On The Art of Reading Part 11

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 be _hard._ But English Literature is _not_ a mystery, _not_ a 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 of _professionising_ Literature. 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, I am to say that in all the circ.u.mstances of this case the Commissioners are of the opinion that it would be desirable that a public enquiry in connection with the Charity should be held in the locality.

And the man--very likely an educated man--having written _that,_ 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.

VIII

I declare to you that Literature was _not_ written for schoolmasters, nor for schoolmistresses. I would not exchange it for a wilderness of schoolmasters. It should be delivered from them, who, with their silly _Ablauts_ and '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 ma.s.s one interesting well-written history of the 'subject.'

IX

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 unpatriotic _lache,_ 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--_accable_--with the sufferings of his town-folk, has truly felt the iron enter into his soul on being forced to sign a doc.u.ment written out for him in the invaders'

French.

Cannot we treat our n.o.ble inheritance of literature and language as scrupulously, and with as high a sense of their appertaining to our national honour, as a Frenchman cherishes _his_ language, _his_ literature? 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 pa.s.sed 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 the _national_ side 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 the _personal_ side 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's _Sermon II preached at Pauls upon Christmas Day, in the Evening._ 1624.]

LECTURE VII

THE VALUE OF GREEK AND LATIN IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1918

I

I have promised you, Gentlemen, for to-day some observations on _The Value of Greek and Latin in English Literature_: a mild, academic t.i.tle, a _camouflage_ t.i.tle, so to say; calculated to shelter us for a while from the vigilance of those hot-eyed reformers who, had I advertised _The Value of Greek and Latin in English Life_ might 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, 'there _is_ a path which the vulture's eye hath not seen!'

You, at any rate, know by this time that wherever these lectures a.s.sert literature they a.s.sert life, perhaps even too pa.s.sionately, allowing neither the fact of death nor the possibility of divorce.

II

But let us begin with the first word, '_Value_'--'The _Value_ of 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 true _Values._

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 called _Value._

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 air With fountain ardour, fountain play, To reach the s.h.i.+ning 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 Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, The farther going more to dwell And 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 s.h.i.+vers through; The breast of us a sounded sh.e.l.l, 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 called _Value._ Let us, for a minute or two, a.s.say 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 a _humour_: and the function of Thalia, the Comic Spirit, as you may read in Meredith's "Essay on Comedy," is just to p.r.i.c.k 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 fas.h.i.+on? 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 suppose That my nose is too long You are certainly wrong'--

This old man he detects as lacking sense of proportion, sense of humour. Pa.s.s 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'll _have to,_ Miss!' Pa.s.s from this rudimentary criticism to high talent employed on the same subject, and you get "Cyrano de Bergerac." Pa.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trated, 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.'

IV

Applying this to literature, I note, but shall not insist here on the fact--though fact it is--that the Greek and Roman 'cla.s.sical'

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.