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 ON THE ART OF READING 
 
 LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 1916-1918 
 
 BY 
 
 SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH, M.A. 
 
 FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE 
 
 KING EDWARD VII PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1921
 
 TO 
 
 H. F. S. 
 
 AND 
 H. M. C. 
 
 First Edition 1920 
 Reprinted 1920, 1921
 
 CoUeg-e 
 
 Library 
 
 1003 
 
 T 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 HE following twelve lectures have this much in 
 common with a previous twelve published in 
 1916 under the tide On the Art of Writing they form 
 no compact treatise but present their central idea as I 
 was compelled at the time to enforce it, amid the dust 
 of skirmishing with opponents and with practical 
 difficulties. 
 
 They cover and to some extent, by reflection, 
 chronicle a period during which a few friends, who 
 had an idea and believed in it, were fighting to establish 
 the present English Tripos at Cambridge. In the end 
 we carried our proposals without a vote : but the oppo- 
 sition was stiff for a while; and I feared, on starting 
 to read over these pages for press, that they might be 
 too occasional and disputatious. I am happy to think 
 that, on the whole, they are not; and that the reader, 
 though he may wonder at its discursiveness, will find 
 the argument pretty free from polemic. Any one who 
 has inherited a library of I7th century theology will 
 agree with me that, of all dust, the ashes of dead con- 
 troversies afford the driest. 
 
 And after all, and though it be well worth while to 
 strive that the study of English (of our own literature, 
 and of the art of using our own language, in speech or in 
 writing, to the best purpose) shall take an honourable 
 place among the Schools of a great University, that the 
 other fair sisters of learning shall 
 
 Ope for thee their queenly circle... 
 
 If -U O-f
 
 vi Preface 
 
 it is not in our Universities that the general redemption 
 of English will be won ; nor need a mistake here or there, 
 at Oxford or Cambridge or London, prove fatal. We 
 make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch 
 one another's success: and where there is freedom to 
 experiment there is hope to improve. A youth who can 
 command means to enter a University can usually 
 command some range in choosing which University it 
 shall be. If Cambridge cannot supply what he wants, 
 or if our standard of training be low in comparison with 
 that of Oxford, or of London or of Manchester, the 
 pressure of neglect will soon recall us to our senses. 
 
 The real battle for English lies in our Elementary Schools, 
 and in the training of our Elementary Teachers. It is there 
 that the foundations of a sound national teaching in 
 English will have to be laid, as it is there that a wrong 
 trend will lead to incurable issues. For the poor child 
 has no choice of Schools, and the elementary teacher, 
 whatever his individual gifts, will work under a yoke 
 imposed upon him by Whitehall. I devoutly trust that 
 Whitehall will make the yoke easy and adaptable while 
 insisting that the chariot must be drawn. 
 
 I foresee, then, these lectures condemned as the 
 utterances of a man who, occupying a Chair, has con- 
 trived to fall betwixt two stools. My thoughts have too 
 often strayed from my audience in a University theatre 
 away to remote rural class-rooms where the hungry 
 sheep look up and are not fed; to piteous groups of 
 urchins standing at attention and chanting The Wreck of 
 the Hesperus in unison. Yet to these, being tied to the 
 place and the occasion, I have brought no real help.
 
 Preface vii 
 
 A man has to perform his task as it comes. But I 
 must say this in conclusion. Could I wipe these lectures 
 out and re-write them in hope to benefit my countrymen 
 in general, I should begin and end upon the text to be 
 found in the twelfth and last that a liberal education 
 is not an appendage to be purchased by a few: that 
 Humanism is, rather, a quality which can, and should, 
 condition all our teaching; which can, and should, be 
 impressed as a character upon it all, from a poor child's 
 first lesson in reading up to a tutor's last word to his 
 pupil on the eve of a Tripos. 
 
 ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE PAO! 
 
 I INTRODUCTORY . . . . ... i 
 
 II APPREHENSION versus COMPREHENSION . .: 20 
 
 III CHILDREN'S READING (I) .... 37 
 
 IV (II) . : .' . 54 
 V ON READING FOR EXAMINATIONS . . 74 
 
 VI ON A SCHOOL OF ENGLISH .... 95 
 
 VII THE VALUE OF GREEK AND LATIN IN 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE . . . . 115 
 
 VIII ON READING THE BIBLE (I) . . 135 
 
 IX (II) . . 154 
 
 X (III) 172 
 
 XI OF SELECTION . . , . . . 196 
 
 XII ON THB USE OF MASTERPIECES . . . 212 
 
 INDEX . . . . . . 231
 
 LECTURE I 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 5, 1916 
 I 
 
 IN the third book of the Ethics, and in the second 
 chapter, Aristotle, dealing with certain actions 
 which, though bad in themselves, admit of pity and 
 forgiveness because they were committed involuntarily, 
 through ignorance, instances 'the man who did not 
 know a subject was forbidden, like Aeschylus with the 
 Mysteries,' and 'the man who only meant to show 
 how it worked, like the fellow who let off the catapult ' 
 (17 Sec^ai /8ou\oftei>o? dtfrelvai, oJs o TOV KaTaire\TT]v). 
 
 I feel comfortably sure, Gentlemen, that in a previous 
 course of lectures On the Art of Writing^ unlike Aes- 
 chylus, I divulged no mysteries : but I am troubled with 
 speculations over that man and the catapult, because I 
 really was trying to tell you how the thing worked; and 
 Aristotle, with a reticence which (as Horace afterwards 
 noted) may lend itself to obscurity, tells us neither what 
 happened to that exponent of ballistics, nor to the en- 
 gine itself, nor to the other person. 
 
 My discharge, such as it was, at any rate provoked 
 another Professor (emeritus^ learned, sagacious, vener- 
 able) to retort that the true business of a Chair such as 
 this is to instruct young men how to read rather than 
 how to write. Well, be it so. I accept the challenge. 
 
 Q. C. I
 
 2 Lecture I 
 
 I propose in this and some ensuing lectures, to talk 
 of the Art and Practice of Reading, particularly as 
 applied to English Literature: to discuss on what 
 ground and through what faculties an Author and his 
 Reader meet : to enquire if, or to what extent, Reading 
 of the best Literature can be taught; and supposing it 
 to be taught, if or to what extent it can be examined 
 upon ; with maybe an interlude or two, to beguile the 
 way. 
 
 II 
 
 The first thing, then, to be noted about the reading 
 of English (with which alone I am concerned) is that 
 for Englishmen it has been made, by Act of Parliament, 
 compulsory. 
 
 The next thing to be noted is that in our schools and 
 Colleges and Universities it has been made, by Statute 
 or in practice, all but impossible. 
 
 The third step is obvious to reconcile what we 
 cannot do with what we must : and to that aim I shall, 
 under your patience, direct this and the following lec- 
 ture. I shall be relieved at all events, and from the 
 outset, of the doubt by which many a Professor, here 
 and elsewhere, has been haunted: I mean the doubt 
 whether there really is such a subject as that of which 
 he proposes to treat. Anything that requires so much 
 human ingenuity as reading English in an English 
 University must be an art. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But I shall be met, of course, by the question 'How 
 is the reading of English made impossible at Cam-
 
 Introductory 3 
 
 bridge?' and I pause here on the edge of my subject, 
 to clear away that doubt. 
 
 It is no fault of the University. 
 
 The late Philip Gilbert Hamerton, whom some 
 remember as an etcher, wrote a book which he entitled 
 (as I think, too magniloquently) The Intellectual Life. 
 He cast it in the form of letters 'To an Author who 
 kept very Irregular Hours,' 'To a Young Etonian who 
 thought of becoming a Cotton-spinner,' 'To a Young 
 Gentleman who had firmly resolved never to wear any- 
 thing but a Grey Coat' (but Mr Hamerton couldn't 
 quite have meant that). 'To a Lady of High Culture 
 who found it difficult to associate with persons of her 
 Own Sex,' ' To a young Gentleman of Intellectual 
 Tastes, who, without having as yet any Particular Lady 
 in View, had expressed, in a General Way, his Determin- 
 ation to get Married.' The volume is well worth reading. 
 In the first letter of all, addressed ' To a young Man 
 of Letters who worked Excessively,' Mr Hamerton 
 fishes up from his memory, for admonishment, this 
 salutary instance: 
 
 A tradesman, whose business affords an excellent outlet for 
 energetic bodily activity, told me that having attempted, in ad- 
 dition to his ordinary work, to acquire a foreign language which 
 seemed likely to be useful to him, he had been obliged to abandon 
 it on account of alarming cerebral symptoms. This man has 
 immense vigour and energy, but the digestive functions, in this 
 instance, are sluggish. However, when he abandoned study, the 
 cerebral inconveniences disappeared, and have never returned 
 since. 
 
 I 2
 
 Lecture I 
 
 Now we all know, and understand, and like that man : 
 for the simple reason that he is every one of us. 
 
 You or I (say) have to take the Modern Languages 
 Tripos, Section A (English), in 1 9 1 y 1 . First of all (and 
 rightly) it is demanded of us that we show an acquaint- 
 ance, and something more than a bowing acquaintance, 
 with Shakespeare. Very well ; but next we have to write 
 a paper and answer questions on the outlines of English 
 Literature from 1 350 to 1832 almost 500 years , and 
 next to write a paper and show particular knowledge of 
 English Literature between 1700 and 1785 eighty- 
 five years. Next comes a paper on passages from se- 
 lected English verse and prose writings the Statute 
 discreetly avoids calling them literature between 1200 
 and 1500, exclusive of Chaucer; with questions on 
 language, metre, literary history and literary criticism : 
 then a paper on Chaucer with questions on language, 
 metre, literary history and literary criticism: lastly a 
 paper on writing in the Wessex dialect of Old English, 
 with questions on the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, 
 language, metre and literary history. 
 
 Now if you were to qualify yourself for all this as a 
 scholar should, and in two years, you would certainly 
 deserve to be addressed by Mr Hamerton as * A Young 
 Man of Letters who worked Excessively'; and to work 
 
 1 The reader will kindly turn back to p. I, and observe the date 
 at the head of this lecture. At that time I was engaged against a 
 system of English teaching which I believed to be thoroughly bad. 
 That system has since given place to another, which I am prepared 
 to defend as a better.
 
 Introductory 5 
 
 excessively is not good for anyone. Yet, on the other 
 hand, you are precluded from using, for your ' cerebral 
 inconveniences,' the heroic remedy exhibited by Mr 
 Hamerton's enterprising tradesman, since on that 
 method you would not attain to the main object of your 
 laudable ambition, a Cambridge degree. 
 
 But the matter is very much worse than your Statute 
 makes it out. Take one of the papers in which some 
 actual acquaintance with Literature is required the 
 Special Period from 1700 to 1785; then turn to your 
 Cambridge History of English Literature, and you will find 
 that the mere bibliography of those eighty-five years 
 occupies something like five or six hundred pages five 
 or six hundred pages of titles and authors in simple 
 enumeration! The brain reels; it already suffers 'cere- 
 bral inconveniences.' But stretch the list back to 
 Chaucer, back through Chaucer to those alleged prose 
 writings in the Wessex dialect, then forward from 1785 
 to Wordsworth, to Byron, to Dickens, Carlyle, Tenny- 
 son, Browning, Meredith, even to this year in which 
 literature still lives and engenders; and the brain, if not 
 too giddy indeed, stands as Satan stood on the brink of 
 Chaos 
 
 Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith 
 
 He had to cross 
 
 and sees itself, with him, now plumbing a vast vacuity, 
 and anon nigh-foundered, * treading the crude con- 
 sistence.' 
 
 The whole business of reading English Literature in 
 two years, to know it in any reputable sense of the word 
 let alone your learning to write English is, in short,
 
 6 Lecture 1 
 
 impossible. And the framers of the Statute, recognising 
 this, have very sensibly compromised by setting you to 
 work on such things as ' the Outlines of English Litera- 
 ture'; which are not Literature at all but are only what 
 some fellow has to say about it, hastily summarising his 
 estimates of many works, of which on a generous compu- 
 tation he has probably read one-fifth ; and by examining 
 you on (what was it all ?) ' language, metre, literary 
 history and literary criticism,' which again are not 
 Literature, or at least (as a Greek would say in his idiom) 
 escape their own notice being Literature. For English 
 Literature as I take it, is that which sundry men and 
 women have written memorably in English about Life. And 
 so I come to my subject the art of reading that, which 
 is Literature. 
 
 I shall take leave to leap into it over another man's 
 back, or, rather over two men's backs. No doubt it has 
 happened to many of you to pick up in a happy moment 
 some book or pamphlet or copy of verse which just says 
 the word you have unconsciously been listening for, 
 almost craving to speak for yourself, and so sends you 
 off hot-foot on the trail. And if you have had that 
 experience, it may also have happened to you that, after 
 ranging, you returned on the track ' like faithful hound 
 returning,' in gratitude, or to refresh the scent; and 
 that, picking up the book again, you found it no such 
 wonderful book after all, or that some of the magic had 
 faded by process of the change in yourself which itself 
 had originated. But the word was spoken.
 
 Introductory 7 
 
 Such a book pamphlet I may call it, so small it was, 
 fell into my hands some ten years ago; The Aims of 
 Literary Study no very attractive title byDr Corson,a 
 distinguished American Professor (and let me say that, for 
 something more than ten say for twenty years much 
 of the most thoughtful as well as the most thorough 
 work upon English comes to us from America). I 
 find, as I handle again the small duodecimo volume, 
 that my own thoughts have taken me a little wide, per- 
 haps a little astray, from its suggestions. But for 
 loyalty's sake I shall start just where Dr Corson started, 
 with a passage from Browning's A Death in the Desert^ 
 supposed (you will remember) 
 
 Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochenc 
 narrating the death of St John the Evangelist, John of 
 Patmos ; the narrative interrupted by this gloss : 
 
 [This is the doctrine he was wont to teach, 
 How divers persons witness in each man, 
 Three souls which make up one soul : first^ to wit, 
 A soul of each and all the bodily parts, 
 Seated therein, which works, and is What Does, 
 And has the use of earth, and ends the man 
 Downward : but, tending upward for advice, 
 Grows into, and again is grown into 
 By the next soul, which, seated in the brain, 
 Useth the first with its collected use, 
 And feeleth, thinketh, willeth, is What Knows'. 
 Which, duly tending upward in its turn, 
 Grows into, and again is grown into 
 By the last soul, that uses both the first, 
 Subsisting whether they assist or no, 
 And, constituting man's self, is What Is 
 And leans upon the former
 
 8 Lecture I 
 
 (Mark the word, Gentlemen ; ' leans upon the former ' 
 leaning back, as it were felt by him, on this very man 
 who had leaned on Christ's bosom, being loved) 
 
 And leans upon the former, makes it play, 
 
 As that played off the first: and, tending up, 
 
 Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man 
 
 Upward in that dread point of intercourse, 
 
 Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him. 
 
 What Does, What Knows, What Is; three souls, one man. 
 
 I give the glossa of Theotypas.] 
 
 What Does, What Knows, What Is there is no mis- 
 taking what Browning means, nor in what degrees of 
 hierarchy he places this, that, and the other.... Does it not 
 strike you how curiously men to-day, with their minds 
 perverted by hate, are inverting that order? all the 
 highest value set on What Does What Knows suddenly 
 seen to be of importance, but only as important in 
 feeding the guns, perfecting explosives, collaring trade 
 all in the service of What Does, of ' Get on or Get 
 Out,' of 'Efficiency'; no one stopping to think that 
 'Efficiency' is must be a relative term! Efficient 
 for what ? for What Does, What Knows or perchance, 
 after all, for What Is ? No ! banish the humanities and 
 throw everybody into practical science: not into that 
 study of natural science, which can never conflict with 
 the 'humanities' since it seeks discovery for the pure 
 sake of truth, or charitably to alleviate man's lot 
 
 Sweetly, rather, to ease, loose and bind 
 As need requires, this frail fallen humankind... 
 
 but to invent what will be commercially serviceable 
 in besting your neighbour, or in gassing him, or in
 
 Introductory 9 
 
 slaughtering him neatly and wholesale. But still the 
 whisper (not ridiculous in its day) will assert itself, that 
 What Is comes first, holding and upheld by God ; still 
 through the market clamour for a 'Business Govern- 
 ment' will persist the voice of Plato murmuring that, 
 after all, the best form of government is government by 
 good men : and the voice of some small man faintly pro- 
 testing ' But I don't want to be governed by business 
 men ; because I know them and, without asking much 
 of life, I have a hankering to die with a shirt on my back.' 
 
 VI 
 
 But let us postpone What Is for a moment, and deal 
 with What Does and What Knows. They too, of course, 
 have had their oppositions, and the very meaning of a 
 University such as Cambridge its fons, its origo, its 
 TO rt r\v tZvai was to assert What Knows against What 
 Does in a medieval world pranced over by men-at- 
 arms, Normans, English, Burgundians, Scots. Ancillary 
 to Theology, which then had a meaning vastly differ- 
 ent from its meaning to-day, the University tended as 
 portress of the gate of knowledge of such knowledge 
 as the Church required, encouraged, or permitted and 
 kept the flag of intellectual life, as I may put it, flying 
 above that gate and over the passing throngs of 
 'doers' and mailed-fisters. The University was a Seat 
 of Learning: the Colleges, as they sprang up, were 
 Houses of Learning. 
 
 But note this, which in their origin and still in the 
 frame of their constitution differentiates Oxford and 
 Cambridge from all their ancient sisters and rivals.
 
 io Lecture 1 
 
 These two (and no third, I believe, in Europe) were cor- 
 porations of Teachers, existing for Teachers, governed 
 by Teachers. In a Scottish University the students 
 by vote choose their Rector: but here or at Oxford 
 no undergraduate, no Bachelor, counts at all in the 
 government, both remaining alike in s fa fit pupillari 
 until qualified as Masters Magistri. Mark the word, 
 and mark also the title of one who obtained what in 
 those days would be the highest of degrees (but yet 
 gave him no voting strength above a Master). He was 
 a Professor * Sanctae Theologiae Professor.' To this 
 day every country clergyman who comes up to Cam- 
 bridge to record his non-placet, does so by virtue of his 
 capacity to teach what he learned here in theory, that 
 is. Scholars were included in College foundations on 
 a sort of pupil-teacher-upply system: living in rooms 
 with the lordly masters, and valeting them for the 
 privilege of 'reading with* them. We keep to this day 
 the pleasant old form of words. Now for various rea- 
 sons one of which, because it is closely germane to my 
 subject, I shall particularly examine Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge, while conserving almost intact their medieval 
 frame of government, with a hundred other survivals 
 which Time but makes, through endurance, more en- 
 dearing, have, insensibly as it were, and across (it must 
 be confessed) intervals of sloth and gross dereliction of 
 duty, added a new function to the cultivation of learning 
 that of furnishing out of youth a succession of men 
 capable of fulfilling high offices in Church and State. 
 
 Some may regret this. I think many of us must regret 
 that a deeper tincture of learning is not required of the
 
 Introductory u 
 
 average pass-man, or injected into him perforce. But 
 speaking roughly about fact, I should say that while we 
 elders up here are required nay, presumed to know 
 certain things, we aim that our young men shall be of a 
 certain kind; and I see no cause to disown a sentence in 
 the very first lecture I had the honour of reading before 
 you 'The man we are proud to send forth from our 
 Schools will be remarkable less for something he can 
 take out of his wallet and exhibit for knowledge, than 
 for being something, and that something recognisable 
 for a man of unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose 
 trained judgment we can trust to choose the better and 
 reject the worse/ 
 
 The reasons which have led our older Universities to 
 deflect their functions (whether for good or ill) so far 
 from their first purpose are complicated if not many. 
 Once admit young men in large numbers, and youth 
 (I call any Dean or Tutor to witness) must be com- 
 promised with; will construe the laws of its seniors in 
 its own way, now and then breaking them; and will in- 
 evitably end by getting something of its own way. The 
 growth of gymnastic, the insensible gravitation of the 
 elderly towards Fenner's there to snatch a fearful joy 
 and explain that the walk was good for them ; the Union 
 and other debating societies; College rivalries; the fes- 
 tivities of May Week ; the invasion of women students: 
 all these may have helped. But I must dwell discreetly on 
 one compelling and obvious cause the increased and 
 increasing unwieldiness of Knowledge. And that is the 
 main trouble, as I guess.
 
 13 Lecture I 
 
 VII 
 
 Let us look it fair in the face : because it is the main 
 practical difficulty with which I propose that, in suc- 
 ceeding lectures, we grapple. Against Knowledge I 
 have, as the light cynic observed of a certain lady's past, 
 only one serious objection that there is so much of it. 
 There is indeed so much of it that if with the best will 
 in the world you devoted yourself to it as a mere scholar, 
 you could not possibly digest its accumulated and still 
 accumulating stores. As Sir Thomas Elyot wrote in the 
 1 6th century (using, you will observe, the very word of 
 Mr Hamerton's energetic but fed-up tradesman), ' In- 
 conveniences always doe happen by ingurgitation and 
 excessive feedings.' An old schoolmaster and a poet 
 Mr James Rhoades, late of Sherborne comments in 
 words which I will quote, being unable to better them : 
 
 This is no less true of the mind than of the body. I do not 
 know that a well-informed man, as such, is more worthy of 
 regard than a well-fed one. The brain, indeed, is a nobler organ 
 than the stomach, but on that very account is the less to be 
 excused for indulging in repletion. The temptation, I confess, 
 is greater, because for the brain the banquet stands ever spread 
 before our eyes, and is, unhappily, as indestructible as the widow's 
 meal and oil. 
 
 Only think what would become of us if the physical food, by 
 which our bodies subsist, instead of being consumed by the eater, 
 was passed on intact by every generation to the next, with the 
 superadded hoards of all the ages, the earth's productive power 
 meanwhile increasing year by year beneath the unflagging hand 
 of Science, till, as Comus says, she 
 
 would be quite surcharged with her own weight 
 And strangled with her waste fertility.
 
 Introductory 13 
 
 Should we. rather not pull down our barns, and build smaller, 
 and make bonfires of what they would not hold? And yet, with 
 regard to Knowledge, the very opposite of this is what we do. 
 We store the whole religiously, and that though not twice alone, 
 as with the bees in Virgil, but scores of times in every year, is 
 the teeming produce gathered in. And then we put a fearful 
 pressure on ourselves and others to gorge of it as much as ever 
 we can hold. 
 
 Facit indignatio versus. My author, gathering heat, 
 puts it somewhat dithyrambically : but there you have 
 it, Gentlemen. 
 
 If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Know- 
 ledge grows and groans on the board until the finer 
 appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Know- 
 ledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you 
 produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, 
 on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that : 
 and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an 
 idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven 
 specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at 
 Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned im- 
 mensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the 
 taste to discriminate. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The old schoolmaster whom I quoted just now goes 
 on: 
 
 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,
 
 14 Lecture 1 
 
 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. 
 
 Here let me interpose and quote the last three lines of 
 that Book three lines only ; simple, unornamented, but 
 for every man and every woman who have dwelt to- 
 gether since our first parents, in mere statement how 
 wise! 
 
 Thus they in mutual accusation spent 
 The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning', 
 And of their vain contest appear'd no end. 
 A parent afterwards told me (my schoolmaster adds) that his 
 son went home and so buried himself in the book that food and 
 sleep that day had no attraction for him. Next morning, I need 
 hardly say, the difference in his appearance was remarkable: he 
 had outgrown all his intellectual clothes. 
 
 The end of this story strikes me, I confess, as rapid, 
 and may be compared with that of the growth of 
 Delian Apollo in the Homeric hymn; but we may 
 agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that 
 tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion. 
 
 IX 
 
 What Does What Knows What Is.... 
 
 I am not likely to depreciate to you the value of What 
 Does, after spending my first twelve lectures up here, on 
 the art and practice of Writing, encouraging you to do 
 this thing which I daily delight in trying to do : as God 
 forbid that anyone should hint a slightening word of 
 what our sons and brothers are doing just now, and 
 doing for us ! But Peace being the normal condition of
 
 Introductory 15 
 
 man's activity, I look around me for a vindication of 
 what is noblest in What Does and am content with a 
 passage from George Eliot's poem Stradivarius, the gist 
 of which is that God himself might conceivably make 
 better fiddles than Stradivari's, but by no means certainly; 
 since, as a fact, God orders his best fiddles of Stradivari. 
 Says the great workman, 
 
 * God be praised, 
 Antonio Stradivari has an eye 
 That winces at false work and loves the true, 
 With hand and arm that play upon the tool 
 As willingly as any singing bird 
 Sets him to sing his morning roundelay, 
 Because he likes to sing and likes the song.' 
 Then Naldo: ' 'Tis a pretty kind of fame 
 At best, that comes of making violins; 
 And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go 
 To purgatory none the less.' 
 
 But he: 
 
 * 'Twere purgatory here to make them ill; 
 And for my fame when any master holds 
 'Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine, 
 He will be glad that Stradivari lived, 
 Made violins, and made them of the best. 
 The masters only know whose work is good: 
 
 They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill 
 I give them instruments to play upon, 
 God choosing me to help Him.' 
 
 4 What! Were God 
 At fault for violins, thou absent? ' 
 
 'Yes; 
 He were at fault for Stradivari's work.' 
 
 * Why, many hold Giuseppe's violins 
 As good as thine.'
 
 16 Lecture 1 
 
 ' May be: they are different. 
 His quality declines: he spoils his hand 
 With over-drinking. But were his the best, 
 He could not work for two. My work is mine, 
 And heresy or not, if my hand slacked 
 I should rob God since He is fullest good 
 Leaving a blank instead of violins. 
 I say, not God Himself can make man's best 
 Without best men to help him 
 
 'Tis God gives skill, 
 
 But not without men's hands: He could not make 
 Antonio Stradivari's violins 
 Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel.' 
 
 So much then for What Does : I do not depreciate it. 
 
 X 
 
 Neither do I depreciate in Cambridge, save the 
 mark! What Knows. All knowledge is venerable; and 
 I suppose you will find the last vindication of the 
 scholar's life at its baldest in Browning's A Gram- 
 marian's Funeral: 
 
 Others mistrust and say, * But time escapes: 
 
 Live now or never! ' 
 He said, * What's time? Leave Now for dog and apes! 
 
 Man has Forever.' 
 Back to his book then; deeper drooped his head: 
 
 Calculus racked him: 
 Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead : 
 
 Tussis attacked him.... 
 So, with the throttling hands of death at strife, 
 
 Ground he at grammar; 
 Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife : 
 
 While he could stammer
 
 Introductory 17 
 
 He settled Hoti's business let it be ! 
 
 Properly based Oun 
 Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, 
 
 Dead from the waist down. 
 Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: 
 
 Hail to your purlieus, 
 All ye highfliers of the feathered race, 
 
 Swallows and curlews ! 
 Here's the top-peak; the multitude below 
 
 Live, for they can, there: 
 This man decided not to Live but Know 
 
 Bury this man there. 
 
 Nevertheless Knowledge is not, cannot be, every- 
 thing; and indeed, as a matter of experience, cannot even 
 be counted upon to educate. Some of us have known 
 men of extreme learning who yet are, some of them, 
 uncouth in conduct, others violent and overbearing in 
 converse, others unfair in controversy, others even un- 
 scrupulous in action men of whom the sophist 
 Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic may stand for the 
 general type. Nay, some of us will subscribe with the 
 old schoolmaster whom I will quote again, when he writes : 
 
 To myself personally, as an exception to the rule that opposites 
 attract, a very well-informed person is an object of terror. His 
 mind seems to be so full of facts that you cannot, as it were, see 
 the wood for the trees; there is no room for perspective, no lawns 
 and glades for pleasure and repose, no vistas through which to 
 view some towering hill or elevated temple; everything in that 
 crowded space seems of the same value: he speaks with no more 
 awe of King Lear than of the last Cobden prize essay; he has 
 swallowed them both with the same ease, and got the facts safe 
 in his pouch; but he has no time to ruminate because he must 
 still be swallowing; nor does he seem to know what even 
 Q.C. 2
 
 i8 Lecture I 
 
 Macbeth, with Banquo's murderers then at work, found leisure 
 to remember that good digestion must wait on appetite, if 
 health is to follow both. 
 
 Now that may be put a trifle too vivaciously, but the 
 moral is true. Bacon tells us that reading maketh a full 
 man. Yes, and too much of it makes him too full. The 
 two words of the Greek upon knowledge remain true, 
 that the last triumph of Knowledge is Know Thyself. So 
 Don Quixote repeats it to Sancho Panza, counselling 
 him how to govern his Island : 
 
 First, O son, thou hast to fear God, for in fearing Him is 
 wisdom, and being wise thou canst not err. 
 
 But secondly thou hast to set thine eyes on what thou art, 
 endeavouring to know thyself- which is the most difficult know- 
 ledge that can be conceived. 
 
 But to know oneself is to know that which alone can 
 know What Is. So the hierarchy runs up. 
 
 XI 
 
 What Does, What Knows, What Is.... 
 
 I have happily left myself no time to-day to speak of 
 What Is : happily, because I would not have you even 
 approach it towards the end of an hour when your 
 attention must be languishing. But I leave you with 
 two promises, and with two sayings from which as this 
 lecture took its start its successors will proceed. 
 
 The first promise is, that What 7>, being the spiritual 
 element in man, is the highest object of his study. 
 
 The second promise is that, nine-tenths of what is 
 worthy to be called Literature being concerned with 
 this spiritual element, for that it should be studied, from 
 firstly up to ninthly, before anything else.
 
 Introductory 19 
 
 And my two quotations are for you to ponder: 
 
 (1) This, first: 
 
 That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually 
 attractive, is an ultimate fact beyond which we cannot go.... 
 Spirit to spirit as in water face answereth to face, so the heart 
 of man to man. 
 
 (2) And this other, from the writings of an obscure 
 Welsh clergyman of the iyth century: 
 
 You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth 
 in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned 
 with the stars. 
 
 2 2
 
 LECTURE II 
 APPREHENSION VERSUS COMPREHENSION 
 
 WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1916 
 I 
 
 ET us attempt to-day, Gentlemen, picking up the 
 
 E 
 
 scent where we left at the conclusion of my first 
 lecture, to hunt the Art of Reading (as I shall call it), 
 a little further on the line of common-sense; then to cast 
 back and chase on a line somewhat more philosophical. 
 If these lines run wide and refuse to unite, we shall have 
 made a false cast : if they converge and meet, we shall 
 have caught our hare and may proceed, in subsequent 
 lectures, to cook him. 
 
 Well, the line of common-sense has brought us to 
 this point that, man and this planet being such as they 
 are, for a man to read all the books existent on it is im- 
 possible; and, if possible, would be in the highest degree 
 undesirable. Let us, for example, go back quite beyond 
 the invention of printing and try to imagine a man who 
 had read all the rolls destroyed in the Library of Alex- 
 andria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the num- 
 ber of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this 
 man to be gifted with a memory retentive as Lord 
 Macaulay's. Suppose lastly that we go to such a man 
 and beg him to repeat to us some chosen one of the 
 fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of Euripides. 
 It is incredible that he could gratify us.
 
 Apprehension v. Comprehension 21 
 
 There was, as I have said, a great burniftg at Alex- 
 andria in 47 B.C., when Caesar set the fleet in the 
 harbour on fire to prevent its falling into the hands of 
 the Egyptians. The flames spread, and the great library 
 stood but 400 yards from the quayside, with warehouses 
 full of books yet closer. The last great burning was 
 perpetrated in A.D. ^642. Gibbon quotes the famous 
 sentence of Omar, the great Mohajnmedan who gave 
 the order : ' If these writings of the Greeks agree with 
 the book of God, they are useless and need not be pre- 
 served; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought 
 to be destroyed,' and goes on: 
 
 The sentence was executed with blind obedience; the volumes 
 of paper or parchment were distributed to the four thousand 
 baths of the city; and such was their incredible multitude that 
 six months were barely sufficient for the consumption of this 
 precious fuel.... The tale has been repeatedly transcribed; and 
 every scholar, with pious indignation, has deplored the irre- 
 parable shipwreck of the learning, the arts, and the genius, of 
 antiquity. For my own part, I am strongly tempted to deny both 
 the fact and the consequences. 
 
 Of the consequence he writes : 
 
 Perhaps the church and seat of the patriarchs might be en- 
 riched with a repository of books: but, if the ponderous mass of 
 Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in 
 the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that 
 it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of mankind. I sin- 
 cerely regret the more valuable libraries which have been in- 
 volved in the ruin of the Roman empire; but, when I seriously 
 compute the lapse of ages, the waste of ignorance, and the 
 calamities of war, our treasures, rather than our losses, are the 
 object of my surprise. Many curious and interesting facts are
 
 2,2, Lecture II 
 
 buried in oblivion : the three great historians of Rome have been 
 transmitted to our hands in a mutilated state, and we are deprived 
 of many pleasing compositions of the lyric, iambic, and dramatic 
 poetry of the Greeks. Yet we should gratefully remember that 
 the mischances of time and accident have spared the classic works 
 to which the suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the first place of 
 genius and glory; the teachers of ancient knowledge, who are 
 still extant, had perused and compared the writings of their pre- 
 decessors; nor can it fairly be presumed that any important truth, 
 any useful discovery in art or nature, has been snatched away 
 from the curiosity of modern ages. 
 
 I certainly do not ask you to subscribe to all that. In 
 fact when Gibbon asks us to remember gratefully ' that 
 the mischances of time and accident have spared the 
 classic works to which the suffrage of antiquity has ad- 
 judged the first place of genius and glory,' I submit 
 with all respect that he talks nonsense. Like the 
 stranger in the temple of the sea-god, invited to admire 
 the many votive garments of those preserved out of 
 shipwreck, I ask 'at ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post 
 vota nuncupata perierunt ? ' or in other words ' Where 
 are the trousers of the drowned ? ' * What about the 
 Sthenoboea of Euripides, the Revellers of Ameipsias 
 to which, as a matter of simple fact, what you call 
 the suffrage of antiquity did adjudge the first prize, 
 above Aristophanes' best?' 
 
 But of course he is equally right to this extent, that 
 the fire consumed a vast deal of rubbish : solid tons more 
 than any man could swallow, let be, digest 'read, 
 mark, learn and inwardly digest.' And that was in 
 642 A.D., whereas we have arrived at 1916. Where 
 would our voracious Alexandrian be to-day, with all the
 
 Apprehension v. Comprehension 23 
 
 literature of the Middle Ages added to his feast and 
 on top of that all the printed books of 450 years? 
 'Reading,' says Bacon, 'maketh a Full Man.' Yes, 
 indeed ! 
 
 Now I am glad that sentence of Bacon falls pat 
 here, because it gives me, turning to his famous Essay 
 Of Studies, the reinforcement of his great name for the 
 very argument which I am directing against the fallacy 
 of those teachers who would have you use 'manuals' 
 as anything else than guides to your own reading or 
 perspectives in which the authors are set out in the 
 comparative eminence by which they claim priority of 
 study or indicate the proportions of a literary period. 
 Some of these manuals are written by men of knowledge 
 so encyclopaedic that (if it go with critical judgment) 
 for these purposes they may be trusted. But to require 
 you, at your stage of reading, to have even the minor 
 names by heart is a perversity of folly. For later studies 
 it seems to me a more pardonable mistake, but yet a 
 mistake, to hope that by the employ of separate 
 specialists you can get even in 15 'or 20 volumes a 
 perspective, a proportionate description, of what English 
 Literature really is. But worst of all is that Examiner, 
 who aware that you must please him, to get a good 
 degree, and being just as straight and industrious 
 as anyone else assumes that in two years you have 
 become expert in knowledge that beats a lifetime, and, 
 brought up against the practical impossibility of this 
 assumption, questions you not on a little selected first- 
 hand knowledge but on massed information which at 
 the best can be but derivative and second-hand.
 
 24 Lecture II 
 
 Now hear Bacon. 
 Studies serve for Delight 
 (Mark it, he puts delight first) 
 
 Studies serve for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability. 
 Their Chiefe use for Delight, is in Privatenesse and Retiring 1 ; for 
 Ornament, is in Discourse; and for Ability, is in the Judgement 
 and Disposition of Businesse....To spend too much Time in 
 Studies is Sloth; to use them too much for Ornament is Affecta- 
 tion; to make Judgement wholly by their Rules is the Humour of 
 aScholler. They perfect Nature, and are perfected by Experience: 
 for Naturall Abilities are like Naturall Plants, they need Proyning 
 by Study. And Studies themselves doe give forth Directions too 
 much at Large, unless they be bounded in by experience. 
 
 Again, he says: 
 
 Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and 
 Some Few to be Chewed and Digested: that is, some Bookes are 
 tobereadonely in Parts; Others to be read but not Curiously; and 
 some Few are to be read wholly, and with Diligence and Atten- 
 tion. Some Bookes also may be read by Deputy, and Extracts 
 made of them by Others. But that would be onely in the lesse 
 important Arguments, and the Meaner Sort of Bookes: else dis- 
 tilled Bookes are like Common distilled Waters, Flashy Things. 
 
 So you see, Gentlemen, while pleading before you 
 that Reading is an Art that its best purpose is not to 
 accumulate Knowledge but to produce, to educate, such- 
 and-such a man that 'tis a folly to bite off more than 
 you can assimilate and that with it, as with every other 
 
 1 Do you remember, by the bye, Samuel Rogers's lines on Lady 
 Jane Grey? They have always seemed to me very beautiful: 
 Like her most gentle, most unfortunate, 
 Crown'd but to die who in her chamber sate 
 Musing with Plato, though the horn was blown, 
 And every ear and every heart was won, 
 And all in green array were chasing down the sun!
 
 Apprehension v. Comprehension 25 
 
 art, the difficulty and the discipline lie in selecting out 
 of vast material, what is fit, fine, applicable I have 
 the great Francis Bacon himself towering behind my 
 shoulder for patron. 
 
 Some would push the argument further than here 
 and now, at any rate I choose to do, or perhaps would 
 at all care to do. For example, Philip Gilbert Hamer- 
 ton, whom I quoted to you three weeks ago, instances 
 in his book The Intellectual Life an accomplished French 
 cook who, in discussing his art, comprised the whole 
 secret of it under two heads the knowledge of the 
 mutual influences of ingredients, and the judicious 
 management of heat : 
 
 Amongst the dishes for which my friend had a deserved repu- 
 tation was a certain gateau de fote which had a very exquisite 
 flavour. The principal ingredient, not in quantity but in power, 
 was the liver of a fowl; but there were several other ingredients 
 also, and amongst these a leaf or two of parsley. He told me 
 that the influence of the parsley was a good illustration of his 
 theory about his art. If the parsley were omitted, the flavour he 
 aimed at was not produced at all; but, on the other hand, if the 
 quantity of the parsley was in the least excessive, then the gateau 
 instead of being a delicacy for gourmets became an uneatable mess. 
 Perceiving that I was really interested in the subject, he kindly 
 promised a practical evidence of his doctrine, and the next day 
 intentionally spoiled the dish by a trifling addition of parsley. 
 He had not exaggerated the consequences; the delicate flavour 
 entirely departed, and left a nauseous bitterness in its place, like 
 the remembrance of an ill-spent youth. 
 
 I trust that none of you are in a position to appre- 
 ciate the full force of this last simile; and, for myself, 
 I should have taken the chefs word for it, without ex- 
 periment. Mr Hamerton proceeds to draw his moral :
 
 26 Lecture II 
 
 There is a sort of intellectual chemistry which is quite as 
 marvellous as material chemistry and a thousand times more 
 difficult to observe. One general truth may, however, be relied 
 
 upon It is true that everything we learn affects the whole 
 
 character of the mind. 
 
 Consider how incalculably important becomes the question of 
 proportion in our knowledge, and how that which we are is 
 dependent as much upon our ignorance as our science. What we 
 call ignorance is only a smaller proportion what we call science 
 only a larger. 
 
 Here the argument begins to become delicious: 
 
 The larger quantity is recommended as an unquestionable 
 good, but the goodness of it is entirely dependent on the mental 
 product that we want. Aristocracies have always instinctively felt 
 this, and have decided that a gentleman ought not to know too 
 much of certain arts and sciences. The character which they 
 had accepted as their ideal would have been destroyed by in- 
 discriminate additions to those ingredients of which long ex- 
 perience had fixed the exact proportions 
 
 The last generation of the English country aristocracy was 
 particularly rich in characters whose unity and charm was de- 
 pendent upon the limitations of their culture, and which would 
 have been entirely altered, perhaps not for the better, by simply 
 knowing a science or a literature that was closed to them. 
 
 If anything could be funnier than that, it is that it is, 
 very possibly, true. Let us end our quest-by-common- 
 sense, for the moment, on this; that to read all the 
 books that have been written in short to keep pace 
 with those that are being written is starkly impossible, 
 and (as Aristotle would say) about what is impossible 
 one does not argue. We must select. Selection implies 
 skilful practice. Skilful practice is only another term 
 for Art. So far plain common-sense leads us. On this 
 point, then, let us set up a rest and hark back.
 
 Apprehension v. Comprehension 27 
 
 II 
 
 Let us cast back to the three terms of my first lecture 
 What does. What knows, What is. 
 
 I shall here take leave to recapitulate a brief argument 
 much sneered at a few years ago when it was still fash- 
 ionable to consider Hegel a greater philosopher than 
 Plato. Abbreviating it I repeat it, because I believe in 
 it yet to-day, when Hegel (for causes unconnected with 
 pure right and wrong) has gone somewhat out of 
 fashion for a while. 
 
 As the tale, then, is told by Plato, in the tenth book 
 of The Republic, one Er the son of Armenius, a Pam- 
 phylian, was slain in battle; and ten days afterwards, 
 when they collected the dead for burial, his body alone 
 showed no taint of corruption. His relatives, however, 
 bore it off to the funeral pyre; and on the twelfth day, 
 lying there, he returned to life, and he told them what 
 he had seen in the other world. Many wonders he re- 
 lated concerning the dead, for example, with their 
 rewards and punishments : but what had impressed him 
 as most wonderful of all was the great spindle of Neces- 
 sity, reaching up to Heaven, with the planets revolving 
 around it in graduated whorls of width and spread : yet 
 all concentric and so timed that all complete the full 
 circle punctually together 'The Spindle turns on the 
 knees of Necessity; and on the rim of each whorl sits 
 perched a Siren who goes round with it, hymning a 
 single note; the eight notes together forming one 
 harmony.' 
 
 Now as we have the divine word for it upon two
 
 28 Lecture II 
 
 great commandments hang all the law and the prophets, 
 so all religions, all philosophies, hang upon two stead- 
 fast and faithful beliefs ; the first of which Plato would 
 show by the above parable. 
 
 It is, of course, that the stability of the Universe rests 
 upon ordered motion that the 'firmament' above, 
 around, beneath, stands firm, continues firm, on a 
 balance of active and tremendous forces somehow har- 
 moniously composed. Theology asks 'by What?' or 
 ' by Whom ? ' Philosophy inclines rather to ask ' How ? ' 
 Natural Science, allowing that for. the present these 
 questions are probably unanswerable, contents itself 
 with mapping and measuring what it can of the various 
 forces. But all agree about the harmony; and when a 
 Galileo or a Newton discovers a single 'rule of it for us, 
 he but makes our assurance surer. For uncounted cen- 
 turies before ever hearing of Gravitation men knew of 
 the sun that he rose and set, of the moon that she waxed 
 an4 waned, of the tides they they flowed and ebbed, all 
 regularly, at times to be predicted ; of the stars that they 
 swung as by clockwork around the pole. Says the son 
 of Sirach : 
 
 At the word of the Holy One they will stand in due order, 
 And they will not faint in their watches. 
 
 So evident is this calculated harmony that men, seeking 
 to interpret it by what was most harmonious in them- 
 selves or in their human experience, supposed an actual 
 Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals: Plato as 
 we see (who learned of Pythagoras) inventing his Oc- 
 tave of Sirens, perched on the whorls of the great 
 spindle and intoning as they spin.
 
 Apprehension v. Comprehension 29 
 
 Dante (Chaucer copying him in The Parlement of 
 Foules) makes the spheres nine: and so does Milton: 
 
 then listen I 
 
 To the celestial Sirens harmony, 
 That sit upon the nine infolded Sphears, 
 And sing to those that hold the vital shears, 
 And turn the Adamantine spindle round 
 On which the fate of gods and men is wound. 
 Such sweet compulsion doth in musick lie 
 To lull the daughters of Necessity, 
 And keep unsteady Nature to her law, 
 And the low world in measur'd motion draw 
 After the heavenly tune.... 
 
 If the sceptical mind object to the word law as beg- 
 ging the question and postulating a governing intelli- 
 gence with a governing will if it tell me that when 
 revolted Lucifer uprose in starlight 
 
 and at the stars, 
 
 Which are the brain of heaven, he look'd, and sank. 
 Around the ancient track march'd, rank on rank, 
 The army of unalterable law 
 
 he was merely witnessing a series of predictable or in- 
 variable recurrences, I answer that he may be right, it 
 suffices for my argument that they are recurrent, are 
 invariable, can be predicted. Anyhow the Universe is 
 not Chaos (if it were, by the way, we should be unable 
 to reason about it at all). It stands and is renewed upon 
 a harmony: and what Plato called 'Necessity' is the 
 Duty compulsory or free as you or I can conceive it 
 the Duty of all created things to obey that harmony, the 
 Duty of which Wordsworth tells in his noble Ode. 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong: 
 
 And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.
 
 3O Lecture II 
 
 III 
 
 Now the other and second great belief is, that the 
 Universe, the macrocosm, cannot be apprehended at all 
 except as its rays converge upon the eye, brain, soul of 
 Man, the microcosm: on you, on me, on the tiny per- 
 cipient centre upon which the immense cosmic circle 
 focusses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass and he 
 is not shrivelled up! Other creatures, he notes, share 
 in his sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not in 
 his percipience or not in any degree worth measuring. 
 So far as he can discover, he is not only a bewildered 
 actor in the great pageant but 'the ring enclosing all,' 
 the sole intelligent spectator. Wonder of wonders, it 
 is all meant for him \ 
 
 I doubt if, among men of our nation, this truth was 
 ever more clearly grasped than by the Cambridge 
 Platonists who taught your forerunners of the I yth cen- 
 tury. But I will quote you here two short passages from 
 the work of a sort of poor relation of theirs, a humble 
 Welsh parson of that time, Thomas Traherne un- 
 known until the day before yesterday from whom 
 I gave you one sentence in my first lecture. He is 
 speaking of the fields and streets that were the scene 
 of his childhood : 
 
 Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, 
 and that divine light wherewith I was born, are the best unto this 
 
 day wherein I can see the Universe The corn was orient and 
 
 immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. 
 I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust 
 and stones of the street were as precious as gold : the gates were 
 at first the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them
 
 Apprehension v. Comprehension 31 
 
 first through one of the gates transported and ravished 
 me Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were 
 moving jewels; I knew not that they were born or should 
 die.... 
 
 The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people 
 were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as 
 much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. 
 The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and 
 stars; and all the World was mine, and I the only spectator 
 and enjoyer of it. 
 
 Then: 
 
 News from a foreign country came, 
 
 As if my treasure and my wealth lay there; 
 So much it did my heart inflame, 
 
 'Twas wont to call my Soul into mine earj 
 Which thither went to meet 
 The approaching sweet, 
 And on the threshold stood 
 To entertain the unknown Good.... 
 
 What sacred instinct did inspire 
 My Soul in childhood with a hope so strong? 
 
 What secret force moved my desire 
 To expect new joys beyond the seas, so young? 
 Felicity I knew 
 
 Was out of view, 
 
 And being here alone, 
 
 I saw that happiness was gone 
 From me ! For this 
 
 I thirsted absent bliss, 
 And thought that sure beyond the seas, 
 
 Or else in something near at hand 
 I knew not yet (since naught did please 
 
 I knew) my Bliss did stand.
 
 32 Lecture II 
 
 But little did the infant dream 
 
 That all the treasures of the world were by: 
 And that himself was so the cream 
 
 And crown of all which round about did lie. 
 Yet thus it was: the Gem, 
 
 The Diadem, 
 The Ring enclosing all 
 
 That stood upon this earthly ball, 
 The Heavenly Eye, 
 
 Much wider than the sky, 
 Wherein they all included were, 
 
 The glorious Soul, that was the King 
 Made to possess them, did appear 
 A small and little thing! 
 
 And then comes the noble sentence of which I promised 
 you that it should fall into its place : 
 
 You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth 
 in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned 
 with the stars. 
 
 Man in short you, I, any one of us the heir of it all ! 
 
 Tot circa unum ca-put tumuhuantes deos I 
 
 Our best privilege to sing our short lives out in tune 
 with the heavenly concert and if to sing afterwards, 
 then afterwards! 
 
 IV 
 
 But how shall Man ever attain to understand and find 
 his proper place in this Universe, this great sweeping 
 harmonious circle of which nevertheless he feels himself 
 to be the diminutive focus? His senses are absurdly 
 imperfect. His ear cannot catch any music the spheres 
 make; and moreover there are probably neither spheres
 
 Apprehension v. Comprehension 33 
 
 nor music. His eye is so dull an instrument that (as 
 Blanco White's famous sonnet reminds us) he can 
 neither see this world in the dark, nor glimpse any of 
 the scores of others until it falls dark : 
 
 If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life? 
 
 Yet the Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing 
 to man save in so far as he apprehends it : and lacking 
 him (so far as he knows) it utterly lacks the compli- 
 ment of an audience. Is all the great orchestra designed 
 for nothing but to please its Conductor? Yes, if you 
 choose : but no, as I think. And here my other quotation : 
 
 That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually 
 attractive, is an ultimate fact.... Spirit to spirit as in water face 
 answereth to face, so the heart of man to man. 
 
 Yes and, all spirit being mutually attractive, far more 
 than this 1 I preach to you that, through help of eyes 
 that are dim, of ears that are dull, by instinct of some- 
 thing yet undefined call it soul it wants no less a 
 name Man has a native impulse and attraction and 
 yearning to merge himself in that harmony and be one 
 with it : a spirit of adoption (as St Paul says) whereby 
 we cry Abba^ Father I 
 
 And because ye are Sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of 
 His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father. 
 
 That is to say, we know we have something within us 
 correspondent to the harmony, and (I make bold to say) 
 unless we have deadened it with low desires, worthy to 
 join in it. Even in his common daily life Man is for 
 ever seeking after harmony, in avoidance of chaos: he 
 Q.c. 3
 
 34 Lecture II 
 
 cultivates habits by the clock, he forms committees, 
 
 governments, hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which 
 
 (as he hopes) a system of society will work in tune. But 
 
 these are childish imitations, underplay on the great 
 
 motive : 
 
 The Kingdom of God is within you. 
 
 Quid aliud est anima quam Deus in corpora humane hospitans? 
 
 Gentlemen, you may be thinking that I have brought 
 you a long way round, that the hour is wearing late, and 
 that we are yet far from the prey we first hunted on the 
 line of common-sense. But be patient for a minute or 
 two, for almost we have our hand on the animal. 
 
 If the Kingdom of God, or anything correspondent 
 to it, be within us, even in such specks of dust as we 
 separately are, why that, and that only, can be the light 
 by which you or I may hope to read the Universal : that 
 and that only, deserves the name of ' What Is.' Nay, 
 I can convince you in a moment. Let me recall a passage 
 of Emerson quoted by me on the morning I first had 
 the honour to address an audience in Cambridge: 
 
 It is remarkable (says he) that involuntarily we always read 
 as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, 
 do not in their stateliest pictures... any where make us feel that 
 we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true that 
 in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shake- 
 speare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the 
 corner feels to be true of himself. 
 
 It is remarkable, as Emerson says; and yet, as we 
 now see, quite simple. A learned man may patronise 
 a less learned one: but the Kingdom of God cannot
 
 Apprehension v. Comprehension 35 
 
 patronise the Kingdom of God, the larger the smaller. 
 There are large and small. Between these two mysteries 
 of a harmonious universe and the inward soul are 
 granted to live among us certain men whose minds and 
 souls throw out filaments more delicate than ours, 
 vibrating to far messages which they bring home, to 
 report them to us; and these men we call prophets, 
 poets, masters, great artists, and when they write it, we 
 call their report literature. But it is by the spark in us 
 that we read it: and not all the fire of God that was in 
 Shakespeare can dare to patronise the little spark in 
 me. If it did, I can see with Blake the angelic 
 
 host 
 
 throw down their spears 
 And water heaven with their tears. 
 
 VI 
 
 To nurse that spark, common to the king, the sage, 
 the poorest child to fan, to draw up to a flame, to 
 'educate' What Is to recognise that it is divine, yet 
 frail, tender, sometimes easily tired, easily quenched 
 under piles of book-learning to let it run at play very 
 often, even more often to let it rest in what Wordsworth 
 
 calls 
 
 a wise passiveness 
 
 passive to use a simile of Coventry Patmore as a 
 photographic plate which finds stars that no telescope 
 can discover, simply by waiting with its face turned 
 upward to mother it, in short, as wise mothers do 
 their children this is what I mean by the Art of 
 Reading. 
 
 32
 
 36 Lecture II 
 
 For all great Literature, I would lastly observe, is 
 gentle towards that spirit which learns of it. It teaches 
 by apprehension not by comprehension which is what 
 many philosophers try to do, and, in trying, break their 
 jugs and spill the contents. Literature understands man 
 and of what he is capable. Philosophy, on the other 
 hand, may not be * harsh and crabbed, as dull fools sup- 
 pose,' but the trouble with most of its practitioners is 
 that they try to comprehend the Universe. Now the man 
 who could comprehend the Universe would ipso facto 
 comprehend God, and be ipso facto a Super-God, able 
 to dethrone him, and in the arrogance of his intellectual 
 conceit full ready to make the attempt.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 CHILDREN'S READING (I) 
 
 WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 1917 
 
 I HAVE often wished, Gentlemen, that some more 
 winning name could be found for the thing we call 
 Education; and I have sometimes thought wistfully 
 that, had we made a better thing of it, we should long 
 ago have found a more amiable, a blither, name. 
 
 For after all it concerns the child; and is it quite an 
 accident that, weaning him away from lovely things 
 that so lovelily call themselves 'love,' 'home,' 'mother,' 
 we can find no more alluring titles for the streets into 
 which we entrap him than ' Educational Facilities,' 
 ' Local Examinations,' ' Preceptors,' ' Pedagogues,' 
 ' Professors,' ' Matriculations,' ' Certificates,' ' Diplo- 
 mas,' 'Seminaries,' ' Elementary or Primary, and Se- 
 condary Codes,' 'Continuation Classes,' 'Reforma- 
 tories,' 'Inspectors,' 'Local Authorities,' 'Provided' 
 and 'Non-Provided,' 'Denominational' and 'Unde- 
 nominational,' and 'D.Litt.' and 'Mus. Bac.'? Expres- 
 sive terms, no doubt! but I ask with the poet 
 
 Who can track 
 A Grace's naked foot amid them all? 
 
 Take even such words as should be perennially beau- 
 tiful by connotation words such as 'Academy,' 'Mu- 
 seum.' Does the one (O, Ode on a Distant Prospect of 
 Clapham Academy!} call up visions of that green lawn
 
 38 Lecture III 
 
 by Cephissus, of its olives and plane trees and the 
 mirrored statues among which Plato walked and held 
 discourse with his few? Does the other as a rule 
 invite to haunts (O God! O Montreal!) where you 
 can be secure of communion with Apollo and the Nine? 
 Answer if the word Academy does not first call up to 
 the mind some place where small boys are crammed, 
 the word Museum some place where bigger game are 
 stuffed? 
 
 And yet ' academy,' * museum,' even * education ' 
 are sound words if only we would make the things 
 correspond with their meanings. The meaning of 
 'education' is a leading out, a dra wing-forth; not an 
 imposition of something on somebody a catechism or 
 an uncle upon the child; but an eliciting of what is 
 within him. Now, if you followed my last lecture, we 
 find that which is within him to be no less, potentially, 
 than the Kingdom of God. 
 
 I grant that this potentiality is, between the ages of 
 four and sixteen, not always, perhaps not often, evident. 
 The boy in Bagehot's phrase 'the small apple-eating 
 urchin whom we know' has this in common with the 
 fruit for which he congenitally sins, that his very virtues 
 in immaturity are apt, setting the teeth on edge, to be 
 mistaken for vices. A writer, to whom I shall recur, 
 has said: 
 
 If an Englishman who had never before tasted an apple were 
 to eat one in July, he would probably come to the conclusion that 
 it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit, 'conceived in sin and 
 shapen in iniquity,' fit only to be consigned to perdition (on a 
 dust heap or elsewhere). But if the same man were to wait till
 
 Children's Reading (I) 39 
 
 October and then eat an apple from the same tree, he would 
 find that the sourness had ripened into wholesome and refreshing 
 acidity; the hardness into firmness of fibre which, besides being 
 pleasant to the palate, makes the apple ' keep ' better than any 
 other fruit; the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic 
 qualities, and so on.... 
 
 In other words trench, manure, hoe and water 
 around your young tree, and patiently allow the young 
 fruit to develop of its own juice from the root; your own 
 task being, as the fruit forms, but to bring in all you 
 can of air and sunshine upon it. It must, as every 
 mother and nurse knows, be coaxed to realise itself, to 
 develop, to grow from its individual root. It may be 
 coaxed and trained. But the main secret lies in en- 
 couraging it to grow, and, to that end, in pouring sun- 
 shine upon it and hoeing after each visitation of tears 
 parentally induced. 
 
 Every child wants to grow. Every child wants to 
 learn. During his first year or so of life he fights for 
 bodily nutriment, almost ferociously. From the age of 
 two or thereabouts he valiantly essays the conquest of 
 articulate speech, using it first to identify his father or 
 his mother amid the common herd of Gentiles; next, 
 to demand a more liberal and varied dietary; anon, as 
 handmaid of his imperious will to learn. This desire, 
 still in the nursery, climbs like dissolution in Words- 
 worth's sonnet from low to high: from a craving to 
 discover experimentally what the stomach will assimilate 
 and what reject, up to a kingly debonair interest in 
 teleology. Our young gentleman is perfectly at ease in 
 Sion. He wants to know why soldiers are (or were) red,
 
 40 Lecture III 
 
 and if they were born so; whence bread and milk is 
 derived, and would it be good manners to thank the 
 next cow for both; why mamma married papa, and 
 that having been explained and thoughtfully accepted 
 as the best possible arrangement still thoughtfully, 
 not in the least censoriously, 'why the All-Father 
 has not married yet? ' He falls asleep weighing the 
 eligibility of various spinsters, church-workers, in the 
 parish. 
 
 His brain teeming with questions, he asks them of 
 impulse and makes his discoveries with joy. He passes 
 to a school, which is supposed to exist for the purpose 
 of answering these or cognate questions even before 
 he asks them: and behold, he is not happy! Or, he is 
 happy enough at play, or at doing in class the things 
 that should not be done in class: his master writes 
 home that he suffers in his school work 'from having 
 always more animal spirits than are required for 
 his immediate purposes.' What is the trouble? You 
 cannot explain it by home-sickness: for it attacks day 
 boys alike with boarders. You cannot explain it by 
 saying that all true learning involves 'drudgery,' unless 
 you make that miserable word a mendicant and force 
 it to beg the question. 'Drudgery' is what you feel to 
 be drudgery 
 
 Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, 
 Makes that and th* action fine. 
 
 and, anyhow, this child learned one language 
 English, a most difficult one eagerly. Of the nursery 
 through which I passed only one sister wept while
 
 Children's Reading (I) 41 
 
 learning to read, and that was over a scholastic work 
 entitled Reading Without Tears. 
 
 Do you know a chapter in Mr William Canton's 
 book The Invisible Playmate in which, as Carlyle dealt 
 in Sartor Resartus with an imaginary treatise by an 
 imaginary Herr Teufelsdrockh, as Matthew Arnold 
 in Friendship's Garland with the imaginary letters of an 
 imaginary Arminius (Germany in long-past happier 
 days lent the world these playful philosophical spirits), 
 so the later author invents an old village grandpapa, 
 with the grandpapa-name of Altegans and a prose-poem 
 printed in scarecrow duodecimo on paper-bag pages 
 and entitled 'Erster Schulgangj 'first school-going,' or 
 ' first day at school ' ? 
 
 The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; de- 
 lightful as it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is 
 commonplace in fact. All over the world and all under it too, 
 when their time comes the children are trooping to school. 
 The great globe swings round out of the dark into the sun; 
 there is always morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting 
 region of the morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones 
 afoot shining companies and groups, couples and bright solitary 
 figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about 
 them. 
 
 He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely 
 moorlands... he sees them on the hillsides... in the woods, on the 
 stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the sea- 
 cliffs and on the water-ribbed sands; trespassing on the railway 
 lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in the ferry- 
 boats; he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in 
 small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known 
 only as a strange tradition. 
 
 The morning-side of the planet is alive with them: one hears
 
 42 Lecture III 
 
 their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents 
 sweep ' eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond 
 the moon ' . . .and as new nations with their cities and villages, their 
 fields, woods, mountains and sea-shores, rise up into the morning- 
 side, lo ! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh 
 troops of these school-going children of the dawn 
 
 What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of 
 childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor 
 and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be daunted 
 by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of * millers and bakers 
 at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful picture of all, he sees them travelling 
 schoolward by the late moonlight which now and again in the 
 winter months precedes the tardy dawn. 
 
 That vision strikes me as being poetically true as well 
 as delightful : by which I mean that it is not sentimental : 
 we know that it ought to be true, that in a world well- 
 ordered according to our best wishes for it, it would be 
 naturally true. It expresses the natural love of Age, 
 brooding on the natural eager joy of children. But that 
 natural eager joy is just what our schools, in the matter 
 of reading, conscientiously kill. 
 
 In this matter of reading of children's reading 
 we stand, just now, or halt just now, between two ways. 
 The parent, I believe, has decisively won back to the 
 right one which good mothers never quite forsook. 
 There was an interval, lasting from the early years of 
 the last century until midway in Queen Victoria's reign 
 and a little beyond, when children were mainly brought 
 up on the assumption of natural vice. They might adore 
 father and mother, and yearn to be better friends with 
 papa: but there was the old Adam, a quickening evil 
 spirit; there were his imps always in the way, confound
 
 Children's Reading (I) 43 
 
 them ! I myself lived, with excellent grandparents, for 
 several years on pretty close terms with Hell and an 
 all-seeing Eye; until I grew so utterly weary of both 
 that I have never since had the smallest use for either. 
 Some of you may have read, as a curious book, the 
 agreeable history called The Fairchild Family, in which 
 Mr Fairchild leads his naughty children afield to a 
 gallows by a cross-road and seating them under the 
 swinging corpse of a malefactor, deduces how easily 
 they may come to this if they go on as they have been 
 going. The authors of such monitory or cautionary 
 tales understood but one form of development, the 
 development of Original Sin. You stole a pin, and pro- 
 ceeded by fatal steps, to the penitentiary; you threw a 
 stick at a pheasant, turned poacher, shot a gamekeeper 
 and ended on the gallows. You were always Eric and 
 it was always Little by Little with you Stay! memory 
 preserves one gem from a Sunday school dialogue, one 
 sharp-cut intaglio of childhood springing fully armed 
 from the head of Satan : 
 
 Q. Where hast thou been this Sabbath morning? 
 A. I have been coursing of the squirrel. 
 Q. Art not afraid so to desecrate the Lord's Day with idle 
 sport? 
 
 A. By no means: for I should tell you that I am an Atheist. 
 
 I forget what happened to that boy: but doubtless it 
 was, as it should have been, something drastic. 
 
 The spell of prohibition, of repression, lies so strong 
 upon these authors that when they try to break away 
 from it, to appeal to something better than fear in the
 
 44 Lecture III 
 
 child, and essay to amuse, they become merely silly. For 
 an example in verse : 
 
 If Human Beings only knew 
 What sorrows little birds go through, 
 
 I think that even boys 
 Would never think it sport or fun 
 To stand and fire a frightful gun 
 
 For nothing but the noise. 
 
 For another (instructional and quite a good memoria 
 technica so far as it goes) : 
 
 William and Mary came next to the throne: 
 When Mary died, there was William alone. 
 
 Now for a story of incident. It comes from the book 
 Reading Without Tears, that made my small sister weep. 
 She did not weep over the story, because she did not 
 claim to be an angel. 
 
 Did you ever hear of the donkey that went into the sea with 
 the little cart?... A lady drove the cart down to the beach. She 
 had six children with her. Three little ones sat in the cart by 
 her side. Three bigger girls ran before the cart When they 
 came to the beach the lady and the children got out. 
 
 Very good so far. It opens like the story of Nausicaa 
 [Odyssey, Book vi, lines 81 86]. 
 
 The lady wished the donkey to bathe its legs in the sea, to 
 make it strong and clean. But the donkey did not like to go 
 near the sea. So the lady bound a brown shawl over its eyes, and 
 she bade the big girls lead it close to the waves. Suddenly a big 
 wave rushed to the land. The girls started back to avoid the 
 wave, and they let go the donkey's rein. 
 
 The donkey was alarmed by the noise the girls made, and it 
 went into the sea, not knowing where it was going because it
 
 Children's Reading (I) 45 
 
 was not able to see. The girls ran screaming to the lady, crying 
 out, ' The donkey is in the sea ! ' 
 
 There it was, going further and further into the sea, till the 
 cart was hidden by the billows. The donkey sank lower and 
 lower every moment, till no part of it was seen but the ears; 
 for the brown shawl was over its nose and mouth. Now the 
 children began to bawl and to bellow! But no one halloed so 
 loud as the little boy of four. His name was Merty. He feared 
 that the donkey was drowned.... 
 
 Two fishermen were in a boat far away. They said * We hear 
 howls and shrieks on the shore. Perhaps a boy or girl is drowning. 
 Let us go and save him.' So they rowed hard, and they soon 
 came to the poor donkey, and saw its ears peeping out of the 
 sea. The donkey was just going to sink when they lifted it up 
 by the jaws, and seized the bridle and dragged it along. The 
 children on the shore shouted aloud for joy. The donkey with 
 the cart came safe to land. The poor creature was weak and 
 dripping wet. The fishermen unbound its eyes, and said to the 
 lady, ' We cannot think how this thing came to be over its eyes.' 
 The lady said she wished she had not bound up its eyes, and she 
 gave the shillings in her purse to the fishermen who had saved 
 her donkey. 
 
 Now every child knows that a donkey may change 
 into a Fairy Prince: that is a truth of imagination. But 
 to be polite and say nothing of the lady, every child 
 knows that no donkey would be ass enough to behave 
 as in this narrative. And the good parents who, 
 throughout the later i8th century and the I9th, in- 
 flicted this stuff upon children, were sinning against the 
 light. Perrault's Fairy Tales, and Madame D'Aulnoy's 
 were to their hand in translations; Le Cabinet des Fees, 
 which includes these and M. Galland's Arabian Nights 
 and many another collection of delectable stories, ex-
 
 46 Lecture III 
 
 tends on my shelves to 41 volumes (the last volume 
 appeared during the fury of the French Revolution!). 
 The brothers Grimm published the first volume of their 
 immortal tales in 1812, the second in 1814. A capital 
 selection from them, charmingly rendered, was edited 
 by our Edgar Taylor in 1823; and drew from Sir 
 Walter Scott a letter of which some sentences are worth 
 our pondering. 
 He writes: 
 
 There is also a sort of wild fairy interest in [these tales] which 
 makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the 
 imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy 
 stories which have been in later years composed for them. In 
 the latter case their minds are, as it were, put into the stocks... 
 and the moral always consists in good moral conduct being 
 crowned with temporal success. Truth is, I would not give one 
 tear shed over Little Red Riding Hood for all the benefit to be 
 derived from a hundred histories of Jemmy Goodchild. 
 
 Few nowadays, I doubt, remember Gammer Grethel. 
 She has been ousted by completer, maybe far better, 
 translations of the Grimms' Household Tales. But turn- 
 ing back, the other day, to the old volume for the old 
 sake's sake (as we say in the West) I came on the 
 Preface no child troubles with a Preface and on 
 these wise words: 
 
 Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic 
 (we might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy 
 and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated by 
 some. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement 
 by exercise as our j udgment or our memory. 
 
 And that admirable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real 
 text of my discourse to-day. I lay no sentimental stress
 
 Children's Reading (I) 47 
 
 upon Wordsworth's Ode and its doctrine that ' Heaven 
 lies about us in our infancy.' It was, as you know, a 
 favourite doctrine with our Platonists of the I yth cen- 
 tury: and critics who trace back the Ode Intimations 
 of Immortality to Henry Vaughan's 
 
 Happy those early days, when I 
 Shined in my Angel-infancy. 
 
 might connect it with a dozen passages from authors of 
 that century. Here is one from Centuries of Meditations 
 by that poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne whom I 
 quoted to you the other day: 
 
 Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, 
 and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto 
 this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the Gift of God 
 they attended me into the world, and by His special favour I 
 remember them till now Certainly Adam in Paradise had not 
 more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when 
 I was a child. 
 
 And here is another from John Earle's Character of 
 ' A Child ' in his Microcosmography : 
 
 His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he 
 reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs 
 to see what innocence he has out-liv'd. 
 
 He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse: the 
 one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity. 
 Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got Eternity 
 without a burthen, and exchang'd but one Heaven for another. 
 
 Bethinking me again of * the small apple-eating urchin 
 whom we know,' I suspect an amiable fallacy in all 
 this: I doubt if when he scales an apple-bearing tree 
 which is neither his own nor his papa's he does so under
 
 48 Lecture III 
 
 impulse of any conscious yearning back to Hierusalem, 
 his happy home, 
 
 Where trees for evermore bear fruit. 
 
 At any rate, I have an orchard, and he has put up 
 many excuses, but never yet that he was recollecting 
 Sion. 
 
 Still the doctrine holds affinity with the belief which 
 I firmly hold and tried to explain to you with persuasion 
 last term : that, boy or man, you and I, the microcosms, 
 do sensibly, half-sensibly, or insensibly yearn, 
 through what we feel to be best in us, to 'join up' with 
 the greater harmony; that by poetry or religion or what- 
 not we have that within us which craves to be drawn 
 out, 'e-ducated,' and linked up. 
 
 Now the rule of the nursery in the last century rested 
 on Original Sin, and consequently and quite logically 
 tended not to educate, but to repress. There are no new 
 fairy-tales of the days when your grandmothers wore 
 crinolines I know, for I have searched. Mothers and 
 nurses taught the old ones ; the Three Bears still found, 
 one after another, that * somebody has been sleeping in 
 my bed'; Fatima continued to call 'Sister Anne, do 
 you see anyone coming?' the Wolf to show her teeth 
 under her nightcap and snarl out (O, great moment!) 
 * All the better to eat you with, my dear.' But the 
 Evangelicals held the field. Those of our grandfathers 
 and grandmothers who understood joy and must have 
 had fairies for ministers those of our grandmothers 
 who played croquet through a hoop with a bell and 
 practised Cupid's own sport of archery those of our
 
 Children's Reading (I) 49 
 
 grandfathers who wore jolly peg-top trousers and 
 Dundreary whiskers, and built the Crystal Palace and 
 drove to the Derby in green-veiled top-hats with Dutch 
 dolls stuck about the brim tot circa unum caput tumul- 
 tuantes deos and those splendid uncles who used to 
 descend on the old school in a shower of gold half-a- 
 sovereign at the very least all these should have trailed 
 fairies with them in a cloud. But in practice the evan- 
 gelical parent held the majority, put away all toys 
 but Noah's Ark on Sundays, and voted the fairies 
 down. 
 
 I know not who converted the parents. It may have 
 been that benefactor of Europe, Hans Christian Ander- 
 sen, born at Odensee in Denmark in April 1805. He 
 died, near Copenhagen, in 1875, having by a few 
 months outlived his yoth birthday. I like to think that 
 his genius, a continuing influence over a long genera- 
 tion, did more than anything else to convert the parents. 
 The schools, always more royalist than the King, pro- 
 fessionally bleak, professionally dull, professionally re- 
 pressive rather than educative, held on to a tradition 
 which, though it had to be on the sly, every intelligent 
 mother and nurse had done her best to evade. The 
 schools made a boy's life penitential on a system. They 
 discovered athletics, as a safety-valve for high spirits 
 they could not cope with, and promptly made that 
 safety-valve compulsory! They went on to make 
 athletics a religion. Now athletics are not properly a 
 religious exercise, and their meaning evaporates as soon 
 as you enlist them in the service of repression. They 
 are being used to do the exact opposite of that for which 
 
 Q.C. 4
 
 5O Lecture III 
 
 God meant them. Things are better now : but in those 
 times how many a boy, having long looked forward to 
 it, rejoiced in his last day at school? 
 
 I know surely enough what must be in your minds 
 at this point: I am running up my head hard against 
 the doctrine of Original Sin, against the doctrine that 
 in dealing with a child you are dealing with a 'fallen 
 nature,' with a human soul 'conceived in sin,' unre- 
 generate except by repression ; and therefore that repres- 
 sion and more repression must be the only logical way 
 with your Original Sinners. 
 
 Well, then, I am. I have loved children all my life; 
 studied them in the nursery, studied them for years 
 ten or twelve years intimately in elementary schools. 
 I know for a surety, if I have acquired any knowledge, 
 that the child is a ' child of God ' rather than a ' Child 
 of wrath ' ; and here before you I proclaim that to con- 
 nect in any child's mind the Book of Joshua with the 
 Gospels, to make its Jehovah identical in that young mind 
 with the Father of Mercy of whom Jesus was the Son, 
 to confuse, as we do in any school in this land between 
 9.5 and 9.45 a.m., that bloodthirsty tribal deity whom 
 the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true God the 
 Father, is a blasphemous usage, and a curse. 
 
 But let me get away to milder heresies. If you will 
 concede for a moment that the better way with a child 
 is to draw out, to educate, rather than to repress, what is 
 in him, let us observe what he instinctively wants. Now 
 first, of course, he wants to eat and drink, and to run 
 about. When he passes beyond these merely animal 
 desires to what we may call the instinct of growth in his
 
 Children's Reading (I) 51 
 
 soul, how does he proceed ? I think Mr Holmes, whom 
 I have already quoted, very fairly sets out these desires 
 as any grown-up person can perceive them. The child 
 desires 
 
 (1) to talk and to listen; 
 
 (2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word); 
 
 (3) to draw, paint and model; 
 
 (4) to dance and sing; 
 
 (5) to know the why of things; 
 
 (6) to construct things. 
 
 Now I shall have something to say by and by on the 
 amazing preponderance in this list of those instincts 
 which Aristotle would have called mimetic. This morn- 
 ing I take only the least imitative of all, the desire to 
 know the why of things. 
 
 Surely you know, taking only this, that the master- 
 key admitting a child to all, or almost all, palaces of 
 knowledge is his ability to read. When he has grasped 
 that key of his mother-tongue he can with perseverance 
 unlock all doors to all the avenues of knowledge. 
 More he has the passport to heavens unguessed. 
 
 You will perceive at once that what I mean here by 
 * reading * is the capacity for silent reading, taking a 
 book apart and mastering it; and you will bear in mind 
 the wonder that I preached to you in a previous lecture 
 that great literature never condescends, that what 
 yonder boy in a corner reads of a king is happen- 
 ing to him. Do you suppose that in an elementary 
 school one child in ten reads thus? Listen to a wise 
 ex-inspector, whose words I can corroborate of ex- 
 perience :
 
 52 Lecture III 
 
 The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary 
 elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress is that the 
 children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word. 
 They are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering 
 the contents of the book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual 
 nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. They are standing 
 up one by one and reading aloud to their teacher. 
 
 Ah ! but I have seen far worse than that. I have visited 
 and condemned rural schools where the practice was to 
 stand a class up say a class of thirty children and 
 make them read in unison : which meant, of course, that 
 the front row chanted out the lesson while the back 
 rows made inarticulate noises. I well remember 
 one such exhibition, in a remote country school on 
 the Cornish hills, and having my attention arrested 
 midway by the face of a girl in the third row. She was 
 a strikingly beautiful child, with that combination of 
 bright auburn, almost flaming, hair with dark eyebrows, 
 dark eyelashes, dark eyes, which of itself arrests your 
 gaze, being so rare; and those eyes seemed to challenge 
 me half scornfully and ask, ' Are you really taken in by all 
 this?' Well, I soon stopped the performance and 
 required each child to read separately: whereupon it 
 turned out that, in the upper standards of this school 
 of 70 or 80 children, one only this disdainful girl 
 could get through half a dozen easy sentences with 
 credit. She read well and intelligently, being accustomed 
 to read to herself, at home. 
 
 I daresay that this bad old method of block-reading 
 is dead by this time. 
 
 Reading aloud and separately is excellent for several
 
 Children's Reading (I) 53 
 
 purposes. It tests capacity: it teaches correct pro- 
 nunciation by practice, as well as the mastery of 
 difficult words : it provides a good teacher with frequent 
 opportunities of helping the child to understand what 
 he reads. 
 
 But as his schooling proceeds he should be accus- 
 tomed more and more to read to himself: for that, 
 I repeat, is the master key.
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 CHILDREN'S READING (II) 
 
 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1917 
 
 I 
 
 IN our talk, Gentlemen, about Children's Reading 
 we left off upon a list, drawn up by Mr Holmes in 
 his book 'What Is, and What Might Be' of the things 
 that, apart from physical nourishment and exercise, a 
 child instinctively desires. 
 He desires 
 
 (1) to talk and to listen; 
 
 (2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word) ; 
 
 (3) to draw, paint, and model; 
 
 (4) to dance and sing; 
 
 (5) to know the why of things ; 
 
 (6) to construct things. 
 
 Let us scan through this catalogue briefly, in its 
 order. 
 
 No. (i). To talk and to listen Mr Holmes calls this 
 the communicative instinct. Every child wants to talk 
 with those about him, or at any rate with his chosen 
 ones his parents, brothers, sisters, nurse, governess, 
 gardener, boot-boy (if he possess these last) with 
 other children, even if his dear papa is poor: to tell 
 them what he has been doing, seeing, feeling: and to 
 listen to what they have to tell him. 
 
 Nos. (2), (3), (4). To act our author calls this the 
 'dramatic instinct': to draw, paint and model this the
 
 Children's Reading (II) 55 
 
 Artistic instinct ' : to dance and sing this the 'musical in- 
 stinct.' But obviously all these are what Aristotle would 
 call 'mimetic' instincts: 'imitative' (in a sense I shall 
 presently explain) ; even as No. (2) acting like No. (i) 
 talking and listening comes of craving for sym- 
 pathy. In fact, as we go on, you will see that these 
 instincts overlap and are not strictly separable, though 
 we separate them just now for convenience. 
 
 No. (5). To know the why of things the 'inquisitive 
 instinct.' This, being the one which gives most trouble 
 to parents, parsons, governesses, conventional school- 
 masters to all grown-up persons who pretend to know 
 what they don't and are ashamed to tell what they do 
 is of course the most ruthlessly repressed. 
 
 * The time is come,' the Infant said, 
 
 'To talk of many things: 
 Of babies, storks and cabbages 
 And 
 
 having studied the Evangelists' Window facing the 
 family pew 
 
 And whether cows have wings.' 
 
 The answer, in my experience, is invariably stern, and 
 'in the negative': in tolerant moments compromising 
 on 'Wait, like a good boy, and see.' 
 
 But we singled out this instinct and discussed it in 
 our last lecture. 
 
 No. (6). To construct things the 'constructive in- 
 stinct.' I quote Mr Holmes here: 
 
 After analysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys to 
 pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them. The
 
 56 Lecture IV 
 
 ends that he sets before himself are those which Comte set before 
 the human race savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir: induire 
 pour deduire, afin de construire. The desire to make things, to 
 build things up, to control ways and means, to master the re- 
 sources of nature, to put his knowledge of her laws and facts to 
 practical use, is strong in his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and 
 
 he will spend hours in building and rebuilding houses, churches 
 
 Set him on a sandy shore with a spade and a pail, and he will 
 spend hours in constructing fortified castles with deep encircling 
 moats. 
 
 Again obviously this constructive instinct overlaps 
 with the imitative ones. Construction, for example, 
 enters into the art of making mud-pies and has also 
 been applied in the past to great poetry. If you don't 
 keep a sharp eye in directing this instinct, it may con- 
 ceivably end in an Othello or in a Divina Commedia. 
 
 II 
 
 Without preaching on any of the others, however, I 
 take three of the six instincts scheduled by Mr Holmes 
 the three which you will allow to be almost purely 
 imitative. They are: 
 
 Acting, 
 
 Drawing, painting, modelling, 
 
 Dancing and singing. 
 
 Now let us turn to the very first page of Aristotle's 
 Poetics and what do we read? 
 
 Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic 
 poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the 
 lyre, are all, in general, modes of imitation 
 
 For as there are persons who represent a number of things by 
 colours and drawings, and others vocally, so it is with the arts
 
 Children's Reading (II) 57 
 
 above mentioned. They all imitate by rhythm, language, har- 
 mony, singly or combined. 
 
 Even dancing (he goes on) 
 
 imitates character, emotion and action, by rhythmical movement. 
 
 Now, having touched on mud-pies, let me say a few 
 words upon these aesthetic imitative instincts of acting, 
 dancing, singing before I follow Aristotle into his ex- 
 planation of the origin of Poetry, which I think we 
 may agree to be the highest subject of our Art of Read- 
 ing and to hold promise of its highest reward. 
 
 Every wise mother sings or croons to her child and 
 dances him on her knee. She does so by sure instinct, 
 long before the small body can respond or his eyes 
 always blue at first and unfathomably aged return her 
 any answer. It lulls him into the long spells of sleep so 
 necessary for his first growth. By and by, when he has 
 found his legs, he begins to skip, and even before he 
 has found articulate speech, to croon for himself. Pass 
 a stage, and you find him importing speech, drama, 
 dance, incantation, into his games with his playmates. 
 Watch a cluster of children as they enact 'Here we 
 go gathering nuts in May' eloquent line: it is just what 
 they are doing! or 'Here come three Dukes a-riding, 
 or 'Fetch a pail of water, or 'Sally, Sally Waters': 
 
 Sally, Sally Waters, 
 
 Sitting in the sand, 
 Rise, Sally rise, Sally, 
 
 For a young man. 
 
 Suitor presented, accepted [I have noted, by the way, 
 that this game is more popular with girls than with
 
 58 Lecture IV 
 
 boys] ; wedding ceremony hastily performed so hastily, 
 it were more descriptive to say 'taken for granted* 
 within the circle ; the dancers, who join hands and resume 
 the measure, chanting 
 
 Now you are married, we wish you joy 
 First a girl and then a boy 
 
 the order, I suspect, dictated by exigencies of rhyme 
 rather than of Eugenics, as Dryden confessed that a 
 rhyme had often helped him to a thought. And yet I 
 don't know; for the incantation goes on to redress the 
 balance in a way that looks scientific: 
 
 Ten years after, son and daughter, 
 And now 
 
 [practically!] 
 
 And now, Miss Sally, come out of the water. 
 
 The players end by supplying the applause which, in 
 these days of division of labour, is commonly left to the 
 audience. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Well, there you have it all : acting, singing, dancing, 
 choral movement enlisted ancillary to the domestic 
 drama : and, when you start collecting evidence of these 
 imitative instincts blent in childhood the mass will soon 
 amaze you and leave you no room to be surprised that 
 many learned scholars, on the supposition that un- 
 civilised man is a child more or less and at least so 
 much of child that one can argue through children's 
 practice to his have found the historical origin of 
 Poetry itself in these primitive performances: 'com-
 
 Children's Reading (II) 59 
 
 munal poetry ' as they call it. I propose to discuss with 
 you (may be next term) in a lecture not belonging to 
 this 'course' the likelihood that what we call specifi- 
 cally 'the Ballad,' or 'Ballad Poetry,' originated thus. 
 Here is a wider question. Did all Poetry develope out 
 of this, historically, as a process in time and in fact? 
 These scholars (among whom I will instance one of the 
 most learned Dr Gummere) hold that it did: and I 
 may take a passage from Dr Gummere's Beginnings of 
 Poetry (p. 95) to show you how they call in the practice 
 of savage races to support their theory. The Botocudos 
 of South America are according to Dr Paul Ehren- 
 reich who has observed them 1 an ungentlemanly tribe, 
 'very low in the social scale.' 
 
 The Botocudos are little better than a leaderless horde, and 
 pay scant respect to their chieftain; they live only for their im- 
 mediate bodily needs, and take small thought for the morrow, 
 still less for the past. No traditions, no legends, are abroad to 
 tell them of their forbears. They still use gestures to express 
 feeling and ideas; while the number of words which imitate a 
 given sound ' is extraordinarily great.' An action or an object 
 is named by imitating the sound peculiar to it; and sounds are 
 doubled to express greater intensity To speak is ad; to speak 
 loudly or to sing, is ao-ao. And now for their aesthetic life, their 
 song, dance, poetry, as described by this accurate observer. ' On 
 festal occasions the whole horde meets by night round the camp 
 fire for a dance. Men and women alternating. . .form a circle; each 
 dancer lays his arms about the necks of his two neighbours, and 
 the entire ring begins to turn to the right or to the left, while all 
 the dancers stamp strongly and in rhythm the foot that is advanced, 
 and drag after it the other foot. Now with drooping heads they 
 press closer and closer together; now they widen the circle. 
 
 1 The reference given is Zeitschr. f. Ethnologic, xix. 30 ff.
 
 60 Lecture IV 
 
 Throughout the dance resounds a monotonous song to which 
 they stamp their feet. Often one can hear nothing but a con- 
 tinually repeated Kalaui aha!... Again, however, short impro- 
 vised songs, in which we are told the doings of the day, the 
 reasons for rejoicing, what not, as "Good hunting," or "Now 
 we have something to eat," or "Brandy is good." ' 
 
 ' As to the aesthetic value ' of these South American 
 utterances, Dr Gummere asks in a footnote, 'how far is 
 it inferior to the sonorous commonplaces of our own 
 verse say The Psalm of Life?' I really cannot answer 
 that question. Which do you prefer, Gentlemen? 
 * Life is real, life is earnest,' or ' Now we have something 
 to eat?' I must leave you to settle it with the Food 
 Controller. 
 
 The Professor goes on: 
 
 'Now and then, too, an individual begins a song, and is an- 
 swered by the rest in chorus. . . . They never sing without dancing, 
 never dance without singing, and have but one word to express both 
 song and dance.' 
 
 As the unprejudiced reader sees [Dr Gummere proceeds] this 
 clear and admirable account confirms the doctrine of early 
 days revived with fresh ethnological evidence in the writings of 
 Dr Brown and of Adam Smith, that dance, poetry and song 
 were once a single and inseparable function, and is in itself fatal to 
 the idea of rhythmic prose, of solitary recitation, as foundations 
 
 of poetry All poetry is communal, holding fast to the rhythm 
 
 of consent as to the one sure fact 
 
 IV 
 
 Now I should tell you, Gentlemen, that I hold such 
 utterances as this last whatever you may think of the 
 utterances of the Botocudos to be exorbitant: that
 
 Children's Reading (//) 61 
 
 I distrust all attempts to build up (say) Paradise Lost 
 historically from the yells and capers of recondite 
 savages. * Life is real, life is earnest ' may be no better 
 aesthetically (I myself think it a little better) than ' Now 
 we have something to eat.* * Brandy is good* may rival 
 Pindar's "Apia-rov ^ei/ u&>/o,and indeed puts what it con- 
 tains of truth with more of finality, less of provocation 
 (though Pindar at once follows up "Apia-rov pev vBap 
 with exquisite poetry): butyou cannot truly you cannot 
 exhibit the steps which lead up from 'Brandy is 
 good' to such lines as 
 
 Thus with the year 
 Seasons return; but not to me returns 
 Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, 
 Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, 
 Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. 
 
 I bend over the learned page pensively, and I seem to 
 see a Botocudo Professor though not high 'in the 
 social scale,' they may have such things visiting Cam- 
 bridge on the last night of the Lent races and reporting 
 of its inhabitants as follows : 
 
 They pay scant heed to their chiefs: they live only for their 
 immediate bodily needs, and take small thought for the morrow. 
 On festal occasions the whole horde meets by night round the 
 camp fire for a dance. Each dancer lays his arms about the necks 
 of his two neighbours, stamping strongly with one foot and 
 dragging the other after it. Now with drooping heads they press 
 closer and closer together; now they widen the circle. Often 
 one can hear nothing but a continually repeated kalaul aha, or 
 again one hears short improvised songs in which we are told the 
 doings of the day, the reasons for rejoicing, what not, as * Good 
 hunting,' * Good old ' [naming a tribal God], or in former
 
 62 Lecture IV 
 
 times ' Now we shall be but a short while,' or ' Woemmal ' Now 
 and then, too, an individual begins a song and is answered by the 
 rest in chorus such as 
 
 For he is an estimable person 
 Beyond possibility of gainsaying. 
 
 The chorus twice repeats this and asseverates that they are 
 following a custom common to the flotilla, the expeditionary 
 force, and even their rude seats of learning. 
 
 And Dr Gummere, or somebody else, comments: 
 ' As the unprejudiced reader will see, this clear and 
 admirable account confirms our hypothesis that in com- 
 munal celebration we have at once the origin and model 
 of three poems, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost and 
 In Memoriam, recorded as having been composed by 
 members of this very tribe.' 
 
 Although we have been talking of instincts, we are 
 not concerned here with the steps by which the child, 
 or the savage, following an instinct attains to write 
 poetry; but, more modestly, with the instinct by which 
 the child likes it, and the way in which he can be best 
 encouraged to read and improve this natural liking. 
 Nor are we even concerned here to define Poetry. It 
 suffices our present purpose to consider Poetry as the 
 sort of thing the poets write. 
 
 But obviously if we find a philosopher discussing 
 poetry without any reference to children, and indepen- 
 dently basing it upon the very same imitative instincts 
 which we have noted in children, we have some promise 
 of being on the right track.
 
 Children's Reading (II) 63 
 
 So I return to Aristotle. Aristotle (I shall in fairness 
 say) does not anticipate Dr Gummere, to contradict or 
 refute him; he may even be held to support him inci- 
 dentally. But he sticks to business, and this is what 
 he says (Poetics, c. iv) : 
 
 Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, and 
 these natural causes. First the instinct to imitate is implanted in 
 man from his childhood, and in this he differs from other 
 animals, being the most imitative of them all. Man gets his first 
 learning through imitation, and all men delight in seeing things 
 imitated. This is clearly shown by experience.... 
 
 To imitate, then, being instinctive in our nature, so too we 
 have an instinct for harmony and rhythm, metre being mani- 
 festly a species of rhythm : and man, being born to these instincts 
 and little by little improving them, out of his early improvisations 
 created Poetry. 
 
 Combining these two instincts, with him, we arrive 
 at harmonious imitation. Well and good. But what is it we 
 imitate in poetry? noble things or mean things? After 
 considering this, putting mean things aside as unworthy, 
 and voting for the nobler which must at the same 
 time be true, since without truth there can be no real 
 nobility Aristotle has to ask 'In what way true? True 
 to ordinary life, with its observed defeats of the right 
 by the wrong? or true, as again instinct tells good men 
 it should be, universally?' So he arrives at his conclusion 
 that a true thing is not necessarily truth of fact in a 
 world where truth in fact is so often belied or made 
 meaningless not the record that Alcibiades went 
 somewhere and suffered something but truth to the
 
 64 Lecture IV 
 
 Universal, the superior demand of our conscience. In 
 such a way only we know that The Tempest or Paradise 
 Lost or The Ancient Mariner or Prometheus Unbound 
 can be truer than any police report. Yet we know 
 that they are truer in essence, and in significance, 
 since they appeal to eternal verities since they imitate 
 the Universal whereas the police report chronicles 
 (faithfully, as in duty bound, even usefully in its way) 
 events which may, nay must, be significant somehow 
 but cannot at best be better to us than phenomena, 
 broken ends and shards. 
 
 VI 
 
 I return to the child. Clearly in obeying the instinct 
 which I have tried to illustrate, he is searching to realise 
 himself; and, as educators, we ought to help this effort 
 or, at least, not to hinder it. 
 
 Further, if we agree with Aristotle, in this searching 
 to realise himself through imitation, what will the child 
 most nobly and naturally imitate ? He will imitate what 
 Aristotle calls 'the Universal,' the superior demand. 
 And does not this bring us back to consent with what I 
 have been preaching from the start in this course that 
 to realise ourselves in What Is not only in degree trans- 
 cends mere knowledge and activity, What Knows and 
 What Does, but transcends it in kind? It is not only 
 what the child unconsciously longs for: it is that for 
 which (in St Paul's words) 'the whole creation groaneth 
 and travaileth in pain together until now'; craving for 
 this (I make you the admission) as emotionally as the 
 heart may be thrilled, the breast surge, the eyes swell
 
 Children's Reading (II) 65 
 
 with tears, at a note drawn from the violin : feeling that 
 somewhere, beyond reach, we have a lost sister, and she 
 speaks to our soul. 
 
 VII 
 
 Who, that has been a child, has not felt this surprise 
 of beauty, the revelation, the call of it ? 
 
 The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion... 
 
 yes, or a rainbow on the spray against a cliff; or a vista 
 of lawns between descending woods ; or a vision of fish 
 moving in a pool under the hazel's shadow? Who has 
 not felt the small surcharged heart labouring with desire 
 to express it? 
 
 I preach to you that the base of all Literature, of all 
 Poetry, of all Theology, is one, and stands on one rock : 
 the very highest Universal Truth is something so simple that 
 a child may understand it. This, surely, was in Jesus' 
 mind when he said 'I thank thee, O Father, Lord of 
 heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things 
 from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto 
 babes.' 
 
 For as the Universe is one, so the individual human 
 souls, that apprehend it, have no varying values intrin- 
 sically, but one equal value. They vary but in power to 
 apprehend, and this may be more easily hindered than 
 helped by the conceit begotten of finite knowledge. I 
 shall even dare to quote of this Universal Truth, the 
 words I once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley 
 concerning divine Love : ' I see now that if God's love 
 reach up to every star and down to every poor soul on 
 Q.C. 5
 
 66 Lecture IV 
 
 earth, it must be vastly simple ; so simple that all dwellers 
 on Earth may be assured of it as all who have eyes 
 may be assured of the planet shining yonder at the end 
 of the street and so vast that all bargaining is below 
 it, and they may inherit it without considering their 
 deserts.' I believe this to be strictly and equally true 
 of the appeal which Poetry makes to each of us, child 
 or man, in his degree. As Johnson said of Gray's Elegy r , 
 it * abounds with images which find a mirror in every 
 mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom re- 
 turns an echo.' It exalts us through the best of us, by 
 telling us something new yet not strange, something 
 that we recognise, something that we too have known, or 
 surmised, but had never the delivering speech to tell. 
 'There is a pleasure in poetic pains,' says Wordsworth: 
 but, Gentlemen, if you have never felt the travail, yet 
 you have still to understand the bliss of deliverance. 
 
 VIII 
 
 If, then, you consent with me thus far in theory, let 
 us now drive at practice. You have (we will say) a class 
 of thirty or forty in front of you. We will assume that 
 they know their a b, ab, can at least spell out their 
 words. You will choose a passage for them, and you 
 will not (if you are wise) choose a passage from Paradise 
 Lost: your knowledge telling you that Paradise Lost was 
 written, late in his life, by a great virtuoso, and older men 
 (of whom I, sad to say, am one) assuring you that to taste 
 the Milton of Paradise Lost a man must have passed his 
 thirtieth year. You take the early Milton : you read out 
 this, for instance, from U Allegro:
 
 Children's Reading (II) 67 
 
 Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee 
 Jest and youthful Jollity, 
 Quips, and Cranks, and wanton wiles, 
 Nods and Becks, and wreathed Smiles 
 Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, 
 And love to live in dimple sleek; 
 Sport that wrinkled Care derides, 
 And Laughter holding both his sides.... 
 
 Go on: just read it to them. They won't know who 
 Hebe was, but you can tell them later. The metre is 
 taking hold of them (in my experience the metre of 
 L* Allegro can be relied upon to grip children) and 
 anyway they can see ' Laughter holding both his sides ' : 
 they recognise it as if they saw the picture. Go on steadily : 
 
 Come, and trip it as ye go, 
 
 On the light fantastick toe; 
 
 And in thy right hand lead with thee 
 
 The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty; 
 
 And, if I give thee honour due, 
 
 Mirth, admit me of thy crew 
 
 Do not pause and explain what a Nymph is, or why 
 Liberty is the 'Mountain Nymph!* Go on reading: 
 the Prince has always to break through briers to kiss 
 the Sleeping Beauty awake. Go on with the incantation 
 calling him, persuading him, that he is the Prince and 
 she is worth it. Go on reading 
 
 Mirth, admit me of thy crew, 
 To live with her, and live with thee, 
 In unreproved pleasures free; 
 To hear the lark begin his flight, 
 And singing startle the dull night, 
 From his watch-towre in the skies, 
 Till the dappled dawn doth rise. 
 
 32
 
 68 Lecture IV 
 
 At this point still as you read without stopping to 
 explain, the child certainly feels that he is being led to 
 something. He knows the lark : but the lark's ' watch- 
 towre' he had never thought of that: and 'the dap- 
 pled dawn ' yes that's just //, now he comes to think : 
 
 Then to come, in spite of sorrow, 
 And at my window bid good-morrow, 
 Through the sweet-briar or the vine 
 Or the twisted eglantine; 
 While the cock with lively din 
 Scatters the rear of Darkness thin; 
 And to the stack, or the barn door, 
 Stoutly struts his dames before: 
 Oft listening how the hounds and horn 
 Cheerily rouse the slumbering Morn, 
 From the side of some hoar hill, 
 Through the high wood echoing shrill: 
 Sometime walking, not unseen, 
 By hedgerow elms on hillocks green, 
 Right against the eastern gate, 
 Where the great sun begins his state, 
 Robed in flames and amber light, 
 The clouds in thousand liveries dight; 
 While the ploughman, near at hand, 
 Whistles o'er the furrow'd land, 
 And the milkmaid singeth blithe, 
 And the mower whets his sithe, 
 And every shepherd tells his tale 
 Under the hawthorn in the dale. 
 
 Don't stop (I say) to explain that Hebe was (for once) 
 the legitimate daughter of Zeus and, as such, had the 
 privilege to draw wine for the gods. Don't even stop, 
 just yet, to explain who the gods were. Don't discourse 
 on amber, otherwise ambergris; don't explain that
 
 Children's Reading (II) 69 
 
 'gris* in this connexion doesn't mean 'grease'; don't 
 trace it through the Arabic into Noah's Ark; don't 
 prove its electrical properties by tearing up paper into 
 little bits and attracting them with the mouth-piece of 
 your pipe rubbed on your sleeve. Don't insist philo- 
 logically that when every shepherd 'tells his tale' he 
 is not relating an anecdote but simply keeping tally of 
 his flock. 
 
 Just go on reading, as well as you can ; and be sure 
 that when the children get the thrill of it, for which you 
 wait, they will be asking more questions, and pertinent 
 ones, than you are able to answer. 
 
 IX 
 
 This advice, to be sure, presupposes of the teacher 
 himself some capacity of reading aloud, and reading 
 aloud is not taught in our schools. In our Elementary 
 Schools, in which few of the pupils contemplate being 
 called to Holy Orders or to the Bar, it is practised, 
 indeed, but seldom taught as an art. In our Secondary 
 and Public Schools it is neither taught nor practised: 
 as I know to my cost and you, to yours, Gentlemen, 
 on whom I have had to practise. 
 
 But let the teacher take courage. First let him read 
 a passage 'at the long breath' as the French say 
 aloud, and persuasively as he can. Now and then he 
 may pause to indicate some particular beauty, repeating 
 the line before he proceeds. But he should be sparing 
 of these interruptions. When Laughter, for example, is 
 already ' holding both his sides ' it cannot be less than 
 officious, a work of supererogation, to stop and hold
 
 70 Lecture IV 
 
 them for him ; and he who obeys the counsel of per- 
 fection will read straight to the end and then recur to 
 particular beauties. Next let him put up a child to con- 
 tinue with the tale, and another and another, just as in 
 a construing class. While the boy is reading, the teacher 
 should never interrupt : he should wait, and return after- 
 wards upon a line that has been slurred or wrongly 
 emphasised. When the children have done reading he 
 should invite questions on any point they have found 
 puzzling: it is with the operation of poetry on their 
 minds that his main business lies. Lastly, he may run 
 back over significant points they have missed. 
 
 'And is that all the method?' Yes, that is all the 
 method. * So simple as that ? * Yes, even so simple as 
 that, and (I claim) even so wise, seeing that it just lets 
 the author Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton or 
 Coleridge have his own own way with the young plant 
 just lets them drop 'like the gentle rain from heaven,' 
 and soak in. 
 
 The moving Moon went up the sky, 
 
 And no where did abide: 
 Softly she was going up, 
 
 And a star or two beside. 
 
 Do you really want to chat about that"? Cannot you 
 trust it? 
 
 The stars were dim, and thick the night, 
 
 The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white? 
 
 From the sails the dew did drip 
 Till clomb above the eastern bar 
 The horned Moon, with one bright star 
 
 Within the nether tip.
 
 Children's Reading (II) 71 
 
 Must you tell them that for the Moon to hold a star 
 anywhere within her circumference is an astronomical 
 impossibility? Very well, then ; tell it. But tell it after- 
 wards, and put it away quietly. For the quality of Poetry 
 is not strained. Let the rain soak; then use your hoe, 
 and gently; and still trust Nature; by which, I again 
 repeat to you, all spirit attracts all spirit as inevitably as 
 all matter attracts all matter. 
 
 'Strained.' I am glad that memory flew just here 
 to the word of Portia's: for it carries me on to a 
 wise page of Dr Corson's, and a passage in which, 
 protesting against the philologers who cram our 
 children's handbooks with irrelevant information that 
 but obscures what Chaucer or Shakespeare mean, he 
 breaks out in Chaucer's own words: 
 
 Thise cookes ! how they stampe and streyne and grind, 
 And turnen substaunce into accident! 
 
 (Yes, and make the accident the substance!) as 
 he insists that the true subject of literary study is the 
 author's meaning; and the true method a surrender of 
 the mind to that meaning, with what Wordsworth calls 
 'a wise passiveness ' : 
 
 The eye it cannot choose but see; 
 
 We cannot bid die ear be still; 
 Our bodies feel, where'er they be, 
 
 Against- or with our will. 
 
 Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress; 
 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness.
 
 72 Lecture IV 
 
 Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
 Of things for ever speaking, 
 
 That nothing of itself will come, 
 But we must still be seeking? 
 
 I have been talking to-day about children; and find 
 that most of the while I have been thinking, if but sub- 
 consciously, of poor children. Now, at the end, you 
 may ask ' Why, lecturing here at Cambridge, is he pre- 
 occupied with poor children who leave school at fourteen 
 and under, and thereafter read no poetry? '...Oh, yes! I 
 know all about these children and the hopeless, wicked 
 waste; these with a common living-room to read in, a 
 father tired after his day's work, and (for parental 
 encouragement) just the two words ' Get out ! ' A Scots 
 domine writes in his log: 
 
 I have discovered a girl with a sense of humour. I asked my 
 qualifying class to draw a graph of the attendance at a village 
 kirk. * And you must explain away any rise or fall,' I said. 
 
 Margaret Steel had a huge drop one Sunday, and her explanation 
 was * Special Collection for Missions.' Next Sunday the Con- 
 gregation was abnormally large: Margaret wrote ' Change of 
 Minister.'... Poor Margaret! When she is fourteen, she will go 
 out into the fields, and in three years she will be an ignorant 
 country bumpkin. 
 
 And again: 
 
 Robert Campbell (a favourite pupil) left the school to-day. 
 
 He had reached the age-limit Truly it is like death: I stand 
 
 by a new made grave, and I have no hope of a resurrection. 
 Robert is dead.
 
 Children's Reading (II) 73 
 
 Precisely because I have lived on close terms with 
 this, and the wicked waste of it, I appeal to you who 
 are so much more fortunate than this Robert or this 
 Margaret and will have far more to say in the world, to 
 think of them how many they are. I am not senti- 
 mentalising. When an Elementary Schoolmaster spreads 
 himself and tells me he looks upon every child entering 
 his school as a potential Lord Chancellor, I answer that, 
 as I expect, so I should hope, to die before seeing 
 the world a Woolsack. Jack cannot ordinarily be as 
 good as his master; if he were, he would be a great 
 deal better. You have given Robert a vote, however, 
 and soon you will have to give it to Margaret. Can 
 you not give them also, in their short years at school, 
 something to sustain their souls in the long Valley of 
 Humiliation ? 
 
 Do you remember this passage in The Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress as the pilgrims passed down that valley ? 
 
 Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a Boy- 
 feeding his Father's Sheep. The Boy was in very mean Cloaths, 
 but of a very fresh and well-favoured Countenance, and as he 
 sate by himself he Sung. Hark, said Mr Greatheart, to what 
 the Shepherd's Boy saith. 
 
 Well, it was a very pretty song, about Contentment. 
 
 He that is down need fear no fall, 
 
 He that is low, no Pride: 
 He that is humble ever shall 
 
 Have God to be his Guide. 
 
 But I care less for its subject than for the song. Though 
 life condemn him to live it through in the Valley of 
 Humiliation, I want to hear the Shepherd Boy singing.
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 ON READING FOR EXAMINATIONS 
 
 WEDNESDAY, MAY 9, 1917 
 I 
 
 You, Gentlemen, who so far have followed with 
 patience this course of lectures, advertised, maybe 
 too ambitiously, as ' On the Art of Reading,' will recall 
 to your memory, when I challenge it across the intervals 
 of Vacation, that three propositions have been pretty 
 steadily held before you. 
 
 The^n/: (bear me out) that, man's life being of the 
 length it is, and his activities multifarious as they are, 
 out of the mass of printed matter already loaded and 
 still being shot upon this planet, he must make selection. 
 There is no other way. 
 
 The second: that the time and opportunity being so 
 brief, the mass so enormous, and the selection therefore 
 so difficult he should select the books that are best for 
 him, and take them absolutely, not frittering his time upon 
 books written about and around the best : that in their 
 order, of course the primary masterpieces shall come 
 first, and the secondary second, and so on ; and mere chat 
 about any of them last of all. 
 
 My third proposition (perhaps more discutable) has 
 been that, the human soul's activities being separated, 
 so far as we can separate them, into What Does, What 
 Knows, What Is to be such-and-such a man ranks
 
 On Reading for Examinations 75 
 
 higher than either knowing or doing this, that, or the 
 other: that it transcends all man's activity upon pheno- 
 mena, even a Napoleon's: all his housed store of know- 
 ledge, though it be a Casaubon's or a Mark Pattison's: 
 that only by learning to be can we understand or reach, 
 as we have an instinct to reach, to our right place in the 
 scheme of things : and that, any way, all the greatest 
 literature commands this instinct. To be Hamlet to 
 feel yourself Hamlet is more important than killing 
 a king or even knowing all there is to be known about 
 a text. Now most of us have been Hamlet, more or less : 
 while few of us, I trust have ever murdered a monarch : 
 and still fewer, perhaps, can hope to know all that is to be 
 known of the text of the play. But for value, Gentlemen, 
 let us not rank these three achievements by order of their 
 rarity. Shakespeare means us to feel to be Hamlet. 
 That is all : and from the play it is the best we can get. 
 
 II 
 
 Now in talking to you, last term, about children I 
 had perforce to lay stress on the point that, with all this 
 glut of literature, the mass of children in our common- 
 wealth, who leave school at fourteen go forth starving. 
 
 But you are happier. You are happier, not in having 
 your selection of reading in English done for you at 
 school (for you have in the Public Schools scarce any 
 such help): but happier (i) because the time of learning 
 is so largely prolonged, and (2) because this most 
 difficult office of sorting out from the mass what you 
 should read as most profitable has been tentatively per- 
 formed for you by us older men for your relief. For
 
 76 Lecture V 
 
 example, those of you 'if any,' as the Regulations 
 say who will, a week or two hence, be sitting for 
 Section A of the Medieval and Modern Languages 
 Tripos, have been spared, all along, the laborious busi- 
 ness of choosing what you should read or read with 
 particular attention for the good of your souls. Is 
 Chaucer your author? Then you will have read (or 
 ought to have read) The Parlement of Fowles, the Pro- 
 logue to The Canterbury Tales, The Knight's Tale, The 
 Man of Laws Tale, The Nun Priest 1 s Tale, The Doctor's 
 Tale, The Pardoner's Tale with its Prologue, The Friar's 
 Tale. You were not dissuaded from reading Troilus ; you 
 were not forbidden to read all the Canterbury Tales, even 
 the naughtiest; but the works that I have mentioned 
 have been 'prescribed* for you. So, of Shakespeare, 
 we do not discourage you (at all events, intentionally) 
 from reading Macbeth, Othello, As Tou Like It, The 
 Tempest, any play you wish. In other years we * set' each 
 of these in its turn. But for this Year of Grace we insist 
 upon King John, The Merchant of Venice, King Henry IV, 
 Part I, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, King Lear, 
 'certain specified works' and so on, with other 
 courses of study. Why is this done? Be fair to us, 
 Gentlemen. We do it not only to accommodate the 
 burden to your backs, to avoid overtaxing one-and-a- 
 half or two years of study; not merely to guide you that 
 you do not dissipate your reading, that you shall with 
 us, at any rate know where you are. We do it chiefly, 
 and honestly you likewise being honest to give you 
 each year, in each prescribed course, a sound nucleus 
 of knowledge, out of which, later, your minds can
 
 On Reading for Examinations 77 
 
 reach to more. We are not, in the last instance, 
 praiseworthy or blameworthy for your range. I think, 
 perhaps, too little of a man's range in his short while 
 here between (say) nineteen and twenty-two. For any- 
 thing I care, the kernel may be as small as you please. 
 To plant it wholesome, for a while to tend it wholesome, 
 then to show it the sky and that it is wide not a hot- 
 house, nor a brassy cupola over a man, but an atmosphere 
 shining up league on league; to reach the moment of 
 saying 'All this now is yours, if you have the per- 
 severance as I have taught you the power, coelum nactus 
 es y hoc exorna': this, even in our present Tripos, we 
 endeavour to do. 
 
 Ill 
 
 All very well. But, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
 asked 
 
 Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers? 
 'Yes,' I hear you ingeminate; 'but what about Ex- 
 aminations? We thank you, sirs, for thus relieving and 
 guiding us: we acknowledge your excellent intentions. 
 But in practice you hang up a bachelor's gown and hood 
 on a pole, and right under and just in front of it you 
 set the examination-barrier. For this in practice we run 
 during three years or so, and to this all the time you 
 are exhorting, directing us whether you mean it or 
 not, though we suspect that you cannot help yourselves.' 
 Yes; and, as labouring swimmers will turn their eyes 
 even to a little boat in the offing, I hear you pant ' This 
 man at all events always so insistent that good litera- 
 ture teaches What Is rather than What Knows will
 
 j8 Lecture V 
 
 bring word that we may float on our backs, bathe, enjoy 
 these waters and be refreshed, instead of striving 
 through them competitive for a goal. He must condemn 
 literary examinations, nine-tenths of which treat Litera- 
 ture as matter of Knowledge merely.' 
 
 IV 
 
 I am sorry, Gentlemen : I cannot bring you so much 
 of comfort as all that. I have a love of the past which, 
 because it goes down to the roots, has sometimes been 
 called Radicalism: I could never consent with Bacon's 
 gibe at antiquity as pessimum augurium, and Examina- 
 tions have a very respectable antiquity. Indeed no 
 University to my knowledge has ever been able in 
 the long run to do without them: and although certain 
 Colleges King's College here, and New College at 
 Oxford for long persevered in the attempt, the result 
 was not altogether happy, and in the end they have 
 consigned with custom. 
 
 Of course Universities have experimented with the 
 process. Let me give you two or three ancient examples, 
 which may help you to see (to vary Wordsworth) that 
 though 'the Form decays, the function never dies.' 
 
 (i) I begin with most ancient Bologna, famous for 
 Civil Law. At Bologna the process of graduation of 
 admission to the jus docendi^ 'right to teach* con- 
 sisted of two parts, the Private Examination and the 
 Public (conventus): 
 
 The private Examination was the real test of competence, the 
 so-called public Examination being in practice a mere ceremony. 
 Before admission to each of these tests the candidate was pre- 
 sented by the Consiliarius of his Nation to the Rector for
 
 On Reading for Examinations 79 
 
 permission to enter it, and swore that he had complied with all 
 the statutable conditions, that he would give no more than the 
 statutable fees or entertainments to the Rector himself, the 
 Doctor, or his fellow-students, and that he would obey the 
 Rector. Within a period of eight days before the Examination 
 the candidate was presented by ' his own ' Doctor or by some 
 other Doctor or by two Doctors to the Archdeacon, the pre- 
 senting Doctor being required to have satisfied himself by private 
 examination of his presentee's fitness. Early on the morning of 
 the Examination, after attending a Mass of the Holy Ghost, the 
 candidate appeared before the assembled College and was as- 
 signed by one of the Doctors present two passages (puncta) in 
 the Civil or Canon Law as the case might be. He then retired 
 to his house to study the passages, in doing which it would appear 
 that he had the assistance of the presenting Doctor. Later in the 
 day the Doctors were summoned to the Cathedral, or some other 
 public building, by the Archdeacon, who presided over but took 
 no active part in the ensuing examination. The candidate was 
 then introduced to the Archdeacon and Doctors by the pre- 
 senting Doctor or Promotor as he was styled. The Prior of the 
 College then administered a number of oaths in which the candi- 
 date promised respect to that body and solemnly renounced all 
 the rights of which the College had succeeded in robbing all 
 Doctors of other Colleges not included in its ranks. The candidate 
 then gave a lecture or exposition of the two prepared passages: 
 after which he was examined upon them by two of the Doctors 
 appointed by the College. Other Doctors might ask supple- 
 mentary questions of Law (which they were required to swear 
 that they had not previously communicated to the candidate) 
 arising more indirectly out of the passages selected, or might 
 suggest objections to the answers. With a tender regard for the 
 feelings of their comrades at this * rigorous and tremendous 
 Examination ' (as they style it) the Statutes required the Ex- 
 aminer to treat the examinee as his own son. 
 
 But, knowing what we do of parental discipline in the
 
 8o Lecture V 
 
 Middle Ages, we need not take this to enjoin a weak 
 excess of leniency. 
 
 The Examination concluded, the votes of the Doctors present 
 were taken by ballot and the candidate's fate determined by the 
 majority, the decision being announced by the Archdeacon. 
 
 (2) Let us pass to the great and famous University 
 of Paris. At Paris 
 
 In 1275, if not earlier, a preliminary test (or ' Responsions ') 
 was instituted to ascertain the fitness of those who wanted to 
 take part in the public performance. At these 'Responsions' 
 which took place in the December before the Lent in which the 
 candidate was to determine, he had to dispute in Grammar and 
 Logic with a Master. If this test was passed in a satisfactory 
 manner, the candidate was admitted to the Examen Baccalari- 
 andorum^ Examination for the Baccalaureate, which was con- 
 ducted by a board of Examiners appointed by each Nation for 
 its own candidates. The duty of the Examiners was twofold, 
 firstly to ascertain by inspecting the schedules given by his 
 Masters that the candidate had completed the necessary residence 
 and attended Lectures in the prescribed subjects, and secondly 
 to examine him in the contents of his books. If he passed this 
 Examination, he was admitted to determine. 
 
 Determination was a great day in the student's University life. 
 It retained much of its primitive character of a student's festivity. 
 It was not, it would seem, till the middle of the fifteenth century 
 that the student's Master was required to be officially present 
 at it. The Speech-day of a Public School if combined with con- 
 siderably more than the license of the Oxford Encaenia or degree 
 day here in May week would perhaps be the nearest modern 
 equivalent of these medieval exhibitions of rising talent. Every 
 effort was made to attract to the Schools as large an audience as 
 possible, not merely of Masters or fellow-students, but if possible 
 of ecclesiastical dignitaries and other distinguished persons. The 
 friends of a Determiner who was not successful in drawing a
 
 On Reading for Examinations 81 
 
 more distinguished audience, would run out into the streets and 
 forcibly drag chance passers-by into the School. Wine was pro- 
 vided at the Determiner's expense in the Schools: and the day 
 ended in a feast [given in imitation of the Master's Inception- 
 banquets], even if dancing or torch-light processions were for- 
 borne in deference to authority. 
 
 I may add here in parenthesis that the thirstiness, 
 always so remarkable in the medieval man whether it 
 make him strange to you or help to ingratiate him as 
 a human brother, seems to have followed him even into 
 the Tripos. 'It was not only after a University exer- 
 cise,' says the historian (Rashdall, Vol. n, p. 687) 'but 
 during its progress that the need of refreshment was 
 apt to be felt.... Many Statutes allude some by way 
 of prohibition, but not always to the custom of pro- 
 viding wine for the Examiners or Temptator [good 
 word] before, during, or after the Examination. At 
 Heidelberg the Dean of the Faculty might order in 
 drinks, the candidate not. At Leipsic the candidate is 
 forbidden to treat [facere propinam] the Examiners be- 
 fore the Examination: which seems sound. At Vienna 
 (medical school) he is required to spend a florin "pro 
 confectionibus" ' 
 
 V 
 
 Now when we come to England that is, to Oxford 
 and Cambridge, which ever had queer ways of their 
 own we find, strange to say, for centuries no evidence 
 at all of any kind of examination. As for competitive 
 examinations like the defunct Mathematical and Clas- 
 sical Triposes here with Senior Wranglers, Wooden 
 g.c. 6
 
 82 Lecture V 
 
 Spoons and what lay between of all European Uni- 
 versities, Louvain alone used the system and may have 
 invented it. At Louvain the candidates for theMastership 
 were placed in three classes, in each of which the names 
 were arranged in order of merit. The first class were 
 styled Rigorosi (Honour-men), the second Transibiles 
 (Pass-men), the third Gratiosi (Charity-passes) ; while a 
 fourth class, not publicly announced, contained the 
 names of those who could not be passed on any terms. 
 'Si autem (quod absit!\* says the Statute, * aliqui in- 
 veniantur refutabiles, erunt de quarto ordine? 'These 
 competitive examinations' I proceed in the historian's 
 words 'contributed largely to raise Louvain to the 
 high position as a place of learning and education which 
 it retained before the Universities were roused from 
 their I5th century torpor by the revival of Learning.' 
 Pope Adrian VI was one of its famous Primuses, and 
 Jansen another. The College which produced a Primus 
 enjoyed three days' holiday, during which its bell was 
 rung continuously day and night. 
 
 At Oxford and Cambridge (I repeat) we find in their 
 early days no trace of any examination at all. To be 
 sure and as perhaps you know the first archives of 
 this University were burned in the 'Town and Gown' 
 riots of 1381 by the Townsmen, whose descendants 
 Erasmus describes genially as 'combining the utmost 
 rusticity with the utmost malevolence.' But no student 
 will doubt that Cambridge used pretty much the same 
 system as Oxford, and the system was this: When a 
 candidate presented himself before the Chancellor for 
 a License in Arts, he had to swear that he had heard
 
 On Reading for Examinations 83 
 
 certain books 1 , and nine Regent Masters (besides his 
 own Master, who presented him) were required to 
 depose to their knowledge (de scientia) of his suffi- 
 ciency : and five others to their credence (de credulitate\ 
 says the Statute. Only in the School of Theology was 
 no room allowed to credulity : there all the Masters had 
 to depose 'of their knowledge,' and one black ball ex- 
 cluded. 
 
 VI 
 
 Well, you may urge that this method has a good deal 
 to be said for it. I will go some way to meet you too : 
 but first you must pay me the compliment of supposing 
 me a just man. Being a just man, and there also being 
 presumed in me some acquaintance with English 
 Literature not indeed much not necessarily much 
 but enough to distinguish good writing from bad or, 
 at any rate, real writing from sham, and at least to have 
 an inkling of what these poets and prose-writers were 
 trying to do why then I declare to you that, after two 
 years' reading with a man and talk with him about 
 literature, I should have a far better sense of his in- 
 dustry, of his capacity, of his performance and (better) 
 of his promise, than any examination is likely to yield 
 
 1 Why had he to swear this under pain of excommunication, when the 
 lecturer could so easily keep a roll-call? But the amount of oathtaking 
 in a medieval University was prodigious. Even College servants were 
 put on oath for their duties: Gyps invited their own damnation, 
 bed-makers kissed the book. Abroad, where examinations were held, 
 the Examiner swore not to take a bribe, the Candidate neither to give 
 one, nor, if unsuccessful, to take his vengeance on the Examiner 
 with a knife or other sharp instrument. At New College, Oxford, 
 the matriculating undergraduate was required to swear in particular 
 not to dance in the College Chapel. 
 
 6 a
 
 84 Lecture V 
 
 me. In short I could sign him up for a first, second or 
 third class, or as refutabilis, with more accuracy and con- 
 fidence than I could derive from taking him as a stranger 
 and pondering his three or four days' performance in 
 a Tripos. For some of the best men mature slowly: and 
 some, if not most, of the best writers write slowly be- 
 cause they have a conscience; and the most original 
 minds are just those for whom, in a literary examination, 
 it is hardest to set a paper. 
 
 But the process (you will admit) might be invidious, 
 might lend itself to misunderstanding, might conceiv- 
 ably even lead to re-imposition of an oath forbidding 
 the use of a knife or other sharp implement. And 
 among Colleges rivalry is not altogether unknown; 
 and dons, if unlike other men in outward aspect, 
 sometimes resemble them in frailty; and in short I am 
 afraid we shall have to stick to the old system for a 
 while longer. I am sorry, Gentlemen : but you see how 
 it works. 
 
 VII 
 
 Yet and I admit it the main objection abides: 
 that, while Literature deals with What Is rather than 
 with What Knows, Examinations by their very nature 
 test mere Knowledge rather than anything else : that in 
 the hands of a second-rate examiner they tend to test 
 knowledge alone, or what passes for knowledge: and 
 that in the very run of this world most examiners will 
 be second-rate men : which, if we remind ourselves that 
 they receive the pay of fifth-rate ones is, after all, con- 
 siderably better than we have a right to expect.
 
 On Reading for Examinations 85 
 
 We are dealing, mind you, with English Literature 
 our own literature. In examining upon a foreign 
 literature we can artfully lay our stress upon Knowledge 
 and yet neither raise nor risk raising the fatal questions 
 'What is it all about?' 'What is it, and why is it */?' 
 since merely to translate literally a chorus of the 
 Agamemnon, or an ode of Pindar's, or a passage from 
 Dante or Moliere is a creditable performance; to trans- 
 late either well is a considerable feat; and to translate 
 either perfectly is what you can't do, and the examiner 
 knows you can't do, and you know the examiner can't 
 do, and the examiner knows you know he can't do. But 
 when we come to a fine thing in our own language 
 to a stanza from Shelley's Adonais for instance: 
 
 He has outsoared the shadow of our night; 
 
 Envy and calumny and hate and pain, 
 And that unrest which men miscall delight, 
 
 Can touch him not and torture not again; 
 
 From the contagion of the world's slow stain 
 He is secure, and now can never mourn 
 
 A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain; 
 Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, 
 With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. 
 
 what can you do with that? How can you examine on 
 that? Well, yes, you can request the candidate, to * Write 
 a short note on the word calumny above,' or ask 'From 
 what is it derived?' 'What does he know of BlackwoocTs 
 Magazine?' 'Can he quote any parallel allusion in 
 Byron ? ' You can ask all that : but you are not getting 
 within measurable distance of it. Your mind is not even 
 moving on the right plane. Or let me turn back to some
 
 86 
 
 Lecture V 
 
 light and artless Elizabethan thing say to the Oenone 
 duet in Peele's Arraignment of Paris : 
 
 Oenone. Fair and fair and twice so fair, 
 
 As fair as any may be: 
 The fairest shepherd on our green, 
 
 A love for any lady. 
 Paris. Fair and fair and twice so fair, 
 
 As fair as any may be: 
 Thy love is fair for thee alone, 
 
 And for no other lady. 
 Oenone. My love is fair, my love is gay, 
 
 As fresh as bin the flowers in May, 
 And of my love my roundelay, 
 My merry merry merry roundelay 
 
 Concludes with Cupid's curse: 
 They that do change old love for new, 
 
 Pray gods they change for worse.... 
 My love can pipe, my love can sing, 
 My love can many a pretty thing, 
 And of his lovely praises ring 
 My merry merry merry roundelays: 
 
 ''Amen ' to Cupid's curse: 
 They that do change old love for new, 
 
 Pray gods they change for worse. 
 Ambo. Fair and fair and twice so fair, 
 
 As fair as any may be: 
 The fairest shepherd on our green, 
 
 A love for any lady.... 
 
 How can anyone examine on that* How can anyone 
 solemnly explain, in a hurry, answering one of five or six 
 questions selected from a three hours' paper, just why 
 and howthat hits him? And yet, if it hit him not, he is lost. 
 If even so simple a thing as that a thing of silly sooth 
 do not hit him, he is all unfit to traffic with literature.
 
 On Reading for Examinations 87 
 
 VIII 
 
 You see how delicate a business it is. Examination in 
 Literature, being by its very nature so closely tied down 
 to be a test of Knowledge, can hardly, save when used by 
 genius, with care, be any final test of that which is better 
 than Knowledge, of that which is the crown of all 
 scholarship, of understanding. 
 
 But do not therefore lose heart, even in your reading 
 for strict purposes of examination. Our talk is of 
 reading. Let me fetch you some comfort from the sister 
 and correlative, but harder, art of writing. 
 
 I most potently believe that the very best writing, in 
 verse or in prose, can only be produced in moments of 
 high excitement, or rather (as I should put it) in those 
 moments of still and solemn awe into which a noble 
 excitement lifts a man. Let me speak only of prose, of 
 which you may more cautiously allow this than of verse. 
 I think of St Paul's glorious passage, as rendered in the 
 Authorised version, concluding the 1 5th chapter of his 
 First Epistle to the Corinthians. First, as you know, 
 comes the long, swaying, scholastic, somewhat sophisti- 
 cated argument about the evidence of resurrection; 
 about the corn, 'that which thou sowest,' the vivifica- 
 tion, the change in vivification, and the rest. All this, 
 almost purely argumentative, should be read quietly, 
 with none of the bravura which your prize reader 
 lavishes on it. The argument works up quietly at once 
 tensely and sinuously, but very quietly to conviction. 
 Then comes the hush; and then the authoritative voice 
 speaking out of it, awful and slow, ' Behold, I shew you
 
 88 Lecture V 
 
 a mystery'... and then, all the latent emotion of faith 
 taking hold and lifting the man on its surge, 'For the 
 trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incor- 
 ruptible'... and so, incorruption tolling down corrup- 
 tion, the trumpet smashes death underfoot in victory: 
 until out of the midst of tumult, sounds the recall; 
 sober, measured, claiming the purified heart back to 
 discipline. 'Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye 
 stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work 
 of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is 
 not in vain in the Lord.' 
 
 I think of that triumphant passage. I think of the 
 sentences with which Isaak Walton ends his life of 
 Donne. I think of the last pages of Motley's Dutch 
 Republic, with its eulogy on William the Silent so ex- 
 quisitely closing: 
 
 As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave 
 nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets. 
 
 I think of two great prose passages in Thackeray's 
 Esmond \ of Landor's Dream of Boccaccio... and so on: 
 and I am sure that, in prose or in verse, the best that 
 man can utter flows from him either in moments of 
 high mental excitement or in the hush of that Altitudo 
 to which high excitement lifts him. 
 
 But, first now, observe how all these passages and 
 they are the first I call to mind rise like crests on a 
 large bulk of a wave St Paul's on a labouring argu- 
 ment about immortality; Motley's at the conclusion of 
 a heavy task. Long campaigning brings the reward of 
 Harry Esmond's return to Castlewood, long intrigue
 
 On Reading for Examinations 89 
 
 of the author's mind with his characters closes that 
 febrile chapter in which Harry walks home to break 
 the news of the death of the Duke of Hamilton in 
 the early morning through Kensington, where the news- 
 boys are already shouting it: 
 
 The world was going to its business again, although dukes lay 
 dead and ladies mourned for them... So day and night pass away, 
 and to-morrow comes, and our place knows us not. Esmond 
 thought of the courier now galloping on the north road to 
 inform him, who was Earl of Arran yesterday, that he was Duke 
 of Hamilton to-day, and of a thousand great schemes, hopes, 
 ambitions, that were alive in the gallant heart, beating but a few 
 hours since, and now in a little dust quiescent. 
 
 And on top of this let me assure you that in writing, or 
 learning to write, solid daily practice is the prescription 
 and 'waiting upon inspiration' a lure. These crests 
 only rise on the back of constant labour. Nine days, 
 according to Homer, Leto travailed with Apollo: 
 but he was Apollo, lord of Song. I know this to be true 
 of ordinary talent: but, supposing you all to be 
 geniuses, I am almost as sure that it holds of genius. 
 Listen to this: 
 
 Napoleon I used to say that battles were won by the sudden 
 flashing of an idea through the brain of a commander at a certain 
 critical instant. The capacity for generating this sudden electric 
 spark was military genius Napoleon seems always to have 
 counted upon it, always to have believed that when the critical 
 moment arrived the wild confusion of the battlefield would be 
 illuminated for him by that burst of sudden flame. But if 
 Napoleon had been ignorant of the prosaic business of his pro- 
 fession, to which he attended more closely than any other commander^
 
 90 Lecture V 
 
 would these moments of supreme clearness have availed him, or 
 would they have come to him at all? 
 
 My author thinks not: and I am sure he is right. So, 
 in writing, only out of long preparation can come the 
 truly triumphant flash: and I ask you to push this 
 analogy further, into the business of reading, even of 
 reading for examination. You learn to discipline your- 
 selves, you acquire the art of marshalling, of concen- 
 trating, driving your knowledge upon a point: and 
 for you are young that point is by no means the final 
 point. Say that it is only an examination, and silly at 
 that. Still you have been learning the art, you have 
 been training yourself to be, for a better purpose, 
 effective. 
 
 IX 
 
 Yet, and when this has been granted, the crucial 
 question abides and I must not shirk it ' you say that 
 the highest literature deals with What Is rather than 
 with What Knows. It is all very fine to assure us that 
 testing our knowledge about Literature and around 
 Literature, and on this side or that side of Literature, 
 is healthy for us in some oblique way: but can you 
 examiners examine, or can you not, on Literature 
 in what you call its own and proper category of 
 What Is?' 
 
 So I hear the question the question which beats 
 and has beaten, over and over again, good men trying 
 to construct Schools of English in our Universities. 
 
 With all sense of a responsibility, of a difficulty, that 
 has lain on my mind for these five years, I answer,
 
 On Reading for Examinations 91 
 
 Gentlemen,' Yes, we ought : yes, we can : and yes, we 
 will.' 
 
 But, for the achievement, we teachers must first know 
 how to teach. When that is learned, Examination will 
 come as a consequent, easy, almost trivial matter. I will, 
 for example having already allowed how hard it is to 
 examine on literature take the difficulty at its very 
 extreme. I will select a piece of poetry, and the poet 
 shall be Keats on whom, if on any one, is felt the 
 temptation to write gush and loose aesthetic chatter. 
 A pupil comes to read with me, and I open at the 
 famous Ode to a Grecian Urn. 
 
 (1) We read it through together, perhaps twice; at 
 the second attempt getting the emphasis right, and some, 
 at any rate, of the modulations of voice. So we reach 
 a working idea of the Ode and what Keats meant it 
 to be. 
 
 (2) We then compare it with his other Odes, and 
 observe that it is (a) regular in stanza form, () in spite 
 of its outburst in the 3rd stanza 'More happy love! 
 more happy, happy love' etc. much severer in tone 
 than, e.g., the Ode to a Nightingale or the Ode to Psyche, 
 (c) that the emotion is not luscious, but simple, (d) that 
 this simplicity is Hellenic, so far as Keats can compass 
 it, and (<?) eminently well-suited to its subject, which is 
 a carven urn, gracious but severe of outline; a moment 
 of joy caught by the sculptor and arrested, for time to 
 perpetuate; yet and this is the point of the Ode 
 conveying a sense that innocent gaiety is not only its own 
 excuse, but of human things one of the few eternal 
 and eternal just because it is joyous and fleeting.
 
 92 Lecture V 
 
 (3) Then we go back and compare this kind of quiet 
 immortal beauty with the passionate immortality 
 hymned in the Nightingale Ode 
 
 Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! 
 
 No hungry generations tread thee down... 
 with all the rest of that supreme stanza: from which 
 (with some passages my reading supplies to illustrate 
 the difference) we fall to contrasting the vibrating 
 thrill of the Nightingale with the happy grace of the 
 Grecian Urn and, allowing each to be appropriate, dis- 
 pute for a while, perhaps, over the merits of classical 
 calm and romantic thrill. 
 
 (4) From this we proceed to examine the Ode in 
 detail line by line : which examination brings up a whole 
 crowd of questions, such as 
 
 (a) We have a thought enounced in the first stanza. 
 Does the Ode go on to develop and amplify it, as an 
 Ode should ? Or does Pegasus come down again and 
 again on the prints from which he took off? If he do 
 this, and the action of the Ode be dead and unpro- 
 gressive, is the defect covered by beauty of language? 
 Can such defect ever be so covered? 
 
 (j3) Lines 15 and 16 anticipate lines 21 24, which 
 are saying the same thing and getting no forwarder, 
 (y) We come to the lines 
 
 What little town by river or sea shore, 
 Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, 
 
 Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? 
 with the answering lines 
 
 And, little town, thy streets for evermore 
 Will silent be; and not a soul to tell 
 Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
 
 On Reading for Examinations 93 
 
 and we note Sir Sidney Colvin's suggestion that this 
 breaks in upon an arrest of art as though it were an arrest 
 on reality: and remember that he raised a somewhat 
 similar question over The Nightingale-, and comparing 
 them, discuss truth of emotion against truth of reality. 
 
 We come to the last stanza and lament 'O Attic 
 shape! Fair attitude' for its jingle: but note how the 
 poet recovers himself and brings the whole to a grand 
 close. 
 
 I have, even yet, mentioned but a few of the points. 
 For one, I have omitted its most beautiful vowel-play, 
 on which teacher and pupil can dwell and learn to- 
 gether. And heaven forbid that as a teacher I should 
 insist even on half of those I have indicated. A teacher, 
 as I hold, should watch for what his pupil divines of 
 his own accord; but if, trafficking with works of inspira- 
 tion, he have no gift to catch that inspiration nor power 
 to pass it on, then I say ' Heaven help him ! but he has 
 no valid right on earth to be in the business.' 
 
 And if a teacher have all these chances of teaching 
 mind you, of accurate teaching supplied him by a 
 single Ode of Keats, do you suppose we cannot set in 
 an Examination paper one intelligent question upon it, 
 in its own lawful category? 
 
 Gentlemen, with the most scrupulous tenderness for 
 aged and even decrepit interests, we have been trying 
 to liberate you from certain old bad superstitions and 
 silently laying the stones of a new School of English, 
 which we believe to be worthy even of Cambridge. 
 
 Our proposals are before the University. Should 
 they be passed, still everything will depend on the
 
 94 Lecture V 
 
 loyalty of its teachers to the idea; and on that enthusiasm 
 which I suppose to be the nurse of all studies and know 
 to be the authentic cherishing nurse of ours. We may 
 even have conceded too much to the letter, but we have 
 built and built our trust on the spirit 'which maketh 
 alive.'
 
 LECTURE VI 
 ON A SCHOOL OF ENGLISH 
 
 WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1917 
 I 
 
 TT is now, Gentlemen, five years less a term since, 
 L feeling (as they say of other offenders) my position 
 acutely, I had the honour of reading an Inaugural before 
 this University and the impudence to loose, in the course 
 of it, a light shaft against a phrase in the very Ordinance 
 defining the duties of this Chair. 
 
 * It shall be the duty of the Professor,' says the Ordinance, 
 * 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.' 
 
 That was the phrase at which I glanced 'the subject 
 of English Literature'; and I propose that we start 
 to-day, for reasons that will appear, by subjecting this 
 subject to some examination. 
 
 II 
 
 *The Subject of English Literature.' Surely for a 
 start there is no such thing ; or rather, may we not say 
 that everything is, has been or can be, a subject of 
 English Literature? Man's loss of Paradise has been 
 a subject of English Literature, and so has been a 
 Copper Coinage in Ireland, and so has been Roast
 
 g6 Lecture VI 
 
 Sucking-pig, and so has been Holy Dying, and so has 
 been Mr Pepys's somewhat unholy living, and so have 
 been Ecclesiastical Polity, The Grail, Angling for Chub, 
 The Wealth of Nations, The Sublime and the Beautiful, 
 TheDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Prize-Fights, 
 Grecian Urns, Modern Painters, Intimations of Im- 
 mortality in early Childhood, Travels with a Donkey, 
 Rural Rides and Rejected Addresses all these have 
 been subjects of English Literature : as have been human 
 complots and intrigues as wide asunder as Othello and 
 The School for Scandal\ persons as different as Prome- 
 theus and Dr Johnson, Imogen and Moll Flanders, 
 Piers the Plowman and Mr Pickwick; places as different 
 as Utopia and Cranford, Laputa and Reading Gaol. 
 Epipsychidion is literature : but so is A Tale of a Tub. 
 Listen, for this is literature: 
 
 If some king of the earth have so large an extent of dominion, 
 in north, and south, so that he hath winter and summer together 
 in his dominions, so large an extent east and west as that he hath 
 day and night together in his dominions, much more hath God 
 mercy and j udgement together : He brought light out of darkness, 
 not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy summer out of winter, 
 though thou have no spring; though in the ways of fortune, or 
 understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, 
 wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and be- 
 numbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to 
 thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the 
 spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the 
 sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his 
 mercies, and all times are his seasons 1 . 
 
 1 Donne's Sermon II preached at Pauls upon Christmas Day, in the 
 Evening. 1624.
 
 On a School of English 97 
 
 But listen again, for this also is literature: 
 
 A sweet disorder in the dress 
 
 Kindles in clothes a wantonness: 
 
 A lawn about the shoulders thrown 
 
 Into a fine distraction: 
 
 An erring lace, which here and there 
 
 Enthrals the crimson stomacher: 
 
 A cuff neglectful, and thereby 
 
 Ribbons to flow confusedly: 
 
 A winning wave, deserving note, 
 
 In the tempestuous petticoat: 
 
 A careless shoe-string, in whose tie 
 
 I see a wild civility: 
 
 Do more bewitch me than when art 
 
 Is too precise in every part. 
 
 Here again is literature: 
 
 When I was a child, at seven years old, my friends on a 
 holiday filled my pockets with coppers. I went directly to a shop 
 where they sold toys for children; and being charmed with the 
 sound of a whistle that I met by the way in the hands of another 
 boy, I voluntarily offered him all my money for one. I then came 
 home and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with 
 my whistle but disturbing all the family. My brothers and sisters 
 and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I 
 had given four times as much for it as it was worth The re- 
 flection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure. 
 
 [BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.] 
 
 Of a bridal, this is literature : 
 
 Open the temple gates unto my love, 
 Open them wide that she may enter in ! 
 
 But so also is Suckling's account of a wedding that 
 begins 
 
 I tell thee, Dick, where I have been. 
 0-c. 7
 
 gg Lecture VI 
 
 This is literature: 
 
 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. 
 
 But so is this literature: 
 
 One circle cannot touch another circle on the outside at more 
 points than one. 
 
 For, if it be possible, let the circle ACK touch the circle ABC 
 at the points A^ C. Join AC. 
 
 Then because the two points .//, C are in the circumference of 
 the circle ACK the line which joins them falls within that circle. 
 
 But the circle ACK is without the circle ABC. Therefore 
 the straight line AC is without the circle ABC. 
 
 But because the two points A^ C are in the circumference of 
 ABC therefore the straight line AC falls within that circle. 
 Which is absurd. 
 
 Therefore one circle cannot touch another on the outside at 
 more points than one. 
 
 All thoughts, as well as all passions, all delights 
 votum, timor^ ira, voluptas 
 
 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 God 
 forbid it should ever not be so! 
 
 Ill 
 
 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 ac-
 
 On a School of English 99 
 
 cepted 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 pass 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 de- 
 liver 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, com- 
 merce of clothing, and so on, up to commerce in know- 
 ledge 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 English- 
 man'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 
 
 72
 
 TOO Lecture VI 
 
 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 sur- 
 vive 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 assume 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 pos- 
 sessed with Johnson, Shelley 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
 
 On a School of English 101 
 
 two writers who are excellent because possessed with a 
 passion 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. 
 
 I believe the following to be a fair account of how 
 these examinations in English Language and Litera- 
 ture came to pass, and how a certain kind of student 
 came to pass 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 seven- 
 ties 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 per- 
 haps Chaucer's Prologue and a Speech of Burke. In
 
 IO2 Lecture VI 
 
 the great Public Schools no English Literature was 
 studied, save in those which had invented 'Modern 
 Sides/ to prepare boys specially for Woolwich or Sand- 
 hurst or the Indian Civil Service; for entrance to which 
 examinations were held on certain prescribed English 
 Classics, and marks mainly given for acquaintance with 
 the editors' notes. 
 
 In the Universities, the study of English Classics 
 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 Classical Educa- 
 tion (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 classics with a hability 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 in- 
 structors would continue, * with the classics 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 ruTrrro, " I beat," 
 until he, too, reaches the summit and beholds the landscape: 
 
 But O, what labour! 
 
 O Prince, what pain!'
 
 On a School of English 103 
 
 Now so much of truth, Gentlemen, as this plea con- 
 tains was admitted last term by your Senate, in sepa- 
 rating 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.'
 
 IO4 Lecture VI 
 
 'But,' he confessed, 'at So-and-so' naming the great 
 Public School ' we never wrote out an account of any- 
 thing, 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 Classical 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 classics, 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 sym- 
 pathy 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 Classics could put up a stout 
 defence upon any of those names. To choose the for- 
 lornest hope of the three, I can hear him demonstrating, 
 to his own satisfaction if not to yours, that Bunyan took
 
 On a School of English 105 
 
 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 scholarship of fifty scholars ex- 
 pressed and blended. 
 
 But, as a theory, the strict classical 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 Mediter- 
 ranean sources which are the well-heads of our civilisa- 
 tion : 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 classical 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 to- 
 gether, and had read no English authors ; but disastrous 
 even to highly eminent scholars. Listen, pray, to this 
 passage from one of them, Frederick Paley, who con- 
 descended (Heaven knows why) to turn the majestic 
 verse of Pindar into English Prose 
 
 From the Vlllth 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
 
 io6 Lecture VI 
 
 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 home- 
 stead 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 clusters 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 ex- 
 orbitant 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 rehearse these names now but in 
 deepest respect? Oh, believe me, Gentlemen ! they were 
 wonderful fighters in a cause that at first seemed hope- 
 less. 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 responsi- 
 bilities of this Chair. I worship great learning, which
 
 On a School of English 107 
 
 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 pushing 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 what- 
 ever, 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. 
 
 (p) 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 cumbering simple texts with philological 
 notes; on which, rather than on the text, we unhappy 
 students were carefully examined. For an example sup-
 
 io8 Lecture VI 
 
 plied to Dr Corson I take those three lines of Cowper's 
 Task (Ek i, 8688): 
 
 Thus first necessity invented stools, 
 Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs, 
 And luxury th' accomplish'd SOFA last. 
 
 Now in these three lines the word 'accomplished* 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 fashion ; composed long 
 sentences painfully innocent of any word not derivable 
 from Anglo-Saxon, sentences in which the c impenetra- 
 bility of matter' became the 4 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 kinship and 
 went on spelling Alfred with an A. 
 
 (d} They were I suppose through opposition ex- 
 tremely irascible men ; like farmers. Urbanity was the last 
 note in their gamut, the City urbs quam dicuntRomam 
 the last of places in their ken. There was no engaging
 
 On a School of English 109 
 
 them in dialectic, an Athenian art which they frankly 
 despised. If you happened to disagree with them, their 
 answer was a sturdy 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 ' passim) 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 con- 
 tain anyone ignorant of the published Transactions 
 of the Wiltshire Walking Club, Vol. HI, p. 159 
 Puddlehampton^ its Rise and Decline^ with a note on 
 Vespasian ?' 
 
 (e) These pioneers pushing 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 
 classical 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 Lan- 
 guage and Literature into their hands, and then you get 
 the fallacy full-flowered into a convention. English
 
 no Lecture VI 
 
 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 class-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 ail- 
 ments, 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 sexton, 
 And the sexton toll'd the bell. 
 
 But when it comes to writing; to keeping bright the noble 
 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 con- 
 tinuing 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
 
 On a School of English in 
 
 news is that these cooks, of whom Chaucer wrote pro- 
 phetically 
 
 These cookes, how they stampe and streyne and grinde, 
 And turnen substaunce into accident, 
 
 have formed themselves into professional Associations 
 to protect 'the study of the subject of English Litera- 
 ture ' and bark off any intruder who would teach in 
 another way than theirs. 
 
 VII 
 
 But I say to you that Literature is not, and should 
 not be, the preserve of any priesthood. To write English, 
 so as to make Literature, may be hard. But English 
 Literature is not a mystery, not a Professors' Kitchen. 
 
 And the trouble lies, not in the harm professionising 
 does to schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, but in the 
 harm it does 'in widest commonalty spread* among 
 men and women who, as Literature was written for them, 
 addressed to them, ought to find in it, all their lives 
 through, a retirement from mean occupations, a well of 
 refreshment, sustainment in the daily drudgery of life, 
 solace in calamity, an inmate by the hearth, ever so- 
 ciable, never intrusive to be sought and found, to be 
 found and dropped at will : 
 
 Men, when their affairs require, 
 Must themselves at whiles retire; 
 Sometimes hunt, and sometimes hawk, 
 And not ever sit and talk 
 
 to be dropped at will and left without any answering 
 growl of moroseness ; to be consulted again at will and 
 found friendly.
 
 ii2 Lecture VI 
 
 For this is the trouble ofprofessiomsing'Litcra.ture. We 
 exile it from the business of life, in which it would ever 
 be at our shoulder, to befriend us. Listen, for example, 
 to an extract from a letter written, a couple of weeks 
 ago, by somebody in the Charity Commission: 
 
 Sir, 
 
 With reference to previous correspondence in this 
 matter, I am to say that in all the circumstances of this case the 
 Commissioners are of the opinion that it would be desirable that 
 a public enquiry in connection with the Charity should be held 
 in the locality. 
 
 And the man very likely an educated man having 
 written that^ very likely went home and read Chaucer, 
 Dante, or Shakespeare, or Burke for pleasure! That is 
 what happens when you treat literature as a * subject,' 
 separable from life and daily practice. 
 
 VIII 
 
 I declare to you that Literature was not written for 
 schoolmasters, nor for schoolmistresses. I would not ex- 
 change it for a wilderness of schoolmasters. It should 
 be delivered from them, who, with their silly Ablauts 
 and 'tendencies,' can themselves neither read nor write. 
 For the proof? Having the world's quintessential 
 store of mirth and sharp sorrow, wit, humour, comfort, 
 farce, comedy, tragedy, satire; the glories of our 
 birth and state, piled all at their elbows, only one man 
 of the crowd and he M. Jusserand, a Frenchman 
 has contrived to draw out of the mass one interesting 
 well-written history of the * subject.'
 
 On a School of English 113 
 
 IX 
 
 Is there, then, no better way ? Yes there is a better 
 way: for the French have it, with their language and 
 literature. In France, as Matthew Arnold noted, a 
 generation ago, the ordinary journey-man work of 
 literature is done far better and more conscientiously 
 than with us. In France a man feels it almost a personal 
 stain, an unpatriotic Iache> to write even on a police- 
 order anything so derogatory to the tradition of his 
 language as our Cabinet Ministers read out as answers 
 to our House of Commons. I am told that many a 
 Maire in a small provincial town in N.E. France, even 
 when overwhelmed accable with the sufferings of his 
 town-folk, has truly felt the iron enter into his soul on 
 being forced to sign a document written out for him in 
 the invaders' French. 
 
 Cannot we treat our noble inheritance of literature 
 and language as scrupulously, and with as high a sense 
 of their appertaining to our national honour, as a French- 
 man cherishes his language, his literature? Cannot we 
 study to leave our inheritance as the old Athenian put 
 it temperately, ' not worse but a little better than we 
 found it '? 
 
 I think we can, and should. I shall close to-day, 
 Gentlemen, with the most modest of perorations. In 
 my first lecture before you, in January 1913, I quoted 
 to you the artist in Don Quixote who, being asked what 
 animal he was painting, answered diffidently * That is as 
 it may turn out.' 
 
 The teaching of our language and literature is, after 
 
 Q.C. 8
 
 H4 Lecture VI 
 
 all, a new thing and still experimental. The main tenets 
 of those who, aware of this, have worked on the scheme 
 for a School of English in Cambridge, the scheme re- 
 cently passed by your Senate and henceforth to be in 
 operation, are three: 
 
 The first. That literature cannot be divorced from 
 life : that (for example) you cannot understand Chaucer 
 aright, unless you have the background, unless you 
 know the kind of men for whom Chaucer wrote and 
 the kind of men whom he made speak; that is the 
 national side with which all our literature is concerned. 
 
 The second. Literature being so personal a thing, you 
 cannot understand it until you have some personal 
 understanding of the men who wrote it. Donne is 
 Donne; Swift, Swift; Pope, Pope; Johnson, Johnson; 
 Goldsmith, Goldsmith; Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb; 
 Carlyle, Carlyle. Until you have grasped those men, as 
 men, you cannot grasp their writings. That isthepersonaJ 
 side of literary study, and as necessary as the other. 
 
 The third. That the writing and speaking of English 
 is a living art, to be practised and (if it may be) im- 
 proved. That what these great men have done is to hand 
 us a grand patrimony; that they lived to support us 
 through the trial we are now enduring, and to carry us 
 through to great days to come. So shall our sons, now 
 fighting in France, have a language ready for the land 
 they shall recreate and repeople.
 
 I 
 
 LECTURE VII 
 
 THE VALUE OF GREEK AND LATIN IN 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1918 
 I 
 
 HAVE promised you, Gentlemen, for to-day some 
 observations on The Value of Greek and Latin in 
 English Literature', a mild, academic title, a camouflage 
 title, so to say; calculated to shelter us for a while from 
 the vigilance of those hot-eyed reformers who, had I 
 advertised The Value of Greek and Latin in English 
 Life might even now be swooping from all quarters of 
 the sky on a suggestion that these dry bones yet were 
 flesh : for the eyes I dread are not only red and angry, 
 but naturally microscopic and that indeed, if they 
 only knew it, is their malady. Yet ' surely ' groaned 
 patient Job, * there is a path which the vulture's eye 
 hath not seen ! ' 
 
 You, at any rate, know by this time that wherever 
 these lectures assert literature they assert life, perhaps 
 even too passionately, allowing neither the fact of death 
 nor the possibility of divorce. 
 
 II 
 
 But let us begin with the first word, ' Value ' ' The 
 Value of Greek and Latin in English Literature.' What 
 do I mean by ' Value'? Well, I use it, generally, in the 
 
 82
 
 n6 Lecture VII 
 
 sense of ' worth ' ; but with a particular meaning, or 
 shade of meaning, too. And, this particular meaning 
 is not the particular meaning intended (as I suppose) 
 by men of commerce who, on news of a friend's death, 
 fall a-musing and continue musing until the fire kindles, 
 and they ask 'What did So-and-so die worth?' or 
 sometimes, more wisely than they know, ' What did 
 poor old So-and-so die worth? ' or again, more collo- 
 quially, ' What did So-and-so " cut up " for? ' Neither 
 is it that which more disinterested economists used to 
 teach; men never (I fear me) loved, but anyhow lost 
 awhile, who for my green unknowing youth, at Thebes 
 or Athens growing older I tend to forget which is, 
 or was, which defined the Value of a thing as its ' pur- 
 chasing power ' which the market translates into 
 * price.' For to borrow a phrase which I happened on, 
 the other day, with delight, in the preface to a transla- 
 tion of Lucian there may be forms of education less 
 paying than the commercial and yet better worth paying 
 for; nay, above payment or computation in price 1 . 
 
 No: the particular meaning I use to-day is that 
 which artists use when they talk of painting or of 
 music. To see things, near or far, in their true per- 
 spective and proportions ; to judge them through dis- 
 tance; and fetching them back, to reproduce them in 
 art so proportioned comparatively, so rightly adjusted, 
 that they combine to make a particular and just per- 
 spective: that is to give things their true Values. 
 
 Suppose yourself reclining on a bank on a clear day, 
 
 1 The Works of Lucian of Samosata: translated by H. W. Fowler 
 and F. G. Fowler (Introduction, p. xxix). Oxford, Clarendon Press.
 
 Greek, Latin and English 117 
 
 looking up into the sky and watching the ascent of a 
 skylark while you listen to his song. That is a posture 
 in which several poets of repute have placed themselves 
 from time to time: so we need not be ashamed of it. 
 Well, you see the atmosphere reaching up and up, mile 
 upon mile. There are no milestones planted there. But, 
 wave on wave perceptible, the atmosphere stretches up 
 through indeterminate distances ; and according as your 
 painter of the sky can translate these distances, he gives 
 his sky what is called Value. 
 
 You listen to the skylark's note rising, spiral by spiral, 
 on * the very jet of earth ' : 
 
 As up he wings the spiral stair, 
 
 A song of light, and pierces air 
 With fountain ardour, fountain play, 
 
 To reach the shining tops of day: 
 
 and you long for the musical gift to follow up and up 
 the delicate degrees of distance and thread the notes 
 back as the bird ascending drops them on a thread, as 
 it were, of graduated beads, half music and half dew : 
 
 That was the chirp of Ariel 
 You heard, as overhead it flew, 
 The farther going more to dwell 
 And wing our green to wed our blue; 
 But whether note of joy, or knell, 
 Not his own Father-singer knew; 
 Nor yet can any mortal tell, 
 Save only how it shivers through; 
 The breast of us a sounded shell, 
 The blood of us a lighted dew. 
 
 Well in music, in painting, this graduating which 
 gives right proportion and, with proportion, a sense of
 
 n8 , Lecture VII 
 
 distance, of atmosphere, is called Value. Let us, for a 
 minute or two, assay this particular meaning of Value 
 upon life and literature, and first upon life, or, rather 
 upon one not negligible facet of life. 
 
 I suppose that if an ordinary man of my age were 
 asked which has better helped him to bear the burs of 
 life religion or a sense of humour he would, were he 
 quite honest, be gravelled for an answer. Now the best 
 part of a sense of humour, as you know without my 
 telling you, consists in a sense of proportion ; a habit, 
 abiding and prompt at command, of seeing all human 
 affairs in their just perspective, so that its happy pos- 
 sessor at once perceives anything odd or distorted or 
 overblown to be an excrescence, a protuberance, a 
 swelling, literally a humour \ and the function of Thalia, 
 the Comic Spirit, as you may read in Meredith's Essay 
 on Comedy^ is just to prick these humours. I will but 
 refer you to Meredith's Essay, and here cite you the 
 words of an old schoolmaster: 
 
 It would seem to be characteristic of the same mind to appre- 
 ciate the beauty of ideas in just proportion and harmonious 
 relation to each other, and the absurdity of the same ideas when 
 distorted or brought into incongruous juxtaposition. The exercise 
 of this sense of humour... compels the mind to form a picture to 
 itself, accompanied by pleasurable emotion; and what is this but 
 setting the imagination to work, though in topsy-turvy fashion? 
 Nay, in such a case, imagination plays a double part, since it is 
 only by instantaneous comparison with ideal fitness and propor- 
 tion that it can grasp at full force the grotesqueness of their 
 contraries 1 . 
 
 1 The Training of the Imagination: by James Rhoades. London, 
 John Lane, 1900.
 
 Greek, Latin and English 119 
 
 Let us play with an example for one moment. A child 
 sees such an excrescence, such an offence upon propor- 
 tion, in an immoderately long nose. He is apt to call 
 attention to it on the visage of a visitor : it intrigues him 
 in Perrault's ' Prince Charming ' and many a fairy tale : 
 it amuses him in Lear's Book of Nonsense: 
 
 There was an old man with a Nose, 
 Who said * If you choose to suppose 
 
 That my nose is too long 
 
 You are certainly wrong 
 
 This old man he detects as lacking sense of proportion, 
 sense of humour. Pass from the child to the working- 
 man as we know him. A few weeks ago, a lady featured, 
 as to nose, on the side of excess was addressing a 
 North Country audience on the Economic Position of 
 Women after the War. Said she, * There won't be men 
 to go round.' Said a voice ' Eh, but they'll have to, 
 Miss!' Pass from this rudimentary criticism to high 
 talent employed on the same subject, and you get 
 Cyrano de Bergerac. Pass to genius, to Milton, and you 
 find the elephant amusing Adam and Eve in Paradise, 
 and doing his best: 
 
 the unwieldy elephant, 
 
 To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed 
 
 His lithe proboscis. 
 
 Milton, like the elephant, jokes with difficulty, but he, 
 too, is using all his might. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I have illustrated, crudely enough, how a sense of 
 things in their right values will help us on one side of
 
 I2O Lecture VII 
 
 our dealings with life. But truly it helps us on every 
 side. This was what Plato meant when he said that a 
 philosopher must see things as they relatively are within 
 his horizon 6 (TVVOITTIKOS StaXefcrtfco?. And for this 
 it was that an English poet praised Sophocles as one 
 Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole. 
 
 And this of course is what Dean Inge meant when, the 
 other day, in a volume of Cambridge Essays on Education, 
 he reminded us, for a sensible commonplace, that 
 ' The wise man is he who knows the relative values of 
 things.' 
 
 IV 
 
 Applying this to literature, I note, but shall not 
 insist here on the fact though fact it is that the 
 Greek and Roman * classical ' writers (as we call them) 
 laid more stress than has ever been laid among the sub- 
 sequent tribes of men upon the desirability of getting 
 all things into proportion, of seeing all life on a scale of 
 relative values. And the reason I shall not insist on this 
 is simply that better men have saved me the trouble. 
 
 I propose this morning to discuss the value of the 
 classics to students of English literature from, as the 
 modern phrase goes, a slightly different angle. 
 
 Reclining and looking up into that sky which is not 
 too grandiose an image for our own English Literature, 
 you would certainly not wish, Gentlemen, to see it as 
 what it is not as a cloth painted on the flat. No more 
 than you would choose the sky overarching your life to 
 be a close, hard, copper vault, would you choose this 
 literature of ours to resemble such a prison. I say
 
 Greek, Latin and English 121 
 
 nothing, for the moment, of the thrill of comparing 
 ours with other constellations^-of such a thrill as 
 Blanco White's famous sonnet imagines in Adam's soul 
 when the first night descended on Eden and 
 
 Hesperus with the host of heaven came, 
 
 And lo ! Creation widen'd in man's view. 
 
 Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd 
 
 Within thy beams, O sun!... 
 
 No : I simply picture you as desiring to realise our own 
 literature, its depths and values, mile above mile deeper 
 and deeper shining, with perchance a glimpse of a city 
 celestial beyond, or at whiles, on a ladder of values, of 
 the angels the messengers climbing and returning. 
 
 Well, now, I put it to you that without mental breed- 
 ing, without at least some sense of ancestry, an English- 
 man can hardly have this perception of value, this vision. 
 I put to you what I posited in an earlier course of 
 lectures, quoting Bagehot, that while a knowledge of 
 Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer of English, 
 he should at least have a firm conviction that those two 
 languages existed. I refer you to a long passage which, 
 in one of those lectures, I quoted from Cardinal New- 
 man to the effect that for the last 3000 years the 
 Western World has been evolving a human society, 
 having its bond in a common civilisation a society to 
 which (let me add, by way of footnote), Prussia to-day 
 is firmly, though with great difficulty, being tamed. 
 There are, and have been, other civilisations in the 
 world the Chinese, for instance; a huge civilisation,
 
 122 Lecture VII 
 
 stationary, morose, to us unattractive; l but this civilisa- 
 tion,' says Newman, ' together with the society which 
 is its creation and its home, is so distinctive and lumin- 
 ous in its character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing 
 in its duration, and so utterly without rival upon the face 
 of the earth, that the association may fitly assume for 
 itself the title of " Human Society," and its civilisation 
 the abstract term " Civilisation." 
 He goes on: 
 
 Looking, then, at the countries which surround the Mediter- 
 ranean Sea as a whole, I see them to be, from time immemorial, 
 the seat of an association of intellect and mind such as deserves 
 to be called the Intellect and Mind of the Human Kind. 
 
 But I must refer you to his famous book The Idea of a 
 University to read at length how Newman, in that 
 sinuous, sinewy, Platonic style of his, works it out the 
 spread, through Rome, even to our shores, of the 
 civilisation which began in Palestine and Greece. 
 
 VI 
 
 I would press the point more rudely upon you, and more 
 particularly, than does Newman. And first, for Latin 
 
 I waive that Rome occupied and dominated this 
 island during 400 years. Let that be as though it had 
 never been. For a further 1000 years and more Latin 
 remained the common speech of educated men through- 
 out Europe: the * Universal Language.' Greek had 
 been smothered by the Turk. Through all that time 
 through the most of what we call Modern History, 
 Latin reigned everywhere. Is this a fact to be ignored 
 by any of you who would value ' values '?
 
 Greek, Latin and English 123 
 
 Here are a few particulars, by way of illustration. 
 More wrote his Utopia, Bacon wrote all the bulk of his 
 philosophical work, in Latin; Newton wrote his Prin- 
 cipia in Latin. Keble's Lectures on Poetry (if their 
 worth and the name of Keble may together save me from 
 bathos) were delivered in Latin. Our Vice-Chancellor, 
 our Public Orator still talk Latin, securing for it what 
 attention they can : nor have 
 
 The bigots of this iron time 
 
 Yet call'd their harmless art a crime. 
 
 But there is a better reason why you should endeavour 
 to understand the value of Latin in our literature; a 
 filial reason. Our fathers built their great English 
 prose, as they built their oratory, upon the Latin model. 
 Donne used it to construct his mighty fugues: Burke 
 to discipline his luxuriance. Says Cowper, it were 
 
 Praise enough for any private man, 
 
 That Chatham's language was his mother tongue, 
 
 And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own.' 
 
 Well then, here is a specimen of Chatham's language: 
 from his speech, Romanly severe, denouncing the 
 Government of the day for employing Red Indians in 
 the American War of Independence. He is addressing 
 the House of Lords : 
 
 I call upon that right reverend bench, those holy ministers of 
 the Gospel, and pious pastors of our Church I conjure them to 
 join in the holy work, and vindicate the religion of their God. 
 I appeal to the wisdom and the law of this learned bench to 
 defend and support the justice of their country. I call upon the 
 bishops to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn ; upon 
 the learned judges to interpose the purity of their ermine, to
 
 124 Lecture VII 
 
 save us from this pollution. I call upon the honour of your 
 lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to main- 
 tain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my 
 country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius 
 of the Constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls 
 the immortal ancestor of this noble lord [Lord Suffolk] frowns 
 with indignation at the disgrace of his country. In vain he led 
 your victorious fleets against the boasted Armada of Spain; in 
 vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the 
 religion the Protestant religion of this country, against the 
 arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition, if these more 
 than Popish cruelties and inquisitorial practices are let loose 
 among us to turn forth into our settlements, among our ancient 
 connexions, friends, and relations, the merciless cannibal, thirst- 
 ing for the blood of man, woman, and child ! to send forth the 
 infidel savage against whom? against your Protestant brethren; 
 to lay waste their country, to desolate their dwellings, and ex- 
 tirpate their race and name, with these horrible hell-hounds of 
 savage war ! hell-hounds, I say, of savage war ! Spain armed 
 herself with blood-hounds to extirpate the wretched natives of 
 America, and we improve on the inhuman example even of 
 Spanish cruelty; we turn loose these savage hell-hounds against 
 our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, 
 laws, liberties, and religion, endeared to us by every tie that 
 should sanctify humanity 
 
 My lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say 
 more; but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have 
 said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor reposed 
 my head on my pillow, without giving this vent to my eternal 
 abhorrence of such preposterous and enormous principles. 
 
 That was Chatham. For Wolfe he, as you know, was 
 ever reading the classics even on campaign: as Burke 
 again carried always a Virgil in his pocket. Abeunt 
 studia in mores. Moreover can we separate Chatham's 
 Roman morality from Chatham's language in the pas-
 
 Greek, Latin and English 125 
 
 sage I have just read ? No : we cannot. No one, being 
 evil, can speak good things with that weight; 'for out 
 of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh* We 
 English (says Wordsworth) 
 
 We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
 That Shakespeare spake.... 
 
 You may criticise Chatham's style as too consciously 
 Ciceronian. But has ever a Parliamentary style been 
 invented which conveys a nobler gravity of emotion? 
 'Buskined ' ? yes : but the style of a man. ' Mannered ' ? 
 yes, but in the grand manner. * Conscious ' ? yes, but 
 of what? Conscious of the dignity a great man owes to 
 himself, and to the assembly he addresses. He conceives 
 that assembly as 'the British Senate'; and, assuming, he 
 communicates that high conception. The Lords feel that 
 they are listening as Senators, since it is only thus a 
 Senate should be addressed, as nothing less than a Senate 
 should be addressed thus. 
 
 Let me read you a second passage; of written prose: 
 
 Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter 
 went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to 
 sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel 
 crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall. We may 
 enjoy the present while we are insensible of infirmity and decay: 
 but the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it apper- 
 tains to what is past and what is to come. There are no fields 
 of amaranth on this side of the grave; there are no voices, O 
 Rhodope! that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no 
 name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of 
 which the echo is not faint at last 1 . 
 
 1 Landor: sop and Rbodofi.
 
 126 Lecture VII 
 
 Latin all Latin down to its exquisite falling close ! 
 And I say to you, Gentlemen, that passages such as 
 these deserve what Joubert claimed of national monu- 
 ments, Ce sont les crampons qui unissent une generation a 
 une autre. Conserve* ce qu'ont vu vos peres, ' These are 
 the clamps that knit one generation to another. Cherish 
 those things on which your fathers' eyes have looked.' 
 
 Abeunt studia in mores. 
 
 If, years ago, there had lacked anything to sharpen 
 my suspicion of those fork-bearded professors who de- 
 rived our prose from the stucco of Anglo-Saxon prose, it 
 would have been their foolish deliberate practice of com- 
 posing whole pages of English prose without using one 
 word derivative from Latin or Greek. Esau, when he sold 
 his birthright, had the excuse of being famished. These 
 pedants, with a full board, sought frenetically to give it 
 away board and birthright. ' So when this corruptible 
 shall have put on incorruption^ and this mortal shall have 
 put on immortality ' almost, I say, these men had de- 
 served to have a kind of speech more to their taste read 
 over their coffins. 
 
 VII 
 
 What, in the next place, can I say of Greek, save 
 that, as Latin gave our fathers the model of prose, 
 Greek was the source of it all, the goddess and genius 
 of the well-head? And, casting about to illustrate, as 
 well as may be, what I mean by this, I hit on a minor 
 dialogue of Plato, the Phaedrus, and choose you a short 
 passage in Edward FitzGerald's rendering: 
 
 When Socrates and Phaedrus have discoursed away the noon- 
 day under the plane trees by the Ilissus, they rise to depart
 
 Greek, Latin and English 127 
 
 toward the city. But Socrates (pointing perhaps to some images 
 of Pan and other sylvan deities) says it is not decent to leave their 
 haunts without praying to them, and he prays: 
 
 'O auspicious Pan, and ye other deities of this place, grant to 
 me to become beautiful inwardly^ and that all my outward goods 
 may prosper my inner soul. Grant that I may esteem wisdom 
 the only riches, and that I may have so much gold as temperance 
 can handsomely carry. 
 
 * Have we yet aught else to pray for, Phaedrus? For myself 
 I seem to have prayed enough.' 
 
 Phaedrus'. * Pray as much for me also: for friends have all in 
 common.' 
 
 Socrates. * Even so be it. Let us depart.' 
 
 To this paternoster of Socrates, reported more than 
 four centuries before Christ taught the Lord's Prayer, 
 let me add an attempted translation of the lines that 
 close Homer's hymn to the Delian Apollo. Imagine the 
 old blind poet on the beach chanting to the islanders 
 the glorious boast of the little island how it of all lands 
 had harboured Leto in her difficult travail; how she 
 gave birth to the Sun God ; how the immortal child, as 
 the attendant goddesses touched his lips with ambrosia, 
 burst his swaddling bands and stood up, sudden, a god 
 erect : 
 
 But he, the Sun-God, did no sooner taste 
 That food divine than every swaddling band 
 
 Burst strand by strand, 
 And burst the belt above his panting waist 
 
 All hanging loose 
 About him as he stood and gave command: 
 
 * Fetch me my lyre, fetch me my curving bow! 
 And, taught by these, shall know 
 All men, through me, the unfaltering will of Zeus! '
 
 128 Lecture VII 
 
 So spake the unshorn God, the Archer bold, 
 
 And turn'd to tread the ways of Earth so wide; 
 While they, all they, had marvel to behold 
 
 How Delos broke in gold 
 Beneath his feet, as on a mountain-side 
 Sudden, in Spring, a tree is glorified 
 
 And canopied with blossoms manifold. 
 But he went swinging with a careless stride, 
 
 Proud, in his new artillery bedight, 
 Up rocky Cynthus, and the isles descried 
 All his, and their inhabitants for wide, 
 Wide as he roam'd, ran these in rivalry 
 To build him temples in many groves: 
 And these be his, and all the isles he loves, 
 
 And every foreland height, 
 And every river hurrying to the sea. 
 
 But chief in thee, 
 Delos, as first it was, is his delight. 
 Where the long-robed lonians, each with mate 
 And children, pious to his altar throng, 
 
 And, decent, celebrate 
 
 His birth with boxing-match and dance and song: 
 So that a stranger, happening them among, 
 Would deem that these lonians have no date, 
 Being ageless, all so met; 
 And he should gaze 
 And marvel at their ways, 
 Health, wealth, the comely face 
 On man and woman envying their estate 
 
 And yet 
 
 You shall he least be able to forget, 
 You maids of Delos, dear ones, as ye raise 
 The hymn to Phoebus, Leto, Artemis, 
 
 In triune praise, 
 
 Then slide your song back upon ancient days 
 And men whose very name forgotten is,
 
 Greek, Latin and English 129 
 
 And women who have lived and gone their ways: 
 And make them live agen, 
 Charming the tribes of men, 
 Whose speech ye mock with pretty mimicries 
 So true 
 
 They almost woo 
 
 The hearer to believe he's singing too ! 
 Speed me, Apollo: speed me, Artemis! 
 
 And you, my dears, farewell ! Remember me 
 Hereafter if, from any land that is, 
 Some traveller question ye 
 
 * Maidens, who was the sweetest man of speech 
 Fared hither, ever chanted on this beach? * 
 
 I you beseech 
 Make answer to him, civilly 
 
 * Sir, he was just a blind man, and his home 
 
 In rocky Chios. But his songs were best, 
 And shall be ever in the days to come.' 
 
 Say that: and as I quest 
 In fair wall'd cities far, I'll tell them there 
 (They'll list, for 'twill be true) 
 Of Delos and of you. 
 But chief and evermore my song shall be 
 Of Prince Apollo, lord of Archery. 
 God of the Silver Bow, whom Leto bare 
 
 Leto, the lovely-tress'd. 
 
 Did time permit, I might quote you a chorus of 
 Aeschylus, a passage from Thucydides or from Aristotle, 
 to illustrate Gibbon's saying that the Greek language 
 4 gave a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the 
 abstractions of metaphysics.' But there it is, and it has 
 haunted our literature; at first filtering through Latin, 
 at length breaking from Constantinople in flood and 
 
 Q.c. 9
 
 130 Lecture VII 
 
 led to us, to Oxford and Cambridge, by Erasmus, by 
 Grocyn : 
 
 Thee, that lord of splendid lore 
 
 Orient from old Hellas' shore. 
 
 To have a sense of Greek, too, is to own a corrective of 
 taste. I quote another old schoolmaster here a dead 
 friend, Sidney Irwin: 
 
 What the Greeks disliked was extravagance, caprice, boastful- 
 ness, and display of all kinds.... The Greeks hated all monsters. 
 The quaint phrase in the Odyssey about the Queen of the 
 Laestrygones * She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her ' 
 would have seemed to them most reasonable. . . . 
 
 To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue 
 of pruning of condensing a perpetual protest against all that 
 crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer's purpose. To 
 forget this is but to ' confound our skill in covetousness.' We 
 cannot all be writers... but we all wish to have good taste, and 
 good taste is born of a generous caution about letting oneself go. 
 I say generous^ for caution is seldom generous but it is a 
 generous mood which is in no haste to assert itself. To consider 
 the thing, the time, the place, the person, and to take yourself 
 and your own feelings only fifth is to be armour-proof against 
 bad taste. 
 
 VIII 
 
 They tell us that Greek is going, here. Well, I hold 
 no brief for compulsory Greek ; and I shall say but one 
 word on it. I put it, rather idly, to a vote in a Cam- 
 bridge Combination Room, the other day, and was 
 amazed to find how the votes were divided. The men of 
 science were by no means unanimous. They owned that 
 there was much to be said even for compulsory Greek,
 
 Greek, Latin and English 131 
 
 if only Greek had been intelligently taught. And with 
 that, of course, I agree : for to learn Greek is, after all, 
 a baptism into a noble cult. The Romans knew that. 
 I believe that, even yet, if the schools would rebuild 
 their instruction in Greek so as to make it interesting, 
 as it ought to be, from the first, we should oust those 
 birds who croak and chatter upon the walls of our old 
 Universities. I find the following in FitzGerald's 
 Polonius : 
 
 An old ruinous tower which had harboured innumerable 
 jackdaws, sparrows, and bats, was at length repaired. When the 
 masons left it, the jackdaws, sparrows, and bats came back in 
 search of their old dwellings. But these were all filled up. * Of 
 what use now is this great building ? ' said they, ' come let us 
 forsake this useless stone-heap.' 
 
 And the beauty of this little apologue is that you can 
 read it either way. 
 
 IX 
 
 But, although a student of English Literature be 
 ignorant of Greek and Latin as languages, may he not 
 have Greek and Latin literature widely opened to him 
 by intelligent translations? The question has often been 
 asked, but I ask it again. May not some translations 
 open a door to him by which he can see them through 
 an atmosphere, and in that atmosphere the authentic 
 ancient gods walking: so that returning upon English 
 literature he may recognise them there, too, walking 
 and talking in a garden of values? The highest poetical 
 speech of .any one language defies, in my belief, trans- 
 
 92
 
 132 Lecture VII 
 
 lation into any other. But Herodotus loses little, and 
 North is every whit as good as Plutarch. 
 
 Sigh no more, ladies; ladies, sigh no more! 
 
 Men were deceivers ever; 
 One foot in sea and one on shore, 
 To one thing constant never 
 
 Suppose that rendered thus: 
 
 I enjoin upon the adult female population (yvvaiKe^ not once 
 but twice, that there be from this time forward, a total cessation 
 of sighing. The male is, and has been, constantly addicted to 
 inconstancy, treading the ocean and the mainland respectively 
 with alternate feet. 
 
 That, more or less, is what Paley did upon Euripides, 
 and how would you like it if a modern Greek did it 
 upon Shakespeare? None the less I remember that my 
 own first awed surmise of what Greek might mean came 
 from a translated story of Herodotus the story of 
 Cleobis and Biton at the tail of an old grammar-book, 
 before I had learnt the Greek alphabet; and I am sure 
 that the instinct of the old translators was sound; that 
 somehow (as Wordsworth says somewhere) the present 
 must be balanced on the wings of the past and the 
 future, and that as you stretch out the one you stretch 
 out the other to strength. 
 
 X 
 
 There is no derogation of new things in this plea 
 I make specially to you who may be candidates in our 
 School of English. You may remember my reading to 
 you in a previous lecture that liberal poem of Cory's 
 invoking the spirit of * dear divine Comatas,' that 
 
 Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.
 
 Greek, Latin and English 133 
 
 Well, I would have your minds, as you read our litera- 
 ture, reach back to that Dorian shepherd through an 
 atmosphere his made ours as through veils, each veil 
 unfolding a value. So you will recognise how, from 
 Chaucer down, our literature has panted after the Medi- 
 terranean water-brooks. So through an atmosphere you 
 will link (let me say) Collins's Ode to Evening, or 
 Matthew Arnold's Strayed Reveller up to the Pervi- 
 gilium Feneris, Mr Sturge Moore's Sicilian Fine-dresser 
 up to Theocritus, Pericles' funeral oration down to 
 Lincoln's over the dead at Gettysburg. And as I read 
 you just now some part of an English oration in the 
 Latin manner, so I will conclude with some stanzas 
 in the Greek manner. They are by Landor a proud 
 promise by a young writer, hopeful as I could wish any 
 young learner here to be. The title 
 
 Corinna, from Athens, to Tanagra 
 
 Tanagra! think not I forget 
 
 Thy beautifully storied streets; 
 Be sure my memory bathes yet 
 
 In clear Thermodon, and yet greets 
 The blithe and liberal shepherd-boy, 
 Whose sunny bosom swells with joy 
 When we accept his matted rushes 
 
 Upheav'd with sylvan fruit; away he bounds, and blushes. 
 A gift I promise: one I see 
 
 Which thou with transport wilt receive, 
 The only proper gift for thee, 
 
 Of which no mortal shall bereave 
 In later times thy mouldering walls, 
 Until the last old turret falls; 
 A crown, a crown from Athens won, 
 A crown no god can wear, beside Latona's son.
 
 134 Lecture VII 
 
 There may be cities who refuse 
 
 To their own child the honours due, 
 
 And look ungently on the Muse; 
 But ever shall those cities rue 
 
 The dry, unyielding, niggard breast, 
 
 Offering no nourishment, no rest, 
 
 To that young head which soon shall rise 
 Disdainfully, in might and glory, to the skies. 
 
 Sweetly where cavern'd Dirce flows 
 
 Do white-arm'd maidens chaunt my lay, 
 
 Flapping the while with laurel-rose 
 The honey-gathering tribes away; 
 
 And sweetly, sweetly Attic tongues 
 
 Lisp your Corinna's early songs; 
 
 To her with feet more graceful come 
 The verses that have dwelt in kindred breasts at home. 
 
 O let thy children lean aslant 
 
 Against the tender mother's knee, 
 
 And gaze, into her face, and want 
 To know what magic there can be 
 
 In words that urge some eyes to dance, 
 
 While others as in holy trance 
 
 Look up to heaven: be such my praise 1 
 Why linger? I must haste, or lose the Delphic bays.
 
 LECTURE VIII 
 ON READING THE BIBLE (I) 
 
 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 1918 
 
 I 
 
 not to Contradict and Confute J says Bacon of 
 Studies in general : and you may be the better 
 disposed, Gentlemen, to forgive my choice of subject 
 to-day if in my first sentence I rule that way of reading 
 the Bible completely out of court. You may say at once 
 that, the Bible being so full of doctrine as it is, and such 
 a storehouse for exegesis as it has been, this is more 
 easily said than profitably done. You may grant me 
 that the Scriptures in our Authorised Version are part 
 and parcel of English Literature (and more than part 
 and parcel) ; you may grant that a Professor of English 
 Literature has therefore a claim, if not an obligation, 
 to speak of them in that Version; you may having 
 granted my incessant refusal to disconnect our national 
 literature from our national life, or to view them as dis- 
 connected accept the conclusion which plainly flows 
 from it; that no teacher of English can pardonably 
 neglect what is at once the most majestic thing in our 
 literature and by all odds the most spiritually living 
 thing we inherit; in our courts at once superb monu- 
 ment and superabundant fountain of life; and yet you 
 may discount beforehand what he must attempt. 
 
 For (say you) if he attempt the doctrine, he goes 
 straight down to buffeted waters so broad that only
 
 136 Lecture VIII 
 
 stout theologians can win to shore; if, on the other hand, 
 he ignore doctrine, the play is Hamlet with the Prince 
 of Denmark left out. He reduces our Bible to ' mere 
 literature,' to something 'belletristic,' pretty, an artifice, 
 a flimsy, a gutted thing. 
 
 II 
 
 Now of all ways of dealing with literature that happens 
 to be the way we should least admire. By that way we 
 disassociate literature from life ; * what they said ' from 
 the men who said it and meant it, not seldom at the 
 risk of their lives. My pupils will bear witness in their 
 memories that when we talk together concerning poetry, 
 for example, by ' poetry ' we mean ' that which the 
 poets wrote,' or (if you like) * the stuff the poets wrote' ; 
 and their intelligence tells them, of course, that anyone 
 who in the simple proposition 'Poets wrote Poetry' con- 
 nects an object with a subject by a verb does not, at any 
 rate, intend to sunder what he has just been at pains, 
 however slight, to join together: he may at least have 
 the credit, whether he be right or wrong, of asserting 
 his subject and his object to be interdependent. Take 
 a particular proposition John Milton wrote a poem 
 called Paradise Lost. You will hardly contest the truth 
 of that: but what does it mean? Milton wrote the story 
 of the Fall of Man : he told it in some thousands of lines 
 of decasyllabic verse unrhymed; he measured these lines 
 out with exquisite cadences. The object of our simple 
 sentence includes all these, and this much beside : that 
 he wrote the total poem and made it what it is. Nor can 
 that object be fully understood literature being, ever
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 137 
 
 and always, so personal a thing until we understand 
 the subject, John Milton what manner of man he was, 
 and how on earth, being such a man, he contrived to do 
 it. We shall never quite know that : but it is important 
 we should get as near as we can. 
 
 Of the Bible this is yet more evident, it being a trans- 
 lation. Isaiah did not write the cadences of his pro- 
 phecies, as we ordinary men of this country know them : 
 Christ did not speak the cadences of the Parables or of 
 the Sermon on the Mount, as we know them. These have 
 been supplied by the translators. By all means let us 
 study them and learn to delight in them ; but Christ did 
 not suffer for his cadences, still less for the cadences 
 invented by Englishmen almost 1600 years later; and 
 Englishmen who went to the stake did not die for these 
 cadences. They were Lollards and Reformers who lived 
 too soon to have heard them ; they were Catholics of the 
 ' old profession ' who had either never heard or, having 
 heard, abhorred them. These men were cheerful to die 
 for the meaning of the Word and for its authorship 
 because it was spoken by Christ. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There is in fact, Gentlemen, no such thing as ( mere 
 literature.' Pedants have coined that contemptuous 
 term to express a figmentary concept of their own 
 imagination or to be more accurate, an hallucination of 
 wrath having about as much likeness to a vera causa 
 as had the doll which (if you remember) Maggie 
 Tulliver used to beat in the garret whenever, poor child, 
 the world went wrong with her somehow. The thoughts,
 
 138 Lecture VIII 
 
 actions and passions of men became literature by the 
 simple but difficult process of being recorded in memor- 
 able speech; but in that process neither the real thing 
 recorded nor the author is evacuated. Belles lettres, Fine 
 Art are odious terms, for which no clean-thinking man 
 has any use. There is no such thing in the world as 
 belles lettres\ if there were, it would deserve the name. 
 As for Fine Art, the late Professor Butcher bequeathed 
 to us a translation of Aristotle's Poetics with some ad- 
 mirable appendixes the whole entitled Aristotle's 
 Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. Aristotle never in his 
 life had a theory of Fine Art as distinct from other art : 
 nor (I wager) can you find in his discovered works a 
 word for any such thing. Now if Aristotle had a concept 
 of ' fine ' art as distinguished from other art, he was 
 man enough to find a name for it. His omission to do 
 anything of the sort speaks for itself. 
 
 So you should beware of any teacher who would treat 
 the Bible or any part of it as* fine writing, 'mere literature. 
 
 IV 
 
 Let me, having said this, at once enter a caveat, a 
 qualification. Although men do not go to the stake for 
 the cadences, the phrases of our Authorised Version, it 
 remains true that these cadences, these phrases, have 
 for three hundred years exercised a most powerful effect 
 upon their emotions. They do so by association of ideas 
 by the accreted memories of our race enwrapping conno- 
 tation around a word, a name say the name Jerusalem, 
 or the name Sioni
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 139 
 
 And they that wasted us, required of us mirth, saying, 
 Sing to us one of the songs of Sion. 
 
 How shall we sing the Lord's song, in a strange land? If I 
 forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning ! 
 
 It must be known to you, Gentlemen, that these 
 words can affect men to tears who never connect them 
 in thought with the actual geographical Jerusalem ; who 
 connect it in thought merely with a quite different 
 native home from which they are exiles. Here and there 
 some one man may feel a similar emotion over Landor's 
 
 Tanagra, think not I forget... 
 
 But the word Jerusalem will strike twenty men twenty- 
 fold more poignantly: for to each it names the city 
 familiar in spirit to his parents when they knelt, and 
 to their fathers before them: not only the city which 
 was his nursery and yet lay just beyond the landscape 
 seen from its window; its connotation includes not only 
 what the word * Rome ' has meant, and ever must mean, 
 to thousands on thousands setting eyes for the first time 
 on The City: but it holds, too, some hint of the New 
 Jerusalem, the city of twelve gates before the vision of 
 which St John fell prone : 
 
 Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem, 
 
 Would God I were in thee! 
 Thy Gardens and thy gallant walks 
 
 Continually are green : 
 There grows such sweet and pleasant flowers 
 
 As nowhere else are seen. 
 Quite through the streets with pleasant sound 
 
 The flood of Life doth flowj 
 Upon whose banks on every side 
 
 The wood of Life doth grow...
 
 140 Lecture VIII 
 
 Our Lady sings Magnificat 
 
 With tones surpassing sweet: 
 And all the virgins bear their part, 
 
 Sitting about her feet. 
 Hierusalem, my happy home. 
 
 Would God I were in thee! 
 Would God my woes were at an end, 
 
 Thy joys that I might see! 
 
 You cannot (I say) get away from these connotations 
 accreted through your own memories and your fathers' ; 
 as neither can you be sure of getting free of any great 
 literature in any tongue, once it has been written. Let 
 me quote you a passage from Cardinal Newman [he is 
 addressing the undergraduates of the Catholic Uni- 
 versity of Dublin] : 
 
 How real a creation, how sui generis, is the style of Shake- 
 speare, or of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, or of Swift, 
 or of Pope, or of Gibbon, or of Johnson! 
 
 [I pause to mark how just this man can be to his great 
 enemies. Pope was a Roman Catholic, you will re- 
 member; but Gibbon was an infidel.] 
 
 Even were the subject-matter without meaning, though in 
 truth the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense, still 
 the style would, on that supposition, remain as perfect and 
 original a work as Euclid's Elements or a symphony of Beethoven. 
 And, like music, it has seized upon the public mind : and the 
 literature of England is no. longer a mere letter, printed in books 
 and shut up in libraries, but it is a living voice, which has gone 
 forth in its expressions and its sentiments into the world of men, 
 which daily thrills upon our ears and syllables our thoughts, 
 which speaks to us through our correspondents and dictates when 
 we put pen to paper. Whether we will or no, the phraseology 
 of Shakespeare, of the Protestant formularies, of Milton, of Pope,
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 141 
 
 of Johnson's Table-talk, and of Walter Scott, have become a 
 portion of the vernacular tongue, the household words, of which 
 perhaps we little guess the origin, and the very idioms of our 
 familiar conversation So tyrannous is the literature of a nation; 
 it is too much for us. We cannot destroy or reverse it... We 
 cannot make it over again. It is a great work of man, when 
 it is no work of God's.... We cannot undo the past. English 
 Literature will ever have been Protestant 
 
 V 
 
 I am speaking, then, to hearers who would read not 
 to contradict and confute; who have an inherited sense 
 of the English Bible; and who have, even as I, a store 
 of associated ideas, to be evoked by any chance phrase 
 from it; beyond this, it may be, nothing that can be 
 called scholarship by any stretch of the term. 
 
 Very well, then : my first piece of advice on reading 
 the Bible is that you do it. 
 
 I have, of course, no reason at all to suppose or 
 suggest that any member of this present audience omits 
 to do it. But some general observations are permitted 
 to an occupant of this Chair : and, speaking generally, 
 and as one not constitutionally disposed to lamentation 
 [in the book we are discussing, for example, I find 
 Jeremiah the contributor least to my mind], I do believe 
 that the young read the Bible less, and enjoy it less 
 probably read it less, because they enjoy it less than 
 their fathers did. 
 
 The Education Act of 1870, often in these days too 
 sweepingly denounced, did a vast deal of good along 
 with no small amount of definite harm. At the head of 
 the harmful effects must (I think) be set its discourage-
 
 142 Lecture VIII 
 
 ment of Bible reading; and this chiefly through its 
 encouraging parents to believe that they could hence- 
 forth hand over the training of their children to the 
 State, lock, stock and barrel. You all remember the 
 picture in Burns of The Cotter's Saturday Night: 
 
 The chearfu' supper done, wi' serious face, 
 
 They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; 
 The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace, 
 The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride. 
 His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, 
 His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare; 
 
 Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, 
 He wales a portion with judicious care, 
 And 'Let us worship God!' he says, with solemn air. 
 
 But you know that the sire bred on the tradition of 
 1870 and now growing grey, does nothing of that sort 
 on a Saturday night : that, Saturday being tub-night, he 
 inclines rather to order the children into the back- 
 kitchen to get washed ; that on Sunday morning, having 
 seen them off to a place of worship, he inclines to sit 
 down and read, in place of the Bible, his Sunday news- 
 paper : that in the afternoon he again shunts them off to 
 Sunday-school. Now to speak first of the children it 
 is good for them to be tubbed on Saturday night; good 
 for them also, I dare say, to attend Sunday-school on 
 the following afternoon ; but not good in so far as they 
 miss to hear the Bible read by their parents and 
 Pure religion breathing household laws. 
 
 ' Pure religion ' ? Well perhaps that begs the question : 
 and I dare say Burns' cotter when he waled 'a portion 
 with judicious care,' waled it as often as not perhaps
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 143 
 
 oftener than not to contradict and confute; that often 
 he contradicted and confuted very crudely, very ignor- 
 antly. But we may call it simple religion anyhow, sincere 
 religion, parental religion, household religion: and for 
 a certainty no 'lessons' in day-school or Sunday-school 
 have, for tingeing a child's mind, an effect comparable 
 with that of a religion pervading the child's home, 
 present at bedside and board: 
 
 Here a little child I stand, 
 Heaving up my either hand; 
 Cold as paddocks tho' they be, 
 Here I lift them up to Thee; 
 For a benison to fell 
 On our meat and on us all. Amen. 
 
 permeating the house, subtly instilled by the very 
 accent of his father's and his mother's speech. For the 
 grown man... I happen to come from a part of England 
 where men, in all my days, have been curiously concerned 
 with religion and are yet so concerned; so much that you 
 can scarce take up a local paper and turn to the corre- 
 spondence column but you will find some heated 
 controversy raging over Free Will and Predestination, 
 the Validity of Holy Orders, Original Sin, Redemption 
 of the many or the few: 
 
 Go it Justice, go it Mercy! 
 Go it Douglas, go it Percy! 
 
 But the contestants do not write in the language their 
 fathers used. They seem to have lost the vocabulary, 
 and to have picked up, in place of it, the jargon of the 
 Yellow Press, which does not tend to clear definition 
 on points of theology. The mass of all this controversial
 
 144 Lecture VIII 
 
 stuff is no more absurd, no more frantic, than it used 
 to be: but in language it has lost its dignity with its 
 homeliness. It has lost the colouring of the Scriptures, 
 the intonation of the Scriptures, the Scriptural habit. 
 
 If I turn from it to a passage in Bunyan, I am con- 
 versing with a man who, though he has read few other 
 books, has imbibed and soaked the Authorised Version 
 into his fibres so that he cannot speak but Biblically. 
 Listen to this: 
 
 As to the situation of this town, it lieth just between the two 
 worlds, and the first founder, and builder of it, so far as by the 
 best, and most authentic records I can gather, was one Shaddai; 
 and he built it for his own delight. He made it the mirror, and 
 glory of all that he made, even the Top-piece beyond anything 
 else that he did in that country: yea, so goodly a town was 
 Mansoul, when first built, that it is said by some, the Gods at 
 the setting up thereof, came down to see it, and sang for joy.... 
 
 The wall of the town was well built, yea so fast and firm 
 was it knit and compact together, that had it not been for the 
 townsmen themselves, they could not have been shaken, or 
 broken for ever. 
 
 Or take this: 
 
 Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a Boy 
 feeding his Father's Sheep. The Boy was in very mean Cloaths, 
 but of a very fresh and well-favoured Countenance, and as he 
 
 sate by himself he Sung Then said their Guide, Do you hear 
 
 him? I will dare to say, that this Boy lives a merrier Life, and 
 wears more of that Herb called Heart's-ease in his Bosom, than 
 he that is clad in Silk and Velvet. 
 
 I choose ordinary passages, not solemn ones in which 
 Bunyan is consciously scriptural. But you cannot miss 
 the accent.
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 145 
 
 That is Bunyan, of course; and I am far from saying 
 that the labouring men among whom I grew up, at the 
 fishery or in the hayfield, talked with Bunyan's magic. 
 But I do assert that they had something of the accent; 
 enough to be like, in a child's mind, the fishermen and 
 labourers among whom Christ found his first disciples. 
 They had the large simplicity of speech, the cadence, 
 the accent. But let me turn to Ireland, where, though 
 not directly derived from our English Bible a similar 
 scriptural accent survives among the peasantry and is, 
 I hope, ineradicable. I choose two sentences from a 
 book of ' Memories ' recently written by the survivor 
 of the two ladies who together wrote the incomparable 
 * Irish R.M.' The first was uttered by a small cultivator 
 who was asked why his potato-crop had failed: 
 
 * I couldn't hardly say ' was the answer. ' Whatever it was, 
 God spurned them in a boggy place.' 
 
 Is that not the accent of Isaiah? 
 
 He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into 
 a large country. 
 
 The other is the benediction bestowed upon the late 
 Miss Violet Martin by a beggar-woman in Skibbereen : 
 
 Sure ye' re always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight 
 of the Glory of Heaven ! 
 
 VI 
 
 But one now sees, or seems to see, that we children 
 did, in our time, read the Bible a great deal, if per- 
 force we were taught to read it in sundry bad ways : of 
 which perhaps the worst was that our elders hammered 
 in all the books, all the parts of it, as equally inspired 
 Q. c. 10
 
 146 Lecture VIII 
 
 and therefore equivalent. Of course this meant among 
 other things that they hammered it all in literally : but 
 let us not sentimentalise over that. It really did no 
 child any harm to believe that the universe was created 
 in a working week of six days, and that God sat down 
 and looked at it on Sunday, and behold it was very 
 good. A week is quite a long while to a child, yet a 
 definite division rounding off a square job. The bath- 
 taps at home usually, for some unexplained reason, went 
 wrong during the week-end: the plumber came in on 
 Monday and carried out his tools on Saturday at mid- 
 day. These little analogies really do (I believe) help the 
 infant mind, and not at all to its later detriment. Nor 
 shall I ask you to sentimentalise overmuch upon the 
 harm done to a child by teaching him that the blood- 
 thirsty jealous Jehovah of the Book of Joshua is as 
 venerable (being one and the same unalterably, 'with 
 whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning') 
 as the Father * the same Lord, whose property is always 
 to have mercy,' revealed to us in the Gospel, invoked 
 for us at the Eucharist. I do most seriously hold it to 
 be fatal if we grow up and are fossilised in any such 
 belief. (Where have we better proof than in the invo- 
 cations which the family of the Hohenzollerns have 
 been putting up, any time since August 1914 and for 
 years before to this bloody identification of the 
 Christian man's God with Joshua's ?) My simple advice 
 is that you not only read the Bible early but read it 
 again and again : and if on the third or fifth reading it 
 leave you just where the first left you if you still get 
 from it no historical sense of a race developing its concept
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 147 
 
 of God well then, the point of the advice is lost, and 
 there is no more to be said. But over this business of 
 teaching the Book of Joshua to children I am in some 
 doubt. A few years ago an Education Committee, of 
 which I happened to be Chairman, sent ministers of 
 religion about, two by two, to test the religious in- 
 struction given in Elementary Schools. Of the two who 
 worked around my immediate neighbourhood, one was 
 a young priest of the Church of England, a medievalist 
 with an ardent passion for ritual ; the other a gentle Con- 
 gregational minister, a mere holy and humble man of 
 heart. They became great friends in the course of these 
 expeditions, and they brought back this report * It is 
 positively wicked to let these children grow up being 
 taught that there is no difference in value between 
 Joshua and St Matthew: that the God of the Lord's 
 Prayer is the same who commanded the massacre of 
 Ai.' Well, perhaps it is. Seeing how bloodthirsty old 
 men can be in these days, one is tempted to think that 
 they can hardly be caught too young and taught de- 
 cency, if not mansuetude. But I do not remember, as a 
 child, feeling any horror about it, or any difficulty in 
 reconciling the two concepts. Children are a bit blood- 
 thirsty, and I observe that two volumes of the late 
 Captain Mayne Reid The Rifle Rangers, and The Scalp 
 Hunters have just found their way into The World 1 's 
 Classics and are advertised alongside of Ruskin's Sesame 
 and Lilies and the De Imitatione Christi. I leave you to 
 think this out; adding but this for a suggestion: that as 
 the Hebrew outgrew his primitive tribal beliefs, so the 
 bettering mind of man casts off the old clouts of primi-
 
 148 Lecture VIII 
 
 tive doctrine, he being in fact better than his religion. 
 You have all heard preachers trying to show that Jacob 
 was a better fellow than Esau somehow. You have all, 
 I hope, rejected every such explanation. Esau was a 
 gentleman: Jacob was not. The instinct of a young man 
 meets that wall, and there is no passing it. Later, the 
 mind of the youth perceives that the writer of Jacob's 
 history has a tribal mind and supposes throughout that 
 for the advancement of his tribe many things are per- 
 missible and even admirable which a later and urbaner 
 mind rejects as detestably sharp practice. And the 
 story of Jacob becomes the more valuable to us his- 
 torically as we realise what a hero he is to the bland 
 chronicler. 
 
 VII 
 
 But of another thing, Gentlemen, I am certain : that 
 we were badly taught in that these books, while 
 preached to us as equivalent, were kept in separate 
 compartments. We were taught the books of Kings 
 and Chronicles as history. The prophets were the 
 Prophets, inspired men predicting the future which 
 they only did by chance, as every inspired man does. 
 Isaiah was never put into relation with his time at all; 
 which means everything to our understanding of Isaiah, 
 whether of Jerusalem or of Babylon. We ploughed 
 through Kings and Chronicles, and made out lists of 
 rulers, with dates and capital events. Isaiah was all fine 
 writing about nothing at all, and historically we were 
 concerned with him only to verify some far-fetched 
 reference to the Messiah in this or that Evangelist.
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 149 
 
 But there is not, never has been, really fine literature 
 like Isaiah composed about nothing at all : and in the 
 mere matter of prognostication I doubt if such experts 
 as Zadkiel and Old Moore have anything to fear from 
 any School of Writing we can build up in Cambridge. 
 But if we had only been taught to read Isaiah concur- 
 rently with the Books of the Kings, what a fire it would 
 have kindled among the dry bones of our studies ! 
 
 Then said the Lord unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, 
 thou, and Shear-jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the 
 upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field. 
 
 Scholars, of course, know the political significance of 
 that famous meeting. But if we had only known it ; if 
 we had only been taught what Assyria was with its suc- 
 cessive monarchs Tiglath-pileser, Shalmaneser, Sargon, 
 Sennacherib; and why Syria and Israel and Egypt 
 were trying to cajole or force Judah into alliance; what 
 a difference (I say) this passage would have meant to us ! 
 
 VIII 
 
 I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother 
 a boy too early and overmuch with history; that the best 
 way is to let him ramp at first through the Scriptures 
 even as he might through The Arabian Nights: to let 
 him take the books as they come, merely indicating, for 
 instance, that Job is a great poem, the Psalms great 
 lyrics, the story of Ruth a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs 
 the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well and what 
 then ? He will certainly get less of The Cotter's Saturday 
 Night into it, and certainly more of the truth of the East. 
 There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for
 
 150 Lecture VIII 
 
 himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban : the trek of 
 Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn : the figures of Rebekah 
 at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rispah beneath 
 the gibbet: Sisera bowing in weariness: Saul great 
 Saul by the tent-prop with the jewels in his turban: 
 
 All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart. 
 
 Or consider to choose one or two pictures out of the 
 tremendous procession consider Michal, Saul's royal 
 daughter: how first she is given in marriage to David 
 to be a snare for him ; how loving him she saves his life, 
 letting him down from the window and dressing up an 
 image on the bed in his place : how, later, she is handed 
 over to another husband Phaltiel, how David demands 
 her back, and she goes: 
 
 And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping 
 behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, 
 return. And he returned. 
 
 Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul's 
 daughter, as she sees David capering home before the 
 ark, and how her affection had done with this emotional 
 man of the ruddy countenance, so prone to weep in his 
 bed: 
 
 And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, 
 Michal Saul's daughter 
 
 Mark the three words 
 
 Michal Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw 
 King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she 
 despised him in her heart. 
 
 The whole story goes into about ten lines. Your psycho-
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 151 
 
 logical novelist nowadays, given the wit to invent it, 
 would make it cover 500 pages at least. 
 
 Or take the end of David in the first two chapters of 
 the First Book of Kings, with its tale of Oriental in- 
 trigues, plots, treacheries, murderings in the depths of 
 the horrible palace wherein the old man is dying. Or 
 read of Solomon and his ships and his builders, and see 
 his Temple growing (as Heber put it) like a tall palm, 
 with no sound of hammers. Or read again the end of 
 Queen Athaliah: 
 
 And when Athaliah heard the noise of the guard and of the 
 people, she came to the people into the temple of the Lord. 
 And when she looked, behold, the king stood by a pillar, as the 
 manner was, and the princes and the trumpeters by the king, 
 and all the people of the land rejoiced, and blew with trumpets: 
 And Athaliah rent her clothes, and cried Treason, Treason. 
 But Jehoiada the priest commanded the captains of the hundreds, 
 the officers of the host, and said unto them, Have her forth 
 without the ranges.... 
 
 And they laid hands on her; and she went by the way by 
 the which the horses came into the king's house: and there was 
 she slain. 
 
 Let a youngster read this, I say, just as it is written ; 
 and how the true East sound, scent, form, colour 
 pours into the narrative! cymbals and trumpets, 
 leagues of sand, caravans trailing through the heat, priest 
 and soldiery and kings going up between them to the 
 altar; blood at the foot of the steps, blood everywhere, 
 smell of blood mingled with spices, sandal-wood, dung 
 of camels ! 
 
 Yes, but how if you will permit the word how the 
 enjoyment of it as magnificent literature might be en-
 
 152 Lecture VIII 
 
 hanced by a scholar who would condescend to whisper, 
 of his knowledge, the magical word here or there, to 
 the child as he reads ! For an instance. 
 
 No child no grown man with any sense of poetry 
 can deny his ear to the Forty-fifth Psalm; the one that 
 begins * My heart is inditing a good matter,' and 
 plunges into a hymn of royal nuptials. First (you re- 
 member) the singing-men, the sons of Korah, lift their 
 chant to the bridegroom, the King: 
 
 Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty... And in thy 
 majesty ride prosperously. 
 
 Or as we hear it in the Book of Common Prayer : 
 
 Good luck have thou with thine honour. . . 
 
 because of truth and meekness and righteousness; and thy 
 right hand shall teach thee terrible things.... 
 
 All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of 
 the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad. 
 
 Anon they turn to the Bride: 
 
 Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear; 
 forget also thine own people, and thy father's house 
 
 The King's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of 
 wrought gold. 
 
 She shall be brought unto the king in raiment of needlework: 
 the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company. And the 
 daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift. Instead of thy 
 fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest make princes 
 in all the earth. 
 
 For whom (wonders the young reader, spell-bound 
 by this) for what happy bride and bridegroom was this 
 glorious chant raised? Now suppose that, just here, he 
 has a scholar ready to tell him what is likeliest true that
 
 On Reading the Bible (I) 153 
 
 the bridegroom was Ahab that the bride, the daughter 
 of Sidon, was no other than Jezebel, and became what 
 Jezebel now is with what an awe of surmise would 
 two other passages of the history, toll on his ear? 
 
 And one washed the chariot in the pool of Samaria; and the 
 dogs licked up his blood.... 
 
 And when he (Jehu) was come in, he did eat and drink, and 
 said, Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a 
 king's daughter. 
 
 And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her 
 than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands. 
 
 Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he said, This 
 is the word of the Lord, which he spake by his servant Elijah 
 theTishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the 
 flesh of Jezebel so that (men) shall not say, This is Jezebel. 
 
 In another lecture, Gentlemen, I propose to take up 
 the argument and attempt to bring it to this point. 
 c How can we, having this incomparable work, necessary 
 for study by all who would write English, bring it 
 within the ambit of the English Tripos and yet avoid 
 offending the experts?'
 
 w 
 
 LECTURE IX 
 
 ON READING THE BIBLE (II) 
 
 WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 1918 
 I 
 
 E left off last term, Gentlemen, upon a note of 
 protest. We wondered why it should be that our 
 English Version of the Bible lies under the ban of 
 schoolmasters, Boards of Studies, and all who devise 
 courses of reading and examinations in English Litera- 
 ture: that among our * prescribed books ' we find 
 Chaucer's Prologue, we find Hamlet, we find Paradise 
 Lost, we find Pope's Essay on Man, again and again, but 
 The Book of Job never; The Vicar of Wakefield'&.n& Gray's 
 Elegy often, but Ruth or Isaiah, Ecclesiasticus or Wisdom 
 never. 
 
 I propose this morning: 
 
 (1) to enquire into the reasons for this, so far as I 
 can guess and interpret them; 
 
 (2) to deal with such reasons as we can discover or 
 surmise ; 
 
 (3) to suggest to-day, some simple first aid: and in 
 another lecture, taking for experiment a single book 
 from the Authorised Version, some practical ways of 
 including it in the ambit of our new English Tripos. 
 This will compel me to be definite: and as definite pro- 
 posals invite definite objections, by this method we are
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 155 
 
 likeliest to know where we are, and if the reform we 
 seek be realisable or illusory. 
 
 II 
 
 I shall ask you then, first, to assent with me, that the 
 Authorised Version of the Holy Bible is, as a literary 
 achievement, one of the greatest in our language; nay, 
 with the possible exception of the complete works of 
 Shakespeare, the very greatest. You will certainly not 
 deny this. 
 
 As little, or less, will you deny that more deeply than 
 any other book more deeply even than all the writings 
 of Shakespeare far more deeply it has influenced our 
 literature. Here let me repeat a short passage from a 
 former lecture of mine (May 15, 1913, five years ago). 
 I had quoted some few glorious sentences such as: 
 
 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.... 
 
 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and 
 this mortal shall have put on immortality... 
 
 and having quoted these I went on : 
 
 When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, these 
 rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established 
 Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven 
 had wrought. The Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set 
 a seal on our national style It has cadences homely and sub- 
 lime, yet so harmonises them that the voice is always one. 
 Simple men holy and humble men of heart like Isaak Walton
 
 156 Lecture IX 
 
 and Bunyan have their lips touched and speak to the home- 
 lier tune. Proud men, scholars Milton, Sir Thomas Browne 
 practise the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms 
 of our Bible they, too, fall back 'The great mutations of 
 the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.' 
 ' Acquaint thyself with the Choragium of the stars.' ' There 
 is nothing immortal but immortality.' The precise man Addison 
 cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly clarity: 
 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 trump our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls 
 its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of 
 a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in everything we see, 
 hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood. 
 
 If that be true, or less than gravely overstated : if the 
 English Bible hold this unique place in our literature; 
 if it be at once a monument, an example and (best of 
 all) a well of English undefiled, no stagnant water, but 
 quick, running, curative, refreshing, vivifying; may we 
 not agree, Gentlemen, to require the weightiest reason 
 why our instructors should continue to hedge in the 
 temple and pipe the fountain off in professional con- 
 duits, forbidding it to irrigate freely our ground of 
 study? 
 
 It is done so complacently that I do not remember to 
 have met one single argument put up in defence of it; 
 and so I am reduced to guess-work. What can be the 
 justifying reason for an embargo on the face of it so 
 silly and arbitrary, if not senseless ?
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 157 
 
 III 
 
 
 
 Does it reside perchance in some primitive instinct of 
 taboo\ of a superstition of fetish-worship fencing off 
 sacred things as unmentionable, and reinforced by the 
 bad Puritan notion that holy things are by no means to 
 be enjoyed? 
 
 If so, I begin by referring you to the Greeks and 
 their attitude towards the Homeric poems. We, of 
 course, hold the Old Testament more sacred than 
 Homer. But I very much doubt if it be more sacred to 
 us than the Iliad and the Odyssey were to an old Athenian, 
 in his day. To the Greeks and to forget this is the 
 fruitfullest source of error in dealing with the Tra- 
 gedians or even with Aristophanes to the Greeks, 
 their religion, such as it was, mattered enormously. 
 They built their Theatre upon it, as we most certainly 
 do not; which means that it had sunk into their daily 
 life and permeated their enjoyment of it, as our religion 
 certainly does not affect our life to enhance it as amusing 
 or pleasurable. We go to Church on Sunday, and write 
 it off as an observance; but if eager to be happy with a 
 free heart, we close early and steal a few hours from the 
 working-day. We antagonise religion and enjoyment, 
 worship and holiday. Nature being too strong for any 
 convention of ours, courtship has asserted itself as per- 
 missible on the Sabbath, if not as a Sabbatical institution. 
 
 Now the Greeks were just as much slaves to the letter 
 of their Homer as any Auld Licht Elder to the letter of 
 St Paul. No one will accuse Plato of being over- 
 friendly to poetry. Yet I believe you will find in Plato
 
 158 Lecture IX 
 
 some 1 50 direct citations from Homer, not to speak of 
 allusions scattered broadcast through the dialogues, 
 often as texts for long argument. Of these citations and 
 allusions an inordinate number seem to us laboriously 
 trivial that is to say, unless we put ourselves into the 
 Hellenic mind. On the other hand Plato uses others 
 to enforce or illustrate his profoundest doctrines. For 
 an instance, in Phaedo ( 96) Socrates is arguing that 
 the soul cannot be one with the harmony of the bodily 
 affections, being herself the master-player who com- 
 mands the strings: 
 
 ' almost always' [he says] 'opposing and coercing them in all 
 sorts of ways throughout life, sometimes more violently with the 
 pains of medicine and gymnastic; then again more gently; 
 threatening, and also reprimanding the desires, passions, fears, as 
 if talking to a thing which is not herself; as Homer in the 
 Odyssey represents Odysseus doing in the words 
 
 <TTf)do<i Se Tr\ijj;a<; tcpaBirjv rjviiraTre pvdta 
 rer\a0i 8rf, KpaBirj" KOI Kvvrepov a\\o TTOT' er\v)$. 
 
 He beat his breast, and thus reproached his heart: 
 Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured. 
 
 Do you think [asks Socrates] that Homer wrote this under the 
 idea that the soul is a harmony capable of being led by the affec- 
 tions of the body, and not rather of a nature which should lead 
 and master them herself a far diviner thing than any harmony? 
 
 A Greek, then, will use Homer his Bible 
 minutely on niceties of conduct or broadly on first 
 principles of philosophy or religion. But equally, since 
 it is poetry all the time to him, he will take or to 
 instance particular writers, Aristotle and the late Greek, 
 Longinus will take a single hexameter to illustrate a
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 159 
 
 minute trick of style or turn of phrase, as equally he 
 will choose a long passage or the whole Iliad, the whole 
 Odyssey, to illustrate a grand rule of poetic construction, 
 a first principle of aesthetics. For an example 
 * Herein,' says Aristotle, starting to show that an Epic 
 poem must have Unity of Subject * Herein, to repeat 
 what we have said before, we have a further proof of 
 Homer's superiority to the rest. He did not attempt 
 to deal even with the Trojan War in its entirety, though 
 it was a whole story with a definite beginning, middle 
 and end feeling apparently that it was too long a story 
 to be taken in at one view or else over-complicated by 
 variety of incidents.' And as Aristotle takes the Iliad 
 his Bible to illustrate a grand rule of poetical construc- 
 tion, so the late writer of his tradition Longinus 
 will use it to exhibit the core and essence of poetical 
 sublimity; as in his famous ninth chapter, of which 
 Gibbon wrote: 
 
 The ninth chapter... [of the IIEPI YTOYS or De Sublimi- 
 tate of Longinus] is one of the finest monuments of antiquity. 
 Till now, I was acquainted only with two ways of criticising a 
 beautiful passage: the one, to show, by an exact anatomy of it, 
 the distinct beauties of it, and whence they sprung; the other, an 
 idle exclamation, or a general encomium, which leaves nothing 
 behind it. Longinus has shown me that there is a third. He 
 tells me his own feelings upon reading it; and tells them with so 
 much energy, that he communicates them. I almost doubt which 
 is more sublime, Homer's Battle of the Gods, or Longinus's 
 Apostrophe to Terentianus upon it. 
 
 Well, let me quote you, in translation, a sentence or 
 two from this chapter, which produced upon Gibbon 
 such an effect as almost to anticipate Walter Pater's 
 famous definition, * To feel the virtue of the poet, of
 
 160 Lecture IX 
 
 the painter, to disengage it, to set it forth these are 
 the three stages of the critic's duty.' 
 
 * Elsewhere,' says Longinus, 'I have written as follows: Sub- 
 limity is the echo of a great soul.' 1 
 
 1 Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.' It was worth 
 repeating too was it not? 
 
 For it is not possible that men with mean and servile 
 ideas and aims prevailing throughout their lives should 
 produce anything that is admirable and worthy of im- 
 mortality. Great accents we expect to fall from the lips 
 of those whose thoughts are deep and grave. ... Hear how 
 magnificently Homer speaks of the higher powers: 'As 
 far as a man seeth with his eyes into the haze of distance as 
 he sitteth upon a cliff of outlook and gazeth over the wine-dark 
 sea, even so far at a bound leap the neighing horses of the Gods.' 
 
 ' He makes ' [says Longinus] ' the vastness of the 
 world the measure of their leap.' Then, after a criticism 
 of the Battle of the Gods (too long to be quoted here) 
 he goes on: 
 
 Much superior to the passages respecting the Battle of the 
 Gods are those which represent the divine nature as it really is 
 pure and great and undefiled; for example, what is said of 
 Poseidon. 
 
 Her far-stretching ridges, her forest-trees, quaked in dismay, 
 And her peaks, and the Trojans' town, and the ships of Achaia's 
 
 array, 
 
 Beneath his immortal feet, as onward Poseidon strode. 
 Then over the surges he drave: leapt, sporting before the God, 
 Sea-beasts that uprose all round from the depths, for their king 
 
 they knew, 
 And for rapture the sea was disparted, and onward the car-steeds 
 
 flew 1 . 
 
 1 I borrow the verse and in part the prose of Professor W. Rhys 
 Roberts' translation.
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 161 
 
 Then how does Longinus conclude? Why, very 
 strangely very strangely indeed, whether you take the 
 treatise to be by that Longinus, the Rhetorician and 
 Zenobia's adviser, whom the Emperor Aurelian put to 
 death, or prefer to believe it the work of an unknown 
 hand in the first century. The treatise goes on : 
 
 Similarly, the legislator of the Jews [Moses], no ordinary man, 
 having formed and expressed a worthy conception of the might 
 of the Godhead, writes at the very beginning of his Laws, * God 
 said ' What? * Let there be light, and there was light.' 
 
 IV 
 
 So here, Gentlemen, you have Plato, Aristotle, 
 Longinus all Greeks of separate states men of 
 eminence all three, and two of surpassing eminence, all 
 three and each in his time and turn treating Homer 
 reverently as Holy Writ and yet enjoying it liberally as 
 poetry. For indeed the true Greek mind had no thought 
 to separate poetry from religion, as to the true Greek 
 mind reverence and liberty to enjoy, with the liberty of 
 mind that helps to enjoy, were all tributes to the same 
 divine thing. They had no professionals, no puritans, 
 to hedge it off with a taboo : and so when the last and 
 least of the three, Longinus, comes to our Holy Writ 
 the sublime poetry in which Christendom reads its God, 
 his open mind at once recognises it as poetry and as 
 sublime. 'God said, Let there be light; and there was 
 light.' If Longinus could treat this as sublime poetry, 
 why cannot we, who have translated and made it 
 ours ? 
 
 Q.C. XI
 
 162 Lecture IX 
 
 Are we forbidden on the ground that our Bible is 
 directly inspired? Well, inspiration, as Sir William 
 Davenant observed and rather wittily proved, in his 
 Preface to Gondibert^ ' is a dangerous term.* It is 
 dangerous mainly because it is a relative term, a term 
 of degrees. You may say definitely of some things that 
 the writer was inspired, as you may certify a certain 
 man to be mad that is, so thoroughly and convincingly 
 mad that you can order him under restraint. But quite 
 a number of us are (as they say in my part of the world) 
 'not exactly,' and one or two of us here and there at 
 moments may have a touch even of inspiration. So of 
 the Bible itself: I suppose that few nowadays would 
 contend it to be all inspired equally. ' No ' you may say, 
 ' not all equally: but all of it directly^ as no other book is.' 
 
 To that I might answer, ' How do you know that 
 direct inspiration ceased with the Revelation of St John 
 the Divine, and closed the book. It may be: but how 
 do you know, and what authority have you to say that 
 Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, for example, or Browning's 
 great Invocation of Love was not directly inspired? 
 Certainly the men who wrote them were rapt above 
 themselves : and, if not directly, Why indirectly, and how'? 
 
 But I pause on the edge of a morass, and spring back 
 to firmer ground. Our Bible, as we have it, is a trans- 
 lation, made by forty-seven men and published in the 
 year 1 6 1 1 . The original and I am still on firm ground 
 because I am quoting now from The Cambridge History 
 of English Literature 'either proceeds from divine in-
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 163 
 
 spiration, as some will have it, or, according to others, 
 is the fruit of the religious genius of the Hebrew race. 
 From either point of view the authors are highly gifted 
 individuals' [!] 
 
 highly gifted individuals, who, notwithstanding their diversities, 
 and the progressiveness observable in their representations of the 
 nature of God, are wonderfully consistent in the main tenor of 
 their writings, and serve, in general, for mutual confirmation 
 and illustration. In some cases, this may be due to the revision 
 of earlier productions by later writers, which has thus brought 
 more primitive conceptions into a degree of conformity with 
 maturer and profounder views; but, even in such cases, the 
 earlier conception often lends itself, without wrenching, to the 
 deeper interpretation and the completer exposition. The Bible 
 is not distinctively an intellectual achievement 
 
 In all earnest I protest that to write about the Bible in 
 such a fashion is to demonstrate inferentially that it has 
 never quickened you with its glow; that, whatever your 
 learning, you have missed what the unlearned Bunyan, 
 for example, so admirably caught the true wit of the 
 book. The writer, to be sure, is dealing with the 
 originals. Let us more humbly sit at the feet of the 
 translators. * Highly gifted individuals,' or no, the sort 
 of thing the translators wrote was 'And God said, Let 
 there be light,' 'A sower went forth to sow,' 'The 
 Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman 
 took,' ' The wages of sin is death,' ' The trumpet 
 shall sound,' * Jesus wept,' 'Death is swallowed up in 
 victory.' 
 
 Let me quote you for better encouragement, as well 
 as for relief, a passage from Matthew Arnold on the 
 Authorised Version: 
 
 II 2
 
 164 Lecture IX 
 
 The effect of Hebrew poetry can be preserved and transferred 
 in a foreign language as the effect of other great poetry cannot. 
 The effect of Homer, the effect of Dante, is and must be in 
 great measure lost in a translation, because their poetry is a 
 poetry of metre, or of rhyme, or both; and the effect of these is 
 not really transferable. A man may make a good English poem 
 with the matter and thoughts of Homer and Dante, may even 
 try to reproduce their metre, or rhyme: but the metre and rhyme 
 will be in truth his own, and the effect will be his, not the effect 
 of Homer or Dante. Isaiah's, on the other hand, is a poetry, as 
 is well known, of parallelism; it depends not on metre and rhyme, 
 but on a balance of thought, conveyed by a corresponding balance 
 of sentence; and the effect of this can be transferred to another 
 language. ... Hebrew poetry has in addition the effect of assonance 
 and other effects which cannot perhaps be transferred; but its 
 main effect, its effect of parallelism of thought and sentence, can. 
 
 I take this from the preface to his little volume in which 
 Arnold confesses that his * paramount object is to get 
 Isaiah enjoyed.' 
 
 VI 
 
 Sundry men of letters besides Matthew Arnold have 
 pleaded for a literary study of the Bible, and specially 
 of our English Version, that we may thereby enhance 
 our enjoyment of the work itself and, through this, 
 enjoyment and understanding of the rest of English 
 Literature, from 1611 down. Specially among these 
 pleaders let me mention Mr F. B. Money-Coutts (now 
 Lord Latymer) and a Cambridge man, Dr R. G. 
 Moulton, now Professor of Literary Theory and Inter- 
 pretation in the University of Chicago. Of both these 
 writers I shall have something to say. But first and 
 generally, if you ask me why all their pleas have not
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 165 
 
 yet prevailed, I will give you my own answer the fault 
 as usual lies in ourselves in our own tameness and 
 incuriosity. 
 
 There is no real trouble with the taboo set up by 
 professionals and puritans, if we have the courage to walk 
 past it as Christian walked between the lions; no real 
 tyranny we could not overthrow, if it were worth while, 
 with a push ; no need at all for us to ' wreathe our sword 
 in myrtle boughs.' What tyranny exists has grown up 
 through the quite well-meaning labours of quite well- 
 meaning men : and, as I started this lecture by saying, 
 I have never heard any serious reason given why we 
 should not include portions of the English Bible in our 
 English Tripos, if we choose. 
 
 Nos te s 
 Nos facimus, Scriptura, deam. 
 
 Then why don't we choose? 
 
 To answer this, we must (I suggest) seek somewhat 
 further back. The Bible that is to say the body of the 
 old Hebrew Literature clothed for us in English 
 comes to us in our childhood. But how does it come? 
 
 Let me, amplifying a hint from Dr Moulton, ask you 
 to imagine a volume including the great books of our 
 own literature all bound together in some such order as 
 this: Paradise Lost, Darwin's Descent of Man, The Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle, Walter Map, Mill On Liberty, Hooker's 
 Ecclesiastical Polity, The Annual Register, Froissart, 
 Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Domesday Book, Le 
 Morte d* Arthur, Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chan- 
 cellors, Boswell's Johnson, Barbour's The Bruce, Hak- 
 luyt's Voyages, Clarendon, Macaulay, the plays of
 
 166 Lecture IX 
 
 Shakespeare, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, The Faerie 
 Queene, Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Bacon's Essays, 
 Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, FitzGerald's Omar 
 Khayyam, Wordsworth, Browning, Sartor Resartus, 
 Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Burke's Letters on a 
 Regicide Peace, Ossian, Piers Plowman, Burke's Thoughts 
 on the Present Discontents, Quarles, Newman's Apologia, 
 Donne's Sermons, Ruskin, Blake, The Deserted Village, 
 Manfred, Blair's Grave, The Complaint of Deor, Bailey's 
 Festus, Thompson's Hound of Heaven. 
 
 Will you next imagine that in this volume most of 
 the author's names are lost; that, of the few that survive, 
 a number have found their way into wrong places ; that 
 Ruskin for example is credited with Sartor Resartus; 
 that Laus Feneris and Dolores are ascribed to Queen 
 Elizabeth, The Anatomy of Melancholy to Charles II; 
 and that, as for the titles, these were never invented by 
 the authors, but by a Committee? 
 
 Will you still go on to imagine that all the poetry is 
 printed as prose ; while all the long paragraphs of prose 
 are broken up into short verses, so that they resemble 
 the little passages set out for parsing or analysis in an 
 examination paper? 
 
 This device, as you know, was first invented by the 
 exiled translators who published the Geneva Bible (as 
 it is called) in 1557; and for pulpit use, for handiness 
 of reference, for * waling a portion,' it has its obvious ad- 
 vantages: but it is, after all and at the best, a very 
 primitive device: and, for my part, I consider it the 
 deadliest invention of all for robbing the book of out- 
 ward resemblance to literature and converting it to the
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 167 
 
 aspect of a gazetteer a biblion a-biblion, as Charles 
 Lamb puts it. 
 
 Have we done ? By no means. Having effected all 
 this, let us pepper the result over with italics and 
 numerals, print it in double columns, with a marginal 
 gutter on either side, each gutter pouring down an inky 
 flow of references and cross references. Then, and not 
 till then, is the outward disguise complete so far as 
 you are concerned. It remains only then to appoint it 
 to be read in Churches, and oblige the child to get 
 selected portions of it by heart on Sundays. But you 
 are yet to imagine that the authors themselves have 
 taken a hand in the game: that the later ones suppose 
 all the earlier ones to have been predicting all the 
 time in a nebulous fashion what they themselves have 
 to tell, and indeed to have written mainly with that 
 object: so that Macaulay and Adam Smith, for example 
 constantly interrupt the thread of their discourse to 
 affirm that what they tell us must be right because 
 Walter Map or the author of Piers Plowman foretold 
 it ages before. 
 
 Now a grown man that is to say, a comparatively 
 unimpressionable man that is again to say, a man past 
 the age when to enjoy the Bible is priceless has pro- 
 bably found out somehow that the word prophet does 
 not (in spite of vulgar usage) mean * a man who pre- 
 dicts.' He has experienced too many prophets of that 
 kind especially since 1914 and he respects Isaiah 
 too much to rank Isaiah among them. He has been in 
 love, belike; he has read the Song of Solomon: he very 
 much doubts if, on the evidence, Solomon was the kind
 
 i68 Lecture IX 
 
 of lover to have written that Song, and he is quite 
 certain that when the lover sings to his beloved: 
 
 Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins. 
 Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools 
 in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. 
 
 he knows, I say, that this is not a description of the 
 Church and her graces, as the chapter-heading auda- 
 ciously asserts. But he is lazy; too lazy even to com- 
 mend the Revised Version for striking Solomon out of 
 the Bible, calling the poem The Song of Songs, omitting 
 the absurd chapter-headings, and printing the poetry as 
 poetry ought to be printed. The old-fashioned arrange- 
 ment was good enough for him. Or he goes to church 
 on Christmas Day and listens to a first lesson, of which 
 the old translators made nonsense, and, in two passages 
 at least, stark nonsense. But, again, the old nonsense is 
 good enough for him; soothing in fact. He is not even 
 quite sure that the Bible, looking like any other book, 
 ought to be put in the hands of the young. 
 
 In all this I think he is wrong. I am sure he is wrong 
 if our contention be right, that the English Bible should 
 be studied by us all for its poetry and its wonderful 
 language as well as for its religion the religion and 
 the poetry being in fact inseparable. For then, in 
 Euripides' phrase, we should clothe the Bible in a dress 
 through which its beauty might best shine. 
 
 VII 
 
 If you ask me How? I answer first begging you to 
 bear in mind that we are planning the form of the book 
 for our purpose, and that other forms will be used for
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 169 
 
 other purposes that we should start with the simplest 
 alterations, such as these: 
 
 (1) The books should be re-arranged in their right 
 order, so far as this can be ascertained (and much of it 
 has been ascertained). I am told, and I can well believe, 
 that this would at a stroke clear away a mass of confusion 
 in strictly Biblical criticism. But that is not my business. 
 I know that it would immensely help our literary study. 
 
 (2) I should print the prose continuously, as prose 
 is ordinarily and properly printed: and the poetry in 
 verse lines, as poetry is ordinarily and properly printed. 
 And I should print each on a page of one column, with 
 none but the necessary notes and references, and these 
 so arranged that they did not tease and distract the eye. 
 
 (3) This arrangement should be kept, whether for 
 the Tripos we prescribe a book in the Authorised text 
 or in the Revised. As a rule, perhaps or as a rule for 
 some years to come we shall probably rely on the 
 Authorised Version : but for some books (and I instance 
 Job} we should undoubtedly prefer the Revised. 
 
 (4) With the verse we should, I hold, go farther even 
 than the Revisers. As you know, much of the poetry 
 in the Bible, especially of such as was meant for music, 
 is composed in stanzaic form, or in strophe and anti- 
 strophe, with prelude and conclusion, sometimes with 
 a choral refrain. We should print these, I contend, in 
 their proper form, just as we should print an English 
 poem in its proper form. 
 
 I shall conclude to-day with a striking instance of 
 this, with four strophes from the io7th Psalm, taking 
 leave to use at will the Authorised, the Revised and the
 
 170 Lecture IX 
 
 Coverdale Versions. Each strophe you will note, has a 
 double refrain. As Dr Moulton points out, the one puts 
 up a cry for help, the other an ejaculation of praise after 
 the help has come. Each refrain has a sequel verse, 
 which appropriately changes the motive and sets that 
 of the next stanza : 
 
 (0 
 
 They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary wayj 
 
 They found no city to dwell in. 
 
 Hungry and thirsty, 
 
 Their soul fainted in them. 
 
 Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, 
 And he delivered them out of their distresses. 
 
 He led them forth by a straight way, 
 
 That they might go to a city of habitation. 
 
 Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, 
 And for his wonderful works to the children of men! 
 
 For he satisfied! the longing soul, 
 
 And filleth the hungry soul with goodness. 
 
 00 
 
 Such as sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death 
 
 Being bound in affliction and iron; 
 
 Because they rebelled against the words of God, 
 
 And contemned the counsel of the most High: 
 
 Therefore he brought down their heart with labour; 
 
 They fell down, and there was none to help. 
 
 Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, 
 And he saved them out of their distresses. 
 
 He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, 
 
 And brake their bands in sunder. 
 
 Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, 
 And for his wonderful works to the children of men! 
 
 For he hath broken the gates of brass, 
 
 And cut the bars of iron in sunder.
 
 On Reading the Bible (II) 171 
 
 Fools because of their transgression, 
 
 And because of their iniquities, are afflicted, 
 
 Their soul abhorreth all manner of meat; 
 
 And they draw near unto death's door. 
 
 Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, 
 And he saveth them out of their distresses. 
 
 He sendeth his word and healeth them, 
 
 And delivereth them from their destructions. 
 
 Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness^ 
 And for his wonderful works to the children of men! 
 
 And let them offer the sacrifices of thanksgiving, 
 
 And declare his works with singing! 
 
 (iv) 
 
 They that go down to the sea in ships, 
 
 That do business in great waters; 
 
 These see the works of the Lord, 
 
 And his wonders in the deep. 
 
 For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, 
 
 Which lifteth up the waves thereof. 
 
 They mount up to the heaven, 
 
 They go down again to the depths; 
 
 Their soul melteth away because of trouble. 
 
 They reel to and fro, 
 
 And stagger like a drunken man, 
 
 And are at their wits' end. 
 
 Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, 
 And he bringeth them out of their distresses. 
 
 He maketh the storm a calm, 
 
 So that the waves thereof are still. 
 
 Then are they glad because they be quiet; 
 
 So he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be. 
 Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, 
 And for his wonderful works to the children of men! 
 
 Let them exalt him also in the assembly of the people, 
 
 And praise him in the seat of the elders !
 
 M 
 
 LECTURE X 
 
 ON READING THE BIBLE (III) 
 
 MONDAY, MAY 6, 1918 
 I 
 
 Y task to-day, Gentlemen, is mainly practical: to 
 choose a particular book of Scripture and show 
 (if I can) not only that it deserves to be enjoyed, in its 
 English rendering, as a literary masterpiece, because it 
 abides in that dress, an indisputable classic for us, as 
 surely as if it had first been composed in English; but 
 that it can, for purposes of study, serve the purpose of 
 any true literary school of English as readily, and as 
 usefully, as the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales or 
 Hamlet or Paradise Lost. I shall choose The Book of Job 
 for several reasons, presently to be given ; but beg you 
 to understand that, while taking it for a striking illus- 
 tration, I use it but to illustrate; that what may be done 
 with Job may, in degree, be done with Ruth, with Esther, 
 with the Psalms, The Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes-, with 
 Isaiah of Jerusalem, Ezekiel, sundry of the prophets; 
 even with St Luke's Gospel or St Paul's letters to the 
 Churches. 
 
 My first reason, then, for choosing Job has already 
 been given. It is the most striking illustration to be 
 found. Many of the Psalms touch perfection as lyrical 
 strains : of the ecstacy of passion in love I suppose The 
 Song of Songs to express the very last word. There are
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 173 
 
 chapters of Isaiah that snatch the very soul and ravish 
 it aloft. In no literature known to me are short stories 
 told with such sweet austerity of art as in the Gospel 
 parables I can even imagine a high and learned artist 
 in words, after rejecting them as divine on many grounds, 
 surrendering in the end to their divine artistry. But for 
 high seriousness combined with architectonic treatment 
 on a great scale; for sublimity of conception, working 
 malleably within a structure which is simple, severe, 
 complete, having a beginning, a middle and an end; for 
 diction never less than adequate, constantly right and 
 therefore not seldom superb, as theme, thought and 
 utterance soar up together and make one miracle, I can 
 name no single book of the Bible to compare with Job. 
 My second reason is that the poem, being brief, 
 compendious and quite simple in structure, can be 
 handily expounded ; Job is what Milton precisely called 
 it, 'a brief model/ And my third reason (which I must 
 not hide) is that two writers whom I mentioned in my 
 last lecture Lord Latymer and Professor R. G. 
 Moulton have already done this for me. A man who 
 drives at practice must use the tools other men have 
 made, so he use them with due acknowledgment; and 
 this acknowledgment I pay by referring you to Book II 
 of Lord Latymer's The Poet's Charter, and to the analysis 
 of Job with which Professor Moulton introduces his 
 Literary Study of the Bible. 
 
 II 
 
 But I have a fourth reason, out of which I might 
 make an apparent fifth by presenting it to you in two 
 different ways. Those elders of you who have followed
 
 174 Lecture X 
 
 certain earlier lectures ' On the Art of Writing ' may 
 remember that they set very little store upon metre as a 
 dividing line between poetry and prose, and no store at 
 all upon rhyme. I am tempted to-day to go farther, and 
 to maintain that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, 
 the more impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that 
 this impertinence increases in a sort of geometrical pro- 
 gression as you advance from monosyllabic to dissyllabic 
 and on to trisyllabic rhyme. Let me put this by a series 
 of examples. 
 
 We start with no rhyme at all: 
 
 Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first born ! 
 
 Or of the Eternal coeternal beam 
 
 May I express thee unblamed ? since God is light, 
 
 And never but in unapproached light 
 
 Dwelt from eternity. 
 
 We feel of this, as we feel of a great passage in Hamlet 
 or Lear, that here is verse at once capable of the highest 
 sublimity and capable of sustaining its theme, of lifting 
 and lowering it at will, with endless resource in the slide 
 and pause of the caesura, to carry it on and on. We feel 
 it to be adequate, too, for quite plain straightforward 
 narrative, as in this passage from Balder Dead: 
 
 But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose, 
 
 The throne, from which his eye surveys the world; 
 
 And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode 
 
 To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven, 
 
 High over Asgard, to light home the King. 
 
 But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart; 
 
 And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came. 
 
 And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang 
 
 Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets, 
 
 And the Gods trembled on their golden beds
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 175 
 
 Hearing the wrathful Father coming home 
 For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came. 
 And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left 
 Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall: 
 And in Valhalla Odin laid him down. 
 
 Now of rhyme he were a fool who, with Lycidas, or 
 Gray's Elegy, or certain choruses of Prometheus Un- 
 bound, or page after page of Victor Hugo in his mind, 
 should assert it to be in itself inimical, or a hindrance, 
 or even less than a help, to sublimity; or who, with 
 Dante in his mind, should assert it to be, in itself, any 
 bar to continuous and sustained sublimity. But lan- 
 guages differ vastly in their wealth of rhyme, and differ 
 out of any proportion to their wealth in words : English 
 for instance being infinitely richer than Italian in vo- 
 cabulary, yet almost ridiculously poorer in dissyllabic, 
 or feminine rhymes. Speaking generally, I should say 
 that in proportion to its wonderful vocabulary, English 
 is poor even in single rhymes; that the words 'love,' 
 'truth,' 'God,' for example have lists of possible con- 
 geners so limited that the mind, hearing the word 
 'love,' runs forward to match it with 'dove' or 'above* 
 or even with 'move': and this gives it a sense of arrest, 
 of listening, of check, of waiting, which alike impedes 
 the flow of Pope in imitating Homer, and of Spenser 
 in essaying a sublime and continuous story of his own. 
 It does well enough to carry Chaucer over any gap with 
 a 'forsooth as I you say* or 'forsooth as I you tell': 
 but it does so at a total cost of the sublime. And this 
 (I think) was really at the back of Milton's mind when 
 in the preface to Paradise Lost he championed blank 
 verse against 'the jingling sound of like endings.'
 
 176 Lecture X 
 
 But when we pass from single rhymes to double, of 
 which Dante had an inexhaustible store, we find the 
 English poet almost a pauper; so nearly a pauper that 
 he has to achieve each new rhyme by a trick which 
 tricking is fatal to rapture, alike in the poet and the 
 hearer. Let me instance a poem which, planned for 
 sublimity, keeps tumbling flat upon earth through the 
 inherent fault of the machine I mean Myers's St Paul 
 a poem which, finely conceived, pondered, worked 
 and re-worked upon in edition after edition, was from 
 the first condemned (to my mind) by the technical bar 
 of dissyllabic rhyme which the poet unhappily chose. 
 I take one of its most deeply felt passages that of St 
 Paul protesting against his conversion being taken for 
 instantaneous, wholly accounted for by the miraculous 
 vision related in the Acts of the Apostles : 
 
 Let no man think that sudden in a minute 
 All is accomplished and the work is done; 
 
 Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it 
 Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun. 
 
 Oh the regret, the struggle and the failing! 
 
 Oh the days desolate and useless years! 
 Vows in the night, so fierce and unavailing! 
 
 Stings of my shame and passion of my tears! 
 
 How have I seen in Araby Orion, 
 
 Seen without seeing, till he set again, 
 Known the night-noise and thunder of the lion, 
 
 Silence and sounds of the prodigious plain! 
 
 How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring 
 
 Lifted all night in irresponsive air, 
 Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring, 
 
 Blank with the utter agony of prayer!
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 177 
 
 'What,' ye will say, 'and thou who at Damascus 
 Sawest the splendour, answeredst the Voice; 
 
 So hast thou suffered and canst dare to ask us, 
 Paul of the Romans, bidding us rejoice ? ' 
 
 You cannot say I have instanced a passage anything 
 short of fine. But do you not feel that a man who is 
 searching for a rhyme to Damascus has not really the 
 time to cry 'Abba, father'? Is not your own rapture 
 interrupted by some wonder ' How will he bring it 
 off'? And when he has searched and contrived to 'ask 
 us,' are we responsive to the ecstacy? Has he not if I 
 may employ an Oriental trope for once let in the chill 
 breath of cleverness upon the garden of beatitude? No 
 man can be clever and ecstatic at the same moment 1 . 
 
 As for triple rhymes rhymes of the comedian who had 
 a lot o* news with many curious facts about the square on 
 the hypotenuse, or the cassiowary who ate the missionary 
 on the plains of Timbuctoo, with Bible, prayer-book, 
 hymn-book too they are for the facetious, and re- 
 moved, as far as geometrical progression can remove 
 them, from any Paradise Lost or Regained. 
 
 It may sound a genuine note, now and then : 
 
 Alas! for the rarity 
 Of Christian charity 
 
 Under the sun ! 
 Oh, it was pitiful! 
 Near a whole city full, 
 
 Home she had none ! 
 
 But not often : and, I think, never but in lyric. 
 
 1 It is fair to say that Myers cancelled the Damascus stanza in his 
 final edition. 
 
 Q.C. 12
 
 178 Lecture X 
 
 III 
 
 So much, then, for rhyme. We will approach the 
 question of metre, helped or unhelped by rhyme, in 
 another way; and a way yet more practical. 
 
 When Milton (determined to write a grand epic) 
 was casting about for his subject, he had a mind for 
 some while, to attempt the story of Job. You may find 
 evidence for this in a MS. preserved here in Trinity 
 College Library. You will find printed evidence in a 
 passage of his Reason of Church Government: 
 
 1 Time serves not now,' he writes, ' and perhaps I might seem 
 too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at 
 home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to 
 propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; 
 whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and 
 those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book 
 of Job a brief model...' 
 
 Again, we know Job to have been one of the three 
 stories meditated by Shelley as themes for great lyrical 
 dramas, the other two being the madness of Tasso and 
 Prometheus Unbound. Shelley never abandoned this idea 
 of a lyrical drama on Job ; and if Milton abandoned the 
 idea of an epic, there are passages in Paradise Lost as 
 there are passages in Prometheus Unbound that might 
 well have been written for this other story. Take the lines 
 
 Why am I mock'd with death, and lengthen'd out 
 To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet 
 Mortality my sentence, and be earth 
 Insensible! how glad would lay me down 
 As in my mother's lap! There I should rest 
 And sleep secure;...
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 179 
 
 What is this, as Lord Latymer asks, but an echo of 
 Job's words? 
 
 For now should I have lien down and been quiet; 
 I should have slept; then had I been at rest: 
 With kings and counsellers of the earth, 
 Which built desolate places for themselves. . . 
 There the wicked cease from troubling; 
 And there the weary be at rest. 
 
 There is no need for me to point out how exactly, 
 though from two nearly opposite angles, the story of 
 Job would hit the philosophy of Milton and the 
 philosophy of Shelley to the very heart. What is the 
 story of the afflicted patriarch but a direct challenge 
 to a protestant like Milton (I use the word in its strict 
 sense) to justify the ways of God to man? It is the very 
 purpose, in sum, of the Book of Job, as it is "the very 
 purpose, in sum, of Paradise Lost: and since both 
 poems can only work out the justification by long 
 argumentative speeches, both poems lamentably fail as 
 real solutions of the difficulty. To this I shall recur, 
 and here merely observe that qui s* excuse s y accuse : a God 
 who can only explain himself by the help of long- 
 winded scolding, or of long-winded advocacy, though 
 he employ an archangel for advocate, has given away 
 the half of his case by the implicit admission that 
 there are two sides to the question. And when we 
 have put aside the poetical ineptitude of a Creator 
 driven to apology, it remains that to Shelley the Jehovah 
 who, for a sort of wager, allowed Satan to torture Job 
 merely for the game of testing him, would be no better
 
 180 Lecture X 
 
 than any other tyrant; would be a miscreant Creator, 
 abominable as the Zeus of the Prometheus Unbound. 
 
 Now you may urge that Milton and Shelley dropped 
 Job for hero because both felt him to be a merely static 
 figure: and that the one chose Satan, the rebel angel, 
 the other chose Prometheus the rebel Titan, because 
 both are active rebels, and as epic and drama require 
 action, each of these heroes makes the thing move; that 
 Satan and Prometheus are not passive sufferers like Job 
 but souls as quick and fiery as Byron's Lucifer: 
 
 Souls who dare use their immortality 
 Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in 
 His everlasting face, and tell him that 
 His evil is not good. 
 
 Very well, urge this : urge it with all your might. All 
 the while you will be doing just what I desire you to do, 
 using Job alongside Prometheus Unbound and Paradise 
 Lost as a comparative work of literature. 
 
 But, if you ask me for my own opinion why Milton 
 and Shelley dropped their intention to make poems on 
 the Book of Job, it is that they no sooner tackled it than 
 they found it to be a magnificent poem already, and a 
 poem on which, with all their genius, they found them- 
 selves unable to improve. 
 
 I want you to realise a thing most simple, demon- 
 strable by five minutes of practice, yet so confused by 
 conventional notions of what poetry is that I dare say 
 it to be equally demonstrable that Milton and Shelley 
 discovered it only by experiment. Does this appear to 
 you a bold thing to say of so tremendous an artist as 
 Milton ? Well, of course it would be cruel to quote in
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 181 
 
 proof his paraphrases of Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi : to set 
 against the Authorised Version's 
 
 When Israel went out of Egypt, 
 
 The house of Jacob from a people of strange language 
 
 such pomposity as 
 
 When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son 
 After long toil their liberty had won 
 
 or against 
 
 O give thanks... 
 
 To him that stretched out the earth above the waters: 
 
 for his mercy endureth for ever. 
 To him that made great lights: 
 
 for his mercy endureth for ever 
 
 such stuff as 
 
 Who did the solid earth ordain 
 To rise above the watery plain; 
 
 For his mercies aye endure^ 
 
 Ever faithful, ever sure. 
 Who, by his all-commanding might, 
 Did fill the new-made world with light; 
 
 For his mercies aye endure, 
 
 Ever faithful ', ever sure. 
 
 verses yet farther weakened by the late Sir William 
 Baker for Hymns Ancient and Modern. 
 
 It were cruel, I say, to condemn these attempts as 
 little above those of Sternhold and Hopkins, or even of 
 those of Tate and Brady: for Milton made them at 
 fifteen years old, and he who afterwards consecrated his 
 youth to poetry soon learned to know better. And yet, 
 bearing in mind the passages in Paradise Lost and 
 Paradise Regained which paraphrase the Scriptural
 
 1 82 Lecture X 
 
 narrative, I cannot forbear the suspicion that, though 
 as an artist he had the instinct to feel it, he never quite 
 won to knowing the simple fact that the thing had 
 already been done and surpassingly well done : he, who 
 did so much to liberate poetry from rhyme he even 
 he who in the grand choruses of Samson Agonistes did 
 so much to liberate it from strict metre never quite 
 realised, being hag-ridden by the fetish that rides be- 
 tween two panniers, the sacred and the profane, that 
 this translation of Job already belongs to the category 
 of poetry, is poetry, already above metre, and in rhythm 
 far on its way to the insurpassable. If rhyme be allowed 
 to that greatest of arts, if metre, is not rhythm above 
 both for her service? Hear in a sentence how this 
 poem uplifts the rhythm of the Vulgate : 
 
 Ecce y Deus magnus vincens scientiam nostram; numerus 
 annorum ejus inestimabilisl 
 
 But hear, in a longer passage, how our English rhythm 
 swings and sways to the Hebrew parallels : 
 
 Surely there is a mine for silver, 
 
 And a place for gold which they refine. 
 
 Iron is taken out of the earth, 
 
 And brass is molten out of the stone. 
 
 Man setteth an end to darkness, 
 
 And searcheth out to the furthest bound 
 
 The stones of thick darkness and of the shadow of death. 
 
 He breaketh open a shaft away from where men sojourn; 
 
 They are forgotten of the foot that pass eth by; 
 
 They hang afar from men, they swing to and fro. 
 
 As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: 
 
 And underneath it is turned up as it were by fire. 
 
 The stones thereof are the place of sapphires,
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 183 
 
 And it hath dust of gold. 
 
 That path no bird of prey knoweth, 
 
 Neither hath the falcon's eye seen it: 
 
 The proud beasts have not trodden it, 
 
 Nor hath the fierce lion passed thereby. 
 
 He putteth forth his hand upon the flinty rock; 
 
 He overturneth the mountains by the roots. 
 
 He cutteth out channels among the rocks; 
 
 And his eye seeth every precious thing. 
 
 He bindeth the streams that they trickle not; 
 
 And the thing that is hid bringeth he forth to light. 
 
 But where shall wisdom be found? 
 
 And where is the place of understanding? 
 
 Man knoweth not the price thereof; 
 
 Neither is it found in the land of the living. 
 
 The deep saith, It is not in me: 
 
 And the sea saith, It is not with me. 
 
 It cannot be gotten for gold, 
 
 Neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. 
 
 It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, 
 
 With the precious onyx, or the sapphire. 
 
 Gold and glass cannot equal it: 
 
 Neither shall the exchange thereof be jewels of fine gold. 
 
 No mention shall be made of coral or of crystal : 
 
 Yea, the price of wisdom is above rubies. 
 
 The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, 
 
 Neither shall it be valued with pure gold. 
 
 Whence then cometh wisdom? 
 
 And where is the place of understanding? 
 
 Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, 
 
 And kept close from the fowls of the air. 
 
 Destruction and Death say, 
 
 We have heard a rumour thereof with our ears. 
 
 God understandeth the way thereof, 
 
 And he knoweth the place thereof. 
 
 For he looketh to the ends of the earth,
 
 184 Lecture X 
 
 And seeth under the whole heaven; 
 
 To make a weight for the wind; 
 
 Yea, he meteth out the waters by measure. 
 
 When he made a decree for the rain, 
 
 And a way for the lightning of the thunder: 
 
 Then did he see it, and declare it; 
 
 He established it, yea, and searched it out. 
 
 And unto man he said, 
 
 Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; 
 
 And to depart from evil is understanding. 
 
 Is that poetry? Surely it is poetry. Can you improve 
 it with the embellishments of rhyme and strict scansion ? 
 Well, sundry bold men have tried, and I will choose, 
 for your judgment, the rendering of a part of the above 
 passage by one who is by no means the worst of them 
 a hardy anonymous Scotsman. His version was pub- 
 lished at Falkirk in 1869: 
 
 His hand on the rock the adventurer puts, 
 And mountains entire overturns by the roots; 
 New rivers in rocks are enchased by his might, 
 And everything precious revealed to his sight; 
 The floods from o'er-flowing he bindeth at will, 
 And the thing that is hid bringeth forth by his skill. 
 
 But where real wisdom is found can he shew? 
 Or the place understanding inhabiteth? No! 
 Men know not the value, the price of this gem; 
 'Tis not found in the land of the living with them. 
 It is not in me, saith the depth; and the sea 
 With the voice of an echo, repeats, Not in me. 
 
 (I have a suspicion somehow that what the sea really 
 answered, in its northern vernacular, was ' Me either.') 
 
 Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place 
 Understanding hath chosen, since this is the case?.-.
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 185 
 
 Enough! This not only shows how that other ren- 
 dering can be spoilt even to the point of burlesque by 
 an attempt, on preconceived notions, to embellish it 
 with metre and rhyme, but it also hints that parallel 
 verse will actually resent and abhor such embellishment 
 even by the most skilled hand. Yet, I repeat, our version 
 of Job is poetry undeniable. What follows ? 
 
 Why, it follows that in the course of studying it 
 as literature we have found experimentally settled for 
 us and on the side of freedom a dispute in which 
 scores of eminent critics have taken sides: a dispute 
 revived but yesterday (if we omit the blank and devas- 
 tated days of this War) by the writers and apostles 
 of vers libres. 'Can there be poetry without metre?' 
 'Is free verse a true poetic form?' Why, our Book of 
 Job being poetry, unmistakable poetry, of course there 
 can, to be sure it is. These apostles are butting at 
 an open door. Nothing remains for them but to go and 
 write vers libres as fine as those of Job in our English 
 translation. Or suppose even that they write as well 
 as M. Paul Fort, they will yet be writing ancestrally, 
 not as innovators but as renewers. Nothing is done in 
 literature by arguing whether or not this or that be 
 possible or permissible. The only way to prove it 
 possible or permissible is to go and do it: and then you 
 are lucky indeed if some ancient writers have not fore- 
 stalled you. 
 
 IV 
 
 Now for another question (much argued, you will 
 remember, a few years ago) ' Is there can there be 
 such a thing as a Static Theatre, a Static Drama?'
 
 i86 Lecture X 
 
 Most of you (I daresay) remember M. Maeterlinck's 
 definition of this and his demand for it. To summarise 
 him roughly, he contends that the old drama the 
 traditional, the conventional drama lives by action; 
 that, in Aristotle's phrase, it represents men doing, 
 7r/)aTTo^ras,and resolves itself into a struggle of human 
 wills whether against the gods, as in ancient tragedy, 
 or against one another, as in modern. M. Maeterlinck 
 tells us 
 
 There is a tragic element in the life of every day that is far 
 more real, far more penetrating, far more akin to the true self 
 that is in us, than is the tragedy that lies in great ad venture.... It 
 goes beyond the determined struggle of man against man, and 
 desire against desire; it goes beyond the eternal conflict of duty 
 and passion. Its province is rather to reveal to us how truly 
 wonderful is the mere act of living, and to throw light upon the 
 existence of the soul, self-contained in the midst of ever-restless 
 immensities; to hush the discourse of reason and sentiment, so 
 that above the tumult may be heard the solemn uninterrupted 
 whisperings of man and his destiny. 
 
 To the tragic author [he goes on, later], as to the mediocre 
 painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the 
 violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation 
 
 thereof does the entire interest of his work consist Indeed 
 
 when I go to a theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few 
 hours with my ancestors, who conceived life as though it were 
 
 something that was primitive, arid and brutal I am shown a 
 
 deceived husband killing his wife, a woman poisoning her lover, 
 a son avenging his father, a father slaughtering his children, 
 murdered kings, ravished virgins, imprisoned citizens in a 
 word all the sublimity of tradition, but alas how superficial and 
 material! Blood, surface-tears and death ! What can I learn from 
 creatures who have but one fixed idea, who have no time to live, 
 for that there is a riva', a mistress, whom it behoves them to 
 put to death?
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 187 
 
 M. Maeterlinck does not (he says) know if the Static 
 Drama of his craving be impossible. He inclines to 
 think instancing some Greek tragedies such as 
 Prometheus and Choephori that it already exists. But 
 may we not, out of the East the slow, the stationary 
 East fetch an instance more convincing? 
 
 The Drama of Job opens with a Prologue in the 
 mouth of a Narrator. 
 
 There was a man in the land of Uz, named Job; 
 upright, God-fearing, of great substance in sheep, cattle 
 and oxen ; blest also with seven sons and three daughters. 
 After telling of their family life, how wholesome it is, 
 and pious, and happy 
 
 The Prologue passes to a Council held in Heaven. 
 The Lord sits there, and the sons of God present them- 
 selves each from his province. Enters Satan (whom 
 we had better call the Adversary) from his sphere of 
 inspection, the Earth, and reports. The Lord specially 
 questions him concerning Job, pattern of men. The 
 Adversary demurs. 'Doth Job fear God for nought? 
 Hast thou not set a hedge about his prosperity? But 
 put forth thy hand and touch all that he hath, and he 
 will renounce thee to thy face.' The Lord gives leave 
 for this trial to be made (you will recall the opening of 
 Everyman} : 
 
 So, in the midst of his wealth, a messenger came to 
 Job and says
 
 i88 Lecture X 
 
 The oxen were plowing, 
 and the asses feeding beside them: 
 and the Sabeans fell upon them, 
 
 and took them away; 
 
 yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the swordj 
 and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 
 
 While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, 
 
 The fire of God is fallen from heaven, 
 and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, 
 
 and consumed them; 
 and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 
 
 While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, 
 The Chaldeans made three bands, 
 and fell upon the camels, 
 
 and have taken them away, 
 
 yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword; 
 and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 
 
 While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, 
 
 Thy sons and thy daughters 
 
 were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's 
 house: 
 
 and, behold, 
 
 there came a great wind from the wilderness, 
 and smote the four corners of the house, 
 and it fell upon the young men, 
 
 and they are dead; 
 and T only am escaped alone to tell thee. 
 
 Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and 
 fell down upon the ground, and worshipped; and he said, 
 Naked came I out of my mother's womb, 
 
 And naked shall I return thither: 
 The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away 
 blessed be the name of the Lord.
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 189 
 
 So the Adversary is foiled, and Job has not renounced 
 God. 
 
 A second Council is held in Heaven; and the Ad- 
 versary, being questioned, has to admit Job's integrity, 
 but proposes a severer test: 
 
 Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. 
 But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, 
 and he will renounce thee to thy face. 
 
 Again leave is given : and the Adversary smites Job 
 with the most hideous and loathsome form of leprosy. 
 His kinsfolk (as we learn later) have already begun to 
 desert and hold aloof from him as a man marked out 
 by God's displeasure. But now he passes out from 
 their midst, as one unclean from head to foot, and 
 seats himself on the ash-mound that is, upon the 
 Mezbele or heap of refuse which accumulates outside 
 Arab villages. 
 
 * The dung,' says Professor Moulton, 'which is heaped upon 
 the Mezbele of the Hauran villages is not mixed with straw, 
 which in that warm and dry land is not needed for litter, and it 
 comes mostly from solid-hoofed animals, as the flocks and oxen 
 are left over-night in the grazing places. It is carried in baskets 
 in a dry state to this place... and usually burnt once a month.... 
 The ashes remain If the village has been inhabited for cen- 
 turies the Mezbele reaches a height far overtopping it. The 
 winter rains reduce it into a compact mass, and it becomes by and 
 by a solid hill of earth The Mezbele serves the inhabitants for 
 a watchtower, and in the sultry evenings for a place of con- 
 course, because there is a current of air on the height. There 
 all day long the children play about it; and there the outcast, who 
 has been stricken with some loathsome malady, and is not 
 allowed to enter the dwellings of men, lays himself down
 
 igo Lecture X 
 
 begging an alms of the passers-by by day, and by night 
 sheltering himself among the ashes which the heat of the sun 
 has warmed.* 
 
 Here, then, sits in his misery 'the forsaken grandee'; 
 and here yet another temptation comes to him this 
 time not expressly allowed by the Lord. Much foolish 
 condemnation (and, I may add, some foolish facetious- 
 ness) has been heaped on Job's wife. As a matter of 
 fact she is not a wicked woman she has borne her part 
 in the pious and happy family life, now taken away : she 
 has uttered no word of complaint though all the sub- 
 stance be swallowed up and her children with it. But 
 now the sight of her innocent husband thus helpless, 
 thus incurably smitten, wrings, through love and 
 anguish and indignation, this cry from her: 
 
 Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? renounce God, 
 and die. 
 
 But Job answered, soothing her: 
 
 Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? 
 shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not 
 receive evil? 
 
 So the second trial ends, and Job has sinned not with 
 his lips. 
 
 But now comes the third trial, which needs no 
 Council in Heaven to decree it. Travellers by the 
 mound saw this figure seated there, patient, uncom- 
 plaining, an object of awe even to the children who at 
 first mocked him; asked this man's history; and hearing 
 of it, smote on their breasts, and made a token of it and 
 carried the news into far countries : until it reached the
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 191 
 
 ears of Job's three friends, all great tribesmen like him- 
 self Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and 
 Zophar the Naamathite. These three made an appoint- 
 ment together to travel and visit Job. ' And when they 
 lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they 
 lifted up their voice and wept.' Then they went up and 
 sat down opposite him on the ground. But the majesty 
 of suffering is silent : 
 
 Here I and sorrows sit; 
 Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.... 
 
 No, not a word.... And, with the grave courtesy of 
 Eastern men, they too are silent: 
 
 So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and 
 seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw 
 that his grief was very great. 
 
 The Prologue ends. The scene is set. After seven 
 days of silence the real drama opens. 
 
 VI 
 
 Of the drama itself I shall attempt no analysis, re- 
 ferring you for this to the two books from which I have 
 already quoted. My purpose being merely to persuade 
 you that this surpassing poem can be studied, and ought 
 to be studied, as literature, I shall content myself with 
 turning it (so to speak) once or twice in my hand and 
 glancing one or two facets at you. 
 
 To begin with, then, you will not have failed to 
 notice, in the setting out of the drama, a curious re- 
 semblance between Job and the Prometheus of Aeschylus. 
 .The curtain in each play lifts on a figure solitary, tor-
 
 192 Lecture X 
 
 tured (for no reason that seems good to us) by a higher 
 will which, we are told, is God's. The chorus of Sea- 
 nymphs in the opening of the Greek play bears no 
 small resemblance in attitude of mind to Job's three 
 friends. When Job at length breaks the intolerable 
 silence with 
 
 Let the day perish wherein I was born, 
 
 And the night which said, There is a man child conceived. 
 
 he uses just such an outburst as Prometheus : and, as he 
 is answered by his friends, so the Nymphs at once ex- 
 claim to Prometheus 
 
 Seest thou not that thou hast sinned? 
 
 But at once, for anyone with a sense of comparative 
 literature, is set up a comparison between the persistent 
 West and the persistent East; between the fiery ener- 
 gising rebel and the patient victim. Of these two, both 
 good, one will dare everything to release mankind from 
 thrall; the other will submit, and justify himself man- 
 kind too, if it may hap by submission. 
 
 At once this difference is seen to give a difference of 
 form to the drama. Our poem is purely static. Some 
 critics can detect little individuality in Job's three 
 friends, to distinguish them. For my part I find Eliphaz 
 more of a personage than the other two; grander in the 
 volume of his mind, securer in wisdom; as I find Zophar 
 rather noticeably a mean-minded greybeard, and Bildad 
 a man of the stand-no-nonsense kind. But, to tell the 
 truth, I prefer not to search for individuality in these 
 men: I prefer to see them as three figures with eyes of 
 stone almost expressionless. For in truth they are the
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 193 
 
 conventions, all through, the orthodox men ad- 
 dressing Job, the reality; and their words come to this: 
 
 Thou sufferest, therefore must have sinned. 
 
 All suffering is, must be a judgment upon sin. 
 
 Else God is not righteous. 
 
 They are statuesque, as the drama is static. The speeches 
 follow one another, rising and falling, in rise and fall 
 magnificently and deliberately eloquent. Not a limb is 
 seen to move, unless it be when Job half rises from the 
 dust in sudden scorn of their conventions : 
 
 No doubt but ye are the people, 
 
 And wisdom shall die with you! 
 
 or again 
 
 Will ye speak unrighteously for God, 
 
 And talk deceitfully for him? 
 Will ye respect his person ? 
 Willy* contend for God? 
 
 Yet so great is this man, who has not renounced and 
 will not renounce God, that still and ever he clamours 
 for more knowledge of Him. Still getting no answer, 
 he lifts up his hands and calls the great Oath of Clear- 
 ance; in effect 'If I have loved gold overmuch, hated 
 mine enemy, refused the stranger my tent, truckled to 
 public opinion: 
 
 If my land cry out against me, 
 
 And the furrows thereof weep together; 
 If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money, 
 Or have caused the owners thereof to lose their life: 
 Let thistles grow instead of wheat, 
 And cockle instead of barley. 
 
 With a slow gesture he covers his face: 
 The words of Job are ended. 
 Q.C. 13
 
 194 Lecture X 
 
 VII 
 
 They are ended: even though at this point (when the 
 debate seems to be closed) a young Aramaean Arab, 
 Elihu, who has been loitering around and listening to 
 the controversy, bursts in and delivers his young red-hot 
 opinions. They are violent, and at the same time quite 
 raw and priggish. Job troubles not to answer : the others 
 keep a chilling silence. But while this young man rants, 
 pointing skyward now and again, we see, we feel it is 
 most wonderfully conveyed as clearly as if indicated 
 by successive stage-directions, a terrific thunder-storm 
 gathering;a thunder-storm with a whirlwind. Itgathers; 
 it is upon them; it darkens them with dread until even 
 the words of Elihu dry on his lips : 
 
 If a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up. 
 
 It breaks and blasts and confounds them; and out of it 
 the Lord speaks. 
 
 Now of that famous and marvellous speech, put by 
 the poet into the mouth of God, we may say what may 
 be said of all speeches put by man into the mouth of 
 God. We may say, as of the speeches of the Archangel 
 in Paradise Lost that it is argument, and argument, by 
 its very nature, admits of being answered. But, if to 
 make God talk at all be anthropomorphism, here is 
 anthropomorphism at its very best in its effort to reach 
 to God. 
 
 There is a hush. The storm clears away; and in this hush the 
 voice of the Narrator is heard again, pronouncing the Epilogue. 
 Job has looked in the face of God and reproached him as a friend 
 reproaches a friend. Therefore his captivity was turned, and his
 
 On Reading the Bible (III) 195 
 
 wealth returned to him, and he begat sons and daughters, and 
 saw his son's sons unto the fourth generation. So Job died, being 
 old and full of years. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Structurally a great poem ; historically a great poem ; 
 philosophically a great poem; so rendered for us in 
 noble English diction as to be worthy in any comparison 
 of diction, structure, ancestry, thought ! Why should 
 we not study it in our English School, if only for pur- 
 pose of comparison? I conclude with these words of 
 Lord Latymer: 
 
 There is nothing comparable with it except the Prometheus 
 Bound of Aeschylus. It is eternal, illimitable.... its scope is the 
 relation between God and Man. It is a vast liberation, a great 
 gaol-delivery of the spirit of Man; nay, rather a great Acquittal.
 
 LECTURE XI 
 OF SELECTION 
 
 WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1918 
 I 
 
 Cus hark back, Gentlemen, to our original prob- 
 lem, and consider if our dilatory way have led us to 
 some glimpse of a practical solution. 
 
 We may re-state it thus: Assuming it to be true, as 
 men of Science assure us, that the weight of this planet 
 remains constant, and is to-day what it was when man- 
 kind carelessly laid it on the shoulders of Atlas; that 
 nothing abides but it goes, that nothing goes but in 
 some form or other it comes back; you and I may well 
 indulge a wonder what reflections upon this astonishing 
 fact our University Librarian, Mr Jenkinson, takes to 
 bed with him. A copy of every book printed in the 
 United Kingdom is or I had better say, should be 
 deposited with him. Putting aside the question of what 
 he has done to deserve it, he must surely wonder at times 
 from what other corners of the earth Providence has been 
 at pains to collect and compact the ingredients of the 
 latest new volume he handles for a moment before fondly 
 committing it to the cellars. 
 
 'Locked up, not lost.' 
 
 Or, to take it in reverse When the great library of 
 Alexandria went up in flames, doubtless its ashes awoke 
 an appreciable and almost immediate energy in the
 
 Of Selection 197 
 
 crops of the Nile Delta. The more leisurable process of 
 desiccation, by which, under modern storage, the com- 
 ponents of a modern novel are released to fresh unions 
 and activities admits, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, 
 a wide solution, and was just the question to tease that 
 good man. Can we not hear him discussing it? 'To be 
 but pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration... To 
 burn the bones of the King of Edom for lime seems no 
 irrational ferity: but to store the back volumes of 
 Mr Bottomley's John Bull a passionate prodigality.' 
 
 II 
 
 Well, whatever the perplexities of our Library we 
 may be sure they will never break down that tradition 
 of service, help and courtesy which is, among its fine 
 treasures, still the first. But we have seen that Mr Jen- 
 kinson's perplexities are really but a parable of ours: 
 that the question, What are we to do with all these books 
 accumulating in the world? really is a question: that 
 their mere accumulation really does heap up against us 
 a barrier of such enormous and brute mass that the 
 stream of human culture must needs be choked and 
 spread into marsh unless we contrive to pipe it through. 
 That a great deal of it is meant to help that even the 
 most of it is well intentioned avails not against the 
 mere physical obstacle of its mass. If you consider an 
 Athenian gentleman of the j"th century B.C. connecting 
 (as I always preach here) his literature with his life, two 
 things are bound to strike you: the first that he was 
 a man of leisure, somewhat disdainful of trade and 
 relieved of menial work by a number of slaves; the
 
 198 Lecture XI 
 
 second, that he was surprisingly unencumbered with 
 books. You will find in Plato much about reciters, 
 actors, poets, rhetoricians, pleaders, sophists, public 
 orators and refiners of language, but very little indeed 
 about books. Even the library of Alexandria grew in a 
 time of decadence and belonged to an age not his. 
 Says Jowett in the end : 
 
 He who approaches him in the most reverent spirit shall reap 
 most of the fruit of his wisdom; he who reads him by the light 
 of ancient commentators will have the least understanding of 
 him. 
 
 We see him [Jowett goes on] with the eye of the mind in 
 the groves of the Academy, or on the banks of the Ilissus, or 
 in the streets of Athens, alone or walking with Socrates, full of 
 those thoughts which have since become the common possession 
 of mankind. Or we may compare him to a statue hid away in 
 some temple of Zeus or Apollo, no longer existing on earth, a 
 statue which has a look as of the God himself. Or we may once 
 more imagine him following in another state of being the great 
 company of heaven which he beheld of old in a vision. So, 
 'partly trifling but with a certain degree of seriousness,' we linger 
 around the memory of a world which has passed away. 
 
 Yes, ' which has passed away,' and perhaps with no 
 token more evident of its decease than the sepulture of 
 books that admiring generations have heaped on it! 
 
 Ill 
 
 In a previous lecture I referred you to the beautiful 
 opening and the yet more beautiful close of the Phaedrus. 
 Let us turn back and refresh ourselves with that 
 Dialogue while we learn from it, in somewhat more of 
 detail, just what a book meant to an Athenian : how fresh 
 a thing it was to him and how little irksome.
 
 Of Selection 199 
 
 Phaedrus has spent his forenoon listening to a dis- 
 course by the celebrated rhetorician Lysias on the 
 subject of Love, and is starting to cool his head with a 
 stroll beyond the walls of the city, when he encounters 
 Socrates, who will not let him go until he has delivered 
 up the speech with which Lysias regaled him, or, better 
 still, the manuscript, * which I suspect you are carrying 
 there in your left hand under your cloak.' So they bend 
 their way beside Ilissus towards a tall plane tree, seen 
 in the distance. Having reached it, they recline. 
 
 'By Hera,' says Socrates, 'a fair resting-place, full of summer 
 sounds and scents ! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high 
 bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully 
 cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I 
 think this spot must be sacred to Acheloiis and the Nymphs. 
 And the breeze, how deliciously charged with balm! and all 
 summer's murmur in the air, shrilled by the chorus of the grass- 
 hoppers! But the greatest charm is this knoll of turf, positively 
 a pillow for the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been a 
 delectable guide.' 
 
 'What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates,' returns 
 Phaedrus. 'When you are in the country, as you say, you really 
 are like some stranger led about by a guide. Upon my word, I 
 doubt if you ever stray beyond the gates save by accident.' 
 
 'Very true, my friend: and I hope you will forgive me for 
 the reason which is, that I love knowledge, and my teachers 
 are the men who dwell in the city, not the trees or country 
 scenes. Yet I do believe you have found a spell to draw me forth, 
 like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is 
 waved. For only hold up before me in like manner a book, 
 and you may lead me all round Attica and over the wide world.' 
 
 So they recline and talk, looking aloft through that 
 famous pure sky of Attica, mile upon mile transparent;
 
 2oo Lecture XI 
 
 and their discourse (preserved to us) is of Love, and 
 seems to belong to that atmosphere, so clear it is and 
 luminously profound. It ends with the cool of the day, 
 and the two friends arise to depart. Socrates looks about 
 him. 
 
 ' Should we not before going, offer up a prayer to 
 these local deities? ' 
 
 * By all means,' Phaedrus agrees. 
 
 Socrates (praying): 'Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who 
 haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that 
 the outward and inward may be at one ! May I esteem the wise 
 to be the rich; and may I myself have that quantity of gold 
 
 which a temperate man, and he only, can carry Anything 
 
 more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me.' 
 
 Phaedrus. ' Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks, 
 should have all things in common.' 
 
 Socrates. 'Amen, then Let us go.' 
 
 Here we have, as it seems to me, a marriage, without 
 impediment, of wisdom and beauty between two minds 
 that perforce have small acquaintance with books: and 
 yet, with it, Socrates' confession that anyone with a book 
 under his cloak could lead him anywhere by the nose. 
 So we see that Hellenic culture at its best was inde- 
 pendent of book-learning, and yet craved for it. 
 
 IV 
 
 When our own Literature awoke, taking its origin 
 from the proud scholarship of the Renaissance, an 
 Englishman who affected it was scarcely more cumbered 
 with books than our Athenian had been, two thousand 
 years before. It was, and it remained, aristocratic: 
 sparingly expensive of its culture. It postulated, if not
 
 Of Selection 201 
 
 a slave population, at least a proletariat for which its 
 blessings were not. No one thought of making a 
 fortune by disseminating his work in print. Shake- 
 speare never found it worth while to collect and publish 
 his plays; and a very small sense of history will suffice 
 to check our tears over the price received by Milton for 
 Paradise Lost. We may wonder, indeed, at the time it 
 took our forefathers to realise or, at any rate, to 
 employ the energy that lay in the printing-press. For 
 centuries after its invention mere copying commanded 
 far higher prices than authorship 1 . Writers gave 
 ' authorised ' editions to the world sometimes for the 
 sake of fame, often to justify themselves against piratical 
 publishers, seldom in expectation of monetary profit. 
 Listen, for example, to Sir Thomas Browne's excuse for 
 publishing Religio Medici (1643): 
 
 Had not almost every man suffered by the press or were not the 
 tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for 
 complaint: but in times wherein I have lived to behold the highest 
 perversion of that excellent invention, the name of his Majesty 
 defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved, the writings of both 
 depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted; complaints 
 may seem ridiculous in private persons; and men of my condition 
 may be as incapable of affronts, as hopeless of their reparations. 
 And truly had not the duty I owe unto the importunity of 
 friends, and the allegiance I must ever acknowledge unto truth, 
 prevailed with me; the inactivity of my disposition might have 
 made these sufferings continual, and time that brings other 
 things to light, should have satisfied me in the remedy of its 
 oblivion. But because things evidently false are not only 
 printed, but many things of truth most falsely set forth, in this 
 
 1 Charles Reade notes this in The Cloister and the Hearth, chap. LXI.
 
 2O2 Lecture XI 
 
 latter I could not but think myself engaged. For though we have 
 no power to redress the former, yet in the other, the reparation 
 being within our selves, I have at present represented unto the 
 world a full and intended copy of that piece, which was most 
 imperfectly and surreptitiously published before. 
 
 This I confess, about seven years past, with some others of 
 affinity thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had 
 at leisurable hours composed; which being communicated unto 
 one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription 
 successively corrupted, untill it arrived in a most depraved copy 
 at the press... 1 . 
 
 V 
 
 The men of the i8th century maintained the old 
 tradition of literary exclusiveness, but in a somewhat 
 different way and more consciously. 
 
 I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, 
 that nine out of ten of you dislike the i8th century 
 and all its literary works. As for the Women students, 
 they one and all abominate it. You do not, I regret to 
 say, provide me with reasons much more philosophical 
 than the epigrammatist's for disliking Doctor Fell. 
 May one whose time of life excuses perhaps a detach- 
 ment from passion attempt to provide you with one? 
 If so, first listen to this from Mr and Mrs Hammond's 
 book The Village Labour er, 1760-1832: 
 
 A row of 1 8th century houses, or a room of normal 1 8th 
 century furniture, or a characteristic piece of i8th century 
 literature, conveys at once a sensation of satisfaction and com- 
 
 1 The loose and tautologous style of this Preface is worth noting. 
 Likely enough Browne wrote it in a passion that deprived him of his 
 habitual self-command. One phrase alone reveals the true Browne 
 that is, Browne true to himself: 'and time that brings other things to 
 light, should have satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion.'
 
 Of Selection 203 
 
 pleteness. The secret of this charm is not to be found in any 
 special beauty or nobility of design or expression, but simply in 
 an exquisite fitness. The i8th century mind was a unity, an 
 order. All literature and art that really belong to the i8th 
 century are the language of a little society of men and women 
 who moved within one set of ideas; who understood each other; 
 who were not tormented by any anxious or bewildering problems; 
 who lived in comfort, and, above all things, in composure. The 
 classics were their freemasonry. There was a standard for the 
 mind, for the emotions, for taste: there were no incongruities. 
 
 When you have a society like this, you have what we roughly 
 call a civilisation, and it leaves its character and canons in all 
 its surroundings and in its literature. Its definite ideas lend 
 themselves readily to expression. A larger society seems an 
 anarchy in contrast: just because of its escape into a greater 
 world it seems powerless to stamp itself in wood or stone; it is 
 condemned as an age of chaos and mutiny, with nothing to 
 declare. 
 
 You do wrong, I assure you, in misprising these men 
 of the 1 8th century. They reduced life, to be sure: but 
 by that very means they saw it far more completely than 
 do we, in this lyrical age with our worship of 'fine excess.' 
 Here at any rate, and to speak only of its literature, you 
 have a society fencing that literature around I do not 
 say by forethought or even consciously but in effect 
 fencing its literature around, to keep it in control and 
 capable of an orderly, a nice, even an exquisite cultiva- 
 tion. Dislike it as you may, I do not think that any of 
 you, as he increases his knowledge of the technique of 
 English Prose, yes, and of English Verse (I do not 
 say of English Poetry) will deny his admiration to the 
 men of the i8th century. The strength of good prose 
 resides not so much in the swing and balance of the
 
 2O4 Lecture XI 
 
 single sentence as in the marshalling of argument, the 
 orderly procession of paragraphs, the disposition of 
 parts so that each finds its telling, its proper, place; the 
 adjustment of the means to the end; the strategy which 
 brings its full force into action at the calculated moment 
 and drives the conclusion home upon an accumulated 
 sense of justice. I do not see how any student of i8th 
 century literature can deny its writers Berkeley or 
 Hume or Gibbon Congreve or Sheridan Pope or 
 Cowper Addison or Steele or Johnson Burke or 
 Chatham or Thomas Paine their meed for this, or, if 
 he be an artist, even his homage. 
 
 But it remains true, as your instinct tells you, and as 
 I have admitted, that they achieved all this by help of 
 narrow and artificial boundaries. Of several fatal ex- 
 clusions let me name but two. 
 
 In the first place, they excluded the Poor; imitating 
 in a late age the Athenian tradition of a small polite 
 society resting on a large and degraded one. Throughout 
 the 1 8th century and the great Whig families were 
 at least as much to blame for this as the Tories by 
 enclosure of commons, by grants, by handling of the 
 franchise, by taxation, by poor laws in result punitive 
 though intended to be palliative, the English peasantry 
 underwent a steady process of degradation into serfdom : 
 into a serfdom which, during the first twenty years of 
 the next century, hung constantly and precariously on 
 the edge of actual starvation. The whole theory of 
 culture worked upon a principle of double restriction ; 
 of restricting on the one hand the realm of polite 
 knowledge to propositions suitable for a scholar and a
 
 Of Selection 205 
 
 gentlemen, and, on the other, the numbers of the 
 human family permitted to be either. The theory 
 deprecated enthusiasm, as it discountenanced all am- 
 bition in a poor child to rise above what Sir Spencer 
 Walpole called ' his inevitable and hereditary lot ' 
 to soften which and make him acquiescent in it was, 
 with a Wilberforce or a Hannah More, the last dream 
 of restless benevolence. 
 
 VI 
 
 Also these i8th century men fenced off the whole of 
 our own Middle English and medieval literature 
 fenced off Chaucer and Dunbar, Malory and Berners 
 as barbarous and ' Gothic.' They treated these writers 
 with little more consideration than Boileau had thought 
 it worth while to bestow on Villon or on Ronsard 
 enfin Malherbe \ As for Anglo-Saxon literature, one may 
 safely say that, save by Gray and a very few others, its 
 existence was barely surmised. 
 
 You may or may not find it harder to forgive them 
 that they ruled out moreover a great part of the litera- 
 ture of the preceding century as offensive to urbane 
 taste or as they would say, ' disgusting.' They disliked 
 it mainly, one suspects, as one age revolts from the 
 fashion of another as some of you, for example, revolt 
 from the broad plenty of Dickens (Heaven forgive you) 
 or the ornament of Tennyson. Some of the great 
 writers of that age definitely excluded God from their 
 scheme of things: others included God fiercely, but with 
 circumscription and limitation. I think it fair to say of 
 them generally that they hated alike the mystical and
 
 2o6 Lecture XI 
 
 the mysterious, and, hating these, could have little 
 commerce with such poetry as Crashaw's and Vaughan's 
 or such speculation as gave ardour to the prose of the 
 Cambridge Platonists. Johnson's famous attack, in his 
 Life of Cowley, upon the metaphysical followers of 
 Donne ostensibly assails their literary conceits, but truly 
 and at bottom rests its quarrel against an attitude of 
 mind, in respect of which he lived far enough removed 
 to be unsympathetic yet near enough to take denuncia- 
 tion for a duty. Johnson, to put it vulgarly, had as little 
 use for Vaughan's notion of poetry as he would have 
 had for Shelley's claim that it 
 
 feeds on the ae'real kisses 
 Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses, 
 
 and we have only to set ourselves back in Shelley's age 
 and read (say) the verse of Frere and Canning in The 
 Anti-Jacobin, to understand how frantic a lyrist let 
 be how frantic a political figure Shelley must have 
 appeared to well regulated minds. 
 
 VII 
 
 All this literature which our forefathers excluded has 
 come back upon us: and concurrently we have to deal 
 with the more serious difficulty (let us give thanks for it) 
 of a multitude of millions insurgent to handsel their 
 long-deferred heritage. I shall waste no time in arguing 
 that we ought not to wish to withhold it, because we 
 cannot if we would. And thus the problem becomes 
 a double one, of distribution as well as of selection. 
 
 Now in the first place I submit that this distribution 
 should be free : which implies that our selection must be
 
 Of Selection 207 
 
 confined to books and methods of teaching. There must 
 be no picking and choosing among the recipients, no 
 appropriation of certain forms of culture to certain 
 * stations of life ' with a tendency, conscious or uncon- 
 scious, to keep those stations as stationary as possible. 
 
 Merely by clearing our purpose to this extent we shall 
 have made no inconsiderable advance. For even the 
 last century never quite got rid of its predecessor's fixed 
 idea that certain degrees of culture were appropriate 
 to certain stations of life. With what gentle persistence 
 it prevails, for example, in Jane Austen's novels; with 
 what complacent rhetoric in Tennyson (and in spite of 
 Lady Clara Vere de Vere) 1 Let me remind you that by 
 allowing an idea to take hold of our animosity we may 
 be as truly * possessed ' by it as though it claimed our 
 allegiance. The notion that culture may be drilled to 
 march in step with a trade or calling endured through 
 the Victorian age of competition and possessed the mind 
 not only of Samuel Smiles who taught by instances how 
 a bright and industrious boy might earn money and 
 lift himself out of his ' station,' but of Ruskin himself, 
 who in the first half of Sesame and Lilies, in the lecture 
 Of Kings' Treasuries, discussing the choice of books, 
 starts vehemently and proceeds at length to denounce 
 the prevalent passion for self-advancement of rising 
 above one's station in life quite as if it were the most 
 important thing, willy-nilly, in talking of the choice of 
 books. Which means that, to Ruskin, just then, it 
 was the most formidable obstacle. Can we, at this time 
 of day, do better by simply turning the notion out of 
 doors? Yes, I believe that we can: and upon this credo:
 
 208 Lecture XI 
 
 I believe that while it may grow and grow infinitely 
 with increase of learning, the grace of a liberal education, 
 like the grace of Christianity, is so catholic a thing so 
 absolutely above being trafficked, retailed, apportioned, 
 among ' stations in life ' that the humblest child may claim 
 it by indefeasible right, having a sou/. 
 
 Further, I believe that Humanism is, or should be, no 
 decorative appanage, purchased late in the process of educa- 
 tion,within the means of a few: but a quality, rather, which 
 should, and can, condition all teaching, from a child's first 
 lesson in Reading: that its unmistakable hall-mark can be 
 impressed upon the earliest task set in an Elementary 
 School. 
 
 VIII 
 
 I am not preaching red Radicalism in this : I am not 
 telling you that Jack is as good as his master: if he were, 
 he would be a great deal better; for he would under- 
 stand Homer (say) as well as his master, the child of 
 parents who could afford to have him taught Greek. 
 As Greek is commonly taught, I regret to say, whether 
 they have learnt it or not makes a distressingly small 
 difference to most boys' appreciation of Homer. Still 
 it does make a vast difference to some, and should make 
 a vast difference to all. And yet, if you will read the 
 passage in Kinglake's Eothen in which he tells in words 
 that find their echo in many a reader's memory of his 
 boyish passion for Homer and if you will note that the 
 boy imbibed his passion, after all, through the conduit 
 of Pope's translation you will acknowledge that, for the 
 human boy, admission to much of the glory of Homer's
 
 Of Selection 209 
 
 realm does not depend upon such mastery as a boy of 
 fifteen or sixteen possesses over the original. But let 
 me quote you a few sentences: 
 
 I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholars love The most 
 humble and pious among women was yet so proud a mother that 
 she could teach her first-born son no Watts's hymns, no 
 collects for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood 
 no less than this to find a home in his saddle, and to love old 
 Homer, and all that old Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek 
 was ingeniously rendered into English, the English of Pope 
 even, but not even a mesh like that can screen an earnest child 
 from the fire of Homer's battles. 
 
 I pored over the Odyssey as over a story-book, hoping and 
 fearing for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the Iliad 
 line by line I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as 
 with love.... 
 
 The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing 
 the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their 
 talking,... but all the while that he thus chafes at the pausing of 
 the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's poetry is blazing 
 so full upon the people and things of the 7//W, that soon to the 
 eyes of the child they grow familiar as his mother's shawl.... 
 
 It was not the recollection of school nor college learning, 
 but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, which 
 made me bend forward so longingly to the plains of Troy. 
 
 IX 
 
 It is among the books then, and not among the 
 readers, that we must do our selecting. But how? On 
 what principle or principles? 
 
 Sometime in the days of my youth, a newspaper, The 
 Pall Mall Gazette^ then conducted by W. T. Stead, made 
 a conscientious effort to solve the riddle by inviting a 
 Q.C. 14
 
 2io Lecture XI 
 
 number of eminent men to compile lists of the Hundred 
 Best Books. Now this invitation rested on a fallacy. 
 Considering for a moment how personal a thing is 
 Literature, you will promptly assure yourselves that 
 there is there can be no such thing as the Hundred 
 Best Books. If you yet incline to toy with the notion, 
 carry it on and compile a list of the Hundred Second- 
 best Books: nay, if you will, continue until you find 
 yourself solemnly, with a brow corrugated by responsi- 
 bility, weighing the claims (say) of Velleius Paterculus, 
 Paul and Virginia and Mr Jorrocks to admission among 
 the Hundred Tenth-best Books. There is in fact no 
 positive hierarchy among the classics. You cannot 
 appraise the worth of Charles Lamb against the worth 
 of Casaubon : the worth of Hesiod against the worth of 
 Madame de Sevigne' : the worth of The'ophile Gautier 
 against the worth of Dante or Thomas Hobbes or 
 Macchiavelli or Jane Austen. They all wrote with pens, 
 in ink, upon paper : but you no sooner pass beyond these 
 resemblances than your comparison finds itself working 
 in impart materia. 
 
 Also why should the Best Books be 100 in number, 
 rather than 99 or 199? And under what conditions 
 is a book a Best Book? There are moods in which we not 
 only prefer Pickwick to the Rig-Vedas or Sakuntala, 
 but find that it does us more good. In our day again I 
 pay all respect to Messrs Dent's Everyman's Library. 
 It was a large conception vigorously planned. But, in the 
 nature of things, Everyman is going to arrive at a point 
 beyond which he will find it more and more difficult to 
 recognise himself: at a point, let us say, when Every-
 
 Of Selection 211 
 
 man, opening a new parcel, starts to doubt if, after all, 
 it wouldn't be money in his pocket to be Somebody 
 Else. 
 
 X 
 
 And yet, may be, The Pall Mall Gazette was on the 
 right scent. For it was in search of masterpieces: and, 
 however we teach, our trust will in the end repose upon 
 masterpieces, upon the great classics of whatever 
 Language or Literature we are handling : and these, in 
 any language are neither enormous in number and mass, 
 nor extraordinarily difficult to detect, nor (best of all) 
 forbidding to the reader by reason of their own difficulty. 
 Upon a selected few of these even upon three, or two, 
 or one we may teach at least a surmise of the true 
 delight, and may be some measure of taste whereby our 
 pupil will, by an inner guide, be warned to choose the 
 better and reject the worse when we turn him loose to 
 read for himself. 
 
 To this use of masterpieces I shall devote my final 
 lecture. 
 
 14 *
 
 LECTURE XII 
 
 ON THE USE OF MASTERPIECES 
 
 WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1918 
 I 
 
 I DO not think, Gentlemen, that we need to bother 
 ourselves to-day with any definition of a ' classic,' or of 
 the stigmata by which a true classic can be recognised. 
 Sainte-Beuve once indicated these in a famous discourse, 
 Qu'est-ce qu'un classiquei and it may suffice us that these 
 include Universality and Permanence. Your true 
 classic is universal, in that it appeals to the catholic mind 
 of man. It is doubly permanent: for it remains signifi- 
 cant, or acquires a new significance, after the age for 
 which it was written and the conditions under which it 
 was written, have passed away; and it yet keeps, un- 
 defaced by handling, the original noble 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 title of 
 classic 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 classic,
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 213 
 
 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 ultimately 
 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 con- 
 siderable 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 com- 
 municate 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 Shake- 
 speare * 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,
 
 214 Lecture XII 
 
 humanity ' ; but they raise your gorge to defend you 
 from swallowing the fifth-rate, the sham, the fraudu- 
 lent. Abeunt studio, 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 him- 
 self 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 damnable in- 
 stance, 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 ^Eneae 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 par- 
 ticular outrage. I know the sort of man well enough 
 to venture that he never had a liberal education, and,
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 215 
 
 further, that he is probably rather proud of it. But he 
 may nevertheless own some instinct of primitive kind- 
 liness: and I wish he could know how he afflicts men 
 of sensitiveness who have sons at the War. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Secondly, let us consider what use we can make of 
 even one selected classic. 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 incorpo- 
 rate.' 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 main- 
 tain 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.
 
 216 Lecture XII 
 
 IV 
 
 But let us take something far simpler than the Ninth 
 Book of Paradise Lost and more direct than any trans- 
 lated 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 noblest 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 hew Ferdinand; 
 
 (4) that, though Shakespeare uses his loftiest, most 
 accomplished and, in a sense, his most difficult lan- 
 guage : a way of talking it has cost him a life-time to 
 acquire, in line upon line inviting the scholar's, pro- 
 sodist'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 
 assistant harmonies, doubles and redoubles the spell. 
 A child no more resents this because it is strange than he 
 objects to read in a fairy-tale 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 imagina-
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 217 
 
 tion, that what he demands of life is the wonderful, the 
 glittering, possibility? 
 
 Now if, putting all this together and taking confi- 
 dence from it, we boldly launch a child upon The 
 Tempest we shall come sooner or later upon passages 
 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 thatch 'd 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 lass-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard; 
 
 And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky hard 
 
 Where thou thyself dost air; the Queen o' the sky 
 
 Whose watery arch and messenger am I, 
 
 Bids thee leave these. . . . 
 
 The passage 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
 
 218 Lecture XII 
 
 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 Naiades, of the wandering brooks 
 With your sedg'd crowns 
 
 and if the child demand what is meant by ' pioned 
 and twilled brims,' you have to answer him that 
 nobody 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 
 passed 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 if Ferdinand (I repeat) and 
 the isle is ' full of voices.' If these voices were all intelli- 
 gible, why then, as Browning would say, 'the less 
 Island it.'
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 219 
 
 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 gover- 
 nance 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 inter- 
 mittent, 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,
 
 22O Lecture XII 
 
 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 litera- 
 ture 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 ^th 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 asserting genius; the men who, in 
 Newman's words, * deserve to be Classics, 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. Pass Athens and 
 come to Alexandria: still men are accumulating books 
 and the material for books; threshing out the classics 
 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
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 221 
 
 (I regret to say) either heartily assisting 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 scholarship lift themselves above the waters : mere 
 specks at first, but ridges appear and connect them : and, 
 to first seeming, sterile enough: 
 
 Nee Cereri opportuna seges, nee commoda Baccho 
 
 but as they join and become a terra firma^ a thin soil 
 gathers on them God knows whence: and, God 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 nobly, how blithely paid you may 
 learn, without seeking recondite examples, from Cuth- 
 bert'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 re- 
 creating not scholarship 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
 
 222 Lecture XII 
 
 to reflect that beyond our present passions, 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 n, 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 manu- 
 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 partitioned 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 accumulate books and to keep them. The
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 223 
 
 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 passionate chasings across Europe, in and out of 
 obscure monasteries, to recover the lost MSS of the 
 classics : 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 col- 
 lected two hundred and thirty-eight for Florence : or the 
 story of the editio -princess 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 classes in this country; and that yet, in the nature 
 of things, these classes 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. 
 
 Let me point out further that within the last few 
 months we have doubled the difficulty at a stroke by 
 sharing the government of our country with women and
 
 224 Lecture XII 
 
 admitting them to Parliament. It beseems a great 
 nation to take great risks : to dare them is at once a sign 
 and a property of greatness: and for good or ill but for 
 limitless good as we trust our country has quietly 
 made this enterprise amid the preoccupations of the 
 greatest War in its annals. Look at it as you will let 
 other generations judge it as they will it stands a 
 monument of our faith in free self-government that in 
 these most perilous days we gave and took so high a 
 guerdon of trust in one another. 
 
 But clearly it implies that all the women of this 
 country, down to the small girls entering our elementary 
 schools, must be taught a great many things their 
 mothers and grandmothers happy in their generation 
 were content not to know 1 . 
 
 1 'Well!...myeducationis at last finished : indeed it would be strange, 
 if, after five years' hard application, anything were left incomplete. 
 Happily that is all over now; and I have nothing to do, but to exercise 
 my various accomplishments. 
 
 'Let me see! as to French, I am mistress of that, and speak it, if 
 possible, with more fluency than English. Italian I can read with ease, 
 and pronounce very well : as well at least, and better, than any of my 
 friends ; and that is all one need wish for in Italian. Music I have 
 learned till I am perfectly sick of it. But. . .it will be delightful to 
 play when we have company. I must still continue to practise a little ; 
 the only thing, I think, that I need now to improve myself in. And 
 then there are my Italian songs ! which everybody allows I sing with 
 taste, and as it is what so few people can pretend to, I am particularly 
 glad that I can. 
 
 'My drawings are universally admired; especially the shells and 
 flowers; which are beautiful, certainly; besides this, I have a decided 
 taste in all kinds of fancy ornaments. 
 
 'And then my dancing and waltzing ! in which our master himself 
 owned that he could take me no further! just the figure for it 
 certainly; it would be unpardonable if I did not excel. 
 
 'As to common things / geography, and history, and poetry, and 
 philosophy, thank my stars, I have got through them all! so that I
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 225 
 
 It cannot be denied, I think, that in the long course 
 of this War, now happily on the point of a victorious con- 
 clusion, we have suffered heavily through past neglect 
 and present nescience of our literature, which is so much 
 more European, so much more catholic, a thing than 
 either our politics or our national religion : that largely 
 by reason of this neglect and this nescience our states- 
 men have again and again failed to foresee how con- 
 tinental nations would act through failing to understand 
 their minds; and have almost invariably, through this 
 lack of sympathetic understanding, failed to interpret 
 us to foreign friend or foe, even when (and it was not 
 often) they interpreted us to ourselves. I note that 
 America a country with no comparable separate 
 tradition of literature has customarily chosen men 
 distinguished by the grace of letters for ambassadors 
 to the Court of St James Motley, Lowell, Hay, Page, 
 in our time: and has for her President a man of letters 
 and a Professor at that ! whereas, even in these critical 
 days, Great Britain, having a most noble cause and 
 at least half-a-hundred writers and speakers capable 
 of presenting it with dignity and so clearly that no 
 neutral nation could mistake its logic, has by preference 
 entrusted it to stunt journalists and film-artistes. If in 
 these later days you have lacked a voice to interpret you 
 
 may consider myself not only perfectly accomplished, but also thoroughly 
 well-informed. 
 
 'Well, to be sure, how much have I fagged through ; the only 
 wonder is that one head can contain it all.' 
 
 I found this in a little book Thoughts of Divines and Philosophers, 
 selected by Basil Montagu. The quotation is signed 'J. T.' I cannot 
 trace it, but suspect Jane Taylor. 
 
 9- c. 15
 
 226 Lecture XII 
 
 in the great accent of a Chatham, the cause lies in past 
 indifference to that literary tradition which is by no 
 means the least among the glories of our birth and state. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Masterpieces, then, will serve us as prophylactics of 
 taste, even from childhood; and will help us, further, to 
 interpret the common mind of civilisation. But they 
 have a third and yet nobler use. They teach us to lift 
 our own souls. 
 
 For witness to this and to the way of it I am going to 
 call an old writer for whom, be it whim or not, I have 
 an almost i8th century reverence Longinus. No one 
 exactly knows who he was; although it is usual to 
 identify him with that Longinus who philosophised in 
 the court of the Queen Zenobia and was by her, in her 
 downfall, handed over with her other counsellors to be 
 executed by Aurelian: though again, as is usual, 
 certain bold bad men affirm that, whether he was this 
 Longinus or not, the treatise of which I speak was not 
 written by any Longinus at all but by someone with 
 a different name, with which they are unacquainted. Be 
 this as it may, somebody wrote the treatise and its first 
 editor, Francis Robertello of Basle, in 1554 called him 
 Dionysius Longinus ; and so shall I, and have done with 
 it, careless that other MSS than that used by Robertello, 
 speak of Dionysius or Longinus. Dionysius Longinus, 
 then, in the 3rd century A. D. some say in the ist: it is 
 no great matter wrote a little book IIEPI 'T^OT2 
 commonly cited as Longinus on the Sublime. The title 
 is handy, but quite misleading, unless you remember
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 227 
 
 that by * Sublimity * Longinus meant, as he expressly 
 defines it, * a certain distinction and excellence in 
 speech.' The book, thus recovered, had great authority 
 with critics of the iyth and 1 8th centuries. For the last 
 hundred .years it has quite undeservedly gone out of 
 vogue. 
 
 It is (I admit) a puzzling book, though quite clear 
 in argument and language: pellucidly clear, but here 
 and there strangely modern, even hauntingly modern, if 
 the phrase may be allowed. You find yourself rubbing 
 your eyes over a passage more like Matthew Arnold 
 than something of the 3rd century: or you come without 
 warning on a few lines of * comparative criticism,' as we 
 call it an illustration from Genesis 'God said, Let 
 there be Light, and there was Light ' used for a speci- 
 men of the exalted way of saying things. Generally, you 
 have a sense that this author's lineage is mysterious after 
 the fashion of Melchisedek's. 
 
 Well, to our point Longinus finds that the con- 
 ditions of lofty utterance are five : of which the first is 
 by far the most important. And this foremost condition 
 is innate: you either have it or you have not. Here it 
 is: 
 
 'Elsewhere,' says Longinus, 'I have written as follows: 
 "Sublimity is the echo of a great soul" Hence even a bare idea 
 sometimes, by itself and without a spoken word will excite 
 admiration, just because of the greatness of soul implied. Thus 
 the silence of Ajax in the underworld is great and more sublime 
 than words.* 
 
 You remember the passage, how Odysseus meets that 
 great spirit among the shades and would placate it, 
 
 152
 
 228 Lecture XII 
 
 would ' make up ' their quarrel on earth now, with 
 carneying words: 
 
 'Ajax, son of noble Telamon, wilt thou not then, even in 
 death forget thine anger against me over that cursed armour.... 
 Nay, there is none other to blame but Zeus: he laicbthy doom 
 on thee. Nay, come hither, O my lord, and hear me and master 
 thine indignation.' 
 
 So I spake, but he answered me not a word, but strode from 
 me into the Darkness, following the others of the dead that be 
 departed. 
 
 Longinus goes on: 
 
 It is by all means necessary to point this out that the truly 
 eloquent must be free from base and ignoble (or ill-bred) thoughts. 
 For it is not possible that men who live their lives with mean 
 and servile aims and ideas should produce what is admirable and 
 worthy of immortality. Great accents we expect to fall from 
 the lips of those whose thoughts are dignified. 
 
 Believe this and it surely follows, as concave implies 
 convex, that by daily converse and association with 
 these great ones we take their breeding, their manners, 
 earn their magnanimity, make ours their gifts of 
 courtesy, unselfishness, mansuetude, high seated pride, 
 scorn of pettiness, wholesome plentiful jovial laughter. 
 
 He that of such a height hath built his mind, 
 And rear'd the dwelling of his soul so strong 
 As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame 
 Of his resolved powers, nor all the wind 
 Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong 
 His settled peace, or to disturb the same; 
 
 What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may 
 The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey!
 
 On the Use of Masterpieces 229 
 
 And with how free an eye doth he look down 
 Upon these lower regions of turmoil ! 
 Where all the storms of passions mainly beat 
 On flesh and blood; where honour, power, renown, 
 Are only gay afflictions, golden toil; 
 Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet 
 As frailty doth ; and only great doth seem 
 To little minds, who do it so esteem.... 
 
 Knowing the heart of man is set to be 
 
 The centre of this world, about the which 
 These revolutions of disturbances 
 Still roll; where all th' aspects of misery 
 Predominate; whose strong effects are such 
 As he must bear, being powerless to redress; 
 And that, unless above himself he can 
 Erect himself, how poor a thing is man I 1 
 
 IX . 
 
 If the exhortation of these verses be somewhat too 
 high and stoical for you, let me return to Longinus and 
 read you, from his concluding chapter, a passage you 
 may find not inapposite to these times, nor without a 
 moral : 
 
 *It remains' [he says] 'to clear up, my dear Terentianus, a 
 question which a certain philosopher has recently mooted. 
 I wonder,' he says, 'as no doubt do many others, how it happens 
 that in our time there are men who have the gift of persuasion 
 to the utmost extent, and are well fitted for public life, and are 
 keen and ready, and particularly rich in all the charms of language, 
 yet there no longer arise really lofty and transcendent natures 
 unless it be quite peradventure. So great and world-wide a dearth 
 of high utterance attends our age. Can it be,' he continued, 'we 
 are to accept the common cant that democracy is the nursing 
 mother of genius, and that great men of letters flourish and die 
 
 1 Samuel Daniel, Epistle to the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland,
 
 230 Lecture XII 
 
 with it? For freedom, they say, has the power to cherish and 
 encourage magnanimous minds, and with it is disseminated eager 
 mutual rivalry and the emulous thirst to excel. Moreover, by 
 the prizes open under a popular government, the mental faculties 
 of orators are perpetually practised and whetted, and as it were, 
 rubbed bright, so that they shine free as the state itself. Whereas 
 to-day,' he went on, 'we seem to have learnt as an infant-lesson 
 that servitude is the law of life; being all wrapped, while our 
 thoughts are yet young and tender, in observances and customs 
 as in swaddling clothes, bound without access to that fairest and 
 most fertile source of man's speech (I mean Freedom) so that 
 we are turned out in no other guise than that of servile flatterers. 
 And servitude (it has been well said) though it be even righteous, 
 is the cage of the soul and a public prison-house.' 
 
 But I answered him thus. 'It is easy, my good sir, and 
 characteristic of human nature, to gird at the age in which one 
 lives. Yet consider whether it may not be true that it is less the 
 world's peace that ruins noble nature than this war illimitable 
 which holds our aspirations in its fist, and occupies our age with 
 passions as with troops that utterly plunder and harry it. The love 
 of money and the love of pleasure enslave us, or rather, as one 
 may say, drown us body and soul in their depths. For vast and 
 unchecked wealth marches with lust of pleasure for comrade, and 
 when one opens the gate of house or city, the other at once enters 
 and abides. And in time these two build nests in the hearts of men, 
 and quickly rear a progeny only too legitimate: and the ruin 
 within the man is gradually consummated as the sublimities of 
 his soul wither away and fade, and in ecstatic contemplation 
 of our mortal parts we omit to exalt, and come to neglect in non- 
 chalance, that within us which is immortal.' 
 
 I had a friend once who, being in doubt with what 
 picture to decorate the chimney-piece in his library, cast 
 away choice and wrote up two Greek words M^TXHS 
 'I ATPEION ; that is, the hospital the healing-place of 
 the soul.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Acts of the Apostles, The, 176, 177 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 156, 204 
 
 Adonais, Shelley's, 85 
 
 Adrian VI, Pope, 82 
 
 Aeschylus, I, 129, 191, 195 
 
 Aesop and Rhodope, Landor's, 125 
 
 Agamemnon, The, 85 
 
 Aims of Literary Study, The, J 
 
 Allegro, V, 66, 67, 68 
 
 Ameipsias, 22 
 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton's, 
 
 166 
 
 Ancient Mariner, The, 64 
 Andersen, Hans Christian, 49 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The, 165 
 Annual Register, The, 165 
 Anti-Jacobin, The, 206 
 Apologia, Newman's, 166 
 Arabian Nights, M. Galland's, 45 
 Arabian Nights, The, 149 
 Arber, 106 
 Aristophanes, 22, 157 
 Aristotle, i, 26, 51, 55, 56, 63, 64, 
 
 129, 138, 158, 159, 161, 186,221 
 Arnold, Matthew, 41, 107, 113, 
 
 133, 163, 164, 219, 227 
 Arraignment of Paris, Peele's, 86 
 As Ton Like It, 76 
 Aulnoy, Madame D', 45 
 Aurispa, 223 
 Austen, Jane, 1 10, 207, 210 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 23, 24, 25, 78, 101, 
 
 135, 166, 218 
 Bagehot, Walter, 38, 121 
 Bailey, Philip James, 166 
 Baker, Sir William, 181 
 Balder Dead, 174, 175 
 Ballad, The, 59 
 
 Barbour, John, 165 
 
 Bede, 221, 222 
 
 Beethoven, 140 
 
 Beginnings of Poetry, Dr Gum- 
 mere's, 59, 60, 62, 63 
 
 Beowulf, 107 
 
 Berkeley, George, 204 
 
 Berners, 205 
 
 Bible, The, 105, 135 et seq. 
 
 Bible, Geneva, The, 166 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 85 
 
 Blair, Robert, 166 
 
 Blake, William, 32, 166 
 
 Boileau, 205 
 
 Bologna, University of, 78 
 
 Book of Nonsense, Lear's, 119 
 
 Boswell, James, 100, 165 
 
 Bottomley, Horatio, 197 
 
 Brady, Nicholas, 181 
 
 Brooke, Stopford, 101 
 
 Brown, Dr John, 60 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 156, 197, 201, 
 202 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 77 
 
 Browning, Robert, 5, 7, 16, 162, 
 166, 218 
 
 Bruce, The, Barbour's, 165 
 
 Bunyan, John, 104, 144, 145, 156, 
 163 
 
 Burke, Edmund, lot, 112, 124, 
 1 66, 204 
 
 Burns, Robert, 104, 142 
 
 Burton, Robert, 166 
 
 Butcher, Professor, 138 
 
 Byron, Lord, 5, 85, 180 
 
 Cabinet des Tees, Le, 45 
 Cambridge Essays on Education, 
 Inge's essay in, 120
 
 232 
 
 Index 
 
 Cambridge History of English Litera- 
 ture, The, 5, 162, 222 
 Cambridge Platonists, The, 30, 206 
 Cambridge, University of, I, 2 et 
 
 ^.,61,62,81,82,93,95,114, 
 
 130, 223 
 
 Campbell, John, 165 
 Canning, 206 
 
 Canterbury Tales, The, 76, 172 
 Canterbury Tales, The Prologue to 
 
 the, 76 
 
 Canton, William, 41 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 5, 41, 114 
 Casaubon, 75, 210 
 Centuries of Meditations, Thomas 
 
 Traherne's, 47 
 Chatham, Earl of, 124, 125, 204, 
 
 226 
 Chaucer, 4, 29, 70, 71, 76, 95, 101, 
 
 no, 112, 114, 133, 154, 175, 
 
 205 
 
 Chicago, University of, 164 
 Choephori, 187 
 Chronicles, Book of, 148 
 Clarendon, Lord, 165 
 Clark, William George, loi, 106 
 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 
 
 Charles Reade's, 201 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 70 
 Collins, William, 133 
 Colvin, Sir Sidney, 93 
 Complaint of Dear, The, 166 
 Comte, Auguste, 56 
 Congreve, William, 204 
 Corinna, from Athens, to Tanagra, 
 
 Landor's, 133, 134 
 Corinthians, St Paul's First Epistle 
 
 to the, 87, 88 
 Corson, Dr, 7, 71, 108 
 Cory, William (Johnson), 132 
 Cotter's Saturday Night, The, 
 
 Burns's, 142, 149 
 Coverdale, Miles, 105, 155, 170 
 Cowper, William, 108, 123, 204 
 
 Cranmer, Thomas, 105 
 Crashaw, Richard, 206 
 Cuthbert, 221 
 Cyrano de Bergerac, 119 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, 229 
 
 Dante, 29, 85, 112, 164, 175, 176, 
 
 210 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 165 
 Davenant, Sir William, 162 
 Death in the Desert, A, Browning's, 
 
 7 
 
 Descent of Man, Darwin's, 165 
 Deserted Village, The, 166 
 Dickens, Charles, 5, 205 
 Dionysius, 226 
 Divina Commedia, 56 
 Doctor's Tale, The, 76 
 Dolores, Swinburne's, 1 66 
 Domesday Book, 165 
 Don Quixote, 113 
 Donne, John, 88, 96, 114, 123, 166, 
 
 206 
 
 Dream of Boccaccio, Landor's, 88 
 Dryden, John, 58 
 Dublin, University of, 140 
 D unbar, William, 205 
 Dutch Republic, Motley's, 88 
 
 Earle, John, 47, 106 
 
 Ecclesiastes, 172 
 
 Ecclesiastical Polity, Richard 
 Hooker's, 165 
 
 Ecclesiasticus, 154 
 
 Education, 37 et seq. 
 
 Ehrenreich, Dr Paul, 59 
 
 Elegy written in a Country Church- 
 yard, Gray's, 66, 154, 175 
 
 Eliot, George, 15 
 
 Ellis, A. J., 106 
 
 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 12 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 34, 216 
 
 Eothen, Kinglalce's, 208, 209 
 
 Epistle to the Lady Margaret, Coun-
 
 Index 
 
 233 
 
 tess of Cumberland, Samuel 
 
 Daniel's, 228, 229 
 Erasmus, 130, 223 
 Enter Schulgang, 41 
 Esmond, Thackeray's, 88, 89 
 Essay on Comedy, Meredith's, 118 
 Essay on Man, Pope's, 154 
 Essays, Bacon's, 123, 166 
 Esther, 172 
 
 Ethics, The, Aristotle, I 
 Euclid, 100, 140 
 Euripides, 20, 22, 132, 168 
 Everyman, 187 
 Everyman's Library, 210 
 Ezekiel, 172 
 
 Faerie Queene, The, 166 
 
 Fairchild Family, The, 43 
 
 Festus, Bailey's, 166 
 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 126, 131, 166 
 
 Fort, Paul, 185 
 
 Fowler, F. G., 116 
 
 Fowler, H. W., 116 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 97 
 
 Frere, J. H., 206 
 
 Friar's Tale, The, 76 
 
 Friendship's Garland, Matthew 
 
 Arnold's, 41 
 Froissart, 165 
 Fur ni vail, 106 
 
 Galileo, 28 
 
 Galland, M., 45 
 
 Gammer Grethel, 46 
 
 Gautier, Theophile. 210 
 
 Genesis, Book of, 227 
 
 Geneva Bible, The, 166 
 
 Gibbon, Edward, 21, 22, 129, 140, 
 156, 159, 204 
 
 Golden Treasury, Palgrave's, 166 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, no, 114 
 
 Gondibert, Sir William Dave- 
 nant's, 162 
 
 Grammarian's Funeral, A, Brown- 
 ing's, 1 6 
 
 Grave, Robert Blair's, 166 
 Gray, Thomas, 66, 154, 175 
 Gregory the Great, 220 
 Grimm, the brothers, 46 
 Grocyn, 130 
 
 Grosart, Alexander Balloch, 106 
 Gummere, Dr, 59, 60, 62, 63 
 
 Hakluyt, Richard, 165 
 
 Hales, Dr, 106, 107 
 
 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 3, 12, 25 
 
 Hamlet, 76, 136, 154, 172, 174, 216 
 
 Hammond, Mr, 202 
 
 Hammond, Mrs, 202 
 
 Hay, 225 
 
 Hazlitt, William, 215 
 
 Hegel, 27 
 
 Heidelberg, University of, 8 1 
 
 Here Come Three Dukes a-riding, 57 
 
 Here we go Gathering Nuts in May, 
 
 57 
 
 Herodotus, 132 
 Hesiod, 210 
 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 
 Holmes, Mr, 51, 54, 55, 56 
 Homer, 89, 127, 157, 158, 159, 160, 
 
 161, 164, 175, 178, 208 
 Hooker, Richard, 165 
 Hopkins, John, 181 
 Horace, I 
 Hound of Heaven, The, Thompson's 
 
 166 
 
 Household Tales, the Grimms', 46 
 Hugo, Victor, 175 
 Hume, David, 204 
 Hymns Ancient and Modern, 181 
 
 Idea of a University, The, New- 
 man's, 122 
 
 Iliad, The, 107, 157, 159 
 Imitatione Christi, De, 147 
 In Memoriam, Tennyson's, 62 
 Inge, Dean, 120 
 
 Intellectual Life, The, Hamerton's, 
 3 25. 26
 
 234 
 
 Index 
 
 Intimations of Immortality, Words- 
 worth's, 47 
 
 Invisible Playmate, The, William 
 Canton's, 41 
 
 Irish R.M., The Adventures of an, 
 Somerville's and Ross's, 145 
 
 Irwin, Sidney, 130 
 
 Isaiah, 164, 167, 172, 173 
 
 Isaiah, Book of, 148, 154, 164 
 
 Isthmian Odes, Pindar's, 105 
 
 Jansen, 82 
 
 Jenkinson, Mr, 196, 197 
 
 Job, 178, 179, 180, 187 etseq. 
 
 Job, Book of, 149, 154, 172 et seq. 
 
 John Bull, Bottomley's, 197 
 
 John, St, of Patmos, 7, 139, 162 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 66, 96, 100, 114, 
 
 140, 141, 156, 204, 206 
 Jonson, Ben, no 
 Joshua, Book of, 50, 146, 147 
 Joubert, 126 
 Jowett, Benjamin, 198 
 Jusserand, J. J., 112 
 
 Keats, John, 91, 93 
 
 Keble, John, 123 
 
 King Henry IV, Part I, 76 
 
 King John, 76 
 
 King Lear, 17, 76, 174, 214 
 
 Kinglake, Alexander William, 208 
 
 Kings, Book of, 149, 151 
 
 Kings' Treasuries, Of, Ruskin's, 207 
 
 Knight's Tale, The, 76 
 
 Lamb, Charles, no, 114, 167, 210, 
 
 213 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 88, 125, 
 
 133, 139 
 Latymer, Lord (F. . B. Money- 
 
 Coutts), 164, 173, 179, 195 
 Laus Veneris, Swinburne's, 166 
 Lear, Edward, 119 
 Lectures on Poetry, Keble's, 123 
 Leipsic, University of, 8 1 
 
 Letters on a Regicide Peace, Burke's, 
 
 166 
 
 Life of Cowley, Johnson's, 206 
 Life of Johnson, Boswell's, 165 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 133 
 Literary Study of the Bible, Moul- 
 
 ton's, 173 
 Lives of the Lord Chancellors, John 
 
 Campbell's, 165 
 Longinus, 158, 159, 160, 161, 226 
 
 et seq. 
 Longinus on the Sublime, 159, 1 60, 
 
 161, 226 et seq. 
 Louvain, University of, 82 
 Lowell, James Russell, 225 
 Lucian, 116 
 Luke, St, Gospel of, 172 
 Lycidas, 175 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 20, 165, 167 
 
 Macbeth, 76 
 
 Macchiavelli, 210 
 
 Maeterlinck, 1 86, 187 
 
 Malherbe, 205 
 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, 205 
 
 Man of Law's Tale, The, 76 
 
 Manfred, 166 
 
 Map, Walter, 165, 167 
 
 Martin, Violet, 145 
 
 Marvell, Andrew, 214 
 
 Matthew, Gospel of St, 147 
 
 Memories, Irish, Somerville's and 
 
 Ross's, 145 
 
 Merchant of Venice, The, 76 
 Meredith, George, 5, 118 
 Microcosmograpby, John Earle's, 47 
 Mill, John Stuart, 100, 165 
 Milton, John, 29, 66, 67, 68, 70, 
 
 loo, 101, 119, 136, 140, 156, 
 
 i?3, 175, !7 8 > J 79> I8o > I8l > 
 20 1 
 
 Moliere, 85 
 
 Money-Coutts, F. B. (Lord Laty- 
 mer), 164, 173, 179, 195 
 
 Montagu, Basil, 225
 
 Index 
 
 235 
 
 Moore, Sturge, 133 
 
 More, Hannah, 205 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, 1 23 
 
 Morris, Richard, 106 
 
 Morte d' Arthur, Le, 165 
 
 Motley, 88, 225 
 
 Moulton, Dr R. G., 164, 165, 170, 
 
 173, 189 
 
 Much Ado About Nothing, 76 
 Myers, F. W. H., 176, 177 
 
 Newman, John Henry, 121, 122, 
 
 140, 1 66, 220 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 28, 123 
 Nichoks V, Pope (Tbmmaso Paren- 
 
 tucelli), 223 
 
 North, Sir Thomas, 132 
 Notes and Queries, 109 
 Nun Priest's Tale, The, 76 
 
 Ode to a Grecian Urn, Keats's, 91, 
 
 9 2 93 
 
 Ode to a Nightingale, Keats's, 92, 93 
 Ode to Evening, ColHns's, 133 
 Ode to Psyche, Keats's, 91 
 Odyssey, The, 44, 157, 158, 159 
 Of Studies, Bacon's, 23, 24, 25 
 Omar, 21 
 
 Omar Khayyam, FitzGerald's, 1 66 
 On Liberty, John Stuart Mill's, 165 
 On the Art of Writing, I 
 Ossian, 1 66 
 Othello, 56, 76, 96 
 Oxford, University of, IO, 78, 80, 
 
 81, 82, 83, 130 
 Page, 225 
 
 Paine, Thomas, 204 
 Paley, Frederick, 105, 106, 132 
 Palgrave, Francis Turner, 166 
 Pall Mall Gazette, The, 209, 211 
 Paradise Lost, 61, 62, 64, 66, 136, 
 
 I54> l6 5> I7 2 > !75> i77 I79 
 
 180, 181, 194, 201, 215, 216 
 Paradise Regained, 177, 181 
 
 Paradiso, The, 214 
 Pardoner's Tale, The, j6 
 Parentucelli, Tommaso (Pope 
 
 Nicholas V), 223 
 Paris, University of, 80, 8 1 
 Parlement of Foules, The, 29, 76 
 Pater, Walter, 107, 160 
 Patmore, Coventry, 35 
 Pattison, Mark, 75 
 Paul, St, 33, 64, 87, 88, 157, 172, 
 
 176, 177 
 Peek, 86 
 Pericles, 133 
 Perrault, 45, 119 
 Pervigilium Veneris, The, 133 
 Phaedo, The, 158, 214, 220 
 Phaedrus, The, 126, 198 
 Piers Ploughman, 166, 167 
 Pilgrim's Progress, The, 73 
 Pindar, 61, 85, 105 
 Plato, 9, 17, 27, 28, 29, 38, 120, 
 
 126, 158, 161, 198 
 Plutarch, 132 
 Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's, 
 
 166 
 Poet's Charter, The, Lord Laty- 
 
 mer's (Money-Coutts), 173 
 Poetics, Aristotle's, 56, 63, 138 
 Polonius, FitzGerald's, 131 
 Pope, Alexander, 114, 140, 154, 
 
 175, 204, 208 
 
 Prince Charming, Perrault's, 119 
 Principia, Newton's, 123 
 Prior, Matthew, 1 10 
 Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 
 
 The, 101, 154, 172 
 Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus, 187, 
 
 191, 192, 195 
 Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's, 64, 
 
 166, 175, 178, 179, 180 
 Psalm of Life, The, 60 
 Psalm cvii, 169, 170, 171 
 Psalm cxiv, Milton's Paraphrase 
 
 of, 181
 
 236 
 
 Index 
 
 Psalm cxxxvi, Milton's Paraphrase Shakespeare, William, 4, 34, 35, 70, 
 
 7 1 , 75, 7 6 > IOI I0 4> II2 > I2 5 
 
 132, 140, 155, 166, 213, 216, 
 
 218 
 Shelley, 85, 166, 178, 179, 180, 
 
 206 
 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 204 
 Sicilian Fine-Dresser, The, Sturge 
 
 Moore's, 133 
 Skeat, Walter W., 106 
 
 Quarks, Francis, 1 66 
 
 Rashdall, Hastings, 81 
 Reade, Charles, 201 
 Reading without Tears, 41, 44 
 
 Reason of Church Government, Mil- Smiles, Samuel, 207 
 
 ton's, 178 
 Reid, Captain Mayne, 147 
 
 2OI, 2O2 
 
 Republic, Plato's, 17, 27 
 
 Revelation of St John the Divine, Sophocles, 120 
 
 Smith, Adam, 60, 165, 167 
 Socrates, 127, 158, 199, 200, 220, 
 
 221 
 
 Solomon, 167, 168 
 
 Song of Songs, 149, 167, 168, 172 
 
 The, 162 
 Revellers, Ameipsias, 22 
 Rhoades, James, 12, 118, 215, 218 
 
 Spenser, 175 
 
 Stead, W. T., 209 
 
 Steele, Sir Richard, no, 204 
 
 Rifle Rangers, The, Mayne Reid's, Sternhold, Thomas, 181 
 
 H7 
 
 Roberts, Prof. W. Rhys, 160 
 Ronsard, 205 
 
 Ruskin, John, 100, 147, 166, 207 
 Ruth, 172 
 
 Sally, Sally, Waters, 57 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, 212 
 
 St Paul, Myers's, 176, 177 
 
 Samson Agonistes, 182 
 
 Sartor Resartus, Carlyle's, 41, 166 
 
 Sthenoboea, Euripides, 22 
 Stradivarius, George Eliot's, 15 
 Strayed Reveller, Matthew Arnold's, 
 
 133 
 
 Stubbs, 109 
 
 Sublimitate, De, Longinus, 159 
 Suckling, Sir John, 97 
 Swift, Jonathan, 114, 140 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 166 
 
 Table Talk, Johnson's, 141 
 
 Scalp Hunters, The, Mayjie Reid's, Task, The, Cowper's, 108 
 
 H7 
 
 School for Scandal, The, 96 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 46, 141 
 Sermon on the Mount, The, 137 
 Sermon II preached at Pauls upon 
 
 Christmas Day, in the Evening. 
 
 1624, Donne's, 96 
 Sermons, Donne's, 166 
 
 Sesame and Lilies, Ruskin's, 147, Tertullian, 220 
 
 Tasso, 178 
 
 Tate, Nahum, 181 
 
 Taylor, Edgar, 46 
 
 Taylor, Jane, 225 
 
 Tempest, The, 64, 76, 216, 217, 
 
 218, 219 
 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 5, 205, 
 
 207 
 
 207 
 Sevigne, Madame de, 210 
 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
 88, 156
 
 Index 
 
 237 
 
 Theocritus, 133 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 166 
 
 Thoughts of Divines and Philoso- 
 phers, Basil Montagu's, 225 
 
 Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 
 Burke's, 166 
 
 Thucydides, 129 
 
 1 intern Abbey, Wordsworth's, 162 
 
 Todhunter, Dr, 100 
 
 Traherne, Thomas, 30, 47 
 
 Training of the Imagination, The, 
 Rhoades, 118 
 
 Troilus, 76 
 
 Tyndale, William, 105, 155 
 
 Utopia, More's, 123 
 
 Vaughan, Henry, 206 
 Vicar of W akefield, The, 154 
 Vienna, medical school of, 81 
 Village Labourer, The, Mr and 
 
 Mrs Hammond's, 202, 203 
 Villon, 205 
 Virgil, 13, 124, 178 
 
 Voyages, Hakluyt's, 165 
 Vulgate, The, 182 
 
 Walpole, Sir Spencer, 205 
 
 Walton, Isaak, 88, 155 
 
 Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith's, 
 
 165 
 
 Wesley, John, 65 
 Wessobrunn, 222 
 What is and What Might Be, 
 
 Holmes, 54, 55 
 White, Blanco, 33, 121 
 Wilberforce, 205 
 Wisdom, Book of, 154 
 Wolfe, General, 124 
 Wordsworth, William, 5, 29, 35, 
 
 39,47,66,71,78,125,132,162 
 
 166, 215, 221 
 World's Classics, The, 147 
 Wright, Aldis, 101, 106 
 Wydif, 155 
 
 Zadkiel, 149 
 Zenobia, 226 
 
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