IV

But every convention has a fallacy somewhere at the root; whether

it be useful and operative, as many a legal fiction is operative,

for good; or senile, past service yet tyrannous by custom, and so

pernicious; or merely foolish, as certain artistic conventions

are traceable, when a Ruskin comes to judgment, back to nothing

better than folly: and it becomes men of honest mind, in dealing

with anything recognisable as a convention, to examine its

accepted fallacy, whether it be well understood or ill understood;

beneficent or pernicious or merely foolish or both foolish and

pernicious: and this is often most handily done by tracing its

history.

Now I shall assume that the framers of the Ordinance regulating

the duties of this Chair knew well enough, of their own reading,

that English Literature deals with a vast variety of subjects:

and that, if any piece of writing miss to deal with its

particular subject, so closely that theme and treatment can

scarcely be separated, by so much will it be faulty as literature.

Milton is fairly possessed with the story of Man's fall, Boswell

possessed with Johnson, Shelley with hatred of tyranny in all its

manifestations, Mill again with the idea of Liberty: and it is

only because we had knowledge presented to us at an age when we

thought more attentively of apples, that we still fail to

recognise in Euclid and Dr Todhunter two writers who are excellent

because possessed with a passion for Geometry.

I infer, then, that the framers of the Ordinance, when they

employed this phrase 'the study of the subject of English

Literature,' knew well enough that no such thing existed in

nature, but adopted the convention that English Literature could

be separated somehow from its content and treated as a subject

all by itself, for teaching purposes: and, for purposes of

examination, could be yoked up with another subject called

English Language, as other Universities had yoked it.

V

I believe the following to be a fair account of how these

examinations in English Language and Literature came to pass, and

how a certain kind of student came to pass these Examinations. At

any rate since the small revolution has happened in my life-time

and most of it since I was able to observe, the account here is

drawn from my own observation and may be checked and corrected by

yours.

Thirty-five or forty years ago--say in the late seventies or

early eighties--some preparatory schools, and others that taught

older boys but ranked below the great Public Schools in repute,

taught so much of English Literature as might be comprised, at a

rough calculation, in two or three plays of Shakespeare, edited

by Clark and Aldis Wright; a few of Bacon's Essays, Milton's

early poems, Stopford Brooke's little primer, a book of extracts

for committal to memory, with perhaps Chaucer's "Prologue" and a

Speech of Burke. In the great Public Schools _no_ English

Literature was studied, save in those which had invented 'Modern

Sides,' to prepare boys specially for Woolwich or Sandhurst or

the Indian Civil Service; for entrance to which examinations were

held on certain prescribed English Classics, and marks mainly

given for acquaintance with the editors' notes.

In the Universities, the study of English Classics was not

officially recognised at all.

Let us not hastily suppose that this neglect of English rested

wholly on unreason, or had nothing to say for itself. Teachers

and tutors of the old Classical Education (as it was called)

could plead as follows:

'In the first place,' they would say, 'English Literature is

too _easy_ a study. Our youth, at School or University, starts

on his native classics with a liability which in any foreign

language he has painfully to acquire. The voices that

murmured around his cradle, the voice of his nurse, of his

governess, of the parson on Sundays; the voices of village

boys, stablemen, gamekeepers and farmers--friendly or

unfriendly--of callers, acquaintances, of the children he met

at Children's Parties; the voices that at the dinner-table

poured politics or local gossip into the little pitcher with

long ears--all these were English voices speaking in English:

and all these were all the while insensibly leading him up the

slope from the summit of which he can survey the promised

land spread at his feet as a wide park; and he holds the key of

the gates, to enter and take possession. Whereas,' the old

instructors would continue, 'with the classics of any foreign

language we take him at the foot of the steep ascent, spread a

table before him (_mensa, mensa, mensam_ ...) and coax or drive

him up with variations upon amo, "I love" or [Greek: tupto],

"I beat," until he, too, reaches the summit and beholds the

landscape:

But O, what labour!

O Prince, what pain!'

Now so much of truth, Gentlemen, as this plea contains was

admitted last term by your Senate, in separating the English

Tripos, in which a certain linguistic familiarity may be not

rashly presumed of the student, from the Foreign Language

Triposes, divided into two parts, of which the first will more

suspiciously test his capacity to construe the books he professes

to have studied. I may return to this and to the alleged

_easiness_ of studies in a School of English. Let us proceed just

now with the reasoned plea for neglect.

These admirable old schoolmasters and dons would have hesitated,

maybe, to say flatly with Dogberry that 'to write and read comes

by nature ... and for your writing and reading, let that appear

when there is no need of such vanity.' But in practice their

system so worked, and in some of the Public Schools so works

to this day. Let me tell you that just before the war an

undergraduate came to me from the Sixth Form of one of the best

reputed among these great schools. He wished to learn to write.

He wished (poor fellow) to write me an essay, if I would set him

a subject. He had never written an essay at school. 'Indeed,'

said I, 'and there is no reason why you should, if by "essay" you

mean some little treatise about "Patriotism" or "A Day in the

Country." I will choose you no such subject nor any other upon

any book which you have never read. Tell me, what is your

Tripos?' He said 'the History Tripos.' 'Then,' said I, 'since

History provides quite a large number of themes, choose one and I

will try to correct your treatment of it, without offence to your

opinions or prejudice to your facts.' 'But,' he confessed, 'at

So-and-so'--naming the great Public School--'we never _wrote_ out

an account of anything, or set down our opinions on anything, to

be corrected. We just construed and did sums: And when he brought

me his first attempt, behold, it was so. He could not construct a

simple sentence, let alone putting two sentences together; while,

as for a paragraph, it lay beyond his farthest horizon. In short,

here was an instance ready to hand for any cheap writer engaged

to decry the old Classical Education.

What would the old schoolmasters plead in excuse? Why this, as I

suggest--'You cite an extreme instance. But, while granting

English Literature to be great, we would point out that an

overwhelming majority of our best writers have modelled their

prose and verse upon the Greek and Roman classics, either

directly or through tradition. Now we have our own language

_gratis,_ so to speak. Let us spend our pains, then, in acquiring

Latin and Greek, and the tradition. So shall we most intimately

enjoy our own authors; and so, if we wish to write, we shall have

at hand the clues they followed, the models they used.'

Now I have as you know, Gentlemen, a certain sympathy with this

plea, or with a part of it: nor can so much of truth as its

argument contains be silenced by a 'What about Shakespeare?' or a

'What about Bunyan?' or a 'What about Burns?' I believe our

imaginary pleader for the Classics could put up a stout defence

upon any of those names. To choose the forlornest hope of the

three, I can hear him demonstrating, to his own satisfaction if

not to yours, that Bunyan took his style straight out of the

Authorised Version of our Bible; which is to say that he took it

from the styles of forty-seven scholars, _plus_ Tyndale's, _plus_

Coverdale's, _plus_ Cranmer's--the scholarship of fifty scholars

expressed and blended.

But, as a theory, the strict classical argument gives itself

away, as well by its intolerance as by its obvious distrust of

the genius of our own wonderful language. I have in these five

years, and from this place, Gentlemen, counselled you to seek

back ever to those Mediterranean sources which are the well-heads

of our civilisation: but always (I hope) on the understanding

that you use them with a large liberty. They are effete for us

unless we add and mingle freely the juice of our own natural

_genius._

And in practice the strict classical theory, with its implied

contempt of English, has been disastrous: disastrous not only

with the ordinary man--as with my Sixth Form boy who could not

put two sentences together, and had read no English authors; but

disastrous even to highly eminent scholars. Listen, pray, to this

passage from one of them, Frederick Paley, who condescended

(Heaven knows why) to turn the majestic verse of Pindar into

English Prose--

_From the VIIIth Isthmian:_

And now that we are returned from great sorrows, let us

not fall into a dearth of victories, nor foster griefs; but as

we have ceased from our tiresome troubles, we will publicly

indulge in a sweet roundelay.

_From the IVth Pythian:_

It had been divinely predicted to Pelias, that he should die

by the doughty sons of Aeolus and an alarming oracle had come

to his wary mind, delivered at the central point of tree-clad

mother-earth, 'that he must by all means hold in great caution

the man with one shoe, when he shall have come from a homestead

on the hills.'

And he accordingly came in due time, armed with two spears,

a magnificent man. The dress he wore was of a double kind,

the national costume of the Magnesians.... Nor as yet had

the glossy clusters of his hair been clipped away, but

dangled brightly adown his back.

Forward he went at once and took his stand among the

people.... Him then they failed to recognise: but some of the

reverent-minded went so far as to say, 'Surely this cannot be

Apollo!'

It needs no comment, I think. Surely _this_ cannot be Apollo!

Frederick Paley flourished--if the word be not exorbitant for so

demure a writer--in the middle of the last century (he was born

in the year of Waterloo and died in the year after Queen

Victoria's first jubilee). Well, in that period there grew up a

race of pioneers who saw that English Literature--that proud park

and rolling estate--lay a tangled, neglected wilderness for its

inheritors, and set themselves bravely to clear broad ways

through it. Furnivall and Skeat, Aldis Wright, Clark, Grosart,

Arber, Earle, Hales, Morris, Ellis and the rest--who can rehearse

these names now but in deepest respect? Oh, believe me,

Gentlemen! they were wonderful fighters in a cause that at first

seemed hopeless. If I presume to speak of foibles to-day, you

will understand that I do so because, lightly though I may talk

to you at times, I have a real sense of the responsibilities of

this Chair. I worship great learning, which they had: I loathe

flippant detraction of what is great; I have usually a heart for

men-against-odds and the unpopular cause. But these very valiant

fighters had, one and all, some very obvious foibles: and

because, in the hour of success, these foibles came to infect the

whole teaching of English in this country, and to infect it

fatally for many years, I shall dare to point them out.