more real, far more penetrating, far more akin to the true self that is in us, than is the tragedy that lies in great adventure…. It goes beyond the determined struggle of man against man, and desire against desire; it goes beyond the eternal conflict of duty and passion. Its province is rather to reveal to us how truly wonderful is the mere act of living, and to throw light upon the existence of the soul, self-contained in the midst of ever-restless immensities; to hush the discourse of reason and sentiment, so that above the tumult may be heard the solemn uninterrupted whisperings of man and his destiny.
To the tragic author [he goes on, later], as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation thereof does the entire interest of his work consist…. Indeed when I go to a theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few hours with my ancestors, who conceived life as though it were something that was primitive, arid and brutal…. I am shown a deceived husband killing his wife, a woman poisoning her lover, a son avenging his father, a father slaughtering his children, murdered kings, ravished virgins, imprisoned citizens—in a word all the sublimity of tradition, but alas how superficial and material! Blood, surface-tears and death! What can I learn from creatures who have but one fixed idea, who have no time to live, for that there is a rival, a mistress, whom it behoves them to put to death?
M. Maeterlinck does not (he says) know if the Static Drama of his craving be impossible. He inclines to think—instancing some Greek tragedies such as "Prometheus" and "Choephori"—that it already exists. But may we not, out of the East—the slow, the stationary East—fetch an instance more convincing?
The Drama of Job opens with a "Prologue" in the mouth of aNarrator.
There was a man in the land of Uz, named Job; upright, God-fearing, of great substance in sheep, cattle and oxen; blest also with seven sons and three daughters. After telling of their family life, how wholesome it is, and pious, and happy—
The Prologue passes to a Council held in Heaven. The Lord sits there, and the sons of God present themselves each from his province. Enters Satan (whom we had better call the Adversary) from his sphere of inspection, the Earth, and reports. The Lord specially questions him concerning Job, pattern of men. The Adversary demurs. 'Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast thou not set a hedge about his prosperity? But put forth thy hand and touch all that he hath, and he will renounce thee to thy face.' The Lord gives leave for this trial to be made (you will recall the opening of "Everyman"):
So, in the midst of his wealth, a messenger came to job and says—
The oxen were plowing,and the asses feeding beside them:and the Sabeans fell upon them,and took them away;yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword;and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said,The fire of God is fallen from heaven,and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants,and consumed them;and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said,The Chaldeans made three bands,and fell upon the camels,and have taken them away,yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword;and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said,Thy sons and thy daughterswere eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house:and, behold,there came a great wind from the wilderness,and smote the four corners of the house,and it fell upon the young men,and they are dead;and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, andfell down upon the ground, and worshipped; and he said,Naked came I out of my mother's womb,and naked shall I return thither:the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away;blessed be the name of the Lord.
So the Adversary is foiled, and Job has not renounced God. A second Council is held in Heaven; and the Adversary, being questioned, has to admit Job's integrity, but proposes a severer test:
Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face.
Again leave is given: and the Adversary smites job with the most hideous and loathsome form of leprosy. His kinsfolk (as we learn later) have already begun to desert and hold aloof from him as a man marked out by God's displeasure. But now he passes out from their midst, as one unclean from head to foot, and seats himself on the ash-mound—that is, upon the Mezbele or heap of refuse which accumulates outside Arab villages.
'The dung,' says Professor Moulton, `which is heaped upon the Mezbele of the Hauran villages is not mixed with straw, which in that warm and dry land is not needed for litter, and it comes mostly from solid-hoofed animals, as the flocks and oxen are left over-night in the grazing places. It is carried in baskets in a dry state to this place … and usually burnt once a month…. The ashes remain…. If the village has been inhabited for centuries the Mezbele reaches a height far overtopping it. The winter rains reduce it into a compact mass, and it becomes by and by a solid hill of earth…. The Mezbele serves the inhabitants for a watchtower, and in the sultry evenings for a place of concourse, because there is a current of air on the height. There all day long the children play about it; and there the outcast, who has been stricken with some loathsome malady, and is not allowed to enter the dwellings of men, lays himself down begging an alms of the passers-by by day, and by night sheltering himself among the ashes which the heat of the sun has warmed.'
Here, then, sits in his misery 'the forsaken grandee'; and here yet another temptation comes to him—this time not expressly allowed by the Lord. Much foolish condemnation (and, I may add, some foolish facetiousness) has been heaped on Job's wife. As a matter of fact she isnota wicked woman—she has borne her part in the pious and happy family life, now taken away: she has uttered no word of complaint though all the substance be swallowed up and her children with it. But now the sight of her innocent husband thus helpless, thus incurably smitten, wrings, through love and anguish and indignation, this cry from her:
Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? renounce God, and die.
But Job answered, soothing her:
Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?
So the second trial ends, and Job has sinned not with his lips.
But now comes the third trial, which needs no Council in Heaven to decree it. Travellers by the mound saw this figure seated there, patient, uncomplaining, an object of awe even to the children who at first mocked him; asked this man's history; and hearing of it, smote on their breasts, and made a token of it and carried the news into far countries: until it reached the ears of Job's three friends, all great tribesmen like himself—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. These three made an appointment together to travel and visit Job. 'And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept.' Then they went up and sat down opposite him on the ground. But the majesty of suffering is silent:
Here I and sorrows sit;Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it….
No, not a word…. And, with the grave courtesy of Eastern men, they too are silent:
So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great.
The Prologue ends. The scene is set. After seven days of silence the real drama opens.
Of the drama itself I shall attempt no analysis, referring you for this to the two books from which I have already quoted. My purpose being merely to persuade you that this surpassing poem can be studied, and ought to be studied, as literature, I shall content myself with turning it (so to speak) once or twice in my hand and glancing one or two facets at you.
To begin with, then, you will not have failed to notice, in the setting out of the drama, a curious resemblance between "Job" and the "Prometheus" of Aeschylus. The curtain in each play lifts on a figure solitary, tortured (for no reason that seems good to us) by a higher will which, we are told, is God's. The chorus of Sea-nymphs in the opening of the Greek play bears no small resemblance in attitude of mind to job's three friends. When job at length breaks the intolerable silence with
Let the day perish wherein I was born,And the night which said, There is a man child conceived.
he uses just such an outburst as Prometheus: and, as he is answered by his friends, so the Nymphs at once exclaim to Prometheus
Seest thou not that thou hast sinned?
But at once, for anyone with a sense of comparative literature, is set up a comparison between the persistent West and the persistent East; between the fiery energising rebel and the patient victim. Of these two, both good, one will dare everything to release mankind from thrall; the other will submit, and justify himself—mankind too, if it may hap—by submission.
At once this difference is seen to give a difference of form to the drama. Our poem is purely static. Some critics can detect little individuality in Job's three friends, to distinguish them. For my part I find Eliphaz more of a personage than the other two; grander in the volume of his mind, securer in wisdom; as I find Zophar rather noticeably a mean-minded greybeard, and Bildad a man of the stand-no-nonsense kind. But, to tell the truth, I prefer not to search for individuality in these men: I prefer to see them as three figures with eyes of stone almost expressionless. For in truth they are the conventions, all through,—the orthodox men—addressing Job, the reality; and their words come to this:
Thou sufferest, therefore must have sinned.All suffering is, must be a judgment upon sin.Else God is not righteous.
They are statuesque, as the drama is static. The speeches follow one another, rising and falling, in rise and fall magnificently and deliberately eloquent. Not a limb is seen to move, unless it be when job half rises from the dust in sudden scorn of their conventions:
No doubt butyeare the people,And wisdom shall die with you!
or again
Will ye speak unrighteously for God,And talk deceitfully for him?Willyerespecthisperson?Willyecontend for God?
Yet—so great is this man, who has not renounced and will not renounce God, that still and ever he clamours for more knowledge of Him. Still getting no answer, he lifts up his hands and calls the great Oath of Clearance; in effect 'If I have loved gold overmuch, hated mine enemy, refused the stranger my tent, truckled to public opinion':
If my land cry out against me,And the furrows thereof weep together;If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money,Or have caused the owners thereof to lose their life:Let thistles grow instead of wheat,And cockle instead of barley.
With a slow gesture he covers his face:
The words of Job are ended.
They are ended: even though at this point (when the debate seems to be closed) a young Aramaean Arab, Elihu, who has been loitering around and listening to the controversy, bursts in and delivers his young red-hot opinions. They are violent, and at the same time quite raw and priggish. Job troubles not to answer: the others keep a chilling silence. But while this young man rants, pointing skyward now and again, we see, we feel—it is most wonderfully conveyed—as clearly as if indicated by successive stage-directions, a terrific thunder-storm gathering; a thunder-storm with a whirlwind. It gathers; it is upon them; it darkens them with dread until even the words of Elihu dry on his lips:
If a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up.
It breaks and blasts and confounds them; and out of it the Lord speaks.
Now of that famous and marvellous speech, put by the poet into the mouth of God, we may say what may be said of all speeches put by man into the mouth of God. We may say, as of the speeches of the Archangel in "Paradise Lost" that it is argument, and argument, by its very nature, admits of being answered. But, if to make God talk at all be anthropomorphism, here is anthropomorphism at its very best in its effort to reach to God.
There is a hush. The storm clears away; and in this hush the voice of the Narrator is heard again, pronouncing the Epilogue. Job has looked in the face of God and reproached him as a friend reproaches a friend. Therefore his captivity was turned, and his wealth returned to him, and he begat sons and daughters, and saw his sons' sons unto the fourth generation. So Job died, being old and full of years.
Structurally a great poem; historically a great poem; philosophically a great poem; so rendered for us in noble English diction as to be worthy in any comparison of diction, structure, ancestry, thought! Why should we not study it in our English School, if only for purpose of comparison? I conclude with these words of Lord Latymer:
There is nothing comparable with it except the "Prometheus Bound" of Aeschylus. It is eternal, illimitable … its scope is the relation between God and Man. It is a vast liberation, a great gaol-delivery of the spirit of Man; nay, rather a great Acquittal.
[Footnote 1: It is fair to say that Myers cancelled the Damascus stanza in his final edition.]
Let us hark back, Gentlemen, to our original problem, and consider if our dilatory way have led us to some glimpse of a practical solution.
We may re-state it thus: Assuming it to be true, as men of Science assure us, that the weight of this planet remains constant, and is to-day what it was when mankind carelessly laid it on the shoulders of Atlas; that nothing abides but it goes, that nothing goes but in some form or other it comes back; you and I may well indulge a wonder what reflections upon this astonishing fact our University Librarian, Mr Jenkinson, takes to bed with him. A copy of every book printed in the United Kingdom is—or I had better say, should be—deposited with him. Putting aside the question of what he has done to deserve it, he must surely wonder at times from what other corners of the earth Providence has been at pains to collect and compact the ingredients of the latest new volume he handles for a moment before fondly committing it to the cellars.
'Locked up, not lost.'
Or, to take it in reverse—When the great library of Alexandria went up in flames, doubtless its ashes awoke an appreciable and almost immediate energy in the crops of the Nile Delta. The more leisurable process of desiccation, by which, under modern storage, the components of a modern novel are released to fresh unions and activities admits, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, a wide solution, and was just the question to tease that good man. Can we not hear him discussing it? 'To be but pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration…. To burn the bones of the King of Edom for lime seems no irrational ferity: but to store the back volumes of Mr Bottomley's "John Bull" a passionate prodigality.'
Well, whatever the perplexities of our Library we may be sure they will never break down that tradition of service, help and courtesy which is, among its fine treasures, still the first. But we have seen that Mr Jenkinson's perplexities are really but a parable of ours: that the question, What are we to do with all these books accumulating in the world? reallyisa question: that their mere accumulation reallydoesheap up against us a barrier of such enormous and brute mass that the stream of human culture must needs be choked and spread into marsh unless we contrive to pipe it through. That a great deal of it is meant to help—that even the most of it is well intentioned—avails not against the mere physical obstacle of its mass. If you consider an Athenian gentleman of the 5th century B.C. connecting (as I always preach here) his literature with his life, two things are bound to strike you: the first that he was a man of leisure, somewhat disdainful of trade and relieved of menial work by a number of slaves; the second, that he was surprisingly unencumbered with books. You will find in Plato much about reciters, actors, poets, rhetoricians, pleaders, sophists, public orators and refiners of language, but very little indeed about books. Even the library of Alexandria grew in a time of decadence and belonged to an age not his. Says Jowett in the end:
He who approaches him in the most reverent spirit shall reap most of the fruit of his wisdom; he who reads him by the light of ancient commentators will have the least understanding of him.
We see him [Jowett goes on] with the eye of the mind in the groves of the Academy, or on the banks of the Ilissus, or in the streets of Athens, alone or walking with Socrates, full of those thoughts which have since become the common possession of mankind. Or we may compare him to a statue hid away in some temple of Zeus or Apollo, no longer existing on earth, a statue which has a look as of the God himself. Or we may once more imagine him following in another state of being the great company of heaven which he beheld of old in a vision. So, 'partly trifling but with a certain degree of seriousness,' we linger around the memory of a world which has passed away.
Yes, 'which has passed away,' and perhaps with no token more evident of its decease than the sepulture of books that admiring generations have heaped on it!
In a previous lecture I referred you to the beautiful opening and the yet more beautiful close of the "Phaedrus." Let us turn back and refresh ourselves with that Dialogue while we learn from it, in somewhat more of detail, just what a book meant to an Athenian: how fresh a thing it was to him and how little irksome.
Phaedrus has spent his forenoon listening to a discourse by the celebrated rhetorician Lysias on the subject of Love, and is starting to cool his head with a stroll beyond the walls of the city, when he encounters Socrates, who will not let him go until he has delivered up the speech with which Lysias regaled him, or, better still, the manuscript, 'which I suspect you are carrying there in your left hand under your cloak.' So they bend their way beside Ilissus towards a tall plane tree, seen in the distance. Having reached it, they recline.
'By Hera,' says Socrates, 'a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to Acheloüs and the Nymphs. And the breeze, how deliciously charged with balm! and all summer's murmur in the air, shrilled by the chorus of the grasshoppers! But the greatest charm is this knoll of turf,—positively a pillow for the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been a delectable guide.'
'What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates,' returns Phaedrus. 'When you are in the country, as you say, you really are like some stranger led about by a guide. Upon my word, I doubt if you ever stray beyond the gates save by accident.'
'Very true, my friend: and I hope you will forgive me for the reason—which is, that I love knowledge, and my teachers are the men who dwell in the city, not the trees or country scenes. Yet I do believe you have found a spell to draw me forth, like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. For only hold up before me in like manner a book, and you may lead me all round Attica and over the wide world.'
So they recline and talk, looking aloft through that famous pure sky of Attica, mile upon mile transparent; and their discourse (preserved to us) is of Love, and seems to belong to that atmosphere, so clear it is and luminously profound. It ends with the cool of the day, and the two friends arise to depart. Socrates looks about him.
'Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local deities?'
'By all means,' Phaedrus agrees.
Socrates(praying): 'Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that the outward and inward may be at one! May I esteem the wise to be the rich; and may I myself have that quantity of gold which a temperate man, and he only, can carry…. Anything more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me.'
Phaedrus.'Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks, should have all things in common.'
Socrates.'Amen, then…. Let us go.'
Here we have, as it seems to me, a marriage, without impediment, of wisdom and beauty between two minds that perforce have small acquaintance with books: and yet, with it, Socrates' confession that anyone with a book under his cloak could lead him anywhere by the nose. So we see that Hellenic culture at its best was independent of book-learning, and yet craved for it.
When our own Literature awoke, taking its origin from the proud scholarship of the Renaissance, an Englishman who affected it was scarcely more cumbered with books than our Athenian had been, two thousand years before. It was, and it remained, aristocratic: sparingly expensive of its culture. It postulated, if not a slave population, at least a proletariat for which its blessings were not. No one thought of making a fortune by disseminating his work in print. Shakespeare never found it worth while to collect and publish his plays; and a very small sense of history will suffice to check our tears over the price received by Milton for "Paradise Lost." We may wonder, indeed, at the time it took our forefathers to realise—or, at any rate, to employ—the energy that lay in the printing-press. For centuries after its invention mere copying commanded far higher prices than authorship[1]. Writers gave 'authorised' editions to the world sometimes for the sake of fame, often to justify themselves against piratical publishers, seldom in expectation of monetary profit. Listen, for example, to Sir Thomas Browne's excuse for publishing "Religio Medici" (1643):
Had not almost every man suffered by the press or were not the tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for complaint: but in times wherein I have lived to behold the highest perversion of that excellent invention, the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved, the writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted; complaints may seem ridiculous in private persons; and men of my condition may be as incapable of affronts, as hopeless of their reparations. And truly had not the duty I owe unto the importunity of friends, and the allegiance I must ever acknowledge unto truth, prevailed with me; the inactivity of my disposition might have made these sufferings continual, and time that brings other things to light, should have satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion. But because things evidently false are not only printed, but many things of truth most falsely set forth, in this latter I could not but think myself engaged. For though we have no power to redress the former, yet in the other, the reparation being within our selves, I have at present represented unto the world a full and intended copy of that piece, which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously published before.
This I confess, about seven years past, with some others of affinity thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisurable hours composed; which being communicated unto one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription successively corrupted, untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the press … [2]
The men of the 18th century maintained the old tradition of literary exclusiveness, but in a somewhat different way and more consciously.
I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, that nine out of ten of you dislike the 18th century and all its literary works. As for the Women students, they one and all abominate it. You do not, I regret to say, provide me with reasons much more philosophical than the epigrammatist's for disliking Doctor Fell. May one whose time of life excuses perhaps a detachment from passion attempt to provide you with one? If so, first listen to this from Mr and Mrs Hammond's book "The Village Labourer," 1760-1832:
A row of 18th century houses, or a room of normal 18th century furniture, or a characteristic piece of 18th century literature, conveys at once a sensation of satisfaction and completeness. The secret of this charm is not to be found in any special beauty or nobility of design or expression, but simply in an exquisite fitness. The 18th century mind was a unity, an order. All literature and art that really belong to the 18th century are the language of a little society of men and women who moved within one set of ideas; who understood each other; who were not tormented by any anxious or bewildering problems; who lived in comfort, and, above all things, in composure. The classics were their freemasonry. There was a standard for the mind, for the emotions, for taste: there were no incongruities.
When you have a society like this, you have what we roughly call a civilisation, and it leaves its character and canons in all its surroundings and in its literature. Its definite ideas lend themselves readily to expression. A larger society seems an anarchy in contrast: just because of its escape into a greater world it seems powerless to stamp itself in wood or stone; it is condemned as an age of chaos and mutiny, with nothing to declare.
You do wrong, I assure you, in misprising these men of the 18th century. They reduced life, to be sure: but by that very means they saw it far morecompletelythan do we, in this lyrical age, with our worship of 'fine excess.' Here at any rate, and to speak only of its literature, you have a society fencing that literature around—I do not say by forethought or even consciously—but in effect fencing its literature around, to keep it in control and capable of an orderly, a nice, even an exquisite cultivation. Dislike it as you may, I do not think that any of you, as he increases his knowledge of the technique of English Prose, yes, and of English Verse (I do not say of English Poetry) will deny his admiration to the men of the 18th century. The strength of good prose resides not so much in the swing and balance of the single sentence as in the marshalling of argument, the orderly procession of paragraphs, the disposition of parts so that each finds its telling, its proper, place; the adjustment of the means to the end; the strategy which brings its full force into action at the calculated moment and drives the conclusion home upon an accumulated sense ofjustice.I do not see how any student of 18th century literature can deny its writers—Berkeley or Hume or Gibbon—Congreve or Sheridan—Pope or Cowper—Addison or Steele or Johnson—Burke or Chatham or Thomas Paine—their meed for this, or, if he be an artist, even his homage.
But it remains true, as your instinct tells you, and as I have admitted, that they achieved all this by help of narrow and artificial boundaries. Of several fatal exclusions let me name but two.
In the first place, they excluded the Poor; imitating in a late age the Athenian tradition of a small polite society resting on a large and degraded one. Throughout the 18th century—and the great Whig families were at least as much to blame for this as the Tories—by enclosure of commons, by grants, by handling of the franchise, by taxation, by poor laws in result punitive though intended to be palliative, the English peasantry underwent a steady process of degradation into serfdom: into a serfdom which, during the first twenty years of the next century, hung constantly and precariously on the edge of actual starvation. The whole theory of culture worked upon a principle of double restriction; of restricting on the one hand the realm of polite knowledge to propositions suitable for a scholar and a gentleman, and, on the other, the numbers of the human family permitted to be either. The theory deprecated enthusiasm, as it discountenanced all ambition in a poor child to rise above what Sir Spencer Walpole called 'his inevitable and hereditary lot'—to soften which and make him acquiescent in it was, with a Wilberforce or a Hannah More, the last dream of restless benevolence.
Also these 18th century men fenced off the whole of our own Middle English and medieval literature—fenced off Chaucer and Dunbar, Malory and Berners—as barbarous and 'Gothic.' They treated these writers with little more consideration than Boileau had thought it worth while to bestow on Villon or on Ronsard—enfin Malherbe! As for Anglo-Saxon literature, one may, safely say that, save by Gray and a very few others, its existence was barely surmised.
You may or may not find it harder to forgive them that they ruled out moreover a great part of the literature of the preceding century as offensive to urbane taste, or as they would say, 'disgusting.' They disliked it mainly, one suspects, as one age revolts from the fashion of another—as some of you, for example, revolt from the broad plenty of Dickens (Heaven forgive you) or the ornament of Tennyson. Some of the great writers of that age definitely excluded God from their scheme of things: others included God fiercely, but with circumscription and limitation. I think it fair to say of them generally that they hated alike the mystical and the mysterious, and, hating these, could have little commerce with such poetry as Crashaw's and Vaughan's or such speculation as gave ardour to the prose of the Cambridge Platonists. Johnson's famous attack, in his "Life of Cowley," upon the metaphysical followers of Donne ostensibly assails their literary conceits, but truly and at bottom rests its quarrel against an attitude of mind, in respect of which he lived far enough removed to be unsympathetic yet near enough to take denunciation for a duty. Johnson, to put it vulgarly, had as little use for Vaughan's notion of poetry as he would have had for Shelley's claim that it
feeds on the aëreal kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses,
and we have only to set ourselves back in Shelley's age and read (say) the verse of Frere and Canning in "The Anti-Jacobin," to understand how frantic a lyrist—let be how frantic a political figure—Shelley must have appeared to well-regulated minds.
All this literature which our forefathers excluded has come back upon us: and concurrently we have to deal with the more serious difficulty (let us give thanks for it) of a multitude of millions insurgent to handsel their long-deferred heritage. I shall waste no time in arguing that we ought not to wish to withhold it, because we cannot if we would. And thus the problem becomes a double one, ofdistributionas well as ofselection.
Now in the first place I submit that thisdistributionshould be free: which implies that ourselectionmust be confined to books and methods of teaching. There must be no picking and choosing among the recipients, no appropriation of certain forms of culture to certain 'stations of life' with a tendency, conscious or unconscious, to keep those stations as stationary as possible.
Merely by clearing our purpose to this extent we shall have made no inconsiderable advance. For even the last century never quite got rid of its predecessor's fixed idea that certain degrees of culture were appropriate to certain stations of life. With what gentle persistence it prevails, for example, in Jane Austen's novels; with what complacent rhetoric in Tennyson (and in spite of Lady Clara Vere de Vere)! Let me remind you that by allowing an idea to take hold of our animosity we may be as truly `possessed' by it as though it claimed our allegiance. The notion that culture may be drilled to march in step with a trade or calling endured through the Victorian age of competition and possessed the mind not only of Samuel Smiles who taught by instances how a bright and industrious boy might earn money and lift himself out of his 'station,' but of Ruskin himself, who in the first half of "Sesame and Lilies," in the lecture "Of Kings' Treasuries," discussing the choice of books, starts vehemently and proceeds at length to denounce the prevalent passion for self-advancement—of rising above one's station in life—quite as if it were the most important thing, willy-nilly, in talking of the choice of books. Which means that, to Ruskin, just then, it was the most formidable obstacle. Can we, at this time of day, do better by simply turning the notion out of doors? Yes, I believe that we can: and upon thiscredo:
I believe that while it may grow—and grow infinitely—with increase of learning, the grace of a liberal education, like the grace of Christianity, is so catholic a thing—so absolutely above being trafficked, retailed, apportioned, among `stations in life'—that the humblest child may claim it by indefeasible right, having a soul.
Further, I believe that Humanism is, or should he, no decorative appanage, purchased late in the process of education, within the means of a few: but a quality, rather, which should, and can, condition all teaching, from a child's first lesson in Reading: that its unmistakable hall-mark can be impressed upon the earliest task set in an Elementary School.
I am not preaching red Radicalism in this: I am not telling you that Jack is as good as his master: if he were, he would be a great deal better; for he would understand Homer (say) as well as his master, the child of parents who could afford to have him taught Greek. As Greek is commonly taught, I regret to say, whether they have learnt it or not makes a distressingly small difference to most boys' appreciation of Homer. Still it does make a vast difference to some, and should make a vast difference to all. And yet, if you will read the passage in Kinglake's "Eöthen" in which he tells—in words that find their echo in many a reader's memory—of his boyish passion for Homer—and if you will note that the boy imbibed his passion, after all, through the conduit of Pope's translation—you will acknowledge that, for the human boy, admission to much of the glory of Homer's realm does not depend upon such mastery as a boy of fifteen or sixteen possesses over the original. But let me quote you a few sentences:
I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar's love. The most humble and pious among women was yet so proud a mother that she could teach her first-born son no Watts's hymns, no collects for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood no less than this—to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that old Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek was ingeniously rendered into English, the English of Pope even, but not even a mesh like that can screen an earnest child from the fire of Homer's battles.
I pored over the "Odyssey" as over a story-book, hoping and fearing for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the "Iliad"—line by line I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love….
The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their talking … but all the while that he thus chafes at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the "Iliad," that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his mother's shawl….
It was not the recollection of school nor college learning, but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, which made me bend forward so longingly to the plains of Troy.
It is among the books then, and not among the readers, that we must do our selecting. But how? On what principle or principles?
Sometime in the days of my youth, a newspaper, "The Pall Mall Gazette," then conducted by W. T. Stead, made a conscientious effort to solve the riddle by inviting a number of eminent men to compile lists of the Hundred Best Books. Now this invitation rested on a fallacy. Considering for a moment how personal a thing is Literature, you will promptly assure yourselves that there is—there can be—no such thing as the Hundred Best Books. If you yet incline to toy with the notion, carry it on and compile a list of the Hundred Second-best Books: nay, if you will, continue until you find yourself solemnly, with a brow corrugated by responsibility, weighing the claims (say) of Velleius Paterculus, Paul and Virginia and Mr Jorrocks to admission among the Hundred Tenth-best Books. There is, in fact no positive hierarchy among the classics. You cannot appraise the worth of Charles Lamb against the worth of Casaubon: the worth of Hesiod against the worth of Madame de Sévigné: the worth of Théophile Gautier against the worth of Dante or Thomas Hobbes or Macchiavelli or Jane Austen. They all wrote with pens, in ink, upon paper: but you no sooner pass beyond these resemblances than your comparison finds itself working in impari materia.
Also why should the Best Books be 100 in number, rather than 99 or 199? And under what conditions is a book a Best Book? There are moods in which we not only prefer Pickwick to the Rig-Vedas or Sakuntalà, but find that it does us more good. In our day again I pay all respect to Messrs Dent's "Everyman's Library." It was a large conception vigorously planned. But, in the nature of things, Everyman is going to arrive at a point beyond which he will find it more and more difficult to recognise himself: at a point, let us say, when Everyman, opening a new parcel, starts to doubt if, after all, it wouldn't be money in his pocket to be Somebody Else.
And yet, may be, "The Pall Mall Gazette" was on the right scent. For it was in search of masterpieces: and, however we teach, our trust will in the end repose upon masterpieces, upon the great classics of whatever Language or Literature we are handling: and these, in any language are neither enormous in number and mass, nor extraordinarily difficult to detect, nor (best of all) forbidding to the reader by reason of their own difficulty. Upon a selected few of these—even upon three, or two, or one—we may teach at least a surmise of the true delight, and may be some measure of taste whereby our pupil will, by an inner guide, be warned to choose the better and reject the worse when we turn him loose to read for himself.
To this use of masterpieces I shall devote my final lecture.
[Footnote 1: Charles Reade notes this in "The Cloister and theHearth," chap. LXI.]
[Footnote 2: The loose and tautologous style of this Preface is worth noting. Likely enough Browne wrote it in a passion that deprived him of his habitual self-command. One phrase alone reveals the true Browne—that is, Browne true to himself: 'and time that brings other things to light, should have satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion.']