than to our civilisation: it reminds him of the way young gentlemen go to
work in the East when they would engage in correspondence with the object
of their affection. The enamoured one cannot write a sentence himself:
_he_ is the specialist in passion (for the moment); but thought and words
are two things to him, and for words he must go to another specialist,
the professional letter-writer. Thus there is a division of labour.
The man of words, duly instructed, dips the pen of desire in the ink of
devotedness and proceeds to spread it over the page of desolation. Then
the nightingale of affection is heard to warble to the rose of
loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of
expectation. That is what the Easterns are said to consider fine
writing; and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to
which I have been referring.
Now hear this fine passage:--
Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and
expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language.
That is what I have been laying down, and this is literature; not
_things_, but the verbal symbols of things; not on the other hand mere
_words_; but thoughts expressed in language. Call to mind, gentlemen,
the meaning of the Greek word which expresses this special prerogative
of man over the feeble intelligence of the lower animals. It is called
Logos; what does Logos mean? it stands both for _reason_ and for
_speech_, and it is difficult to say which it means more properly. It
means both at once: why? because really they cannot be divided.... When
we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex and
the concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought to tread
speech under foot and to hope to do without it--then will it be
conceivable that the vigorous and fertile intellect should renounce its
own double, its instrument of expression and the channel of its
speculations and emotions.
'As if,' he exclaims finely, 'language were the hired servant, the mere
mistress of reason, and not the lawful wife in her own house!'
If you need further argument (but what serves it to slay the slain?) let
me remind you that you cannot use the briefest, the humblest process of
thought, cannot so much as resolve to take your bath hot or cold, or
decide what to order for breakfast, without forecasting it to yourself in
some form of words. Words are, in fine, the only currency in which we can
exchange thought even with ourselves. Does it not follow, then, that the
more accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to our
thoughts? Does it not follow that by drilling ourselves to write
perspicuously we train our minds to clarify their thought? Does it not
follow that some practice in the deft use of words, with its
correspondent defining of thought, may well be ancillary even to the
study of Natural Science in a University?
But I have another word for our men of science. It was inevitable,
perhaps, that Latin--so long the Universal Language--should cease in time
to be that in which scientific works were written. It was impossible,
perhaps, to substitute, by consent, some equally neat and austere modern
language, such as French. But when it became an accepted custom for each
nation to use its own language in scientific treatises, it certainly was
not foreseen that men of science would soon be making discoveries at a
rate which left their skill in words outstripped; that having to invent
their terms as they went along, yet being careless and contemptuous of a
science in which they have no training, they would bombast out our
dictionaries with monstrously invented words that not only would have
made Quintilian stare and gasp, but would affront the decently literate
of any age.
After all, and though we must sigh and acquiesce in the building of
Babel, we have some right to examine the bricks. I was waiting, the other
day, in a doctor's anteroom, and picked up one of those books--it was a
work on pathology--so thoughtfully left lying in such places; to persuade
us, no doubt, to bear the ills we have rather than fly to others capable
of being illustrated. I found myself engaged in following the manoeuvres
of certain well-meaning bacilli generically described as 'Antibodies.' I
do not accuse the author (who seemed to be a learned man) of having
invented this abominable term: apparently it passed current among
physiologists and he had accepted it for honest coin. I found it, later
on, in Webster's invaluable dictionary: Etymology, 'anti' up against
'body', some noxious 'foreign body' inside your body or mine.
Now gin a body meet a body for our protection and in this gallant spirit,
need a body reward him with this hybrid label? Gratitude apart, I say
that for our own self-respect, whilst we retain any sense of intellectual
pedigree, 'antibody' is no word to throw at a friendly bacillus. Is it
consonant with the high dignity of science to make her talk like a cheap
showman advertising a 'picture-drome'? The man who eats peas with his
knife can at least claim a historical throwback to the days when forks
had but two prongs and the spoons had been removed with the soup. But
'antibody' has no such respectable derivation. It is, in fact, a
barbarism, and a mongrel at that. The man who uses it debases the
currency of learning: and I suggest to you that it is one of the many
functions of a great University to maintain the standard of that
currency, to guard the _jus et norma loquendi_, to protect us from such
hasty fellows or, rather, to suppeditate them in their haste.
Let me revert to our list of the qualities necessary to good writing, and
come to the last--_Persuasiveness_; of which you may say, indeed, that it
embraces the whole--not only the qualities of propriety, perspicuity,
accuracy, we have been considering, but many another, such as harmony,
order, sublimity, beauty of diction; all in short that--writing being an
art, not a science, and therefore so personal a thing--may be summed up
under the word _Charm_. Who, at any rate, does not seek after Persuasion?
It is the aim of all the arts and, I suppose, of all exposition of the
sciences; nay, of all useful exchange of converse in our daily life. It
is what Velasquez attempts in a picture, Euclid in a proposition, the
Prime Minister at the Treasury box, the journalist in a leading article,
our Vicar in his sermon. Persuasion, as Matthew Arnold once said, is the
only true intellectual process. The mere cult of it occupied many of the
best intellects of the ancients, such as Longinus and Quintilian, whose
writings have been preserved to us just because they were prized. Nor can
I imagine an earthly gift more covetable by you, Gentlemen, than that of
persuading your fellows to listen to your views and attend to what you
have at heart.
Suppose, sir, that you wish to become a journalist? Well, and why not? Is
it a small thing to desire the power of influencing day by day to better
citizenship an unguessed number of men, using the best thought and
applying it in the best language at your command?... Or are you, perhaps,
overawed by the printed book? On that, too, I might have a good deal to
say; but for the moment would keep the question as practical as I can.
Well, it is sometimes said that Oxford men make better journalists than
Cambridge men, and some attribute this to the discipline of their great
School of _Literae Humaniores_, which obliges them to bring up a weekly
essay to their tutor, who discusses it. Cambridge men retort that all
Oxford men are journalists, and throw, of course, some accent of scorn on
the word. But may I urge--and remember please that my credit is pledged
to _you_ now--may I urge that this is not a wholly convincing answer?
For, to begin with, Oxford men have not changed their natures since
leaving school, but are, by process upon lines not widely divergent from
your own, much the same pleasant sensible fellows you remember. And,
next, if you truly despise journalism, why then despise it, have done
with it and leave it alone. But I pray you, do not despise it if you mean
to practise it, though it be but as a step to something better. For while
the ways of art are hard at the best, they will break you if you go
unsustained by belief in what you are trying to do.
In asking you to practise the written word, I began with such
low but necessary things as propriety, perspicuity, accuracy.
But _persuasion_--the highest form of persuasion at any rate--cannot be
achieved without a sense of beauty. And now I shoot a second rapid--_I
want you to practise verse, and to practise it assiduously_.... I am
quite serious. Let me remind you that, if there ever was an ancient
state of which we of Great Britain have great right and should have
greater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual heirs, that state was
Imperial Rome. And of the Romans (whom you will allow to have been a
practical people) nothing is more certain than the value they set upon
acquiring verse. To them it was not only (as Dr Johnson said of Greek)
'like old lace--you can never have too much of it.' They cultivated it
with a straight eye to national improvement. Among them, as a scholar
reminded us the other day, you find 'an educational system deliberately
and steadily directed towards the development of poetical talent. They
were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the Greeks, that they
were born to art and literature.... The characteristic Roman triumphs
are the triumphs of a material civilisation.' Rome's rôle in the world
was 'the absorption of outlying genius.' Themselves an unimaginative
race with a language not too tractable to poetry, they made great
poetry, and they made it of patient set purpose, of hard practice. I
shall revert to this and maybe amplify reasons in another lecture. For
the moment I content myself with stating the fact that no nation ever
believed in poetry so deeply as the Romans.
Perpend this then, and do not too hastily deride my plea that you should
practise verse-writing. I know most of the objections, though I may not
remember all. _Mediocribus esse poetis_, etc.--that summarises most of
them: yet of an infliction of much bad verse from you, if I am prepared
to endure it, why should anyone else complain? I say that the youth of a
University ought to practise verse-writing; and will try to bring this
home to you by an argument convincing to me, though I have never seen it
in print.
What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so?
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning,
Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne--we may stop there. Of these all but
Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three Keats,
who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly
well-to-do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to
say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius
bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little
truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were
University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the
means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard
fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well-to-do, and
I challenge you that, if he had not been well-to-do, he would no more
have attained to writing "Saul" or "The Ring and the Book" than Ruskin
would have attained to writing "Modern Painters" if his father had not
dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income;
and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew
young, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by the
laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but
let us face them. It is--however dishonouring to us as a nation--certain
that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these
days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe me--and
I have spent a great part of the last ten years in watching some 320
Elementary Schools--we may prate of democracy, but actually a poor child
in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to
be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings
are born.
What do I argue from this? I argue that until we can bring more
intellectual freedom into our State, more 'joy in widest commonalty
spread,' upon you, a few favoured ones, rests an obligation to see that
the springs of English poetry do not fail. I put it to you that of this
glory of our birth and state _you_ are the temporary stewards. I put it
to the University, considered as a dispenser of intellectual light, that
to treat English poetry as though it had died with Tennyson and your
lecturers had but to compose the features of a corpse, is to abnegate
high hope for the sake of a barren convenience. I put it to the Colleges,
considered as disciplinary bodies, that the old way of letting Coleridge
slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect
that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who
practise it the greater will be the chance of _someone's_ reaching
perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings
forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's
and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets
are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin
gowns to drape Doctors of Letters?'
In the life of Benvenuto Cellini you will find this passage worth your
pondering.--He is telling how, while giving the last touches to his
Perseus in the great square of Florence, he and his workmen inhabited a
shed built around the statue. He goes on:--
The folk kept on attaching sonnets to the posts of the door....I believe
that, on the day when I opened it for a few hours to the public, more
than twenty were nailed up, all of them overflowing with the highest
panegyrics. Afterwards, when I once more shut it off from view,
everyone brought sonnets, with Latin and Greek verses: for the
University of Pisa was then in vacation, and all the doctors and
scholars kept vying with each other who could produce the best.
I may not live to see the doctors and scholars of this University thus
employing the Long Vacation; as perhaps we shall wait some time for
another Perseus to excite them to it. But I do ask you to consider that
the Perseus was not entirely cause nor the sonnets entirely effect; that
the age when men are eager about great work is the age when great work
gets itself done; nor need it disturb us that most of the sonnets were,
likely enough, very bad ones--in Charles Lamb's phrase, very like what
Petrarch might have written if Petrarch had been born a fool. It is the
impetus that I ask of you: the will to try.
Lastly, Gentlemen, do not set me down as one who girds at your
preoccupation, up here, with bodily games; for, indeed, I hold
'gymnastic' to be necessary as 'music' (using both words in the Greek
sense) for the training of such youths as we desire to send forth from
Cambridge. But I plead that they should be balanced, as they were in the
perfect young knight with whose words I will conclude to-day:--
Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtained the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent by that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town-folk my strength, a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man-at-arms did make.
How far they shot awry! the true cause is,
Stella looked on; and from her heavenly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.
'Untrue,' you say? Well, there is truth of emotion as well as of fact;
and who is there among you but would fain be able not only to win such a
guerdon but to lay it in such wise at your lady's feet?
That then was Philip Sidney, called the peerless one of his age; and
perhaps no Englishman ever lived more graciously or, having used life,
made a better end. But you have seen this morning's newspaper: you have
read of Captain Scott and his comrades, and in particular of the death of
Captain Oates; and you know that the breed of Sidney is not extinct.
Gentlemen, let us keep our language noble: for we still have heroes to
commemorate![1]
[Footnote 1: The date of the above lecture was Wednesday, February 12th,
1913, the date on which our morning newspapers printed the first
telegrams giving particulars of the fate of Captain Scott's heroic
conquest of the South Pole, and still more glorious, though defeated,
return. The first brief message concerning Captain Oates, ran as
follows:--
'From the records found in the tent where the bodies were discovered it
appeared that Captain Oates's feet and hands were badly frost-bitten,
and, although he struggled on heroically, his comrades knew on March 16
that his end was approaching. He had borne intense suffering for weeks
without complaint, and he did not give up hope to the very end.
"He was a brave soul. He slept through the night hoping not to wake; but
he awoke in the morning.
"It was blowing a blizzard. Oates said: 'I am just going outside, and I
may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard, and we have not seen
him since.
"We knew that Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to
dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English
gentleman."']
LECTURE III.
ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSE AND PROSE
Wednesday, February 26
You will forgive me, Gentlemen, that having in my second lecture
encouraged you to the practice of verse as well as of prose, I seize the
very next opportunity to warn you against confusing the two, which differ
on some points essentially, and always so as to demand separate rules--or
rather (since I am shy of the word 'rules') a different concept of what
the writer should aim at and what avoid. But you must, pray, understand
that what follows will be more useful to the tiro in prose than to the
tiro in verse; for while even a lecturer may help you to avoid writing
prose in the manner of Milton, only the gods--and they hardly--can cure a
versifier of being prosaic.
We started upon a promise to do without scientific definitions; and in
drawing some distinctions to-day between verse and prose I shall use only
a few rough ones; good, as I hope, so far as they go; not to be found
contrary to your scientific ones, if ever, under another teacher you
attain to them; yet for the moment used only as guides to practice, and
pretending to be no more.
Thus I go some way--though by no means all the way--towards defining
literature when I remind you that its very name (_litterae_--letters)
implies the written rather than the spoken word; that, for example,
however closely they approximate one to the other as we trace them back,
and even though we trace them back to identical beginnings, the
Writer--the Man of Letters--does to-day differ from the Orator. There was
a time, as you know, when the poet and the historian had no less than the
orator, and in the most literal sense, to 'get a hearing.' Nay, he got it
with more pains: for the orator had his senate-house or his law-court
provided, whereas Thespis jogged to fairs in a cart, and the Muse of
History, like any street acrobat, had to collect her own crowd. Herodotus
in search of a public packed his history in a portmanteau, carted it to
Olympia, found a favourable 'pitch,' as we should say, and wooed an
audience to him much as on a racecourse nowadays do those philanthropic
gentlemen who ply a dubious trade with three half-crowns and a gold
chain. It would cost us an effort to imagine the late Bishop Stubbs thus
trying his fortune with a bag full of select Charters at Queen's Club or
at Kempton Park, and exerting his lungs to retrieve a crowd that showed
some disposition to edge off towards the ring or the rails.
The historian's conditions have improved; and like any other sensible man
he has advanced his claim with them, and revised his method. He writes
nowadays with his eye on the printed book. He may or may not be a dull
fellow: being a dull fellow, he may or may not be aware of it; but at
least he knows that, if you lay him upside down on your knee, you can on
awaking pick him up, resume your absorption, and even turn back some
pages to discover just where or why your interest flagged: whereas a
Hellene who deserted Herodotus, having a bet on the Pentathlon, not only
missed what he missed but missed it for life.
The invention of print, of course, has made all, or almost all, the
difference.
I do not forget that the printed book--the written word--presupposes a
speaking voice, and must ever have at its back some sense in us of the
speaking voice. But in writing prose nowadays, while always recollecting
that prose has its origin in speech--even as it behoves us to recollect
that Homer intoned the Iliad to the harp and Sappho plucked her passion
from the lyre--we have to take things as they are. Except Burns, Heine,
Béranger (with Moore, if you will), and you will find it hard to compile
in all the lyrical poetry of the last 150 years a list of half a dozen
first-class or even second-class bards who wrote primarily to be sung. It
may help you to estimate how far lyrical verse has travelled from its
origins if you will but remind yourselves that a _sonnet_ and a _sonata_
were once the same thing, and that a _ballad_ meant a song accompanied by
dancing--the word _ballata_ having been specialised down, on the one line
to the _ballet_, in which Mademoiselle Genée or the Russian performers
will dance for our delight, using no words at all; on the other to "Sir
Patrick Spens" or "Clerk Saunders," 'ballads' to which no one in his
senses would dream of pointing a toe.
Thus with Verse the written (or printed) word has pretty thoroughly
ousted the speaking voice and its auxiliaries--the pipe, the lute, the
tabor, the chorus with its dance movements and swaying of the body; and
in a quieter way much the same thing is happening to prose. In the Drama,
to be sure, we still write (or we should) for the actors, reckon upon
their intonations, their gestures, lay account with the tears in the
heroine's eyes and her visible beauty: though even in the Drama to-day
you may detect a tendency to substitute dialectic for action and
paragraphs for the [Greek: Stichomuthia], the sharp outcries of passion
in its give-and-take. Again we still--some of us--deliver sermons from
pulpits and orations in Parliament or upon public platforms. Yet I am
told that the vogue of the sermon is passing; and (by journalists) that
the leading article has largely superseded it. On that point I can offer
you no personal evidence; but of civil oratory I am very sure that the
whole pitch has been sensibly lowered since the day of Chatham, Burke,
Sheridan; since the day of Brougham and Canning; nay, ever since the day
of Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli. Burke, as everyone knows, once brought
down a Brummagem dagger and cast it on the floor of the House. Lord
Chancellor Brougham in a peroration once knelt to the assembled peers,
'_Here the noble lord inclined his knee to the Woolsack_' is, if I
remember, the stage direction in Hansard. Gentlemen, though in the course
of destiny one or another of you may be called upon to speak daggers to
the Treasury Bench, I feel sure you will use none; while, as for Lord
Brougham's genuflexions, we may agree that to emulate them would cost
Lord Haldane an effort. These and even far less flagrant or flamboyant
tricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of fashion. You could hardly
revive them to-day and keep that propriety to which I exhorted you a
fortnight ago. They would be out of tune; they would grate upon the
nerves; they would offend against the whole style of modern oratory,
which steadily tends to lower its key, to use the note of quiet
business-like exposition, to adopt more and more the style of written
prose.