ON THE ART OF WRITING

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSC. F. CLAY, ManagerLondon: FETTER LANE, E. C. Edinburgh: 100 PRINCES STREET. 

Bombay, Calcutta and Madras: MACMILLAN & CO. LTD. Toronto: J. M. DENT AND SONS, LTD. Tokyo: THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA. 

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ON THE ART OF WRITING

LECTURES DELIVERED IN THEUNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE1913-1914

BY

SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH, M. A. Fellow of Jesus CollegeKing Edward VII Professor of English Literature

Cambridge: at the University Press1917

First Edition 1916Reprinted 1916, 1917

TO JOHN HAY LOBBAN

PREFACE

By recasting these lectures I might with pains have turned them into asmooth treatise. But I prefer to leave them (bating a very fewcorrections and additions) as they were delivered. If, as the reader willall too easily detect, they abound no less in repetitions than inarguments dropped and left at loose ends--the whole bewraying a mancalled unexpectedly to a post where in the act of adapting himself, oflearning that he might teach, he had often to adjourn his main purposeand skirmish with difficulties--they will be the truer to life; and somay experimentally enforce their preaching, that the Art of Writing is aliving business. 

Bearing this in mind, the reader will perhaps excuse certain smallvivacities, sallies that meet fools with their folly, masking the mainattack. _That_, we will see, is serious enough; and others will carry iton, though my effort come to naught. 

It amounts to this--Literature is not a mere Science, to be studied; butan Art, to be practised. Great as is our own literature, we must considerit as a legacy to be improved. Any nation that potters with any glory ofits past, as a thing dead and done for, is to that extent renegade. Ifthat be granted, not all our pride in a Shakespeare can excuse therelaxation of an effort--however vain and hopeless--to better him, orsome part of him. If, with all our native exemplars to give us courage, we persist in striving to write well, we can easily resign to othernations all the secondary fame to be picked up by commentators. 

Recent history has strengthened, with passion and scorn, the faith inwhich I wrote the following pages. 

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCHNovember 1915

CONTENTS

LECTURE

I INAUGURAL

II THE PRACTICE OF WRITING

III ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSE AND PROSE

IV ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF VERSE

V INTERLUDE: ON JARGON

VI ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF PROSE

VII SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED

VIII ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (I)

IX ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (II)

X ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES (I)

XI ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES (II)

XII ON STYLE

 INDEX

LECTURE I. 

INAUGURAL

Wednesday, January 29, 1913

In all the long quarrel set between philosophy and poetry I know ofnothing finer, as of nothing more pathetically hopeless, than Plato'sreturn upon himself in his last dialogue 'The Laws. ' There are who findthat dialogue (left unrevised) insufferably dull, as no doubt it iswithout form and garrulous. But I think they will read it with a newtolerance, may-be even with a touch of feeling, if upon second thoughtsthey recognise in its twisting and turnings, its prolixities andrepetitions, the scruples of an old man who, knowing that his time inthis world is short, would not go out of it pretending to know more thanhe does, and even in matters concerning which he was once very sure hascome to divine that, after all, as Renan says, 'La Verité consiste dansles nuances. ' Certainly 'the mind's dark cottage battered and decayed'does in that last dialogue admit some wonderful flashes, From Heaven descended to the low-roofed house Of Socrates, or rather to that noble 'banquet-hall deserted' which aforetime hadentertained Socrates. 

Suffer me, Mr Vice-Chancellor and Gentlemen, before reaching my text, toremind you of the characteristically beautiful setting. The place isCrete, and the three interlocutors--Cleinias a Cretan, Megillus aLacedaemonian, and an Athenian stranger--have joined company on apilgrimage to the cave and shrine of Zeus, from whom Minos, firstlawgiver of the island, had reputedly derived not only his parentage butmuch parental instruction. Now the day being hot, even scorching, and theroad from Cnossus to the Sacred Cave a long one, our three pilgrims, whohave foregathered as elderly men, take it at their leisure, and proposeto beguile it with talk upon Minos and his laws. 'Yes, and on the way, 'promises the Cretan, 'we shall come to cypress-groves exceedingly talland fair, and to green meadows, where we may repose ourselves andconverse. ' 'Good, ' assents the Athenian. 'Ay, very good indeed, andbetter still when we arrive at them. Let us push on. '

So they proceed. I have said that all three are elderly men; that is, menwho have had their opportunities, earned their wages, and so nearlyearned their discharge that now, looking back on life, they can afford tosee Man for what he really is--at his best a noble plaything for thegods. Yet they look forward, too, a little wistfully. They are of theworld, after all, and nowise so tired of it, albeit disillusioned, as tohave lost interest in the game or in the young who will carry it on. SoMinos and his laws soon get left behind, and the talk (as so oftenbefalls with Plato) is of the perfect citizen and how to train him--ofeducation, in short; and so, as ever with Plato, we are back at lengthupon the old question which he could never get out of his way--What to dowith the poets?

It scarcely needs to be said that the Athenian has taken hold of theconversation, and that the others are as wax in his hands. 'O Athenianstranger, ' Cleinias addresses him--'inhabitant of Attica I will not callyou, for you seem to deserve rather the name of Athene herself, becauseyou go back to first principles. ' Thus complimented, the stranger letshimself go. Yet somehow he would seem to have lost speculative nerve. 

It was all very well in the 'Republic, ' the ideal State, to be bold anddeclare for banishing poetry altogether. But elderly men have given uppursuing ideals; they have 'seen too many leaders of revolt. ' OurAthenian is driving now at practice (as we say), at a well-governed Staterealisable on earth; and after all it is hard to chase out the poets, especially if you yourself happen to be something of a poet at heart. Hear, then, the terms on which, after allowing that comedies may beperformed, but only by slaves and hirelings, he proceeds to allow seriouspoetry. 

 And if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who write tragedy, come to us and say--'O strangers, may we go to your city and country, or may we not, and shall we bring with us our poetry? What is your will about these matters?'--how shall we answer the divine men? I think that our answer should be as follows:--

 'Best of strangers, ' we will say to them, 'we also, according to our ability, are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the best and noblest: for our whole state is an imitation of the best and noblest life. .. . You are poets and we are poets, both makers of the same strains, rivals and antagonists in the noblest of dramas, which true law alone can perfect, as our hope is. Do not then suppose that we shall all in a moment allow you to erect your stage in the Agora, and introduce the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our own, and permit you to harangue our women and children and the common people in language other than our own, and very often the opposite of our own. For a State would be mad which gave you this license, until the magistrates had determined whether your poetry might be recited and was fit for publication or not. Wherefore, O ye sons and scions of the softer Muses! first of all show your songs to the Magistrates and let them compare them with our own, and if they are the same or better, we will give you a chorus; but if not, then, my friends, we cannot. '

Lame conclusion! Impotent compromise! How little applicable, at allevents, to our Commonwealth! though, to be sure (you may say) we possessa relic of it in His Majesty's Licenser of Plays. As you know, there hasbeen so much heated talk of late over the composition of the CountyMagistracy; yet I give you a countryman's word, Sir, that I have heardmany names proposed for the Commission of the Peace, and on many grounds, but never one on the ground that its owner had a conservative taste inverse!

Nevertheless, as Plato saw, we must deal with these poets somehow. It ispossible (though not, I think, likely) that in the ideal State therewould be no Literature, as it is certain there would be no Professors ofit; but since its invention men have never been able to rid themselves ofit for any length of time. _Tamen usque recurrit. _ They may forbidApollo, but still he comes leading his choir, the Nine:--

 [Greek: Akletos men egoge menoimi ken es de kaleunton Tharsesas Moisaisi snu amepeaisin ikoiman. ]

And he may challenge us English boldly! For since Chaucer, at any rate, he and his train have never been [Greek: akletoi] to us--least of allhere in Cambridge. 

Nay, we know that he should be welcome. Cardinal Newman, proposing theidea of a University to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, lamented that theEnglish language had not, like the Greek, 'some definite words toexpress, simply and generally, intellectual proficiency or perfection, such as "health, " as used with reference to the animal frame, and"virtue, " with reference to our moral nature. ' Well, it is a reproach tous that we do not possess the term: and perhaps again a reproach to usthat our attempts at it--the word 'culture' for instance--have been aptto take on some soil of controversy, some connotative damage fromover-preaching on the one hand and impatience on the other. But we doearnestly desire the thing. We do prize that grace of intellect whichsets So-and-so in our view as 'a scholar and a gentleman. ' We do wish asmany sons of this University as may be to carry forth that lifelong stampfrom her precincts; and--this is my point--from our notion of such a manthe touch of literary grace cannot be excluded. I put to you for a testLucian's description of his friend Demonax--

 His way was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was just a man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But his discourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neither disgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but on the contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged to more orderly, contented, hopeful lives. 

I put it to you, Sir, that Lucian needs not to say another word, but weknow that Demonax had loved letters, and partly by aid of them hadarrived at being such a man. No; by consent of all, Literature is a nurseof noble natures, and right reading makes a full man in a sense evenbetter than Bacon's; not replete, but complete rather, to the pattern forwhich Heaven designed him. In this conviction, in this hope, publicspirited men endow Chairs in our Universities, sure that Literature is agood thing if only we can bring it to operate on young minds. 

That he has in him some power to guide such operation a man must believebefore accepting such a Chair as this. And now, Sir, the terrible momentis come when your [Greek: xenos] must render some account--I will not sayof himself, for that cannot be attempted--but of his business here. Well, first let me plead that while you have been infinitely kind to thestranger, feasting him and casting a gown over him, one thing not allyour kindness has been able to do. With precedents, with traditions suchas other Professors enjoy, you could not furnish him. The Chair is a newone, or almost new, and for the present would seem to float in the void, like Mahomet's coffin. Wherefore, being one who (in my Lord Chief JusticeCrewe's phrase) would 'take hold of a twig or twine-thread to uphold it';being also prone (with Bacon) to believe that 'the counsels to which Timehath not been called, Time will not ratify'; I do assure you that, hadany legacy of guidance been discovered among the papers left by mypredecessor, it would have been eagerly welcomed and as piously honoured. O, trust me, Sir!--if any design for this Chair of English Literature hadbeen left by Dr Verrall, it is not I who would be setting up any newstage in your agora! But in his papers--most kindly searched for me byMrs Verrall--no such design can be found. He was, in truth, a strickenman when he came to the Chair, and of what he would have built we canonly be sure that, had it been this or had it been that, it wouldinfallibly have borne the impress of one of the most beautiful minds ofour generation. The gods saw otherwise; and for me, following him, I cameto a trench and stretched my hands to a shade. 

For me, then, if you put questions concerning the work of this Chair, Imust take example from the artist in Don Quixote, who being asked what hewas painting, answered modestly, 'That is as it may turn out. ' The courseis uncharted, and for sailing directions I have but these words of yourOrdinance:

 It shall be the duty of the Professor 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. 

And I never even knew that English Literature had a 'subject'; or, rather, supposed it to have several! To resume:

 The Professor shall treat this subject on literary and critical rather than on philological and linguistic lines:

--a proviso which at any rate cuts off a cantle, large in itself, if notcomparatively, of the new Professor's ignorance. But I ask you to notethe phrase 'to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study'--not, you will observe, 'to teach'; for this absolves me from raising at thestart a question of some delicacy for me, as Green launched his"Prolegomena to Ethics" upon the remark that 'an author who seeks to gaingeneral confidence scarcely goes the right way to work when he beginswith asking whether there really is such a subject as that of which heproposes to treat. ' In spite of--mark, pray, that I say _in spiteof_--the activity of many learned Professors, some doubt does lurk inthe public mind if, after all, English Literature can, in any ordinarysense, be taught, and if the attempts to teach it do not, after all, justify (as Wisdom is so often justified of her grandparents) thesilence sapience of those old benefactors who abstained from endowingany such Chairs. 

But that the study of English Literature can be promoted in young mindsby an elder one, that their zeal may be encouraged, their tastesdirected, their vision cleared, quickened, enlarged--this, I take it, noman of experience will deny. Nay, since our two oldest Universities havea habit of marking one another with interest--an interest, indeed, sometimes heightened by nervousness--I may point out that all this hasbeen done of late years, and eminently done, by a Cambridge man you gaveto Oxford. This, then, Mr Vice-Chancellor--this or something like this, Gentlemen--is to be my task if I have the good fortune to win yourconfidence. 

Let me, then, lay down two or three principles by which I propose to beguided. (1) For the first principle of all I put to you that in studyingany work of genius we should begin by taking it _absolutely_; that is tosay, with minds intent on discovering just what the author's mindintended; this being at once the obvious approach to its meaning (its[Greek: to ti en einai], the 'thing it was to be'), and the merest dutyof politeness we owe to the great man addressing us. We should lay ourminds open to what he wishes to tell, and if what he has to tell be nobleand high and beautiful, we should surrender and let soak our minds in it. 

Pray understand that in claiming, even insisting upon, the first placefor this _absolute_ study of a great work I use no disrespect towardsthose learned scholars whose labours will help you, Gentlemen, to enjoyit afterwards in other ways and from other aspects; since I hold there isno surer sign of intellectual ill-breeding than to speak, even to feel, slightingly of any knowledge oneself does not happen to possess. Stillless do I aim to persuade you that anyone should be able to earn aCambridge degree by the process (to borrow Macaulay's phrase) of readingour great authors 'with his feet on the hob, ' a posture I have not eventried, to recommend it for a contemplative man's recreation. Theseeditors not only set us the priceless example of learning for learning'ssake: but even in practice they clear our texts for us, andafterwards--when we go more minutely into our author's acquaintance, wishing to learn all we can about him--by increasing our knowledge ofdetail they enchance our delight. Nay, with certain early writers--sayChaucer or Dunbar, as with certain highly allusive ones--Bacon, orMilton, or Sir Thomas Browne--some apparatus must be supplied from thestart. But on the whole I think it a fair contention that such helps tostudying an author are secondary and subsidiary; that, for example, withany author who by consent is less of his age than for all time, to studythe relation he bore to his age may be important indeed, and even highlyimportant, yet must in the nature of things be of secondary importance, not of the first. 

But let us examine this principle a little more attentively--for it isthe palmary one. As I conceive it, that understanding of literature whichwe desire in our Euphues, our gracefully-minded youth, will includeknowledge in varying degree, yet is itself something distinct fromknowledge. Let us illustrate this upon Poetry, which the most of us willallow to be the highest form of literary expression, if not of allartistic expression. Of all the testimony paid to Poetry, none commandsbetter witness than this--that, as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy 'itabounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and withsentiments to which every heart returns an echo. ' When George Eliot said, 'I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as Ishould like them, ' she but repeated of Wordsworth (in homelier, morefamiliar fashion) what Johnson said of Gray; and the same testimony liesimplicit in Emerson's fine remark that 'Universal history, the poets, theromancers'--all good writers, in short--'do not anywhere make us feelthat we intrude, that this is for our betters. Rather it is true that, intheir greatest strokes, there we feel most at home. ' The mass ofevidence, of which these are samples, may be summarised thus:--As wedwell here between two mysteries, of a soul within and an orderedUniverse without, so among us are granted to dwell certain men of moredelicate intellectual fibre than their fellows--men whose minds have, asit were, filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to usstray messages between these two mysteries, as modern telegraphy haslearnt to search out, snatch, gather home human messages astray overwaste waters of the Ocean. 

If, then, the ordinary man be done this service by the poet, that (as DrJohnson defines it) 'he feels what he remembers to have felt before, buthe feels it _with a great increase of sensibility_'; or even if, thoughthe message be unfamiliar, it suggests to us, in Wordsworth's phrase, to'feel that we are greater than we know, ' I submit that we respond to itless by anything that usually passes for knowledge, than by animprovement of sensibility, a tuning up of the mind to the poet's pitch;so that the man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will beremarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibitfor knowledge, than for _being_ something, and that 'something, ' a man ofunmistakable intellectual breeding, whose trained judgment we can trustto choose the better and reject the worse. 

But since this refining of the critical judgment happens to be less easyof practice than the memorising of much that passes for knowledge--ofwhat happened to Harriet or what Blake said to the soldier--and far lesseasy to examine on, the pedagogic mind (which I implore you not tosuppose me confusing with the scholarly) for avoidance of trouble tendsall the while to dodge or obfuscate what is essential, piling upaccidents and irrelevancies before it until its very face is hidden. Andwe should be the more watchful not to confuse the pedagogic mind with thescholarly since it is from the scholar that the pedagogue pretends toderive his sanction; ransacking the great genuine commentators--be it aSkeat or a Masson or (may I add for old reverence' sake?) an AldisWright--fetching home bits of erudition, _non sua poma_, and announcing'This _must_ be the true Sion, for we found it in a wood. '

Hence a swarm of little school books pullulates annually, all upside downand wrong from beginning to end; and hence a worse evil afflicts us, thatthe English schoolboy starts with a false perspective of any givenmasterpiece, his pedagogue urging, obtruding lesser things upon hisvision until what is really important, the poem or the play itself, isseen in distorted glimpses, if not quite blocked out of view. 

This same temptation--to remove a work of art from the category for whichthe author designed it into another where it can be more convenientlystudied--reaches even above the schoolmaster to assail some very eminentcritics. I cite an example from a book of which I shall hereafter have tospeak with gratitude as I shall always name it with respect--"The Historyof English Poetry, " by Dr Courthope, sometime Professor of Poetry atOxford. In his fourth volume, and in his estimate of Fletcher as adramatist, I find this passage:--

 But the crucial test of a play's quality is only applied when it is read. So long as the illusion of the stage gives credit to the action, and the words and gestures of the actor impose themselves on the imagination of the spectator, the latter will pass over a thousand imperfections, which reveal themselves to the reader, who, as he has to satisfy himself with the drama of silent images, will nor be content if this or that in any way fall short of his conception of truth and nature, --which seems equivalent to saying that the crucial test of the frieze ofthe Parthenon is its adaptability to an apartment in Bloomsbury. So longas the illusion of the Acropolis gave credit to Pheidias' design, and thesunlight of Attica imposed its delicate intended shadows edging thereliefs, the countrymen of Pericles might be tricked; but the visitor tothe British Museum, as he has to satisfy himself with what happensindoors in the atmosphere of the West Central Postal Division of London, will not be content if Pheidias in any way fall short of _his_ conceptionof truth and nature. Yet Fletcher (I take it) constructed his plays asplays; the illusion of the stage, the persuasiveness of the actor'svoice, were conditions for which he wrought, and on which he had a rightto rely; and, in short, any critic behaves uncritically who, distrustinghis imagination to recreate the play as a play, elects to consider it inthe category of something else. 

In sum, if the great authors never oppress us with airs of condescension, but, like the great lords they are, put the meanest of us at our ease intheir presence, I see no reason why we should pay to any commentator aservility not demanded by his master. 

My next two principles may be more briefly stated. 

(2) I propose next, then, that since our investigations will deal largelywith style, that curiously personal thing; and since (as I have said)they cannot in their nature be readily brought to rule-of-thumb tests, and may therefore so easily be suspected of evading all tests, of beingmere dilettantism; I propose (I say) that my pupils and I rebuke thissuspicion by constantly aiming at the concrete, at the study of suchdefinite beauties as we can see presented in print under our eyes; alwaysseeking the author's intention, but eschewing, for the present at anyrate, all general definitions and theories, through the sieve of whichthe particular achievement of genius is so apt to slip. And havingexcluded them at first in prudence, I make little doubt we shall go on toexclude them in pride. Definitions, formulæ (some would add, creeds) havetheir use in any society in that they restrain the ordinaryunintellectual man from making himself a public nuisance with his privateopinions. But they go a very little way in helping the man who has a realsense of prose or verse. In other words, they are good discipline forsome thyrsus-bearers, but the initiated have little use for them. AsThomas à Kempis 'would rather feel compunction than understand thedefinition thereof, ' so the initiated man will say of the 'Grand Style, 'for example--'Why define it for me?' When Viola says simply:

 I am all the daughters of my father's house, And all the brothers too, or Macbeth demands of the Doctor

 Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow. . ?

or Hamlet greets Ophelia, reading her Book of Hours, with

 Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered!

or when Milton tells of his dead friend how

 Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd Under the opening eyelids of the morn, We drove afield, or describes the battalions of Heaven

 On they move Indissolubly firm: nor obvious hill, Nor strait'ning vale, nor wood, nor stream divide Their perfect ranks, or when Gray exalts the great commonplace

 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour; The paths of glory lead but to the grave, or when Keats casually drops us such a line as

 The journey homeward to habitual self, or, to come down to our own times and to a living poet, when I open on apage of William Watson and read

 O ancient streams, O far descended woods, Full of the fluttering of melodious souls!. .. 

'why then (will say the initiated one), why worry me with any definitionof the Grand Style in English, when here, and here, and again here--inall these lines, simple or intense or exquisite or solemn--I recogniseand feel the _thing_?'

Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie just here. Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can beapplied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personalpersuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive. 

(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with me to Plato'swayfarers, whom we have left so long under the cypresses; and loth as wemust be to lay hands on our father Parmenides, I feel we must treat thegifted Athenian stranger to a little manhandling. For did you notobserve--though Greek was a living language and to his metropolitan mindthe only language--how envious he showed himself to seal up the well, orallow it to trickle only under permit of a public analyst: to treat allinnovation as suspect, even as, a hundred odd years ago, the LyricalBallads were suspect?

But the very hope of this Chair, Sir (as I conceive it), relies on thecourage of the young. As Literature is an Art and therefore not to bepondered only, but practised, so ours is a living language and thereforeto be kept alive, supple, active in all honourable use. The orator canyet sway men, the poet ravish them, the dramatist fill their lungs withsalutary laughter or purge their emotions by pity or terror. The historian 'superinduces upon events the charm of order. 'The novelist--well, even the novelist has his uses; and I would warn youagainst despising any form of art which is alive and pliant in the handsof men. For my part, I believe, bearing in mind Mr. Barrie's "Peter Pan"and the old bottles he renovated to hold that joyous wine, that evenMusical Comedy, in the hands of a master, might become a thing ofbeauty. Of the Novel, at any rate--whether we like it or not--we have toadmit that it does hold a commanding position in the literature of ourtimes, and to consider how far Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie was right theother day when he claimed, on the first page of his brilliant study ofThomas Hardy, that 'the right to such a position is not to be disputed;for here, as elsewhere, the right to a position is no more than thepower to maintain it. ' You may agree with that or you may not; you mayor may not deplore the forms that literature is choosing now-a-days; butthere is no gainsaying that it is still very much alive. And I would sayto you, Gentlemen, 'Believe, and be glad that Literature and the Englishtongue are both alive. ' Carlyle, in his explosive way, once demanded ofhis countrymen, 'Shakespeare or India? If you had to surrender one toretain the other, which would you choose?' Well, our Indian Empire isyet in the making, while the works of Shakespeare are complete andpurchasable in whole calf; so the alternatives are scarcely _in parimateria_; and moreover let us not be in a hurry to meet trouble halfway. But in English Literature, which, like India, is still in themaking, you have at once an Empire and an Emprise. In that alone youhave inherited something greater than Sparta. Let us strive, each in hislittle way, to adorn it. 

But here at the close of my hour, the double argument, that Literature isan Art and English a living tongue, has led me right up to a fourthprinciple, the plunge into which (though I foresaw it from the first) allthe coward in me rejoices at having to defer to another lecture. Iconclude then, Gentlemen, by answering two suspicions, which very likelyhave been shaping themselves in your minds. In the first place, you willsay, 'It is all very well for this man to talk about "cultivating anincreased sensibility, " and the like; but we know what that leads to--toquackery, to aesthetic chatter: "Isn't this pretty? Don't you admirethat?"' Well, I am not greatly frightened. To begin with, when we come toparticular criticism I shall endeavour to exchange it with you in plainterms; a manner which (to quote Mr Robert Bridges' "Essay on Keats") 'Iprefer, because by obliging the lecturer to say definitely what he means, it makes his mistakes easy to point out, and in this way the truebusiness of criticism is advanced. ' But I have a second safeguard, moreto be trusted: that here in Cambridge, with all her traditions of austerescholarship, anyone who indulges in loose distinct talk will be quicklyrecalled to his tether. Though at the time Athene be not kind enough todescend from heaven and pluck him backward by the hair, yet the very_genius loci_ will walk home with him from the lecture room, whisperingmonitions, cruel to be kind. 

'But, ' you will say alternatively, 'if we avoid loose talk on thesematters we are embarking on a mighty difficult business. ' Why, to be surewe are; and that, I hope, will be half the enjoyment. After all, we havea number of critics among whose methods we may search for help--from thePersian monarch who, having to adjudicate upon two poems, caused the oneto be read to him, and at once, without ado, awarded the prize to theother, up to the great Frenchman whom I shall finally invoke to sustainmy hope of building something; that is if you, Gentlemen, will be contentto accept me less as a Professor than as an Elder Brother. 

The Frenchman is Sainte-Beuve, and I pay a debt, perhaps appropriatelyhere, by quoting him as translated by the friend of mine, now dead, whofirst invited me to Cambridge and taught me to admire her--one ArthurJohn Butler, sometime a Fellow of Trinity, and later a great pioneeramong Englishmen in the study of Dante. Thus while you listen to theappeal of Sainte-Beuve, I can hear beneath it a more intimate voice, notfor the first time, encouraging me. 

Sainte-Beuve then--_si magna licet componere parvis_--is delivering anInaugural Lecture in the École Normale, the date being April 12th, 1858. 'Gentlemen, ' he begins, 'I have written a good deal in the last thirtyyears; that is, I have scattered myself a good deal; so that I need togather myself together, in order that my words may come before you withall the more freedom and confidence. ' That is his opening; and he ends:--

 As time goes on, you will make me believe that I can for my part be of some good to you: and with the generosity of your age you will repay me, in this feeling alone, far more than I shall be able to give you in intellectual freedom, in literary thought. If in one sense I bestow on you some of my experience, you will requite me, and in a more profitable manner, by the sight of your ardour for what is noble: you will accustom me to turn oftener and more willingly towards the future in your company. You will teach me again to hope. 

LECTURE II. 

THE PRACTICE OF WRITING. 

Wednesday, February 12

We found, Gentlemen, towards the close of our first lecture, that theargument had drawn us, as by a double chain, up to the edge of a boldleap, over which I deferred asking you to take the plunge with me. Yetthe plunge must be taken, and to-day I see nothing for it but to hardenour hearts. 

Well, then, I propose to you that, English Literature being (as weagreed) an Art, with a living and therefore improvable language for itsmedium or vehicle, a part--and no small part--of our business is _topractise it. _ Yes, I seriously propose to you that here in Cambridge we_practise writing_: that we practise it not only for our own improvement, but to make, or at least try to make, appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a recognisable hall-mark of anything turned out by ourEnglish School. By all means let us study the great writers of the pastfor their own sakes; but let us study them for our guidance; that we, inour turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span oftime, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance ofShakespeare or of Burke. Portraits of other great ones look down on youin your college halls: but while you are young and sit at the brieffeast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts andmovingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?

I protest, Gentlemen, that if our eyes had not been sealed, as with wax, by the pedagogues of whom I spoke a fortnight ago, this one habit ofregarding our own literature as a _hortus siccus_, this our neglect topractise good writing as the constant auxiliary of an Englishman'sliberal education, would be amazing to you seated here to-day as it willbe starkly incredible to the future historian of our times. Tell me, pray; if it concerned _Painting_--an art in which Englishmen boast arecord far briefer, far less distinguished--what would you think of asimilar acquiescence in the past, a like haste to presume the dissolutionof aptitude and to close accounts, a like precipitancy to divorce us fromthe past, to rob the future of hope and even the present of livelyinterest? Consider, for reproof of these null men, the Discoursesaddressed (in a pedantic age, too) by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the Membersand Students of the Royal Academy. He has (as you might expect) enough tosay of Tintoretto, of Titian, of Caracci, and of the duty of studyingtheir work with patience, with humility. But why does he exhort hishearers to con them?--Why, because he is all the time _driving atpractice_. Hear how he opens his second Discourse (his first to theStudents). After congratulating the prize-winners of 1769, he desires 'tolead them into such a course of study as may render their future progressanswerable to their past improvement'; and the great man goes on:--

 I flatter myself that from the long experience I have had, and the necessary assiduity with which I have pursued these studies in which like you I have been engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in offering some hints to your consideration. They are indeed in a great degree founded upon my own mistakes in the same pursuit. .. . 

Mark the noble modesty of that! To resume--

 In speaking to you of the Theory of the Art, I shall only consider it as it has relation to the method of your studies. 

And then he proceeds to preach the Old Masters. --But how?--why?--to whatend? Does he recite lists of names, dates, with formulae concerningstyles? He does nothing of the sort. Does he recommend his old mastersfor copying, then?--for mere imitation? Not a bit of it!--he comes downlike a hammer on copying. Then for what, in fine, will he have themstudied? Listen:--

 The more extensive your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention. 

Yes, of _invention_, your power to make something new:

 --and what may appear still more like a paradox, _the more original will be your conceptions_. 

There spake Sir Joshua Reynolds: and I call that the voice of a trueElder Brother. He, standing face to face with the young, thought of theold masters mainly as spiritual begetters of practice. And will anyone inthis room tell me that what Reynolds said of painting is not to-day, forus, applicable to writing?

We accept it of Greek and Latin. An old Sixth Form master once said tome, 'You may give up Latin Verse for this term, if you will: but I warnyou, no one can be a real scholar who does not constantly practiseverse. ' He was mistaken, belike. I hold, for my part, that in our PublicSchools, we give up a quite disproportionate amount of time to'composition' (of Latin Prose especially) and starve the boys' readingthereby. But at any rate we do give up a large share of the time to it. Then if we insist on this way with the tongues of Homer and Virgil, whydo we avoid it with the tongue of Shakespeare, our own living tongue? Ianswer by quoting one of the simplest wisest sayings of Don Quixote(Gentlemen, you will easily, as time goes on, and we better ouracquaintance, discover my favourite authors):--

 The great Homer wrote not in Latin, for he was a Greek; and Virgil wrote not in Greek, because he was a Latin. In brief, all the ancient poets wrote in the tongue which they sucked in with their mother's milk, nor did they go forth to seek for strange ones to express the greatness of their conceptions: and, this being so, it should be a reason for the fashion to extend to all nations. 

Does the difference, then, perchance lie in ourselves? Will you tell me, 'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passablywell'? Can he, indeed?. .. Can _you, _ sir? Nay, believe me, you are eitheran archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to havingspoken English prose all your life without knowing it. 

Indeed, when we try to speak prose without having practised it the resultis apt to be worse than our own vernacular. How often have I heard someworthy fellow addressing a public audience!--say a Parliamentarycandidate who believes himself a Liberal Home Ruler, and for the momentis addressing himself to meet some criticism of the financial proposalsof a Home Rule Bill. His own vernacular would be somewhat as follows:--

 Oh, rot! Give the Irish their heads and they'll run straight enough. Look at the Boers, don't you know. Not half such a decent sort as the Irish. Look at Irish horses, too. Eh? What?

But this, he is conscious, would hardly suit the occasion. He thereforeamends it thus:--

 Mr Chairman--er--as regards the financial proposals of His Majesty's Government, I am of the deliberate--er--opinion that our national security--I may say, our Imperial security--our security as--er--a governing people--lies in trusting the Irish as we did in the--er --case of the Boers--H'm Mr Gladstone, Mr Chairman--Mr Chairman, Mr Gladstone----

and so on. You perceive that the style is actually worse than in thesample quoted before; it has become flabby whereas that other was at anyrate nervous? But now suppose that, having practised it, our candidatewas able to speak like this:--

 'But what (says the Financier) is peace to us without money? Your plan gives us no revenue. ' No? But it does--for it secures to the subject the power of Refusal, the first of all Revenues. Experience is a cheat, and fact is a liar, if this power in the subject of proportioning his grant, or of not granting at all, has not been found the richest mine of Revenue ever discovered by the skill or by the fortune of man. It does not indeed vote you 152, 750 pounds 11 shillings 2 3/4 pence, nor any other paltry limited sum--but it gives you the strong box itself, the fund, the bank, from whence only revenues can arise among a people sensible of freedom: _Positâ luditur arcâ_. .. . Is this principle to be true in England, and false everywhere else? Is it not true in Ireland? Has it not hitherto been true in the Colonies? Why should you presume that in any country a body duly constituted for any function will neglect to perform its duty and abdicate its trust? Such a presumption would go against all Governments in all nations. But in truth this dread of penury of supply, from a free assembly, has no foundation in nature. For first, observe that, besides the desire which all men have naturally of supporting the honour of their own Government, that sense of dignity, and that security to property, which ever attend freedom, have a tendency to increase the stock of a free community. Most may be taken where most is accumulated. And what is the soil or climate where experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the politic machinery in the world?

That, whether you agree or disagree with its doctrine, is great prose. That is Burke. 'O Athenian stranger, ' said the Cretan I quoted in myfirst lecture, --'inhabitant of Attica I will not call you, since youdeserve the name of Athene herself, because you go back to firstprinciples!'

But, you may object, 'Burke is talking like a book, and I have no wish totalk like a book. ' Well, as a fact, Burke is here at the culmen of a longsustained argument, and his language has soared with it, as his waywas--logic and emotion lifting him together as upon two balanced majesticwings. But you are shy of such heights? Very well again, and all creditto your modesty! Yet at least (I appeal to that same modesty) when youtalk or write, you would wish to _observe the occasion_; to say what youhave to say without impertinence or ill-timed excess. You would notharangue a drawing-room or a subcommittee, or be facetious at a funeral, or play the skeleton at a banquet: for in all such conduct you would bemixing up things that differ. Be cheerful, then: for this desire of yoursto be appropriate is really the root of the matter. Nor do I ask you toaccept this on my sole word, but will cite you the most respectablewitnesses. Take, for instance, a critic who should be old enough toimpress you--Dionysius of Halicarnassus. After enumerating the qualitieswhich lend charm and nobility to style, he closes the list with'appropriateness, which all these need':--

 As there is a charming diction, so there is another that is noble; as there is a polished rhythm, so there is another that is dignified; as variety adds grace in one passage, so in another it adds fulness; _and as for appropriation, it will prove the chief source of beauty, or else of nothing at all_. 

Or listen to Cicero, how he sets appropriateness in the very heart of histeaching, as the master secret:--

 Is erit eloquens qui poterit parva summisse, modica temperate, magna graviter dicere. .. . Qui ad id quodcunque decebit poterit accommodare orationem. Quod quum statuerit, tum, ut quidque erit dicendum, ita dicet, nec satura jejune, nec grandia minute, nec item contra, sed erit rebus ipsis par et aequalis oratio. 

 'Whatever his theme he will speak as becomes it; neither meagrely where it is copious, nor meanly where it is ample, nor in _this_ way where it demands _that_; but keeping his speech level with the actual subject and adequate to it. '

I might quote another great man, Quintilian, to you on the firstimportance of this appropriateness, or 'propriety'; of speaking not onlyto the purpose but _becomingly_--though the two as (he rightly says) areoften enough one and the same thing. But I will pass on to what has everseemed, since I found it in one of Jowett's 'Introductions' to Plato, thebest definition known to me of good style in literature:--

 The perfection of style is variety in unity, freedom, ease, clearness, the power of saying anything, and of striking any note in the scale of human feelings, without impropriety. 

You see, O my modest friend! that your gamut needs not to be very wide, to begin with. The point is that within it you learn to play becomingly. 

Now I started by proposing that we try together to make appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a hall-mark of anything turnedout by our English School here, and I would add (growing somewhathardier) a hall-mark of all Cambridge style so far as our English Schoolcan influence it. I chose these four epithets _accurate, perspicuous, persuasive, appropriate_, with some care, of course as my duty was; andwill assume that by this time we are agreed to desire _appropriateness_. Now for the other three:--

_Perspicuity. _--I shall waste no words on the need of this: since thefirst aim of speech is to be understood. The more clearly you write themore easily and surely you will be understood. I propose to demonstrateto you further, in a minute or so, that the more clearly you write themore clearly you will understand yourself. But a sufficient reason hasbeen given in ten words why you should desire perspicuity. 

_Accuracy. _--Did I not remind myself in my first lecture, that Cambridgeis the home of accurate scholarship? Surely no Cambridge man wouldwillingly be a sloven in speech, oral or written? Surely here, ifanywhere, should be acknowledged of all what Newman says of the classics, that 'a certain unaffected neatness and propriety and grace of dictionmay be required of any author, for the same reason that a certainattention to dress is expected of every gentleman. ' After all, what arethe chief differentiae between man and the brute creation but that heclothes himself, that he cooks his food, that he uses articulate speech?Let us cherish and improve all these distinctions. 

But shall we now look more carefully into these twin questions ofperspicuity and accuracy: for I think pursuing them, we may almost reachthe philosophic kernel of good writing. I quoted Newman playfully amoment ago. I am going to quote him in strong earnest. And here let mesay that of all the books written in these hundred years there is perhapsnone you can more profitably thumb and ponder than that volume of his inwhich, under the title of "The Idea of a University, " he collected ninediscourses addressed to the Roman Catholics of Dublin with some lecturesdelivered to the Catholic University there. It is fragmentary, becauseits themes were occasional. It has missed to be appraised at its trueworth, partly no doubt by reason of the colour it derives from a religionstill unpopular in England. But in fact it may be read without offence bythe strictest Protestant; and the book is so wise--so eminently wise--asto deserve being bound by the young student of literature for a frontleton his brow and a talisman on his writing wrist. 

Now you will find much pretty swordsmanship in its pages, but nothingmore trenchant than the passage in which Newman assails and puts to routthe Persian host of infidels--I regret to say, for the most part Men ofScience--who would persuade us that good writing, that style, issomething extrinsic to the subject, a kind of ornamentation laid on totickle the taste, a study for the _dilettante_, but beneath the notice of_their_ stern and masculine minds. 

Such a view, as he justly points out, belongs rather to the Oriental mindthan to our civilisation: it reminds him of the way young gentlemen go towork in the East when they would engage in correspondence with the objectof their affection. The enamoured one cannot write a sentence himself:_he_ is the specialist in passion (for the moment); but thought and wordsare two things to him, and for words he must go to another specialist, the professional letter-writer. Thus there is a division of labour. 

 The man of words, duly instructed, dips the pen of desire in the ink of devotedness and proceeds to spread it over the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of expectation. That is what the Easterns are said to consider fine writing; and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to which I have been referring. 

Now hear this fine passage:--

 Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language. That is what I have been laying down, and this is literature; not _things_, but the verbal symbols of things; not on the other hand mere _words_; but thoughts expressed in language. Call to mind, gentlemen, the meaning of the Greek word which expresses this special prerogative of man over the feeble intelligence of the lower animals. It is called Logos; what does Logos mean? it stands both for _reason_ and for _speech_, and it is difficult to say which it means more properly. It means both at once: why? because really they cannot be divided. .. . When we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex and the concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought to tread speech under foot and to hope to do without it--then will it be conceivable that the vigorous and fertile intellect should renounce its own double, its instrument of expression and the channel of its speculations and emotions. 

'As if, ' he exclaims finely, 'language were the hired servant, the meremistress of reason, and not the lawful wife in her own house!'

If you need further argument (but what serves it to slay the slain?) letme remind you that you cannot use the briefest, the humblest process ofthought, cannot so much as resolve to take your bath hot or cold, ordecide what to order for breakfast, without forecasting it to yourself insome form of words. Words are, in fine, the only currency in which we canexchange thought even with ourselves. Does it not follow, then, that themore accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to ourthoughts? Does it not follow that by drilling ourselves to writeperspicuously we train our minds to clarify their thought? Does it notfollow that some practice in the deft use of words, with itscorrespondent defining of thought, may well be ancillary even to thestudy of Natural Science in a University?

But I have another word for our men of science. It was inevitable, perhaps, that Latin--so long the Universal Language--should cease in timeto be that in which scientific works were written. It was impossible, perhaps, to substitute, by consent, some equally neat and austere modernlanguage, such as French. But when it became an accepted custom for eachnation to use its own language in scientific treatises, it certainly wasnot foreseen that men of science would soon be making discoveries at arate which left their skill in words outstripped; that having to inventtheir terms as they went along, yet being careless and contemptuous of ascience in which they have no training, they would bombast out ourdictionaries with monstrously invented words that not only would havemade Quintilian stare and gasp, but would affront the decently literateof any age. 

After all, and though we must sigh and acquiesce in the building ofBabel, we have some right to examine the bricks. I was waiting, the otherday, in a doctor's anteroom, and picked up one of those books--it was awork on pathology--so thoughtfully left lying in such places; to persuadeus, no doubt, to bear the ills we have rather than fly to others capableof being illustrated. I found myself engaged in following the manoeuvresof certain well-meaning bacilli generically described as 'Antibodies. ' Ido not accuse the author (who seemed to be a learned man) of havinginvented this abominable term: apparently it passed current amongphysiologists and he had accepted it for honest coin. I found it, lateron, in Webster's invaluable dictionary: Etymology, 'anti' up against'body', some noxious 'foreign body' inside your body or mine. 

Now gin a body meet a body for our protection and in this gallant spirit, need a body reward him with this hybrid label? Gratitude apart, I saythat for our own self-respect, whilst we retain any sense of intellectualpedigree, 'antibody' is no word to throw at a friendly bacillus. Is itconsonant with the high dignity of science to make her talk like a cheapshowman advertising a 'picture-drome'? The man who eats peas with hisknife can at least claim a historical throwback to the days when forkshad but two prongs and the spoons had been removed with the soup. But'antibody' has no such respectable derivation. It is, in fact, abarbarism, and a mongrel at that. The man who uses it debases thecurrency of learning: and I suggest to you that it is one of the manyfunctions of a great University to maintain the standard of thatcurrency, to guard the _jus et norma loquendi_, to protect us from suchhasty fellows or, rather, to suppeditate them in their haste. 

Let me revert to our list of the qualities necessary to good writing, andcome to the last--_Persuasiveness_; of which you may say, indeed, that itembraces the whole--not only the qualities of propriety, perspicuity, accuracy, we have been considering, but many another, such as harmony, order, sublimity, beauty of diction; all in short that--writing being anart, not a science, and therefore so personal a thing--may be summed upunder the word _Charm_. Who, at any rate, does not seek after Persuasion?It is the aim of all the arts and, I suppose, of all exposition of thesciences; nay, of all useful exchange of converse in our daily life. Itis what Velasquez attempts in a picture, Euclid in a proposition, thePrime Minister at the Treasury box, the journalist in a leading article, our Vicar in his sermon. Persuasion, as Matthew Arnold once said, is theonly true intellectual process. The mere cult of it occupied many of thebest intellects of the ancients, such as Longinus and Quintilian, whosewritings have been preserved to us just because they were prized. Nor canI imagine an earthly gift more covetable by you, Gentlemen, than that ofpersuading your fellows to listen to your views and attend to what youhave at heart. 

Suppose, sir, that you wish to become a journalist? Well, and why not? Isit a small thing to desire the power of influencing day by day to bettercitizenship an unguessed number of men, using the best thought andapplying it in the best language at your command?. .. Or are you, perhaps, overawed by the printed book? On that, too, I might have a good deal tosay; but for the moment would keep the question as practical as I can. 

Well, it is sometimes said that Oxford men make better journalists thanCambridge men, and some attribute this to the discipline of their greatSchool of _Literae Humaniores_, which obliges them to bring up a weeklyessay to their tutor, who discusses it. Cambridge men retort that allOxford men are journalists, and throw, of course, some accent of scorn onthe word. But may I urge--and remember please that my credit is pledgedto _you_ now--may I urge that this is not a wholly convincing answer?For, to begin with, Oxford men have not changed their natures sinceleaving school, but are, by process upon lines not widely divergent fromyour own, much the same pleasant sensible fellows you remember. And, next, if you truly despise journalism, why then despise it, have donewith it and leave it alone. But I pray you, do not despise it if you meanto practise it, though it be but as a step to something better. For whilethe ways of art are hard at the best, they will break you if you gounsustained by belief in what you are trying to do. 

In asking you to practise the written word, I began with suchlow but necessary things as propriety, perspicuity, accuracy. But _persuasion_--the highest form of persuasion at any rate--cannot beachieved without a sense of beauty. And now I shoot a second rapid--_Iwant you to practise verse, and to practise it assiduously_. .. . I amquite serious. Let me remind you that, if there ever was an ancientstate of which we of Great Britain have great right and should havegreater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual heirs, that state wasImperial Rome. And of the Romans (whom you will allow to have been apractical people) nothing is more certain than the value they set uponacquiring verse. To them it was not only (as Dr Johnson said of Greek)'like old lace--you can never have too much of it. ' They cultivated itwith a straight eye to national improvement. Among them, as a scholarreminded us the other day, you find 'an educational system deliberatelyand steadily directed towards the development of poetical talent. Theywere not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the Greeks, that theywere born to art and literature. .. . The characteristic Roman triumphsare the triumphs of a material civilisation. ' Rome's rôle in the worldwas 'the absorption of outlying genius. ' Themselves an unimaginativerace with a language not too tractable to poetry, they made greatpoetry, and they made it of patient set purpose, of hard practice. Ishall revert to this and maybe amplify reasons in another lecture. Forthe moment I content myself with stating the fact that no nation everbelieved in poetry so deeply as the Romans. 

Perpend this then, and do not too hastily deride my plea that you shouldpractise verse-writing. I know most of the objections, though I may notremember all. _Mediocribus esse poetis_, etc. --that summarises most ofthem: yet of an infliction of much bad verse from you, if I am preparedto endure it, why should anyone else complain? I say that the youth of aUniversity ought to practise verse-writing; and will try to bring thishome to you by an argument convincing to me, though I have never seen itin print. 

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so?Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne--we may stop there. Of these all butKeats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairlywell-to-do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing tosay: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical geniusbloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds littletruth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve wereUniversity men: which means that somehow or other they procured themeans to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hardfact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well-to-do, andI challenge you that, if he had not been well-to-do, he would no morehave attained to writing "Saul" or "The Ring and the Book" than Ruskinwould have attained to writing "Modern Painters" if his father had notdealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income;and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slewyoung, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by thelaudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, butlet us face them. It is--however dishonouring to us as a nation--certainthat, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in thesedays, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe me--andI have spent a great part of the last ten years in watching some 320Elementary Schools--we may prate of democracy, but actually a poor childin England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave tobe emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writingsare born. 

What do I argue from this? I argue that until we can bring moreintellectual freedom into our State, more 'joy in widest commonaltyspread, ' upon you, a few favoured ones, rests an obligation to see thatthe springs of English poetry do not fail. I put it to you that of thisglory of our birth and state _you_ are the temporary stewards. I put itto the University, considered as a dispenser of intellectual light, thatto treat English poetry as though it had died with Tennyson and yourlecturers had but to compose the features of a corpse, is to abnegatehigh hope for the sake of a barren convenience. I put it to the Colleges, considered as disciplinary bodies, that the old way of letting Coleridgeslip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollectthat in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are whopractise it the greater will be the chance of _someone's_ reachingperfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flingsforward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton'sand those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poetsare they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spingowns to drape Doctors of Letters?'

In the life of Benvenuto Cellini you will find this passage worth yourpondering. --He is telling how, while giving the last touches to hisPerseus in the great square of Florence, he and his workmen inhabited ashed built around the statue. He goes on:--

 The folk kept on attaching sonnets to the posts of the door. .. . I believe that, on the day when I opened it for a few hours to the public, more than twenty were nailed up, all of them overflowing with the highest panegyrics. Afterwards, when I once more shut it off from view, everyone brought sonnets, with Latin and Greek verses: for the University of Pisa was then in vacation, and all the doctors and scholars kept vying with each other who could produce the best. 

I may not live to see the doctors and scholars of this University thusemploying the Long Vacation; as perhaps we shall wait some time foranother Perseus to excite them to it. But I do ask you to consider thatthe Perseus was not entirely cause nor the sonnets entirely effect; thatthe age when men are eager about great work is the age when great workgets itself done; nor need it disturb us that most of the sonnets were, likely enough, very bad ones--in Charles Lamb's phrase, very like whatPetrarch might have written if Petrarch had been born a fool. It is theimpetus that I ask of you: the will to try. 

Lastly, Gentlemen, do not set me down as one who girds at yourpreoccupation, up here, with bodily games; for, indeed, I hold'gymnastic' to be necessary as 'music' (using both words in the Greeksense) for the training of such youths as we desire to send forth fromCambridge. But I plead that they should be balanced, as they were in theperfect young knight with whose words I will conclude to-day:--

 Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance Guided so well that I obtained the prize, Both by the judgment of the English eyes And of some sent by that sweet enemy France; Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance, Town-folk my strength, a daintier judge applies His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise; Some lucky wits impute it but to chance; Others, because of both sides I do take My blood from them who did excel in this, Think Nature me a man-at-arms did make. How far they shot awry! the true cause is, Stella looked on; and from her heavenly face Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race. 

'Untrue, ' you say? Well, there is truth of emotion as well as of fact;and who is there among you but would fain be able not only to win such aguerdon but to lay it in such wise at your lady's feet?

That then was Philip Sidney, called the peerless one of his age; andperhaps no Englishman ever lived more graciously or, having used life, made a better end. But you have seen this morning's newspaper: you haveread of Captain Scott and his comrades, and in particular of the death ofCaptain Oates; and you know that the breed of Sidney is not extinct. Gentlemen, let us keep our language noble: for we still have heroes tocommemorate![1]

[Footnote 1: The date of the above lecture was Wednesday, February 12th, 1913, the date on which our morning newspapers printed the firsttelegrams giving particulars of the fate of Captain Scott's heroicconquest of the South Pole, and still more glorious, though defeated, return. The first brief message concerning Captain Oates, ran asfollows:--

'From the records found in the tent where the bodies were discovered itappeared that Captain Oates's feet and hands were badly frost-bitten, and, although he struggled on heroically, his comrades knew on March 16that his end was approaching. He had borne intense suffering for weekswithout complaint, and he did not give up hope to the very end. 

"He was a brave soul. He slept through the night hoping not to wake; buthe awoke in the morning. 

"It was blowing a blizzard. Oates said: 'I am just going outside, and Imay be some time. ' He went out into the blizzard, and we have not seenhim since. 

"We knew that Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried todissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an Englishgentleman. "']

LECTURE III. 

ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSE AND PROSE

Wednesday, February 26

You will forgive me, Gentlemen, that having in my second lectureencouraged you to the practice of verse as well as of prose, I seize thevery next opportunity to warn you against confusing the two, which differon some points essentially, and always so as to demand separate rules--orrather (since I am shy of the word 'rules') a different concept of whatthe writer should aim at and what avoid. But you must, pray, understandthat what follows will be more useful to the tiro in prose than to thetiro in verse; for while even a lecturer may help you to avoid writingprose in the manner of Milton, only the gods--and they hardly--can cure aversifier of being prosaic. 

We started upon a promise to do without scientific definitions; and indrawing some distinctions to-day between verse and prose I shall use onlya few rough ones; good, as I hope, so far as they go; not to be foundcontrary to your scientific ones, if ever, under another teacher youattain to them; yet for the moment used only as guides to practice, andpretending to be no more. 

Thus I go some way--though by no means all the way--towards definingliterature when I remind you that its very name (_litterae_--letters)implies the written rather than the spoken word; that, for example, however closely they approximate one to the other as we trace them back, and even though we trace them back to identical beginnings, theWriter--the Man of Letters--does to-day differ from the Orator. There wasa time, as you know, when the poet and the historian had no less than theorator, and in the most literal sense, to 'get a hearing. ' Nay, he got itwith more pains: for the orator had his senate-house or his law-courtprovided, whereas Thespis jogged to fairs in a cart, and the Muse ofHistory, like any street acrobat, had to collect her own crowd. Herodotusin search of a public packed his history in a portmanteau, carted it toOlympia, found a favourable 'pitch, ' as we should say, and wooed anaudience to him much as on a racecourse nowadays do those philanthropicgentlemen who ply a dubious trade with three half-crowns and a goldchain. It would cost us an effort to imagine the late Bishop Stubbs thustrying his fortune with a bag full of select Charters at Queen's Club orat Kempton Park, and exerting his lungs to retrieve a crowd that showedsome disposition to edge off towards the ring or the rails. 

The historian's conditions have improved; and like any other sensible manhe has advanced his claim with them, and revised his method. He writesnowadays with his eye on the printed book. He may or may not be a dullfellow: being a dull fellow, he may or may not be aware of it; but atleast he knows that, if you lay him upside down on your knee, you can onawaking pick him up, resume your absorption, and even turn back somepages to discover just where or why your interest flagged: whereas aHellene who deserted Herodotus, having a bet on the Pentathlon, not onlymissed what he missed but missed it for life. 

The invention of print, of course, has made all, or almost all, thedifference. 

I do not forget that the printed book--the written word--presupposes aspeaking voice, and must ever have at its back some sense in us of thespeaking voice. But in writing prose nowadays, while always recollectingthat prose has its origin in speech--even as it behoves us to recollectthat Homer intoned the Iliad to the harp and Sappho plucked her passionfrom the lyre--we have to take things as they are. Except Burns, Heine, Béranger (with Moore, if you will), and you will find it hard to compilein all the lyrical poetry of the last 150 years a list of half a dozenfirst-class or even second-class bards who wrote primarily to be sung. Itmay help you to estimate how far lyrical verse has travelled from itsorigins if you will but remind yourselves that a _sonnet_ and a _sonata_were once the same thing, and that a _ballad_ meant a song accompanied bydancing--the word _ballata_ having been specialised down, on the one lineto the _ballet_, in which Mademoiselle Genée or the Russian performerswill dance for our delight, using no words at all; on the other to "SirPatrick Spens" or "Clerk Saunders, " 'ballads' to which no one in hissenses would dream of pointing a toe. 

Thus with Verse the written (or printed) word has pretty thoroughlyousted the speaking voice and its auxiliaries--the pipe, the lute, thetabor, the chorus with its dance movements and swaying of the body; andin a quieter way much the same thing is happening to prose. In the Drama, to be sure, we still write (or we should) for the actors, reckon upontheir intonations, their gestures, lay account with the tears in theheroine's eyes and her visible beauty: though even in the Drama to-dayyou may detect a tendency to substitute dialectic for action andparagraphs for the [Greek: Stichomuthia], the sharp outcries of passionin its give-and-take. Again we still--some of us--deliver sermons frompulpits and orations in Parliament or upon public platforms. Yet I amtold that the vogue of the sermon is passing; and (by journalists) thatthe leading article has largely superseded it. On that point I can offeryou no personal evidence; but of civil oratory I am very sure that thewhole pitch has been sensibly lowered since the day of Chatham, Burke, Sheridan; since the day of Brougham and Canning; nay, ever since the dayof Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli. Burke, as everyone knows, once broughtdown a Brummagem dagger and cast it on the floor of the House. LordChancellor Brougham in a peroration once knelt to the assembled peers, '_Here the noble lord inclined his knee to the Woolsack_' is, if Iremember, the stage direction in Hansard. Gentlemen, though in the courseof destiny one or another of you may be called upon to speak daggers tothe Treasury Bench, I feel sure you will use none; while, as for LordBrougham's genuflexions, we may agree that to emulate them would costLord Haldane an effort. These and even far less flagrant or flamboyanttricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of fashion. You could hardlyrevive them to-day and keep that propriety to which I exhorted you afortnight ago. They would be out of tune; they would grate upon thenerves; they would offend against the whole style of modern oratory, which steadily tends to lower its key, to use the note of quietbusiness-like exposition, to adopt more and more the style of writtenprose. 

Let me help your sense of this change, by a further illustration. Burke, as we know, was never shy of declaiming--even of declaiming in atorrent--when he stood up to speak: but almost as little was he shy ofit when he sat down to write. If you turn to his "Letters on theRegicide Peace" --no raw compositions, but penned in his latter days andclosing, or almost closing, upon that tenderest of farewells to hiscountry--

 In this good old House, where everything at least is well aired, I shall be content to put up my fatigued horses and here take a bed for the long night that begins to darken upon me--

if, I say, you turn to these "Letters on the Regicide Peace" and consultthe title-page, you will find them ostensibly addressed to 'a Member ofthe present Parliament'; and the opening paragraphs assume that Burke andhis correspondent are in general agreement. But skim the pages and youreyes will be arrested again and again by sentences like these:--

 The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price--the blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime. 

Magnificent, truly! But your ear has doubtless detected the blankverse--three iambic lines:--

 Are purchased at ten thousand times their price. .. Be shed but to redeem the blood of man. .. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime. 

Again Burke catches your eye by rhetorical inversions:--

 But too often different is rational conjecture from melancholy fact, Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar, by repetitions:--

 Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another . .. Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not our neighbour; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, whatever it may be, is an old creation; and we have good data to calculate all the mischief to be apprehended from it. When I find Algiers transferred to Calais, I will tell you what I think of that point--

by quick staccato utterances, such as:--

 And is this example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other--

or

 Our dignity? That is gone. I shall say no more about it. Light lie the earth on the ashes of English pride!

I say that the eye or ear, caught by such tropes, must (if it becritical) recognise them at once as _rhetoric_, as the spoken wordmasquerading under guise of the written. Burke may pretend to be seated, penning a letter to a worthy man who will read it in his slippers: butactually Burke is up and pacing his library at Beaconsfield, now stridingfrom fire-place to window with hands clasped under his coat tails, anonpausing to fling out an arm with some familiar accustomed gesture in aHouse of Commons that knows him no more, towards a Front Bench peopled byshades. In fine the pretence is Cicero writing to Atticus, but the styleis Cicero denouncing Catiline. 

As such it is not for your imitation. Burke happened to be a genius, witha swoop and range of mind, as of language to interpret it, with a gift toenchant, a power to strike and astound, which together make him, to mythinking, the man in our literature most nearly comparable withShakespeare. Others may be more to your taste; you may love othersbetter: but no other two leave you so hopeless of discovering _how it isdone_. Yet not for this reason only would I warn you against imitatingeither. For like all great artists they accepted their conditions andwrought for them, and those conditions have changed. When Jacques wishedto recite to an Elizabethan audience that

 All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players--

or Hamlet to soliloquise

 To be, or not to be: that is the question--

the one did not stretch himself under a property oak, nor did the othercast himself back in a chair and dangle his legs. They both advancedboldly from the stage, down a narrow platform provided for suchrecitations and for that purpose built boldly forward into theauditorium, struck an attitude, declaimed the purple passage, andreturned, covered with applause, to continue the action of the play. Thiswas the theatrical convention; this the audience expected and understood;for this Shakespeare wrote. Similarly, though the device must have beenwearing thin even in 1795-6, Burke cast a familiar epistle into languageproper to be addressed to Mr Speaker of the House of Commons. Shakespearewrote, as Burke wrote, for his audience; and their glory is that theyhave outlasted the conditions they observed. Yet it was by observing themthat they gained the world's ear. Let us, who are less than they, bewareof scorning to belong to our own time. 

For my part I have a great hankering to see English Literature feelingback through these old modes to its origins. I think, for example, thatif we studied to write verse that could really be sung, or if we weremore studious to write prose that could be read aloud with pleasure tothe ear, we should be opening the pores to the ancient sap; since theroots are always the roots, and we can only reinvigorate our growththrough them. 

Unhappily, however, I cannot preach this just yet; for we are aiming atpractice, and at Cambridge (they tell me) while you speak well, you writeless expertly. A contributor to "The Cambridge Review, " a fortnight ago, lamented this at length: so you will not set the aspersion down to me, nor blame me if these early lectures too officiously offer a kind of'First Aid': that, while all the time eager to descant on the_affinities_ of speech and writing, I dwell first on their _differences_;or that, in speaking of Burke, an author I adore only 'on this sideidolatry, ' I first present him in some aspects for your avoidance. Similarly I adore the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, yet should no morecommend it to you for instant imitation than I could encourage you towalk with a feather in your cap and a sword under your gown. Let usobserve proprieties. 

To return to Burke. --At his most flagrant, in these "Letters on theRegicide Peace, " he boldly raids Shakespeare. You are all, I doubt not, conversant with the Prologue to "Henry the Fifth":--

 O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars: and at his heels, Leash'd in like hounds, should Famine, Sword and Fire Crouch for employment. 

Well, this passage Burke, assuming his correspondent to be familiar withit, boldly claps into prose and inserts into a long diatribe against Pittfor having tamely submitted to the rebuffs of the French Directory. Thusit becomes:--

 On that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars: that he would bid to be brought forth from their hideous Kennel (where his scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs of War, whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance that feeds them; that he would let them loose in Famine, Plagues and Death, upon a guilty race to whose frame and to all whose habit, Order, Peace, Religion and Virtue, are alien and abhorrent. 

Now Shakespeare is but apologising for the shortcomings of his'play-house, whereas Burke is denouncing his country's shame andprophesying disaster to Europe. Yet do you not feel with me that whileShakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to makethem appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same orsimilar words have become tumid, turgid?

Why? I am sure that the difference lies not in the two men: nor is it allthe secret, or even half the secret, that Burke is mixing up the spokenwith the written word, using the one while pretending to use the other. That has carried us some way; but now let us take an important stepfarther. The root of the matter lies in certain essential differencesbetween verse and prose. We will keep, if you please, to our roughpractical definitions. Literature--the written word--is a permanentrecord of memorable speech; a record, at any rate, intended to bepermanent. We set a thing down in ink--we print it in a book--because wefeel it to be memorable, to be worth preserving. But to set thismemorable speech down we must choose one of two forms, verse or prose;and I define verse to be a record in metre and rhythm, prose to be arecord which, dispensing with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythmlaxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, so always that itconvey a certain pleasure to the ear. 

You observe that I avoid the term Poetry, over which the critics havewaged, and still are waging, a war that promises to be endless. Is WaltWhitman a poet? Is the Song of Songs (which is not Solomon's)--is theBook of Job--are the Psalms--all of these as rendered in our AuthorisedVersion of Holy Writ--are all of these poetry? Well 'yes, ' if you want myopinion; and again 'yes, ' I am sure. But truly on this field, thoughscores of great men have fought across it--Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge, Scaliger (I pour the names on you at random), Johnson, Wordsworth, thetwo Schlegels, Aristotle with Twining his translator, Corneille, Goethe, Warton, Whately, Hazlitt, Emerson, Hegel, Gummere--but our axles growhot. Let us put on the brake: for in practice the dispute comes to verylittle: since literature is an art and treats scientific definitions asJ. K. Stephen recommended. From them

 It finds out what it cannot do, And then it goes and does it. 

I am journeying, say, in the West of England. I cross a bridge over astream dividing Devon from Cornwall. These two counties, each beautifulin its way, are quite unlike in their beauty: yet nothing happened as Istepped across the brook, and for a mile or two or even ten I am aware ofno change. Sooner or later that change will break upon the mind and Ishall be startled, awaking suddenly to a land of altered features. But atwhat turn of the road this will happen, just how long the smallmultiplied impressions will take to break into surmise, intoconviction--that nobody can tell. So it is with poetry and prose. Theyare different realms, but between them lies a debatable land which a DeQuincey or a Whitman or a Paul Fort or a Marinetti may attempt. I adviseyou who are beginners to keep well one side or other of the frontier, remembering that there is plenty of room and what happened to Tupper. 

If we restrict ourselves to the terms 'verse' and 'prose, ' we shall findthe line much easier to draw. Verse is memorable speech set down in metrewith strict rhythms; prose is memorable speech set down withoutconstraint of metre and in rhythms both lax and various--so lax, sovarious, that until quite recently no real attempt has been made toreduce them to rule. I doubt, for my part, if they can ever be reduced torule; and after a perusal of Professor Saintsbury's latest work, "AHistory of English Prose Rhythm, " I am left doubting. I commend this bookto you as one that clears up large patches of forest. No one has yet sowell explained what our prose writers, generation after generation, havetried to do with prose: and he has, by the way, furnished us with acapital anthology--or, as he puts it, with 'divers delectable draughts ofexample. ' But the road still waits to be driven. Seeking practicalguidance--help for our present purpose--I note first that many a passagehe scans in one way may as readily be scanned in another; that when hehas finished with one and can say proudly with Wordsworth:--

 I've measured it from side to side, 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide, we still have a sensation of coming out (our good master with us) by thatsame door wherein we went; and I cannot as yet after arduous trialdiscover much profit in his table of feet--Paeons, Dochmiacs, Antispasts, Proceleusmatics and the rest--an Antispast being but an iamb followed bya trochee, and Proceleusmatic but two pyrrhics, or four consecutive shortsyllables--when I reflect that, your possible number of syllables beingas many as five to a foot, you may label them (as Aristotle would say)until you come to infinity, where desire fails, without getting nearerany rule of application. 

Let us respect a genuine effort of learning, though we may not detect itsimmediate profit. In particular let us respect whatever ProfessorSaintsbury writes, who has done such splendid work upon Englishverse-prosody. I daresay he would retort upon my impatience grandlyenough, quoting Walt Whitman:--

I am the teacher of athletes;He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own;He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. 

His speculations may lead to much in time; though for the present theyyield us small instruction in the path we seek. 

It is time we harked back to our own sign-posts. Verse is written inmetre and strict rhythm; prose, without metre and with the freestpossible rhythm. That distinction seems simple enough, but it carriesconsequences very far from simple. Let me give you an illustration takenalmost at hazard from Milton, from the Second Book of "ParadiseRegained":--

 Up to a hill anon his steps he reared From whose high top to ken the prospect round, If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd; But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. 

These few lines are verse, are obviously verse with the accent of poetry;while as obviously they are mere narrative and tell us of the simplestpossible incident--how Christ climbed a hill to learn what could be seenfrom the top. Yet observe, line for line and almost word for word, howstrangely they differ from prose. Mark the inversions: 'Up to a hill anonhis steps he reared, ' 'But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. 'Mark next the diction--'his steps he reared. ' In prose we should not rearour steps up the Gog-magog hills, or even more Alpine fastnesses; nor, arrived at the top, should we 'ken' the prospect round; we might 'con, 'but should more probably 'survey' it. Even 'anon' is a tricky word inprose, though I deliberately palmed it off on you a few minutes ago. Markthirdly the varied repetition, 'if cottage were in view, sheep-cote orherd--but cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. ' Lastly compare thewhole with such an account as you or I or Cluvienus would write in plainprose:--

 Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from its summit might disclose some sign of human habitation--a herd, a sheep-cote, a cottage perhaps. But he could see nothing of the sort. 

But you will ask, '_Why_ should verse and prose employ diction sodifferent? _Why_ should the one invert the order of words in a fashionnot permitted to the other?' and I shall endeavour to answer thesequestions together with a third which, I dare say, you have sometimesbeen minded to put when you have been told--and truthfully told--by yourmanuals and histories, that when a nation of men starts making literatureit invariably starts on the difficult emprise of verse, and goes on toprose as by an afterthought. Why should men start upon the more difficultform and proceed to the easier? It is not their usual way. In learning toskate, for instance, they do not cut figures before practising loose andeasy propulsion. 

The answer is fairly simple. Literature (once more) is a record ofmemorable speech; it preserves in words a record of such thoughts or ofsuch deeds as we deem worth preserving. Now if you will imagine yourselfa very primitive man, lacking paper or parchment; or a slightly lessprimitive, but very poor, man to whom the price of parchment and ink isprohibitive; you have two ways of going to work. You can carve your wordsupon trees or stones (a laborious process) or you can commit them tomemory and carry them about in your head; which is cheaper and handier. For an illustration, you find it useful, anticipating the tax-collector, to know how many days there are in the current month. But further youfind it a nuisance and a ruinous waste of time to run off to the tribaltree or monolith whenever the calculation comes up; so you invent aformula, and you cast that formula into _verse_ for the simple reasonthat verse, with its tags, alliterations, beat of syllables, jingle ofrhymes (however your tribe has chosen to invent it), has a knack, notpossessed by prose, of sticking in your head. You do not say, 'Quick thytablets, memory! Let me see--January has 31 days, February 28 days, March31 days, April 30 days. ' You invent a verse:--

 Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. .. 

Nay, it has been whispered to me, Gentlemen, that in this University somesuch process of memorising in verse has been applied by bold badirreverently-minded men even to the "Evidences" of our cherished Paley. 

This, you will say, is mere verse, and not yet within measurable distanceof poetry. But wait! The men who said the more memorable things, or sangthem--the men who recounted deeds and genealogies of heroes, plagues andfamines, assassinations, escapes from captivity, wanderings and conquestsof the clan, all the 'old, unhappy, far-off things and battles longago'--the men who sang these things for their living, for a supper, abed in the great hall, and something in their wallet to carry them on tothe next lordship--these were gentlemen, scôps, bards, minstrels (callthem how you will), a professional class who had great need of a fullrepertory in a land swarming with petty chieftains, and to adapt theirstrains to the particular hall of entertainment. It would never do, forexample, to flatter the prowess of the Billings in the house of theHoppings, their hereditary foes, or to bore the Wokings (who lived wherethe crematorium now is) with the complicated genealogy of the Tootings:for this would have been to miss that appropriateness which I preachedto you in my second lecture as a preliminary rule of good writing. Nay, when the Billings intermarried with the Tootings--when the Billings tookto cooing, so to speak--a hasty blend of excerpts would be required forthe "Epithalamium. " So it was all a highly difficult business, needingadaptability, a quick wit, a goodly stock of songs, a retentive memoryand every artifice to assist it. Take "Widsith, " for example, the'far-travelled man. ' He begins:--

 Widsith spake: he unlocked his word-hoard. 

So he had a hoard of words, you see: and he must have needed them, for hegoes on:--

 Forthon ic maeg singan and secgan spell, Maenan fore mengo in meoduhealle, Hu me cynegode cystum dohten. Ic waes mid Hunum and mid Hreth-gotum, Mid Sweom and mid Geatum, and mid Suth-Denum. Mid Wenlum ic waes and mid Waernum and mid Wicingum. Mid Gefthum ic waes and mid Winedum. .. . 

 (Therefore I can sing and tell a tale, recount in the Mead Hall, how men of high race gave rich gifts to me. I was with Huns and with Hreth Goths, with the Swedes, and with the Geats, and with the South Danes; I was with the Wenlas, and with the Waernas, and with the Vikings; I was with the Gefthas and with the Winedae. .. . )

and so on for a full dozen lines. I say that the memory of such men musthave needed every artifice to help it: and the chief artifice to theirhand was one which also delighted the ears of their listeners. They sangor intoned to the harp. 

There you get it, Gentlemen. I have purposely, skimming a wide subject, discarded much ballast; but you may read and scan and read again, andalways you must come back to this, that the first poets sang their wordsto the harp or to some such instrument: and just there lies the secretwhy poetry differs from prose. The moment you introduce music you let inemotion with all its sway upon speech. From that moment you changeeverything, down to the order of the words--the _natural_ order of thewords: and (remember this) though the harp be superseded, the voice neverforgets it. You may take up a Barrack Room Ballad of Kipling's, and it isthere, though you affect to despise it for a banjo or concertina:--

 Ford--ford--ford of Kabul river. .. 

'Bang, whang, whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife. ' From themoment men introduced music they made verse a thing essentially separatefrom prose, from its natural key of emotion to its natural ordering ofwords. Do not for one moment imagine that when Milton writes:--

 But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. 

or

 Of man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree. .. 

--where you must seek down five lines before you come to the verb, andthen find it in the imperative mood--do not suppose for a moment that heis here fantastically shifting words, inverting phrases out of theirnatural order. For, as St Paul might say, there is a natural order ofprose and there is a natural order of verse. The natural order of proseis:--

 I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family, though not of that county; my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first in Hull. --[_Defoe. _]

or

 Further I avow to your Highness that with these eyes I have beheld the person of William Wooton, B. D. , who has written a good sizeable volume against a friend of your Governor (from whom, alas! he must therefore look for little favour) in a most gentlemanly style, adorned with the utmost politeness and civility. --[_Swift. _]

The natural order of poetry is:--

 Thus with the year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. 

or

 But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. 

and this basal difference you must have clear in your minds before, indealing with prose or verse, you can practise either with profit or readeither with intelligent delight. 

LECTURE IV. 

ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF VERSE

Thursday, April 17

In our last lecture, Gentlemen, we discussed the difference betweenverse, or metrical writing, and prose. We traced that difference (as youwill remember) to Music--to the harp, the lyre, the dance, the chorus, all those first necessary accompaniments which verse never quite forgets;and we concluded that, as Music ever introduces emotion, which is indeedher proper and only means of persuading, so the natural language of versewill be keyed higher than the natural language of prose; will be keyedhigher throughout and even for its most ordinary purposes--as forexample, to tell us that So-and-so sailed to Troy with so many ships. 

I grant you that our steps to this conclusion were lightly and rapidlytaken: yet the stepping-stones are historically firm. Verse does precedeprose in literature; verse does start with musical accompaniment; musicalaccompaniment does introduce emotion; and emotion does introduce an orderof its own into speech. I grant you that we have travelled far from thedays when a prose-writer, Herodotus, labelled the books of his history bythe names of the nine Muses. I grant you that if you go to the Vaticanand there study the statues of the Muses (noble, but of no early date)you may note that Calliope, Muse of the Epic--unlike her sisters Euterpe, Erato, Thalia--holds for symbol no instrument of music, but a stylus anda tablet. Yet the earlier Calliope, the Calliope of Homer, was a Muse ofSong. 

 [Greek: Menin aeide, Thea--]

'Had I a thousand tongues, a thousand hands. '--For what purpose does thepoet wish for a thousand tongues, but to sing? for what purpose athousand hands, but to pluck the wires? not to dip a thousand pens in athousand inkpots. 

I doubt, in fine, if your most learned studies will discover much amisswith the frontier we drew between verse and prose, cursorily though weran its line. Nor am I daunted on comparing it with Coleridge's morephilosophical one, which you will find in the "Biographia Literaria"(c. XVIII)--

 And first for the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state which it counteracts, and how this balance of antagonism becomes organised into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term) by a supervening act of the will and judgment consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. 

I will not swear to understand precisely what Coleridge means here, though I believe that I do. But at any rate, and on the principle that oftwo hypotheses, each in itself adequate, we should choose the simpler, Isuggest in all modesty that we shall do better with our own than withColeridge's, which has the further disadvantage of being scarcelyamenable to positive evidence. We can say with historical warrant thatSappho struck the lyre, and argue therefrom, still within close range ofcorrection, that her singing responded to the instrument: whereas toassert that Sappho's mind 'was balanced by a spontaneous effort whichstrove to hold in check the workings of passion' is to say something forwhich positive evidence will be less handily found, whether to contradictor to support. 

Yet if you choose to prefer Coleridge's explanation, no great harm willbe done: since Coleridge, who may be presumed to have understood it, promptly goes on to deduce that, as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement. 

which is precisely where we found ourselves, save that where Coleridgeuses the word 'excitement' we used the word 'emotion. '

Shall we employ an illustration before proceeding?--some sentence easilyhandled, some commonplace of the moralist, some copybook maxim, I carenot what. 'Contentment breeds Happiness'--That is a proposition withwhich you can hardly quarrel; sententious, sedate, obviously true;provoking delirious advocacy as little as controversial heat; in short avery fair touchstone. Now hear how the lyric treats it, in these lines ofDekker--

 Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers? O sweet content! Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd? O punishment! Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex'd To add to golden numbers golden numbers? O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content! Work apace, apace, apace, apace; Honest labour wears a lovely face; Then hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!

 Canst drink the waters of the crystal spring? O sweet content! Swim'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears? O punishment! Then he that patiently want's burden bears No burden bears, but is a king, a king! O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content! Work apace, apace, apace, apace; Honest labour wears a lovely face; Then hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!

There, in lines obviously written for music, you have our sedatesentence, 'Contentment breeds Happiness, ' converted to mere emotion. Note(to use Coleridge's word) the 'excitement' of it. There are but two plainindicative sentences in the two stanzas--(1) 'Honest labour wears alovely face' (used as a refrain), and (2) 'Then he that patiently want'sburden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!' (heightenedemotionally by inversion and double repetition). Mark throughout howbroken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations:both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza: withcunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and each stanza wound up by anoutburst of emotional nonsense--'hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!'--asa man might skip or whistle to himself for want of thought. 

Now (still keeping to our same subject of Contentment) let us _prosify_the lyrical order of language down to the lowest pitch to which geniushas been able to reduce it and still make noble verse. You have all readWordsworth's famous Introduction to the "Lyrical Ballads, " and you knowthat Wordsworth's was a genius working on a theory that the languages ofverse and of prose are identical. You know, too, I dare say, into whatbanalities that theory over and over again betrayed him: banalities suchas--

 His widowed mother, for a second mate Espoused the teacher of the village school: Who on her offspring zealously bestowed Needful instruction. 

--and the rest. Nevertheless Wordsworth was a genius; and genius workingpersistently on a narrow theory will now and again 'bring it off' (asthey say). So he, amid the flat waste of his later compositions, didundoubtedly 'bring it off' in the following sonnet:--

 These times strike monied worldlings with dismay: Ev'n rich men, brave by nature, taint the air With words of apprehension and despair; While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray, Men unto whom sufficient for the day And minds not stinted or untill'd are given, Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven, Are cheerful as the rising sun in May. What do we gather hence but firmer faith That every gift of noble origin Is breath'd upon by Hope's perpetual breath; That Virtue and the faculties within Are vital; and that riches are akin To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?

Here, I grant, are no repetitions, no inversions. The sentences, thoughmetrical, run straightforwardly, verb following subject, object verb, asin strict prose. In short here you have verse reduced to the order andstructure of prose as nearly as a man of genius, working on a set theory, could reduce it while yet maintaining its proper emotional key. But firstlet me say that you will find very few like instances of success even inWordsworth; and few indeed to set against innumerable passages whereineither his verse defies his theory and triumphs, or succumbs to it and, succumbing, either drops sheer to bathos or spreads itself over deadflats of commonplace. Let me tell you next that the instances you willfind in other poets are so few and so far between as to be negligible;and lastly that even such verse as the above has only to be compared witha passage of prose and its emotional pitch is at once betrayed. Takethis, for example, from Jeremy Taylor:--

 Since all the evil in the world consists in the disagreeing between the object and the appetite, as when a man hath what he desires not, or desires what he hath not, or desires amiss, he that compares his spirit to the present accident hath variety of instance for his virtue, but none to trouble him, because his desires enlarge not beyond his present fortune: and a wise man is placed in a variety of chances, like the nave or centre of a wheel in the midst of all the circumvolutions and changes of posture, without violence or change, save that it turns gently in compliance with its changed parts, and is indifferent which part is up, and which is down; for there is some virtue or other to be exercised whatever happens--either patience or thanksgiving, love or fear, moderation or humility, charity or contentedness. 

Or, take this from Samuel Johnson:--

 The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind; and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove. 

Now, to be frank, I do not call that first passage very good prose. Likemuch of Jeremy Taylor's writing it is prose tricked out with thetrappings and odds-and-ends of verse. It starts off, for example, with abrace of heroics--'Since all the evil in the world consists'. .. 'betweenthe object and the appetite. ' You may say, further, that the simile ofthe wheel, though proper enough to prose, is poetical too: that Homermight have used it ('As in a wheel the rim turns violently, while thenave, though it turns also, yet seems to be at rest'--something of thatsort). Nevertheless you will agree with me that, in exchangingWordsworth for Taylor and Johnson, we have relaxed something with themetre, something that the metre kept taut; and this something wediscover to be the emotional pitch. 

But let me give you another illustration, supplied (I dare say quiteunconsciously) by one who combined a genuine love of verse--in which, however, he was no adept--with a sure instinct for beautiful prose. Contentment was a favourite theme with Isaak Walton: "The CompleatAngler" is packed with praise of it: and in "The Compleat Angler" occursthis well-known passage:--

 But, master, first let me tell you, that very hour which you were absent from me, I sat down under a willow tree by the waterside, and considered what you had told me of the owner of that pleasant meadow in which you then had left me; that he had a plentiful estate, and not a heart to think so; that he had at this time many law-suits depending, and that they both damped his mirth and took up so much of his time and thoughts that he had no leisure to take the sweet content that I, who pretended no title to them, took in his fields: for I could there sit quietly; and looking on the water, see some fishes sport themselves in the silver streams, others leaping at flies of several shapes and colours; looking on the hills, I could behold them spotted with woods and groves; looking down the meadows, could see, here a boy gathering lilies and lady-smocks, and there a girl cropping culverlocks and cowslips, all to make garlands suitable to this present month of May. These and many other field-flowers so perfumed the air that I thought that very meadow like that field in Sicily of which Diodorus speaks, where the perfumes arising from the place make all dogs that hunt in it to fall off and lose their hottest scent. I say, as I thus sat, joying in my own happy condition, and pitying this poor rich man that owned this and many other pleasant groves and meadows about me, I did thankfully remember what my Saviour said, that the meek possess the earth; or rather they enjoy what the others possess and enjoy not; for Anglers and meek quiet-spirited men are free from those high, those restless thoughts which corrode the sweets of life; and they, and they only can say as the poet has happily exprest it:

 'Hail, blest estate of lowliness! Happy enjoyments of such minds As, rich in self-contentedness, Can, like the reeds in roughest winds, By yielding make that blow but small At which proud oaks and cedars fall. '

There you have a passage of felicitous prose culminating in a stanza oftrite and fifth-rate verse. Yes, Walton's instinct is sound; for he iskeying up the pitch; and verse, even when mediocre in quality, has itspitch naturally set above that of prose. So, if you will turn to yourWalton and read the page following this passage, you will see that, stillby a sure instinct, he proceeds from this scrap of reflective verse to amere rollicking 'catch':

 Man's life is but vain, for 'tis subject to pain And sorrow, and short as a bubble; 'Tis a hodge-podge of business and money and care, And care, and money and trouble. .. 

--which is even worse rubbish, and yet a step upwards in emotion becauseVenator actually sings it to music. 'Ay marry, sir, this is musicindeed, ' approves Brother Peter; 'this cheers the heart. '

In this and the preceding lecture, Gentlemen, I have enforced at somelength the opinion that to understand the many essential differencesbetween verse and prose we must constantly bear in mind that verse, beingmetrical, keeps the character originally imposed on it by musicalaccompaniment and must always, however far the remove, be referred backto its origin and to the emotion which music excites. 

Mr George Bernard Shaw having to commit his novel "Cashel Byron'sProfession" to paper in a hurry, chose to cast it in blank verse as beingmore easily and readily written so: a performance which brilliantlyilluminates a half-truth. Verse--or at any rate, unrhymed iambicverse--is easier to write than prose, if you care to leave out theemotion which makes verse characteristic and worth writing. I havelittle doubt that, had he chosen to attempt it, Mr Shaw would have foundhis story still more ductile in the metre of "Hiawatha. " But theexperiment proves nothing: or no more than that, all fine art costinglabour, it may cost less if burlesqued in a category not its own. 

Let me take an example from a work with which you are all familiar--"TheStudent's Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge. " Onp. 405 we read:--

 The Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos is divided into ten sections, A, A2, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I. A student may take either one or two sections at the end of his second year of residence, and either one or two more sections at the end of his third or fourth year of residence; or he may take two sections at the end of his third year only. Thus this Tripos can be treated either as a divided or as an undivided Tripos at the option of the candidate. 

Now I do not hold that up to you for a model of prose. Still, lucidityrather than emotion being its aim, I doubt not that the composer spentpains on it; more pains than it would have cost him to convey hisinformation metrically, thus:--

 There is a Tripos that aspires to blend The Medieval and the Modern tongues In one red burial (Sing Heavenly Muse!) Divided into sections A, A2, B, C, D, E, F, G and H and I. A student may take either one or two (With some restrictions mention'd in a footnote) At th' expiration of his second year: Or of his third, or of his fourth again Take one or two; or of his third alone Take two together. Thus this tripos is (Like nothing in the Athanasian Creed) Divisible or indivisible At the option of the candidate--Gadzooks!

This method has even some advantage over the method of prose in that itis more easily memorised; but it has, as you will admit, the one fatalflaw that it imports emotion into a theme which does not properly admitof emotion, and that so it offends against our first rule ofwriting--that it should be appropriate. 

Now if you accept the argument so far as we have led it--that verse is bynature more emotional than prose--certain consequences would seem tofollow: of which the first is that while the capital difficulty of verseconsists in saying ordinary things the capital difficulty of proseconsists in saying extraordinary things; that while with verse, keyed forhigh moments, the trouble is to manage the intervals, with prose thetrouble is to manage the high moments. 

Let us dwell awhile on this difference, for it is important. You remembermy quoting to you in my last lecture these lines of Milton's:--

 Up to a hill anon his steps he reared From whose high top to ken the prospect round, If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd; But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. 

We agreed that these were good lines, with the accent of poetry: but weallowed it to be a highly exalted way of telling how So-and-so climbed ahill for a better view but found none. Now obviously this exaltation doesnot arise immediately out of the action described (which is as ordinaryas it well could be), but is _derivative_. It borrows its wings, itsimpetus, from a previous high moment, from the emotion proper to thatmoment, from the speech proper to that emotion: and these sustain usacross to the next height as with the glide of an aeroplane. Your ownsense will tell you at once that the passage would be merely bombastic ifthe poet were starting to set forth how So-and-so climbed a hill for theview--just that, and nothing else: as your own sense tells you that theswoop is from one height to another. For if bathos lay ahead, if Miltonhad but to relate how the Duke of York, with twenty thousand men, 'marched up a hill and then marched down again, ' he certainly would notuse diction such as:--

 Up to a hill anon his steps he reared. 

Even as it is, I think we must all detect a certain artificiality in thepassage, and confess to some relief when Satan is introduced to us, tenlines lower down, to revivify the story. For let us note that, in thenature of things, the more adorned and involved our style (and Milton'sis both ornate and involved) the more difficulty we must find with theseflat pedestrian intervals. Milton may 'bring it off, ' largely throughknowing how to dodge the interval and contrive that it shall at any ratebe brief: but, as Bagehot noted, when we come to Tennyson and findTennyson in "Enoch Arden" informing us of a fish-jowter, that:--

 Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil In ocean-smelling osier--

(_i. E. _ in a fish-basket)

 --and his face Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales, Not only to the market town were known, But in the leafy lanes beyond the down Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp And peacock yewtree of the lonely Hall Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering, why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether too pompous for itsload, and those who make speech too pompous for its content commit, albeit in varying degrees, the error of Defoe's religious lady who, seeing a bottle of over-ripe beer explode and cork and froth fly up tothe ceiling, cried out, 'O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power!' The poetwho commends fresh fish to us as 'ocean-spoil' can cast no stone at hisbrother who writes of them as 'the finny denizens of the deep, ' or evenat his cousin the journalist, who exalts the oyster into a 'succulentbivalve'--

 The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air; Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear!

I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as atechnical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epicto plunge _in medias res_, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching atonce a high wind which shall carry him hereafter across dull levels andintervals. I believe that it lay--though whether consciously or not hescarcely tells us--at the bottom of Matthew Arnold's mind when, selectingcertain qualities for which to praise Homer, he chose, for the veryfirst, Homer's _rapidity_. 'First, ' he says, 'Homer is eminently rapid;and, ' he adds justly, 'to this rapidity the elaborate movement ofMiltonic blank verse is alien. '

Now until one studies writing as an art, trying to discover what this orthat form of it accomplishes with ease and what with difficulty, and whyverse can do one thing and prose another, Arnold's choice of _rapidity_to put in the forefront of Homer's merits may seem merely capricious. 'Homer (we say) has other great qualities. Arnold himself indicatesHomer's simplicity, directness, nobility. Surely either one of theseshould be mentioned before rapidity, in itself not comparable as a virtuewith either?'

But when we see that the difficulty of verse-narrative lies just _here_;that the epic poet who is rapid has met, and has overcome, the capitaldifficulty of his form, then we begin to do justice not only to Arnold asa critic but (which is of far higher moment) to Homer as a craftsman. 

The genius of Homer in this matter is in fact something daemonic. Heseems to shirk nothing: and the effect of this upon critics isbewildering. The acutest of them are left wondering how on earth anordinary tale--say of how some mariners beached ship, stowed sail, walkedashore and cooked their dinner--can be made so poetical. They areinclined to divide the credit between the poet and his fortunate age--'atime' suggests Pater 'in which one could hardly have spoken at allwithout ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat withoutmaking a picture "in the great style" against a sky charged withmarvels. '

Well, the object of these lectures is not to explain genius. Just here itis rather to state a difficulty; to admit that, once in history, geniusovercame it; yet warn you how rare in the tale of poetical achievement issuch a success. Homer, indeed, stands first, if not unmatched, amongpoets in this technical triumph over the capital disability ofannihilating flat passages. I omit Shakespeare and the dramatists;because they have only to give a stage direction 'Enter Cassius, lookinglean, ' and Cassius comes in looking leaner than nature; whereas Homer hasin his narrative to walk Hector or Thersites on to the scene, describehim, walk him off. I grant the rapidity of Dante. It is amazing; and wemay yield him all the credit for choosing (it was his genius that choseit) a subject which allowed of the very highest rapidity; since Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, though they differ in other respects, have thisin common, that they are populous and the inhabitants of each socompendiously shepherded together that the visitor can turn from oneperson to another without loss of time. But Homer does not escort usaround a menagerie in which we can move expeditiously from one cage toanother. He proposes at least, both in the "Iliad" and in the "Odyssey, "to unfold a story; and he _seems_ to unfold it so artlessly that welinger on the most pedestrian intervals while he tells us, for example, what the heroes ate and how they cooked it. A modern writer would serveus a far better dinner. Homer brings us to his with our appetite all thekeener for having waited and watched the spitting and roasting. 

I would point out to you what art this genius conceals; how cunning isthis apparent simplicity: and for this purpose let me take Homer at theextreme of his difficulty--when he has to describe a long sea-voyage. 

Some years ago, in his last Oxford lectures, Mr Froude lamented that nopoet in this country had arisen to write a national epic of the greatElizabethan seamen, to culminate (I suppose) as his History culminated, in the defeat of the Armada: and one of our younger poets; Mr AlfredNoyes, acting on this hint has since given us an epic poem on "Drake, " intwelve books. But Froude probably overlooked, as Mr Noyes has notovercome, this difficulty of the flat interval which, while ever thebugbear of Epic, is magnified tenfold when our action takes place on thesea. For whereas the verse should be rapid and the high moments frequent, the business of seafaring is undeniably monotonous, as the intervalsbetween port and port, sea-fight and sea-fight, must be long and lazy. Matters move more briskly in an occasional gale; but even a gale lasts, and must be ridden out; and the process of riding to a gale of wind:--

 For ever climbing up the climbing wave

--your ship taking one wave much as she takes another--is in its naturemonotonous. Nay, you have only to read Falconer's "Shipwreck" to discoverhow much of dulness may lie enwrapped, to discharge itself, even in afirst-class tempest. Courses, reckonings, trimmings of canvas--theseoccur in real life and amuse the simple mariner at the time. But to thereader, if he be a landsman, their repetition in narrative may easilybecome intolerable; and when we get down to the 'trades, ' even the seamansets his sail for a long spell of weather and goes to sleep. In short youcannot upon the wide Atlantic push action and reaction to and fro as uponthe plains of windy Troy: nor could any but a superhuman genius makesustained poetry (say) out of Nelson's untiring pursuit of Villeneuve, which none the less was one of the most heroic feats in history. 

This difficulty, inherent in navigation as a subject for the Epic Muse, has, I think, been very shrewdly detected and hit off in a parody of MrNoyes' poem by a young friend of mine, Mr Wilfred Blair:--

 Meanwhile the wind had changed, and Francis Drake Put down the helm and drove against the seas-- Once more the wind changed, and the simple seaman, Full fraught with weather wisdom, once again Put down the helm and so drove on--_et cetera_. 

Now Homer actually has performed this feat which we declare to be next toimpossible. He actually does convey Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, by aten years' voyage too; he actually has narrated that voyage to us inplain straightforward words; and, what is more, he actually has made asuperb epic of it. Yes, but when you come to dissect the Odyssey, whatamazing artifice is found under that apparently straightforwardtale!--eight years of the ten sliced out, to start with, andmagnificently presented to Circe

 Where that Aeaean isle forgets the main

--and (one may add), so forgetting, avoids the technical difficultiesconnected therewith. 

Note the space given to Telemachus and his active search for the losthero: note too how the mass of Odysseus' seafaring adventures iscondensed into a reported speech--a traveller's tale at the court ofAlcinoüs. Virgil borrowed this trick, you remember; and I dare to swearthat had it fallen to Homer to attempt the impossible saga of Nelson'spursuit after Villeneuve he would have achieved it triumphantly--by meansof a tale told in the first person by a survivor to Lady Hamilton. Note, again, how boldly (being free to deal with an itinerary of which hisaudience knew nothing but surmised that it comprehended a vast deal ofthe marvellous, spaced at irregular distances) Homer works in a shipwreckor a miracle wherever the action threatens to flag. Lessing, as you know, devoted several pages of the "Laoköon" to the shield of Achilles; toHomer's craft in depicting it as it grew under Hephaestus' hammer: sothat we are intrigued by the process of manufacture instead of beingwearied by a description of the ready-made article; so also (if one maypresume to add anything to Lessing) that we are cunningly flattered in asense that the shield is being made for _us. _ Well, that is one artificeout of many: but if you would gauge at all Homer's resource and subtletyin technique I recommend you to analyse the first twelve books ofthe "Odyssey" and count for yourselves the device by which thepoet--[Greek: polutropos] as was never his hero--evades or hurries overeach flat interval as he happens upon it. 

 These things, Ulysses, The wise bards also Behold and sing. But O, what labour! O Prince, what pain!

You may be thinking, Gentlemen, that I take up a disproportionate amountof your time on such technical matters at these. But literature being anart (forgive the reiteration!) and therefore to be practised, I want usto be seeking all the time _how it is done_; to hunt out the principleson which the great artists wrought; to face, to rationalise, thedifficulties by which they were confronted, and learn how they overcamethe particular obstacle. Surely even for mere criticism, apart frompractice, we shall equip ourselves better by seeking, so far as we may, how the thing is done than by standing at gaze before this or thatmasterpiece and murmuring 'Isn't that beautiful! How in the world, now. .. !'

I am told that these lectures are criticised as tending to make youconceited: to encourage in you a belief that you can do things, when itwere better that you merely admired. Well I would not dishearten you bytelling to what a shred of conceit, even of hope, a man can be reducedafter twenty-odd years of the discipline. But I can, and do, affirm thatthe farther you penetrate in these discoveries the more sacred theultimate mystery will become for you: that the better you understand thegreat authors as exemplars of practice, the more certainly you willrealise what is the condescension of the gods. 

Next time, then, we will attempt an enquiry into the capital difficultyof Prose. 

LECTURE V. 

INTERLUDE: ON JARGON

Thursday, May 1

We parted, Gentlemen, upon a promise to discuss the capital difficulty ofProse, as we have discussed the capital difficulty of Verse. But, although we shall come to it, on second thoughts I ask leave to break theorder of my argument and to interpose some words upon a kind of writingwhich, from a superficial likeness, commonly passes for prose in thesedays, and by lazy folk is commonly written for prose, yet actually is notprose at all; my excuse being the simple practical one that, by firstclearing this sham prose out of the way, we shall the better deal withhonest prose when we come to it. The proper difficulties of prose willremain: but we shall be agreed in understanding what it is, or at anyrate what it is not, that we talk about. I remember to have heardsomewhere of a religious body in the United States of America which hadreason to suspect one of its churches of accepting Spiritual consolationfrom a coloured preacher--an offence against the laws of the Synod--anddespatched a Disciplinary Committee with power to act; and of theCommittee's returning to report itself unable to take any action underits terms of reference, for that while a person undoubtedly coloured hadundoubtedly occupied the pulpit and had audibly spoken from it in theCommittee's presence, the performance could be brought within nodefinition of preaching known or discoverable. So it is with thatinfirmity of speech--that flux, that determination of words to the mouth, or to the pen--which, though it be familiar to you in parliamentarydebates, in newspapers, and as the staple language of Blue Books, Committees, Official Reports, I take leave to introduce to you as prosewhich is not prose and under its real name of Jargon. 

You must not confuse this Jargon with what is called Journalese. The twooverlap, indeed, and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices. ButJargon finds, maybe, the most of its votaries among good douce people whohave never written to or for a newspaper in their life, who would nevertalk of 'adverse climatic conditions' when they mean 'bad weather'; whohave never trifled with verbs such as 'obsess, ' 'recrudesce, ' 'envisage, ''adumbrate, ' or with phrases such as 'the psychological moment, ' 'thetrue inwardness, ' 'it gives furiously to think. ' It dallies withLatinity--'sub silentio, ' 'de die in diem, ' 'cui bono?' (always in thesense, unsuspected by Cicero, of 'What is the profit?')--but not for thesake of style. Your journalist at the worst is an artist in his way: hedaubs paint of this kind upon the lily with a professional zeal; the moreflagrant (or, to use his own word, arresting) the pigment, the happier ishis soul. Like the Babu he is trying all the while to embellish our poorlanguage, to make it more floriferous, more poetical--like the Babu forexample who, reporting his mother's death, wrote, 'Regret to inform you, the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket. '

_There_ is metaphor: _there_ is ornament: _there_ is a sense of poetry, though as yet groping in a world unrealised. No such gusto marks--no suchzeal, artistic or professional, animates--the practitioners of Jargon, who are, most of them (I repeat), douce respectable persons. Caution isits father: the instinct to save everything and especially trouble: itsmother, Indolence. It looks precise, but it is not. It is, in thesetimes, _safe_: a thousand men have said it before and not one to yourknowledge had been prosecuted for it. And so, like respectability inChicago, Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst. It is becoming thelanguage of Parliament: it has become the medium through which Boards ofGovernment, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought and sovoice the reason of their being. 

Has a Minister to say 'No' in the House of Commons? Some men areconstitutionally incapable of saying no: but the Minister conveys itthus--'The answer to the question is in the negative. ' That means 'no. 'Can you discover it to mean anything less, or anything more except thatthe speaker is a pompous person?--which was no part of the informationdemanded. 

That is Jargon, and it happens to be accurate. But as a rule Jargon is byno means accurate, its method being to walk circumspectly around itstarget; and its faith, that having done so it has either hit thebull's-eye or at least achieved something equivalent, and safer. 

Thus the Clerk of a Board of Guardians will minute that--

 In the case of John Jenkins deceased the coffin provided was of the usual character. 

Now this is not accurate. 'In the case of John Jenkins deceased, ' forwhom a coffin was supplied, it is wholly superfluous to tell us that heis deceased. But actually John Jenkins never had more than one case, andthat was the coffin. The Clerk says he had two, --a coffin in a case: butI suspect the Clerk to be mistaken, and I am sure he errs in telling usthat the coffin was of the usual character: for coffins have nocharacter, usual or unusual. 

For another example (I shall not tell you whence derived)--

 In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first class [So you see the lucky fellow gets a case as well as a first-class. He might be a stuffed animal: perhaps he is] In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first class the class-list will show by some convenient mark (1) the Section or Sections for proficiency in which he is placed in the first class and (2) the Section or Sections (if any) in which he has passed with special distinction. 

'The Section or Sections (if any)'--But, how, if they are not any, couldthey be indicated by a mark however convenient?

 The Examiners will have regard to the style and method of the candidate's answers, and will give credit for excellence _in these respects_. 

Have you begun to detect the two main vices of Jargon? The first is thatit uses circumlocution rather than short straight speech. It says 'In thecase of John Jenkins deceased, the coffin' when it means 'John Jenkins'scoffin': and its yea is not yea, neither is its nay nay: but its answeris in the affirmative or in the negative, as the foolish and superfluous'case' may be. The second vice is that it habitually chooses vague woollyabstract nouns rather than concrete ones. I shall have something to sayby-and-by about the concrete noun, and how you should ever be strugglingfor it whether in prose or in verse. For the moment I content myself withadvising you, if you would write masculine English, never to forget theold tag of your Latin Grammar--

 Masculine will only be Things that you can touch and see. 

But since these lectures are meant to be a course in First Aid towriting, I will content myself with one or two extremely rough rules: yetI shall be disappointed if you do not find them serviceable. 

The first is:--Whenever in your reading you come across one of thesewords, _case, instance, character, nature, condition, persuasion, degree_--whenever in writing your pen betrays you to one or another ofthem--pull yourself up and take thought. If it be 'case' (I choose it asJargon's dearest child--'in Heaven yclept Metonomy') turn to thedictionary, if you will, and seek out what meaning can be derived from_casus_, its Latin ancestor: then try how, with a little trouble, you canextricate yourself from that case. The odds are, you will feel like abutterfly who has discarded his chrysalis. 

Here are some specimens to try your hand on--

 (1) All those tears which inundated Lord Hugh Cecil's head were dry in the case of Mr Harold Cox. 

Poor Mr Cox! left gasping in his aquarium!

 (2) [From a cigar-merchant] In any case, let us send you a case on approval. 

 (3) It is contended that Consols have fallen in consequence: but such is by no means the case. 

'Such, ' by the way, is another spoilt child of Jargon, especially inCommittee's Rules--'Co-opted members may be eligible as such; suchmembers to continue to serve for such time as'--and so on. 

 (4) Even in the purely Celtic areas, only in two or three cases do the Bishops bear Celtic names. 

For 'cases' read 'dioceses. '

 _Instance. _ In most instances the players were below their form. 

But what were they playing at? Instances?

 _Character--Nature. _ There can be no doubt that the accident was caused through the dangerous nature of the spot, the hidden character of the by-road, and the utter absence of any warning or danger signal. 

Mark the foggy wording of it all! And yet the man hit something and brokehis neck! Contrast that explanation with the verdict of a coroner's juryin the West of England on a drowned postman--'We find that deceased methis death by an act of God, caused by sudden overflowing of the riverWalkhan and helped out by the scandalous neglect of the way-wardens. '

 The Aintree course is notoriously of a trying nature. 

 On account of its light character, purity and age, Usher's whiskey is a whiskey that will agree with you. 

 _Order. _ The mésalliance was of a pronounced order. 

 _Condition. _ He was conveyed to his place of residence in an intoxicated condition. 

'He was carried home drunk. '

 _Quality and Section. _ Mr ----, exhibiting no less than five works, all of a superior quality, figures prominently in the oil section. 

This was written of an exhibition of pictures. 

 _Degree. _ A singular degree of rarity prevails in the earlier editions of this romance. 

That is Jargon. In prose it runs simply 'The earlier editions of thisromance are rare'--or 'are very rare'--or even (if you believe what I takeleave to doubt), 'are singularly rare'; which should mean that they arerarer than the editions of any other work in the world. 

Now what I ask you to consider about these quotations is that in each thewriter was using Jargon to shirk prose, palming off periphrases upon uswhen with a little trouble he could have gone straight to the point. 'Asingular degree of rarity prevails, ' 'the accident was caused through thedangerous nature of the spot, ' 'but such is by no means the case. ' We maynot be capable of much; but we can all write better than that, if we takea little trouble. In place of, 'the Aintree course is of a trying nature'we can surely say 'Aintree is a trying course' or 'the Aintree course isa trying one'--just that and nothing more. 

Next, having trained yourself to keep a look-out for these worstoffenders (and you will be surprised to find how quickly you get into theway of it), proceed to push your suspicions out among the whole cloudyhost of abstract terms. 'How excellent a thing is sleep, ' sighed SanchoPanza; 'it wraps a man round like a cloak'--an excellent example, by theway, of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that'among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing thehuman consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances mayperhaps be accounted not the least remarkable. ' How vile a thing--shallwe say?--is the abstract noun! It wraps a man's thoughts round likecotton wool. 

Here is a pretty little nest of specimens, found in "The Times" newspaperby Messrs. H. W. And F. G. Fowler, authors of that capital little book"The King's English":--

 One of the most important reforms mentioned in the rescript is the unification of the organisation of judicial institutions and the guarantee for all the tribunals of the independence necessary for securing to all classes of the community equality before the law. 

I do not dwell on the cacophony; but, to convey a straightforward pieceof news, might not the Editor of "The Times" as well employ a man towrite:--

 One of the most important reforms is that of the Courts, which need a uniform system and to be made independent. In this way only can men be assured that all are equal before the law. 

I think he might. 

A day or two ago the musical critic of the "Standard" wrote this:--

 MR LAMOND IN BEETHOVEN

 Mr Frederick Lamond, the Scottish pianist, as an interpreter of Beethoven has few rivals. At his second recital of the composer's works at Bechstein Hall on Saturday afternoon he again displayed a complete sympathy and understanding of his material that extracted the very essence of aesthetic and musical value from each selection he undertook. The delightful intimacy of his playing and his unusual force of individual expression are invaluable assets, which, allied to his technical brilliancy, enable him to achieve an artistic triumph. The two lengthy Variations in E flat major (Op. 35) and in D major, the latter on the Turkish March from 'The Ruins of Athens, ' when included in the same programme, require a master hand to provide continuity of interest. _To say that Mr Lamond successfully avoided moments that might at times, in these works, have inclined to comparative disinterestedness, would be but a moderate way of expressing the remarkable fascination with which his versatile playing endowed them_, but _at the same time_ two of the sonatas given included a similar form of composition, and no matter how intellectually brilliant may be the interpretation, the extravagant use of a certain mode is bound in time to become somewhat ineffective. In the Three Sonatas, the E major (Op. 109), the A major (Op. 2), No. 2, and the C minor (Op. 111), Mr Lamond signalised his perfect insight into the composer's varying moods. 

Will you not agree with me that here is no writing, here is no prose, here is not even English, but merely a flux of words to the pen?

Here again is a string, a concatenation--say, rather, a tiara--of gems ofpurest ray serene from the dark unfathomed caves of a Scottishnewspaper:--

 The Chinese viewpoint, as indicated in this letter, may not be without interest to your readers, because it evidently is suggestive of more than an academic attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, if allowed to materialise, might suddenly culminate in disaster resembling the Chang-Sha riots. It also ventures to illustrate incidents having their inception in recent premature endeavours to accelerate the development of Protestant missions in China; but we would hope for the sake of the interests involved that what my correspondent describes as 'the irresponsible ruffian element' may be known by their various religious designations only within very restricted areas. 

Well, the Chinese have given it up, poor fellows! and are asking theChristians--as to-day's newspapers inform us--to pray for them. Do youwonder? But that is, or was, the Chinese 'viewpoint, '--and what awillow-pattern viewpoint! Observe its delicacy. It does not venture tointerest or be interesting; merely 'to be not without interest. ' But itdoes 'venture to illustrate incidents'--which, for a viewpoint, is braveenough: and this illustration 'is suggestive of something more than anacademic attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, ifallowed to materialise, might suddenly culminate. ' What materialises? Theunpleasant aspect? or the things? Grammar says the 'things, ' 'thingswhich if allowed to materialise. ' But things are materialised already, and as a condition of their being things. It must be the aspect, then, that materialises. But, if so, it is also the aspect that culminates, andan aspect, however unpleasant, can hardly do that, or at worst cannotculminate in anything resembling the Chang-Sha riots. .. . I give it up. 

Let us turn to another trick of Jargon: the trick of Elegant Variation, so rampant in the Sporting Press that there, without needing to attendthese lectures, the Undergraduate detects it for laughter:--

 Hayward and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling; which apparently had no terrors for the Surrey crack. The old Oxonian, however, took some time in settling to work. .. . 

Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it. But why do you practise it inyour Essays? An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay onByron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nayexact, that Bryon shall be mentioned again and again. But myundergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on onepage is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in thesecond sentence turns into 'that great but unequal poet' andthenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus withProteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half-way down thepage he becomes 'the gloomy master of Newstead': overleaf he isreincarnated into 'the meteoric darling of society': and so proceedsthrough successive avatars--'this arch-rebel, ' 'the author of ChildeHarold, ' 'the apostle of scorn, ' 'the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormallysensitive of his club-foot, ' 'the martyr of Missolonghi, ' 'thepageant-monger of a bleeding heart. ' Now this again is Jargon. It doesnot, as most Jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes of timidity, which is worse. In literature as in life he makes himself felt who notonly calls a spade a spade but has the pluck to double spades andre-double. 

For another rule--just as rough and ready, but just as useful: Train yoursuspicions to bristle up whenever you come upon 'as regards, ' 'withregard to, ' 'in respect of, ' 'in connection with, ' 'according as towhether, ' and the like. They are all dodges of Jargon, circumlocutionsfor evading this or that simple statement: and I say that it is notenough to avoid them nine times out of ten, or nine-and-ninety times outof a hundred. You should never use them. That is positive enough, I hope?Though I cannot admire his style, I admire the man who wrote to me, 'ReTennyson--your remarks anent his "In Memoriam" make me sick': for thoughre is not a preposition of the first water, and 'anent' has enjoyed itsday, the finish crowned the work. But here are a few specimens far, veryfar, worse:--

 The special difficulty in Professor Minocelsi's case [our old friend 'case' again] arose _in connexion with_ the view he holds _relative to_ the historical value of the opening pages of Genesis. 

That is Jargon. In prose, even taking the miserable sentence as it standsconstructed, we should write 'the difficulty arose over the views heholds about the historical value, ' etc. 

From a popular novelist:--

 I was entirely indifferent _as to_ the results of the game, caring nothing at all _as to_ whether _I had losses or gains_--

Cut out the first 'as' in 'as to, ' and the second 'as to' altogether, andthe sentence begins to be prose--'I was indifferent to the results of thegame, caring nothing whether I had losses or gains. '

But why, like Dogberry, have 'had losses'? Why not simply 'lose. ' Let ustry again. 'I was entirely indifferent to the results of the game, caringnothing at all whether I won or lost. '

Still the sentence remains absurd: for the second clause but repeats thefirst without adding one jot. For if you care not at all whether you winor lose, you must be entirely indifferent to the results of the game. Sowhy not say 'I was careless if I won or lost, ' and have done with it?

 A man of simple and charming character, he was fitly _associated with_ the distinction of the Order of Merit. 

I take this gem with some others from a collection made three years ago, by the "Oxford Magazine"; and I hope you admire it as one beyond price. 'He was associated with the distinction of the Order of Merit' means 'hewas given the Order of Merit. ' If the members of that Order make asociety then he was associated with them; but you cannot associate a manwith a distinction. The inventor of such fine writing would doubtlesshave answered Canning's Needy Knife-grinder with:--

 I associate thee with sixpence! I will see thee in another association first!

But let us close our _florilegium_ and attempt to illustrate Jargon bythe converse method of taking a famous piece of English (say Hamlet'ssoliloquy) and remoulding a few lines of it in this fashion:--

 To be, or the contrary? Whether the former or the latter be preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion; the answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death; and with the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with the latter: so that in this connection it might be argued with regard to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to mention a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying nature. 

That is Jargon: and to write Jargon is to be perpetually shuffling aroundin the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms; to be for ever hearkening, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg exhorting you tocircumvent the difficulty, to beat the air because it is easier than toflesh your sword in the thing. The first virtue, the touchstone of amasculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write in the active voice, 'They gave him a silver teapot, ' youwrite as a man. When you write 'He was made the recipient of a silverteapot, ' you write jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store onthe concrete noun. Somebody--I think it was FitzGerald--once posited thequestion 'What would have become of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham hadhad the writing of the Parables?' Without pursuing that dreadful enquiryI ask you to note how carefully the Parables--those exquisite shortstories--speak only of 'things which you can touch and see'--'A sowerwent forth to sow, ' 'The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which awoman took, '--and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on the Mount andalmost every verse of the Gospel. The Gospel does not, like my youngessayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's'--not 'Render untoCaesar the things that appertain to that potentate. ' The Gospel does notsay 'Consider the growth of the lilies, ' or even 'Consider how the liliesgrow. ' It says, 'Consider the lilies, how they grow. '

Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English so constantlychooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase forcing you to touchand see. No writer so insistently teaches the general through theparticular. He does it even in "Venus and Adonis" (as Professor Wendell, of Harvard, pointed out in a brilliant little monograph on Shakespeare, published some ten years ago). Read any page of "Venus and Adonis" sideby side with any page of Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and you cannot butmark the contrast: in Shakespeare the definite, particular, visualisedimage, in Marlowe the beautiful generalisation, the abstract term, thething seen at a literary remove. Take the two openings, both of whichstart out with the sunrise. Marlowe begins:--

 Now had the Morn espied her lover's steeds: Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds, And, red for anger that he stay'd so long, All headlong throws herself the clouds among. 

Shakespeare wastes no words on Aurora and her feelings, but gets to hishero and to business without ado:--

 Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face--(You have the sun visualised at once), Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn. 

When Shakespeare has to describe a horse, mark how definite he is:--

 Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long, Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide, High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong; Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide. 

Or again, in a casual simile, how definite:--

 Upon this promise did he raise his chin, Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave, Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in. 

Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of Hero's first meetingLeander:--

 It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate. .. , and set against it Shakespeare's description of Venus' last meeting withAdonis, as she came on him lying in his blood:--

 Or as a snail whose tender horns being hit Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain, And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit, Long after fearing to creep forth again; So, at his bloody view--

I do not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to belovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. Butyou cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later onhe learned to pack into verse, such as:--

 Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care. 

Is it unfair to instance Marlowe, who died young? Then let us takeWebster for the comparison; Webster, a man of genius or of something verylike it, and commonly praised by the critics for his mastery overdefinite, detailed, and what I may call _solidified sensation_. Let ustake this admired passage from his "Duchess of Malfy":--

 _Ferdinand. _ How doth our sister Duchess bear herself In her imprisonment?

 _Basola. _ Nobly: I'll describe her. She's sad as one long used to 't, and she seems Rather to welcome the end of misery Than shun it: a behaviour so noble As gives a majesty to adversity(Note the abstract terms. ) You may discern the shape of loveliness More perfect in her tears than in her smiles; She will muse for hours together; and her silence(Here we first come on the concrete: and beautiful it is. ) Methinks expresseth more than if she spake. 

Now set against this the well-known passage from "Twelfth Night" wherethe Duke asks and Viola answers a question about someone unknown to himand invented by her--a mere phantasm, in short: yet note how much moredefinite is the language:--

_Viola. _ My father had a daughter lov'd a man; As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, _I_ should your lordship. 

_Duke. _ And what's her history?

_Viola. _ A blank, my lord. She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like Patience on a monument Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when Shakespeare _has_to use the abstract noun 'concealment, ' on an instant it turns into avisible worm 'feeding' on the visible rose; how, having to use a secondabstract word 'patience, ' at once he solidifies it in tangible stone. 

Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who havewritten learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim--to prefer theconcrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, thedefinite to the vague--as a canon of rhetoric. Whately has much to say onit. The late Mr E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke(prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens toscholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim bysetting a passage from Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America"alongside a passage of like purport from Lord Brougham's "Inquiry intothe Policy of the European Powers. " Here is the deadly parallel:--

BURKE. 

 In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern Ægypt and Arabia and Curdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders. 

BROUGHAM. 

 In all the despotisms of the East, it has been observed that the further any part of the empire is removed from the capital, the more do its inhabitants enjoy some sort of rights and privileges: the more inefficacious is the power of the monarch; and the more feeble and easily decayed is the organisation of the government. 

You perceive that Brougham has transferred Burke's thought to his ownpage: but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke'svivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold onthe mind?

'This particularising style, ' comments Mr Payne, 'is the essence ofPoetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy itproduces. Brougham's passage is excellent in its way: but it pales beforethe flashing lights of Burke's sentences. The best instances of thisenergy of style, he adds, are to be found in the classical writers of theseventeenth century. 'When South says, "An Aristotle was but the rubbishof an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise, " he communicatesmore effectually the notion of the difference between the intellect offallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermonsput together. '

You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this passage isexpounding trash; but you will agree with Mr Payne and me that he utteredit vividly. 

Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of writing, apassage from Dr John Donne far beyond and above anything that ever laywithin South's compass:--

 The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirle-wind hath blown the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not say _This is Iesabel_; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it should be; but they shall not say, they shall not know, _This is Iesabel. _

Carlyle noted of Goethe, 'his emblematic intellect, his never-failingtendency to transform into _shape_, into _life_, the feeling that maydwell in him. Everything has form, has visual excellence: the poet'simagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, and his pen turnsthem into shape. '

Perpend this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will not hereafter set it down tomy reproach that I wasted an hour of a May morning in a denunciation ofJargon, and in exhorting you upon a technical matter at first sight sotrivial as the choice between abstract and definite words. 

A lesson about writing your language may go deeper than language; forlanguage (as in a former lecture I tried to preach to you) is yourreason, your [Greek: logos]. So long as you prefer abstract words, whichexpress other men's summarised concepts of things, to concrete ones whichas near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-handmaterial for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers atsecond-hand. If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if not yourwhole character, will almost certainly correspond. Where your mind shouldgo straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with afair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade orcircumvent. For the Style is the Man, and where a man's treasure is therehis heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also. 

LECTURE VI. 

ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF PROSE

Thursday, May 15

To-day, Gentlemen, leaving the Vanity Fair of Jargon behind us, we haveto essay a difficult country; of which, though fairly confident of hiscompass-bearings, your guide confesses, that wide tracts lie outside hisknowledge--outside of anything that can properly be called his knowledge. I feel indeed somewhat as Gideon must have felt when he divided his hoston the slopes of Mount Gilead, warning back all who were afraid. Inasking the remnant to follow as attentively as they can, I promise onlythat, if Heaven carry us safely across, we shall have 'broken the back'of the desert. 

In my last lecture but one, then, --and before our small interlude withJargon--the argument had carried us, more or less neatly, up to thispoint: that the capital difficulty of verse consisted in saying ordinaryunemotional things, of bridging the flat intervals between high moments. This point, I believe, we made effectively enough. 

Now, for logical neatness, we should be able to oppose a correspondingpoint, that the capital difficulty of prose consists in sayingextraordinary things, in running it up from its proper level to thesehigh emotional, musical, moments. And mightily convenient that would be, Gentlemen, if I were here to help you to answer scientific questionsabout prose and verse instead of helping you, in what small degree I can, to write. But in Literature (which, let me remind you yet once again, isan art) you cannot classify as in a science. 

Pray attend while I impress on you this most necessary warning. Instudying literature, and still more in studying to write it, distrust allclassification! All classifying of literature intrudes 'science' upon anart, and is artificially 'scientific'; a trick of pedants, that they maymake it the easier to examine you on things with which no man should haveany earthly concern, as I am sure he will never have a heavenly one. Beetles, minerals, gases, may be classified; and to have them classifiedis not only convenient but a genuine advance of knowledge. But if you hadto _make_ a beetle, as men are making poetry, how much wouldclassification help? To classify in a science is necessary for thepurpose of that science: to classify when you come to art is at the bestan expedient, useful to some critics and to a multitude of examiners. Itserves the art-critic to talk about Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite, schools of painting. The expressions are handy, and we know more or lesswhat they intend. Just so handily it may serve us to talk about'Renaissance poets, ' 'the Elizabethans, ' 'the Augustan age. ' But suchterms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examplesthe terms 'inorganic, ' 'mammal, ' 'univalve, ' 'Old Red Sandstone' arescientific, precise, determinate. An animal is either a mammal or it isnot: you cannot say as assuredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan. We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the greatest of Elizabethans, though as a fact he wrote his most famous plays when Elizabeth was dead. Shirley was but seven years old when Elizabeth died; yet (if'Elizabethan' have any meaning but a chronological one) Shirley belongsto the Elizabethan firmament, albeit but as a pale star low on thehorizon: whereas Donne--a post-Elizabethan if ever there was one--had by1603 reached his thirtieth year and written almost every line of thosewonderful lyrics which for a good sixty years gave the dominant note toJacobean and Caroline poetry. 

In treating of an art we classify for handiness, not for purposes ofexact knowledge; and man (_improbus homo_) with his wicked inventions isfor ever making fools of our formulae. Be consoled--and, if you are wise, thank Heaven--that genius uses our best-laid logic to explode it. 

Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after deciding the capitaldifficulty of prose to lie in saying extraordinary things, in running upto the high emotional moments, the prose-writers explode and blow ouradmirable conclusions to ruins. 

You see, we gave them the chance to astonish us when we defined prose as'a record of human thought, dispensing with metre and using rhythmlaxly. ' When you give genius leave to use something laxly, at its will, genius will pretty surely get the better of you. 

Observe, now, following the story of English prose, what has happened. Its difficulty--the inherent, the native disability of prose--is tohandle the high emotional moments which more properly belong to verse. Well, we strike into the line of our prose-writers, say as early asMalory. We come on this; of the Passing of Arthur:--

 'My time hieth fast, ' said the king. Therefore said Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, 'Take thou Excalibur my good sword, and go with it to yonder water side; and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that water and come again and tell me what there thou seest. ' 'My lord, ' said Bedivere, 'Your commandment shall be done; and lightly bring you word again. ' So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the way he beheld that noble sword, that the pommel and the haft was all of precious stones, and then he said to himself, 'If I throw this rich sword in the water, thereof shall never come good, but harm and loss. ' And then Sir Bedivere hid Excaliber under a tree. And so, as soon as he might, he came again unto the king, and said he had been at the water and had thrown the sword into the water, 'What saw thou there?' said the king, 'Sir, ' he said, 'I saw nothing but waves and winds. '

Now I might say a dozen things of this and of the whole passage thatfollows, down to Arthur's last words. Specially might I speak to you ofthe music of its monosyllables--'"What sawest you there?" said the king. .. "Do as well as thou mayest; for in me is no trust for to trust in. For Iwill into the Vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous wound. And ifthou hear never more of me, pray for my soul. "' But, before makingcomment at all, I shall quote you another passage; this from LordBerners' translation of Froissart, of the death of Robert Bruce:--

 It fortuned that King Robert of Scotland was right sore aged and feeble: for he was greatly charged with the great sickness, so that there was no way for him but death. And when he felt that his end drew near, he sent for such barons and lords of his realm as he trusted best, and shewed them how there was no remedy with him, but he must needs leave this transitory life. .. . Then he called to him the gentle knight, Sir William Douglas, and said before all the lords, 'Sir William, my dear friend, ye know well that I have had much ado in my days to uphold and sustain the right of this realm; and when I had most ado I made a solemn vow, the which as yet I have not accomplished, whereof I am right sorry; the which was, if I might achieve and make an end of all my wars, so that I might once have brought this realm in rest and peace, then I promised in my mind to have gone and warred on Christ's enemies, adversaries to our holy Christian faith. To this purpose mine heart hath ever intended, but our Lord would not consent thereto. .. And sith it is so that my body can not go, nor achieve that my heart desireth, I will send the heart instead of the body, to accomplish mine avow. .. I will, that as soon as I am trespassed out of this world, that ye take my heart out of my body, and embalm it, and take of my treasure as ye shall think sufficient for that enterprise, both for yourself and such company as ye will take with you, and present my heart to the Holy Sepulchre, whereas our Lord lay, seeing my body can not come there. And take with you such company and purveyance as shall be appertaining to your estate. And, wheresoever ye come, let it be known how ye carry with you the heart of King Robert of Scotland, at his instance and desire to be presented to the Holy Sepulchre. ' Then all the lords, that heard these words, wept for pity. 

There, in the fifteenth century and early in the sixteenth, you haveMalory and Berners writing beautiful English prose; prose the emotion ofwhich (I dare to say) you must recognise if you have ears to hear. So yousee that already our English prose not only achieves the 'high moment, 'but seems to obey it rather and be lifted by it, until we ask ourselves, 'Who could help writing nobly, having to tell how King Arthur died or howthe Bruce?' Yes, but I bid you observe that Malory and Berners are bothrelating what, however noble, is quite simple, quite straightforward. Itis when prose attempts to _philosophise_, to _express thoughts_ as wellas to relate simple sayings and doings--it is then that the troublebegins. When Malory has to philosophise death, to _think_ about it, thisis as far as he attains:--

 'Ah, Sir Lancelot, ' said he, 'thou wert head of all Christian Knights! And now I dare say, ' said Sir Ector, 'that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, thou were never matched of none earthly hands; and thou were the curtiest knight that ever bare shield: and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever strood horse, and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strooke with sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and gentlest that ever sat in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest Knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest. '

Beautiful again, I grant! But note you that, eloquent as he can be on thevirtues of his dead friend, when Sir Ector comes to the thought of deathitself all he can accomplish is, 'And now I dare say that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest. '

Let us make a leap in time and contrast this with Tyndale and thetranslators of our Bible, how they are able to make St Paul speak ofdeath:--

 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

There you have something clean beyond what Malory or Berners couldcompass: there you have a different kind of high moment--a high moment ofphilosophising: there you have emotion impregnated with thought. It wasnecessary that our English verse even after Chaucer, our English proseafter Malory and Berners, should overcome this most difficult gap (whichstands for a real intellectual difference) if it aspired to be whatto-day it is--a language of the first class, comparable with Greek andcertainly no whit inferior to Latin or French. 

 * * * * *

Let us leave prose for a moment, and see how Verse threw its bridge overthe gap. If you would hear the note of Chaucer at its deepest, you willfind it in the famous exquisite lines of the Prioress' Prologue:--

 O moder mayde! O maydë moder fre! O bush unbrent, brenning in Moyses' sight!

in the complaint of Troilus, in the rapture of Griselda restored to herchildren:--

 O tendre, O dere, O yongë children myne, Your woful moder wendë stedfastly That cruel houndës or some foul vermyne Hadde eten you; but God of his mercy And your benignë fader tendrely Hath doon you kept. .. 

You will find a note quite as sincere in many a carol, many a ballad, ofthat time:--

 He came al so still There his mother was, As dew in April That falleth on the grass. 

 He came al so still To his mother's bour, As dew in April That falleth on the flour. 

 He came al so still There his mother lay, As dew in April That falleth on the spray. 

 Mother and maiden Was never none but she; Well may such a lady Goddes mother be. 

You get the most emotional note of the Ballad in such a stanzaas this, from "The Nut-Brown Maid":--

 Though it be sung of old and young That I should be to blame, Their's be the charge that speak so large In hurting of my name; For I will prove that faithful love It is devoid of shame; In your distress and heaviness To part with you the same: And sure all tho that do not so True lovers are they none: For, in my mind, of all mankind I love but you alone. 

All these notes, again, you will admit to be exquisite: but they gushstraight from the unsophisticated heart: they are nowise deep save ininnocent emotion: they are not _thoughtful_. So when Barbour breaks outin praise of Freedom, he cries

 A! Fredome is a noble thing!

And that is really as far as he gets. He goes on

 Fredome mayse man to hafe liking. 

(Freedom makes man to choose what he likes; that is, makes him free)

 Fredome all solace to man giffis, He livis at ese that frely livis! A noble hart may haif nane ese, Na ellys nocht that may him plese, Gif fredome fail'th: for fre liking Is yharnit ouer all othir thing. .. 

--and so on for many lines; all saying the same thing, that man yearnsfor Freedom and is glad when he gets it, because then he is free; allhammering out the same observed fact, but all knocking vainly on the doorof thought, which never opens to explain what Freedom _is_. 

Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and 'taking off' from theNut-Brown Maid's artless confession, in my mind, of all mankind I love but you alone, let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare's--

 Thy bosom is endearéd with all hearts Which I by lacking have supposéd dead: And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts, And all those friends which I thought buriéd. How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye As interest of the dead!--which now appear But things removed, that hidden in thee lie. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give; That due of many now is mine alone: Their images I loved I view in thee, And thou, all they, hast all the all of me. 

What a new way of talking about love! Not a happier way--there is less ofheart's-ease in these doubts, delicacies, subtleties--but how much morethoughtful! How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten of the tree of knowledge!

Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this for English Verse: andShakespeare was a miracle which I cheerfully leave others to rationalisefor you, having, for my own part and so far as I have fared in life, found more profit in a capacity for simple wonder. 

But I can tell you how the path was made straight to that miracle. Theshock of the New Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed men'seyes--unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular--to discover aliterature, and the finest in the world, which _habitually philosophisedlife_: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talkreported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knottychapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking _Why?_'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What is his purpose?his destiny?' 'How stands he towards those unseen powers--call them thegods, or whatever you will--that guide and thwart, provoke, madden, control him so mysteriously?' 'What are these things we call good andevil, life, love, death?'

These are questions which, once raised, haunt Man until he finds ananswer--some sort of answer to satisfy him. Englishmen, hitherto contentwith the Church's answers but now aware of this great literature whichanswered so differently--and having other reasons to suspect what theChurch said and did--grew aware that their literature had been as a childat play. It had never philosophised good and evil, life, love or death:it had no literary forms for doing this; it had not even the vocabulary. So our ancestors saw that to catch up their lee-way--to make their reportworthy of this wonderful, alluring discovery--new literary forms had tobe invented--new, that is, in English: the sonnet, the drama, the versein which the actors were to declaim, the essay, the invented tale. Then, for the vocabulary, obviously our fathers had either to go to Greek, which had invented the A. B. C. Of philosophising; or to seek in the otherlanguages which were already ahead of English in adapting that alphabet;or to give our English Words new contents, new connotations, newmeanings; or lastly, to do all three together. 

Well, it was done; and in verse very fortunately done; thanks of courseto many men, but thanks to two especially--to Sir Thomas Wyat, who ledour poets to Italy, to study and adopt the forms in which Italy had castits classical heritage; and to Marlowe, who impressed blank verse uponthe drama. Of Marlowe I shall say nothing; for with what he achieved youare familiar enough. Of Wyat I may speak at length to you, one of thesedays; but here, to prepare you for what I hope to prove--that Wyat is oneof the heroes of our literature--I will give you three brief reasons whywe should honour his memory:--

(1) He led the way. On the value of that service I shall content myselfwith quoting a passage from Newman:--

 When a language has been cultivated in any particular department of thought, and so far as it has been generally perfected, an existing want has been supplied, and there is no need for further workmen. In its earliest times, while it is yet unformed, to write in it at all is almost a work of genius. It is like crossing a country before roads are made communicating between place and place. The authors of that age deserve to be Classics both because of what they do and because they can do it. It requires the courage and force of great talent to compose in the language at all; and the composition, when effected, makes a permanent impression on it. 

This Wyat did. He was a pioneer and opened up a new country toEnglishmen. But he did more. 

(2) Secondly, he had the instinct to perceive that the lyric, if it wouldphilosophise life, love, and the rest, must boldly introduce the personalnote: since in fact when man asks questions about his fortune or destinyhe asks them most effectively in the first person. 'What am _I_ doing?Why are _we_ mortal? Why do _I_ love _thee_?'

This again Wyat did: and again he did more. 

For (3) thirdly--and because of this I am surest of his genius--again andagain, using new thoughts in unfamiliar forms, he wrought out the resultin language so direct, economical, natural, easy, that I know to this dayno one who can better Wyat's best in combining straight speech withmelodious cadence. Take the lines _Is it possible?_--

 Is it possible? For to turn so oft; To bring that lowest that was most aloft: And to fall highest, yet to light soft? Is it possible?

 All is possible! Whoso list believe; Trust therefore first, and after preve; As men wed ladies by licence and leave, All is possible!

or again--

 Forget not! O forget not this!-- How long ago hath been, and is, The mind that never meant amiss: Forget not yet!

or again (can personal note go straighter?)--

 And wilt thou leave me thus? Say nay, say nay, for shame! To save thee from the blame --Of all my grief and grame. And wilt thou leave me thus? Say nay! say nay!

(Say 'nay, ' say 'nay'; and don't say, 'the answer is in the negative. ')

No: I have yet to mention the straightest, most natural of them all, andwill read it to you in full--

 What should I say? Since Faith is dead And Truth away From you is fled? Should I be led With doubleness? Nay! nay! mistress. 

 I promised you And you promised me To be as true As I would be: But since I see Your double heart, Farewell my part!

 Thought for to take Is not my mind; But to forsake One so unkind; And as I find, So will I trust, Farewell, unjust!

 Can ye say nay But that you said That I alway Should be obeyed? And--thus betrayed Or that I wist! Farewell, unkist!

I observe it noted on p. 169 of Volume iii of "The Cambridge History ofEnglish Literature" that Wyat 'was a pioneer and perfection was not to beexpected of him. He has been described as a man stumbling over obstacles, continually falling but always pressing forward. ' I know not to whatwiseacre we owe that pronouncement: but what do you think of it, afterthe lyric I have just quoted? I observe, further, on p. 23 of the samevolume of the same work, that the Rev. T. M. Lindsay, D. D. , Principal ofthe Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland, informs us ofWilson's "Arte of Rhetorique" that

 there is little or no originality in the volume, save, perhaps, the author's condemnation of the use of French and Italian phrases and idioms, which he complains are 'counterfeiting the kinges Englishe. ' The warnings of Wilson will not seem untimely if to be remembered that the earlier English poets of the period--Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and the Earl of Surrey--drew their inspiration from Petrarch and Ariosto, that their earlier attempts at poetry were translations from Italian sonnets, and that their maturer efforts were imitations of the sweet and stately measures and style of Italian poesie. The polish which men like Wyatt and Surrey were praised for giving to our 'rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie' might have led to some degeneration. 

Might it, indeed? As another Dominie would have said, 'Pro-digious. '

 (Thought for to take Is not my mind; But to forsake

This Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church ofScotland--

 Farewell unkiss'd!)

But I have lingered too long with this favourite poet of mine and leftmyself room only to hand you the thread by following which you will cometo the melodious philosophising of Shakespeare's Sonnets--

 Let me not to the marriage of true Minds Admit impediment. Love is not love Which alters where it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. 

Note the Latin words 'impediment, ' 'alteration, ' 'remove. ' We are usingthe language of philosophy here or, rather, the 'universal language, 'which had taken over the legacy of Greek. You may trace the use of itgrowing as, for example, you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books:and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare the miracle. 

The education of Prose was more difficult, and went through more violentconvulsions. I suppose that the most of us--if, after reading a quantityof Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain truth, undauntedby the name of a great epoch--would confess to finding the mass of itclotted in sense as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment almostintolerable after the simple melodious clarity of Malory and Berners. I, at any rate, must own that the most of Elizabethan prose pleases melittle; and I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of such stuffas disgraced the already disgraceful Martin Marprelate Controversy, butof such as a really ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe couldwrite at his average. For a sample:--

 English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as 'Blood is a beggar' and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches. .. . Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if's and and's, and others, while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the French _Doudie_, where they attract more infection in one minute than they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any authors of like argument. 

This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficultiesour prose had to encounter and overcome. But no one would seriouslypropose it as a model for those who would write well, which is ourpresent business. I have called it 'clotted. ' It is, to use a word of thetime, 'farced' with conceits; it needs straining. 

Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to saysomething: that is, to _make_ something. It is not, like modern Jargon, trying to dodge something. English prose, in short, just here is passingthrough a period of puberty, of green sickness: and, looking at ithistorically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with thestature of the grown man to be. 

These throes tear it every way. On the one hand we have Ascham, pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue(yet with a sure instinct he does it):--

 If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him, that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write. .. And as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary, everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling, that no man can do worse. 

On the other hand you have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks andpoises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived twohundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance;Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day. 

For all these writers were alive: and I tell you it is an inspiritingthing to be alive and trying to write English. All these authors werealive and trying to _do_ something. Unconsciously for the most part theywere striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find arhythm for its periods. 

And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too therebefel a miracle. 

You will not ask me 'What miracle?' I mean, of course, the AuthorisedVersion of the Bible. 

I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the Authorised Version was madestraight by previous translators, notably by William Tyndale. I grant youthat Tyndale was a man of genius, and Wyclif before him a man of genius. I grant you that the forty-seven men who produced the Authorised Versionworked in the main upon Tyndale's version, taking that for their basis. Nay, if you choose to say that Tyndale was a miracle in himself, Icheerfully grant you that as well. But, in a lecture one must notmultiply miracles _praeter necessitatem_; and when Tyndale has beengranted you have yet to face the miracle that forty-seven men--not one ofthem known, outside of this performance, for any superlative talent--satin committee and almost consistently, over a vast extent ofwork--improved upon what Genius had done. I give you the word of an oldcommittee-man that this is not the way of committees--that only bymiracle is it the way of any committee. Doubtless the forty-seven wereall good men and godly: but doubtless also good and godly were the Deanand Chapter who dealt with Alfred Steven's tomb of the Duke of Wellingtonin St Paul's Cathedral; and you know what _they_ did. Individual geniussuch as Tyndale's or even Shakespeare's, though we cannot explain it, wemay admit as occurring somehow, and not incredibly, in the course ofnature. But that a large committee of forty-seven should have gonesteadily through the great mass of Holy Writ, seldom interfering withgenius, yet, when interfering, seldom missing to improve: that acommittee of forty-seven should have captured (or even, let us say, should have retained and improved) a rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its manymouths: that, Gentlemen, is a wonder before which I can only stand humbleand aghast. 

Does it or does it not strike you as queer that the people who set you'courses of study' in English Literature never include the AuthorisedVersion, which not only intrinsically but historically is out and awaythe greatest book of English Prose. Perhaps they can pay you the silentcompliment of supposing that you are perfectly acquainted with it?. .. Iwonder. It seems as if they thought the Martin Marprelate Controversy, for example, more important somehow. 

 'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality. .. '

 'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned. '

 'The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of wrought gold. '

 'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off. '

 'And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. '

When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, those rhythms for itsdearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. Just there I findthe effective miracle, making the blind to see, the lame to leap. Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. TheAuthorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our nationalstyle, thinking and speaking. It has cadences homely and sublime, yet soharmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men--holy and humblemen of heart like Isaak Walton or Bunyan--have their lips touched andspeak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars, --Milton, Sir ThomasBrowne--practice the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms of ourBible they, too, fall back. 'The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. ' 'Acquaint thyself with theChoragium of the stars. ' 'There is nothing immortal but immortality. ' Theprecise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenlyclarity: the two parts of Johnson's antithesis come to no more than this'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trumpour Lord has gone up. ' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely asit haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is ineverything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood. 

What madman, then, will say 'Thus or thus far shalt thou go' to a prosethus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years, working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine itsrange, whether of thought or of music? You have received it byinheritance, Gentlemen: it is yours, freely yours--to direct your wordsthrough life as well as your hearts. 

LECTURE VII

SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED

Thursday, May 29

Let me begin to-day, Gentlemen, with a footnote to my last lecture. Itended, as you may remember, upon an earnest appeal to you, if you wouldwrite good English, to study the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; tolearn from it, moreover, how by mastering _rhythm_, our Prose overcamethe capital difficulty of Prose and attuned itself to rival its twininstrument, Verse; compassing almost equally with Verse man's thoughthowever sublime, his emotion however profound. 

Now in the course of my remarks I happened--maybe a littleincautiously--to call the Authorised Version a 'miracle'; using thatword in a colloquial sense, in which no doubt you accepted it; meaningno more than that the thing passed my understanding. I have allowed thatthe famous forty-seven owed an immense deal to earlier translators--tothe Bishops, to Tyndale, to the Wyclif Version, as themselves allowed iteagerly in their preface:--

 Truly (good Christian reader) wee never thought from the beginning that we should needs to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one . .. But to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against: that hath bene our indeavour, that our marke. 

(See [Footnote 1] at the end of this lecture. )

Nevertheless the Authorised Version astounds me, as I believe it willastound you when you compare it with earlier translations. Aristotle (ithas been said) invented Chance to cover the astonishing fact that therewere certain phenomena for which he found himself wholly unable toaccount. Just so, if one may compare very small things with very great, Ispoke of the Authorised Version as a 'miracle. ' It was, it remains, marvellous to me. 

Should these deciduous discourses ever come to be pressed within theleaves of a book, I believe their general meaning will be as clear toreaders as I hope it is to you who give me so much pleasure by pursuingthem--almost (shall I say?) like Wordsworth's Kitten with those otherfalling leaves:--

 That almost I could repine That your transports are not mine. 

But meanwhile certain writers in the newspapers are assuming that by thisword 'miracle' I meant to suggest to you a something like plenaryinspiration at once supernatural and so authoritative that it weresacrilege now to alter their text by one jot or tittle. 

Believe me, I intended nothing of the sort: for that, in my plainopinion, would be to make a fetish of the book. One of these days I hopeto discuss with you what inspiration is: with what accuracy--with whatmeaning, if any--we can say of a poet that he is inspired; questionswhich have puzzled many wise men from Plato downwards. 

But certainly I never dreamt of claiming plenary inspiration for theforty-seven. Nay, if you will have it, they now and again wrote starknonsense. Remember that I used this very same word 'miracle' ofShakespeare, meaning again that the total Shakespeare quite outpasses mycomprehension; yet Shakespeare, too, on occasion talks stark nonsense, orat any rate stark bombast. He never blotted a line--'I would he hadblotted a thousand' says Ben Jonson: and Ben Jonson was right. Shakespeare could have blotted out two or three thousand lines: he wasgreat enough to afford it. Somewhere Matthew Arnold supposes us aschallenging Shakespeare over this and that weak or bombastic passage, andShakespeare answering with his tolerant smile, that no doubt we wereright, but after all, 'Did it greatly matter?'

So we offer no real derogation to the forty-seven in asserting that hereand there they wrote nonsense. They could afford it. But we do stultifycriticism if, adoring the grand total of wisdom and beauty, we prostrateourselves indiscriminately before what is good and what is bad, what issublime sense and what is nonsense, and forbid any reviser to put forth ahand to the ark. 

The most of us Christians go to church on Christmas Day, and there welisten to this from Isaiah, chapter ix, verses 1-7:--

 Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation, when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and afterwards did more grievously afflict her by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations. 

 The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. 

 Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. 

 For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian. 

 For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood: but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire. 

 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. 

The forty-seven keep their majestic rhythm. But have you ever, sitting inchurch on a Christmas morning, asked yourself what it all means, or if itmean anything more than a sing-song according somehow with the holly andivy around the pillars? _'Thou hast multiplied the nation, and notincreased the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy inharvest, '_ But why--if the joy be not increased? _'For every battle ofthe warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood: butthis shall be with burning and fuel of fire. '_ Granted the rhythmicalantithesis, where is the real antithesis, the difference, theimprovement? If a battle there must be, how is burning better thangarments rolled in blood? And, in fine, what is it all about? Now let usturn to the Revised Version:--

 But there shall be no gloom to her that was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time hath he made it glorious, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the nations. 

 The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. Thou hast multiplied the nation, thou hast increased their joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. 

 For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as in the day of Midian. 

 For all the armour of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled in blood, shall even be for burning, for fuel of fire. 

 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 

I say (knowing no Hebrew, merely assuming our Revisers to be at least noworse scholars than the forty-seven) that here, with the old cadenceskept so far as possible, we are given sense in place of nonsense: and Iask you to come to the Revised Version with a fair mind. I myself came toit with some prejudice; in complete ignorance of Hebrew, and with no morethan the usual amount of Hellenistic Greek. I grant at once that theRevised New Testament was a literary fiasco; largely due (if gossip maybe trusted) to trouble with the Greek Aorist, and an unwise decision--inmy opinion the most gratuitously unwise a translator can take--to use oneand the same English word, always and in every connotation, asrepresenting one and the same Greek word: for in any two languages fewwords are precisely equivalent. A fiasco at any rate the Revised NewTestament was, deserving in a dozen ways and in a thousand passages thescorn which Professor Saintsbury has recently heaped on it. But I protestagainst the injustice of treating the two Revisions--of the New Testamentand of the Old--as a single work, and saddling the whole with the sins ofa part. For two years I spent half-an-hour daily in reading theAuthorised and Revised Versions side by side, marking as I went, and inthis way worked through the whole--Old Testament, Apocrypha, NewTestament. I came to it (as I have said) with some prejudice; but Iclosed the books on a conviction, which my notes sustain for me, that theRevisers of the Old Testament performed their task delicately, scrupulously, on the whole with great good judgment; that the critic doesa wrong who brings them under his indiscriminate censure; that on thewhole they have clarified the sense of the Authorised Version whilerespecting its consecrated rhythms; and that--to name an example, thatyou may test my words and judge for yourselves--the solemn splendour ofthat most wonderful poem, the story of Job, [Greek: dialampei], 'shinesthrough' the new translation as it never shone through the old. 

 * * * * *

And now Gentlemen (as George Herbert said on a famous occasion), let ustune our instruments. 

Before discussing with you another and highly important question of stylein writing, I will ask you to look back for a few moments on the road wehave travelled. 

We have agreed that our writing should be _appropriate_: that it shouldfit the occasion; that it should rise and fall with the subject, be gravewhere that is serious, where it is light not afraid of what Stevenson in"The Wrong Box" calls 'a little judicious levity. ' If your writingobserve these precepts, it will be well-mannered writing. 

To be sure, much in addition will depend on yourself--on what you are orhave made yourself, since in writing the style can never be separatedfrom the man. But neither can it in the practice of virtue: yet, thoughmen differ in character, I do not observe that moralists forbear fromlaying down general rules of excellence. Now if you will recall ourfurther conclusion, that writing to be good must be persuasive (sincepersuasion is the only true intellectual process), and will test this bya passage of Newman's I am presently to quote to you, from his famous'definition of a gentleman, ' I think you will guess pretty accurately thegeneral law of excellence I would have you, as Cambridge men, triballyand particularly obey. 

Newman says of a gentleman that among other things:

 He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. .. . If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better perhaps, but less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they found it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion: but he is too clear-sighted to be unjust. He is simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive. 

Enough for the moment on this subject: but commit these words to yourhearts, and you will not only triumph in newspaper controversy. You willdo better: you will avoid it. 

To proceed. --We found further that our writing should be _accurate_:because language expresses thought--is, indeed, the only expression ofthought--and if we lack the skill to speak precisely, our thought willremain confused, ill-defined. The editor of a mining paper in Denver, U. S. A. , boldly the other day laid down this law, that niceties oflanguage were mere 'frills': all a man needed was to 'get there, ' thatis, to say what he wished in his own way. But just here, we found, liesthe mischief. You will not get there by hammering away on your ownuntutored impulse. You must first be your own reader, chiselling out thethought definitely for yourself: and, after that, must carve out theintaglio yet more sharply and neatly, if you would impress its imageaccurately upon the wax of other men's minds. We found that even for Menof Science this neat clean carving of words was a very necessaryaccomplishment. As Sir James Barrie once observed, 'The Man of Scienceappears to be the only man who has something to say, just now--and theonly man who does not know how to say it. ' But the trouble by no meansends with Science. Our poets--those gifted strangely prehensile men who, as I said in my first lecture, seem to be born with filaments by whichthey apprehend, and along which they conduct, the half-secrets of life tous ordinary mortals--our poets would appear to be scamping artisticlabour, neglecting to reduce the vague impressions to the clearly cutimage which is, after all, what helps. It may be a triumph that they havetaught modern French poetry to be suggestive. I think it would be moreprofitable could they learn from France--that nation of fine workmen--tobe definite. 

But about 'getting there'--I ask you to remember Wolfe, with the seal ofhis fate on him, stepping into his bateau on the dark St. Lawrence Riverand quoting as they tided him over:--

 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike th' inevitable hour; The paths of glory lead but to the grave. 

'I had rather have written those lines, ' said Wolfe, 'than conquerCanada. ' That is how our forefathers valued noble writing. The Denvereditor holds that you may write as you please so long as you get there. Well, Wolfe got there: and so, in Wolfe's opinion, did Gray: but perhapsto Wolfe and Gray, and to the Denver editor, 'there' happened to mean twodifferent places. Wolfe got to the Heights of Abraham. 

Further, it was against this loose adaptation of words to thought and tothings that we protested in our interpolated lecture on Jargon, which isnot so much bad writing as the avoidance of writing. The man who employsJargon does not get 'there' at all, even in a raw rough pioneeringfashion: he just walks around 'there' in the ambient tracks of others. Let me fly as high as I can and quote you two recent achievements byCabinet Ministers, as reported in the Press:--(1) 'Mr McKenna's reasonsfor releasing from Holloway Prison Miss Lenton while on remand charged_in connexion with_ (sweet phrase!) the firing of the tea pavilion in KewGardens are given in a letter which he has _caused to be forwarded_ to acorrespondent who inquired _as to_ the circumstances of the release. Theletter says "I am desired by the Home Secretary to say that Lilian Lentonwas reported by the medical officer at Holloway Prison to be in a stateof collapse and in imminent danger of death _consequent upon_ her refusalto take food. Three courses were open--(1) To leave her to die; (2) Toattempt to feed her forcibly, which the medical officer advised wouldprobably entail death in her existing condition: (3) To release her. TheHome Secretary adopted the last course. "'

'Would probably entail death in her existing condition'! Will anyone tellme how Mr McKenna or anyone else could kill, or (as he prefers to put it)entail death upon, Miss Lenton in a non-existing condition?

(2) Next take the Chancellor of the Exchequer. As we know, the Chancellorof the Exchequer can use incisive speech when he chooses. On May 8th asreported in next day's "Morning Post, " Mr Lloyd George, answering aquestion, delivered himself of this to an attentive Senate:--

 With regard to Mr Noel Buxton's questions, I cannot answer for an enquiry which is _of a private and confidential character_, for although I am associated with it I am not associated with it as a Minister of the Crown. .. . Those enquiries are of a very careful systematic and scientific character, and are being conducted by the ablest investigators in this country, some of whom have reputations of international character. I am glad to think that the investigation is of a most impartial character. 

It must be a comforting thought, that an inquiry of a private andconfidential character is also of a very systematic and scientificcharacter, and besides being of a most impartial character, is conductedby men of international character--whatever that may happen to mean. What_is_ an international character, and what would you give for one?

We found that this way of talking, while pretending to be somethingpontifical, is really not prose at all, nor reputable speech at all, butJargon; nor is the offence to be excused by pleading, as I have heard itpleaded, that Mr Lloyd George was not using his own phraseology butquoting from a paper supplied him by some permanent official of theTreasury: since we select our civil servants among men of decenteducation and their salaries warrant our stipulating that they shall beable, at least, to speak and write their mother tongue. 

We laid down certain rules to help us in the way of straightProse:--

(1) _Always always prefer the concrete word to the abstract. _

(2) _Almost always prefer the direct word to the circumlocution. _

(3) _Generally, use transitive verbs, that strike their object; and usethem in the active voice, eschewing the stationary passive, with itslittle auxiliary its's and was's, and its participles getting into thelight of your adjectives, which should be few. For, as a rough law, byhis use of the straight verb and by his economy of adjectives you cantell a man's style, if it be masculine or neuter, writing or'composition. '_

The authors of that capital handbook "The King's English, " which I havealready recommended to you, add two rules:--

(4) _Prefer the short word to the long. _(5) _Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance. _

But these two precepts you would have to modify by so long a string ofexceptions that I do not commend them to you. In fact I think them falsein theory and likely to be fatal in practice. For, as my last lecturetried to show, you no sooner begin to philosophise things instead ofmerely telling a tale of them than you must go to the Mediterraneanlanguages: because in these man first learnt to discuss his 'why' and'how, ' and these languages yet guard the vocabulary. 

Lastly, we saw how, by experimenting with rhythm, our prose 'broke itsbirth's invidious bar' and learnt to scale the forbidden heights. 

Now by attending to the few plain rules given above you may trainyourselves to write sound, straightforward, work-a-day English. But ifyou would write melodious English, I fear the gods will require of youwhat they ought to have given you at birth--something of an ear. Yet themost of us have ears, of sorts; and I believe that, though we can onlyacquire it by assiduous practice, the most of us can wonderfully improveour talent of the ear. 

If you will possess yourselves of a copy of Quintilian or borrow one fromany library (Bohn's translation will do) and turn to his 9th book, youwill find a hundred ways indicated, illustrated, classified, in which awriter or speaker can vary his Style, modulate it, lift or depress it, regulate its balance. 

All these rules, separately worth studying, if taken together may easilybewilder and dishearten you. Let me choose just two, and try to heartenyou by showing that, even with these two only, you can go a long way. 

Take the use of right emphasis. What Quintilian says of rightemphasis--or the most important thing he says--is this:--

 There is sometimes an extraordinary force in some particular word, which, if it be placed in no very conspicuous position in the middle part of a sentence, is likely to escape the attention of the hearer and to be obscured by the words surrounding it; but if it be put at the end of the sentence is urged upon the reader's sense and imprinted on his mind. 

That seems obvious enough, for English use as well as for Latin. 'Thewages of sin is Death'--anyone can see how much more emphatic that isthan 'Death is the wages of sin. ' But let your minds work on this matterof emphasis, and discover how emphasis has always its right pointsomewhere, though it be not at all necessarily at the end of thesentence. Take a sentence in which the strong words actually repeatthemselves for emphasis:--

 Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city. 

Our first impulse would be to place the emphasis at the end:--

 Babylon, that great city, is fallen, is fallen. 

The Latin puts it at the beginning:--

 Cecidit, cecidit, Babylonia illa magna. Fallen, fallen, is Babylon, that great city. 

The forty-seven preserved the 'falling close' so exquisite in the Latin;the emphasis, already secured by repetition, they accentuated bylengthening the pause. I would urge on you that in every sentence thereis just a right point of emphasis which you must train your ears todetect. So your writing will acquire not only emphasis, but balance, andyou will instinctively avoid such an ill-emphasised sentence as this, which, not naming the author, I will quote for your delectation:--

 'Are Japanese Aprils always as lovely as this?' asked the man in the light tweed suit of two others in immaculate flannels with crimson sashes round their waists and puggarees folded in cunning plaits round their broad Terai hats. 

Explore, next, what (though critics have strangely neglected it) to mymind stands the first, or almost the first, secret of beautiful writingin English, whether in prose or in verse; I mean that inter-play ofvowel-sounds in which no language can match us. We have so many vowelsounds indeed, and so few vowels to express them, that the foreigner, mistaking our modesty, complains against God's plenty. We alone, forexample, sound by a natural vowel that noble _I_, which other nations canonly compass by diphthongs. Let us consider that vowel for a moment ortwo and mark how it leads off the dance of the Graces, its sisters:--

 Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. 

Mark how expressively it drops to the solemn vowel 'O, ' andanon how expressively it reasserts itself to express rearisendelight:--

 Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For behold the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and Kings to the brightness of thy rising. 

Take another passage in which the first lift of this _I_ vowel yields toits graver sisters as though the sound sank into the very heart of thesense. 

 I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. '

'And am no more worthy to be called thy son. ' Mark the deep O's. 'Forthis my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found. ' 'O myson, my son Absalom'--observe the I and O how they interchime, until the Oof sorrow tolls the lighter note down:--

 O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absolom, my son, my son!

Or take this lyric, by admission one of the loveliest written in thispresent age, and mark here too how the vowels play and ring and chime andtoll. 

 I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. [2] And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake-water lapping, with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. 

I think if you will but open your ears to this beautiful vowel-play whichruns through all the best of our prose and poetry, whether you ever learnto master it or not, you will have acquired a new delight, and onevarious enough to last you though you live to a very old age. 

All this of which I am speaking is Art: and Literature being an Art, doyou not see how personal a thing it is--how it cannot escape beingpersonal? No two men (unless they talk Jargon) say the same thing in thesame way. As is a man's imagination, as is his character, as is theharmony in himself, as is his ear, as is his skill, so and not otherwisehe will speak, so and not otherwise than they can respond to thatimagination, that character, that order of his intellect, that harmony ofhis soul, his hearers will hear him. Let me conclude with this greatpassage from Newman which I beg you, having heard it, to ponder:--

 If then the power of speech is as great as any that can be named, --if the origin of language is by many philosophers considered nothing short of divine--if by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated, --if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other, --if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and the prophets of the human family--it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study: rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others--be they many or few, be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life--who are united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of our personal influence. 

[Footnote 1: I append the following specimen translations of the famouspassage in St Paul's "First Epistle to the Corinthians" xv. 51 sqq. Ichoose this because (1) it is an important passage; (2) it touches a highmoment of philosophising; (3) the comparison seems to me to representwith great fairness to Tyndale the extent of the forty-seven's debt tohim; (4) it shows that they meant exactly what they said in theirPreface; and (5) it illustrates, towards the close, their genius forimprovement. From the Greek, Wyclif translates:--

 Lo, I seie to you pryvyte of holi thingis | and alle we schulen rise agen | but not alle we schuln be chaungid | in a moment in the twynkelynge of an yë, in the last trumpe | for the trumpe schal sowne: and deed men schulen rise agen with out corrupcion, and we schuln be changid | for it bihoveth this corruptible thing to clothe uncorropcion and this deedly thing to putte aweye undeedlynesse. But whanne this deedli thing schal clothe undeedlynesse | thanne schal the word be don that is written | deeth is sopun up in victorie | deeth, where is thi victorie? deeth, where is thi pricke?

Tyndale:--

 Beholde I shewe you a mystery. We shall not all slepe: but we shall all be chaunged | and that in a moment | and in the twinclinge of an eye | at the sounde of the last trompe. For the trompe shall blowe, and the deed shall ryse incorruptible and we shalbe chaunged. For this corruptible must put on incorruptibilite: and this mortall must put on immortalite. When this corruptible hath put on incorruptibilite | and this mortall hath put on immortalite: than shalbe brought to pass the saying that is written, 'Deeth is consumed in to victory. ' Deeth, where is thy stynge? Hell, where is thy victory?

The Authorised Version:--

 Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleepe, but wee shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinckling of an eye, at the last trumpe, (for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed). For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortall must put on immortalitie. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortall shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to passe the saying that is written, 'Death is swallowed up in victory. ' O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?]

[Footnote 2: I E O : I O E I O : E OU A 'As musing slow, I hail ('as m_u_sing sl_o_w _I_ ha_i_l) Thy genial loved return. ' (Th_y_ g_e_nial l_o_ved ret_u_rn. ') COLLINS, "Ode to Evening. "]

LECTURE VIII. 

ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (I)

Wednesday, October 22

You may think it strange, Gentlemen, that of a course of ten lectureswhich aim to treat English Literature as an affair of practice, I shouldpropose to spend two in discussing our literary lineage: a man's lineageand geniture being reckoned, as a rule, among the things he cannot bereasonably asked to amend. But since of high breeding is begotten (asmost of us believe) a disposition to high thoughts, high deeds; since tohave it and be modestly conscious of it is to carry within us a faithfulmonitor persuading us to whatsoever in conduct is gentle, honourable, ofgood repute, and so silently dissuading us from base thoughts, low ends, ignoble gains; seeing, moreover, that a man will often do more to matchhis father's virtue than he would to improve himself; I shall endeavour, in this and my next lecture, to scour that spur of ancestry and presentit to you as so bright and sharp an incentive that you, who read EnglishLiterature and practise writing here in Cambridge, shall not pass outfrom her insensible of the dignity of your studies, or without pride orremorse according as you have interpreted in practice the motto, _Noblesse oblige_. 

 'Tis wisdom, and that high, For men to use their fortune reverently Even in youth. 

Let me add that, just as a knowledge of his family failings will help oneman in economising his estate, or warn another to shun for his health thepleasures of the table, so some knowledge of our lineage in letters mayput us, as Englishmen, on the watch for certain national defects (forsuch we have), on our guard against certain sins which too easily besetus. Nay, this watchfulness may well reach down from matters of greatmoment to seeming trifles. It is good for us to recognise with Wordsworththat

 We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold. 

But, though less important, it is good also to recognise that, as sons ofCambridge, we equally offend against her breeding when in our scientificwritings we allow ourselves to talk of a microbe as an 'antibody. '

Now, because a great deal of what I have to say this morning, if notheretical, will yet run contrary to the vogue and practice of the Schoolsfor these thirty years, I will take the leap into my subject over agreater man's back and ask you to listen with particular attention to thefollowing long passage from a writer whose opinion you may challenge, butwhose authority to speak as a master of English prose no one in this roomwill deny. 

 When (says Cardinal Newman) we survey the stream of human affairs for the last three thousand years, we find it to run thus:--At first sight there is so much fluctuation, agitation, ebbing and flowing, that we may despair to discern any law in its movements, taking the earth as its bed and mankind as its contents; but on looking more closely and attentively we shall discern, in spite of the heterogeneous materials and the various histories and fortunes which are found in the race of man during the long period I have mentioned, a certain formation amid the chaos--one and one only, --and extending, though not over the whole earth, yet through a very considerable portion of it. Man is a social being and can hardly exist without society, and in matter of fact societies have ever existed all over the habitable earth. The greater part of these associations have been political or religious, and have been comparatively limited in extent and temporary. They have been formed and dissolved by the force of accidents, or by inevitable circumstances; and when we have enumerated them one by one we have made of them all that can be made. But there is one remarkable association which attracts the attention of the philosopher, not political nor religious--or at least only partially and not essentially such--which began in the earliest times and grew with each succeeding age till it reached its complete development, and then continued on, vigorous and unwearied, and still remains as definite and as firm as ever it was. Its bond is a _common civilisation_: and though there are other civilisations in the world, as there are other societies, yet _this_ civilisation, 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 on the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume to itself the title of 'Human Society, ' and _its_ civilisation the abstract term 'Civilisation. '

 There are indeed great outlying portions of mankind which are not, perhaps never have been, included in this Human Society; still they are outlying portions and nothing else, fragmentary, unsociable, solitary and unmeaning, protesting and revolting against the grand central formation of which I am speaking, but not uniting with each other into a second whole. I am not denying, of course, the civilisation of the Chinese, for instance, though it be not our civilisation; but it is a huge, stationary, unattractive, morose civilisation. Nor do I deny a civilisation to the Hindoos, nor to the ancient Mexicans, nor to the Saracens, nor (in a certain sense) to the Turks; but each of these races has its own civilisation, as separate from one another as from ours. 

 I do not see how they can be all brought under one idea. .. . 

 Gentlemen, let me here observe that I am not entering upon the question of races, or upon their history. I have nothing to do with ethnology; I take things as I find them on the surface of history and am but classifying phenomena. Looking, then, at the countries which surround the Mediterranean Sea as a whole, I see them to be from time immemorial, the seat of an association of intellect and mind such as to deserve to be called the Intellect and the Mind of the Human Kind. Starting as it does, and advancing from certain centres, till their respective influences intersect and conflict, and then at length intermingle and combine, a common Thought has been generated, and a common Civilisation defined and established. Egypt is one such starting point, Syria, another, Greece a third, Italy a fourth and North Africa a fifth--afterwards France and Spain. As time goes on, and as colonisation and conquest work their changes, we see a great association of nations formed, of which the Roman Empire is the maturity and the most intelligible expression: an association, however, not political but mental, based on the same intellectual ideas and advancing by common intellectual methods. .. . In its earliest age it included far more of the Eastern world than it has since; in these later times it has taken into its compass a new hemisphere; in the Middle Ages it lost Africa, Egypt and Syria, and extended itself to Germany, Scandinavia and the British Isles. At one time its territory was flooded by strange and barbarous races, but the existing civilisation was vigorous enough to vivify what threatened to stifle it, and to assimilate to the old social forms what came to expel them: and thus the civilisation of modern times remains what it was of old; not Chinese, or Hindoo, or Mexican, or Saracen . .. But the lineal descendant, or rather the continuation--_mutatis mutandis_--of the civilisation which began in Palestine and Greece. 

To omit, then, all minor debts such as what of arithmetic, what ofastronomy, what of geography, we owe to the Saracen, from Palestine wederive the faith of Europe shared (in the language of the Bidding Prayer)by all Christian people dispersed throughout the world; as to Greece weowe the rudiments of our Western art, philosophy, letters; and not onlythe rudiments but the continuing inspiration, so that--though entirelysuperseded in worship, as even in the Athens of Pericles they wereworshipped only by an easy, urbane, more than half humoroustolerance--Apollo and the Muses, Zeus and the great ones of Olympus, Hermes and Hephaestus, Athene in her armour, with her vanquisher thefoam-born irresistible Aphrodite, these remain the authentic gods of ourliterature, beside whom the gods of northern Europe--Odin, Thor, Freya--are strangers, unhomely, uncanny as the shadows of unfamiliarfurniture on the walls of an inn. Sprung though great numbers of us arefrom the loins of Northmen, it is in these gracious deities of the Souththat we find the familiar and the real, as from the heroes of thesister-island, Cucullain and Concobar, we turn to Hercules, to Perseus, to Bellerophon, even to actual men of history, saying 'Give us Leonidas, give us Horatius, give us Regulus. These are the mighty ones weunderstand, and from whom, in a direct line of tradition, we understandHarry of Agincourt, Philip Sidney and our Nelson. '

Now since, of the Mediterranean peoples, the Hebrews discovered theUnseen God whom the body of Western civilisation has learnt to worship;since the Greeks invented art, philosophy, letters; since Rome found anddeveloped the idea of imperial government, of imperial colonies assuperseding merely fissiparous ones, of settling where she conquered(_ubi Romanus vicit ibi habitat_) and so extending with Government thatsystem of law which Europe still obeys; we cannot be surprised thatIsrael, Greece, Rome--each in turn--set store on a pure ancestry. ThoughChrist be the veritable Son of God, his ancestry must be traced backthrough his supposed father Joseph to the stem of Jesse, and so toAbraham, father of the race. Again, as jealously as the Evangelistclaimed Jesus for a Hebrew of the Hebrews, so, if you will turn to the"Menexenus" of Plato in the Oration of Aspasia over the dead who perishedin battle, you hear her claim that 'No Pelopes nor Cadmians, norEgyptians, nor Dauni, nor the rest of the crowd of born foreigners dwellwith us; but ours is the land of pure Hellenes, free from admixture. 'These proud Athenians, as you know, wore brooches in the shape of goldengrasshoppers, to signify that they were [Greek: autochthones], childrenof Attica, sprung direct from her soil. And so, again, the true Roman, while enlarging Rome's citizenship over Asia, Africa, Gaul, to our remoteBritain, insisted, even in days of the later Empire, on his pure descentfrom Æneas and Romulus--

 Unde Remnes et Quirites proque prole posterum Romuli matrem crearet et nepotem Cæsarem. 

 With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew From Romulus down to our Cæsar-last, best of that blood, of that threw. 

Here is a boast that we English must be content to forgo. We may wear arose on St George's day, if we are clever enough to grow one. The Welsh, I dare say, have less difficulty with the leek. But April the 23rd is nota time of roses that we can pluck them as we pass, nor can we claim StGeorge as a compatriot--_Cappadocius nostras_. We have, to be sure, a fewlegendary heroes, of whom King Arthur and Robin Hood are (I suppose) thegreatest; but, save in some Celtic corners of the land, we have fewfairies, and these no great matter; while, as for tutelary gods, oursprings, our wells, our groves, cliffs, mountain-sides, either neverpossessed them or possess them no longer. Not of our landscape did ithappen that

 The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; From haunted spring and dale Edg'd with poplar pale, The parting Genius is with sighing sent. 

--for the sufficient reason that no tutelary gods of importance were everhere to be dispersed. 

Let me press this home upon you by an illustration which I choose withthe double purpose of enforcing my argument and sending you to makeacquaintance (if you have not already made it) with one of the loveliestpoems written in our time. 

In one of Pliny's letters you will find a very pleasant description ofthe source of the Clitumnus, a small Umbrian river which, springing froma rock in a grove of cypresses, descends into the Tinia, a tributary ofthe Tiber. 'Have you ever, ' writes Pliny to his friend Romanus--

 Have you ever seen the source of the Clitumnus? I suppose not, as I never heard you mention it. Let me advise you to go there at once. I have just visited it and am sorry that I put off my visit so long. At the foot of a little hill, covered with old and shady cypress trees, a spring gushes and bursts into a number of streamlets of various size. Breaking, so to speak, forth from its imprisonment, it expands into a broad basin, so clear and transparent that you may count the pebbles and little pieces of money which are thrown into it. From this point the force and weight of the water, rather than the slope of the ground, hurry it onward. What was a mere spring becomes a noble river, broad enough to allow vessels to pass each other as they sail with or against the stream. The current is so strong, though the ground is level, that barges of beam, as they go down, require no assistance of oars; while to go up is as much as can be done with oars and long poles. .. . The banks are clothed with abundant ash and poplar, so distinctly reflected in the transparent waters that they seem to be growing at the bottom of the river and can be counted with ease. The water is as cold as snow and as pure in colour. Hard by the spring stands an ancient and venerable temple with a statue of the river-god Clitumnus, clothed in the customary robe of state. The Oracles here delivered attest the presence of the deity. Close in the precinct stand several little chapels dedicated to particular gods, each of whom owns his distinctive name and special worship, and is the tutelary deity of a runlet. For beside the principal spring, which is, as it were, the parent of all the rest, there are several smaller ones which have their distinct sources but unite their waters with the Clitumnus, over which a bridge is thrown, separating the sacred part of the river from that which is open to general use. Above the bridge you may only go in a boat; below it, you may swim. The people of the town of Hispallum, to whom Augustus gave this place, furnish baths and lodgings at the public expense. There are several small dwelling-houses on the banks, in specially picturesque situations, and they stand quite close to the waterside. In short, everything in the neighbourhood will give you pleasure. You may also amuse yourself with numberless inscriptions on the pillars and walls, celebrating the praises of the stream and of its tutelary god. Many of these you will admire, and some will make you laugh. But no! You are too well cultivated to laugh at such things. Farewell. 

Clitumnus still gushes from its rocks among the cypresses, as in Pliny'sday. The god has gone from his temple, on the frieze of which you mayread this later inscription--'_Deus Angelorum, qui fecit Resurrectionem. _'After many centuries and almost in our day, by the brain of Cavour andthe sword of Garibaldi, he has made a resurrection for Italy. As part ofthat resurrection (for no nation can live and be great without its poet)was born a true poet, Carducci. He visited the bountiful, everlastingsource, and of what did he sing? Possess yourselves, as for a shillingyou may, of his Ode "Alle fonte del Clitumno, " and read: for few noblerpoems have adorned our time. He sang of the weeping willow, the ilex, ivy, cypress and the presence of the god still immanent among them. Hesang of Umbria, of the ensigns of Rome, of Hannibal swooping down overthe Alps; he sang of the nuptials of Janus and Comesena, progenitors ofthe Italian people; of nymphs, naiads, and the moonlight dances ofOreads; of flocks descending to the river at dusk, of the homestead, thebare-footed mother, the clinging child, the father, clad in goat-skins, guiding the ox-wagon; and he ends on the very note of Virgil's famousapostrophe

 _Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra. .. _

with an invocation of Italy--Italy, mother of bullocks for agriculture, of wild colts for battle, mother of corn and of the vine, Roman mother ofenduring laws and mediaeval mother of illustrious arts. The mountains, woods and waters of green Umbria applaud the song, and across theirapplause is heard the whistle of the railway train bearing promise of newindustries and a new national life. 

 E tu, pia madre di giovenchi invitti a franger glebe e rintegrar maggesi e d' annitrenti in guerra aspri polledri, Italia madre, madre di biade e viti e leggi eterne ed incliti arti a raddolcir la vita salve! a te i canti de l' antica lode io rinovello. 

 Plaudono i monti al carme e i boschi e l' acque de l' Umbria verde: in faccia a noi fumando ed anelando nuove industrie in corsa fischia il vapore. 

 And thou, O pious mother of unvanquished Bullocks to break glebe, to restore the fallow, And of fierce colts for neighing in the battle: Italy, mother, Mother of corn and vines and of eternal Laws and illustrious arts the life to sweeten, Hail, hail, all hail! The song of ancient praises Renew I to thee!

 The mountains, woods and waters of green Umbria Applaud the song: and here before us fuming And longing for new industries, a-racing Whistles the white steam. 

(I quote from a translation by Mr E. J. Watson, recently published byMessrs J. W. Arrowsmith, of Bristol. )

I put it to you, Gentlemen, that, worthy as are the glories of England tobe sung, this note of Carducci's we cannot decently or honestly strike. Great lives have been bled away into Tweed and Avon: great spirits havebeen oared down the Thames to Traitor's Gate and the Tower. Deeds done onthe Cam have found their way into history. But I once traced the Avon toits source under Naseby battlefield, and found it issuing from thefragments of a stucco swan. No god mounts guard over the head-water ofthe Thames; and the only Englishman who boldly claims a divine descent is(I understand) an impostor who runs an Agapemone. In short we are a mixedrace, and our literature is derivative. Let us confine our pride to thosevirtues, not few, which are honestly ours. A Roman noble, even to-day, has some excuse for reckoning a god in his ancestry, or at least a wolfamong its wet-nurses: but of us English even those who came over withWilliam the Norman have the son of a tanner's daughter for escort. I verywell remember that, the other day, writers who vindicated our hereditaryHouse of Lords against a certain Parliament Act commonly did so on theground that since the Reform Bill of 1832, by inclusion of all that waseminent in politics, war and commerce, the Peerage had been so changed asto know itself no longer for the same thing. That is our practical way. 

At all events, the men who made our literature had never a doubt, as theywere careless to dissimulate, that they were conquering our tongue tobring it into the great European comity, the civilisation of Greece andRome. An Elizabethan writer, for example, would begin almost as with aformula by begging to be forgiven that he has sought to render the divineaccent of Plato, the sugared music of Ovid, into our uncouth andbarbarous tongue. There may have been some mock-modesty in this, but itrested on a base of belief. Much of the glory of English Literature wasachieved by men who, with the splendour of the Renaissance in their eyes, supposed themselves to be working all the while upon pale and borrowedshadows. 

Let us pass the enthusiasms of days when 'bliss was it in that dawn to bealive' and come down to Alexander Pope and the Age of Reason. Pope at onetime proposed to write a History of English Poetry, and the draft schemeof that History has been preserved. How does it begin? Why thus:--

 ERA I. 

1. School of Provence Chaucer's Visions. _Romaunt of the Rose. _ _Piers Plowman. _ Tales from Boccace. Gower. 

2. School of Chaucer Lydgate. T. Occleve. Walt. De Mapes (a bad error, that!). Skelton. 

3. School of Petrarch E. Of Surrey. Sir Thomas Wyatt. Sir Philip Sidney. G. Gascoyn. 

4. School of Dante Lord Buckhurst's _Induction. Gorboduc. _ Original of Good Tragedy. Seneca his model. 

--and so on. The scheme after Pope's death came into the hands of Gray, who for a time was fired with the notion of writing the History incollaboration with his friend Mason. Knowing Gray's congenitalself-distrust, you will not be surprised that in the end he declined thetask and handed it over to Warton. But, says Mant in his Life of Warton, 'their design'--that is, Gray's design with Mason--'was to introducespecimens of the Proveçal poetry, and of the Scaldic, British and Saxon, as preliminary to what first deserved to be called English poetry, aboutthe time of Chaucer, from whence their history properly so called was tocommence. ' A letter of Gray's on the whole subject, addressed to Warton, is extant, and you may read it in Dr Courthope's "History of EnglishPoetry. "

Few in this room are old enough to remember the shock of awed surmisewhich fell upon young minds presented, in the late 'seventies or early'eighties of the last century, with Freeman's "Norman Conquest" orGreen's "Short History of the English People"; in which as through paringclouds of darkness, we beheld our ancestry, literary as well aspolitical, radiantly legitimised; though not, to be sure, in the Englandthat we knew--but far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick! 'Its pleasantpastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townshipslooking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste ofheather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken hereand there with meadows which crept down to the marshes and to the sea. 'But what of that? There--surely there, in Sleswick--had been discoveredfor us our august mother's marriage lines; and if the most of that brightassurance came out of an old political skit, the "Germania" of Tacitus, who recked at the time? For along followed Mr Stopford Brooke with anadmirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct themeanest of us in our common father's actual name--Beowulf. 

 _Beowulf_ is an old English Epic. .. . There is not one word about our England in the poem. .. . The whole poem, pagan as it is, is English to its very root. It is sacred to us; our Genesis, the book of our origins. 

Now I am not only incompetent to discuss with you the more reconditebeauties of "Beowulf" but providentially forbidden the attempt by theconditions laid down for this Chair. I gather--and my own perusal of thepoem and of much writing about it confirms the belief--that it has beenlargely over-praised by some critics, who have thus naturally provokedothers to underrate it. Such things happen. I note, but withoutsubscribing to it, the opinion of Vigfússon and York Powell, the learnededitors of the "Corpus Poeticum Boreale, " that in the "Beowulf" we have'an epic completely metamorphosed in form, blown out with long-windedempty repetitions and comments by a book poet, so that one must becareful not to take it as a type of the old poetry, ' and I seem to hearas from the grave the very voice of my old friend the younger editor inthat unfaltering pronouncement. But on the whole I rather incline toaccept the cautious surmise of Professor W. P. Ker that 'a reasonableview of the merit of Beowulf is not impossible, though rash enthusiasmmay have made too much of it; while a correct and sober taste may havetoo contemptuously refused to attend to Grendel and the Firedrake, ' andto leave it at that. I speak very cautiously because the manner of thelate Professor Freeman, in especial, had a knack of provoking in gentlebreasts a resentment which the mind in its frailty too easily convertedto a prejudice against his matter: while to men trained to admireThucydides and Tacitus and acquainted with Lucian's 'Way to WriteHistory' ([Greek: Pos dei istorian suggraphein]) his loud insistence thatthe art was not an art but a science, and moreover recently invented byBishop Stubbs, was a perpetual irritant. 

But to return to "Beowulf"--You have just heard the opinions of scholarswhose names you must respect. I, who construe Anglo-Saxon withdifficulty, must admit the poem to contain many fine, even noble, passages. Take for example Hrothgar's lament for Æschere:--

 Hróthgar mathelode, helm Scyldinga: 'Ne frin thú æfter sælum; sorh is geniwod Denigea leódum; deád is Æschere, Yrmenláfes yldra bróthor, Mín rún-wita, ond min ræd-bora; Eaxl-gestealla, thonne we on orlege Hafelan wéredon, thonne hniton fethan, Eoferas cnysedan: swylc scolde eorl wesan Ætheling ær-gód, swylc Æschere wæs. '

 (Hrothgar spake, helm of the Scyldings: 'Ask not after good tidings. Sorrow is renewed among the Dane-folk. Dead is Æschere, Yrmenlaf's elder brother, who read me rune and bore me rede; comrade at shoulder when we fended our heads in war and the boar-helms rang. Even so should we each be an atheling passing good, as Æschere was. ')

This is simple, manly, dignified. It avoids the besetting sin of theAnglo-Saxon gleeman--the pretentious trick of calling things 'out oftheir right names' for the sake of literary effect (as if e. G. The seacould be improved by being phrased into 'the seals' domain'). ItsAnglo-Saxon _staccato_, so tiresome in sustained narrative, here happensto suit the broken utterance of mourning. In short, it exhibits theAnglo-Saxon Muse at her best, not at her customary. But set beside it apassage in which Homer tells of a fallen warrior--at haphazard, as itwere, a single corpse chosen from the press of battle--

 [Greek: polla de chermadia megal aspidas estuphelixam marnamenon amph auton o d en strophaliggi konies keito megas megalosti, lelasmenos ipposunaom. ]

Can you--can anyone--compare the two passages and miss to see that theybelong to two different kingdoms of poetry? I lay no stress here on'architectonics. ' I waive that the "Iliad" is a well-knit epic and thestory of "Beowulf" a shapeless monstrosity. I ask you but to note thedifference of note, of accent, of mere music. And I have quoted you but apassage of the habitual Homer. To assure yourselves that he can rise evenfrom this habitual height to express the extreme of majesty and of humananguish in poetry which betrays no false note, no strain upon the storeof emotion man may own with self-respect and exhibit without derogationof dignity, turn to the last book of the "Iliad" and read of Priamraising to his lips the hand that has murdered his son. I say confidentlythat no one unable to distinguish this, as poetry, from the very best of"Beowulf" is fit to engage upon business as a literary critic. 

In "Beowulf" then, as an imported poem, let us allow much barbarianmerit. It came of dubious ancestry, and it had no progeny. The pretencethat our glorious literature derives its lineage from "Beowulf" is invulgar phrase 'a put up job'; a falsehood grafted upon our text-books byTeutonic and Teutonising professors who can bring less evidence for itthan will cover a threepenny-piece. Its run for something like thatmoney, in small educational manuals, has been in its way a triumph ofpedagogic _réclame_. 

Our rude forefathers--the author of "The Rape of the Lock" and of the"Elegy written in a Country Churchyard"--knew nothing of the Exeter andVercelli Books, nothing of the Ruthwell Cross. But they were poets, practitioners of our literature in the true line of descent, and theyknew certain things which all such artists know by instinct. So, beforeour historians of thirty-odd years ago started to make Chaucer andBeowulf one, these rude forefathers made them two. 'Nor am I confidentthey erred. ' Rather I am confident, and hope in succeeding lectures toconvince you, that, venerable as Anglo-Saxon is, and worthy to be studiedas the mother of our vernacular speech (as for a dozen other reasonswhich my friend Professor Chadwick will give you), its value ishistorical rather than literary, since from it our Literatureis not descended. Let me repeat it in words that admit of nomisunderstanding--_From Anglo-Saxon Prose, from Anglo-Saxon Poetry ourliving Prose and Poetry have, save linguistically, no derivation_. Ishall attempt to demonstrate that, whether or not Anglo-Saxonliterature, such as it was, died of inherent weakness, die it did, andof its collapse the "Vision of Piers Plowman" may be regarded as thelast dying spasm. I shall attempt to convince you that Chaucer did notinherit any secret from Caedmon or Cynewulf, but deserves his old title, 'Father of English Poetry, ' because through Dante, through Boccaccio, through the lays and songs of Provence, he explored back to theMediterranean, and opened for Englishmen a commerce in the trueintellectual mart of Europe. I shall attempt to heap proof on you thatwhatever the agency--whether through Wyat or Spenser, Marlowe orShakespeare, or Donne, or Milton, or Dryden, or Pope, or Johnson, oreven Wordsworth--always our literature has obeyed, howeverunconsciously, the precept _Antiquam exquirite matrem_, 'Seek back tothe ancient mother'; always it has recreated itself, has kept itselfpure and strong, by harking back to bathe in those native--yes, _native_--Mediterranean springs. 

Do not presume me to be right in this. Rather, if you will, presume me tobe wrong until the evidence is laid out for your judgment. But at leastunderstand to-day how profoundly a man, holding that view, must deplorethe whole course of academical literary study during these thirty yearsor so, and how distrust what he holds to be its basal fallacies. 

For, literature being written in language, yet being something quitedistinct, and the development of our language having been fairlycontinuous, while the literature of our nation exhibits a false start--abreak, silence, repentance, then a renewal on right glorious lines--ourstudents of literature have been drilled to follow the speciouscontinuance while ignoring the actual break, and so to commit the onemost fatal error in any study; that of mistaking the inessential for theessential. 

As I tried to persuade you in my Inaugural Lecture, our first duty toLiterature is to study it absolutely, to understand, in Aristotelianphrase, its [Greek: to ti en einae]; what it _is_ and what it _means_. Ifthat be our quest, and the height of it be realised, it is nothing tous--or almost nothing--to know of a certain alleged poet of the fifteenthcentury, that he helped us over a local or temporary disturbance in ourvowel-endings. It is everything to have acquired and to possess such anorm of Poetry within us that we know whether or not what he wrote wasPOETRY. 

Do not think this easy. The study of right literary criticism is muchmore difficult than the false path usually trodden; so difficult, indeed, that you may easily count the men who have attempted to grasp the greatrules and apply them to writing as an art to be practised. But the namesinclude some very great ones--Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, Corneille, Boileau, Dryden, Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Arnold: and the study, though it may not find its pattern in our time, isnot unworthy to be proposed for another attempt before a greatUniversity. 

LECTURE IX. 

ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (II)

Wednesday, November 5

Some of you whose avocations call them, from time to time, to Newmarketmay have noted, at a little distance out from Cambridge, a by-roadadvertised as leading to Quy and Swaffham. It also leads to the site ofan old Roman villa; but you need not interrupt your business to visitthis, since the best thing discovered there--a piece of tessellatedpavement--has been removed and deposited in the Geological Museum here inDowning Street, where you may study it very conveniently. It is not atall a first-class specimen of its kind: not to be compared, for example, with the wonderful pavement at Dorchester, or with that (measuring 35feet by 20) of the great villa unearthed, a hundred years ago, atStonesfield in Oxfordshire: but I take it as the handiest, and am goingto build a small conjecture upon it, or rather a small suggestion of aguess. Remember there is no harm in guessing so long as we do not pretendour guess-work to be something else. 

I will ask you to consider first that in these pavements, laid bare forus as 'the whistling rustic tends his plough, ' we have work datingsomewhere between the first and fifth centuries, work of unchallengeablebeauty, work of a beauty certainly not rivalled until we come to theNorman builders of five or six hundred years later. I want you to letyour minds dwell on these long stretches of time--four hundred years orso of Roman occupation (counting, not from Cæsar's raids, but from theserious invasion of 43 A. D. Under Aulus Plautius, say to some while afterthe famous letter of Honorius, calling home the legions). You may safelyput it at four hundred years, and then count six hundred as the spacebefore the Normans arrive--a thousand years altogether, or but afraction--one short generation--less than the interval of time thatseparates us from King Alfred. In the great Cathedral of Winchester(where sleep, by the way, two gentle writers specially beloved, IsaakWalton and Jane Austen) above the choir-screen to the south, you may seea line of painted chests, of which the inscription on one tells you thatit holds what was mortal of King Canute. 

 Here are sands, ignoble things, Dropp'd from the ruin'd sides of Kings. 

But if you walk around to the north of the altar you will find yourselftreading on tiles not so very far short of twice that antiquity. Gentlemen, do not think that I would ever speak lightly of our lineage:only let us make as certain as we may what that lineage is. 

I want you to-day to understand just what such a pavement as thatpreserved for your inspection in Downing Street meant to the man who sawit laid and owned it these fifteen hundred years--more or less--ago. _UbiRomanus vicit, ibi habitat_--'where the Roman has conquered, there hesettles': but whether he conquered or settled he carried these smalltiles, these _tessellæ_, as religiously as ever Rachel stole herteraphin. 'Wherever his feet went there went the tessellated pavement forthem to stand on. Even generals on foreign service carried in panniers onmuleback the little coloured cubes or _tessellæ_ for laying down apavement in each camping-place, to be taken up again when they movedforward. In England the same sweet emblems of the younger gods of poeticlegend, of love, youth, plenty, and all their happy naturalism, are foundconstantly repeated. '[1] I am quoting these sentences from a localhistorian, but you see how these relics have a knack of inspiring proseat once scholarly and imaginative, as (for a more famous instance) theurns disinterred at Walsingham once inspired Sir Thomas Browne's. Tocontinue and adapt the quotation--

 Bacchus with his wild rout, Orpheus playing to a spell-bound audience, Apollo singing to the lyre, Venus in Mars' embrace, Neptune with a host of seamen, scollops, and trumpets, Narcissus by the fountain, Jove and Ganymede, Leda and the swan, wood-nymphs and naiads, satyrs and fauns, masks, hautboys, cornucopiæ, flowers and baskets of golden fruit--what touches of home they must have seemed to these old dwellers in the Cambridgeshire wilds!

Yes, touches of home! For the owner of this villa (you may conceive) isthe grandson or even great-great-grandson of the colonist who first builtit, following in the wake of the legionaries. The family has prosperedand our man is now a considerable landowner. He was born in Britain: hischildren have been born here: and here he lives a comfortable, well-to-do, out-of-door life, in its essentials I daresay not so veryunlike the life of an English country squire to-day. Instead of chasingfoxes or hares he hunts the wolf and the wild boar; but the sport isgood and he returns with an appetite. He has added a summer parlour tothe house, with a northern aspect and no heating-flues: for the oldparlour he has enlarged the præfurnium, and through the long winterevenings sits far better warmed than many a master of a moderncountry-house. A belt of trees on the brow of the rise protects him fromthe worst winds, and to the south his daughters have planted violet-bedswhich will breathe odorously in the spring. He has rebuilt and enlargedthe slave-quarters and outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around theatrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, where stucco remains, has repainted it in fresh colours. He knows that there are no gaps orweak spots in his stockade fence--wood is always cheap. In a word he hasimproved the estate; is modestly proud of it; and will be content, likethe old Athenian, to leave his patrimony not worse but something betterthan he found it. 

Sensible men--and the Romans were eminently that--as a rule contrive tolive decently, or, at least, tolerably. What struck Arthur Young morethan anything else in his travels through France on the very eve of theRevolution seems to have been the general good-tempered happiness of theFrench gentry on their estates. We may moralise of the Roman colonists asof the French proprietors that 'unconscious of their doom the littlevictims played'; but we have no right to throw back on them the shadow ofwhat was to come or to cloud the picture of a useful, peaceable, maybemore than moderately happy life, with our later knowledge of disastermercifully hidden from it. 

Although our colonist and his family have all been born in Britain, arehappy enough here on the whole, and talk without more than half meaningit, and to amuse themselves with speculations half-wistful, of daring thetremendous journey and setting eyes on Rome some day, their pride is tobelong to her, to Rome, the imperial City, the city afar: their windowsopen back towards her as Daniel's did towards Jerusalem--_Urbs quamdicunt Roman--the_ City. Along the great road, hard by, her imperial writruns. They have never subscribed to the vow of Ruth, 'Thy people shall bemy people and thy God my God. ' They dwell under the Pax Romana, notmerely protected by it but as _citizens_. Theirs are the ancestraldeities portrayed on that unfading pavement in the very centre of thevilla--Apollo and Daphne, Bacchus and Ariadne--

 For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting, and for ever young. 

Parcels come to them, forwarded from the near military station; come bythose trade-routes, mysterious to us, concerning which a mostilluminating book waits to be written by somebody. There are parcels ofseeds--useful vegetables and potherbs, helichryse (marigold as we callthem now) for the flower garden, for the colonnade even roses with realItalian earth damp about their roots. There are parcels of books, too--rolls rather, or tablets--wherein the family reads about Rome; ofits wealth, the uproar of its traffic, the innumerable chimneys smoking, _fumum et opes strepitumque_. For they are always reading of Rome;feeling themselves, as they read, to belong to it, to be neither savagenor even rustic, but by birthright _of the city_, urbane; and what theseexiles read is of how Horace met a bore on the Sacred Road (which wouldcorrespond, more or less, with our Piccadilly)--

 Along the Sacred Road I strolled one day Deep in some bagatelle (you know my way) When up comes one whose face I scarcely knew-- 'The dearest of dear fellows! how d'ye do?' --He grasped my hand. 'Well, thanks! The same to you?'

--or of how Horace apologises for protracting a summer jaunt to hiscountry seat:--

 Five days I told you at my farm I'd stay, And lo! the whole of August I'm away. Well but, Maecenas, you would have me live, And, were I sick, my absence you'd forgive. So let me crave indulgence for the fear Of falling ill at this bad time of year. When, thanks to early figs and sultry heat, The undertaker figures with his suite; When fathers all and fond mammas grow pale At what may happen to their young heirs male, And courts and levees, town-bred mortals' ills, Bring fevers on, and break the seals of wills. 

 (Conington's translation. )

Consider those lines; then consider how long it took the inhabitantsof this island--the cultured ones who count as readers orwriters--to recapture just that note of urbanity. Other thingsour forefathers --Britons, Saxons, Normans, Dutch or Frenchrefugees--discovered by the way; worthier things if you will; but notuntil the eighteenth century do you find just that note recaptured; thenote of easy confidence that our London had become what Rome had been, the Capital city. You begin to meet it in Dryden; with Addison it isfairly established. Pass a few years, and with Samuel Johnson it istaken for granted. His _London_ is Juvenal's Rome, and the same satireapplies to one as applied to the other. But against the urbane lineswritten by one Horace some while before Juvenal let us set a passagefrom another Horace--Horace Walpole, seventeen hundred years later andsome little while ahead of Johnson. He, like our Roman colonist, is asettler in a new country, Twickenham; and like Flaccus he loves toescape from town life. 

 TWICKENHAM, June 8th, 1747. 

 To the Hon. H. S. CONWAY. 

 You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs Chevenix's shop, and the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows with filagree hedges:

 A small Euphrates through the place is roll'd, And little finches wave their wings of gold. 

 Two delightful roads; that you would call dusty, supply me continually with coaches and chaises: barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by the most poetical moonlight. .. . The Chevenixes had tricked it out for themselves; up two pairs of stairs is what they call Mr Chevenix's library, furnished with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton and a lame telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville _predeceased_ me here and instituted certain games called _cricketalia_, which has been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow. 

 You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all tranquility while a Parliament is bursting about my ears. You know it is going to be dissolved. .. . They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections which he won't carry--he had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen. 

There you have Horatio Walpole, the man-about-town, almost preciselyechoing Horatius Flaccus, the man-about-town; and this (if you will bringyour minds to it) is just the sort of passage a Roman colonist in Britainwould open upon, out of his parcel of new books, and read, _andunderstand_, some eighteen hundred years ago. 

What became of it all?--of that easy colonial life, of the men and womenwho trod those tessellated pavements? 'Wiped out, ' say the historians, knowing nothing, merely guessing: for you may with small trouble assureyourselves that the fifth and sixth centuries in the story of this islandare a blind spot, concerning which one man's guess may be as good asanother's. 'Wiped out, ' they will commonly agree; for while, as I warnedyou in another lecture, the pedantic mind, faced with a difficulty, tendsto remove it conveniently into a category to which it does not belong, still more prone is the pedantic mind to remove it out of existencealtogether. So 'wiped out' is the theory; and upon it a sympatheticimagination can invent what sorrowful pictures it will of departinglegions, the last little cloud of dust down the highway, the lovers bythe gate watching it, not comprehending; the peaceful homestead in thebackground, ripe for doom--and what-not. 

Or, stay! There is another theory to which the late Professor Freemaninclined (if so sturdy a figure could be said to incline), laying stresson a passage in Gildas, that the Romans in Britain, faced by the Saxoninvader, got together their money, and bolted away into Gaul. 'The Romansthat were in Britain gathered together their gold-hoard, hid part in theground and carried the rest over to Gaul, ' writes Gildas. 'The hiding inthe ground, ' says Freeman, 'is of course a guess to explain the frequentfinding of Roman coins'--which indeed it _does_ explain better than theguess that they were carried away, and perhaps better than theschoolboy's suggestion that during their occupation of Britain the Romansspent most of their time in dropping money about. Likely enough, largenumbers of the colonists did gather up what they could and flee beforethe approaching storm; but by no means all, I think. For (since, whereall is uncertain, we must reason from what is probable of human nature)in the first place men with large estates do not behave in that waybefore a danger which creeps upon them little by little, as this Saxondanger did. These colonists could not dig up their fields and carry themover to Gaul. They did not keep banking accounts; and in the course offour hundred years their main wealth had certainly been sunk in the land. They could not carry away their villas. We know that many of them did notcarry away the _tessellæ_ for which (as we have seen) they had sopeculiar a veneration; for these remain. Secondly, if the colonists leftBritain in a mass, when in the middle of the sixth century we findBelisarius offering the Goths to trade Britain for Sicily, as being 'muchlarger and this long time subservient to Roman rule, '[2] we must supposeeither (as Freeman appears to suppose) that Belisarius did not know whathe was offering, or that he was attempting a gigantic 'bluff, ' or lastlythat he really was offering an exchange not flatly derisory; of whichthree possible suppositions I prefer the last as the likeliest. Nor am Ithe less inclined to choose it, because these very English historians goon to clear the ground in a like convenient way of the Celticinhabitants, exterminating them as they exterminated the Romans, with a wave of the hand, quite in the fashion of Mr Podsnap. 'This isun-English: therefore for me it merely ceases to exist. '

'_Probable extirpation of the Celtic inhabitants_' jots down Freeman inhis margin, and proceeds to write:

 In short, though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extinguished as a nation could be. The women doubtless would be largely spared, but as far as the male sex is concerned we may feel sure that death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands of our fathers. 

Upon this passage, if brought to me in an undergraduate essay, I shouldhave much to say. The style, with its abstract nouns ('the literalextirpation of a nation is an impossibility'), its padding andperiphrasis ('there is every reason to believe' . .. 'as far as the malesex is concerned we may feel sure') betrays the loose thought. It beginswith 'in short' and proceeds to be long-winded. It commits what evenschoolboys know to be a solecism by inviting us to consider three'alternatives'; and what can I say of 'the women doubtless would belargely spared, ' save that besides scanning in iambics it says whatFreeman never meant and what no-one outside of an Aristophanic comedycould ever suggest? 'The women doubtless would be largely spared'! Itreminds me of the young lady in Cornwall who, asked by her vicar if shehad been confirmed, admitted blushingly that 'she had reason to believe, partially so. '

'The women doubtless would be largely spared'!--But I thank the Professorfor teaching me that phrase, because it tries to convey just what I amdriving at. The Jutes, Angles, Saxons, did not extirpate the Britons, whatever you may hold concerning the Romans. For, once again, men do notbehave in that way, and certainly will not when a live slave is worthmoney. Secondly, the very horror with which men spoke, centuries after, of Anderida quite plainly indicates that such a wholesale massacre wasexceptional, monstrous. If not exceptional, monstrous, why should thisparticular slaughter have lingered so ineffaceably in their memories?Finally, --and to be as curt as the question deserves--the Celtic Britonin the island was not exterminated and never came near to beingexterminated: but on the contrary, remains equipollent with the Saxon inour blood, and perhaps equipollent with that mysterious race we callIberian, which came before either and endures in this island to-day, asanyone travelling it with eyes in his head can see. Pict, Dane, Norman, Frisian, Huguenot French--these and others come in. If mixture of bloodbe a shame, we have purchased at the price of that shame the glory ofcatholicism; and I know of nothing more false in science or more activelypoisonous in politics or in the arts than the assumption that we belongas a race to the Teutonic family. 

Dane, Norman, Frisian, French Huguenot--they all come in. And will yourefuse a hearing when I claim that the Roman came in too? Bethink you howdeeply Rome engraved itself on this island and its features. Bethink youthat, as human nature is, no conquering race ever lived or couldlive--even in garrison--among a tributary one without begetting childrenon it. Bethink you yet further of Freeman's admission that in thewholesale (and quite hypothetical) general massacre 'the women doubtlesswould be largely spared'; and you advance nearer to my point. I see apeople which for four hundred years was permeated by Rome. If you insiston its being a Teutonic people (which I flatly deny) then you have onewhich _alone of Teutonic peoples_ has inherited the Roman gift ofconsolidating conquest, of colonising in the wake of its armies; ofdriving the road, bridging the ford, bringing the lawless under itssense of law. I see that this nation of ours concurrently, when it seeksback to what alone can inspire and glorify these activities, seeks back, not to any supposed native North, but south to the Middle Sea of ourcivilisation and steadily to Italy, which we understand far more easilythan France--though France has helped us times and again. Putting thesethings together, I retort upon the ethnologists--for I come from theWest of England, where we suffer incredible things from them--_'Semperego auditor tantum?'_ I hazard that the most important thing in ourblood is that purple drop of the imperial murex we derive from Rome. 

You must, of course, take this for nothing more than it pretends to be--aconjecture, a suggestion. I will follow it up with two statements offact, neither doubtful nor disputable. 

The first is, that when English poetry awoke, long after the Conquest(or, as I should prefer to put it, after the Crusades) it awoke a newthing; in its vocabulary as much like Anglo-Saxon poetry as ever youwill, but in metre, rhythm, lilt--and more, in style, feeling, imaginative play--and yet more again, in knowledge of what it aimed tobe, in the essentials, in the qualities that make Poetry Poetry--asdifferent from Anglo-Saxon poetry as cheese is from chalk, and as muchmore nutritious. Listen to this--

 Bytuene Mershe ant Averil When spray biginnith to spring, The lutel foul hath hire wyl On hire lud to synge: Ich libbe in love-longinge For semlokest of alle thynge, He may me blisse bringe, Icham in hire bandoun. An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent, Ichot from hevene it is me sent, From alle wymmen my love is lent, And lyht on Alisoun. 

Here you have alliteration in plenty; you even have what some hold to bethe pattern of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (though in practicedisregarded, may be, as often as not), the chosen initial used twice inthe first line and once at least in the second:

 From alle wymmen my _l_ove is _l_ent, And _l_yht on A_l_isoun. 

But if a man cannot see a difference infinitely deeper than anysimilarity between this song of Alison and the old Anglo-Saxon verse--_adifference of nature_--I must despair of his literary sense. 

What has happened? Well, in Normandy, too, and in another tongue, men aresinging much the same thing in the same way:

 A la fontenelle Qui sort seur l'araine, Trouvai pastorella Qui n'iert pas vilaine. .. Merci, merci, douce Marote, N'oçiez pas vostre ami doux, and this Norman and the Englishman were singing to a new tune, which wasyet an old tune re-set to Europe by the Provence, the Roman Province; bythe troubadours--Pons de Capdeuil, Bernard de Ventadour, Bertrand deBorn, Pierre Vidal, and the rest, with William of Poitou, William ofPoitiers. Read and compare; you will perceive that the note then setpersists and has never perished. Take Giraud de Borneil--

 Bel companhos, si dormetz o velhatz Non dortmatz plus, qu'el jorn es apropchatz--

and set it beside a lyric of our day, written without a thought of Giraudde Borneil--

 Heigh! Brother mine, art a-waking or a-sleeping: Mind'st thou the merry moon a many summers fled? Mind'st thou the green and the dancing and the leaping? Mind'st thou the haycocks and the moon above them creeping?. .. 

Or take Bernard de Ventadour's--

 Quand erba vertz, e fuelha par E'l flor brotonon per verjan, E'l rossinhols autet e clar Leva sa votz e mov son chan, Joy ai de luy, e joy ai de la flor, Joy ai de me, e de me dons maior. 

Why, it runs straight off into English verse--

 When grass is green and leaves appear With flowers in bud the meads among, And nightingale aloft and clear Lifts up his voice and pricks his song, Joy, joy have I in song and flower, Joy in myself, and in my lady more. 

And that may be doggerel; yet what is it but

 It was a lover and his lass, With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, That o'er the green cornfield did pass In the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time--

or

 When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! the doxy over the dale, Why then comes in the sweet o' the year; For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. 

Nay, flatter the Anglo-Saxon tradition by picking its very best--and Isuppose it hard to find better than the much-admired opening of PiersPlowman, in which that tradition shot up like the flame of a dyingcandle:

 Bote in a Mayes Morwnynge--on Malverne hulles Me bi-fel a ferly--a Feyrie me thouhte; I was weori of wandringe--and wente me to reste Under a brod banke--bi a Bourne syde, And as I lay and leonede--and lokede on the watres, I slumberde in a slepynge--hit sownede so murie. 

This is good, solid stuff, no doubt: but tame, inert, if not actuallylifeless. As M. Jusserand says of Anglo-Saxon poetry in general, it islike the river Saône--one doubts which way it flows. How tame incomparison with this, for example!--

 In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long, Hit is full mery in feyre foreste To here the foulys song:

 To se the dere draw to the dale And leve the hilles hee, And shadow hem in the leves grene Under the grene-wode tre. 

 Hit befel on Whitsontide, Erly in a May mornyng, The Son up feyre can shyne, And the briddis mery can syng. 

 'This is a mery mornyng, ' said litell John, 'Be Hym that dyed on tre; A more mery man than I am one Lyves not in Cristianté. 

 'Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster, ' Litull John can sey, 'And thynk hit is a full fayre tyme In a mornyng of May. '

There is no doubting which way _that_ flows! And this vivacity, this newbeat of the heart of poetry, is common to Chaucer and the humblestballad-maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics printed yesterday, andit came straight to us out of Provence, the Roman Province. It was theProvençal Troubadour who, like the Prince in the fairy tale, brokethrough the hedge of briers and kissed Beauty awake again. 

You will urge that he wakened Poetry not in England alone but all overEurope, in Dante before our Chaucer, in the trouvères and minnesingers aswell as in our ballad-writers. To that I might easily retort, 'So muchthe better for Europe, and the more of it the merrier, to win their wayinto the great comity. ' But here I put in my second assertion, that weEnglish have had above all nations lying wide of the Mediterranean, theinstinct to refresh and renew ourselves at Mediterranean wells; thatagain and again our writers--our poets especially--have sought them asthe hart panteth after the water-brooks. If you accept this assertion, and if you believe as well that our literature, surpassing Rome's, mayvie with that of Athens--if you believe that a literature which includesChaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley--the AuthorisedVersion of Holy Writ, with Browne, Bunyan, Swift, Addison, Johnson, Arnold, Newman--has entered the circle to take its seat with the first--why then, heartily believing this with you, I leave you to find somebetter explanation than mine if you can. 

But what I content myself with asserting here you can scarcely deny. Chaucer's initial and enormous debt to Dante and Boccaccio stands in aslittle dispute as Dunbar's to Chaucer. On that favourite poet of mine, Sir Thomas Wyat, I descanted in a former lecture. He is one of yourglories here, having entered St. John's College at the age of twelve(which must have been precocious even for those days. ) Anthony Woodasserts that after finishing his course here, he proceeded to CardinalWolsey's new College at Oxford; but, as Christchurch was not foundeduntil 1524, and Wyat, still precocious, had married a wife two yearsbefore that, the statement (to quote Dr Courthope) 'seems no betterfounded than many others advanced by that patriotic but not veryscrupulous author. ' It is more to the point that he went travelling, andbrought home from France, Italy, afterwards Spain--always from Latinaltars--the flame of lyrical poetry to England; the flame of thePetrarchists, caught from the Troubadours, clarified (so to speak) by thesalt of humane letters. On what our Elizabethan literature owes to theClassical revival hundreds of volumes have been written and hundreds morewill be written; I will but remind you of what Spencer talked about withGabriel Harvey, what Daniel disputed with Campion; that Marlowe tried tore-incarnate Machiavelli, that Jonson was a sworn Latinist and the 'tribeof Ben' a classical tribe; while, as for Shakespeare, go and reckon theproportion of Italian and Roman names in his _dramatis personæ_. OfDonne's debt to France, Italy, Rome, Greece, you may read much inProfessor Grierson's great edition, and I daresay Professor Griersonwould be the first to allow that all has not yet been computed. You knowhow Milton prepared himself to be a poet. Have you realised that, inthose somewhat strangely constructed sonnets of his, Milton wasdeliberately modelling upon the "Horatian Ode, " as his confrère, AndrewMarvell, was avowedly attempting the like in his famous Horation Ode onCromwell's Return from Ireland; so that if Cromwell had returned (like MrQuilp), walked in and caught his pair of Latin Secretaries scribblingverse, one at either end of the office table, both might colourably havepleaded that they were, after all, writing Latin. Waller's task in poetrywas to labour true classical polish where Cowley laboured sham-classicalform. Put together Dryden's various Prefaces and you will find them onesolid monument to his classical faith. Of Pope, Gray, Collins, you willnot ask me to speak. What is salt in Cowper you can taste only when youhave detected that by a stroke of madness he missed, or barely missed, being our true English Horace, that almost more nearly than the rest hehit what the rest had been seeking. Then, of the 'romantic revival'--enemy of false classicism, not of classicism--bethink you what, in hisfew great years, Wordsworth owed directly to France of the earlyRevolution; what Keats drew forth out of Lemprière: and again bethink youhow Tennyson wrought upon Theocritus, Virgil, Catullus; upon what Arnoldconstantly shaped his verse; how Browning returned ever upon Italy toinspire his best and correct his worse. 

Of Anglo-Saxon prose I know little indeed, but enough of the world tofeel reasonably sure that if it contained any single masterpiece--oranything that could be paraded as a masterpiece--we should have heardenough about it long before now. It was invented by King Alfred forexcellent political reasons; but, like other ready-made politicalinventions in this country, it refused to thrive. I think it can bedemonstrated, that the true line of intellectual descent in prose liesthrough Bede (who wrote in Latin, the 'universal language'), and notthrough the Blickling Homilies, or, Ælfric, or the Saxon Chronicle. And Iam sure that Freeman is perversely wrong when he laments as a 'greatmistake' that the first Christian missionaries from Rome did not teachtheir converts to pray and give praise in the vernacular. The vernacularbeing what it was, these men did better to teach the religion of thecivilised world--_orbis terrarum_--in the language of the civilisedworld. I am not thinking of its efficiency for spreading the faith; butneither is Freeman; and, for that, we must allow these old missionariesto have known their own business. I am thinking only of how this 'greatmistake' affected our literature; and if you will read ProfessorSaintsbury's "History of English Prose Rhythm" (pioneer work, which yetwonderfully succeeds in illustrating what our prose-writers from time totime were trying to do); if you will study the Psalms in the AuthorisedVersion; if you will consider what Milton, Clarendon, Sir Thomas Browne, were aiming at; what Addison, Gibbon, Johnson; what Landor, Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, Pater; I doubt not your rising from the perusal convincedthat our nation, in this storehouse of Latin to refresh and replenish itsmost sacred thoughts, has enjoyed a continuous blessing: that the Latinof the Vulgate and the Offices has been a background giving depth and, asthe painters say, 'value' to nine-tenths of our serious writing. 

And now, since this and the previous lecture run something counter to agreat deal of that teaching in English Literature which nowadays passesmost acceptably, let me avoid offence, so far as may be, by defining oneor two things I am _not_ trying to do. 

I am not persuading you to despise your linguistic descent. English isEnglish--our language; and all its history to be venerated by us. 

I am not persuading you to despise linguistic study. _All_ learning isvenerable. 

I am not persuading you to behave like Ascham, and turn English proseinto pedantic Latin; nor would I have you doubt that in the set quarrelbetween Campion, who wished to divert English verse into strict classicalchannels, and Daniel, who vindicated our free English way (derived fromLatin through the Provençal), Daniel was on the whole, right, Campion onthe whole, wrong: though I believe that both ways yet lie open, and wemay learn, if we study them intelligently, a hundred things from the oldclassical metres. 

I do not ask you to forget what there is of the Northmen in your blood. If I desired this, I could not worship William Morris as I do, among thelater poets. 

I do not ask you to doubt that the barbarian invaders from the north, with their myths and legends, brought new and most necessary blood ofimagination into the literary material--for the time almost exhausted--ofGreece and Rome. 

Nevertheless, I do contend that when Britain (or, if you prefer it, Sleswick)

 When Sleswick first at Heaven's command Arose from out the azure main, she differed from Aphrodite, that other foam-born, in sundry importantfeatures of ear, of lip, of eye. 

Lastly, if vehement assertions on the one side have driven me into toovehement dissent on the other, I crave pardon; not for the dissent butfor the vehemence, as sinning against the very principle I would hold upto your admiration--the old Greek principle of avoiding excess. 

But I _do_ commend the patient study of Greek and Latin authors--in theoriginal or in translation--to all of you who would write English; andfor three reasons. 

(1) In the first place they will correct your insularity of mind; or, rather, will teach you to forget it. The Anglo-Saxon, it has been noted, ever left an empty space around his houses; and that, no doubt, is goodfor a house. It is not so good for the mind. 

(2) Secondly, we have a tribal habit, confirmed by Protestant meditationupon a Hebraic religion, of confining our literary enjoyment to thewritten word and frowning down the drama, the song, the dance. A fairlyattentive study of modern lyrical verse has persuaded me that thisexclusiveness may be carried too far, and threatens to be deadening. 'Iwill sing and give praise, ' says the Scripture, 'with the best memberthat I have'--meaning the tongue. But the old Greek was an 'all-roundman' as we say. He sought to praise and give thanks with all his members, and to tune each to perfection. I think his way worth your considering. 

(3) Lastly, and chiefly, I commend these classical authors to you becausethey, in the European civilisation which we all inherit, conserve thenorm of literature; the steady grip on the essential; the clean outlineat which in verse or in prose--in epic, drama, history, or philosophicaltreatise--a writer should aim. 

So sure am I of this, and of its importance to those who think ofwriting, that were this University to limit me to three texts on which topreach English Literature to you, I should choose the Bible in ourAuthorised Version, Shakespeare, and Homer (though it were but in a prosetranslation). Two of these lie outside my marked province. Only one ofthem finds a place in your English school. But Homer, who comes neitherwithin my map, nor within the ambit of the Tripos, would--because he mostevidently holds the norm, the essence, the secret of all--rank first ofthe three for my purpose. 

[Footnote 1: From "A History of Oxfordshire, " by Mr J. Meade Falkner, author of Murray's excellent Handbook of Oxfordshire. ]

LECTURE X. 

ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES (I)

Wednesday, November 19

All lectures are too long. Towards the close of my last, Gentlemen, I letfall a sentence which, heard by you in a moment of exhausted or languidinterest, has since, like enough, escaped your memory even if it earnedpassing attention. So let me repeat it, for a fresh start. 

Having quoted to you the words of our Holy Writ, 'I will sing and givepraise with the best member that I have, ' I added 'But the old Greek wasan "all-round" man; he sought to praise and give thanks with all hismembers, and to tune each to perfection. ' Now a great many instructivelectures might be written on that text: nevertheless you may think it astrange one, and obscure, for the discourse on 'English Literature in ourUniversities' which, according to promise, I must now attempt. 

The term 'an all-round man' may easily mislead you unless you take itwith the rest of the sentence and particularly with the words 'praise andgive thanks. ' Praise whom? Give thanks to whom? To _whom_ did our Greektrain all his members to render adoration?

Why, to the gods--his gods: to Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite; and from themdown to the lesser guardian deities of the hearth, the field, thefarmstead. We modern men suffer a double temptation to misunderstand, bybelittling, the reverence in which Hellas and Rome held their gods. Tostart with, our religion has superseded theirs. We approach the Olympianswith no bent towards venerating them; with minds easy, detached, to whicha great deal of their theology--the amativeness of Zeus for example--mustneeds seem broadly comic, and a great deal of it not only comic butchildish. We are encouraged in this, moreover, when we read such writersas Aristophanes and Lucian, and observe how they poked fun at the gods. We assume--so modern he seems--Aristophanes' attitude towards hisimmortals to be ours; that when, for example, Prometheus walks on to thestage under an umbrella, to hide himself from the gaze of all-seeingZeus, the Athenian audience laughed just as we laugh who have readVoltaire. Believe me, they laughed quite differently; believe me, Aristophanes and Voltaire had remarkably different minds and worked onutterly different backgrounds. Believe me, you will understandAristophanes only less than you will understand Æschylus himself if youconfuse Aristophanes' mockery of Olympus with modern mockery. But, if youwill not take my word for it, let me quote what Professor Gilbert Murraysaid, the other day, speaking before the English Association on Greekpoetry, how constantly connected it is with religion:

 'All thoughts, all passions, all desires' . .. In our Art it is true, no doubt, that they are 'the ministers of love'; in Greek they are as a whole the ministers of religion, and this is what in a curious degree makes Greek poetry matter, makes it relevant. There is a sense in each song of a relation to the whole of things, and it was apt to be expressed with the whole body, or, one may say, the whole being. [1]

To a Greek, in short, his gods mattered enormously; and to a Roman. To aRoman they continued to matter enormously, down to the end. Do youremember that tessellated pavement with its emblems and images of theyounger gods? and how I told you that a Roman general on foreign servicewould carry the little cubes in panniers on mule-back, to be laid downfor his feet at the next camping place? Will you suggest that he did thisbecause they were pretty? You know that practical men--conqueringgenerals--don't behave in that way. He did it because they were sacred;because, like most practical men, he was religious, and his gods must gowith him. They filled his literature: for why? He believed himself to besprung from their loins. Where would Latin literature be, for example, ifyou could cut Venus out of it? Consider Lucretius' grand invocation:

 Æneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas, Alma Venus!

Consider the part Virgil makes her play as moving spirit of his wholegreat poem. So follow her down to the days of the later Empire and openthe "Pervigilium Veneris" and discover her, under the name of Dione, still the eternal Aphrodite sprung from the foam amid the churning hoovesof the sea-horses--_inter et bipedes equos_:--

 Time was that a rain-cloud begat her, impregning the heave of the deep, 'Twixt hooves of sea-horses a-scatter, stampeding the dolphins as sheep. Lo! arose of that bridal Dione, rainbow'd and besprent of its dew! _Now learn ye to love who loved never--now ye who have loved, love anew!_ Her favour it was fill'd the sails of the Trojan for Latium bound, Her favour that won her Æneas a bride on Laurentian ground, And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the Vestal, to Mars; As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome for its wars With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew From Romulus down to our Cæsar--last, best of that blood, of that thew. _Now learn ye to love who loved never--now ye who have loved, love anew!_

'Last, best of that blood'--her blood, _fusa Paphies de cruore_, and theblood of Teucer, _revocato a sanguine Teucri_, 'of that thew'--the thewof Tros and of Mars. Of these and no less than these our Roman believedhimself the son and inheritor. 

If we grasp this, that the old literature was packed with the oldreligion, and not only packed with it but permeated by it, we have withinour ten fingers the secret of the 'Dark Ages, ' the real reason why theChristian Fathers fought down literature and almost prevailed to thepoint of stamping it out. They hated it, not as literature; or at anyrate, not to begin with; nor, to begin with, because it happened to bevoluptuous and they austere: but they hated it because it held in itsvery texture, not to be separated, a religion over which they had hardlytriumphed, a religion actively inimical to that of Christ, inimical totruth; so that for the sake of truth and in the name of Christ they hadto fight it, accepting no compromise, yielding no quarter, foreseeing noissue save that one of the twain--Jupiter or Christ, Deus Optimus Maximusor the carpenter's son of Nazareth--must go under. 

It all ended in compromise, to be sure; as all struggles must betweenadversaries so tremendous. To-day, in Dr Smith's "Classical Dictionary, "Origen rubs shoulders with Orpheus and Orcus; Tertullian reposes cheek byjowl with Terpsichore. But we are not concerned, here, with what happenedin the end. We are concerned with what these forthright Christianfighters had in their minds--to trample out the old literature _because_of the false religion. Milton understood this, and was thinking of itwhen he wrote of the effect of Christ's Nativity--

 The Oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No mighty trance, or breathèd spell Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell. 

 The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; From haunted spring, and dale Edg'd with poplar pale, The parting Genius is with sighing sent; With flower-inwoven tresses torn The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. 

as Swinburne understands and expresses it in his "Hymn to Proserpine, "supposed to be chanted by a Roman of the 'old profession' on the morrowof Constantine's proclaiming the Christian faith--

 O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day! From your wrath is the world released, redeem'd from your chains, men say. New Gods are crown'd in the city; their flowers have broken your rods; They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods. But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare; Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were. .. Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake; Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. 

'Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean!' However the struggle might swayin this or that other part of the field, Literature had to be beaten toher knees, and still beaten flat until the breath left her body. You willnot be surprised that the heavy hand of these Christian fathers fellfirst upon the Theatre: for the actor in Rome was by legal definition an'infamous' man, even as in England until the other day he was by legaldefinition a vagabond and liable to whipping. The policy of religiousreformers has ever been to close the theatres, as our Puritans did in1642; and a recent pronouncement by the Bishop of Kensington would seemto show that the instinct survives to this day. Queen Elizabeth--like herbrother, King Edward VI--signalized the opening of a new reign byinhibiting stage-plays; and I invite you to share with me the pensivespeculation, 'How much of English Literature, had she not relented, wouldexist to-day for a King Edward VII Professor to talk about?' Certainlythe works of Shakespeare would not; and that seems to me a thought soimpressive as to deserve the attention of Bishops as well as of Kings. 

Apart from this instinct the Christian Fathers, it would appear, hadplenty of provocation. For the actors, who had jested with the OldReligion on a ground of accepted understanding--much as a good husband(if you will permit the simile) may gently tease his wife, not loving herone whit the less, taught by affection to play without offending--hadmocked at the New Religion in a very different way: savagely, as enemies, holding up to ridicule the Church's most sacred mysteries. Tertullian, inan uncompromising treatise "De Spectaculis, " denounces stage-plays rootand branch; tells of a demon who entered into a woman in a theatre and onbeing exorcised pleaded that the mistake might well be excused, since hehad found her in his own demesne. Christians should avoid these shows andawait the greatest _spectaculum_ of all--the Last Judgment. 'Then, ' hepromises genially, 'will be the time to listen to the tragedians, whoselamentations will be more poignant, for their proper pain. Then will thecomedians turn and twist in capers rendered nimbler than ever by thesting of the fire that is not quenched. ' By 400 A. D. Augustine criestriumphantly that the theatres are falling--the very walls of themtumbling--throughout the Empire. _'Per omnes paene civitates cadunttheatra . .. Cadunt et fora vel moenia in quibus demonia colebantur'_; thevery walls within which these devilments were practised. But the fury isunabated and goes on stamping down the embers. In the eighth century ourown Alcuin (as the school of Freeman would affectionately call him) is noless fierce. All plays are anathema to him, and he even disapproves ofdancing bears--though not, it would appear, of bad puns: _'nec tibi sitursorum saltantium cura, sed clericorum psallentium. '_[2]

The banning of _all_ literature you will find harder to understand; nayimpossible, I believe, unless you accept the explanation I gave you. Yetthere it is, an historical fact. 'What hath it profited posterity--_quidposteritas emolumenti tulit, _' wrote Sulpicius Severus, about 400 A. D. , 'to read of Hector's fighting or Socrates' philosophising?' Pope Gregorythe Great--St Gregory, who sent us the Roman missionaries--made no bonesabout it at all. '_Quoniam non cognovi literaturam, _' he quotedapprovingly from the 70th Psalm, '_introibo in potentias Domini_':'Because I know nothing of literature I shall enter into the strength ofthe Lord. ' 'The praises of Christ cannot be uttered in the same tongue asthose of Jove, ' writes this same Gregory to Desiderius, Archbishop ofVienne, who had been rash enough to introduce some of his young men tothe ancient authors, with no worse purpose than to teach them a littlegrammar. Yet no one was prouder than this Pope of the historical Romewhich he had inherited. Alcuin, again, forbade the reading of Virgil inthe monastery over which he presided: it would sully his disciples'imagination. 'How is this, _Virgilian!_' he cried out upon one taken inthe damnable act, --'that without my knowledge and against my order thouhast taken to studying Virgil?' To put a stop to this unhallowedindulgence the clergy solemnly taught that Virgil was a wizard. 

To us, long used as we are to the innocent gaieties of the ClassicalTripos, these measures to discourage the study of Virgil may appeardrastic, as the mental attitude of Gregory and Alcuin towards the Latinhexameter (so closely resembling that of Byron towards the waltz) not farremoved from foolishness. But there you have in its quiddity themediaeval mind: and the point I now put to you is, that _out of this soilour Universities grew. _

We, who claim Oxford and Cambridge for our nursing mothers, have of allmen least excuse to forget it. A man of Leyden, of Louvain, of Liepzig, of Berlin, may be pardoned that he passes it by. More than a hundredyears ago Salamanca had the most of her stones torn down to make defencesagainst Wellington's cannon. Paris, greatest of all, has kept her renown;but you shall search the slums of the Latin Quarter in vain for the sixtyor seventy Colleges that, before the close of the fifteenth century, hadarisen to adorn her, the intellectual Queen of Europe. In Bologna, theancient and stately, almost alone among the continental Universities, survive a few relics of the old collegiate system--the College of Spain, harbouring some five or six students, and a little house founded forFlemings in 1650: and in Bologna the system never attained to realimportance. 

But in England where, great as London is, the national mind has alwaysharked to the country for the graces of life, so that we seem by instinctto see it as only desirable in a green setting, our Universities, plantedby the same instinct on lawns watered by pastoral streams, have sufferedso little and received as much from the years that now we can hardlyconceive of Oxford or Cambridge as ruined save by 'the unimaginable touchof Time. ' Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, she has lostnot one; while Cambridge (I believe) has parted only with Cavendish. Somehave been subsumed into newer foundations; but always the process hasbeen one of merging, of blending, of justifying the new bottle by the oldwine. The vengeance of civil war--always very much of a family affair inEngland--has dealt tenderly with Oxford and Cambridge; the morecalculating malignity of Royal Commissions not harshly on the whole. University reformers may accuse both Oxford and Cambridge of

 Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade:

but with those sour men we have nothing here to do: like Isaak Walton'smilkmaid we will not 'load our minds with any fears of many things thatwill never be. '

But, as they stand, Oxford and Cambridge--so amazingly alike while theyplay at differences, and both so amazingly unlike anything else in thewide world--do by a hundred daily reminders connect us with the MiddleAge, or, if you prefer Arnold's phrase, whisper its lost enchantments. The cloister, the grave grace in hall, the chapel bell, the men hurryinginto their surplices or to lectures 'with the wind in their gowns, ' thestaircase, the nest of chambers within the oak--all these softlyreverberate over our life here, as from belfries, the mediaeval mind. 

And that mediaeval mind actively hated (of partial acquaintance or byanticipation) almost everything we now study! Between it and us, exceptthese memorials, nothing survives to-day but the dreadful temptation tolearn, the dreadful instinct in men, as they grow older and wiser, totrust learning after all and endow it--that, and the confidence of asteady stream of youth. 

The Universities, then, sprang out of mediaeval life, out of themediaeval mind; and the mediaeval mind had for centuries been taught toabominate literature. I would not exaggerate or darken the 'Dark Ages'for you by throwing too much bitumen into the picture. I know that at thebeginning there had been a school of Origen which advocated the study ofGreek poetry and philosophy, as well as the school of Tertullian whichcondemned it. There is evidence that the 'humanities' were cultivatedhere and there and after a fashion behind Gregory's august back. I grantthat, while in Alcuin's cloister (and Alcuin, remember, became a sort ofImperial Director of Studies in Charlemagne's court) the wretched monkwho loved Virgil had to study him with an illicit candle, to copy himwith numbed fingers in a corner of the bitter-cold cloister, on the otherhand many beautiful manuscripts preserved to us bear witness of cloisterswhere literature was tolerated if not officially honoured. I would nothave you so uncritical as to blame the Church or its clergy for whathappened; as I would have you remember that if the Church killedliterature, she--and, one may say, she alone--kept it alive. 

Yet, and after all these reservations, it remains true that Literaturehad gone down disastrously. Even philosophy, unless you count the palework of Boethius--_real_ philosophy had so nearly perished that menpossessed no more of Aristotle than a fragment of his Logic, and '_the_Philosopher' had to creep back into Western Europe through translationsfrom the Arabic! But this is the point I wish to make clear. --Philosophycame back in the great intellectual revival of the twelfth century;Literature did not. Literature's hour had not come. Men had to catch upon a dreadful leeway of ignorance. The form did not matter as yet: theywanted science--to know. I should say, rather, that as yet form _seemed_not to matter: for in fact form always matters: the personal alwaysmatters: and you cannot explain the vast crowds Abelard drew to Parissave by the fascination in the man, the fire communicated by the livingvoice. Moreover (as in a previous lecture I tried to prove) you cannotdivorce accurate thought from accurate speech; but for accuracy, even forhair-splitting accuracy, of speech the Universities had the definitionsof the Schoolmen. In literature they had yet to discover a concern. Literature was a thing of the past, inanimate. Nowhere in Europe could itbe felt even to breathe. To borrow a beautiful phrase of Wordsworth's, men numbered it among 'things silently gone out of mind or thingsviolently destroyed. '

Nobody quite knows how these Universities began. Least of all can anybodytell how Oxford and Cambridge began. In Bede, for instance--that is, inEngland as the eighth century opens--we see scholarship already movingtowards the _thing_, treading with sure instinct towards the light. Though a hundred historians have quoted it, I doubt if a feeling man wholoves scholarship can read the famous letter of Cuthbert describingBede's end and not come nigh to tears. 

And Bede's story contains no less wonder than beauty, when you considerhow the fame of this holy and humble man of heart, who never left hiscloisters at Jarrow, spread over Europe, so that, though it soundincredible, our Northumbria narrowly missed in its day to become thepole-star of Western culture. But he was a disinterested genius, and hispupil, Alcuin, a pushing dull man and a born reactionary; so that, whileAlcuin scored the personal success and went off to teach in the court ofCharlemagne, the great chance was lost. 

No one knows when the great Universities were founded, or precisely outof what schools they grew; and you may derive amusement from thehistorians when they start to explain how Oxford and Cambridge inparticular came to be chosen for sites. My own conjecture, that they werechosen for the extraordinary salubrity of their climates, has met (Iregret to say) with derision, and may be set down to the caprice of onewho ever inclines to think the weather good where he is happy. Our ownlearned historian, indeed--Mr J. Bass Mullinger--devotes some closelyreasoned pages to proving that Cambridge was chosen as the unlikeliestspot in the world, and is driven to quote the learned Poggio's opinionthat the unhealthiness of a locality recommended it as a place ofeducation for youth; as Plato, knowing naught of Christianity, but giftedwith a soul naturally Christian, '_had selected a noisome spot for hisAcademe, in order that the mind might be strengthened by the weakness ofthe body. _' So difficult still it is for the modern mind to interpret themediaeval!

Most likely these Universities grew as a tree grows from a seed blown bychance of the wind. It seems easy enough to understand why Paris, thatgreat city, should have possessed a great University; yet I surmise theprocesses at Oxford and Cambridge to have been only a little lessfortuitous. The schools of Remigius and of William of Champeaux (we willsay) have given Paris a certain prestige, when Abelard, a pupil ofWilliam's, springs into fame and draws a horde of students from all overEurope to sit at his feet. These 'nations' of young men have to beorganised, brought under some sort of discipline, if only to make thecitizens' lives endurable: and lo! the thing is done. In like mannerIrnerius at Bologna, Vacarius at Oxford, and at Cambridge some innominateteacher, 'of importance, ' as Browning would put it, 'in his day, 'possibly set the ball rolling; or again it is suggested that a body ofscholars dissatisfied with Oxford (such dissatisfaction has been knowneven in historical times) migrated hither--a laborious journey, evennowadays--and that so

 A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far!

These young or nascent bodies had a trick of breaking away after thisfashion. For reasons no longer obvious they hankered specially towardsStamford or Northampton. Until quite recently, within living memory, allcandidates for a Mastership of Arts at Oxford had to promise never tolecture at Stamford. A flood here in 1520, which swept away Garret HostelBridge, put Cambridge in like mind and started a prophecy (to which youmay find allusion in the fourth book of "The Faerie Queene") that bothUniversities would meet in the end, and kiss, at Stamford. Each in turnbroke away for Northampton, and the worthy Fuller (a Northamptonshireman) has recorded his wonder that so eligible a spot was not finallychosen. 

I have mentioned a flood: but the immediate causes of the migrations orattempted migrations were not usually respectable enough to rank with anysuch act of God. They started as a rule with some Town and Gown row, orsome bloody affray between scholars of the North and of the South. Without diminishing your sense of the real fervour for learning whichdrew young men from the remotest parts of Europe to these centres, buthaving for my immediate object to make clear to you that, whatever theseyoung men sought, it was not literature, I wish you first to have in yourminds a vivid picture of what a University town was like, and what itsstudents were like during the greater part of the 12th and 13thcenturies; that is to say, after the first enthusiasm had died down, whenOxford or Cambridge had organised itself into a _Studium Generale_, or_Universitas_ (which, of course, has nothing to do with Universality, whether of teaching or of frequenting, but simply means a Society. _Universitas_ = all of us). 

To begin with, the town was of wood, often on fire in places; with thealleviation of frequent winter floods, which in return, in the words of amodern poet, would 'leave a lot of little things behind them. ' Itrequires but a small effort of the imagination in Cambridge to picturethe streets as narrow, dark, almost meeting overhead in gables out ofwhich the house slops would be discharged after casual warning down intoa central gutter. That these narrow streets were populous with studentsremains certain, however much discount we allow on contemporary bills ofreckoning. And the crowd was noisy. Men have always been ingenious intheir ways of celebrating academical success. Pythagoras, for example, sacrificed an ox on solving the theorem numbered 47 in the first book ofEuclid; and even to-day a Professor in his solitary lodge may beencouraged to believe now and then, from certain evidences in the sky, that the spirit of Pythagoras is not dead but translated. 

But of the mediaeval University the lawlessness, though well attested, can scarcely be conceived. When in the streets 'nation' drew the knifeupon 'nation, ' 'town' upon 'gown'; when the city bell started to answerthe clang of St. Mary's; horrible deeds were done. I pass over massacres, tumults such as the famous one of St Scholastica's Day at Oxford, andchoose one at a decent distance (yet entirely typical) exhumed from theannals of the University of Toulouse, in the year 1332. In that year

 Five brothers of the noble family de la Penne lived together in a Hospicium at Toulouse as students of the Civil and Canon Law. One of them was Provost of a Monastery, another Archdeacon of Albi, another an Archpriest, another Canon of Toledo. A bastard son of their father, named Peter, lived with them as squire to the Canon. On Easter Day, Peter, with another squire of the household named Aimery Béranger and other students, having dined at a tavern, were dancing with women, singing, shouting, and beating 'metallic vessels and iron culinary instruments' in the street before their masters' house. The Provost and the Archpriest were sympathetically watching the jovial scene from a window, until it was disturbed by the appearance of a Capitoul and his officers, who summoned some of the party to surrender the prohibited arms which they were wearing. '_Ben Senhor, non fassat_' was the impudent reply. The Capitoul attempted to arrest one of the offenders; whereupon the ecclesiastical party made a combined attack upon the official. Aimery Béranger struck him in the face with a poignard, cutting off his nose and part of his chin and lips, and knocking out or breaking no less than eleven teeth. The surgeons deposed that if he recovered (he eventually did recover) he would never be able to speak intelligibly. One of the watch was killed outright by Peter de la Penne. That night the murderer slept, just as if nothing had happened, in the house of his ecclesiastical masters. The whole household, masters and servants alike, were, however, surprised by the other Capitouls and a crowd of 200 citizens, and led off to prison, and the house is alleged to have been pillaged. The Archbishop's Official demanded their surrender. In the case of the superior ecclesiastics this, after a short delay, was granted. But Aimery, who dressed like a layman in 'divided and striped clothes' and wore a long beard, they refused to treat as a clerk, though it was afterwards alleged that the tonsure was plainly discernible upon his head until it was shaved by order of the Capitouls. Aimery was put to the torture, admitted his crime, and was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out by hanging, after he had had his hand cut off on the scene of the crime, and been dragged by horses to the place of execution. The Capitouls were then excommunicated by the Official, and the ecclesiastical side of the quarrel was eventually transferred to the Roman Court. Before the Parlement of Paris the University complained of the violation of the Royal privilege exempting scholars' servants from the ordinary tribunals. The Capitouls were imprisoned, and after long litigation sentenced to pay enormous damages to the ruffian's family and erect a chapel for the good of his soul. The city was condemned for a time to the forfeiture of all its privileges. The body was cut down from the gibbet on which it had been hanging for three years, and accorded a solemn funeral. Four Capitouls bore the pall, and all fathers of families were required to walk in the procession. When they came to the Schools, the citizens solemnly begged pardon of the University, and the cortège was joined by 3000 scholars. Finally, it cost the city 15, 000 livres tournois or more to regain their civic privileges. [3]

The late Mr Cecil Rhodes once summarized all Fellows of Colleges aschildren in matters of finance. Be that as it may, you will find nothingmore constant in history than the talent of the Universities forextracting money or money's worth out of a riot. Time (I speak as aparent) has scarcely blunted that faculty; and still--since where youngmen congregate, noise there must be--our Universities like Wordsworth'sHappy Warrior

 turn their necessity to glorious gain. 

These were the excesses of young 'bloods, ' and their servants: but withthem mingled scholars not less ferocious in their habits because almostdesperately poor. You all know, I dare say, that very poor scholars wouldbe granted licences to beg by the Chancellor. The sleeve of this gown inwhich I address you represents the purse or pocket of a Master of Arts, and may hint to you by its amplitude how many crusts he was prepared toreceive from the charitable. 

Now, choosing to ignore (because it has been challenged as overpainted) apicture of penury endured by the scholars of St John's College in thisUniversity, let me tell you two stories, one well attested, the otherfiction if you will, but both agreeable as testifying to the spirit ofyouth which, ever blowing upon their sacred embers, has kept Oxford andCambridge perennially alive. 

My first is of three scholars so poor that they possessed but one 'cappa'and gown between them. They took it in turns therefore, and when one wentto lecture the other two kept to their lodgings. I invite you even toreflect on the joy of the lucky one, in a winter lecture room, dark, withunglazed windows, as he listened and shuffled his feet for warmth in thestraw of the floor. [No one, by the way, can understand the incessantharping of our early poets upon May-time and the return of summer untilhe has pictured to himself the dark and cold discomfort of aMiddle-English winter. ] These three poor scholars fed habitually onbread, with soup and a little wine, tasting meat only on Sundays andfeasts of the Church. Yet one of them, Richard of Chichester, who livedto become a saint, _saepe retulit quod nunquam in vita sua tam jucundam, tam delectabilem duxerat vitam_--that never had he lived so jollily, sodelectably. 

That is youth, youth blessed by friendship. Now for my second story, which is also of youth and friendship. --

Two poor scholars, who had with pains become Masters of Arts and savedtheir pence to purchase the coveted garb, on the afternoon of theiradmission took a country walk in it, together flaunting their new finery. But, the day being gusty, on their return across the bridge, a puff ofwind caught the _biretta_ of one and blew it into the river. The loss wasirrecoverable, since neither could swim. The poor fellow looked at hisfriend. His friend looked at him. 'Between us two, ' he said, 'it is allor naught, ' and cast his own cap to float and sink with the other downstream. 

You will never begin to understand literature until you understandsomething of life. These young men, your forerunners, understoodsomething of life while as yet completely careless of literature. Afterthe impulse of Abelard and others had died down, the mass of studentsbetook themselves to the Universities, no doubt, for quite ordinary, mercenary reasons. The University led to the Church, and the Church, inEngland at any rate, was the door to professional life. 

Nearly all the civil servants of the Crown--I am here quoting freely--thediplomatists, the secretaries or advisers of great nobles, thephysicians, the architects, at one time the secular law-givers, allthrough the Middle Ages the then large tribe of ecclesiastical lawyers, were ecclesiastics. .. . Clerkship did not necessarily involve even minororders. But as it was cheaper to a King or a Bishop or a temporal magnateto reward his physician, his legal adviser, his secretary, or his agentby a Canonry or a Rectory than by large salaries, the average student ofParis or Oxford or Cambridge looked toward the Church as the 'mainchance' as we say, and small blame to him! He never at any rate lookedtowards Literature: nor did the Universities, wise in their generation, encourage him to do anything of the sort. 

You may realise, Gentlemen, how tardily, even in later and moreenlightened times, the study of Literature has crept its way intoofficial Cambridge, if you will take down your "University Calendar" andstudy the list of Professorships there set forth in order of foundation. It begins in 1502 with the Lady Margaret's Chair of Divinity, founded bythe mother of Henry VII. Five Regius Professorships follow: of Divinity, Civil Law, Physic, Hebrew, Greek, all of 1540. So Greek comes in upon theflush of the Renaissance; and the Calendar bravely, yet not committingitself to a date, heads with Erasmus the noble roll which concludes (asmay it long conclude) with Henry Jackson. But Greek comes in last of thefive. Close on a hundred years elapse before the foundation of the nextchair--it is of Arabic; and more than a hundred before we arrive atMathematics. So Sir William Hamilton was not without historical excusewhen he declared the study of Mathematics to be no part of the businessof this University! Then follow Moral Philosophy (1683), Music (1684), Chemistry (1702), Astronomy (1704), Anatomy (1707), Modern History andmore Arabic, with Botany (1724), Geology (1727), closely followed by MrHulse's Christian Advocate, more Astronomy (1749), more Divinity (1777), Experimental Philosophy (1783): then in the nineteenth century more Law, more Medicine, Mineralogy, Archaeology, Political Economy, PureMathematics, Comparative Anatomy, Sanskrit and yet again more Law, beforewe arrive in 1869 at a Chair of Latin. Faint yet pursuing, we have yet topass chairs of Fine Art (belated), Experimental Physics, AppliedMechanics, Anglo-Saxon, Animal Morphology, Surgery, Physiology, Pathology, Ecclesiastical History, Chinese, more Divinity, MentalPhilosophy, Ancient History, Agriculture, Biology, Agricultural Botany, more Biology, Astrophysics, and German, before arriving in 1910 at aChair of English Literature which by this time I have not breath todefend. 

The enumeration has, I hope, been instructive. If it has also plunged youin gloom, to that atmosphere (as the clock warns me) for a fortnight Imust leave you: with a promise, however, in another lecture to cheer you, if it may be, with some broken gleams of hope. 

[Footnote 1: "What English Poetry may still learn from Greek": a paperread before the English Association on Nov. 17, 1911. ]

[Footnote 2: See Mr E. K. Chambers' "Mediaeval Stage", Dr Courthope's"History of English Poetry, " and Professor W. P. Ker's "The Dark Ages". ]

[Footnote 3: Rashdall, "The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages", vol. Ii, p. 684, from documents printed in Fournier's collection. ]

LECTURE XI. 

ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES nglish Literature in OurUniversities (II)

Wednesday, December 3

We broke off, Gentlemen, upon the somewhat painful conclusion that ourUniversities were not founded for the study of literature, and tardilyadmitted it. The dates of our three literary chairs in Cambridge--I speakof our Western literature only, and omit Arabic, Sanskrit, andChinese--clenched that conclusion for us. Greek in 1540, Latin not until1869, English but three years ago--from the lesson of these intervalsthere is no getting away. 

Now I do not propose to dwell on the Renaissance and how Greek came in:for a number of writers in our time have been busy with the Renaissance, and have--I was going to say 'over-written the subject, ' but no--it isbetter to say that they have focussed the period so as to distort thegeneral perspective at the cost of other periods which have earned lessattention; the twelfth century, for example. At any rate their efforts, with the amount they claim of your reading, absolve me from doing morethan remind you that the Renaissance brought in the study of Greek, andGreek necessarily brought in the study of literature: since no man canread what the Greeks wrote and not have his eyes unsealed to what I havecalled a norm of human expression; a guide to conduct, a standard tocorrect our efforts, whether in poetry, or in philosophy, or in art. Forthe rest, I need only quote to you Gibbon's magnificent saying, that theGreek language gave a soul to the objects of sense and a body to theabstractions of metaphysics. [May I add, in parenthesis, that, while nobeliever in compulsory Greek, holding, indeed, that you can hardlyreconcile learning with compulsion, and still more hardly force them tobe compatibles, I subscribe with all my heart to Bagehot's shrewd saying, 'while a knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer ofEnglish, he should at least have a firm conviction that those twolanguages existed. ']

But, assuming you to know something of the Renaissance, and how itbrought Greek into Oxford and Cambridge, I find that in the course of theargument two things fall to be said, and both to be said with someemphasis. 

In the first place, without officially acknowledging their native tongueor its literature, our two Universities had no sooner acquired Greek thantheir members became immensely interested in English. Take, for onewitness out of many, Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke Hall. His lettersto Edmund Spenser have been preserved, as you know. Now Gabriel Harveywas a man whom few will praise, and very few could have loved. Few willquarrel with Dr Courthope's description of him as 'a person ofconsiderable intellectual force, but intolerably arrogant and conceited, and with a taste vitiated by all the affectations of Italian humanism, 'or deny that 'his tone in his published correspondence with Spenser isthat of an intellectual bully. '[1] None will refuse him the title of foolfor attempting to mislead Spenser into writing hexameters. But all youcan urge against Gabriel Harvey, on this count or that or the other, butaccumulates proof that this donnish man was all the while givingthought--giving even ferocious thought--to the business of makingan English Literature. 

Let me adduce more pleasing evidence. At or about Christmas, in the year1597, there was enacted here in Cambridge, in the hall of St John'sCollege, a play called "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, " a skittish work, having for subject the 'discontent of scholars'; the misery attendingthose who, unsupported by a private purse, would follow after Apollo andthe Nine. No one knows the author's name: but he had a wit which has keptsomething of its salt to this day, and in Christmas, 1597, it tookCambridge by storm. The public demanded a sequel, and "The Return fromParnassus" made its appearance on the following Christmas (again in StJohn's College hall); to be followed by a "Second Part of the Return fromParnassus, " the author's overflow of wit, three years later. Of thepopularity of the first and second plays--"The Pilgrimage" and "TheReturn, Part I"--we have good evidence in the prologue to "The Return, Part II, " where the author makes Momus say, before an audience which knewthe truth:

 "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus" and "The Returne from Parnassus" have stood the honest Stagekeepers in many a crowne's expense for linckes and vizards: purchased many a Sophister a knocke with a clubbe: hindred the butler's box, and emptied the Colledge barrells; and now, unlesse you have heard the former, you may returne home as wise as you came: for this last is the last part of The Returne from Parnassus; that is, the last time that the Author's wit will turne upon the toe in this vaine. 

In other words, these plays had set everybody in Cambridge agog, had beenacted by link-light, had led to brawls--either between literary factionsor through offensive personal allusions to which we have lost allclue--had swept into the box-office much money usually spent on Christmasgambling, and had set up an inappeasable thirst for College ale. Thepoint for us is that (in 1597-1601) they abound in topical allusions tothe London theatres: that Shakespeare is obviously just as much a concernto these young men of Cambridge as Mr Shaw (say) is to our young mento-day, and an allusion to him is dropped in confidence that it will beaptly taken. For instance, one of the characters, Gullio, will have somelove-verses recited to him 'in two or three diverse veins, in Chaucer's, Gower's and Spenser's and Mr Shakespeare's. ' Having listened to Chaucer, he cries, 'Tush! Chaucer is a foole'; but coming to some lines of MrShakespeare's "Venus and Adonis, " he cries, 'Ey, marry, Sir! these havesome life in them! Let this duncified world esteeme of Spenser andChaucer, I'le worship sweet Mr Shakespeare, and to honoure him I will layhis "Venus and Adonis" under my pillowe. ' For another allusion--'Few ofthe University pen plaies well, ' says the actor Kempe in Part II of the"Returne"; 'they smell too much of that writer _Ovid_ and that writer_Metamorphosis_, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here'sour fellow _Shakespeare_ puts them all downe, ay and _Ben Jonson_, too. 'Here you have Cambridge assembling at Christmas-tide to laugh atwell-understood hits upon the theatrical taste of London. Here you have, to make Cambridge laugh, three farcical quasi-Aristophanic plays allhinging on the tribulations of scholars who depart to pursue literaturefor a livelihood. For a piece of definite corroborative evidence you havea statute of Queens' College (quoted by Mr Bass Mullinger) which directsthat 'any student refusing to take part in the acting of a comedy ortragedy in the College and absenting himself from the performance, contrary to the injunctions of the President, shall be expelled from theSociety'--which seems drastic. And on top of all this, you have evidenceenough and to spare of the part played in Elizabethan drama by the'University Wits. ' Why, Marlowe (of Corpus Christi) may be held to haveinvented its form--blank verse; Ben Jonson (of St John's) to have carriedit on past its meridian and through its decline, into the masque. BothUniversities claim Lyly and Chapman. Marston, Peel, Massinger, hailedfrom Oxford. But Greene and Nashe were of Cambridge--of St John's both, and Day of Caius. They sought to London, and there (for tragic truthunderlay that Christmas comedy of "The Pilgrimage of Parnassus") many ofthem came to bitter ends: but before reaching their sordid personalruin--and let the deaths of Marlowe and Greene be remembered--they builtthe Elizabethan drama, as some of them lived to add its last ornaments. We know what, meanwhile, Spenser had done. I think it scarcely needsfurther proof that Cambridge, towards the end of the sixteenth century, was fermenting with a desire to read, criticise, yes and write, Englishliterature, albeit officially the University recognised no such thing. 

There remains a second question--How happened it that Cambridge, afteradmitting Greek, took more than three hundred years to establish a Chairof Latin, and that a Chair of English is, so to speak, a mushroom (callit not toadstool!) of yesterday? Why simply enough. Latin continued to bethe working language of Science. In Latin Bacon naturally composed his"Novum Organum" and indeed almost all his scientific and philosophicalwork, although a central figure of his age among English prose-writers. In Latin, in the eighteenth century, Newton wrote his "Principia": and Isuppose that of no two books written by Englishmen before the close ofthat century, or indeed before Darwin's "Origin of Species, " can it beless extravagantly said than of the "Novum Organum" and the "Principia"that they shook the world. Now, without forgetting our Classical Tripos(founded in 1822), as without forgetting the great names of Bentley andPorson, we may observe it as generally true, that whenever and whereverlarge numbers of scientific men use a particular language as theirworking instrument, they have a disposition to look askance on itsrefinements; to be jealous of its literary professors; to accuse these oftreating as an end in itself what is properly a means. Like the Denvereditor I quoted to you in a previous lecture, these scientific workerswant to 'get there' in a hurry, forgetting that (to use anotherAmericanism) the sharper the chisel the more ice it is likely to cut. Youmay observe this disposition--this suspicion of 'literature, ' this thinlyveiled contempt--in many a scientific man to-day; though because hislanguage has changed from Latin to English, it is English he now choosesto cheapen. Well, we cannot help it, perhaps. Perhaps he cannot help it. It is human nature. We must go on persuading him, not losing our tempers. 

None the less we should not shut our eyes to the fact that while alanguage is the working instrument of scientific men there will always bea number of them to decry any study of it for its beauty, and even anystudy of it for the sake of accuracy--its beauty and its accuracy beingindeed scarcely distinguishable. 

I fear, Gentlemen, you may go on from this to the dreadful conclusionthat the date 1869, when Cambridge at length came to possess a Chair ofLatin, marks definitely the hour at which Latin closed its eyes andbecame a dead language; that you may proceed to a yet more dreadfulapplication of this to the Chair of English founded in 1910: and thathenceforward (to misquote what Mr Max Beerbohm once wickedly said ofWalter Pater) you will be apt to regard Professor Housman and me as twowidowers engaged, while the undertaker waits, in composing the featuresof our belovèds. 

But (to speak seriously) that is what I stand here to controvert: and Iderive no small encouragement when--as has more than once happened--A, ascientific man, comes to me and complains that he for his part cannotunderstand B, another scientific man, 'because the fellow can't expresshimself. ' And the need to study precision in writing has grown far moreinstant since men of science have abandoned the 'universal language' andtaken to writing in their own tongues. Let us, while not on the wholeregretting the change, at least recognise some dangers, some possibledisadvantages. I will confine myself to English, considered as asubstitute for Latin. In Latin you have a language which may be thin inits vocabulary and inelastic for modern use; but a language which at allevents compels a man to clear his thought and communicate it to other menprecisely. 

 Thoughts hardly to be packed Into the narrow act

--may be all impossible of compression into the Latin speech. In English, on the other hand, you have a language which by its very copiousness andelasticity tempts you to believe that you can do without packing, withoutcompression, arrangement, order; that, with the Denver editor, all youneed is to 'get there'--though it be with all your intellectualbelongings in a jumble, overflowing the portmanteau. Rather I preach toyou that having proudly inherited English with its _copia fandi_, youshould keep your estate in order by constantly applying to it that _juset norma loquendi_ of which, if you seek to the great models, you willlikewise find yourselves inheritors. 

'But, ' it is sometimes urged, 'why not leave this new study of English tothe younger Universities now being set up all over the country?' 'Ours isan age of specialising. Let these newcomers have something--what betterthan English?--to specialise upon. '

I might respond by asking if the fame of Cambridge would stand where itstands to-day had she followed a like counsel concerning other studiesand, resting upon Mathematics, given over this or that branch of NaturalScience to be grasped by new hands. What of Electricity, for example? Orwhat of Physiology? Yes, and among the unnatural sciences, what ofPolitical Economy? But I will use a more philosophical argument. 

Some years ago I happened on a collection of Bulgarian proverbs of whichmy memory retains but two, yet each an abiding joy. In a lecture onEnglish Literature in our Universities you will certainly not miss toapply the first, which runs, 'Many an ass has entered Jerusalem. '

The application of the second may elude you for a moment. It voices theimpatience of an honest Bulgar who has been worried overmuch to subscribeto what, in this England of ours, we call Church Purposes; and it runs, 'All these two-penny saints will be the ruin of the Church. '

Now far be it from me to apply the term 'two-penny saint' to any existingUniversity. To avoid the accusation I hereby solemnly declare my deepconviction that every single University at this moment in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland has reasons--strong in all, in someoverwhelmingly strong--for its existence. That is plainly said, I hope?Yet I do maintain that if we go on multiplying Universities we shall notincrease the joy; that the reign of two-penny saints lies not far offand will soon lie within measurable distance; and that it will bea pestilent reign. As we saw in out last lecture the word'University'--_Universitas_--had, in its origin, nothing to do withUniversality: it meant no more than a Society, organised (as ithappened) to promote learning. But words, like institutions, often riseabove their beginnings, and in time acquire a proud secondaryconnotation. For an instance let me give you the beautiful Wykehamistmotto _Manners Makyeth Man_, wherein 'manners' originally meant no morethan 'morals. ' So there has grown around our two great Universities ofOxford and Cambridge a connotation (secondary, if you will, but valuableabove price) of universality; of standing like great beacons of light, to attract the young wings of all who would seek learning for theirsustenance. Thousands have singed, thousands have burned themselves, nodoubt: but what thousands of thousands have caught the sacred fire intotheir souls as they passed through and passed out, to carry it, to dropit, still as from wings, upon waste places of the world! Think ofcountry vicarages, of Australian or Himalayan outposts, where men havenourished out lives of duty upon the fire of three transient, pricelessyears. Think of the generations of children to whom their fathers'lives, prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if someone let fallthe word 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge, ' so that they themselves came tosurmise an aura about the name as of a land very far off; and then sayif the ineffable spell of those two words do not lie somewhere in theconflux of generous youth with its rivalries and clash of minds, ere itdisperses, generation after generation, to the duller business of life. Would you have your mother University, Gentlemen, undecorated by sometrue study of your mother-English?

I think not, having been there, and known such thoughts as you will carryaway, and having been against expectation called back to report them. 

 And sometimes I remember days of old When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek, And all the world and I seem'd far less cold, And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold, And hope was strong, and life itself not weak. 

My purpose here (and I cannot too often recur to it) is to wean yourminds from hankering after false Germanic standards and persuade you, orat least point out to you, in what direction that true study lies if youare men enough to take up your inheritance and believe in it as a gloryto be improved. 

Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University on earth can studyEnglish Literature truthfully or worthily, or even at all profitably, unless by studying it in the category for which Heaven, or Nature (callthe ultimate cause what you will), intended it; or, to put the assertionmore concretely, in any other category than that for which the particularauthor--be his name Chaucer or Chesterton, Shakespeare or Shaw--designedit; as neither can Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University study EnglishLiterature, to understand it, unless by bracing itself to consider aliving art. Origins, roots, all the gropings towards light--let these begranted as accessories; let those who search in them be granted allhonour, all respect. It is only when they preach or teach thesepreliminaries, these accessories, to be more important than Literatureitself--it is only when they, owing all their excuse in life to theestablished daylight, din upon us that the precedent darkness claimsprecedence in honour, that one is driven to utter upon them thisdialogue, in monosyllables:

 _And God said, 'Let there be light': and there was light. 'Oh, thank you, Sir, ' said the Bat and the Owl; 'then we are off!'_

I grant you, Gentlemen, that there must always inhere a difficulty incorrelating for the purposes of a Tripos a study of Literature itselfwith a study of these accessories; the thing itself being _naturally_ somuch more difficult: being so difficult indeed that (to take literarycriticism alone and leave for a moment the actual practice of writingout of the question) though some of the first intellects in theworld--Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, Boileau, Dryden, Lessing, Goethe, Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve--have broken into parcels of that territory, themass of it remains unexplored, and nobody as yet has found courage toreduce the reports of these great explorers to any system; so that a veryeminent person indeed found it easy to write to me the other day, 'Theprinciples of Criticism? What are they? Who made them?' To this I couldonly answer that I did not know Who made them; but that Aristotle, Dryden, Lessing, had, as it was credibly reported, discovered five or, itmight be, six. And this difficulty of appraising literature absolutelyinheres in your study of it from the beginning. No one can have set aGeneral Paper on Literature and examined on it, setting it and markingthe written answers, alongside of papers about language, inflexions andthe rest, without having borne in upon him that _here_ the student findshis difficulty. While in a paper set about inflexions, etc. , a pupil witha moderately retentive memory will easily obtain sixty or seventy percent. Of the total marks, in a paper on the book or play consideredcritically an examiner, even after setting his paper with a view to somecertain inferiority of average, has to be lenient before he can awardfifty, forty, or even thirty per cent. Of the total. 

You will find a somewhat illuminating passage--illuminating, that is, ifyou choose to interpret and apply it to our subject--in Lucian's "TrueHistory, " where the veracious traveller, who tells the tale, affirms thathe visited Hades among other places, and had some conversation withHomer, among its many inhabitants--

 Before many days had passed, I accosted the poet Homer, when we were both disengaged, and asked him, among other things, where he came from; it was still a burning question with us, I explained. He said he was aware that some derived him from Chios, others from Smyrna, and others again from Colophon; but in fact he was a Babylonian, generally known not as Homer but as Tigranes; but when later in life he was given as a homer or hostage to the Greeks, that name clung to him. Another of my questions was about the so-called spurious books; had he written them or not? He said that they were all genuine: so I now knew what to think of the critics Zenodotus and Aristarchus and all their lucubrations. Having got a categorical answer on that point, I tried him next on his reason for starting the "Iliad" with the wrath of Achilles. He said he had no exquisite reason; it just came into his head that way. 

Even so diverse are the questions that may be asked concerning any greatwork of art. But to discover its full intent is always the most difficulttask of all. That task, however, and nothing less difficult, will alwaysbe the one worthiest of a great University. 

On that, and on that alone, Gentlemen, do I base all claims for ourSchool of English Literature. And yet in conclusion I will ask you, reminding yourselves how fortunate is your lot in Cambridge, to think offellow-Englishmen far less fortunate. 

Years ago I took some pains to examine the examination papers set by arenowned Examining Body and I found this--'I humbly solicit' (to use aphrase of Lucian's) 'my hearers' incredulity'--that in a paper set uponthree Acts of "Hamlet"--three Acts of "Hamlet"!--the first questionstarted with 'G. Tt. P. . Cha' 'Al. . G. Tor' and invited the candidate to fillin the missing letters correctly. Now I was morally certain that thewords 'gutta-percha' and 'alligator' did not occur in the first threeActs of "Hamlet"; but having carefully re-read them I invited thisexamining body to explain itself. The answer I got was that, tounderstand Shakespeare, a student must first understand the EnglishLanguage! Some of you on leaving Cambridge will go out--a company ofChristian folk dispersed throughout the world--to tell English childrenof English Literature. Such are the pedagogic fetters you will have toknock off their young minds before they can stand and walk. 

Gentlemen, on a day early in this term I sought the mound which is theold Castle of Cambridge. Access to it, as perhaps you know, lies throughthe precincts of the County Prison. An iron railing encloses the mound, having a small gate, for the key of which a notice-board advised me toring the prison bell. I rang. A very courteous gaoler answered the belland opened the gate, which stands just against his wicket. I thanked him, but could not forbear asking 'Why do they keep this gate closed?' 'Idon't know, sir, ' he answered, 'but I suppose if they didn't the childrenmight get in and play. '

So with his answer I went up the hill and from the top saw Cambridgespread at my feet; Magdalene below me, and the bridge which--poor productas it is of the municipal taste--has given its name to so many bridgesall over the world; the river on its long ambit to Chesterton; the towerof St John's, and beyond it the unpretentious but more beautiful tower ofJesus College. To my right the magnificent chine of King's College Chapelmade its own horizon above the yellowing elms. I looked down on thestreets--the narrow streets--the very streets which, a fortnight ago, Itried to people for you with that mediaeval throng which has passed as weshall pass. Still in my ear the gaoler's answer repeated itself--_'Isuppose, if they didn't keep it locked, the children might get in andplay'_: and a broken echo seemed to take it up, in words that for a whilehad no more coherence than the scattered jangle of bells in the townbelow. But as I turned to leave, they chimed into an articulate sentenceand the voice was the voice of Francis Bacon--_Regnum Scientiae ut regnumCoeli non nisi sub persona infantis intratur. --Into the Kingdom ofKnowledge, as into the Kingdom of Heaven, whoso would enter must becomeas a little child. _

[Footnote 1: "Cambridge History of English Literature", vol. Iii, p. 213. ]

LECTURE XII. 

ON STYLE

Wednesday, January 28, 1914

Should Providence, Gentlemen, destine any one of you to write books forhis living, he will find experimentally true what I here promise him, that few pleasures sooner cloy than reading what the reviewers say. Thispromise I hand on with the better confidence since it was endorsed for meonce in conversation by that eminently good man the late Henry Sidgwick;who added, however, 'Perhaps I ought to make a single exception. Therewas a critic who called one of my books "epoch-making. " Being anonymous, he would have been hard to find and thank, perhaps; but I ought to havemade the effort. '

May I follow up this experience of his with one of my own, as a prefaceor brief apology for this lecture? Short-lived as is the author's joy inhis critics, far-spent as may be his hope of fame, mournful his consentwith Sir Thomas Browne that 'there is nothing immortal but immortality, 'he cannot hide from certain sanguine men of business, who in England callthemselves 'Press-Cutting Agencies, ' in America 'Press-Clipping Bureaux, 'and, as each successive child of his invention comes to birth, unbecomingly presume in him an almost virginal trepidation. 'Your book, 'they write falsely, 'is exciting much comment. May we collect and sendyou notices of it appearing in the World's Press? We submit a specimencutting with our terms; and are, dear Sir, ' etc. 

Now, although steadily unresponsive to this wile, I am sometimes guiltyof taking the enclosed specimen review and thrusting it for preservationamong the scarcely less deciduous leaves of the book it was written toappraise. So it happened that having this vacation, to dust--not toread--a line of obsolete or obsolescent works on a shelf, I happened on areview signed by no smaller a man than Mr Gilbert Chesterton andinforming the world that the author of my obsolete book was full of goodstories as a kindly uncle, but had a careless or impatient way ofstopping short and leaving his readers to guess what they most wanted toknow: that, reaching the last chapter, or what he chose to make the lastchapter, instead of winding up and telling 'how everybody lived everafter, ' he (so to speak) slid you off his avuncular knee with a blessingand the remark that nine o'clock was striking and all good childrenshould be in their beds. 

That criticism has haunted me during the vacation. Looking back on acourse of lectures which I deemed to be accomplished; correcting them inprint; revising them with all the nervousness of a beginner; I haveseemed to hear you complain--'He has exhorted us to write accurately, appropriately; to eschew Jargon; to be bold and essay Verse. He hasinsisted that Literature is a living art, to be practised. But just whatwe most needed he has not told. At the final doorway to the secret heturned his back and left us. Accuracy, propriety, perspicuity--these wemay achieve. But where has he helped us to write with beauty, with charm, with distinction? Where has he given us rules for what is called _Style_in short?--having attained which an author may count himself set up inbusiness. '

Thus, Gentlemen, with my mind's ear I heard you reproaching me. I beg youto accept what follows for my apology. 

To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two thingswhich Style is _not_; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, isnot--can never be--extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persianlover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion hesought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary chargedwith ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket ofjewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require apractical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel animpulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it--whole-heartedly--and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. _Murder your darlings. _'

But let me plead further that you have not been left altogether withoutclue to the secret of what Style is. That you must master the secret foryourselves lay implicit in our bargain, and you were never promised thata writer's training would be easy. Yet a clue was certainly put in yourhands when, having insisted that Literature is a living art, I added thattherefore it must be personal and of its essence personal. 

This goes very deep: it conditions all our criticism of art. Yet itconceals no mystery. You may see its meaning most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes--say PureMathematics with Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art withman's thought and emotion about things. In Pure Mathematics things arerarefied into ideas, numbers, concepts, but still farther and fartheraway from the individual man. Two and two make four, and fourpence is notninepence (or at any rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleonkeep the tally. In Acting on the other hand almost everything depends onpersonal interpretation--on the gesture, the walk, the gaze, the tone ofa Siddons, the _rusé_ smile of a Coquelin, the exquisite, vibrantintonation of a Bernhardt. 'English Art?' exclaimed Whistler, 'there isno such thing! Art is art and mathematics is mathematics. ' Whistlererred. Precisely because Art is Art, and Mathematics is Mathematics and aScience, Art being Art can be English or French; and, more than this, must be the personal expression of an Englishman or a Frenchman, as a'Constable' differs from a 'Corot' and a 'Whistler' from both. Surely Ineed not labour this. But what is true of the extremes of Art and Scienceis true also, though sometimes less recognisably true, of the mean: andwhere they meet and seem to conflict (as in History) the impact is thatof the personal or individual mind upon universal truth, and the questionbecomes whether what happened in the Sicilian Expedition, or at the trialof Charles I, can be set forth naked as an alegebraical sum, serene inits certainty, indifferent to opinion, uncoloured in the telling as inthe hearing by sympathy or dislike, by passion or by character. I doubt, while we should strive in history as in all things to be fair, if historycan be written in that colourless way, to interest men in human doings. Iam sure that nothing which lies further towards imaginative, creative, Art can be written in that way. 

It follows then that Literature, being by its nature personal, must be byits nature almost infinitely various. 'Two persons cannot be the authorsof the sounds which strike our ear; and as they cannot be speaking oneand the same speech, neither can they be writing one and the same lectureor discourse. ' _Quot homines tot sententiae. _ You may translate that, ifyou will, 'Every man of us constructs his sentence differently'; and ifthere be indeed any quarrel between Literature and Science (as I nevercan see why there should be), I for one will readily grant Science allher cold superiority, her ease in Sion with universal facts, so it bemine to serve among the multifarious race who have to adjust, as bestthey may, Science's cold conclusions (and much else) to the brotherlygive-and-take of human life. 

_Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas. .. _ Is it possible, Gentlemen, that you can have read one, two, three or more of theacknowledged masterpieces of literature without having it borne in on youthat they are great because they are alive, and traffic not with coldcelestial certainties, but with men's hopes, aspirations, doubts, loves, hates, breakings of the heart; the glory and vanity of human endeavour, the transience of beauty, the capricious uncertain lease on which you andI hold life, the dark coast to which we inevitably steer; all that amusesor vexes, all that gladdens, saddens, maddens us men and women on thisbrief and mutable traject which yet must be home for a while, theanchorage of our hearts? For an instance:--

 Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she: I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country. But beauty vanishes, beauty passes, However rare, rare it be; And when I crumble who shall remember That lady of the West Country?

 (Walter de la Mare. )

Or take a critic--a literary critic--such as Samuel Johnson, of whom weare used to think as of a man artificial in phrase and pedantic injudgment. He lives, and why? Because, if you test his criticism, he neversaw literature but as a part of life, nor would allow in literature whatwas false to life, as he saw it. He could be wrong-headed, perverse;could damn Milton because he hated Milton's politics; on any question ofpassion or prejudice could make injustice his daily food. But he couldnot, even in a friend's epitaph, let pass a phrase (however well turned)which struck him as empty of life or false to it. All Boswell testifiesto this: and this is why Samuel Johnson survives. 

Now let me carry this contention--that all Literature is personal andtherefore various--into a field much exploited by the pedant, and fencedabout with many notice-boards and public warnings. _'Neologisms notallowed here, ' 'All persons using slang, or trespassing in pursuit oforiginality. .. . '_

Well, I answer these notice-boards by saying that, literature beingpersonal, and men various--and even the "Oxford English Dictionary" beingno Canonical book--man's use or defiance of the dictionary depends forits justification on nothing but his success: adding that, since it takesall kinds to make a world, or a literature, his success will probablydepend on the occasion. A few months ago I found myself seated at abump-supper next to a cheerful youth who, towards the close, suggestedthoughtfully, as I arose to make a speech, that, the bonfire (which ofcourse he called the 'bonner') being due at nine-thirty o'clock, therewas little more than bare time left for 'langers and godders. ' It costme, who think slowly, some seconds to interpret that by 'langers' hemeant 'Auld Lang Syne' and by 'godders' 'God Save the King. ' I thought atthe time, and still think, and will maintain against any schoolmaster, that the neologisms of my young neighbour, though not to be recommendedfor essays or sermons, did admirably suit the time, place, and occasion. 

Seeing that in human discourse, infinitely varied as it is, so much mustever depend on _who_ speaks, and to _whom_, in what mood and upon whatoccasion; and seeing that Literature must needs take account of allmanner of writers, audiences, moods, occasions; I hold it a sin againstthe light to put up a warning against any word that comes to us in thefair way of use and wont (as 'wire, ' for instance, for a telegram), evenas surely as we should warn off hybrids or deliberately pedanticimpostors, such as 'antibody' and 'picture-drome'; and that, generally, it is better to err on the side of liberty than on the side of thecensor: since by the manumitting of new words we infuse new blood into atongue of which (or we have learnt nothing from Shakespeare's audacity)our first pride should be that it is flexible, alive, capable ofresponding to new demands of man's untiring quest after knowledge andexperience. Not because it was an ugly thing did I denounce Jargon toyou, the other day: but because it was a dead thing, leading no-whither, meaning naught. There is _wickedness_ in human speech, sometimes. Youwill detect it all the better for having ruled out what is _naughty_. 

Let us err, then, if we err, on the side of liberty. I came, the otherday, upon this passage in Mr Frank Harris's study of 'The ManShakespeare':--

 In the last hundred years the language of Molière has grown fourfold; the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of the engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb instrument, while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class. [1]

Well, let us not lose our heads over this, any more than over otherprophecies of our national decadence. The "Oxford English Dictionary" hasnot yet unfolded the last of its coils, which yet are ample enough toenfold us in seven words for every three an active man can grapple with. Yet the warning has point, and a particular point, for those who aspireto write poetry: as Francis Thompson has noted in his Essay on Shelley:--

 Theoretically, of course, one ought always to try for the best word. But practically, the habit of excessive care in word-selection frequently results in loss of spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit of always taking the best word too easily becomes the habit of always taking the most ornate word, the word most removed from ordinary speech. In consequence of this, poetic diction has become latterly a kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the precise combinations into which the pieces will be shifted. There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of Poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to the poetic purple. .. . Against these it is time some banner should be raised. .. . It is at any rate curious to note that the literary revolution against the despotic diction of Pope seems issuing, like political revolutions, in a despotism of his own making;

and he adds a note that this is the more surprising to him because somany Victorian poets were prose-writers as well. 

 Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose should maintain fresh and comprehensive a poet's diction, should save him from falling into the hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood. 

In diction, then, let us acquire all the store we can, rejecting no coinfor its minting but only if its metal be base. So shall we bring out ofour treasuries new things and old. 

Diction, however, is but a part of Style, and perhaps not the mostimportant part. So I revert to the larger question, 'What is Style? Whatits [Greek: to ti en einai], its essence, the law of its being?'

Now, as I sat down to write this lecture, memory evoked a scene and withthe scene a chance word of boyish slang, both of which may seem to youirrelevant until, or unless, I can make you feel how they hold for me theheart of the matter. 

I once happened to be standing in a corner of a ball-room when thereentered the most beautiful girl these eyes have ever seen or now--sincethey grow dull--ever will see. It was, I believe, her first ball, and bysome freak or in some premonition she wore black: and not pearls--which, I am told, maidens are wont to wear on these occasions--but one crescentof diamonds in her black hair. _Et vera incessu patuit dea. _ Here, I say, was absolute beauty. It startled. 

 I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country. But beauty vanishes, beauty passes. .. . 

She died a year or two later. She may have been too beautiful to livelong. I have a thought that she may also have been too good. 

For I saw her with the crowd about her: I saw led up and presented amongothers the man who was to be, for a few months, her husband: and then, asthe men bowed, pencilling on their programmes, over their shoulders I sawher eyes travel to an awkward young naval cadet (Do you remember Crossjayin Meredith's "The Egoist"? It was just such a boy) who sat abashed andglowering sulkily beside me on the far bench. Promptly with a laugh, sheadvanced, claimed him, and swept him off into the first waltz. 

When it was over he came back, a trifle flushed, and I felicitated him;my remark (which I forget) being no doubt 'just the sort of banality, youknow, one does come out with'--as maybe that the British Navy kept itsold knack of cutting out. But he looked at me almost in tears andblurted, 'It isn't her beauty, sir. You saw? It's--it's--my God, it's the_style_!'

Now you may think that a somewhat cheap, or at any rate inadequate, cryof the heart in my young seaman; as you may think it inadequate in me, and moreover a trifle capricious, to assure you (as I do) that the firstand last secret of a good Style consists in thinking with the heart aswell as with the head. 

But let us philosophise a little. You have been told, I daresay oftenenough, that the business of writing demands _two_--the author and thereader. Add to this what is equally obvious, that the obligation ofcourtesy rests first with the author, who invites the séance, andcommonly charges for it. What follows, but that in speaking or writing wehave an obligation to put ourselves into the hearer's or reader's place?It is _his_ comfort, _his_ convenience, we have to consult. To _express_ourselves is a very small part of the business: very small and almostunimportant as compared with _impressing_ ourselves: the aim of the wholeprocess being to persuade. 

All reading demands an effort. The energy, the good-will which a readerbrings to the book is, and must be, partly expended in the labour ofreading, marking, learning, inwardly digesting what the author means. Themore difficulties, then, we authors obtrude on him by obscure or carelesswriting, the more we blunt the edge of his attention: so that if only inour own interest--though I had rather keep it on the ground ofcourtesy--we should study to anticipate his comfort. 

But let me go a little deeper. You all know that a great part ofLessing's argument in his "Laoköon", on the essentials of Literature asopposed to Pictorial Art or Sculpture, depends on this--that in PictorialArt or in Sculpture the eye sees, the mind apprehends, the whole in amoment of time, with the correspondent disadvantage that this moment oftime is fixed and stationary; whereas in writing, whether in prose or inverse, we can only produce our effect by a series of successive smallimpressions, dripping our meaning (so to speak) into the reader'smind--with the correspondent advantage, in point of vivacity, that ourpicture keeps moving all the while. Now obviously this throws a greaterstrain on his patience whom we address. Man at the best is anarrow-mouthed bottle. Through the conduit of speech he can utter--asyou, my hearers, can receive--only one word at a time. In writing (as myold friend Professor Minto used to say) you are as a commander filing outhis battalion through a narrow gate that allows only one man at a time topass; and your reader, as he receives the troops, has to re-form andreconstruct them. No matter how large or how involved the subject, it canbe communicated only in that way. You see, then, what an obligation weowe to him of order and arrangement; and why, apart from felicities andcuriosities of diction, the old rhetoricians laid such stress upon orderand arrangement as duties we owe to those who honour us with theirattention. '_La clarté, _' says a French writer, '_est la politesse. _'[Greek: Charisi kai sapheneia thue], recommends Lucian. Pay yoursacrifice to the Graces, and to [Greek: sapheneia]--Clarity--first amongthe Graces. 

What am I urging? 'That Style in writing is much the same thing as goodmanners in other human intercourse?' Well, and why not? At all events wehave reached a point where Buffon's often-quoted saying that 'Style isthe man himself' touches and coincides with William of Wykeham's oldmotto that 'Manners makyth Man': and before you condemn my doctrine asinadequate listen to this from Coventry Patmore, still bearing in mindthat a writer's main object is to _impress_ his thought or vision uponhis hearer. 

'There is nothing comparable _for moral force_ to the charm of trulynoble manners. .. . '

I grant you, to be sure, that the claim to possess a Style must beconceded to many writers--Carlyle is one--who take no care to putlisteners at their ease, but rely rather on native force of genius toshock and astound. Nor will I grudge them your admiration. But I do saythat, as more and more you grow to value truth and the modest grace oftruth, it is less and less to such writers that you will turn: and I sayeven more confidently that the qualities of Style we allow them are notthe qualities we should seek as a norm, for they one and all offendagainst Art's true maxim of avoiding excess. 

And this brings me to the two great _paradoxes_ of Style. For the first(1), --although Style is so curiously personal and individual, andalthough men are so variously built that no two in the world carry awaythe same impressions from a show, there is always a norm somewhere; inliterature and art, as in morality. Yes, even in man's most terrific, most potent inventions--when, for example, in "Hamlet" or in "Lear"Shakespeare seems to be breaking up the solid earth under our feet--thereis always some point and standard of sanity--a Kent or an Horatio--towhich all enormities and passionate errors may be referred; to which theagitated mind of the spectator settles back as upon its centre ofgravity, its pivot of repose. 

(2) The second paradox, though it is equally true, you may find a littlesubtler. Yet it but applies to Art the simple truth of the Gospel, thathe who would save his soul must first lose it. Though personalitypervades Style and cannot be escaped, the first sin against Style asagainst good Manners is to obtrude or exploit personality. The verygreatest work in Literature--the "Iliad, " the "Odyssey, " the"Purgatorio, " "The Tempest, " "Paradise Lost, " the "Republic, " "DonQuixote"--is all

 Seraphically free From taint of personality. 

And Flaubert, that gladiator among artists, held that, at its highest, literary art could be carried into pure science. 'I believe, ' said he, 'that great art is scientific and impersonal. You should by anintellectual effort transport yourself into characters, not draw _them_into _yourself_. That at least is the method. ' On the other hand, saysGoethe, 'We should endeavour to use words that correspond as closely aspossible with what we feel, see, think, imagine, experience, and reason. It is an endeavour we cannot evade and must daily renew. ' I callFlaubert's the better counsel, even though I have spent a part of thislecture in attempting to prove it impossible. It at least is noble, encouraging us to what is difficult. The shrewder Goethe encourages us toexploit ourselves to the top of our bent. I think Flaubert would have hitthe mark if for 'impersonal' he had substituted 'disinterested. '

For--believe me, Gentlemen--so far as Handel stands above Chopin, asVelasquez above Greuze, even so far stand the great masculine objectivewriters above all who appeal to you by parade of personality or privatesentiment. 

Mention of these great masculine 'objective' writers brings me to my lastword: which is, 'Steep yourselves in _them_: habitually bring all to thetest of _them_: for while you cannot escape the fate of all style, whichis to be personal, the more of catholic manhood you inherit from thosegreat loins the more you will assuredly beget. '

This then is Style. As technically manifested in Literature it is thepower to touch with ease, grace, precision, any note in the gamut ofhuman thought or emotion. 

But essentially it resembles good manners. It comes of endeavouring tounderstand others, of thinking for them rather than for yourself--ofthinking, that is, with the heart as well as the head. It gives ratherthan receives; it is nobly careless of thanks or applause, not being fedby these but rather sustained and continually refreshed by an inwardloyalty to the best. Yet, like 'character' it has its altar within; tothat retires for counsel, from that fetches its illumination, to rayoutwards. Cultivate, Gentlemen, that habit of withdrawing to be advisedby the best. So, says Fénelon, 'you will find yourself infinitelyquieter, your words will be fewer and more effectual; and while you makeless ado, what you do will be more profitable. '

[Footnote 1: 'An oration, ' says Quintilian, 'may find room for almost anyword saving a few indecent ones (_quae sunt parum verecunda_). ' He addsthat writers of the Old Comedy were often commended even for these: 'butit is enough for us to mind our present business--_sed nobis nostrum opusintueri sat est. _']

INDEX

Abelard 203, 205, 212Abercrombie, Lascelles 18Addison, Joseph 124, 172Alcuin 199, 200, 204, 205Alfred, King 186Aristophanes 192Aristotle 128, 203, 227Arnold, Matthew 35, 76, 139, 186, 202"Arte of Rhetorique, " Wilson's 118Ascham, Roger 121, 188Augustine 199

Bacon, Lord 6, 7, 10, 220, 231Bagehot, Walter 216"Ballata" 45Barbour, John 112Barrie, Sir James Matthew 17, 135Bede 204Beerbohm, Max 222Belisarius 175Bentham, Jeremy 97"Beowulf" 159-165Béranger, Pierre-Jean de 45Berners, Lord 108-110, 120Bible, The: Authorised Version 53, 97, 110, 122 et seq. , 141, 143, 190 Revised Version 131-133Blair, Wilfred 80Blake, William 12Boccaccio 184Boethius 203Bologna, University of 200-1, 206Borneil, Giraud de 181Boswell, James 238Bridges, Robert 19Brooke, the Rev. Stopford A. 159Brougham, Ld 47, 101Browne, Sir Thomas 10, 51, 124, 168, 232Browning, Robert 39, 186Buffon 245Bunyan, John 124Burke, Edmund 27, 28, 46, 47-52, 101Burns, Robert 45Butler, Arthur John 20

Caedmon 163Cambridge 201 _et seqq. _Campion, Thomas 185, 188Carducci, Giosué 154-5Carlyle, Thomas 18, 103, 245Cellini, Benvenuto 41Cervantes 7, 25Chadwick, Professor H. M. 163Chair of English Literature, University Ordinance 7Chambers, E. K. 199Champeaux, William of 205Chaucer, Geoffrey 10, 110-111, 163, 183, 184, 219Chesterton, Gilbert K. 233Chichester, Richard of 211Cicero 28, 49Clare, John 39Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 41, 64, 65Conington, John 171-2Courthope, W. J. 13, 158, 184, 199Coverdale, Miles 124Cowley, Abraham 185Cowper, William 186Crewe, Ld Chief Justice 7Cynewulf 163

Daniel, Samuel 185, 188Dante 77, 184Darwin, Charles 221Defoe, Daniel 61, 75. Dekker, Thomas 65De La Mare, Walter 237De Quincey, Thomas 54Desiderius, Archbishop 199Dionysius of Halicarnassus 28Donne, John 102, 106, 185Dryden, John 172, 186, 227"Duchess of Malfy, " Webster's 99Dunbar 10

'Eliot, George' 11Emerson, Ralph Waldo 11

Falconer, William 79Falkner, J. Meade 168-9Fénelon 248FitzGerald, Edward 97Flaubert, Gustave 247Fletcher, John 13Fowler, W. H. And F. G. 90, 137Freeman, Professor E. A. 158, 160, 174-179, 186"Froissart, " Berners' 108Froude, James Anthony 78Fuller, Thomas 206

Gibbon, Edward 124, 216Gildas 175Goethe 103, 247Gray, Thomas 11, 16, 136, 157-8, 162Green, J. R. 158Green, T. H. 8Gregory the Great, Pope 199Grierson, Professor H. J. C. 185

Hamilton, Sir William 213Hardy, Thomas 18Harris, Frank 240Harvey, Gabriel 185, 216-7Heine, Heinrich 45Herbert, George 133"Hero and Leander, " Marlowe's 98Herodotus 44, 63Homer 25, 64, 69, 76-78, 80, 81, 161, 190, 228Horace 171-2Housman, Professor A. E. 222

Ibsen 96Irnerius 206Isaiah 130-133

Jackson, Dr Henry 213Johnson, Samuel 11, 37, 69, 121, 172, 238Jonson, Ben 129, 146, 185, 219, 220Jowett, Benjamin 29Jusserand, J. J. 182Juvenal, 172

Keats, John 16, 39, 186Kempis, Thomas à 15Ker, Professor W. P. 160, 199Kipling, Rudyard 61

Lamb, Charles 41Lessing 81, 227, 244Lindsay, the Rev. T. M. , D. D. 118Lloyd George, the Right Hon. David 137-8Lucian 6, 160, 192, 228, 245Lucretius 193

Malory, Sir Thomas 107-110, 120Marlowe, Christopher 98-9, 185, 220Marvell, Andrew 185Mason, William 157Masson, David 12McKenna, the Right Hon. Reginald 137-8Meredith, George 243, 247Milton, John 1, 10, 16, 43, 56-62, 74-76, 124, 152, 185, 195, 238Minto, Professor William 245Moore, Thomas 45Morris, William 188Mullinger, J. Bass 205, 219Murray, Professor Gilbert 193

Nashe, Thomas 120Newman, Cardinal 5, 30, 31-2, 115, 134, 144, 147, 234Newton, Sir Isaac 221Noyes, Alfred 78"Nut-Brown Maid, The" 111

Oates, Captain 42Origen 195, 202Oxford 201 _et seq. _

Paris, University of 200, 205Pater, Walter 77, 222Patmore, Coventry 245Payne, E. J. 100-103"Pervigilium Veneris" 151, 194Pheidias 14Philosophy and Poetry 1Piers Plowman 163, 182"Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The" 217-220Plato 1-4, 150, 205Pliny 152-3Podsnap (_see_ Freeman)Poggio 205Pope, Alexander 157, 162Powell, F. York 159Provençal Song 181-183Pythagoras 208

Quintilian 29, 140, 240

Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter 9Rashdall, Hastings 208-213Remigius 206Renan 1Reynolds, Sir Joshua 23-25

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustus 20Saintsbury, Prof. George 55, 56, 187Salamanca, University of 200Scott, The Antarctic Expedition 42Severus, Sulpicius 199Shakespeare, William 15, 41, 50, 51-2, 97-100, 113, 129, 185, 190, 197, 219, 229, 246Shaw, George Bernard 72Shelley 40Shirley, James 106Sidgwick, Henry 232Sidney, Sir Philip 41-2Skeat, Walter W. 12"Sonata" 45South, Robert 102Spenser, Edmund 185, 206, 217, 219Stevenson, Robert Louis 133Stubbs, Bishop W. 44'Student's Handbook, The' 72-3Swift, Jonathan 61Swinburne, Algernon 196

Taylor, Jeremy 68-9Tennyson, Lord 75, 186Tertullian 195, 198, 202Thackeray, William Makepeace 124Thompson, Francis 241Thomson, James 39Toulouse, University of 208Tyndale, William 122, 126, 127

Vacarius 206Ventadour, Bernard de 181"Venus and Adonis" 98-9Verrall, Dr A. W. 7Vigfússon, Gudbrand 159Virgil 25, 80, 194, 200Voltaire 192

Waller, Edmund 85Walpole, Horatio 173Walton, Isaak 70-1, 124, 201Warton, Thomas 158Watson, E. J. 155Watson, William 16Webster, John 99Wendell, Barrett 97Whistler, James McNeill 236Whitman, Walt 53, 56"Widsith" 60Wolfe, General 134Wood, Anthony 184Wordsworth, William 11, 12, 55, 67, 68, 129, 146, 186, 204, 210Wright, Aldis 12Wyat, Sir Thomas 115-118, 184Wyclif, John 124, 127

Yeats, William Butler 143Young, Arthur 171

Cambridge:Printed by J. B. Peace, M. A. , at the University Press.