On The Art of Reading Part 13

They tell us that Greek is going, here. Well, I hold no brief for compulsory Greek; and I shall say but one word on it. I put it, rather idly, to a vote in a Cambridge Combination Room, the other day, and was amazed to find how the votes were divided. The men of science were by no means unanimous. They owned that there was much to be said even for compulsory Greek, if only Greek had been intelligently taught. And with that, of course, I agree: for to learn Greek is, after all, a baptism into a n.o.ble cult. The Romans knew _that._ I believe that, even yet, if the schools would rebuild their instruction in Greek so as to make it interesting, as it ought to be, from the first, we should oust those birds who croak and chatter upon the walls of our old Universities. I find the following in FitzGerald's "Polonius":

An old ruinous tower which had harboured innumerable jackdaws, sparrows, and bats, was at length repaired. When the masons left it, the jackdaws, sparrows, and bats came back in search of their old dwellings. But these were all filled up.

'Of what use now is this great building?' said they, 'come let us forsake this useless stone-heap:

And the beauty of this little apologue is that you can read it either way.

IX

But, although a student of English Literature be ignorant of Greek and Latin as languages, may he not have Greek and Latin literature widely opened to him by intelligent translations? The question has often been asked, but I ask it again. May not _some_ translations open a door to him by which he can see them through an atmosphere, and in that atmosphere the authentic ancient G.o.ds walking: so that returning upon English literature he may recognise them there, too, walking and talking in a garden of values? The highest poetical speech of any one language defies, in my belief, translation into any other. But Herodotus loses little, and North is every whit as good as Plutarch.

Sigh no more, ladies; ladies, sigh no more!

Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea and one on sh.o.r.e, To one thing constant never

Suppose that rendered thus:

I enjoin upon the adult female population ([Greek: gynaikes]), not once but twice, that there be from this time forward, a total cessation of sighing. The male is, and has been, constantly addicted to inconstancy, treading the ocean and the mainland respectively with alternate feet.

That, more or less, is what Paley did upon Euripides, and how would you like it if a modern Greek did it upon Shakespeare? None the less I remember that my own first awed surmise of what Greek might mean came from a translated story of Herodotus--the story of Cleobis and Biton--at the tail of an old grammar-book, before I had learnt the Greek alphabet; and I am sure that the instinct of the old translators was sound; that somehow (as Wordsworth says somewhere) the present must be balanced on the wings of the past and the future, and that as you stretch out the one you stretch out the other to strength.

X

There is no derogation of new things in this plea I make specially to you who may be candidates in our School of English.

You may remember my reading to you in a previous lecture that liberal poem of Cory's invoking the spirit of 'dear divine Comatas,' that

Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.

Well, I would have your minds, as you read our literature, reach back to that Dorian shepherd through an atmosphere--his made ours--as through veils, each veil unfolding a value. So you will recognise how, from Chaucer down, our literature has panted after the Mediterranean water-brooks. So through an atmosphere you will link (let me say) Collins's "Ode to Evening," or Matthew Arnold's "Strayed Reveller" up to the 'Pervigilium Veneris,' Mr Sturge Moore's "Sicilian Vine-dresser" up to Theocritus, Pericles'

funeral oration down to Lincoln's over the dead at Gettysburg.

And as I read you just now some part of an English oration in the Latin manner, so I will conclude with some stanzas in the Greek manner. They are by Landor--a proud promise by a young writer, hopeful as I could wish any young learner here to be. The t.i.tle--

_Corinna, from Athens, to Tanagra_

Tanagra! think not I forget Thy beautifully storied streets; Be sure my memory bathes yet In clear Thermodon, and yet greets The blithe and liberal shepherd-boy, Whose sunny bosom swells with joy When we accept his matted rushes Upheav'd with sylvan fruit; away he bounds, and blushes.

A gift I promise: one I see Which thou with transport wilt receive, The only proper gift for thee, Of which no mortal shall bereave In later times thy mouldering walls, Until the last old turret falls; A crown, a crown from Athens won, A crown no G.o.d can wear, beside Latona's son.

There may be cities who refuse To their own child the honours due, And look ungently on the Muse; But ever shall those cities rue The dry, unyielding, n.i.g.g.ard breast, Offering no nourishment, no rest, To that young head which soon shall rise Disdainfully, in might and glory, to the skies.

Sweetly where cavern'd Dirce flows Do white-arm'd maidens chaunt my lay, Flapping the while with laurel-rose The honey-gathering tribes away; And sweetly, sweetly Attic tongues Lisp your Corinna's early songs; To her with feet more graceful come The verses that have dwelt in kindred b.r.e.a.s.t.s at home.

O let thy children lean aslant Against the tender mother's knee, And gaze into her face, and want To know what magic there can be In words that urge some eyes to dance, While others as in holy trance Look up to heaven: be such my praise!

Why linger? I must haste, or lose the Delphic bays.

[Footnote 1: The Works of Lucian of Samosata: translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (Introduction, p. xxix).

Oxford, Clarendon Press.]

[Footnote 2: "The Training of the Imagination": by James Rhoades. London, John Lane, 1900.]

[Footnote 3: Landor: "aesop and Rhodope."]

LECTURE VIII

ON READING THE BIBLE (I)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 1918

I

'_Read not to Contradict and Confute,_' says Bacon of Studies in general: and you may be the better disposed, Gentlemen, to forgive my choice of subject to-day if in my first sentence I rule _that_ way of reading the Bible completely out of court. You may say at once that, the Bible being so full of doctrine as it is, and such a storehouse for exegesis as it has been, this is more easily said than profitably done. You may grant me that the Scriptures in our Authorised Version are part and parcel of English Literature (and more than part and parcel); you may grant that a Professor of English Literature has therefore a claim, if not an obligation, to speak of them in that Version; you may-- having granted my incessant refusal to disconnect our national literature from our national life, or to view them as disconnected--accept the conclusion which plainly flows from it; that no teacher of English can pardonably neglect what is at once the most majestic thing in our literature and by all odds the most spiritually living thing we inherit; in our courts at once superb monument and superabundant fountain of life; and yet you may discount beforehand what he must attempt.

For (say you) if he attempt the doctrine, he goes straight down to buffeted waters so broad that only stout theologians can win to sh.o.r.e; if, on the other hand, he ignore doctrine, the play is "Hamlet" with the Prince of Denmark left out. He reduces our Bible to 'mere literature,' to something 'belletristic,' pretty, an artifice, a flimsy, a gutted thing.

II

Now of all ways of dealing with literature that happens to be the way we should least admire. By that way we disa.s.sociate literature from life; 'what they said' from the men who said it and meant it, not seldom at the risk of their lives. My pupils will bear witness in their memories that when we talk together concerning poetry, for example, by 'poetry' we mean 'that which the poets wrote,' or (if you like) 'the stuff the poets wrote'; and their intelligence tells them, of course, that anyone who in the simple proposition 'Poets wrote Poetry' connects an object with a subject by a verb does not, at any rate, intend to sunder what he has just been at pains, however slight, to join together: he may at least have the credit, whether he be right or wrong, of a.s.serting his subject and his object to be interdependent. Take a particular proposition--John Milton wrote a poem called "Paradise Lost." You will hardly contest the truth of that: but what does it mean? Milton wrote the story of the Fall of Man: he told it in some thousands of lines of decasyllabic verse unrhymed; he measured these lines out with exquisite cadences. The object of our simple sentence includes all these, and this much beside: that he wrote the total poem and made it what it is. Nor can that object be fully understood--literature being, ever and always, so personal a thing--until we understand the subject, John Milton-- what manner of man he was, and how on earth, being such a man, he contrived to do it. We shall never _quite_ know that: but it is important we should get as near as we can.

Of the Bible this is yet more evident, it being a translation.

Isaiah did not write the cadences of his prophecies, as we ordinary men of this country know them: Christ did not speak the cadences of the Parables or of the Sermon on the Mount, as we know them. These have been supplied by the translators. By all means let us study them and learn to delight in them; but Christ did not suffer for his cadences, still less for the cadences invented by Englishmen almost 1600 years later; and Englishmen who went to the stake did not die for these cadences. They were Lollards and Reformers who lived too soon to have heard them; they were Catholics of the 'old profession' who had either never heard or, having heard, abhorred them. These men were cheerful to die for the _meaning_ of the Word and for its _authors.h.i.+p_-- because it was spoken by Christ.

III

There is in fact, Gentlemen, no such thing as 'mere literature.'

Pedants have coined that contemptuous term to express a figmentary concept of their own imagination or--to be more accurate, an hallucination of wrath--having about as much likeness to a _vera causa_ as had the doll which (if you remember) Maggie Tulliver used to beat in the garret whenever, poor child, the world went wrong with her somehow. The thoughts, actions and pa.s.sions of men became literature by the simple but difficult process of being recorded in memorable speech; but in that process neither the real thing recorded nor the author is evacuated. _Belles lettres, Fine Art_ are odious terms, for which no clean-thinking man has any use. There is no such thing in the world as _belles lettres_; if there were, it would deserve the name. As for _Fine Art,_ the late Professor Butcher bequeathed to us a translation of Aristotle's "Poetics" with some admirable appendixes--the whole ent.i.tled "Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art." Aristotle never in his life had a theory of Fine Art as distinct from other art: nor (I wager) can you find in his discovered works a word for any such thing. Now if Aristotle had a concept of 'fine' art as distinguished from other art, he was man enough to find a name for it. His omission to do anything of the sort speaks for itself.

So you should beware of any teacher who would treat the Bible or any part of it as 'fine writing,' mere literature.

IV

Let me, having said this, at once enter a _caveat,_ a qualification. Although men do not go to the stake for the cadences, the phrases of our Authorised Version, it remains true that these cadences, these phrases, have for three hundred years exercised a most powerful effect upon their emotions. They do so by a.s.sociation of ideas by the accreted memories of our race enwrapping connotation around a word, a name--say the name _Jerusalem,_ or the name _Sion_:

And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Sion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

It must be known to you, Gentlemen, that these words can affect men to tears who never connect them in thought with the actual geographical Jerusalem; who connect it in thought merely with a quite different native home from which they are exiles. Here and there some one man may feel a similar emotion over Landor's

Tanagra, think not I forget....

But the word Jerusalem will strike twenty men twentyfold more poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them: not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond the landscape seen from its window; its connotation includes not only what the word 'Rome' has meant, and ever must mean, to thousands on thousands setting eyes for the first time on _The City_: but it holds, too, some hint of the New Jerusalem, the city of twelve gates before the vision of which St John fell p.r.o.ne:

Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem, Would G.o.d I were in thee!

Thy Gardens and thy gallant walks Continually are green: There grows such sweet and pleasant flowers As nowhere else are seen.

Quite through the streets with pleasant sound The flood of Life doth flow; Upon whose banks on every side The wood of Life doth grow....