Applying this to literature, I note, but shall not insist here on
the fact--though fact it is--that the Greek and Roman 'classical'
writers (as we call them) laid more stress than has ever been
laid among the subsequent tribes of men upon the desirability of
getting all things into proportion, of seeing all life on a scale
of relative values. And the reason I shall not insist on this is
simply that better men have saved me the trouble.
I propose this morning to discuss the value of the classics to
students of English literature from, as the modern phrase goes, a
slightly different angle.
Reclining and looking up into that sky which is not too grandiose
an image for our own English Literature, you would certainly not
wish, Gentlemen, to see it as what it is not--as a cloth painted
on the flat. No more than you would choose the sky overarching
your life to be a close, hard, copper vault, would you choose
this literature of ours to resemble such a prison. I say nothing,
for the moment, of the thrill of comparing ours with other
constellations--of such a thrill as Blanco White's famous sonnet
imagines in Adam's soul when the first night descended on Eden
and
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! Creation widen'd in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd
Within thy beams, O sun!...
No: I simply picture you as desiring to realise _our own_
literature, its depths and values, mile above mile deeper and
deeper shining, with perchance a glimpse of a city celestial
beyond, or at whiles, on a ladder of values, of the angels--the
messengers--climbing and returning.
V
Well, now, I put it to you that without mental breeding, without
at least some sense of ancestry, an Englishman can hardly have
this perception of value, this vision. I put to you what I
posited in an earlier course of lectures, quoting Bagehot, that
while a knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer
of English, he should at least have a firm conviction that those
two languages existed. I refer you to a long passage which, in
one of those lectures, I quoted from Cardinal Newman to the
effect that for the last 3000 years the Western World has
been evolving a human society, having its bond _in a common
civilisation_--a society to which (let me add, by way of
footnote) Prussia today is firmly, though with great difficulty,
being tamed. There are, and have been, other civilisations in the
world --the Chinese, for instance; a huge civilisation,
stationary, morose, to us unattractive; 'but _this_
civilisation,' says Newman, 'together with the society which is
its creation and its home, is so distinctive and luminous in its
character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing in its
duration, and so utterly without rival upon the face of the
earth, that the association may fitly assume for itself the title
of "Human Society," and its civilisation the abstract term
"Civilisation".'
He goes on:
Looking, then, at the countries which surround the
Mediterranean Sea as a whole, I see them to be, from time
immemorial, the seat of an association of intellect and mind
such as deserves to be called the Intellect and Mind of the
Human Kind.
But I must refer you to his famous book "The Idea of a
University" to read at length how Newman, in that sinuous,
sinewy, Platonic style of his, works it out--the spread, through
Rome, even to our shores, of the civilisation which began in
Palestine and Greece.