the last three thousand years, we find it to run thus:--At first sight
there is so much fluctuation, agitation, ebbing and flowing, that we
may despair to discern any law in its movements, taking the earth as
its bed and mankind as its contents; but on looking more closely and
attentively we shall discern, in spite of the heterogeneous materials
and the various histories and fortunes which are found in the race of
man during the long period I have mentioned, a certain formation amid
the chaos--one and one only,--and extending, though not over the whole
earth, yet through a very considerable portion of it. Man is a social
being and can hardly exist without society, and in matter of fact
societies have ever existed all over the habitable earth. The greater
part of these associations have been political or religious, and have
been comparatively limited in extent and temporary. They have been
formed and dissolved by the force of accidents, or by inevitable
circumstances; and when we have enumerated them one by one we have made
of them all that can be made. But there is one remarkable association
which attracts the attention of the philosopher, not political nor
religious--or at least only partially and not essentially such--which
began in the earliest times and grew with each succeeding age till it
reached its complete development, and then continued on, vigorous and
unwearied, and still remains as definite and as firm as ever it was.
Its bond is a _common civilisation_: and though there are other
civilisations in the world, as there are other societies, yet _this_
civilisation, together with the society which is its creation and its
home, is so distinctive and luminous in its character, so imperial in
its extent, so imposing in its duration, and so utterly without rival
on the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume to
itself the title of 'Human Society,' and _its_ civilisation the
abstract term 'Civilisation.'
There are indeed great outlying portions of mankind which are not,
perhaps never have been, included in this Human Society; still they are
outlying portions and nothing else, fragmentary, unsociable, solitary
and unmeaning, protesting and revolting against the grand central
formation of which I am speaking, but not uniting with each other into
a second whole. I am not denying, of course, the civilisation of the
Chinese, for instance, though it be not our civilisation; but it is a
huge, stationary, unattractive, morose civilisation. Nor do I deny a
civilisation to the Hindoos, nor to the ancient Mexicans, nor to the
Saracens, nor (in a certain sense) to the Turks; but each of these
races has its own civilisation, as separate from one another as from
ours.
I do not see how they can be all brought under one idea....
Gentlemen, let me here observe that I am not entering upon the question
of races, or upon their history. I have nothing to do with ethnology; I
take things as I find them on the surface of history and am but
classifying phenomena. Looking, then, at the countries which surround
the Mediterranean Sea as a whole, I see them to be from time
immemorial, the seat of an association of intellect and mind such as to
deserve to be called the Intellect and the Mind of the Human Kind.
Starting as it does, and advancing from certain centres, till their
respective influences intersect and conflict, and then at length
intermingle and combine, a common Thought has been generated, and a
common Civilisation defined and established. Egypt is one such starting
point, Syria, another, Greece a third, Italy a fourth and North Africa
a fifth--afterwards France and Spain. As time goes on, and as
colonisation and conquest work their changes, we see a great
association of nations formed, of which the Roman Empire is the
maturity and the most intelligible expression: an association, however,
not political but mental, based on the same intellectual ideas and
advancing by common intellectual methods.... In its earliest age it
included far more of the Eastern world than it has since; in these
later times it has taken into its compass a new hemisphere; in the
Middle Ages it lost Africa, Egypt and Syria, and extended itself to
Germany, Scandinavia and the British Isles. At one time its territory
was flooded by strange and barbarous races, but the existing
civilisation was vigorous enough to vivify what threatened to stifle
it, and to assimilate to the old social forms what came to expel them:
and thus the civilisation of modern times remains what it was of old;
not Chinese, or Hindoo, or Mexican, or Saracen ... but the lineal
descendant, or rather the continuation--_mutatis mutandis_--of the
civilisation which began in Palestine and Greece.
To omit, then, all minor debts such as what of arithmetic, what of
astronomy, what of geography, we owe to the Saracen, from Palestine we
derive the faith of Europe shared (in the language of the Bidding Prayer)
by all Christian people dispersed throughout the world; as to Greece we
owe the rudiments of our Western art, philosophy, letters; and not only
the rudiments but the continuing inspiration, so that--though entirely
superseded in worship, as even in the Athens of Pericles they were
worshipped only by an easy, urbane, more than half humorous
tolerance--Apollo and the Muses, Zeus and the great ones of Olympus,
Hermes and Hephaestus, Athene in her armour, with her vanquisher the
foam-born irresistible Aphrodite, these remain the authentic gods of our
literature, beside whom the gods of northern Europe--Odin, Thor,
Freya--are strangers, unhomely, uncanny as the shadows of unfamiliar
furniture on the walls of an inn. Sprung though great numbers of us are
from the loins of Northmen, it is in these gracious deities of the South
that we find the familiar and the real, as from the heroes of the
sister-island, Cucullain and Concobar, we turn to Hercules, to Perseus,
to Bellerophon, even to actual men of history, saying 'Give us Leonidas,
give us Horatius, give us Regulus. These are the mighty ones we
understand, and from whom, in a direct line of tradition, we understand
Harry of Agincourt, Philip Sidney and our Nelson.'
Now since, of the Mediterranean peoples, the Hebrews discovered the
Unseen God whom the body of Western civilisation has learnt to worship;
since the Greeks invented art, philosophy, letters; since Rome found and
developed the idea of imperial government, of imperial colonies as
superseding merely fissiparous ones, of settling where she conquered
(_ubi Romanus vicit ibi habitat_) and so extending with Government that
system of law which Europe still obeys; we cannot be surprised that
Israel, Greece, Rome--each in turn--set store on a pure ancestry. Though
Christ be the veritable Son of God, his ancestry must be traced back
through his supposed father Joseph to the stem of Jesse, and so to
Abraham, father of the race. Again, as jealously as the Evangelist
claimed Jesus for a Hebrew of the Hebrews, so, if you will turn to the
"Menexenus" of Plato in the Oration of Aspasia over the dead who perished
in battle, you hear her claim that 'No Pelopes nor Cadmians, nor
Egyptians, nor Dauni, nor the rest of the crowd of born foreigners dwell
with us; but ours is the land of pure Hellenes, free from admixture.'
These proud Athenians, as you know, wore brooches in the shape of golden
grasshoppers, to signify that they were [Greek: autochthones], children
of Attica, sprung direct from her soil. And so, again, the true Roman,
while enlarging Rome's citizenship over Asia, Africa, Gaul, to our remote
Britain, insisted, even in days of the later Empire, on his pure descent
from Æneas and Romulus--
Unde Remnes et Quirites proque prole posterum
Romuli matrem crearet et nepotem Cæsarem.
With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Cæsar-last, best of that blood, of that threw.
Here is a boast that we English must be content to forgo. We may wear a
rose on St George's day, if we are clever enough to grow one. The Welsh,
I dare say, have less difficulty with the leek. But April the 23rd is not
a time of roses that we can pluck them as we pass, nor can we claim St
George as a compatriot--_Cappadocius nostras_. We have, to be sure, a few
legendary heroes, of whom King Arthur and Robin Hood are (I suppose) the
greatest; but, save in some Celtic corners of the land, we have few
fairies, and these no great matter; while, as for tutelary gods, our
springs, our wells, our groves, cliffs, mountain-sides, either never
possessed them or possess them no longer. Not of our landscape did it
happen that
The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent.
--for the sufficient reason that no tutelary gods of importance were ever
here to be dispersed.
Let me press this home upon you by an illustration which I choose with
the double purpose of enforcing my argument and sending you to make
acquaintance (if you have not already made it) with one of the loveliest
poems written in our time.
In one of Pliny's letters you will find a very pleasant description of
the source of the Clitumnus, a small Umbrian river which, springing from
a rock in a grove of cypresses, descends into the Tinia, a tributary of
the Tiber. 'Have you ever,' writes Pliny to his friend Romanus--
Have you ever seen the source of the Clitumnus? I suppose not, as I
never heard you mention it. Let me advise you to go there at once. I
have just visited it and am sorry that I put off my visit so long. At
the foot of a little hill, covered with old and shady cypress trees, a
spring gushes and bursts into a number of streamlets of various size.
Breaking, so to speak, forth from its imprisonment, it expands into a
broad basin, so clear and transparent that you may count the pebbles
and little pieces of money which are thrown into it. From this point
the force and weight of the water, rather than the slope of the ground,
hurry it onward. What was a mere spring becomes a noble river, broad
enough to allow vessels to pass each other as they sail with or against
the stream. The current is so strong, though the ground is level, that
barges of beam, as they go down, require no assistance of oars; while
to go up is as much as can be done with oars and long poles.... The banks
are clothed with abundant ash and poplar, so distinctly reflected in
the transparent waters that they seem to be growing at the bottom of
the river and can be counted with ease. The water is as cold as snow
and as pure in colour. Hard by the spring stands an ancient and
venerable temple with a statue of the river-god Clitumnus, clothed in
the customary robe of state. The Oracles here delivered attest the
presence of the deity. Close in the precinct stand several little
chapels dedicated to particular gods, each of whom owns his distinctive
name and special worship, and is the tutelary deity of a runlet. For
beside the principal spring, which is, as it were, the parent of all
the rest, there are several smaller ones which have their distinct
sources but unite their waters with the Clitumnus, over which a bridge
is thrown, separating the sacred part of the river from that which is
open to general use. Above the bridge you may only go in a boat; below
it, you may swim. The people of the town of Hispallum, to whom Augustus
gave this place, furnish baths and lodgings at the public expense.
There are several small dwelling-houses on the banks, in specially
picturesque situations, and they stand quite close to the waterside. In
short, everything in the neighbourhood will give you pleasure. You may
also amuse yourself with numberless inscriptions on the pillars and
walls, celebrating the praises of the stream and of its tutelary god.
Many of these you will admire, and some will make you laugh. But no!
You are too well cultivated to laugh at such things. Farewell.
Clitumnus still gushes from its rocks among the cypresses, as in Pliny's
day. The god has gone from his temple, on the frieze of which you may
read this later inscription--'_Deus Angelorum, qui fecit Resurrectionem._'
After many centuries and almost in our day, by the brain of Cavour and
the sword of Garibaldi, he has made a resurrection for Italy. As part of
that resurrection (for no nation can live and be great without its poet)
was born a true poet, Carducci. He visited the bountiful, everlasting
source, and of what did he sing? Possess yourselves, as for a shilling
you may, of his Ode "Alle fonte del Clitumno," and read: for few nobler
poems have adorned our time. He sang of the weeping willow, the ilex,
ivy, cypress and the presence of the god still immanent among them. He
sang of Umbria, of the ensigns of Rome, of Hannibal swooping down over
the Alps; he sang of the nuptials of Janus and Comesena, progenitors of
the Italian people; of nymphs, naiads, and the moonlight dances of
Oreads; of flocks descending to the river at dusk, of the homestead, the
bare-footed mother, the clinging child, the father, clad in goat-skins,
guiding the ox-wagon; and he ends on the very note of Virgil's famous
apostrophe
_Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra..._
with an invocation of Italy--Italy, mother of bullocks for agriculture,
of wild colts for battle, mother of corn and of the vine, Roman mother of
enduring laws and mediaeval mother of illustrious arts. The mountains,
woods and waters of green Umbria applaud the song, and across their
applause is heard the whistle of the railway train bearing promise of new
industries and a new national life.
E tu, pia madre di giovenchi invitti
a franger glebe e rintegrar maggesi
e d' annitrenti in guerra aspri polledri,
Italia madre,
madre di biade e viti e leggi eterne
ed incliti arti a raddolcir la vita
salve! a te i canti de l' antica lode
io rinovello.
Plaudono i monti al carme e i boschi e l' acque
de l' Umbria verde: in faccia a noi fumando
ed anelando nuove industrie in corsa
fischia il vapore.
And thou, O pious mother of unvanquished
Bullocks to break glebe, to restore the fallow,
And of fierce colts for neighing in the battle:
Italy, mother,
Mother of corn and vines and of eternal
Laws and illustrious arts the life to sweeten,
Hail, hail, all hail! The song of ancient praises
Renew I to thee!
The mountains, woods and waters of green Umbria
Applaud the song: and here before us fuming
And longing for new industries, a-racing
Whistles the white steam.
(I quote from a translation by Mr E.J. Watson, recently published by
Messrs J.W. Arrowsmith, of Bristol.)
I put it to you, Gentlemen, that, worthy as are the glories of England to
be sung, this note of Carducci's we cannot decently or honestly strike.
Great lives have been bled away into Tweed and Avon: great spirits have
been oared down the Thames to Traitor's Gate and the Tower. Deeds done on
the Cam have found their way into history. But I once traced the Avon to
its source under Naseby battlefield, and found it issuing from the
fragments of a stucco swan. No god mounts guard over the head-water of
the Thames; and the only Englishman who boldly claims a divine descent is
(I understand) an impostor who runs an Agapemone. In short we are a mixed
race, and our literature is derivative. Let us confine our pride to those
virtues, not few, which are honestly ours. A Roman noble, even to-day,
has some excuse for reckoning a god in his ancestry, or at least a wolf
among its wet-nurses: but of us English even those who came over with
William the Norman have the son of a tanner's daughter for escort. I very
well remember that, the other day, writers who vindicated our hereditary
House of Lords against a certain Parliament Act commonly did so on the
ground that since the Reform Bill of 1832, by inclusion of all that was
eminent in politics, war and commerce, the Peerage had been so changed as
to know itself no longer for the same thing. That is our practical way.
At all events, the men who made our literature had never a doubt, as they
were careless to dissimulate, that they were conquering our tongue to
bring it into the great European comity, the civilisation of Greece and
Rome. An Elizabethan writer, for example, would begin almost as with a
formula by begging to be forgiven that he has sought to render the divine
accent of Plato, the sugared music of Ovid, into our uncouth and
barbarous tongue. There may have been some mock-modesty in this, but it
rested on a base of belief. Much of the glory of English Literature was
achieved by men who, with the splendour of the Renaissance in their eyes,
supposed themselves to be working all the while upon pale and borrowed
shadows.
Let us pass the enthusiasms of days when 'bliss was it in that dawn to be
alive' and come down to Alexander Pope and the Age of Reason. Pope at one
time proposed to write a History of English Poetry, and the draft scheme
of that History has been preserved. How does it begin? Why thus:--
ERA I.
1. School of Provence Chaucer's Visions. _Romaunt of the Rose._
_Piers Plowman._ Tales from Boccace. Gower.
2. School of Chaucer Lydgate.
T. Occleve.
Walt. de Mapes (a bad error, that!).
Skelton.
3. School of Petrarch E. of Surrey.
Sir Thomas Wyatt.
Sir Philip Sidney.
G. Gascoyn.
4. School of Dante Lord Buckhurst's _Induction. Gorboduc._
Original of Good Tragedy. Seneca his model.
--and so on. The scheme after Pope's death came into the hands of Gray,
who for a time was fired with the notion of writing the History in
collaboration with his friend Mason. Knowing Gray's congenital
self-distrust, you will not be surprised that in the end he declined the
task and handed it over to Warton. But, says Mant in his Life of Warton,
'their design'--that is, Gray's design with Mason--'was to introduce
specimens of the Proveçal poetry, and of the Scaldic, British and Saxon,
as preliminary to what first deserved to be called English poetry, about
the time of Chaucer, from whence their history properly so called was to
commence.' A letter of Gray's on the whole subject, addressed to Warton,
is extant, and you may read it in Dr Courthope's "History of English
Poetry."
Few in this room are old enough to remember the shock of awed surmise
which fell upon young minds presented, in the late 'seventies or early
'eighties of the last century, with Freeman's "Norman Conquest" or
Green's "Short History of the English People"; in which as through paring
clouds of darkness, we beheld our ancestry, literary as well as
political, radiantly legitimised; though not, to be sure, in the England
that we knew--but far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick! 'Its pleasant
pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships
looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of
heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here
and there with meadows which crept down to the marshes and to the sea.'
But what of that? There--surely there, in Sleswick--had been discovered
for us our august mother's marriage lines; and if the most of that bright
assurance came out of an old political skit, the "Germania" of Tacitus,
who recked at the time? For along followed Mr Stopford Brooke with an
admirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct the
meanest of us in our common father's actual name--Beowulf.
_Beowulf_ is an old English Epic.... There is not one word about our
England in the poem.... The whole poem, pagan as it is, is English
to its very root. It is sacred to us; our Genesis, the book of
our origins.
Now I am not only incompetent to discuss with you the more recondite
beauties of "Beowulf" but providentially forbidden the attempt by the
conditions laid down for this Chair. I gather--and my own perusal of the
poem and of much writing about it confirms the belief--that it has been
largely over-praised by some critics, who have thus naturally provoked
others to underrate it. Such things happen. I note, but without
subscribing to it, the opinion of Vigfússon and York Powell, the learned
editors of the "Corpus Poeticum Boreale," that in the "Beowulf" we have
'an epic completely metamorphosed in form, blown out with long-winded
empty repetitions and comments by a book poet, so that one must be
careful not to take it as a type of the old poetry,' and I seem to hear
as from the grave the very voice of my old friend the younger editor in
that unfaltering pronouncement. But on the whole I rather incline to
accept the cautious surmise of Professor W. P. Ker that 'a reasonable
view of the merit of Beowulf is not impossible, though rash enthusiasm
may have made too much of it; while a correct and sober taste may have
too contemptuously refused to attend to Grendel and the Firedrake,' and
to leave it at that. I speak very cautiously because the manner of the
late Professor Freeman, in especial, had a knack of provoking in gentle
breasts a resentment which the mind in its frailty too easily converted
to a prejudice against his matter: while to men trained to admire
Thucydides and Tacitus and acquainted with Lucian's 'Way to Write
History' ([Greek: Pos dei istorian suggraphein]) his loud insistence that
the art was not an art but a science, and moreover recently invented by
Bishop Stubbs, was a perpetual irritant.
But to return to "Beowulf"--You have just heard the opinions of scholars
whose names you must respect. I, who construe Anglo-Saxon with
difficulty, must admit the poem to contain many fine, even noble,
passages. Take for example Hrothgar's lament for Æschere:--
Hróthgar mathelode, helm Scyldinga:
'Ne frin thú æfter sælum; sorh is geniwod
Denigea leódum; deád is Æschere,
Yrmenláfes yldra bróthor,
Mín rún-wita, ond min ræd-bora;
Eaxl-gestealla, thonne we on orlege
Hafelan wéredon, thonne hniton fethan,
Eoferas cnysedan: swylc scolde eorl wesan
Ætheling ær-gód, swylc Æschere wæs.'
(Hrothgar spake, helm of the Scyldings: 'Ask not after good tidings.
Sorrow is renewed among the Dane-folk. Dead is Æschere, Yrmenlaf's
elder brother, who read me rune and bore me rede; comrade at shoulder
when we fended our heads in war and the boar-helms rang. Even so
should we each be an atheling passing good, as Æschere was.')
This is simple, manly, dignified. It avoids the besetting sin of the
Anglo-Saxon gleeman--the pretentious trick of calling things 'out of
their right names' for the sake of literary effect (as if e.g. the sea
could be improved by being phrased into 'the seals' domain'). Its
Anglo-Saxon _staccato_, so tiresome in sustained narrative, here happens
to suit the broken utterance of mourning. In short, it exhibits the
Anglo-Saxon Muse at her best, not at her customary. But set beside it a
passage in which Homer tells of a fallen warrior--at haphazard, as it
were, a single corpse chosen from the press of battle--
[Greek: polla de chermadia megal aspidas estuphelixam
marnamenon amph auton o d en strophaliggi konies
keito megas megalosti, lelasmenos ipposunaom.]
Can you--can anyone--compare the two passages and miss to see that they
belong to two different kingdoms of poetry? I lay no stress here on
'architectonics.' I waive that the "Iliad" is a well-knit epic and the
story of "Beowulf" a shapeless monstrosity. I ask you but to note the
difference of note, of accent, of mere music. And I have quoted you but a
passage of the habitual Homer. To assure yourselves that he can rise even
from this habitual height to express the extreme of majesty and of human
anguish in poetry which betrays no false note, no strain upon the store
of emotion man may own with self-respect and exhibit without derogation
of dignity, turn to the last book of the "Iliad" and read of Priam
raising to his lips the hand that has murdered his son. I say confidently
that no one unable to distinguish this, as poetry, from the very best of
"Beowulf" is fit to engage upon business as a literary critic.
In "Beowulf" then, as an imported poem, let us allow much barbarian
merit. It came of dubious ancestry, and it had no progeny. The pretence
that our glorious literature derives its lineage from "Beowulf" is in
vulgar phrase 'a put up job'; a falsehood grafted upon our text-books by
Teutonic and Teutonising professors who can bring less evidence for it
than will cover a threepenny-piece. Its run for something like that
money, in small educational manuals, has been in its way a triumph of
pedagogic _réclame_.