On The Art of Reading Part 22

I

I do not think, Gentlemen, that we need to bother ourselves today with any definition of a 'cla.s.sic,' or of the _stigmata_ by which a true cla.s.sic can be recognised. Sainte-Beuve once indicated these in a famous discourse, "Qu'est-ce qu'un cla.s.sique": and it may suffice us that these include Universality and Permanence.

Your true cla.s.sic is _universal,_ in that it appeals to the catholic mind of man. It is doubly _permanent_: for it remains significant, or acquires a new significance, after the age for which it was written and the conditions under which it was written, have pa.s.sed away; and it yet keeps, undefaced by handling, the original n.o.ble imprint of the mind that first minted it--or shall we say that, as generation after generation rings the coin, it ever returns the echo of its father-spirit?

But for our purpose it suffices that in our literature we possess a number of works to which the t.i.tle of cla.s.sic cannot be refused. So let us confine ourselves to these, and to the question, How to use them?

II

Well, to begin with, I revert to a point which I tried to establish in my first lecture; and insist with all my strength that the first obligation we owe to any cla.s.sic, and to those whom we teach, and to ourselves, is to treat it _absolutely_: not for any secondary or derivative purpose, or purpose recommended as useful by any manual: but at first solely to interpret the meaning which its author intended: that in short we should _trust_ any given masterpiece for its operation, on ourselves and on others. In that first lecture I quoted to you this most wise sentence:

That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact,

and consenting to this with all my heart I say that it matters very little for the moment, or even for a considerable while, that a pupil does not perfectly, or even nearly, understand all he reads, provided we can get the attraction to seize upon him.

He and the author between them will do the rest: our function is to communicate and trust. In what other way do children take the ineffaceable stamp of a gentle nurture than by daily attraction to whatsoever is beautiful and amiable and dignified in their home? As there, so in their reading, the process must be gradual of acquiring an inbred monitor to reject the evil and choose the good. For it is the property of masterpieces that they not only raise you to

despise low joys, low Gains; Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains:

they are not only as Lamb wrote of the Plays of Shakespeare 'enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity'; but they raise your gorge to defend you from swallowing the fifth-rate, the sham, the fraudulent. _Abeunt studia in mores._ I cannot, for my part, conceive a man who has once incorporated the "Phaedo" or the "Paradiso" or "Lear" in himself as lending himself for a moment to one or other of the follies plastered in these late stern times upon the firm and most solid purpose of this nation--the inanities, let us say, of a Baby-Week. Or, for a more d.a.m.nable instance, I think of you and me with Marvell's great Horatian Ode sunk in our minds, standing to-day by the statue of Charles I that looks down Whitehall: telling ourselves of 'that memorable scene' before the Banqueting House, remembering amid old woes all the glory of our blood and state, recollecting what is due even to ourselves, standing on the greatest site of our capital, and turning to see it degraded, as it has been for a week, to a vulgar raree-show. Gentlemen, I could read you many poor ill-written letters from mothers whose sons have died for England, to prove to you we have not deserved _that,_ or the sort of placard with which London has been plastered,

Dum domus aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet.

Great enterprises (as we know) and little minds go ill together.

Someone veiled the statue. That, at least, was well done.

I have not the information--nor do I want it--to make even a guess who was responsible for this particular outrage. I know the sort of man well enough to venture that he never had a liberal education, and, further, that he is probably rather proud of it. But he may nevertheless own some instinct of primitive kindliness: and I wish he could know how he afflicts men of sensitiveness who have sons at the War.

III

Secondly, let us consider what use we can make of even one selected cla.s.sic. I refer you back to the work of an old schoolmaster, quoted in my first lecture:

I believe, if the truth were known, men would be astonished at the small amount of learning with which a high degree of culture is compatible. In a moment of enthusiasm I ventured once to tell my 'English set' that if they could really master the ninth book of "Paradise Lost," so as to rise to the height of its great argument and incorporate all its beauties in themselves, they would at one blow, by virtue of that alone, become highly cultivated men.... More and more various learning might raise them to the same height by different paths, but could hardly raise them higher.

I beg your attention for the exact words: 'to rise to the height of its great argument and _incorporate all its beauties in themselves._' There you have it--'to incorporate.' Do you remember that saying of Wordsworth's, casually dropped in conversation, but preserved for us by Hazlitt?--'It is in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language or diction the dress of our thoughts.... It is the _incarnation_ of our thoughts.' Even so, I maintain to you, the first business of a learner in literature is to get complete hold of some undeniable masterpiece and incorporate it, incarnate it. And, I repeat, there are a few great works for you to choose from: works approved for you by ancient and catholic judgment.

IV

But let us take something far simpler than the Ninth Book of "Paradise Lost" and more direct than any translated masterpiece can be in its appeal; something of high genius, written in our mother tongue. Let us take "The Tempest."

Of "The Tempest" we may say confidently:

(1) that it is a literary masterpiece: the last most perfect 'fruit of the n.o.blest tree in our English Forest';

(2) that its story is quite simple; intelligible to a child: (its basis in fact is fairy-tale, pure and simple--as I tried to show in a previous lecture);

(3) that in reading it--or in reading "Hamlet," for that matter-- the child has no sense at all of being patronised, of being 'written down to.' And this has the strongest bearing on my argument. The great authors, as Emerson says, never condescend.

Shakespeare himself speaks to a slip of a boy, and that boy feels that he _is_ Ferdinand;

(4) that, though Shakespeare uses his loftiest, most accomplished and, in a sense, his most difficult language: a way of talking it has cost him a life-time to acquire, in line upon line inviting the scholar's, prosodist's, poet's most careful study; that language is no bar to the child's enjoyment: but rather casts about the whole play an aura of magnificence which, with the a.s.sistant harmonies, doubles and redoubles the spell. A child no more resents this because it is strange than he objects to read in a fairytale of robbers concealed in oil-jars or of diamonds big as a roc's egg. When will our educators see that what a child depends on is imagination, that what he demands of life is the wonderful, the glittering, possibility?

Now if, putting all this together and taking confidence from it, we boldly launch a child upon "The Tempest" we shall come sooner or later upon pa.s.sages that _we_ have arrived at finding difficult. We shall come, for example, to the Masque of Iris, which Iris, invoking Ceres, thus opens:

Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease; Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep, And flat meads thatched with stover, them to keep: Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims, Which spongy April at thy hest betrims-- To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves, Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, Being la.s.s-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard; And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky hard, Where thou thyself dost air--the Queen o' th' sky, Whose watry arch and messenger am I, Bids thee leave these....

The pa.s.sage is undeniably hard for any child, even when you have paused to explain who Ceres is, who Iris, who the Queen o' the sky, and what Iris means by calling herself 'her watery arch and messenger.' The grammatical structure not only stands on its head but maintains that posture for an extravagant while. Naturally (or rather let us say, ordinarily) it would run, 'Ceres, the Queen o' the sky bids thee leave--thy rich leas, etc.' But, the lines being twelve-and-a-half in number, we get no hint of there being any grammatical subject until it bursts on us in the second half of line eleven, while the two main verbs and the object of one of them yet linger to be exploded in the last half-line, 'Bids thee leave these.' And this again is as nothing to the difficulties of interpretation. 'Dismissed bachelor' may be easy; 'pole-clipt vineyard' is certainly not, at first sight. 'To make cold nymphs chaste crowns.' What cold nymphs? You have to wait for another fifty odd lines before being quite sure that Shakespeare means Naiads (and 'What are Naiads?' says the child) --'temperate nymphs':

You nymphs, called Naiads, of the windring brooks, With your sedged crowns...

--and if the child demand what is meant by 'pioned and twilled brims,' you have to answer him that n.o.body knows.

These difficulties--perhaps for you, certainly for the young reader or listener--are reserved delights. My old schoolmaster even indulges this suspicion--'I never can persuade myself that Shakespeare would have pa.s.sed high in a Civil Service Examination on one of his own plays.' At any rate you don't _begin_ with these difficulties: you don't (or I hope you don't) read the notes first: since, as Bacon puts it, 'Studies teach not their own use.'

As for the child, he is not '_grubbing_ for beauties'; he magnificently ignores what he cannot for the moment understand, being intent on _What Is,_ the heart and secret of the adventure.

He _is_ Ferdinand (I repeat) and the isle is 'full of voices.' If these voices were all intelligible, why then, as Browning would say, 'the less Island it.'

V

I have purposely exhibited "The Tempest" at its least tractable.

Who will deny that _as a whole_ it can be made intelligible even to very young children by the simple process of reading it with them intelligently? or that the mysteries such a reading leaves unexplained are of the sort to fascinate a child's mind and allure it? But if this be granted, I have established my contention that the Humanities should not be treated as a mere crown and ornament of education; that they should inform every part of it, from the beginning, in every school of the realm: that whether a child have more education or less education, what he has can be, and should be, a 'liberal education' throughout.

Matthew Arnold, as every one knows, used to preach the use of these masterpieces as prophylactics of taste. I would I could make you feel that they are even more necessary to us.

The reason why?--The reason is that every child born in these Islands is born into a democracy which, apart from home affairs, stands committed to a high responsibility for the future welfare and good governance of Europe. For three centuries or so it has held rule over vast stretches of the earth's surface and many millions of strange peoples: while its obligations towards the general civilisation of Europe, if not intermittent, have been tightened or relaxed, now here, now there, by policy, by commerce, by dynastic alliances, by sudden revulsions or sympathies. But this War will leave us bound to Europe as we never have been: and, whether we like it or not, no less inextricably bound to foe than to friend. Therefore, I say, it has become important, and in a far higher degree than it ever was before the War, that our countrymen grow up with a sense of what I may call the _soul_ of Europe. And nowhere but in literature (which is 'memorable speech')--or at any rate, nowhere so well as in literature--can they find this sense.

VI

There was, as we have seen, a time in Europe, extending over many centuries, when mankind dwelt under the preoccupation of making literature, and still making more of it. The 5th century B.C. in Athens was such a time; and if you will you may envy, as we all admire, the men of an age when to write at all was tantamount to a.s.serting genius; the men who, in Newman's words, 'deserve to be Cla.s.sics, both because of what they do and because they can do it.' If you envy--while you envy--at least remember that these things often paid their price; that the "Phaedo," for example, was bought for us by the death of Socrates. Pa.s.s Athens and come to Alexandria: still men are acc.u.mulating books and the material for books; thres.h.i.+ng out the Cla.s.sics into commentaries and grammars, garnering books in great libraries.

There follows an age which interrupts this hive-like labour with sudden and insensate destruction. German tribes from the north, Turkish from the east, break in upon the granaries and send up literature in flames; the Christian Fathers from Tertullian to Gregory the Great (I regret to say) either heartily a.s.sisting or at least warming their benedictory hands at the blaze: and so thoroughly they do their work that even the writings of Aristotle, the Philosopher, must wait for centuries as 'things silently gone out of mind or things violently destroyed' (to borrow Wordsworth's fine phrase) and creep back into Europe bit by bit, under cover of Arabic translations.

The scholars set to work and begin rebuilding: patient, indefatigable, anonymous as the coral insects at work on a Pacific atoll-building, building, until on the near side of the gulf we call the Dark Age, islets of scholars.h.i.+p lift themselves above the waters: mere specks at first, but ridges appear and connect them: and, to first seeming, sterile enough:

Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho--

but as they join and become a _terra firma,_ a thin soil gathers on them G.o.d knows whence: and, G.o.d knows whence, the seed is brought, 'it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.' There is a price, again, for this resurrection: but how n.o.bly, how blithely paid you may learn, without seeking recondite examples, from Cuthbert's famous letter describing the death of Bede.

Compare that story with that of the last conversation of Socrates; and you will surely recognise that the two men are brothers born out of time; that Bede's work has been a legacy; that his life has been given to recreating--not scholars.h.i.+p merely nor literature merely--but, through them both, something above them both--the soul of Europe. And this may or may not lead you on to reflect that beyond our present pa.s.sions, and beyond this War, in a common sanity Europe (and America with her) will have to discover that common soul again.

But eminent spirits such as Bede's are, by their very eminence, less representative of the process--essentially fugitive and self-abnegatory--than the thousands of copyists who have left no name behind them. Let me read you a short paragraph from "The Cambridge History of English Literature," Chapter 11, written, the other day, by one of our own teachers:

The cloister was the centre of life in the monastery, and in the cloister was the workshop of the patient scribe. It is hard to realise that the fair and seemly handwriting of these ma.n.u.scripts was executed by fingers which, on winter days, when the wind howled through the cloisters, must have been numbed by icy cold. It is true that, occasionally, little carrels or studies in the recesses of the windows were screened off from the main walk of the cloister, and, sometimes, a small room or cell would be part.i.tioned off for the use of a single scribe. The room would then be called the Scriptorium, but it is unlikely that any save the oldest and most learned of the community were afforded this luxury. In these scriptoria of various kinds the earliest annals and chronicles in the English language were penned, in the beautiful and painstaking forms in which we know them.

If you seek testimony, here are the _ipsissima verba_ of a poor monk of Wessobrunn endorsed upon his MS:

The book which you now see was written in the outer seats of the cloister. While I wrote I froze: and what I could not write by the beams of day I finished by candlelight.

We might profitably spend--but to-day cannot spare--a while upon the pains these men of the Middle Ages took to acc.u.mulate books and to keep them. The chained volumes in old libraries, for example, might give us a text for this as well as start us speculating why it is that, to this day, the human conscience incurably declines to include books with other portable property covered by the Eighth Commandment. Or we might follow several of the early scholars and humanists in their pa.s.sionate chasings across Europe, in and out of obscure monasteries, to recover the lost MSS of the cla.s.sics: might tell, for instance, of Pope Nicholas V, whose birth-name was Tommaso Parentucelli, and how he rescued the MSS from Constantinople and founded the Vatican Library: or of Aurispa of Sicily who collected two hundred and thirty-eight for Florence: or the story of the _editio princeps_ of the Greek text of Homer. Or we might dwell on the awaking of our literature, and the trend given to it, by men of the Italian and French renaissance; or on the residence of Erasmus here, in this University, with its results.

VII

But I have said enough to make it clear that, as we owe so much of our best to understanding Europe, so the need to understand Europe lies urgently to-day upon large cla.s.ses in this country; and that yet, in the nature of things, these cla.s.ses can never enjoy such leisure as our forefathers enjoyed to understand what I call the soul of Europe, or at least to misunderstand it _upon acquaintance._