PN 55 A SCIENCE AND LITERATURE Being the Presidential Address delivered by Viscount Morley of Blackburn, O.M., at the Annual General Meeting on January 28, 1911. I owe you my warm thanks for the honour you have done me in choosing me to be your President for the year. Along with my grati- tude goes a very keen sense that I can contribute nothing to the special educational objects that your Association exists to promote. Per- sonally I cannot remember that I was ever taught English. At school I once competed for an English prize poem, without success, but not without an encouraging compliment from the head master that my heroic poem contained the promise of a sound prose style. I shall not attempt to take a part, though as a constant learner I cannot but take an interest, in the various controversial points connected with English teaching that figure in your Transactions. They are important, they are full of life, of experience, and of real enthusiasm. They open new problems for what is, after all, if we look at it in all its bearings, the most responsible of professions. It is not for me to instruct teachers in their own arduous business. Whether the teaching of English is over-methodized, whether grammatical terminology should be uniform, whether in English grammar gender should cease to be recognized, or, at any rate, should not be emphasized ; whether a sentence containing a subordinate clause is to be called a simple sentence ; whether future perfect in the past is the right name for a certain tense of all these and many others I am sure that they touch points of real significance both for scientific analysis of language, and for teaching habits of accurate distinction which mark the difference between slovenly and orderly minds. I have heard of one singularly attractive writer of my generation now dead who used to teach his pupils that the true test of good writing lay in the adverbs. Adjectives, he said, usually took you little further than the expression of broad characteristics ; it is the adverb that dis- plays the delicacy of the thing, and a precise use of the adverb is the sure sign of a truth-loving mind. This, I admit, strikes me as rather a subtle flavour, but such matters are for experts, and for this afternoon you will allow me to let them slumber. An observation of your secre- tary's struck me as hitting the real mark of your proceedings. She says of a certain author that he takes us into that atmosphere of beauty, more or less frequent excursions into which are necessary to help us to endure what she calls the rush of life and the enforced ugliness of much of our surroundings. Grammar, philology, rules of rhetoric, are indis- pensable apparatus. They are a worthy exercise for careful, ingenious, and erudite minds. But all this technique is only a means of ace 555 2 SCIENCE AND LITERATURE to those treasures of our literature that, in the old famous words, are with us in the night, and in the hurry of the prime, stir youth and refresh age, adorn success, and to failure furnish shelter and consolation. It is no trifling concern that exercises your Association, no art of abstruse pedagogic, no pedantry, like Carlyle's favourite example of the fiery grammarian who cried out against his rival, ' May Heaven eternally confound you for your theory of the irregular Greek verbs \ The case has been explicitly opened, at least in one of its parts, in the rather startling sentences with which Mr. Hartog, some three or four years ago, began his excellent little book on The Writing of English. The sentences were four the English boy cannot write English, the English boy is not taught to write English, the French boy can write French, the French boy writes French because he is taught. On Mr. Hartog's plan for applying French methods to English scholastic circumstances I can venture no opinion. If there is substance in the first two of his propositions, the significant thing is not merely that the boy cannot write and is not taught to write English, but the sort of indifference implied in such a state of facts in the general atmosphere to one of the noblest of tongues, and in these days far the most widely spread and far the most powerful of tongues. I was asked the other day how many members of Parliament had ever read a page of Milton's Areopagitica. I wonder. I would not too con- fidently answer even for another place. Your object is to get both parents and teachers to shake off this indifference, whatever it amounts to, for it may be that even teachers are not always animated by delight, which among the elect falls little short of passion, for the glorious literature they have to teach. I do not mean that people do not care for books and libraries. The evidence is all decisively the other way. But the library without the school is of as little avail as schools would be without the library. A library is a labyrinthian maze without a clue to one who has never been trained, I will not say systematically, but even in the elements of English language and literature. I called English the most widespread of living tongues. Surely not the least stupendous fact in our British annals is the conquest of a boundless area of the habitable globe by our English language. There is no parallel. You have been told here, I see, that Arabic is or has been our rival. This is a proposition that needs far deeper limitations and qualifications than I can either set forth or examine. Arabic scholars assure me that though Arabic in Islamic lands for some three or four centuries became the medium for an active propagation of ideas, and though by the Koran it retains its hold in its own area, and keeps in its literary as distinct from its spoken form the stamp of thirteen centuries ago, yet there is no real analogy or comparison with the diffusion of English. Latin is a better analogy. Latin was universally spoken pretty early in Gaul, Britain, Spain, and somewhat later in the provinces on the Danube. In the East it spread more slowly, but by the Antonines and onwards the spread of Latin was pretty complete, even in Africa. Greek was common throughout the empire as the language of commerce in the fourth century. St. Augustine tells us that pains were taken that the Imperial state should impose not only its political yoke but its own tongue upon the conquered peoples, per pacem societatis. This is what, among other things, is slowly coming to pass in India. SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 3 Though to-day only a handful, a million or so, of the population use our language, yet English must inevitably spread from being an official tongue to be a general unifying agent. An Englishman who adds to the glory of our language and letters will deserve Caesar's grand com- pliment to Cicero, declaring it a better claim to a laurel crown to have advanced the boundaries of Roman genius than the boundaries of Roman rule. Whether Julius was sincere or insincere, it is a noble truth for us as well as for old Rome. Looking at contemporary conditions, what is there to strike us ? We cannot miss the leading fact that two enormous changes have come to pass within the last two generations. One is the rise of physical science and invention into reigning power through the whole field of intellectual activity and interest. The other is the huge augmentation of those who know how to read and who have come under the influence of books. Or shall we say of printed matter ? For if we were to judge from the legions who travel by rail, literature means too often books that are no books and only a more or less respectable provision for wasting time. The Head Master of Eton a year ago told you boldly that we live in an age when there is the greatest abundance of bad literature that ever was known in any country in the world, the cheapest and most accessible bad literature. On the other hand, it is quite true, and much to the point, masterpieces are now, in cheap form, finding a market in overwhelming numbers. One well-known series, now num- bering 500 volumes, has in five years had a gross sale of seven million copies, with no sign of decrease. The World's Classics from Oxford count for many of their heroes a sale of 100,000 and an average between 50,000 and 60,000. Let us add that even in the cheapest daily journals no book of serious worth ever goes without a notice, handling it with a degree of competence that not so many years ago was only to be found in half a dozen expensive weeklies. Add on the same side the extension, popularity, and success of public libraries. Encouraging as these facts are in every way, still let us face the unpleasant reflection that if one of the main objects of education must always be to strengthen the faculty of continuous and coherent attention against that tendency to futile and ignoble dispersion which confuses the brain and enervates the will, then are we sure that the printing press, mighty blessing as it is, can be counted a blessing without alloy. What is to be the effect upon the great, the noble, the difficult art of writing ? The writer of either prose or verse is not, and cannot be, independent of surrounding atmosphere and a responsive audience. Even the sublimest genius, whose dawn upon the world seems like an accident, out of all range of knowable cause or condition even he is carried upon the stream of time and circumstance. We all know how French was shaped into its extraordinary perfection in the social influences of the greatest of French Courts. How will our own English fare amid the swelling tides of democracy? So far, if anybody thinks that some oddities of diction or tricks of affectation in construction, or invention of ugly words or revival of worn-out and inappropriate old ones, that these vicious fopperies show signs of creeping in, it is rather from above than below ; from those who ought to know better than those who have had little chance of knowing. This wholesale admission, then, of the principle of universal franchise, male and female, into the world of letters is one mark of our new time. 4 SCIENCE AND LITERATURE Now let me offer a few words on the effects of the relations of letters and science. We may obviously date a new time from 1859, when Darwin's Origin of Species appeared, and, along with two or three other imposing works of that date, launched into common currency a new vocabulary. We now apply in every sphere, high and low, trivial or momentous, talk about evolution, natural selection, environment, heredity, survival of the fittest, and all the rest. The most resolute and trenchant of Darwinians has warned us that new truths begin as rank heresies and end as superstitions ; and if he were alive to see to-day all the effects of his victory on daily speech, perhaps he would not withdraw his words. That great controversy has died down, or at least takes new shape, leaving, after all is said, one of the master contributions to knowledge of nature and its laws, and to man's view of life and the working of his destinies. Scientific interest has now shifted into new areas of discovery, invention, and speculation. Still the spirit of the time remains the spirit of science, and fact, and ordered knowledge. What has been the effect of knowledge upon form, on language, on literary art ? It adds boundless gifts to human conveniences. Does it make an inspiring public for the master of either prose or verse? Darwin himself made no pretensions in authorship. He once said to Sir Charles Lyell that a naturalist's life would be a happy one if he had only to observe and never to write. Yet he is a writer of excellent form for simple and direct description, patient accumulation of persuasive arguments, and a noble and transparent candour in stating what makes against him, which, if not what is called style, is better for the reader than the finest style can be. One eminent literary critic of my acquaintance finds his little volume on earth-worms a most fascinating book, even as literature. Then, although the controversial exigencies of his day affected him with a relish for laying too lustily about him with his powerful flail, I know no more lucid, effective, and manful English than you will find in Huxley. What more delightful book of travel than the Himalaya Journals of the great naturalist Hooker, who carried on his botanical explorations some sixty years ago, and happily is still among us? Buffon, as man of science, is now, I assume, little more than a shadow of a name, and probably even the most highly educated of us know little more about him than his famous pregnant saying that the style is the man a saying, by the way, which really meant no more than that, while Nature gave the material for narrative, it is man who gives the style. Yet the French to this day count him among the greatest of their writers for order, unity, precision, method, clearness in scientific exposition of animated nature, along with majestic gifts of natural eloquence. And anybody who as orator, preacher, professor, seeks guide and stimulus for trying the grander effects upon an audience might do much worse than read Buffon's long renowned and influential Discourse on Style. Even less ambitious people will find in it much that is useful and admirable, provided only that we are not drawn to imitate. May I note that Buffon keeps clear of the mortal sin of trying to produce with the instrument of prose effects that are by all the natural laws of language reserved for the domain of poetry, or, in other words, of asking from any art, whether words, colour, or form, effects that are beyond its resources. Then comes the greatest of all. SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 5 Whatever the decision may be as to the value of Goethe's scientific contribution, this, at least, is certain, that his is the most wondrous ; the unique case of a man who united high original scientific power of mind with transcendent gifts in flight, force, and beauty of poetic imagination. As for science and the poets, only the other day an attractive little book published by Sir Norman Lockyer shows how Tennyson, the composer of verse unsurpassed for exquisite music in our English tongue, yet followed with unflagging interest the problems of evolution and all that hangs upon them. Whether astronomy or geology ' terrible muses ', as he well might call them inspired the better elements of his beautiful work, we may doubt. An English critic has had the courage to say that there is an insoluble element of prose in Dante, and Tennyson has hardly shown that the scientific ideas of an age are soluble in musical words. Browning, his companion poet nearly universal in his range, was too essentially dramatic, too inde- pendent of the scientific influences of his day, too careless of expression, to be a case much in point. Tennyson said of him, he had power of intellect enough for all of them, but he has not the glory of words '. Whether he had or not, science was not responsible. I should like to name, in passing, the English poet who, in Lowell's words, has written less and pleased more than any other. Gray was an incessant and a serious student in learned tongues ; and his annota- tions on the System of Nature, by Linnaeus, his contemporary, bear witness to his industry and minute observation as naturalist. On a page of the first volume he has transcribed some Greek words about our dumb friends. 'We ought to feel', says Aristotle, 'no childish dislike at inspecting even the humblest living creatures, for in them, too, dwells something marvellous ; I bid you enter with confidence, for even here is the divine'. It is pleasant to associate these humanities with the author of the poem, of which I am still bold enough, with your leave, to say that it has for a century and a half given to greater multitudes of men more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in all the glorious treasury of English verse. Now let me take a contemporary the other way. Gabriel Rossetti, a true poet, if not a great one, very firmly declared himself not at all sure that the earth really revolved round the sun. He even aggravated this scandalous position by asking, what, after all, did it matter whether it moved or not. But then Rossetti was not like other poets, painters, or plain men. I once happened to meet him on the evening of a General Election, and was thunderstruck to find that he was not aware of the immense event shaking the world around us. He added by and by that he did not suppose it made much difference whether Whig or Tory won. A greater poet than himself was with us, and shared the Laodicean humour : I forget who won the election, nor do I recollect exactly what difference it did make, if any. In prose fiction was one writer of commanding mind, saturated with the spirit of science. Who does not feel how George Eliot's creative and literary art was impaired, and at last worse than impaired, by her daily associations with science ? Or would it be truer to say I often thought it would that the decline was due to her own ever-deepening sense of the pain of the world and the tragedy of sentient being ? She never looked upon it all as ludibria rerum humanarum, the cruel 6 SCIENCE AND LITERATURE sport of human things. Nor could she dismiss it in the spirit of Queen Victoria's saying to Dr. Benson, about the follies and frivolities of Vanity Fair : ' Archbishop, I sometimes think they must all be mad \ The theatre was too oppressive for George Eliot. The double stress of emotion and thought, of sympathy and reason, wrought upon her too intensely for art. She could not, as virile spirits should, reconcile herself to nature. It needed all her native and well-trained strength of soul to prevent her, science or no science, from being crushed by the thought in Keats's lines how ' men sit and hear each other groan ', how earth is ' full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs ' . Let us look at the invasion of another province by the spirit of the time. The eager curiosity of all these years about the facts of biology, chemistry, physics, and their laws, has inevitably quickened the spread both of the same curiosity and the same respect, quickened by German example, for ascertained facts into the province of history. We live in the documentary age. New sources emerge and new papers are daily dragged to light. In the history of Great Britain alone documents are every year brought almost in barrow-loads to the grateful student's door. Sacred archives everywhere are being unsealed. Whether all this be new truth or old falsehood not every explorer can be quite sure. But the dilemma is now fixed by fate and literary fashion, which is itself a kind of fate. A fabric of inspiring narrative built on foundations of quicksand, on the one side ; on the other a fearsome jungle of minute detail, every regiment in every battle numbered, every hour accounted for, every turn of diplomatic craft tracked. Is this over-burden of recorded fact a misfortune for modern history ? How hard to move with freedom under it ! Is the pure scientific impulse to tell the exact truth with all the necessary reserva- tions easy to combine with regard for artistic pleasure ? I have been reminded that Renan, who possessed both scientific and artistic instinct, somewhere wishes that he could use polychromatic ink, so that he might indicate the subtle shades of doubt that belong to each adjective and adverb. How distracting to the ordinary reader, who loves firm line and bold colour ! What would have become of the splendours of Carlyle's French Revolution if he had followed the scale and method of his Frederick the Great ? It is an interesting guess that a good scholar, familiar with the two ancient languages and with French, could read Gibbon's authorities in five years. The actual mass of print and manuscript through which Ranke, or Gardiner, must have fought his way can hardly have been less than five or six times as bulky. This is the labour of a lifetime. Form as form is buried alive. Some critics insist that the rarest beauty a style can have is to resemble speech. Others put it in another way, that if you are content to give exactitude to the spontaneous thought, then power and grace enough will follow. Taine says the disappearance of style is the perfection of style. If these schools are right, Gibbon's writing will hardly please, and there have been many whom as style it does not please. Be that as it may, Gibbon's unsurpassed greatness as historian lies not at all in his selection of words or the fall of his sentence, but in majesty of historic conception, in superb force of imagination, in the sustained and symmetric grandeur of his design. And here is the peril of the docu- mentary age. The English writer of our own immediate time, with the fullest SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 7 knowledge and deepest understanding of the fact and spirit of history, would, I think, be pronounced by most critics with a right to judge to be the late Lord Acton. His learning has been called by learned men a marvel. Nor did it ever loosen his hold on practical life, for he was one of the fortunate beings who are all of one piece. His mind, notwithstanding a rather puzzling union within the reserved precincts of theology of submission to authority with his vehement passion for individual freedom, was still a complete whole. May I read to you how Mr. Bryce in 1883 once heard him late at night in his library at Cannes explain in what wise a history of liberty might be made the central thread of all history ? * He spoke for six or seven minutes only ; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if from some mountain- summit high in air he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision that discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now exciting, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole land- scape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight '. Acton's was a leading case where knowledge and profundity was not matched by form. His page is overloaded, he is often over-subtle, he has the fault, or shall I call it the literary crime, of allusiveness and indirect reference he is apt to put to his reader a riddle or a poser, and then to leave him in the lurch. When all this is said, even in his severest chapter you will find some of the pregnant, luminous, and stimulating things that are the very heart and soul of good literature. It sometimes occurs to me that if those faithful disciples of his were to make a selection of these deep sayings of their master, they would produce an anthology of historic wisdom that might well deserve a favourite place even with the reader whose whole library does not go beyond a couple of shelves. Meanwhile, here is Acton's own account of the historian's direct debt to the methods of science : ' If men of science owe anything to us ', he says, * we may learn much from them that is essential. For they can show how to test proof, how to secure fullness and soundness in induction, how to restrain and employ with safety hypothesis and analogy. It is they who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth irrecoverably prevails '. I find in Sir James Murray's Dictionary a splendid triumph for any age that I am responsible for having once called literature the most seductive, deceiving, and dangerous of professions. That text demands a longer sermon than your time allows. If any of you reject my warn- ing, impatient as I confess myself of overdoing precepts about style, let me urge you, besides the fundamental commonplaces about being above all things simple and direct, lucid and terse, not using two words where one will do about keeping the standard of proof high, and so forth let me commend two qualities for one of which I must, against my will, use a French wordSanity and Justesse. Sanity you know well, at least by name. Justesse is no synonym for justice ; it is more like equity, balance, a fair mind, measure, reserve. Voltaire, who, whatever else we may think of him, knew how to write, said of some 8 SCIENCE AND LITERATURE great lady : - I am charmed with her just and delicate mind ; without justesse of mind there is nothing '. You must curb your ambition of glory, of writing like Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin. You must take your chance of being called dry, flat, tame. But one advantage of these two qualities is that they are within reach, and grandeur for most of us is not. And with this temper it is easier to see the truth, what things really are, and how they actually come to pass. I had noted one further admonition, but opening Mr. Ker's two little volumes of Dryden's prefaces, for which we owe the editor a debt, I came on Johnson's account of Dryden's prose, far better worth your pondering than anything I could say : Dryden's prefaces ' have not the formality of a settled style. . . . The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled : every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place. Nothing is cold or languid ; the whole is airy, animated, and vigorous ; what is little is gay ; what is great is splendid. . . . Everything is excused by the play of images and the spriteliness of expression. Though all is easy, nothing is feeble ; though all seems careless, nothing is harsh ; and though since his earlier works more than a century has passed, they have nothing yet uncouth or obsolete '. This contains both true criticism and good guidance. Nobody here will undervalue criticism, or fall into the gross blunder of regarding it as a mere parasite of creative work. If there be such a person, may I commend him or her to a very modest volume by Mr. Saintsbury called Loci Critici, containing passages to illustrate critical theory and practice from Aristotle downwards. For those whose appetite may grow as they eat, the same editor's history in three volumes of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, from the earliest texts to the present day, is a striking monument of literary enthusiasm, vastly extensive learning, and much good suggestion. I need not recall how criticism has been defined the endeavour in all branches of know- ledge philosophy, history, art, science to see the object as it is in itself. Mr. Courthope's History of English Poetry, now completed, is full of value to the student and of lively interest to all the better kinds of general reader. A new history of the literature of the Victorian era is of rather special interest to me personally, because it was my truly happy fortune to be the friend, and in many cases the intimate, of most of the later writers whom Professor Walker so skilfully and conscientiously commemorates. Of Mr. Sidney Lee's incessant and admirable toil, why need I speak, or of the other well-known workers in the field of English letters ? Such a body of criticism is infinitely useful for the present of literature and of good promise for the future. A graceful French description of what literature means in certain of its types is worth hearing : ' The man of letters is a singular being ; he does not look at things exactly with his own eyes ; he is not the creature of his own impressions ; he is a tree on whom you have grafted Horace, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, and the rest, and hence grow flowers not natural, yet not artificial. Of all the mixed colours he makes for himself a colour of his own ; from all the glasses through which his eyes pass to the next world, there is fused a peculiar tint, and that is the imagination of the man of letters. If he has genius, all these memories are dissipated by the energy of his personal gift '.* 1 Doudan. SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 9 You will think this too fastidious, too enervating, too dilettante. So it is, if it were taken for the whole story. We must add the saving counsel of Cicero who has himself been called the greatest of all men of letters. You must always take care to end by exposing yourself to contact with men, and trying your strength in the struggles of life. Yes, that is the end of books and everything. You remember the jest in one of Goethe's verses : how a stubbornly secluded student was once induced to go to a grand evening party. They asked him how he had enjoyed himself. ' If they had been books ', he answered, ' I would not have read one of them'. Without being sworn devotees of evening parties, we are sure the gruff sage, if he ever existed, must have been so out of touch with his fellow creatures and their action, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, that he had read his books to little purpose after all. There were some interesting and good-natured observations in The Times a few days ago about the decline in the eloquence of our modern prose. It is unhappily impoverished, the writer says ; it is not rich in expressing some of the noblest experiences of the human mind and heart. Grand prose, it may be true, is not heard in debate or in the pulpits, and hardly abounds in the exercises of historian, critic, or biographer. Assuredly we cannot envy the man whom high passages of our classic prose Sir Thomas Browne, Raleigh, Bacon, Hooker, Burke, the last of them notably in the Address to the King do not affect with something of the same swell of emotion as comes from soul-inspiring verse. But grand prose comes from supreme issues, earnest convictions, eager desire to convert and persuade, sublime events, passionate beliefs these are what move to eloquence at its highest. Lincoln was no scholar, but the Second Inaugural is not to be surpassed, and I remember a passage of Cobden's about the Irish famine that is a masterpiece of eloquent feeling on that fateful tragedy. Where the themes and issues are those of scientific truth, that prose should be unemotional is natural. Everybody knows Darwin's own account, how, as the laborious years passed, he so lost his taste for poetry that he could not endure to read a word of it, Shakespeare became so dull it nauseated him, and music set him thinking too energetically on what he had been working at, instead of giving him pleasure. If all this loss was the price of years of fruitful concentration in the master, who can wonder if the scientific and documentary age is an age of prose ? Still I hope it is not too pontifical of me to say that I believe I see in the room to-night men who write prose as firm, as delicate, as easy, as pure, as the heart of man could wish. After what has been said of its spread over the globe, we cannot be indifferent to the fate of our language across the Atlantic. Emerson, that most lovable of our teachers, once said : ' We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe '. But I remember an afternoon long ago at Washington with Walt Whitman, when he made particularly light of Emerson, and was all for packing off the courtly muses, Euro- pean or Bostonian, bag and baggage. America has not followed this felonious purpose. George Meredith used to say that the high- water mark of English prose in our day was to be found in some pages of Charlotte Bronte, and some of Hawthorne's Marble Faun. It will be no hard labour to seek out such pages for yourselves. I need not mention Lowell, and a dozen more Americans, grave and gay, who are the living delight of English readers. American novelties in the way 10 SCIENCE AND LITERATURE of picturesque and unexpected diction, so piquant and effective in collo- quial use, have not yet lowered the standard of writing or oratory. In the new edition of his famous book, Mr. Bryce gives us a glowing account of what is being done, not only by American workers in every branch of science, but by American scholars ; how admirably thorough and painstaking their scholars are, how keen to overtake Germany, and how they are even betrayed into the German fault of indifference to form and style no brilliant personalities in letters or art but is this not true of Europe too % Perhaps, he says, the world is passing through an age with a high level of mediocrity as compared with the outstanding figures of the last century. There is, we must admit, to-day no monarch in any tongue upon the literary throne, no sovereign world-name in poetry or prose, in whom as has happened before now not so many generations ago, in royal succession, to Scott, Byron, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy all the civilized world, Teuton, Latin, Celt, Slav, Oriental, are interested, for whose new works it looks, or where it seeks the gospel of the day. Nabochlish, to use an Irish word that became a favourite with Sir Walter Scott ; it does not matter. Do not let us nurse the humour of the despondent editor, who mournfully told his readers, ' No new epic this month'. Nobody can tell how the wonders of language are performed, nor how a book comes into the world. Genius is genius. The lamp that to-day some may think burns low will be replenished. New orbs will bring light. Literature may be trusted to take care of itself, for it is the transcript of the drama of life, with all its actors, moods, and strange flashing fortunes. The curiosity that it meets is perpetual and insatiable, and the impulses that inspire it can never be extinguished. FOURTEEN DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. -O^a &ML JUW-'ji NO* SH~S6P* ftfc Cgivei T JUN 1 l v 1959 UHhftff* RECD LD MAY 9 W'fM 3 1969 IS LD 21-100m-2,'55 (B139s22)476 General Library University of California Berkeley