Is there, then, no better way? Yes there is a better way: for the
French have it, with their language and literature. In France, as
Matthew Arnold noted, a generation ago, the ordinary journey-man
work of literature is done far better and more conscientiously
than with us. In France a man feels it almost a personal stain,
an unpatriotic _lâche,_ to write even on a police-order anything
so derogatory to the tradition of his language as our Cabinet
Ministers read out as answers to our House of Commons. I am told
that many a Maire in a small provincial town in N.E. France, even
when overwhelmed--_accablé_--with the sufferings of his
town-folk, has truly felt the iron enter into his soul on being
forced to sign a document written out for him in the invaders'
French.
Cannot we treat our noble inheritance of literature and language
as scrupulously, and with as high a sense of their appertaining
to our national honour, as a Frenchman cherishes _his_ language,
_his_ literature? Cannot we study to leave our inheritance---as
the old Athenian put it temperately, 'not worse but a little
better than we found it'?
I think we can, and should. I shall close to-day, Gentlemen, with
the most modest of perorations. In my first lecture before you,
in January 1913, I quoted to you the artist in "Don Quixote" who,
being asked what animal he was painting, answered diffidently
'That is as it may turn out.'
The teaching of our language and literature is, after all, a new
thing and still experimental. The main tenets of those who, aware
of this, have worked on the scheme for a School of English in
Cambridge, the scheme recently passed by your Senate and
henceforth to be in operation, are three:--
_The first._ That literature cannot be divorced from life: that
(for example) you cannot understand Chaucer aright, unless you
have the background, unless you know the kind of men for whom
Chaucer wrote and the kind of men whom he made speak; that is the
_national_ side with which all our literature is concerned.
_The second._ Literature being so personal a thing, you cannot
understand it until you have some personal under-standing of the
men who wrote it. Donne is Donne; Swift, Swift; Pope, Pope;
Johnson, Johnson; Goldsmith, Goldsmith; Charles Lamb, Charles
Lamb; Carlyle, Carlyle. Until you have grasped those men, as men,
you cannot grasp their writings. That is the _personal_ side of
literary study, and as necessary as the other.
_The third._ That the writing and speaking of English is a living
art, to be practised and (if it may be) improved. That what these
great men have done is to hand us a grand patrimony; that they
lived to support us through the trial we are now enduring, and to
carry us through to great days to come. So shall our sons, now
fighting in France, have a language ready for the land they shall
recreate and repeople.
[Footnote 1: Donne's _Sermon II preached at Pauls upon Christmas
Day, in the Evening._ 1624.]