enlightened times, the study of Literature has crept its way into
official Cambridge, if you will take down your "University Calendar" and
study the list of Professorships there set forth in order of foundation.
It begins in 1502 with the Lady Margaret's Chair of Divinity, founded by
the mother of Henry VII. Five Regius Professorships follow: of Divinity,
Civil Law, Physic, Hebrew, Greek, all of 1540. So Greek comes in upon the
flush of the Renaissance; and the Calendar bravely, yet not committing
itself to a date, heads with Erasmus the noble roll which concludes (as
may it long conclude) with Henry Jackson. But Greek comes in last of the
five. Close on a hundred years elapse before the foundation of the next
chair--it is of Arabic; and more than a hundred before we arrive at
Mathematics. So Sir William Hamilton was not without historical excuse
when he declared the study of Mathematics to be no part of the business
of this University! Then follow Moral Philosophy (1683), Music (1684),
Chemistry (1702), Astronomy (1704), Anatomy (1707), Modern History and
more Arabic, with Botany (1724), Geology (1727), closely followed by Mr
Hulse's Christian Advocate, more Astronomy (1749), more Divinity (1777),
Experimental Philosophy (1783): then in the nineteenth century more Law,
more Medicine, Mineralogy, Archaeology, Political Economy, Pure
Mathematics, Comparative Anatomy, Sanskrit and yet again more Law, before
we arrive in 1869 at a Chair of Latin. Faint yet pursuing, we have yet to
pass chairs of Fine Art (belated), Experimental Physics, Applied
Mechanics, Anglo-Saxon, Animal Morphology, Surgery, Physiology,
Pathology, Ecclesiastical History, Chinese, more Divinity, Mental
Philosophy, Ancient History, Agriculture, Biology, Agricultural Botany,
more Biology, Astrophysics, and German, before arriving in 1910 at a
Chair of English Literature which by this time I have not breath to
defend.
The enumeration has, I hope, been instructive. If it has also plunged you
in gloom, to that atmosphere (as the clock warns me) for a fortnight I
must leave you: with a promise, however, in another lecture to cheer you,
if it may be, with some broken gleams of hope.
[Footnote 1: "What English Poetry may still learn from Greek": a paper
read before the English Association on Nov. 17, 1911.]
[Footnote 2: See Mr E. K. Chambers' "Mediaeval Stage", Dr Courthope's
"History of English Poetry," and Professor W. P. Ker's "The Dark Ages".]
[Footnote 3: Rashdall, "The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages",
vol. ii, p. 684, from documents printed in Fournier's collection.]
LECTURE XI.
ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES nglish Literature in Our
Universities (II)
Wednesday, December 3
We broke off, Gentlemen, upon the somewhat painful conclusion that our
Universities were not founded for the study of literature, and tardily
admitted it. The dates of our three literary chairs in Cambridge--I speak
of our Western literature only, and omit Arabic, Sanskrit, and
Chinese--clenched that conclusion for us. Greek in 1540, Latin not until
1869, English but three years ago--from the lesson of these intervals
there is no getting away.
Now I do not propose to dwell on the Renaissance and how Greek came in:
for a number of writers in our time have been busy with the Renaissance,
and have--I was going to say 'over-written the subject,' but no--it is
better to say that they have focussed the period so as to distort the
general perspective at the cost of other periods which have earned less
attention; the twelfth century, for example. At any rate their efforts,
with the amount they claim of your reading, absolve me from doing more
than remind you that the Renaissance brought in the study of Greek, and
Greek necessarily brought in the study of literature: since no man can
read what the Greeks wrote and not have his eyes unsealed to what I have
called a norm of human expression; a guide to conduct, a standard to
correct our efforts, whether in poetry, or in philosophy, or in art. For
the rest, I need only quote to you Gibbon's magnificent saying, that the
Greek language gave a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the
abstractions of metaphysics. [May I add, in parenthesis, that, while no
believer in compulsory Greek, holding, indeed, that you can hardly
reconcile learning with compulsion, and still more hardly force them to
be compatibles, I subscribe with all my heart to Bagehot's shrewd saying,
'while a knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer of
English, he should at least have a firm conviction that those two
languages existed.']
But, assuming you to know something of the Renaissance, and how it
brought Greek into Oxford and Cambridge, I find that in the course of the
argument two things fall to be said, and both to be said with some
emphasis.
In the first place, without officially acknowledging their native tongue
or its literature, our two Universities had no sooner acquired Greek than
their members became immensely interested in English. Take, for one
witness out of many, Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke Hall. His letters
to Edmund Spenser have been preserved, as you know. Now Gabriel Harvey
was a man whom few will praise, and very few could have loved. Few will
quarrel with Dr Courthope's description of him as 'a person of
considerable intellectual force, but intolerably arrogant and conceited,
and with a taste vitiated by all the affectations of Italian humanism,'
or deny that 'his tone in his published correspondence with Spenser is
that of an intellectual bully.'[1] None will refuse him the title of fool
for attempting to mislead Spenser into writing hexameters. But all you
can urge against Gabriel Harvey, on this count or that or the other, but
accumulates proof that this donnish man was all the while giving
thought--giving even ferocious thought--to the business of making
an English Literature.
Let me adduce more pleasing evidence. At or about Christmas, in the year
1597, there was enacted here in Cambridge, in the hall of St John's
College, a play called "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus," a skittish work,
having for subject the 'discontent of scholars'; the misery attending
those who, unsupported by a private purse, would follow after Apollo and
the Nine. No one knows the author's name: but he had a wit which has kept
something of its salt to this day, and in Christmas, 1597, it took
Cambridge by storm. The public demanded a sequel, and "The Return from
Parnassus" made its appearance on the following Christmas (again in St
John's College hall); to be followed by a "Second Part of the Return from
Parnassus," the author's overflow of wit, three years later. Of the
popularity of the first and second plays--"The Pilgrimage" and "The
Return, Part I"--we have good evidence in the prologue to "The Return,
Part II," where the author makes Momus say, before an audience which knew
the truth:
"The Pilgrimage to Parnassus" and "The Returne from Parnassus" have
stood the honest Stagekeepers in many a crowne's expense for linckes
and vizards: purchased many a Sophister a knocke with a clubbe:
hindred the butler's box, and emptied the Colledge barrells; and now,
unlesse you have heard the former, you may returne home as wise as you
came: for this last is the last part of The Returne from Parnassus;
that is, the last time that the Author's wit will turne upon the toe
in this vaine.
In other words, these plays had set everybody in Cambridge agog, had been
acted by link-light, had led to brawls--either between literary factions
or through offensive personal allusions to which we have lost all
clue--had swept into the box-office much money usually spent on Christmas
gambling, and had set up an inappeasable thirst for College ale. The
point for us is that (in 1597-1601) they abound in topical allusions to
the London theatres: that Shakespeare is obviously just as much a concern
to these young men of Cambridge as Mr Shaw (say) is to our young men
to-day, and an allusion to him is dropped in confidence that it will be
aptly taken. For instance, one of the characters, Gullio, will have some
love-verses recited to him 'in two or three diverse veins, in Chaucer's,
Gower's and Spenser's and Mr Shakespeare's.' Having listened to Chaucer,
he cries, 'Tush! Chaucer is a foole'; but coming to some lines of Mr
Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," he cries, 'Ey, marry, Sir! these have
some life in them! Let this duncified world esteeme of Spenser and
Chaucer, I'le worship sweet Mr Shakespeare, and to honoure him I will lay
his "Venus and Adonis" under my pillowe.' For another allusion--'Few of
the University pen plaies well,' says the actor Kempe in Part II of the
"Returne"; 'they smell too much of that writer _Ovid_ and that writer
_Metamorphosis_, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here's
our fellow _Shakespeare_ puts them all downe, ay and _Ben Jonson_, too.'
Here you have Cambridge assembling at Christmas-tide to laugh at
well-understood hits upon the theatrical taste of London. Here you have,
to make Cambridge laugh, three farcical quasi-Aristophanic plays all
hinging on the tribulations of scholars who depart to pursue literature
for a livelihood. For a piece of definite corroborative evidence you have
a statute of Queens' College (quoted by Mr Bass Mullinger) which directs
that 'any student refusing to take part in the acting of a comedy or
tragedy in the College and absenting himself from the performance,
contrary to the injunctions of the President, shall be expelled from the
Society'--which seems drastic. And on top of all this, you have evidence
enough and to spare of the part played in Elizabethan drama by the
'University Wits.' Why, Marlowe (of Corpus Christi) may be held to have
invented its form--blank verse; Ben Jonson (of St John's) to have carried
it on past its meridian and through its decline, into the masque. Both
Universities claim Lyly and Chapman. Marston, Peel, Massinger, hailed
from Oxford. But Greene and Nashe were of Cambridge--of St John's both,
and Day of Caius. They sought to London, and there (for tragic truth
underlay that Christmas comedy of "The Pilgrimage of Parnassus") many of
them came to bitter ends: but before reaching their sordid personal
ruin--and let the deaths of Marlowe and Greene be remembered--they built
the Elizabethan drama, as some of them lived to add its last ornaments.
We know what, meanwhile, Spenser had done. I think it scarcely needs
further proof that Cambridge, towards the end of the sixteenth century,
was fermenting with a desire to read, criticise, yes and write, English
literature, albeit officially the University recognised no such thing.
There remains a second question--How happened it that Cambridge, after
admitting Greek, took more than three hundred years to establish a Chair
of Latin, and that a Chair of English is, so to speak, a mushroom (call
it not toadstool!) of yesterday? Why simply enough. Latin continued to be
the working language of Science. In Latin Bacon naturally composed his
"Novum Organum" and indeed almost all his scientific and philosophical
work, although a central figure of his age among English prose-writers.
In Latin, in the eighteenth century, Newton wrote his "Principia": and I
suppose that of no two books written by Englishmen before the close of
that century, or indeed before Darwin's "Origin of Species," can it be
less extravagantly said than of the "Novum Organum" and the "Principia"
that they shook the world. Now, without forgetting our Classical Tripos
(founded in 1822), as without forgetting the great names of Bentley and
Porson, we may observe it as generally true, that whenever and wherever
large numbers of scientific men use a particular language as their
working instrument, they have a disposition to look askance on its
refinements; to be jealous of its literary professors; to accuse these of
treating as an end in itself what is properly a means. Like the Denver
editor I quoted to you in a previous lecture, these scientific workers
want to 'get there' in a hurry, forgetting that (to use another
Americanism) the sharper the chisel the more ice it is likely to cut. You
may observe this disposition--this suspicion of 'literature,' this thinly
veiled contempt--in many a scientific man to-day; though because his
language has changed from Latin to English, it is English he now chooses
to cheapen. Well, we cannot help it, perhaps. Perhaps he cannot help it.
It is human nature. We must go on persuading him, not losing our tempers.
None the less we should not shut our eyes to the fact that while a
language is the working instrument of scientific men there will always be
a number of them to decry any study of it for its beauty, and even any
study of it for the sake of accuracy--its beauty and its accuracy being
indeed scarcely distinguishable.
I fear, Gentlemen, you may go on from this to the dreadful conclusion
that the date 1869, when Cambridge at length came to possess a Chair of
Latin, marks definitely the hour at which Latin closed its eyes and
became a dead language; that you may proceed to a yet more dreadful
application of this to the Chair of English founded in 1910: and that
henceforward (to misquote what Mr Max Beerbohm once wickedly said of
Walter Pater) you will be apt to regard Professor Housman and me as two
widowers engaged, while the undertaker waits, in composing the features
of our belovèds.
But (to speak seriously) that is what I stand here to controvert: and I
derive no small encouragement when--as has more than once happened--A, a
scientific man, comes to me and complains that he for his part cannot
understand B, another scientific man, 'because the fellow can't express
himself.' And the need to study precision in writing has grown far more
instant since men of science have abandoned the 'universal language' and
taken to writing in their own tongues. Let us, while not on the whole
regretting the change, at least recognise some dangers, some possible
disadvantages. I will confine myself to English, considered as a
substitute for Latin. In Latin you have a language which may be thin in
its vocabulary and inelastic for modern use; but a language which at all
events compels a man to clear his thought and communicate it to other men
precisely.
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into the narrow act
--may be all impossible of compression into the Latin speech. In English,
on the other hand, you have a language which by its very copiousness and
elasticity tempts you to believe that you can do without packing, without
compression, arrangement, order; that, with the Denver editor, all you
need is to 'get there'--though it be with all your intellectual
belongings in a jumble, overflowing the portmanteau. Rather I preach to
you that having proudly inherited English with its _copia fandi_, you
should keep your estate in order by constantly applying to it that _jus
et norma loquendi_ of which, if you seek to the great models, you will
likewise find yourselves inheritors.
'But,' it is sometimes urged, 'why not leave this new study of English to
the younger Universities now being set up all over the country?' 'Ours is
an age of specialising. Let these newcomers have something--what better
than English?--to specialise upon.'
I might respond by asking if the fame of Cambridge would stand where it
stands to-day had she followed a like counsel concerning other studies
and, resting upon Mathematics, given over this or that branch of Natural
Science to be grasped by new hands. What of Electricity, for example? Or
what of Physiology? Yes, and among the unnatural sciences, what of
Political Economy? But I will use a more philosophical argument.
Some years ago I happened on a collection of Bulgarian proverbs of which
my memory retains but two, yet each an abiding joy. In a lecture on
English Literature in our Universities you will certainly not miss to
apply the first, which runs, 'Many an ass has entered Jerusalem.'
The application of the second may elude you for a moment. It voices the
impatience of an honest Bulgar who has been worried overmuch to subscribe
to what, in this England of ours, we call Church Purposes; and it runs,
'All these two-penny saints will be the ruin of the Church.'
Now far be it from me to apply the term 'two-penny saint' to any existing
University. To avoid the accusation I hereby solemnly declare my deep
conviction that every single University at this moment in England,
Scotland, Wales or Ireland has reasons--strong in all, in some
overwhelmingly strong--for its existence. That is plainly said, I hope?
Yet I do maintain that if we go on multiplying Universities we shall not
increase the joy; that the reign of two-penny saints lies not far off
and will soon lie within measurable distance; and that it will be
a pestilent reign. As we saw in out last lecture the word
'University'--_Universitas_--had, in its origin, nothing to do with
Universality: it meant no more than a Society, organised (as it
happened) to promote learning. But words, like institutions, often rise
above their beginnings, and in time acquire a proud secondary
connotation. For an instance let me give you the beautiful Wykehamist
motto _Manners Makyeth Man_, wherein 'manners' originally meant no more
than 'morals.' So there has grown around our two great Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge a connotation (secondary, if you will, but valuable
above price) of universality; of standing like great beacons of light,
to attract the young wings of all who would seek learning for their
sustenance. Thousands have singed, thousands have burned themselves, no
doubt: but what thousands of thousands have caught the sacred fire into
their souls as they passed through and passed out, to carry it, to drop
it, still as from wings, upon waste places of the world! Think of
country vicarages, of Australian or Himalayan outposts, where men have
nourished out lives of duty upon the fire of three transient, priceless
years. Think of the generations of children to whom their fathers'
lives, prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if someone let fall
the word 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge,' so that they themselves came to
surmise an aura about the name as of a land very far off; and then say
if the ineffable spell of those two words do not lie somewhere in the
conflux of generous youth with its rivalries and clash of minds, ere it
disperses, generation after generation, to the duller business of life.
Would you have your mother University, Gentlemen, undecorated by some
true study of your mother-English?
I think not, having been there, and known such thoughts as you will carry
away, and having been against expectation called back to report them.
And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek,
And all the world and I seem'd far less cold,
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold,
And hope was strong, and life itself not weak.
My purpose here (and I cannot too often recur to it) is to wean your
minds from hankering after false Germanic standards and persuade you, or
at least point out to you, in what direction that true study lies if you
are men enough to take up your inheritance and believe in it as a glory
to be improved.
Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University on earth can study
English Literature truthfully or worthily, or even at all profitably,
unless by studying it in the category for which Heaven, or Nature (call
the ultimate cause what you will), intended it; or, to put the assertion
more concretely, in any other category than that for which the particular
author--be his name Chaucer or Chesterton, Shakespeare or Shaw--designed
it; as neither can Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University study English
Literature, to understand it, unless by bracing itself to consider a
living art. Origins, roots, all the gropings towards light--let these be
granted as accessories; let those who search in them be granted all
honour, all respect. It is only when they preach or teach these
preliminaries, these accessories, to be more important than Literature
itself--it is only when they, owing all their excuse in life to the
established daylight, din upon us that the precedent darkness claims
precedence in honour, that one is driven to utter upon them this
dialogue, in monosyllables:
_And God said, 'Let there be light': and there was light.
'Oh, thank you, Sir,' said the Bat and the Owl; 'then we are off!'_
I grant you, Gentlemen, that there must always inhere a difficulty in
correlating for the purposes of a Tripos a study of Literature itself
with a study of these accessories; the thing itself being _naturally_ so
much more difficult: being so difficult indeed that (to take literary
criticism alone and leave for a moment the actual practice of writing
out of the question) though some of the first intellects in the
world--Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, Boileau, Dryden, Lessing, Goethe,
Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve--have broken into parcels of that territory, the
mass of it remains unexplored, and nobody as yet has found courage to
reduce the reports of these great explorers to any system; so that a very
eminent person indeed found it easy to write to me the other day, 'The
principles of Criticism? What are they? Who made them?' To this I could
only answer that I did not know Who made them; but that Aristotle,
Dryden, Lessing, had, as it was credibly reported, discovered five or, it
might be, six. And this difficulty of appraising literature absolutely
inheres in your study of it from the beginning. No one can have set a
General Paper on Literature and examined on it, setting it and marking
the written answers, alongside of papers about language, inflexions and
the rest, without having borne in upon him that _here_ the student finds
his difficulty. While in a paper set about inflexions, etc., a pupil with
a moderately retentive memory will easily obtain sixty or seventy per
cent. of the total marks, in a paper on the book or play considered
critically an examiner, even after setting his paper with a view to some
certain inferiority of average, has to be lenient before he can award
fifty, forty, or even thirty per cent. of the total.
You will find a somewhat illuminating passage--illuminating, that is, if
you choose to interpret and apply it to our subject--in Lucian's "True
History," where the veracious traveller, who tells the tale, affirms that
he visited Hades among other places, and had some conversation with
Homer, among its many inhabitants--
Before many days had passed, I accosted the poet Homer, when we were
both disengaged, and asked him, among other things, where he came
from; it was still a burning question with us, I explained. He said he
was aware that some derived him from Chios, others from Smyrna, and
others again from Colophon; but in fact he was a Babylonian, generally
known not as Homer but as Tigranes; but when later in life he was
given as a homer or hostage to the Greeks, that name clung to him.
Another of my questions was about the so-called spurious books; had he
written them or not? He said that they were all genuine: so I now knew
what to think of the critics Zenodotus and Aristarchus and all their
lucubrations. Having got a categorical answer on that point, I tried
him next on his reason for starting the "Iliad" with the wrath of
Achilles. He said he had no exquisite reason; it just came into his
head that way.
Even so diverse are the questions that may be asked concerning any great
work of art. But to discover its full intent is always the most difficult
task of all. That task, however, and nothing less difficult, will always
be the one worthiest of a great University.
On that, and on that alone, Gentlemen, do I base all claims for our
School of English Literature. And yet in conclusion I will ask you,
reminding yourselves how fortunate is your lot in Cambridge, to think of
fellow-Englishmen far less fortunate.
Years ago I took some pains to examine the examination papers set by a
renowned Examining Body and I found this--'I humbly solicit' (to use a
phrase of Lucian's) 'my hearers' incredulity'--that in a paper set upon
three Acts of "Hamlet"--three Acts of "Hamlet"!--the first question
started with 'G.tt. p..cha' 'Al..g.tor' and invited the candidate to fill
in the missing letters correctly. Now I was morally certain that the
words 'gutta-percha' and 'alligator' did not occur in the first three
Acts of "Hamlet"; but having carefully re-read them I invited this
examining body to explain itself. The answer I got was that, to
understand Shakespeare, a student must first understand the English
Language! Some of you on leaving Cambridge will go out--a company of
Christian folk dispersed throughout the world--to tell English children
of English Literature. Such are the pedagogic fetters you will have to
knock off their young minds before they can stand and walk.
Gentlemen, on a day early in this term I sought the mound which is the
old Castle of Cambridge. Access to it, as perhaps you know, lies through
the precincts of the County Prison. An iron railing encloses the mound,
having a small gate, for the key of which a notice-board advised me to
ring the prison bell. I rang. A very courteous gaoler answered the bell
and opened the gate, which stands just against his wicket. I thanked him,
but could not forbear asking 'Why do they keep this gate closed?' 'I
don't know, sir,' he answered, 'but I suppose if they didn't the children
might get in and play.'