But let us begin with the first word, '_Value_'--'The _Value_ of
Greek and Latin in English Literature.' What do I mean by
'Value'? Well, I use it, generally, in the sense of 'worth'; but
with a particular meaning, or shade of meaning, too. And, this
particular meaning is not the particular meaning intended (as I
suppose) by men of commerce who, on news of a friend's death,
fall a-musing and continue musing until the fire kindles, and
they ask 'What did So-and-so die worth?' or sometimes, more
wisely than they know, 'What did poor old So-and-so die worth?'
or again, more colloquially, 'What did So-and-so "cut up" for?'
Neither is it that which more disinterested economists used to
teach; men never (I fear me) loved, but anyhow lost awhile, who
for my green unknowing youth, at Thebes or Athens--growing older
I tend to forget which is, or was, which--defined the Value of a
thing as its 'purchasing power' which the market translates into
'price.' For--to borrow a phrase which I happened on, the other
day, with delight, in the Introduction to a translation of
Lucian--there may be forms of education less paying than the
commercial and yet better worth paying for; nay, above payment or
computation in price[1].
No: the particular meaning I use to-day is that which artists use
when they talk of painting or of music. To see things, near or
far, in their true perspective and proportions; to judge them
through distance; and fetching them back, to reproduce them in
art so proportioned comparatively, so rightly adjusted, that they
combine to make a particular and just perspective: that is to
give things their true _Values._
Suppose yourself reclining on a bank on a clear day, looking up
into the sky and watching the ascent of a skylark while you
listen to his song. That is a posture in which several poets of
repute have placed themselves from time to time: so we need not
be ashamed of it. Well, you see the atmosphere reaching up and
up, mile upon mile. There are no milestones planted there. But,
wave on wave perceptible, the atmosphere stretches up through
indeterminate distances; and according as your painter of the sky
can translate these distances, he gives his sky what is called
_Value._
You listen to the skylark's note rising, spiral by spiral, on
'the very jet of earth':
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardour, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day:
and you long for the musical gift to follow up and up the
delicate degrees of distance and thread the notes back as the
bird ascending drops them--on a thread, as it were, of graduated
beads, half music and half dew:
That was the chirp of Ariel
You heard, as overhead it flew,
The farther going more to dwell
And wing our green to wed our blue;
But whether note of joy, or knell,
Not his own Father-singer knew;
Nor yet can any mortal tell,
Save only how it shivers through;
The breast of us a sounded shell,
The blood of us a lighted dew.
Well in music, in painting, this graduating which gives right
proportion and, with proportion, a sense of distance, of
atmosphere, is called _Value._ Let us, for a minute or two, assay
this particular meaning of Value upon life and literature, and
first upon life, or, rather upon one not negligible facet of
life.
I suppose that if an ordinary man of my age were asked which has
better helped him to bear the burs of life--religion or a sense
of humour--he would, were he quite honest, be gravelled for an
answer. Now the best part of a sense of humour, as you know
without my telling you, consists in a sense of proportion; a
habit, abiding and prompt at command, of seeing all human,
affairs in their just perspective, so that its happy possessor at
once perceives anything odd or distorted or overblown to be an
excrescence, a protuberance, a swelling, literally a _humour_:
and the function of Thalia, the Comic Spirit, as you may read in
Meredith's "Essay on Comedy," is just to prick these humours. I
will but refer you to Meredith's "Essay," and here cite you the
words of an old schoolmaster:
It would seem to be characteristic of the same mind to appreciate
the beauty of ideas in just proportion and harmonious relation to
each other, and the absurdity of the same ideas when distorted or
brought into incongruous juxtaposition. The exercise of this
sense of humour ... compels the mind to form a picture to itself,
accompanied by pleasurable emotion; and what is this but setting
the imagination to work, though in topsy-turvy fashion? Nay, in
such a case, imagination plays a double part, since it is only by
instantaneous comparison with ideal fitness and proportion
that it can grasp at full force the grotesqueness of their
contraries[2].
Let us play with an example for one moment. A child sees such an
excrescence, such an offence upon proportion, in an immoderately
long nose. He is apt to call attention to it on the visage of a
visitor: it intrigues him in Perrault's 'Prince Charming' and
many a fairy tale: it amuses him in Lear's "Book of Nonsense":
There was an old man with a Nose,
Who said 'If you choose to suppose
That my nose is too long
You are certainly wrong'--
This old man he detects as lacking sense of proportion, sense of
humour. Pass from the child to the working-man as we know him. A
few weeks ago, a lady--featured, as to nose, on the side of
excess--was addressing a North Country audience on the Economic
Position of Women after the War. Said she, 'There won't be men to
go round.' Said a voice 'Eh, but they'll _have to,_ Miss!' Pass
from this rudimentary criticism to high talent employed on the
same subject, and you get "Cyrano de Bergerac." Pass to genius,
to Milton, and you find the elephant amusing Adam and Eve in
Paradise, and doing his best:
the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis.
Milton, like the elephant, jokes with difficulty, but he, too, is
using all his might.
I have illustrated, crudely enough, how a sense of things in
their right values will help us on one side of our dealings with
life. But truly it helps us on every side. This was what Plato
meant when he said that a philosopher must see things as they
relatively are within his horizon--[Greek: o synoptikos
dialektikos]. And for this it was that an English poet praised
Sophocles as one
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
And this of course is what Dean Inge meant when, the other day,
in a volume of "Cambridge Essays on Education," he reminded us,
for a sensible commonplace, that 'The wise man is he who knows
the relative values of things.'