with their school-days will recall their early studies as being in so
large a measure a struggle to acquire the form that the matter at the
time impressed itself only secondarily on the mind. The strange
words betrayed an obstinate angularity; no inflection was so minute
that it could be disregarded without prejudice to sense; even their
place in the puzzle was significant; and if in use they were roughly
treated or jumbled together without due order, they refused either to
reflect things or to express ideas. But imperceptibly this very
quality disciplined the mind to realise that the words had a definite
value. When rightly used, moreover, it seemed that these unworn
words would give forth our thoughts or express a meaning with a
directness and immediacy lacking even in our own speech. Perhaps it
is that many centuries have elapsed since those words had been
bandied about in everyday speech, and hence they have a freshness and
keenness of impression which no vulgar association has had the chance
to blur. In our own time the words which build up the most exquisite
poem, we have known to be used in other contexts--to have provided a
rhyme for a sentimental song or patter for a low comedian. It may be
that when the trireme's rating in the Piraeus found his rations
short, or the centurion was jostled in the crowded byways of the
Suburra, winged words used by Homer or Virgil were pressed into the
service of each to become the vehicle of their complaint and abuse,
and that these same words in their day had many a frivolous or
debasing task to do. But none of this has reached our ears; all the
multitude of tongues which echoed in the Agora and Forum are hushed
in silence and oblivion; and to listeners across the centuries alone
of all the sounds of ancient Greece and Rome "still are their
pleasant voices, their nightingales awake." Ruskin once said, "All
inferior poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away
the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched
commonality to good thoughts; and in general adds to the weight of
human weariness in a most woeful and culpable manner." But the
literary works of Greece and Rome which have reached us come burdened
with no such poor relations; the poets whose reciting in the month of
August was such a plague to Juvenal and his contemporaries have not
survived to weary us, and everything second-rate has long fallen by
the way into the gap of centuries over which only an eternal merit
has enabled the survivors to waft themselves. Due again to the
freshness of the words is another feature of the ancients' writing,
its clarity and its conciseness. It cannot fail to strike the merest
beginner who tries to translate our tongue into Greek or Latin, or
_vice versa_, in how much fewer words in the old languages the
thought can be expressed. It is distressing to find ourselves saying
in ten lines what the Roman said in five; but at least it may give
rise in us to a conscious effort to tighten up the belt of our
speech, when we see the sentences of the ancients clean run like
athletes and fit for their work as compared with the prolapsed and
slovenly figures of so much of our own diction. Moreover, the
ancients did not over-elaborate their thought, being content to leave
something to the mental processes of their readers. How different
from so many of our English scribblers who seem to have taken to
heart Wilde's dictum that "nothing succeeds like excess," and who
swathe the thinnest of thoughts in a profusion of words in the hope,
maybe, that it will appear larger from its wrappings. Even our great
writers are sometimes too eager that nothing that can be said on the
theme they take shall remain unsaid, or any germ remain undeveloped
to which the reader's own mind might give increase; and they are apt
so to run their thought to a standstill that no potentiality remains
in it to set the reader's mind agog. Why do we all know about the
beauty of Argive Helen? Not because Homer gave us a catalogue of her
charms with exhaustive precision, but just because he gave a hint and
left it to us. I think he says no more than that, as one day she
passed upon the walls, the elders said it was no wonder that for such
loveliness men should die and cities should be sacked. Her
loveliness is left to each of us to envisage as we will, and thus it
is that it lives afresh in a myriad forms, newborn throughout the
centuries in each man's heart.
The form then is ever fresh, and I have spoken of it first because to
many of us so barely initiated this has made the earliest and most
immediate impression. It is perhaps only as we get older that the
beauty of the matter unfolds itself and reveals its eternal
significance against our day-to-day experience.
The literature in which peoples with such an outlook found
entertainment and instruction was not composed of novels or problem
plays dealing with heroes and heroines struggling in the little traps
that their own weakness had sprung for them, or with situations
brought about by mean mistakes or obliquities of character. What was
portrayed in the tragedies of the Greeks was nothing less than the
human spirit at grips with the toils of destiny itself. As Seneca
said, "A strong man matched with fortune is a sight for the gods to
witness." For their characters and situations they had their
beautiful mythology to draw on, and the materials which this provided
eclipsed altogether the themes which ordinary everyday life could
suggest. Always in these tragedies we are secure in the confidence
that the characters will not prove unequal to the doom they have to
bear; as it becomes more instant and inexorable so their spirit
becomes more indomitable to meet it, and it is never otherwise than
the mighty who is "mightily laid low." Whether it is a demi-god like
Prometheus or a man like [OE]dipus who is on the rack; whether their
sacrifice to what they deem their duty is demanded of a wife like
Alcestis, or a young girl like Antigone, they show us one and all the
spirit which is unperturbed by trial and undiverted by catastrophe.
It may be said that this high bearing in trials so profound or so
remote avails little to guide us among our practical daily
perplexities; but surely the Greek tragedy, though not drawing on the
smaller issues of life for its themes, shows how these should be
faced by portraying to us the serene and the right spirit towards the
ultimate issues.
If I may now strike a personal note, I think what I have gained is
some sense of proportion, a standard of values, and a profound
respect for the truth of words, which have been of use to me in my
daily life. Add to these the perennial happiness I am fortunate
enough to find in the sheer beauty of Latin and Greek and the
thousand images they call up in the mind, and I am indebted to my
early training more than I can ever hope to repay. I remember well
the first election I fought. It was what was called an old-fashioned
election in an ancient borough now disfranchised. The candidate was
expected to spend three evenings a week during the time of his
probation in one or another of the public houses which jostled each
other through the constituency, listening to and vociferously
applauding what, for want of a better name, was called, on the _lucus
a non lucendo_ principle, comic or humorous song. After a time I
felt the need of a moral purge and a literal sedative. It was the
work of a moment to find what my soul needed. When I came home at
night from these orgies I seldom went to bed without reading
something of the _Odyssey_, the _Æneid_, or the _Odes_ of Horace. By
the date of the election I had read all the last-named, and most of
the others, not without labour in the dictionaries, not always with
ease, but with care and increasing joy; and with the desired result
that, though defeated, I had passed through the fire and the smell of
burning was not on my garments.
Two years later, by my admission to the House of Commons at a
by-election, I entered formally on political life. The possession of
a sense of proportion, of a standard of values, and of respect for
the truth of words proved an inestimable aid to political judgment.
So far as I have had a sense of proportion it has helped me to assess
the personal equation of the individuals, distinguished and
undistinguished, who form the House of Commons. So far as I have
acquired a standard of values, it has helped me to estimate speech
and the written word, and has saved me many a time from bowing to the
idols of the market-place. So far as I have had respect for the
truth of words, I have been helped to detect the fallacy and the
equivocal phrase lurking in the tropical growth of oratory, and I
have endeavoured to use a speech plain and unambiguous. I have also
been able to enjoy with unmixed pleasure the choice of words and the
phrasing of those speakers who model themselves on the classical
tradition. Without a rival in that style I would place one of the
most distinguished members of this Association, the Earl of Oxford.
Amongst our great speakers we have those whose inspiration is
obviously of Athens and those whose debt is to Rome. The Earl of
Oxford is a Roman in his lucidity, in his phrasing, in his felicity.
It requires but little stretch of imagination to picture him in the
Courts delivering a defence, shall we say, _Pro Georgia_, or in its
greatest day addressing the Senate in a speech which for its incisive
and dexterous advocacy, its compact and pregnant sentences, would be
the despair alike of the translator and the most experienced writer
of Latin prose.
And let me add in a sentence, a political leader should know his
_Knights_ by heart, for there is no profounder truth than that the
sausage-seller lies ever on the flank of Cleon.
But over and above these qualities which delight the intellect, there
is the more subtle, deeper something which touches the heart and
soul. The voices that speak to us across the death and rebirth of
nations touch every emotion of each succeeding generation in these
later days, as they touched those who had ears to hear in Athens and
in Rome; but they reach us with the added solemnity and pathos which
cling to remembered sayings of those we have loved and lost. Every
ultimate problem was theirs, as it is ours, and the more you open
your soul to their appeal the more profound your pity for stumbling
humanity, the more eager your effort to bind together the family of
man rather than to loosen it. It is no blind chance that has led one
of our greatest scholars to devote his life to the ideal of the
League of Nations. Rather it is his desire to make his contribution
to redeeming the failure of those very Greeks whom he, more perhaps
than any living man, has helped this modern world to understand.
But we are linked together in the shallows no less than in the deeps.
Need I quote _Diffugere nives_ to those whose first home was in the
country? Is not everything in those lines?--the passing of winter
and the feathering out of the trees, the assurance of every spring in
every world that ever was? How many a holiday and home-coming are
recalled by the words,
peregrine
Labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto.
Have we not the eternal youth of the world in _dulce ridentem_ and
_gratus puell[oe] risus ab angulo_?--a score of words and we see our
own childhood, our children's, and every generation from the
beginning to the end of time. What memories such lines call up!
They knock at the heart like the drum taps of the Fifth Symphony.
I have little more to add. If I have convinced you of my sincerity
as a member of the Association, I am happy. I may repeat to you what
I have said to my friends, that when my work in politics is completed
I shall take down all my old companions from my shelves and work once
more with dictionary and grammar. I have always kept the embers
aglow that they may easily be blown into flame to warm my senile
bones.
I cannot end without an allusion to the Anthology which my dear
friend Mackail has done much to make known to English readers. I
would remind you of the epitaph on the Athenians who fell at Plataea:
the lines might have been written for our own youth which hastened
out to Flanders that late summer, eleven years ago:
Ει το καλως Θνλσκειν αρετης μερος εστι μεγιστον
ημιν εκ παντων τουτ απεεινειμε Τυχη
Ελλαρδι γαρ σπευδοντες ελευθεριην περιθειναι
κεινεθ αγηραντω χρωμενοι ευλογιη.
We stand together with bowed heads in a sorrow and pride that reach
across the centuries.
I remember many years ago standing on the terrace of a beautiful
villa near Florence. It was a September evening, and the valley
below was transfigured in the long horizontal rays of the declining
sun. And then I heard a bell, such a bell as never was on land or
sea, a bell whose every vibration found an echo in my innermost
heart. I said to my hostess, "That is the most beautiful bell I have
ever heard." "Yes," she replied, "it is an English bell." And so it
was. For generations its sound had gone out over English fields,
giving the hours of work and prayer to English folk from the tower of
an English abbey, and then came the Reformation, and some wise
Italian bought the bell whose work at home was done and sent it to
the Valley of the Arno, where after four centuries it stirred the
heart of a wandering Englishman and made him sick for home.
Thus the chance word of a Latin inscription, a line in the anthology,
a phrase of Horace, or a "chorus ending of Euripides" plucks at the
heart-strings and stirs a thousand memories, memories subconscious
and ancestral.
SHAKESPEARE
AT THE CITY OF LONDON SCHOOL
13_th June_, 1924
I vividly remember a Prime Minister, no less a man than Mr.
Gladstone, coming down to my school. Politically opposed to him as I
was, I waited eagerly for the message. Just before Mr. Gladstone's
visit I had had a difference of opinion with my Headmaster, and
relations were somewhat strained. When Mr. Gladstone opened with the
words "Your admirable Headmaster," I felt that the Prime Minister was
so out of touch with the whole of the life I was leading that I never
listened to another word.
You who are here are entering into a blessed heritage that is the
peculiar right of our own people. I am proud to be on the platform
with Sir Sidney Lee, against whose shield all the iconoclasts of the
world break their spears. Some wish to tear the laurels from
Shakespeare's brow to place them on the brow of Bacon; others say
that _Wuthering Heights_ was not written by Emily Brontë: and some
even say that Mr. Lloyd George did not offer ninepence for fourpence.
Long may their spears be broken!
I understand that Shakespeare is a compulsory subject at the School:
do not rush to the conclusion that a man is any the worse for being a
compulsory subject. When I was a boy I knew the _Odes_ of Horace
backwards and forwards, and when I came to manhood year by year those
odes came knocking at the door of my heart at the most unexpected
times and places. So, even if you do not realise it now, the time
will come when you will be thankful that you were steeped in
Shakespeare as boys. In him we not only have, as Sir Gerald Du
Maurier said here not long ago, perhaps the greatest man the world
has ever seen, but one who had a profound knowledge of human nature
and of the world. Shakespeare was one of those few poets in whom we
find the magic which comes straight from heaven, and which is the
prerogative of the very greatest: such magic as we find in the poetry
of Keats, in the first scene of the last act of _The Merchant of
Venice_, and throughout the sonnets.
Shakespeare's plays, no matter of what country he may be writing, are
redolent of our own soil and of our own country people. The habit of
thought and the outlook of Shakespeare's country people and of those
wise men, Shakespeare's fools, may be found to-day in our rural
counties. It is no mere coincidence that the School's "Beaufoy Day"
was originally 23rd April, for besides being Shakespeare's birthday,
it was St. George's Day. That brings us back to England.
The City of London is famed for so many things that people sometimes
fail to realise what she has done for the education of our country
people. Your School is the last of the great foundations for sending
trained men into the world that is left within the boundaries of the
city. One by one they have gone--Christ's Hospital, the
Charterhouse, the Merchant Taylors'. I hope the City of London
School will always remain as a witness to the great light that has
burned throughout the ages in this great city.
You have a tremendous responsibility on your shoulders. Not all the
tradition, not all the great men who have gone before, can keep our
country as she should be kept, unless in each generation are found
the men who will take the torch from the generation that is passing,
keep it bright and hand it on.
To-day there are many things we have to struggle against in England,
but the greatest is the loss of the men from the ages of twenty-six
or twenty-seven to forty, the flower of the nation's early manhood
that lies in France and Belgium. Not only have we lost the benefit
of the work they might be doing to-day, but the natural leaders of
the young men coming along are the school generations immediately
preceding them, and the generations coming to manhood now are
deprived of that natural leadership of the elder brothers who were at
school about a decade before. The burden and the responsibility
falls heavier, therefore, on those who have just come to manhood and
on those about to do so. Never has the need of the country and of
the world for men trained as you are being trained, been so great.
When you come out into the larger world, though you may find the
struggle harder than it has ever been, yet there is a warm welcome
awaiting you from those who to-day are bearing the burden and the
heat. You will find, too, a world that has never been more in need
of the service that can be given by men with trained minds and clean,
sound bodies.
BYRON
AT THE BYRON CENTENARY LUNCHEON
29_th April_, 1924
It is very difficult during a man's lifetime, or in the years
immediately succeeding his death, to make any just estimate of his
fame. The Reverend John Todd, who wrote a _Students' Guide_ shortly
after Byron's death, told his students to beware of bad books, and
included Byron's works and Walter Scott's together. As was his duty,
he had read those books, and was convinced that Byron's works would
quickly pass from notice and be exiled from the shelves of virtuous
men. That is a contribution of literary taste and puritanism from
the United States.
About the same year a young critic wrote of the peculiar strength
evolved by Byron, a man who gave the world a better heart and a new
pulse. That was Alfred Tennyson, who at the age of twenty-five put
his finger on one of the causes why Byron's Centenary is being
celebrated to-day.
What magic is it that brings people together a hundred years after
the death of a famous man? The man who finds new pulses in the world
is the man who will enjoy immortality. Byron was, if anything, a
sower of new seed that had a great germinal force. It is difficult
to realise what that force was when it first appeared, unless we can
put ourselves in the place of the men who read his first poems. At
the time the first cantos of _Childe Harold_ appeared the Continent
for nearly a generation had been a sealed book to travellers, owing
to the European wars; the Mediterranean, now known to almost everyone
in England, was practically an unknown sea; and too often those who
had escaped abroad went with no eyes to see. Byron found the eyes of
the people sealed, and opened them, and for that reason the gratitude
of the nation should be given to him. The spirit at home and in
Europe was waiting for such a revelation as Byron had for it. In the
epoch which immediately followed he pushed the Romantic movement
begun by Scott with a strength and power which Scott himself could
not achieve, and no one was quicker to recognise the genius of the
younger man than that great-hearted poet himself. The spirit
existing both at home and in Europe at, and after, the end of the
Napoleonic War was the spirit that was waiting, all unconsciously,
for the revelation that Byron had for it. It wanted, perhaps,
without knowing it, force, strength and movement, and those things
Byron gave as they had never been given before.
These things alone might not have made his name to-day what it was in
his lifetime, but there was added the personality of which his
contemporaries told, the loss of which made Scott say, "It is as if
the sun had gone out."
The side of Byron which impresses me most is that of the great and
persistent workman in his high profession of literature. He worked
as an artist must work if he is to leave his mark on coming
generations. That is the part of his life which he kept to himself
as the holiest and best to him, and he knew, as great artists do, the
worth of his own work.
Beyond all men Byron was happy in his death. I could not help
thinking as I walked to this commemoration what a different history
it might have been, what a different celebration might have been held
in after years, if Byron had lived to return from Missolonghi. But
in his death he established his immortality, and words not to be
lightly used of any man might be used of him:
"If to die nobly be the chief part of excellence, to us of all men
fortune gave this lot, for, hastening to set a crown of freedom upon
Hellas, we lie possessed of praise that grows not old."
It is praise, which grows not old, for a man who grows not old, that
is his immortality, and it is that immortality we are here to salute.
W. H. HUDSON
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE HUDSON MEMORIAL IN
HYDE PARK
19_th May_, 1925
We are gathered together this May morning to honour a rare and
remarkable spirit. It is more than eighty years ago that Hudson was
born in a land where, to use his own words, he heard "the little
yellow finches in thousands amid the millions of pink peach blossoms,
pouring out wonderful music against the blue sky." Yet just as those
who grow older feel increasingly the pull of that earth from whence
they are sprung--and to none is that pull stronger than to those who
have had the joy to be raised in the red earth of England--so he felt
the pull of that soil of Devonshire whence his forefathers had come.
Fifty years ago he landed in England, unknown, unheralded,
unadvertised, and the greater part of those years were years of
infinite struggle and toil. There is one thing which is not
generally known, and which is a tribute rare in itself and
significant of that high sense of honour and pride which was his.
Early in the century the Civil List did honour to itself by giving
him one of those small pensions which are within its competence.
Then, a few years ago, when his wife died and his meagre income was
minutely supplemented, he surrendered that pension at his own desire
and in spite of the protests of those administering it, because he
felt he could do without it and that, infinitesimal as the relief
would be, he did not wish to let another grain of sand add to the
weight of the already overburdened taxpayers of the country.
It has been a frequent experience in our history for Englishmen and
Scotsmen to go out into the wilds of the earth and to come back and
tell us what strange things they have seen; but Hudson came from the
ends of the earth and rediscovered to the people, many of whom even
if they had eyes saw not, and if they had ears heard not, something
of the beauty of their own country. He it was who made familiar to
thousands the hidden beauties of our southern counties. He taught
Londoners who had never heard of them the names of places like
Whitesheet Hill, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe and Fonthill Bishop--names
of beauty and romance which always fill me with profound gratitude
that the names of flowers, of villages, of stars and birds, were
given in those dark centuries, long before our people were educated
and had the advantage of cheap literature and a popular Press.
There were a few things which raised passion in Hudson: one certainly
was the felling of the big elms in Kensington Gardens and the
destruction of the Rookery; another was the sight of people whose
palates could only be tickled by larks' or plovers' eggs; and another
was the sight of ladies who had ransacked the hidden corners of the
earth to decorate their hats. I think that to-day we are doing
national penance for the sins we have committed in the past, and are
resolving so far as we can to abstain from offence in the future.
It is not for me to say anything of Hudson as a writer, but I would
like to remind you of Joseph Conrad's remark: "One can't tell how
this fellow gets his effects; he writes as the grass grows." We
cannot tell how anyone in the finest literature gets his effects, but
we thank God for the effect.
There was one thing which bored Hudson, and that was politics, but it
is only fair to remember the impartiality of Hudson's admiration for
politicians. There were only two he could tolerate: one was a
Liberal, Lord Grey, and the other a Tory, Lord Banbury. He was
attached to them for obvious reasons: to Lord Grey for his love of
nature and to Lord Banbury for his hatred of cruelty to living
creatures.