I
Let us attempt to-day, Gentlemen, picking up the scent where we
left at the conclusion of my first lecture, to hunt the Art of
Reading (as I shall call it), a little further on the line of
common-sense; then to cast back and chase on a line somewhat more
philosophical. If these lines run wide and refuse to unite, we
shall have made a false cast: if they converge and meet, we shall
have caught our hare and may proceed, in subsequent lectures, to
cook him.
Well, the line of common-sense has brought us to this point--
that, man and this planet being such as they are, for a man to
read all the books existent on it is impossible; and, if
possible, would be in the highest degree undesirable. Let us, for
example, go back quite beyond the invention of printing and try
to imagine a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the
Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the
number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be
gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly
that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen
one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of
Euripides. It is incredible that he could gratify us.
There was, as I have said, a great burning at Alexandria in 47
B.C., when Caesar set the fleet in the harbour on fire to prevent
its falling into the hands of the Egyptians. The flames spread,
and the great library stood but 400 yards from the quayside, with
warehouses full of books yet closer. The last great burning was
perpetrated in A.D. 642. Gibbon quotes the famous sentence of
Omar, the great Mohammedan who gave the order: 'If these writings
of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and
need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and
ought to be destroyed,' and goes on:
The sentence was executed with blind obedience; the
volumes of paper or parchment were distributed to the four
thousand baths of the city; and such was their incredible
multitude that six months were barely sufficient for the
consumption of this precious fuel.... The tale has been
repeatedly transcribed; and every scholar, with pious
indignation, has deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the
learning, the arts, and the genius, of antiquity. For my own
part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and the
consequences.
Of the consequence he writes:
Perhaps the church and seat of the patriarchs might be
enriched with a repository of books: but, if the ponderous
mass of Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed
consumed in the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with
a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of
mankind. I sincerely regret the more valuable libraries,
which have been involved in the ruin of the Roman empire;
but, when I seriously compute the lapse of ages, the waste of
ignorance, and the calamities of war, our treasures, rather
than our losses, are the object of my surprise. Many curious
and interesting facts are buried in oblivion: the three great
historians of Rome have been transmitted to our hands in a
mutilated state, and we are deprived of many pleasing
compositions of the lyric, iambic, and dramatic poetry of the
Greeks. Yet we should gratefully remember that the
mischances of time and accident have spared the classic
works to which the suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the
first place of genius and glory; the teachers of ancient
knowledge, who are still extant, had perused and compared
the writings of their predecessors; nor can it fairly be
presumed that any important truth, any useful discovery in
art or nature, has been snatched away from the curiosity of
modern ages.
I certainly do not ask you to subscribe to all that. In fact when
Gibbon asks us to remember gratefully 'that the mischances of
time and accident have spared the classic works to which the
suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the first place of genius and
glory,' I submit with all respect that he talks nonsense. Like
the stranger in the temple of the sea-god, invited to admire the
many votive garments of those preserved out of shipwreck, I ask
'at ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata perierunt?'--
or in other words 'Where are the trousers of the drowned?' 'What
about the "Sthenoboea" of Euripides, the "Revellers" of Ameipsias--
to which, as a matter of simple fact, what you call the suffrage of
antiquity did adjudge the first prize, above Aristophanes' best?'
But of course he is equally right to this extent, that the fire
consumed a vast deal of rubbish: solid tons more than any man
could swallow,--let be, digest--'read, mark, learn and inwardly
digest.' And that was in A.D. 642, whereas we have arrived at
1916. Where would our voracious Alexandrian be to-day, with all
the literature of the Middle Ages added to his feast and on top
of that all the printed books of 450 years? 'Reading,' says
Bacon, 'maketh a Full Man.' Yes, indeed!
Now I am glad that sentence of Bacon falls pat here, because it
gives me, turning to his famous Essay "Of Studies", the
reinforcement of his great name for the very argument which I am
directing against the fallacy of those teachers who would have
you use 'manuals' as anything else than guides to your own
reading or perspectives in which the authors are set out in the
comparative eminence by which they claim priority of study or
indicate the proportions of a literary period. Some of these
manuals are written by men of knowledge so encyclopaedic that (if
it go with critical judgment) for these purposes they may be
trusted. But to require you, at your stage of reading, to have
even the minor names by heart is a perversity of folly. For later
studies it seems to me a more pardonable mistake, but yet a
mistake, to hope that by the employ of separate specialists you
can get even in 15 or 20 volumes a perspective, a proportionate
description, of what English Literature really is. But worst of
all is that Examiner, who--aware that you must please him, to get
a good degree, and being just as straight and industrious as
anyone else--assumes that in two years you have become expert in
knowledge that beats a lifetime, and, brought up against the
practical impossibility of this assumption, questions you--not on
a little selected first-hand knowledge--but on massed information
which at the best can be but derivative and second-hand.
Now hear Bacon.