On The Art of Reading Part 10

whatsoever, in short, engages man's activity of soul or body, may be deemed the subject of literature and is transformed into literature by process of recording it in memorable speech. It is so, it has been so, and G.o.d forbid it should ever not be so!

III

Now this, put so, is (you will say) so extremely, obvious that it must needs hide a fallacy or at best a quibble on a word. I shall try to show that it does not: that it directly opposes plain truth to a convention accepted by the Ordinance, and that the fallacy lies in that convention.

A convention may be defined as something which a number of men have agreed to accept in lieu of the truth and to pa.s.s off for the truth upon others: I was about to add, preferably when they can catch them young: but some recent travel in railway trains and listening to the kind of stuff men of mature years deliver straight out of newspapers for the products of their own digested thought have persuaded me that the ordinary man is as susceptible at fifty, sixty, or even seventy as at any earlier period of growth, and that the process of incubation is scarcely less rapid.

I am not, to be sure, concerned to deny that there may be conventions useful enough to society, serving it to maintain government, order, public and private decency, or the commerce on which it must needs rest to be a civilised society at all-- commerce of food, commerce of clothing, and so on, up to commerce in knowledge and ideas. Government itself--any form of it--is a convention; marriage is a convention; money of course is a convention, and the alphabet itself I suppose to contain as many conventions as all the old Courts of Love and Laws of Chivalry put together, and our English alphabet one tremendous fallacy, that twenty-six letters, separately or in combination are capable of symbolising all the sounds produced by an Englishman's organs of speech, let alone the sounds he hears from foreigners, dogs, guns, steam-engines, motor-horns and other friends and enemies to whom we deny the franchise. Also of course it ignores the whole system of musical notes--another convention--which yet with many of the older bards could hardly be separated from the words they used, though now only the words survive and as literature.

IV

But every convention has a fallacy somewhere at the root; whether it be useful and operative, as many a legal fiction is operative, for good; or senile, past service yet tyrannous by custom, and so pernicious; or merely foolish, as certain artistic conventions are traceable, when a Ruskin comes to judgment, back to nothing better than folly: and it becomes men of honest mind, in dealing with anything recognisable as a convention, to examine its accepted fallacy, whether it be well understood or ill understood; beneficent or pernicious or merely foolish or both foolish and pernicious: and this is often most handily done by tracing its history.

Now I shall a.s.sume that the framers of the Ordinance regulating the duties of this Chair knew well enough, of their own reading, that English Literature deals with a vast variety of subjects: and that, if any piece of writing miss to deal with its particular subject, so closely that theme and treatment can scarcely be separated, by so much will it be faulty as literature.

Milton is fairly possessed with the story of Man's fall, Boswell possessed with Johnson, Sh.e.l.ley with hatred of tyranny in all its manifestations, Mill again with the idea of Liberty: and it is only because we had knowledge presented to us at an age when we thought more attentively of apples, that we still fail to recognise in Euclid and Dr Todhunter two writers who are excellent because possessed with a pa.s.sion for Geometry.

I infer, then, that the framers of the Ordinance, when they employed this phrase 'the study of the subject of English Literature,' knew well enough that no such thing existed in nature, but adopted the convention that English Literature could be separated somehow from its content and treated as a subject all by itself, for teaching purposes: and, for purposes of examination, could be yoked up with another subject called English Language, as other Universities had yoked it.

V

I believe the following to be a fair account of how these examinations in English Language and Literature came to pa.s.s, and how a certain kind of student came to pa.s.s these Examinations. At any rate since the small revolution has happened in my life-time and most of it since I was able to observe, the account here is drawn from my own observation and may be checked and corrected by yours.

Thirty-five or forty years ago--say in the late seventies or early eighties--some preparatory schools, and others that taught older boys but ranked below the great Public Schools in repute, taught so much of English Literature as might be comprised, at a rough calculation, in two or three plays of Shakespeare, edited by Clark and Aldis Wright; a few of Bacon's Essays, Milton's early poems, Stopford Brooke's little primer, a book of extracts for committal to memory, with perhaps Chaucer's "Prologue" and a Speech of Burke. In the great Public Schools _no_ English Literature was studied, save in those which had invented 'Modern Sides,' to prepare boys specially for Woolwich or Sandhurst or the Indian Civil Service; for entrance to which examinations were held on certain prescribed English Cla.s.sics, and marks mainly given for acquaintance with the editors' notes.

In the Universities, the study of English Cla.s.sics was not officially recognised at all.

Let us not hastily suppose that this neglect of English rested wholly on unreason, or had nothing to say for itself. Teachers and tutors of the old Cla.s.sical Education (as it was called) could plead as follows:

'In the first place,' they would say, 'English Literature is too _easy_ a study. Our youth, at School or University, starts on his native cla.s.sics with a liability which in any foreign language he has painfully to acquire. The voices that murmured around his cradle, the voice of his nurse, of his governess, of the parson on Sundays; the voices of village boys, stablemen, gamekeepers and farmers--friendly or unfriendly--of callers, acquaintances, of the children he met at Children's Parties; the voices that at the dinner-table poured politics or local gossip into the little pitcher with long ears--all these were English voices speaking in English: and all these were all the while insensibly leading him up the slope from the summit of which he can survey the promised land spread at his feet as a wide park; and he holds the key of the gates, to enter and take possession. Whereas,' the old instructors would continue, 'with the cla.s.sics of any foreign language we take him at the foot of the steep ascent, spread a table before him (_mensa, mensa, mensam_ ...) and coax or drive him up with variations upon amo, "I love" or [Greek: tupto], "I beat," until he, too, reaches the summit and beholds the landscape:

But O, what labour!

O Prince, what pain!'

Now so much of truth, Gentlemen, as this plea contains was admitted last term by your Senate, in separating the English Tripos, in which a certain linguistic familiarity may be not rashly presumed of the student, from the Foreign Language Triposes, divided into two parts, of which the first will more suspiciously test his capacity to construe the books he professes to have studied. I may return to this and to the alleged _easiness_ of studies in a School of English. Let us proceed just now with the reasoned plea for neglect.

These admirable old schoolmasters and dons would have hesitated, maybe, to say flatly with Dogberry that 'to write and read comes by nature ... and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.' But in practice their system so worked, and in some of the Public Schools so works to this day. Let me tell you that just before the war an undergraduate came to me from the Sixth Form of one of the best reputed among these great schools. He wished to learn to write.

He wished (poor fellow) to write me an essay, if I would set him a subject. He had never written an essay at school. 'Indeed,'

said I, 'and there is no reason why you should, if by "essay" you mean some little treatise about "Patriotism" or "A Day in the Country." I will choose you no such subject nor any other upon any book which you have never read. Tell me, what is your Tripos?' He said 'the History Tripos.' 'Then,' said I, 'since History provides quite a large number of themes, choose one and I will try to correct your treatment of it, without offence to your opinions or prejudice to your facts.' 'But,' he confessed, 'at So-and-so'--naming the great Public School--'we never _wrote_ out an account of anything, or set down our opinions on anything, to be corrected. We just construed and did sums: And when he brought me his first attempt, behold, it was so. He could not construct a simple sentence, let alone putting two sentences together; while, as for a paragraph, it lay beyond his farthest horizon. In short, here was an instance ready to hand for any cheap writer engaged to decry the old Cla.s.sical Education.

What would the old schoolmasters plead in excuse? Why this, as I suggest--'You cite an extreme instance. But, while granting English Literature to be great, we would point out that an overwhelming majority of our best writers have modelled their prose and verse upon the Greek and Roman cla.s.sics, either directly or through tradition. Now we have our own language _gratis,_ so to speak. Let us spend our pains, then, in acquiring Latin and Greek, and the tradition. So shall we most intimately enjoy our own authors; and so, if we wish to write, we shall have at hand the clues they followed, the models they used.'

Now I have as you know, Gentlemen, a certain sympathy with this plea, or with a part of it: nor can so much of truth as its argument contains be silenced by a 'What about Shakespeare?' or a 'What about Bunyan?' or a 'What about Burns?' I believe our imaginary pleader for the Cla.s.sics could put up a stout defence upon any of those names. To choose the forlornest hope of the three, I can hear him demonstrating, to his own satisfaction if not to yours, that Bunyan took his style straight out of the Authorised Version of our Bible; which is to say that he took it from the styles of forty-seven scholars, _plus_ Tyndale's, _plus_ Coverdale's, _plus_ Cranmer's--the scholars.h.i.+p of fifty scholars expressed and blended.

But, as a theory, the strict cla.s.sical argument gives itself away, as well by its intolerance as by its obvious distrust of the genius of our own wonderful language. I have in these five years, and from this place, Gentlemen, counselled you to seek back ever to those Mediterranean sources which are the well-heads of our civilisation: but always (I hope) on the understanding that you use them with a large liberty. They are effete for us unless we add and mingle freely the juice of our own natural _genius._

And in practice the strict cla.s.sical theory, with its implied contempt of English, has been disastrous: disastrous not only with the ordinary man--as with my Sixth Form boy who could not put two sentences together, and had read no English authors; but disastrous even to highly eminent scholars. Listen, pray, to this pa.s.sage from one of them, Frederick Paley, who condescended (Heaven knows why) to turn the majestic verse of Pindar into English Prose--

_From the VIIIth Isthmian:_

And now that we are returned from great sorrows, let us not fall into a dearth of victories, nor foster griefs; but as we have ceased from our tiresome troubles, we will publicly indulge in a sweet roundelay.

_From the IVth Pythian:_

It had been divinely predicted to Pelias, that he should die by the doughty sons of Aeolus and an alarming oracle had come to his wary mind, delivered at the central point of tree-clad mother-earth, 'that he must by all means hold in great caution the man with one shoe, when he shall have come from a homestead on the hills.'

And he accordingly came in due time, armed with two spears, a magnificent man. The dress he wore was of a double kind, the national costume of the Magnesians.... Nor as yet had the glossy cl.u.s.ters of his hair been clipped away, but dangled brightly adown his back.

Forward he went at once and took his stand among the people.... Him then they failed to recognise: but some of the reverent-minded went so far as to say, 'Surely this cannot be Apollo!'

It needs no comment, I think. Surely _this_ cannot be Apollo!

Frederick Paley flourished--if the word be not exorbitant for so demure a writer--in the middle of the last century (he was born in the year of Waterloo and died in the year after Queen Victoria's first jubilee). Well, in that period there grew up a race of pioneers who saw that English Literature--that proud park and rolling estate--lay a tangled, neglected wilderness for its inheritors, and set themselves bravely to clear broad ways through it. Furnivall and Skeat, Aldis Wright, Clark, Grosart, Arber, Earle, Hales, Morris, Ellis and the rest--who can rehea.r.s.e these names now but in deepest respect? Oh, believe me, Gentlemen! they were wonderful fighters in a cause that at first seemed hopeless. If I presume to speak of foibles to-day, you will understand that I do so because, lightly though I may talk to you at times, I have a real sense of the responsibilities of this Chair. I wors.h.i.+p great learning, which they had: I loathe flippant detraction of what is great; I have usually a heart for men-against-odds and the unpopular cause. But these very valiant fighters had, one and all, some very obvious foibles: and because, in the hour of success, these foibles came to infect the whole teaching of English in this country, and to infect it fatally for many years, I shall dare to point them out.

VI

(a) To begin with, then, these valiant fighters, intent on pus.h.i.+ng their cause to the front, kept no sense of proportion.

All their geese were swans, and "Beowulf" a second "Iliad." I think it scarcely too much to say that, of these men, all so staunch in fighting for the claims of English Literature, not one (with the exception of Dr Hales) appears to have had any critical judgment whatever, apart from the rhyme, verse and inflectional tests on which they bestowed their truly priceless industry.

Criticism, as Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold or Pater understood and practised it, they merely misprized.

(b) I think it was of true scholarly desire to vindicate English Literature from the charge of being 'too easy,' that--as their studies advanced--they laid more and more stress on Middle-English and Old English writings than on what our nations of England and Scotland have written since they learned to write. I dare to think also that we may attribute to this dread of 'easiness' their practice of c.u.mbering simple texts with philological notes; on which, rather than on the text, we unhappy students were carefully examined. For an example supplied to Dr Corson--I take those three lines of Cowper's "Task" (Bk I, 86-88):

Thus first necessity invented stools, Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs, And luxury th' accomplish'd SOFA last.

Now in these three lines the word '_accomplish'd_' is the only one that needs even the smallest explanation. 'But,' says Dr Corson, 'in two different editions of "The Task" in my library, prepared for the use of the young, no explanation is given of it, but in both the Arabic origin of 'sofa' is given. In one the question is asked what other words in English have been derived from the Arabic.' ('Abracadabra' would be my little contribution.)

(c) These valiant fighters--having to extol what Europe had, wrongly enough, forgotten to count among valuable things--turned aggressively provincial, parted their beards in the Anglo-Saxon fas.h.i.+on; composed long sentences painfully innocent of any word not derivable from Anglo-Saxon, sentences in which the 'impenetrability of matter' became the 'un-go-throughsomeness of stuff (but that may have happened in a parody), and in general comported themselves like the Anglo-Saxons they claimed for their forbears; rightly enough for anything anyone cared, but wrongly enough for the rest of us who had no yearning toward that kins.h.i.+p and went on spelling Alfred with an A.

(d) They were--I suppose through opposition--extremely irascible men; like farmers. Urbanity was the last note in their gamut, the City--_urbs quam dic.u.n.t Romam_--the last of places in their ken.

There was no engaging them in dialectic, an Athenian art which they frankly despised. If you happened to disagree with them, their answer was a st.u.r.dy Anglo-Saxon brick. If you politely asked your way to Puddlehampton, and to be directed to Puddlehampton's main objects of interest, the answer you would get (see "Notes and Queries" _pa.s.sim_) would be, 'Who is this that comes out of Nowhere, enquiring for Puddlehampton, unacquainted with Stubbs? Is it possible at this time of day that the world can contain anyone ignorant of the published Transactions of the Wilts.h.i.+re Walking Club, Vol. III, p. 159--"Puddlehampton, its Rise and Decline, with a note on Vespasian?"'

(e) These pioneers--pus.h.i.+ng the importance of English, but occupied more and more with origins and with bad authors, simply could not see the vital truth; that English Literature is a continuing thing, ten times more alive to-day than it was in the times they studied and belauded. The last word upon them is that not a man of them could write prose in the language they thrust on our study. To them, far more than to the old cla.s.sical scholars, English was a shut book: a large book, but closed and clasped, material to heighten a desk for schoolmasters and schoolmistresses.

But schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, like chickens and curses, come home to roost. Once set up your plea for a Tripos of English Language and Literature on the lower plea that it will provide for what _they_ call a 'felt want,' and sooner or later you give English Language and Literature into _their_ hands, and then you get the fallacy full-flowered into a convention. English Literature henceforth is a 'subject,' divorced from life: and what they have made of it, let a thousand handbooks and so-called histories attest. But this world is not a wilderness of cla.s.s-rooms. English Language? They cannot write it, at all events.

They do not (so far as I can discover) try to write it. They talk and write about it; how the poor deceased thing outgrew infantile ailments, how it was operated on for _umlaut,_ how it parted with its vermiform appendix and its inflexions one by one, and lost its vowel endings in muted e's.

And they went and told the s.e.xton, And the s.e.xton toll'd the bell.

But when it comes to _writing_; to keeping bright the n.o.ble weapon of English, testing its poise and edge, feeling the grip, handing it to their pupils with the word, 'Here is the sword of your fathers, that has cloven dragons. So use it, that we who have kept it bright may be proud of you, and of our pains, and of its continuing valiance':--why, as I say, they do not even _try._ Our unprofessional forefathers, when they put pen to paper, did attempt English prose, and not seldom achieved it. But take up any elaborate History of English Literature and read, and, as you read, ask yourselves, 'How can one of the rarest delights of life be converted into _this_? What has happened to merry Chaucer, rare Ben Jonson, gay Steele and Prior, to Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb?'

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces!

gone into the professional stock-pot! And the next news is that these cooks, of whom Chaucer wrote prophetically

Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde, And turnen substaunce into accident!

have formed themselves into professional a.s.sociations to protect 'the study of the subject of English Literature' and bark off any intruder who would teach in another way than theirs.

VII