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 THE BEARING OF ENGLISH STUDIES UPON 
 THE NATIONAL LIFE ^ 
 
 Wds du ererbt von deinen Vcitern hast, 
 Eriuirb es, um es zu hesitzen. 
 
 Goethe. 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 Introduction. — English studies may, as educational instruments, be either 
 exceptionally barren or exceptionally fruitful, A condition of their value, that they 
 be carried on neither out of touch with, nor in exclusive connexion with, any one of 
 the three great domains : science, or explanation, art, or creation, conduct, or morality 
 (p. 2). The study of English Uterature under these conditions leads to an apprehension, 
 not otherwise to be won, of what may be roughly called the mind of England (p. 3). 
 
 I. Beginning with the kinds of Uterature which simply relate or repr(Kiuce. Ballads. 
 The unconscious sifting out of the imessential. Tradition, shedding off inexpressive 
 facts, takes the mould of the tribal or national mind. Conscious selection by a poet 
 with the same result. The Canterbury Tales (p. 5). Chaucer's picture of fourteenth- 
 century England owes its prof oimd veracity to the fact that he was writing as a poet, 
 not as a chronicler ; to amuse, not to instruct (p. 6). Again, while history records 
 event, literature fills in the quiet interstices of the national life, the unsensational 
 happenings which signify and denote, but do not disturb (ib.). Shallow and Silence. 
 The Old Cumberland Beggar. 
 
 II. But literature has not simply to record or reproduce (p. 7). Imaginative trans- 
 mutation of fact its way to truth, as individual vision its way to universahty. English 
 Uterature exceptionally rich in individuality. ' These islanders are themselves all 
 islands.' Classicism and Romanticism. The characteristic ' sociaUty ' (Brimetiere) of 
 French Uterature (p. 8). IndividuaUsm, in comparison, of the Germanic world. 
 Mme de Stael's contrast of Germany and France. The EngUsh Augustan age less 
 vital and significant, as an expression of national Ufe, than the French (p. 9). The 
 ' national ' quaUty of the Elizabethans. But they are greater as poets of the soul than 
 of the State. Shakespeare's Histories and his Tragedies. 
 
 III. Subsequent Uterature has never been so closely in touch with the national Ufe 
 (p. 11). Antagonisms and limitations. Puritanism. The Town. The Coimtry. 
 Yet each limitation has marked a conquest as well as a loss, the horizons of the national 
 mind were permanently enlarged, and only temporarily curtailed. Milton's poetry of 
 spiritual freedom. Wordsworth and the humanity of Nature. Shelley and Keats. 
 Contribution of the poets to our intellectual and spiritual outlook. Mr. Courthope's 
 indictment of the poets of the revolutionary age for having detached poetry from the 
 national life ignores this contribution, and involves an inadequate conception of the 
 relation of the two. England, as interpreted through her practical activities, and 
 through her poetry. Testimony of the EngUsh language to the imaginative elements 
 of the national mind (p. 13). Final claim for EngUsh studies. 
 
 English is, whatever else may be said of it or against it, one of the 
 most plastic, the most Protean, of studies. It will shrivel up into 
 something very near the insignificance and aridity of dust, or expand 
 until it touches the heights and the depths of humanity. Englisli 
 grammar, analysis, and parsing, are perhaps of all subjects those in 
 which the natural vitality has been most nearly crushed out by scholastic 
 pedantry ; and even a play of Shakespeare, treated as a preserve for 
 
 ^ An address delivered to the members of the Manchester Branch of the English 
 Association, March 4, 1910. 
 
 ^a^ 
 
2 THE BEARING OF ENGLISH STUDIES 
 
 hard words, is not much better. But the English language, expounded 
 by a Jespersen or a Henry Bradley, becomes a part of our national 
 being, a sign and symbol of our national character ; nearer to us than 
 hands and feet, but endowed with a more searching, not with a colder, 
 appeal, because it is so near. And English literature, expounded by 
 a Ten Brink or an Andrew Bradley, becomes the explicit mind of 
 England, seen in its most luminous and most pregnant moments. No 
 subject can, in unwise hands, mean less ; none can, worthily handled, 
 mean more. 
 
 This worthy handling may take diifferent forms. But it may be laid 
 down, I think, that the study of literature wants something if it be 
 either wholly out of touch with, or wholly absorbed into, any one of 
 three great provinces of human endeavour, three modes of the human 
 spirit, which we may roughly denote by the names science^ art, and 
 conduct. 
 
 We cannot, in the first place, afford either to ignore, or to push to the 
 logical limit, the view that literature is a product of society, ultimately 
 reducible to laws like society itself. Literary history can never be 
 reduced to a perfectly ordered body of knowledge, fulfilling the ideal of 
 science ; nevertheless it must remain an aim of critical research to seek 
 to order it, to penetrate deeper and deeper into the infinitely subtle 
 webs of causation which make the poem what it is ; to trace, with Taine, 
 the threads of affiliation which attach these delicate creations to the 
 race they spring from and the soil in which they grow ; to detect the 
 working of traditional manner and traditional mood ; or to follow out 
 by the ' Darwinian ' methods of Brunetiere, the descent and development 
 of literary species through successive generations ; to exhibit, for 
 instance, the stately eloquence of Bourdaloue and Massillon, persisting 
 through the intimate and personal prose of Rousseau, in the lyrism of 
 Hugo and de Vigny. 
 
 But even if the reduction of literature to scientific laws admitted of 
 being carried out far further than it does, we should have to take 
 account of facts for which continuous and orderly growth is a less 
 obviously apt analogy than that of the wind blowing where it listeth. 
 However far we can push the methodizing operations of research, we 
 encounter sooner or later potencies which seem to be utterly unique and 
 individual, which give us sensations and feelings distinct from any we 
 have had or can have elsewhere ; which we can delight in and in some 
 degree describe, but cannot explain. Nay, to critics of the Symbolist 
 school the quality of literature only begins when it becomes thus 
 inexplicable, mysterious. What we call the magic of style depends in 
 great part upon just this seeming want of consonance between the 
 conditions and the result : to three sounds you add a fourth, and get 
 * not a fourth sound, but a star '. And it is hardly a paradox to say 
 that those who have the keenest feeling for the magical qualities of 
 style will often be the most successful investigators of its laws ; certainly, 
 without it, the most painstaking collection of facts is apt to become 
 mechanical blundering. The instincts and sensibilities that make for 
 art are here the best guarantee of scientific aptitude — of the power to 
 detect law, to group, affiliate, classify. You cannot classify without 
 a keen sense of values, but it is equally true that the sense of values is 
 quickened by the comparison with which classification begins. You 
 cannot make a rational statement of the relation between Dickens and 
 
UPON THE NATIONAL LIFE 3 
 
 Thackeray, for instance, without a keen sense of literary values ; but 
 the attempt to work out the relation quickens the sense. It is one of 
 the ways in which close contact with literature makes signally for 
 mental and moral health, that it induces us instinctively to get the 
 better of our hard and fast distinctions, leading us, as it were, to a loftier 
 point of vantage from which our absolute categories appear to meet, as 
 all roads lead to Rome. 
 
 And as with the distinction between science and art, so with the 
 distinction between knowledge and practice, between art and life. It 
 is possible to study and to teach literary facts, like the facts of astro- 
 nomy or of Babylonian history, without touching any spring of action, 
 or giving any bias or stimulus to will. It is possible perhaps to teach 
 even great literature in this way. But no teaching of literature can be 
 completely alive which leaves the recipient merely a vessel replenished, 
 and not an organism quickened, and so more healthily disposed for all 
 its functions. This does not mean that morals, or ideas about morality, 
 are embodied in all literature ; nor that, when no ' moral ' is discoverable, 
 one is to be manufactured and put in ; but that all true literature, 
 because it conveys more life and fuller than our o\m, brings with it an 
 implicit criticism of the narrow and pallid life we actually live, places 
 us in an atmosphere which suspends, and in the end slowly saps, the 
 sway of our harder and duller egoisms, and endows us, in the depth of 
 our province or of our suburb, with something of the citizenship of 
 humanity. 
 
 Now, the attempt to be just to all these ideals of literary study — to 
 grasp literature as a growth — in part a product, in part an inexplicable 
 creative force, — and also as a stimulating disclosure of reality, brings us 
 to a kind of knowledge not otherwise to be had, of the nationality out of 
 which it grows, to whose growth it contributes, and whose being it 
 represents. To say that English literature is the mind of England 
 becoming articulate in English speech is, in strictness, hyperbole, no 
 doubt ; but it is hyperbole of the kind which overstates only the most 
 pregnant and suggestive aspect of the truth. The relation of literature 
 to nationality cannot be simply expressed ; the figures of speech in 
 which we try to express it never contain the whole truth, or nothing 
 but the truth, but they all contain some truth. The literature 
 of a people, we may say, is fruit, but it is also seed ; it is a mirror, 
 reflecting the age, but one, no less, in which the age, seeing itself, may 
 better the reflection ; it is a robe, sometimes closely following the 
 contours of the body, sometimes fluttering gaily in the breeze of fancy, 
 but never wholly escaping its control ; it is a versatile, a myriad- 
 minded interpreter, whose speech is often indirect and elusive, conveyed 
 in figure and symbol, in terms of a past that has vanished, or of a 
 future not yet in sight, but is never really irrelevant, or otiose. 
 
 Let me now attempt to illustrate some of the ways in which the study 
 of English literature brings us to the kind of knowledge of our country 
 and people, not otherwise obtainable, to which I have referred. A large 
 and delightful body of literature — most ballads, and many ' historical ' 
 dramas and novels — aims, in some sort, at teUing what happened, at 
 
4 THE BEARING OF ENGLISH STUDIES 
 
 reproducing the past. So far as literature does this, it evidently bears 
 a close relation to written history. But the historian, as such, cannot 
 get away from the matter of fact ; he can neither step aside from, nor 
 outstep, the record. Nations, like individuals, rarely understand them- 
 selves, they do not know what they were meant for nor what they mean, 
 and they are apt to blunder round about the meaning they suppose 
 themselves to have. Life is a blind force, surging into event and 
 action, into personality and character, into thought and passion and 
 speech ; and its blindness betrays it often into a kind of stupidity. 
 The idle, inexpressive things happen ; the significant and expressive 
 things do not happen, or are not noticed, or are not recorded. The 
 historian may choose and sift as he will, but he cannot, beyond certain 
 limits, reconstruct, or invent. Even if it be granted that the ultimate 
 nature of things is richer and deeper than our divining mind, yet the 
 actual record of that ultimate nature in history is fragmentary, and in 
 the earlier times bald and meagre, and the most brilliant reproduction 
 and analysis of that record must in some degree remain bald and 
 meagre too. It is here that literature often interposes an invaluable 
 aid. It may sometimes provide the historian with genuinely historical 
 material. A Grerman landsknecht of the sixteenth century, for in- 
 stance, putting the tale of his day's fighting into rude stanzas at the 
 supper-table of a country tavern, made ' historical ballads ' in which 
 the history is usually better than the verse. He teUs what he saw done, 
 and especially what he did himself ; and he only differs from the 
 chronicler in having been on the spot, and seen, not read or heard, 
 what he teUs. But it may also happen that a number of such literal 
 records, by different hands, gradually resolve themselves, in the process 
 of oral tradition, into a single story, composed, by a kind of spontaneous 
 and unconscious selection, of the incidents and situations which took 
 most powerful hold of the successive reciters and their hearers ; while 
 the indifferent or tedious or repulsive things dropped out or were 
 quietly replaced by things of keener grip. This final story — ^the story, 
 say, of the Iliad or of the Nibelungevlied — is clearly less historical, in the 
 sense that it is a less faithful account of what actually happened, than 
 the original matter-of-fact reports ; but it may be, in another sense, 
 more historical, in so far as, in losing the impress of the actual events 
 it has taken on the impress of the mind and character of the people to 
 which it was thus gradually accommodated. Achilles, or Siegfried, or 
 Beowulf, or Robin Hood, may be quite inadmissible to the pages of the 
 scientific historian as actors in any definite historic events ; but the 
 historian who is scientific in the true sense will be the last to dispense 
 with these incomparable types of what Homeric Greece, or Hohen- 
 stauffen Germany, or pagan Angeln, or the yeomanry and woodlanders 
 of Plantagenet England, most wanted to be, and in their best moments, 
 the moments when they most fully and richly lived, in effect were. 
 For this process, by which a historic matter becomes soaked and 
 saturated as it were in the national character, is something quite dif- 
 ferent from that in which the ideal hero is consciously designed by the 
 poet of a later age, and made to figure perhaps in some quasi-antique 
 picture. Whatever the virtue, as poetic creations, of Tennyson's 
 Arthur, or Vergil's Aeneas, they are not English or Roman as Achilles 
 is Greek. Arthur has far less English blood in him than Tennyson 
 himself — ^the Tennyson of Carlyle's vignette — ^the 'fine large-featured, . . . 
 
UPON THE NATIONAL LIFE 5 
 
 bronze-coloured, shaggy -headed Alfred,dusty, smoky, free, and easy, . . . 
 a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man ' ; even of English soiil he 
 has but a thin extract, and not quite of the best. In all modem litera- 
 ture there is but one example of a legendary figure in whom the inmost 
 soul and heart, the passion and the dreams, the raptures and the 
 agonies, the achievements and the sins, of a great people have embodied 
 themselves, — the Faust of Goethe. 
 
 But there are, fortunately, other ways besides this of traditional 
 selection in which literature may do for the study of the national past, 
 at once less and more, than history proper. The same kind of sifting 
 and elimination and concentration may go on, not in the passage of 
 a story through a succession of minds, but in the working of a single 
 mind upon its own experience. If England is poor in poetry of in- 
 herited tradition, no nation is richer in literature of large, penetrating, 
 and genial observation. If we have no Iliad and no Nibelungen, we 
 have Chaucer ; if we have no Faust, we have a line of great portrayers 
 of the national life from Fielding to Meredith, not equaUed in range and 
 fidelity, if sometimes surpassed in brilliance of style and weight of 
 meaning, by those of any other people. In aU that goes to make a 
 poem or novel a living epitome of a people, the Canterbury Tales stand 
 at the head of them all. 
 
 Chaucer's nine-and-twenty pilgrims may never have saUied out of 
 the Tabard, and paused at the second milestone to draw lots for the 
 first tale ; in any case they told their tales with but a measure of his 
 wonderful art ; but in them we have, nevertheless, the gist and marrow 
 of innumerable companies of men and women brought together by 
 the spell of the young spring-time from all the shires of England for 
 a holiday-tour to the blessed martyr's shrine. You see a hundred 
 things which do not emerge there, you read minds and motives, and 
 subtle shades of manner, deUcate traits of affectation, nuances of breed- 
 ing, which it needed the elvish eye of a Chaucer to discern and to set 
 down ; you see the Prioress with her coy and simple smile, and her 
 fastidious, dainty breeding; and the shy recluse scholar, who loved better 
 than viol or psaltery to have at his bed-head twenty books, bound in 
 black and red, of Aristotle and his philosophy. This lively company 
 rides forth in the most natural way imaginable, like any other troop 
 of wayfarers thrown together by chance, and bound for the same goal ; 
 yet in them pulses the very heart of fourteenth-century England; 
 in their features, their demeanour, their by-play, we may detect, more 
 clearly than in any chronicle, the connexion and interworking of all the 
 factors that dominated, or struggled for dominance, in its society. 
 Chivalry, fast growing out of date, but recalled to a brief and brilliant 
 aftermath by Edward III, lives in the knight with the soil of war and 
 travel on his doublet, but of untamed vigour and nobly courteous to 
 high and low, and in his son. The new power of the sea lives in the 
 savage sea-dog of the west country, who sent his prisoners home by 
 water and tapped the cargo of Bordeaux while its owners slept, but, 
 all the same, was a master of sea-craft, and knew every haven and 
 every current from Gothland to Finisterre. We see the feudal tenant, 
 who has become, by the astute aid and counsel of the law, an indepen- 
 dent landowner, in the ruddy-faced franklin who loves well a sop of 
 wine and keeps open house for all the countryside, and who goes along 
 beside his good friend the wise and wary Serjeant, like the squire and 
 
6 THE BEARING OF ENGLISH STUDIES 
 
 the family solicitor of to-day ; we see the rising power of the towns 
 and the townsfolk, which was to transform the mediaeval into th& 
 modern state, in the Merchant, the Lawyer, and the genial and 
 masterful Host; even in the four substantial though inarticulate 
 burgesses, spick and span with their new dresses and their silver- 
 hilted knives, fresh from the shop, never soiled by service ; whom 
 Chaucer so slily contrasts with the shabby but glorious knight. 
 
 It is clear that in all this we have a mass of strictly historical 
 information ; and further, that the abundance and precision of it are 
 not due merely to the fact that Chaucer had extraordinary gifts of eye 
 and style. They are due mainly to the fact that he was writing as a^ 
 poet, not as a historian, to delight and amuse his hearers, not to inform 
 them. He would not have been so brimfull of instruction for us if he 
 had aimed at instructing his readers. What should they need to be 
 told of an everyday matter like the pilgrimage to Canterbury ? They 
 had all probably been wayfarers along the same well-trodden road and 
 put up at the same familiar hostelries. If Chaucer had been a chronicler 
 he would have disposed of the matter, if he mentioned it at all, in a^ 
 simple entry such as this : ' 1385 : In April of this year men went on 
 pilgrimage to Canterbury, according to their wont. They had much 
 joyous pastime on the way, and gave a goodly supper at the Tabard^ 
 on their return, to one of their company who had best acquitted him 
 in that sport.' In other words, a host of things get left out of the 
 chronicler's record because they are common and matter of course^ 
 which are taken up into the poet's because, for him, the common ways 
 of men and their matter-of-course habits and usages are full of the 
 zest of life ; common as blood and breath, and matter of course as the 
 beating of the heart. 
 
 History for the most part records only the salient incidents, the 
 violent interruptions which disturb the silent continuity of ordinary 
 life, and are so interesting to read about, so disagreeable to undergo. 
 When these are few, the annals are brief ; or if they are not brief they 
 are apt to be dull ; and though we allow that the people were probably 
 happy, we cannot quite forgive them for being happy in such a stupid 
 and uninteresting way. The historian as such has to do with change^ 
 not with standing still ; if he describes stationary conditions at all it is as 
 the result of, or the preparation for, change. And, on the whole, people 
 who live an uneventful life are out of his sphere ; they are, so to speak, 
 not playing his game. But it is just here that literature, with its more 
 brooding eye, and its more profound concern with life itself, not merely 
 with the arresting or sensational moments of life, steps in, and does for 
 us something which the historian quite properly neglects to do, but 
 which is nevertheless needful to be done. 
 
 It is hardly to the dramatist that we should naturally look for this 
 illumination of the quiet undistinguished spaces of commonplace lives y 
 for he outdoes even the historian in his normal demand for salient and 
 moving events, and in the pace at which they sweep through his pages. 
 Yet the same hand which evolved in five acts the colossal story of Lear, 
 and hurried us breathless through the length and breadth of the 
 Roman empire to witness the shame and the glory of Antony, and the 
 witch-splendour of his serpent of old Nile, that same hand can linger 
 to record a bit of homely talk, devoid of either wit or humour, wisdom 
 or pathos, between two simple-minded Gloucestershire squires as they 
 
UPON THE NATIONAL LIFE 7 
 
 sit over their morning ale ; just such talk as might happen any market- 
 day anywhere in all the English countryside : 
 
 * Jesu, Jesu,' exclaims JVIr. Justice Shallow, * the mad days that I have spent ! and 
 to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead ! ' 
 
 * We shall all follow, cousin,' rejoins Master Silence. 
 
 ' Certain, 'tis certain ; very sure, very sure ; death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain 
 to all ; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair ? 
 
 Sil. By my troth, I was not there. 
 
 Shall. Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet ? 
 
 Sil. Dead, sir. 
 
 Shall. Jesu, Jesu, dead ! a' drew a good bow ; and dead ! a' shot a fine shoot : 
 John a Gaunt loved him well, and betted much money on his head. Dead ! a' would 
 have clapped i' the clout at twelve score, and carried you a forehand shaft a fourteen 
 and fourteen and a half, that it would have done a man's heart good to see. How a 
 score of ewes now ? 
 
 Sil. Thereafter as they be : a score of good ewes may be worth ten pounds. 
 
 Shall. And is old Double dead ? ' 
 
 Or I might recall, as a picture of life even further removed from 
 the stress and onrush of history, nearer to the absolute quietude of 
 death, yet more intense and poignantly expressive, Wordsworth's 
 Cumberland Beggar — the solitary bowed old man, who has all but died 
 out of humanity into the silence and the calm of Nature, and yet has 
 his place among the influences which make the little countryside com- 
 munity morally so fresh and sound, by keeping alive in them the pity 
 which runneth soon in gentle hearts. That teUs us more about 
 Cumberland than many a ballad of Border raids. 
 
 II 
 
 I have been, so far, concerned with literature only as a sort of ally 
 of history, throwing open her casements and letting in a piquant and 
 concentrated, but clear and transparent, daylight upon both the 
 broad highways and the shy nooks and recesses of national life. But 
 this is, after all, not what literature has chiefly to do. Her casements, 
 when they are hers, are magic casements ; her light is not the light 
 of common day ; if she contributes, in the end, to a fuller and deeper 
 knowledge of reaUty, it is, more often, not by using good normal eyes 
 to unusually good purpose, but by the absorbed exercise of rare 
 idiosyncrasies of vision, purblind perhaps in many directions, amazingly 
 acute in some. And we have now to ask how the utterances which 
 reflect these individual forms of vision, these originalities of sense 
 and thought, may also enlarge our understanding of the national life. 
 The question is the more urgent for us, since these original and indivi- 
 dual seers have so large and significant a part in the literature of 
 England. No other literature perhaps numbers so many lonely voices. 
 'These islanders,' said a foreign critic once, very pregnantly, 'are 
 themselves all islands.' For literatures, and periods of literature, 
 are not alike in their relation to the common life out of which they 
 grow. The famous critical feud between classicism and romanticism 
 sprang largely from a difference in the value attached to that common 
 life. To the critic of the classical or Augustan tjrpe, good writing 
 could never be out of touch with good sense ; the ideal of literature 
 was proprie communia dicerCy to put the common intellectual heritage 
 
8 THE BEARING OF ENGLISH STUDIES 
 
 into apt and felicitous words. The Romantics, on the other hand, 
 of every shade, have scornfully repudiated the claim of 'common 
 sense ' to be a standard either in literature or in life ; they have 
 pursued ideals, in both, sharply contrasted with those of the mass 
 of the community. The generation of Rousseau called their ideal 
 ' Nature ', and preached a religion of the mountains, exempt from 
 the corruptions of the town ; the generation of Tieck and Schlegel 
 called it ' Art ', and proclaimed a religion of the studio, exempt from 
 the vulgar actuality of the bourgeois, unfriendly to the clarity of 
 science and to the coherence of logic. Beauty, for them, was apt to 
 be something cloistered, or exotic, a revelation of the exalted moment 
 or of the fevered dream ; and poetry became an exclusive antithesis 
 to ' prose ', the creation of a wayward and irresponsible fancy, not 
 the fine flower of universal reason, nor the impassioned expression 
 which is in the countenance of all science. 
 
 France has had her age of brilliant romanticism ; England her age 
 of hardly less brilliant classicism. But it will not be denied that the 
 sociality of which classicism is the most pronounced literary expression, 
 has on the whole been, as Brunetiere declared, a distinctive trait of 
 French literature at large ; nor that the individualism, to which the 
 Romantics paid a homage often more ardent than discreet, has been 
 potent through almost the whole range of the modem literature of 
 England. The spirit of a polished and authoritative society, imposing 
 a common standard of manners, speech, and even of thought, has never 
 been strange to the land which became the mistress of Europe in courtly 
 usage and breeding ; and in the great age of Louis XIV it told almost 
 as a creative and inspiring force, embodying itself in the noble drama 
 of Racine and Corneille, in the more universal and human comedy of 
 Moliere, in the criticism of Boileau, in the dogma of Bossuet ; all 
 addressed to, and presupposing, a society which applied, and was able 
 in a large degree to enforce, a definite and uniform standard of rightness 
 and fitness in art. ' The heretic is the man who has an opinion,' said 
 Bossuet, the mightiest ecclesiastical voice of the seventeenth century ; 
 exactly as he might have said that the ill-bred person was one whose 
 manners were of his own making ; and never has the spirit, which 
 brands having an opinion as heresy, been a more potent determining 
 factor in literature ; where, it might be thought, to have an opinion 
 was the first condition of being entitled to speak at all. However 
 that may be, there is no question that the literary orthodoxy of the 
 great age of France succeeded ; not in the sense that it crushed the 
 literary heretics, though it did that too, but in the sense that it was 
 justified in crushing them. The Chapelains and Voitures, whom 
 Boileau denounced, were not the obscure heralds of a larger day, like 
 Chatterton or Shelley, but delusive and pretentious ignes fatui, whose 
 slender and fitful tapers led nowhere. A part, at least, of the secret 
 of that orthodox success lay in this, that through the voice of fashion, 
 through the voice of an authoritative society spoke the more potent 
 and more enduring voice, I will not say of the genius of France, but 
 at least of the dominant and master strain of the complex and versatile 
 French mind. In that classical literature, with its fastidious clarity, 
 its ordered beauty, its logical control, some of the traits which con- 
 tributed most to build up French nationality, and qualified it to play 
 its colossal part in the making of modern civilization, found their fullest 
 
UPON THE NATIONAL LIFE 9 
 
 expression. Hence the French classics have never been out of date ; 
 through all the vicissitudes of taste they have retained their appeal, 
 and found their response ; and no literature of which that can be said 
 can be insignificant. 
 
 Nothing quite like this is to be found in the Germanic world. 
 The ' taste of the town ' has rarely, in England or in Germany, been 
 a clue to immortal merit ; and if our criticism has often displayed 
 a nice scent for the exceptional in literature, it has most often been 
 in order to proclaim the discovery of a new poetic Eldorado, not 
 to brand a heretic for having an opinion of his own. Grermany, in 
 this point, stands in yet sharper contrast with France than England. 
 When that brilliant Frenchwoman, Mme de Stael, was banished 
 across the Rhine by Napoleon, she was struck by the totally different 
 state of things. There she found no uniform society, no exacting 
 and uniform standard, no orthodoxy of manners, thought, or speech ; 
 but instead, a rich diversity of individual talent and individual taste. 
 ' The superiority of the Germans consists,' she says, ' in their indepen- 
 dence of mind, in their individual originality ; whereas in France the 
 imposition of a uniform model, noble, agreeable, and refined though 
 it be, represses originality and plays into the hands of mediocrity.* 
 In those years, when Napoleon had shattered the very semblance of 
 political cohesion in the Grerman people, it was pardonable for a 
 foreigner to miss the signs of inner spiritual accord in this Babel of 
 individual voices ; but she saw, rightly, that there was no social accord, 
 no alliance between literature and society or the state. But the 
 spiritual bond, however faintly expressed in the outward structure of 
 the Germany of 1816, was the sign of forces that were inwardly 
 working towards full nationality, and Bismarck in 1870 only fashioned 
 a political body for the matured soul. To-day, Goethe and Schiller 
 are more intimately bound up with the national consciousness of 
 Germany than any French poet, even MoUere, even Victor Hugo, with 
 the national consciousness of France. And they have done far more 
 than either to give the national consciousness its ideal content and 
 scope. 
 
 And how does it stand with our own country ? England, as a 
 political society, has had a history far more comparable with that of 
 France than with that of Germany. It has had for many centuries 
 a highly organized political structure, a strong central government, 
 a great capital, and an extremely pronounced and even aggressive 
 national self -consciousness. But the powerful sociality which made 
 England the mother of parliaments has certainly not been a prevailing 
 trait of our literary history. If in political England Mme de Stael 
 would have found the nearest analogue to political France, in literary 
 England she might have heard a parallel to that Babel of lonely voices 
 which charmed her ear in Grermany. For whether or not the English 
 music has really been richer or more varied than the French, it can 
 hardly be disputed that the musicians have cared much less for the 
 conductor ; in other words, that the element of authority, of tradition, 
 of a standard and model imposed by an exacting and united society, 
 has had very much less to do with our songs. The established orthodoxy 
 of the great French classical school has no close analogy among us ; 
 certainly the English Augustans who sought to displace the riot and 
 caprice of English fancy with a reasoned and ordered lucidity like theirs, 
 
10 THE BEARING OF ENGLISH STUDIES 
 
 did not speak, as the French Augustans did, with the full accent, the 
 profound conviction, or the enduring result of those in whose words 
 the master-strains of national character become articulate. The school 
 of Pope is not exactly that parenthesis in the history of the national 
 mind which it is in the history of the national poetry ; but it may fairly 
 be described as one of those paragraphs of a great chapter which com- 
 municate matters highly needful to be known, rather than the very pith 
 and burden of the tale. And when we turn to the Elizabethans, there 
 indeed, if anywhere, we seem to be in the presence of an exalted and 
 exultant national life. But their pervading temper is hardly that 
 'sociality' which Brunetiere laid down as the cardinal trait of the 
 classical literature of France. If they, and the audiences they wrote 
 for, formed, as they did, a very real society, it was a society whose 
 most vital bond was not an inherited tradition, a common culture, 
 or a common standard of taste jealously exacted and observed, but 
 rather a common delight in the glorious extravagances of individual 
 character, which break away from, if they do not break through, the 
 norms of custom, the sanctions of tradition. The thrill with which 
 a spectator in the pit of the Rose watched the colossal Tamburlaine, 
 the scourge of God, trample upon the nations, or Faustus sign his soul 
 away, had some horror in it ; but reverence for laws divine or human 
 contended in him, on less than equal terms, with an insurgent joy 
 at the Titanic hardihood which dared to defy them. In the vaster 
 and maturer intelligence of Shakespeare, these conflicts of the individual 
 with society assume less obvious forms and are fraught with more 
 perplexing problems. They are the absorbing theme of his tragedy. 
 And it is with him normally society that outwardly triumphs, and the 
 individual who outwardly succumbs. But that does not prevent the 
 intellectual, ethical, and imaginative interest from being focused upon 
 what is going on in the soul of the ruined victim. Shakespeare's 
 insight into the structure and working of society, profound as it was, 
 is not to be compared with his understanding of personality ; nor 
 his interest in the diseases of the state with his interest in the maladies 
 of the soul ; the rottenness of Denmark is only there to give occasion 
 to the thought -sickness of Hamlet. And it is in these supreme studies of 
 personality, of personality desperately entangled in the web of its own 
 faculties and failings, far more than in his studies of societies or states, 
 even of societies successfully asserting themselves, of states triumphing, 
 of Finland herself rising up from the disasters wrought in her by 
 weaklmg or despot kings, that the supreme worth of Shakespeare, 
 even for the English citizen, lies. The series of the English histories, 
 great and splendid as they are, are not to be set in the balance here. 
 Henry, vaulting upon his horse before Shrewsbury — 
 
 As full of spirit as the month of May, 
 And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer, 
 
 or scattering a universal largess of heart and hope among his troops 
 before Agincourt, means less for the culture of Englishmen than do 
 Hamlet or Lear, apparently detached from all local or national 
 significance, but more potent, by their wider range and deeper reach, 
 to build us up in the humanity which is not a negation of citizen- 
 ship, but its crown and flower, that without which citizenship itself 
 becomes merely an expanded parochialism. 
 
UPON THE NATIONAL LIFE H 
 
 in 
 
 Yet with all this, literature has never again been in such close 
 touch with the national life of its own day as it was among the great 
 Elizabethans. The generation which followed Shakespeare's death 
 saw the rift in the common consciousness already growing wide, which 
 was never again to be wholly healed. The loftiest and most resonant 
 literary voices were thenceforth partial and exclusive, as Spenser's and 
 Shakespeare's were not. Milton, after his glorious early prime at 
 Horton, averted his ken from half the contemporary world of England, 
 and that half gave no heed, or scornful heed, to him. The Augustans 
 put into exquisite epigrams and antitheses the philosophy, manners, 
 culture, and foUies of the town, but had no eyes for the country. 
 The Romantics who gradually recovered imagination and passion and 
 song for English poetry, sought them in the recluse solitude of woodland 
 hermitages, or country churchyards at nightfall, or the meandering 
 Ouse meadows, or the bracken heights of Quantock, or the Grasmere 
 hills ; but they ignored, or fiercely denounced, the town. All these 
 partial by-ways of literature involved some loss ; compared with the 
 spacious times of Elizabeth, all these latter-day literary movements 
 were in one way or another limited, their limitations were even striking 
 and extraordinary. Every boy and girl can now be made to see more 
 in Herrick than Milton saw, more in Pope than Warton saw, more in 
 Wordsworth than Byron saw. But the really important thing is, that 
 each of these limited movements marked also a gain, a discovery, a 
 creation, the addition of a new asset to the spiritual wealth of the 
 nation. Milton's limitations, his Puritan hardness and austerity, his 
 rigid and arid theology, his insensibility to the ideal aspects of love, 
 these flaws were the mortal and perishable part of him. But what 
 shall we say of his enduring, immortal part ? There had been heroism 
 enough in England, enough stout resistance to despotic authority ; 
 enough of strenuous intellectual devotion to a chosen task. But who 
 does not feel that these virtues acquired, in passing through Milton's 
 sublime spirit, a kind of divine afliatus, which gave them henceforth 
 a stronger hold upon English mind and character ? Milton's picture of 
 the courage which ' never can submit or yield ', his prophetic plea for 
 spiritual liberty, his noble hymn of a consecrated youth, have made 
 these things loom larger in our apprehension. What had been scarcely 
 conscious habits of select and exceptional persons, were made, by 
 Milton's magnificent imaginings, permanent spiritual points of repair, 
 at which, in the future, again and again, the fainter purposes of English- 
 men have gathered strength, and their despondency courage and hope. 
 * Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour ! ' cried Wordsworth ; 
 but Milton, who could thus be called to, in words which have resounded 
 and reverberated in thousands of English hearts, was indeed alive ; 
 a great spiritual force permanently added to the heritage and birthright 
 of Englishmen. Such a national celebration as that of two years ago was 
 not merely a payment of due honour to his memory ; it was a recog- 
 nition, conscious or not, that Milton is a part of us, that he not merely 
 interpreted the England he knew, but helped to constitute the spirit 
 and temper of the England in which we live. 
 
12 THE BEARING OF ENGLISH STUDIES 
 
 Milton, a lonely voice in his own time, is thus a sign of an England 
 still to come. If we turn to the poets of the next century who brought 
 about what we know as the Romantic revival, w^e find ourselves among 
 voices even lonelier, often, than his, which were the signs, and in part 
 the instruments, of changes in the spiritual outlook of England still 
 more distinct and decisive than those foreshadowed by him. In what 
 chiefly was the nineteenth century richer than the seventeenth ? Surely, 
 in its more intimate, sympathetic understanding of Nature and Man. 
 Everywhere it turned away impatiently, like Faust, from the traditional 
 scholasticisms, and drew into close and first-hand contact with living 
 reality. It did not, as Wordsworth in a hasty moment bade it, reject 
 science and art, in order to listen to the woodland linnet ; but it 
 created a science and an art of its own just by listening and looking, by 
 the frank, fearless, and penetrating use of the senses and imagination. 
 It let the old school divinity moulder, and rediscovered the divine. It 
 found Nature mysterious, yet full of speaking voices, whose rhythms our 
 ears could partly catch, and our souls fall into tune with, the source of 
 a veritable new religion, of which Wordsworth's Tintem Abbey was the 
 gospel. And it found human nature mysterious, yet strangely vocal 
 too ; a mine unfathomable, but of which the visible treasures are so 
 rich that Wordsworth, contemplating it with wonder and awe, as some- 
 thing to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil, could yet make it 
 'the haunt and the main region of his song '. The interpretation of 
 Nature, in their different ways, by the geologist, the naturalist, and 
 the landscape-painter, the deepening and widening of the self -conscious- 
 ness of humanity, seen in the growth of the democratic ideal, the more 
 and more absorbed study of history, the recovery of sympathetic insight 
 into the myths of man's infancy, into the Hellenic or the Gothic art of his 
 adolescence, — all these were kindred manifestations of a vast enlarge- 
 ment of the mental and moral horizon, in which the whole of Western 
 Europe in different degrees took part, and without an insight into 
 which the nineteenth century cannot be understood. Now, whatever 
 may be the case on the Continent, in England it is certain that these 
 various manifestations found their subtlest and deepest interpreters 
 and exponents in the poets ; nay, that the poetic voices, lifted up, 
 ' long before the blissful hour arrived,' to chant, as Wordsworth said, 
 the consummation of that union of man's discerning intellect with this 
 goodly universe, had some considerable share in bringing it about. 
 Gray and Collins, Chatterton and Blake, Cowper and Wordsworth, 
 Shelley and Keats, all in various degrees had to wait for their audience, 
 and the audience they eventually found they helped to create. If we can 
 see Nature in part through Shelley's eyes, and hear her through his 
 rhythms, if the imagination of the cultivated Englishman of to-day is 
 sensitive and receptive to beauties which left the cultivated Englishman 
 of his time cold, it is because the Shelleyan poetry, beating as it were 
 upon the senses of English readers for two generations, gradually attuned 
 them to respond, — ^fashioned the Aeolian harp on which its passing 
 breath made music. We now understand and relish them all more 
 intimately than their contemporaries did ; they are ' signs ' of our 
 England in a sense in wh^ich they were not the ' products ' of their own. 
 
 Mr. Courthope, in the closing volume of his valuable History of English 
 Poetry, has brought against these Romantic poets an indictment which 
 rather nearly concerns us here. Conceiving all poetry, of an enduring 
 
UPON THE NATIONAL LIFE 13 
 
 kind, to be a clothing in figure and verse of the body of national tradition 
 in institution and belief, so that the poet's audience find their ideas 
 reflected in his work, he naturally regards with little interest this 
 poetry of the revolutionary age, of which the most vital substance, 
 certainly, though by no means the whole content, was new creation. 
 ' In this concluding volume,' he says, ' I have sought to describe the 
 varied effects produced on the Enghsh imagination by the French 
 Revolution, and the numerous individual attempts made by poets of 
 genius to evolve, out of their own imagination, new forms of the art, 
 unconnected with the stream of national tradition. But just as the 
 principle of abstract liberty has proved unequal to the task of building 
 up a fresh social order in the sphere of politics, so, in the corresponding 
 world of imagination, the last result of the Romantic Movement has 
 been a separation of Poetry from the organized course of national life 
 and action.' And feeling that poetry thus separated misses its end, the 
 historian of Poetry has chosen here to lay down his pen, and to leave the 
 rest of its story, from Shelley's days to our own, so far as he is con- 
 cerned, untold. These poets were, for him, abandoning the poetry 
 which expresses the mind of the community, to follow little private 
 avenues of individual fancy. Such value as their work possesses must 
 be found in the beauty which it contrives incidentally to capture, while 
 steadily denuding itself of substance, interest, and universal truth. 
 
 This view seems to involve two fallacies in regard to the relation 
 between poetry and national life. The first is the assumption that 
 the poet's audience, the body of hearers to whom and in terms of 
 whose ideas he speaks, is that which he finds ; whereas we have just 
 seen that his audience is often, and always in some degree, one which 
 he makes ; to which he speaks in terms of ideas which belong to it 
 chiefly because they have first belonged to him. In this way, ideas 
 which begin by being individual, and which the individual thinker 
 has won by pushing his way through just these lonely avenues of 
 private thought, may end in being a common possession; and the 
 national mind is to that extent enlarged and enriched. Wordsworth, 
 it is hardly too much to say, has created a new sensibility, a new 
 capacity for joy ; he has added to the influences which, in England, 
 make for plain living and high thinking, for fortitude and patient 
 cheer, for the power to live ' by admiration, hope, and love '. And the 
 second fallacy, closely connected with this is, that in gauging the 
 national mind, understanding its present and its past, and forecasting 
 its future, that part of the national mind which stamps itself in the 
 laws, in the established institutions, in the orthodox beliefs, in the 
 obligatory customs, need alone be considered. England, as we read 
 her in her business, in her amusements, in nine-tenths of her legislation, 
 in three-quarters of her religion, is a nation shrewd, practical, common- 
 sense, tolerant of differences by political instinct, but as poorly endowed 
 as any people on record with the sympathetic imagination which inter- 
 prets them. Yet with all this, England has been the mother of a 
 series of poets whose imagination was their supreme gift. ' By nothing,' 
 as Matthew Arnold said, ' is England so great as by her poetry.' The 
 wonderful language we use, soiled and corrupted as it may be in the 
 music-hall or the baser journalism, cannot forget that it has been 
 moulded in the brains of singers as well as in those of ' shop-keepers ' ; 
 and to-day we have the astonishing spectacle that the same speech which 
 
14 BEARING OF ENGLISH STUDIES UPON NATIONAL LIFE 
 
 serves perfectly to convey the political convictions of the practical 
 Anglo-Saxon in the columns of the Times, can become, on the lips of 
 the eager dreaming Celt beyond the Irish Sea, in the verse of Yeats, in 
 the prose of Synge, an idiom so exquisite in its naive grace and tender- 
 ness that the modern school of Irish poets no longer seek to prolong 
 the insecure vitality of the Irish tongue. It is not for nothing that 
 Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats and Coleridge were born in England; 
 they stand for something without which England and the English mind 
 could not be completely understood. They, and a host of others of 
 whom they are tjrpes, are there as a permanent reminder that matter- 
 of-fact practicality, mechanical ingenuity, masterful self-assertion, 
 political sagacity, and shrewd common sense, do not exhaust the gifts 
 and qualities of English mentality ; that in the nature of the English 
 child, out of which, largely by the aid of the teacher, the future man- 
 hood and womanhood of England are to be evolved, there lurk implicit 
 capacities also for responding to, or even initiating, the imaginative 
 vision which does not add to the material satisfactions of life, but 
 extorts through symbol and figure its rich significance ; which does not 
 make money, or further trade, but creates a spiritual wealth that 
 liberates from the bondage of narrow cares and the burden of petty 
 thoughts. And yet these glaringly contrasted aims have a hidden 
 affinity and nexus. English poetry, as a whole, is distinguished by its 
 close bearing upon reality ; its drama mirrors the age and body of the 
 time ; its visionary songs are no vagaries of sweet tune, but a significant 
 music, charged with implicit ' criticism of life '. For the English 
 people, the culture which its own literature affords is the companionship 
 not of alien genius but of its own best moments, the finer spirit of its 
 own ruling temper, the explicit affirmation of its instinctive but vague 
 surmises. 
 
 If, then, literature is the clue to an understanding of the national 
 life of a unique kind, and if our own national life is, as, without any 
 blustering patriotism, we must admit it to be, of great and enduring 
 significance in the history of civilization and of mankind, the claim of 
 the study of English literature to be reckoned an indispensable part of 
 what are called in education the Humanities, standing on at least equal 
 terms with any other class of Literae Humuniores, must surely be 
 allowed. The number of those who have no access to humanity 
 through the classics, or who have access to the classics but fail to extract 
 even a glimmer of humanity out of them, is, and will always be, vast. 
 But English literature is still, even in many great and progressive 
 schools, the slighted Cinderella, for whom anything, and any one, is 
 good enough. When England at length comes to comprehend that 
 education, in the largest sense of the word, is her greatest need, I look 
 forward confidently to the day when that slighted Cinderella will, in the 
 great phrase of Ben Jonson, be ' stripped of the rags wherewith the 
 times have adulterated her form ' ; and I shall not shrink through any 
 fear of hyperbole from adding his final words : ' and rendered worthy 
 to be embraced and kissed of all the great and master spirits of the 
 world*. 
 
i-i DAY USE 
 
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