similarity between this song of Alison and the old Anglo-Saxon verse--_a
difference of nature_--I must despair of his literary sense.
What has happened? Well, in Normandy, too, and in another tongue, men are
singing much the same thing in the same way:
A la fontenelle
Qui sort seur l'araine,
Trouvai pastorella
Qui n'iert pas vilaine...
Merci, merci, douce Marote,
N'oçiez pas vostre ami doux,
and this Norman and the Englishman were singing to a new tune, which was
yet an old tune re-set to Europe by the Provence, the Roman Province; by
the troubadours--Pons de Capdeuil, Bernard de Ventadour, Bertrand de
Born, Pierre Vidal, and the rest, with William of Poitou, William of
Poitiers. Read and compare; you will perceive that the note then set
persists and has never perished. Take Giraud de Borneil--
Bel companhos, si dormetz o velhatz
Non dortmatz plus, qu'el jorn es apropchatz--
and set it beside a lyric of our day, written without a thought of Giraud
de Borneil--
Heigh! Brother mine, art a-waking or a-sleeping:
Mind'st thou the merry moon a many summers fled?
Mind'st thou the green and the dancing and the leaping?
Mind'st thou the haycocks and the moon above them creeping?...
Or take Bernard de Ventadour's--
Quand erba vertz, e fuelha par
E'l flor brotonon per verjan,
E'l rossinhols autet e clar
Leva sa votz e mov son chan,
Joy ai de luy, e joy ai de la flor,
Joy ai de me, e de me dons maior.
Why, it runs straight off into English verse--
When grass is green and leaves appear
With flowers in bud the meads among,
And nightingale aloft and clear
Lifts up his voice and pricks his song,
Joy, joy have I in song and flower,
Joy in myself, and in my lady more.
And that may be doggerel; yet what is it but
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green cornfield did pass
In the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time--
or
When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy over the dale,
Why then comes in the sweet o' the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.
Nay, flatter the Anglo-Saxon tradition by picking its very best--and I
suppose it hard to find better than the much-admired opening of Piers
Plowman, in which that tradition shot up like the flame of a dying
candle:
Bote in a Mayes Morwnynge--on Malverne hulles
Me bi-fel a ferly--a Feyrie me thouhte;
I was weori of wandringe--and wente me to reste
Under a brod banke--bi a Bourne syde,
And as I lay and leonede--and lokede on the watres,
I slumberde in a slepynge--hit sownede so murie.
This is good, solid stuff, no doubt: but tame, inert, if not actually
lifeless. As M. Jusserand says of Anglo-Saxon poetry in general, it is
like the river Saône--one doubts which way it flows. How tame in
comparison with this, for example!--
In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song:
To se the dere draw to the dale
And leve the hilles hee,
And shadow hem in the leves grene
Under the grene-wode tre.
Hit befel on Whitsontide,
Erly in a May mornyng,
The Son up feyre can shyne,
And the briddis mery can syng.
'This is a mery mornyng,' said litell John,
'Be Hym that dyed on tre;
A more mery man than I am one
Lyves not in Cristianté.
'Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster,'
Litull John can sey,
'And thynk hit is a full fayre tyme
In a mornyng of May.'
There is no doubting which way _that_ flows! And this vivacity, this new
beat of the heart of poetry, is common to Chaucer and the humblest
ballad-maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics printed yesterday, and
it came straight to us out of Provence, the Roman Province. It was the
Provençal Troubadour who, like the Prince in the fairy tale, broke
through the hedge of briers and kissed Beauty awake again.
You will urge that he wakened Poetry not in England alone but all over
Europe, in Dante before our Chaucer, in the trouvères and minnesingers as
well as in our ballad-writers. To that I might easily retort, 'So much
the better for Europe, and the more of it the merrier, to win their way
into the great comity.' But here I put in my second assertion, that we
English have had above all nations lying wide of the Mediterranean, the
instinct to refresh and renew ourselves at Mediterranean wells; that
again and again our writers--our poets especially--have sought them as
the hart panteth after the water-brooks. If you accept this assertion,
and if you believe as well that our literature, surpassing Rome's, may
vie with that of Athens--if you believe that a literature which includes
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley--the Authorised
Version of Holy Writ, with Browne, Bunyan, Swift, Addison, Johnson,
Arnold, Newman--has entered the circle to take its seat with the first--
why then, heartily believing this with you, I leave you to find some
better explanation than mine if you can.
But what I content myself with asserting here you can scarcely deny.
Chaucer's initial and enormous debt to Dante and Boccaccio stands in as
little dispute as Dunbar's to Chaucer. On that favourite poet of mine,
Sir Thomas Wyat, I descanted in a former lecture. He is one of your
glories here, having entered St. John's College at the age of twelve
(which must have been precocious even for those days.) Anthony Wood
asserts that after finishing his course here, he proceeded to Cardinal
Wolsey's new College at Oxford; but, as Christchurch was not founded
until 1524, and Wyat, still precocious, had married a wife two years
before that, the statement (to quote Dr Courthope) 'seems no better
founded than many others advanced by that patriotic but not very
scrupulous author.' It is more to the point that he went travelling, and
brought home from France, Italy, afterwards Spain--always from Latin
altars--the flame of lyrical poetry to England; the flame of the
Petrarchists, caught from the Troubadours, clarified (so to speak) by the
salt of humane letters. On what our Elizabethan literature owes to the
Classical revival hundreds of volumes have been written and hundreds more
will be written; I will but remind you of what Spencer talked about with
Gabriel Harvey, what Daniel disputed with Campion; that Marlowe tried to
re-incarnate Machiavelli, that Jonson was a sworn Latinist and the 'tribe
of Ben' a classical tribe; while, as for Shakespeare, go and reckon the
proportion of Italian and Roman names in his _dramatis personæ_. Of
Donne's debt to France, Italy, Rome, Greece, you may read much in
Professor Grierson's great edition, and I daresay Professor Grierson
would be the first to allow that all has not yet been computed. You know
how Milton prepared himself to be a poet. Have you realised that, in
those somewhat strangely constructed sonnets of his, Milton was
deliberately modelling upon the "Horatian Ode," as his confrère, Andrew
Marvell, was avowedly attempting the like in his famous Horation Ode on
Cromwell's Return from Ireland; so that if Cromwell had returned (like Mr
Quilp), walked in and caught his pair of Latin Secretaries scribbling
verse, one at either end of the office table, both might colourably have
pleaded that they were, after all, writing Latin. Waller's task in poetry
was to labour true classical polish where Cowley laboured sham-classical
form. Put together Dryden's various Prefaces and you will find them one
solid monument to his classical faith. Of Pope, Gray, Collins, you will
not ask me to speak. What is salt in Cowper you can taste only when you
have detected that by a stroke of madness he missed, or barely missed,
being our true English Horace, that almost more nearly than the rest he
hit what the rest had been seeking. Then, of the 'romantic revival'--
enemy of false classicism, not of classicism--bethink you what, in his
few great years, Wordsworth owed directly to France of the early
Revolution; what Keats drew forth out of Lemprière: and again bethink you
how Tennyson wrought upon Theocritus, Virgil, Catullus; upon what Arnold
constantly shaped his verse; how Browning returned ever upon Italy to
inspire his best and correct his worse.
Of Anglo-Saxon prose I know little indeed, but enough of the world to
feel reasonably sure that if it contained any single masterpiece--or
anything that could be paraded as a masterpiece--we should have heard
enough about it long before now. It was invented by King Alfred for
excellent political reasons; but, like other ready-made political
inventions in this country, it refused to thrive. I think it can be
demonstrated, that the true line of intellectual descent in prose lies
through Bede (who wrote in Latin, the 'universal language'), and not
through the Blickling Homilies, or, Ælfric, or the Saxon Chronicle. And I
am sure that Freeman is perversely wrong when he laments as a 'great
mistake' that the first Christian missionaries from Rome did not teach
their converts to pray and give praise in the vernacular. The vernacular
being what it was, these men did better to teach the religion of the
civilised world--_orbis terrarum_--in the language of the civilised
world. I am not thinking of its efficiency for spreading the faith; but
neither is Freeman; and, for that, we must allow these old missionaries
to have known their own business. I am thinking only of how this 'great
mistake' affected our literature; and if you will read Professor
Saintsbury's "History of English Prose Rhythm" (pioneer work, which yet
wonderfully succeeds in illustrating what our prose-writers from time to
time were trying to do); if you will study the Psalms in the Authorised
Version; if you will consider what Milton, Clarendon, Sir Thomas Browne,
were aiming at; what Addison, Gibbon, Johnson; what Landor, Thackeray,
Newman, Arnold, Pater; I doubt not your rising from the perusal convinced
that our nation, in this storehouse of Latin to refresh and replenish its
most sacred thoughts, has enjoyed a continuous blessing: that the Latin
of the Vulgate and the Offices has been a background giving depth and, as
the painters say, 'value' to nine-tenths of our serious writing.
And now, since this and the previous lecture run something counter to a
great deal of that teaching in English Literature which nowadays passes
most acceptably, let me avoid offence, so far as may be, by defining one
or two things I am _not_ trying to do.
I am not persuading you to despise your linguistic descent. English is
English--our language; and all its history to be venerated by us.
I am not persuading you to despise linguistic study. _All_ learning is
venerable.
I am not persuading you to behave like Ascham, and turn English prose
into pedantic Latin; nor would I have you doubt that in the set quarrel
between Campion, who wished to divert English verse into strict classical
channels, and Daniel, who vindicated our free English way (derived from
Latin through the Provençal), Daniel was on the whole, right, Campion on
the whole, wrong: though I believe that both ways yet lie open, and we
may learn, if we study them intelligently, a hundred things from the old
classical metres.
I do not ask you to forget what there is of the Northmen in your blood.
If I desired this, I could not worship William Morris as I do, among the
later poets.
I do not ask you to doubt that the barbarian invaders from the north,
with their myths and legends, brought new and most necessary blood of
imagination into the literary material--for the time almost exhausted--of
Greece and Rome.
Nevertheless, I do contend that when Britain (or, if you prefer it,
Sleswick)
When Sleswick first at Heaven's command
Arose from out the azure main,
she differed from Aphrodite, that other foam-born, in sundry important
features of ear, of lip, of eye.
Lastly, if vehement assertions on the one side have driven me into too
vehement dissent on the other, I crave pardon; not for the dissent but
for the vehemence, as sinning against the very principle I would hold up
to your admiration--the old Greek principle of avoiding excess.
But I _do_ commend the patient study of Greek and Latin authors--in the
original or in translation--to all of you who would write English; and
for three reasons.
(1) In the first place they will correct your insularity of mind; or,
rather, will teach you to forget it. The Anglo-Saxon, it has been noted,
ever left an empty space around his houses; and that, no doubt, is good
for a house. It is not so good for the mind.
(2) Secondly, we have a tribal habit, confirmed by Protestant meditation
upon a Hebraic religion, of confining our literary enjoyment to the
written word and frowning down the drama, the song, the dance. A fairly
attentive study of modern lyrical verse has persuaded me that this
exclusiveness may be carried too far, and threatens to be deadening. 'I
will sing and give praise,' says the Scripture, 'with the best member
that I have'--meaning the tongue. But the old Greek was an 'all-round
man' as we say. He sought to praise and give thanks with all his members,
and to tune each to perfection. I think his way worth your considering.
(3) Lastly, and chiefly, I commend these classical authors to you because
they, in the European civilisation which we all inherit, conserve the
norm of literature; the steady grip on the essential; the clean outline
at which in verse or in prose--in epic, drama, history, or philosophical
treatise--a writer should aim.
So sure am I of this, and of its importance to those who think of
writing, that were this University to limit me to three texts on which to
preach English Literature to you, I should choose the Bible in our
Authorised Version, Shakespeare, and Homer (though it were but in a prose
translation). Two of these lie outside my marked province. Only one of
them finds a place in your English school. But Homer, who comes neither
within my map, nor within the ambit of the Tripos, would--because he most
evidently holds the norm, the essence, the secret of all--rank first of
the three for my purpose.
[Footnote 1: From "A History of Oxfordshire," by Mr J. Meade Falkner,
author of Murray's excellent Handbook of Oxfordshire.]
LECTURE X.
ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES (I)
Wednesday, November 19
All lectures are too long. Towards the close of my last, Gentlemen, I let
fall a sentence which, heard by you in a moment of exhausted or languid
interest, has since, like enough, escaped your memory even if it earned
passing attention. So let me repeat it, for a fresh start.
Having quoted to you the words of our Holy Writ, 'I will sing and give
praise with the best member that I have,' I added 'But the old Greek was
an "all-round" man; he sought to praise and give thanks with all his
members, and to tune each to perfection.' Now a great many instructive
lectures might be written on that text: nevertheless you may think it a
strange one, and obscure, for the discourse on 'English Literature in our
Universities' which, according to promise, I must now attempt.
The term 'an all-round man' may easily mislead you unless you take it
with the rest of the sentence and particularly with the words 'praise and
give thanks.' Praise whom? Give thanks to whom? To _whom_ did our Greek
train all his members to render adoration?
Why, to the gods--his gods: to Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite; and from them
down to the lesser guardian deities of the hearth, the field, the
farmstead. We modern men suffer a double temptation to misunderstand, by
belittling, the reverence in which Hellas and Rome held their gods. To
start with, our religion has superseded theirs. We approach the Olympians
with no bent towards venerating them; with minds easy, detached, to which
a great deal of their theology--the amativeness of Zeus for example--must
needs seem broadly comic, and a great deal of it not only comic but
childish. We are encouraged in this, moreover, when we read such writers
as Aristophanes and Lucian, and observe how they poked fun at the gods.
We assume--so modern he seems--Aristophanes' attitude towards his
immortals to be ours; that when, for example, Prometheus walks on to the
stage under an umbrella, to hide himself from the gaze of all-seeing
Zeus, the Athenian audience laughed just as we laugh who have read
Voltaire. Believe me, they laughed quite differently; believe me,
Aristophanes and Voltaire had remarkably different minds and worked on
utterly different backgrounds. Believe me, you will understand
Aristophanes only less than you will understand Æschylus himself if you
confuse Aristophanes' mockery of Olympus with modern mockery. But, if you
will not take my word for it, let me quote what Professor Gilbert Murray
said, the other day, speaking before the English Association on Greek
poetry, how constantly connected it is with religion:
'All thoughts, all passions, all desires' ... In our Art it is true, no
doubt, that they are 'the ministers of love'; in Greek they are as a
whole the ministers of religion, and this is what in a curious degree
makes Greek poetry matter, makes it relevant. There is a sense in each
song of a relation to the whole of things, and it was apt to be
expressed with the whole body, or, one may say, the whole being.[1]
To a Greek, in short, his gods mattered enormously; and to a Roman. To a
Roman they continued to matter enormously, down to the end. Do you
remember that tessellated pavement with its emblems and images of the
younger gods? and how I told you that a Roman general on foreign service
would carry the little cubes in panniers on mule-back, to be laid down
for his feet at the next camping place? Will you suggest that he did this
because they were pretty? You know that practical men--conquering
generals--don't behave in that way. He did it because they were sacred;
because, like most practical men, he was religious, and his gods must go
with him. They filled his literature: for why? He believed himself to be
sprung from their loins. Where would Latin literature be, for example, if
you could cut Venus out of it? Consider Lucretius' grand invocation:
Æneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas,
Alma Venus!
Consider the part Virgil makes her play as moving spirit of his whole
great poem. So follow her down to the days of the later Empire and open
the "Pervigilium Veneris" and discover her, under the name of Dione,
still the eternal Aphrodite sprung from the foam amid the churning hooves
of the sea-horses--_inter et bipedes equos_:--
Time was that a rain-cloud begat her, impregning the heave of the deep,
'Twixt hooves of sea-horses a-scatter, stampeding the dolphins as
sheep.
Lo! arose of that bridal Dione, rainbow'd and besprent of its dew!
_Now learn ye to love who loved never--now ye who have loved, love
anew!_
Her favour it was fill'd the sails of the Trojan for Latium bound,
Her favour that won her Æneas a bride on Laurentian ground,
And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the Vestal, to Mars;
As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome for its wars
With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Cæsar--last, best of that blood, of that thew.
_Now learn ye to love who loved never--now ye who have loved, love
anew!_
'Last, best of that blood'--her blood, _fusa Paphies de cruore_, and the
blood of Teucer, _revocato a sanguine Teucri_, 'of that thew'--the thew
of Tros and of Mars. Of these and no less than these our Roman believed
himself the son and inheritor.
If we grasp this, that the old literature was packed with the old
religion, and not only packed with it but permeated by it, we have within
our ten fingers the secret of the 'Dark Ages,' the real reason why the
Christian Fathers fought down literature and almost prevailed to the
point of stamping it out. They hated it, not as literature; or at any
rate, not to begin with; nor, to begin with, because it happened to be
voluptuous and they austere: but they hated it because it held in its
very texture, not to be separated, a religion over which they had hardly
triumphed, a religion actively inimical to that of Christ, inimical to
truth; so that for the sake of truth and in the name of Christ they had
to fight it, accepting no compromise, yielding no quarter, foreseeing no
issue save that one of the twain--Jupiter or Christ, Deus Optimus Maximus
or the carpenter's son of Nazareth--must go under.
It all ended in compromise, to be sure; as all struggles must between
adversaries so tremendous. To-day, in Dr Smith's "Classical Dictionary,"
Origen rubs shoulders with Orpheus and Orcus; Tertullian reposes cheek by
jowl with Terpsichore. But we are not concerned, here, with what happened
in the end. We are concerned with what these forthright Christian
fighters had in their minds--to trample out the old literature _because_
of the false religion. Milton understood this, and was thinking of it
when he wrote of the effect of Christ's Nativity--
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No mighty trance, or breathèd spell
Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.
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;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
as Swinburne understands and expresses it in his "Hymn to Proserpine,"
supposed to be chanted by a Roman of the 'old profession' on the morrow
of Constantine's proclaiming the Christian faith--
O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!
From your wrath is the world released, redeem'd from your chains,
men say.
New Gods are crown'd in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were...
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in
the brake;
Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from
thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
'Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean!' However the struggle might sway
in this or that other part of the field, Literature had to be beaten to
her knees, and still beaten flat until the breath left her body. You will
not be surprised that the heavy hand of these Christian fathers fell
first upon the Theatre: for the actor in Rome was by legal definition an
'infamous' man, even as in England until the other day he was by legal
definition a vagabond and liable to whipping. The policy of religious
reformers has ever been to close the theatres, as our Puritans did in
1642; and a recent pronouncement by the Bishop of Kensington would seem
to show that the instinct survives to this day. Queen Elizabeth--like her
brother, King Edward VI--signalized the opening of a new reign by
inhibiting stage-plays; and I invite you to share with me the pensive
speculation, 'How much of English Literature, had she not relented, would
exist to-day for a King Edward VII Professor to talk about?' Certainly
the works of Shakespeare would not; and that seems to me a thought so
impressive as to deserve the attention of Bishops as well as of Kings.