Yet, and when this has been granted, the crucial question abides
and I must not shirk it 'you say that the highest literature
deals with _What Is_ rather than with _What Knows._ It is all
very fine to assure us that testing our knowledge _about_
Literature and _around_ Literature, and on this side or that side
of Literature, is healthy for us in some oblique way: but can you
examiners examine, or can you not, on Literature in what you call
its own and proper category of _What Is_?'
So I hear the question--the question which beats and has beaten,
over and over again, good men trying to construct Schools of
English in our Universities.
With all sense of a responsibility, of a difficulty, that has
lain on my mind for these five years, I answer, Gentlemen, 'Yes,
we ought: yes, we can: and yes, we will.'
But, for the achievement, we teachers must first know how to
teach. When that is learned, Examination will come as a
consequent, easy, almost trivial matter. I will, for example--
having already allowed how _hard_ it is to examine on literature
--take the difficulty at its very extreme. I will select a piece
of poetry, and the poet shall be Keats--on whom, if on any one,
is felt the temptation to write gush and loose aesthetic chatter.
A pupil comes to read with me, and I open at the famous "Ode to a
Grecian Urn."
(1) We read it through together, perhaps twice; at the
second attempt getting the emphasis right, and some, at any
rate, of the modulations of voice. So we reach a working
idea of the Ode and what Keats meant it to be.
(2) We then compare it with his other Odes, and observe that it
is (a) regular in stanza form, (b) in spite of its outburst in
the 3rd stanza--'More happy love! more happy, happy love' etc.--
much severer in tone than, e.g., the "Ode to a Nightingale" or
the "Ode to Psyche," (c) that the emotion is not luscious, but
simple, (d) that this simplicity is Hellenic, so far as Keats can
compass it, and (e) eminently well-suited to its subject, which
is a carven urn, gracious but severe of outline; a moment of joy
caught by the sculptor and arrested, for time to perpetuate; yet
--and this is the point of the Ode--conveying a sense that
innocent gaiety is not only its own excuse, but of human things
one of the few eternal--and eternal just because it is joyous and
fleeting.
(3) Then we go back and compare this kind of quiet immortal
beauty with the passionate immortality hymned in the "Nightingale
Ode"
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down...
with all the rest of that supreme stanza: from which (with some
passages my reading supplies to illustrate the difference) we
fall to contrasting the vibrating thrill of the "Nightingale"
with the happy grace of the "Grecian Urn" and, allowing each to
be appropriate, dispute for a while, perhaps, over the merits of
classical calm and romantic thrill.
(4) From this we proceed to examine the Ode in detail line by
line: which examination brings up a whole crowd of questions,
such as
(a) We have a thought enounced in the first stanza. Does the Ode
go on to develop and amplify it, as an Ode should? Or does
Pegasus come down again and again on the prints from which he
took off? If he do this, and the action of the Ode be dead and
unprogressive, is the defect covered by beauty of language? Can
such defect ever be so covered?
(b) Lines 15 and 16 anticipate lines 21-24, which are saying the
same thing and getting no forwarder.
(c) We come to the lines
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
with the answering lines
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
and we note Sir Sidney Colvin's suggestion that this breaks in
upon an arrest of art as though it were an arrest on reality: and
remember that he raised a somewhat similar question over "The
Nightingale"; and comparing them, discuss truth of emotion
against truth of reality.
We come to the last stanza and lament 'O Attic shape! Fair
attitude' for its jingle: but note how the poet recovers himself
and brings the whole to a grand close.
I have, even yet, mentioned but a few of the points. For one, I
have omitted its most beautiful vowel-play, on which teacher and
pupil can dwell and learn together. And heaven forbid that as a
teacher I should _insist_ even on half of those I have indicated.
A teacher, as I hold, should watch for what his pupil divines of
his own accord; but if, trafficking with works of inspiration, he
have no gift to catch that inspiration nor power to pass it on,
then I say 'Heaven help him! but he has no valid right on earth
to be in the business.'
And if a teacher have all these chances of teaching--mind you, of
_accurate_ teaching--supplied him by a single Ode of Keats, do
you suppose we cannot set in an Examination paper one intelligent
question upon it, in its own lawful category?
Gentlemen, with the most scrupulous tenderness for aged and even
decrepit interests, we have been trying to liberate you from
certain old bad superstitions and silently laying the stones of a
new School of English, which we believe to be worthy even of
Cambridge.
Our proposals are before the University. Should they be passed,
still everything will depend on the loyalty of its teachers to
the idea; and on that enthusiasm which I suppose to be the nurse
of all studies and know to be the authentic cherishing nurse of
ours. We may even have conceded too much to the letter, but we
have built and built our trust on the spirit 'which maketh
alive.'
[Footnote 1: Why had he to swear this under pain of
excommunication, when the lecturer could so easily keep a
roll-call? But the amount of oathtaking in a medieval University was
prodigious. Even College servants were put on oath for their
duties: Gyps invited their own damnation, bed-makers kissed the
book. Abroad, where examinations were held, the Examiner swore
not to take a bribe, the Candidate neither to give one, nor, if
unsuccessful, to take his vengeance on the Examiner with a knife
or other sharp instrument. At New College, Oxford, the
matriculating undergraduate was required to swear in particular
not to dance in the College Chapel.]