[Footnote 1: The annual address to the students of the London Society
for the Extension of University Teaching, delivered at the Mansion
House, February 26th, 1887.]
When my friend Mr. Goschen invited me to discharge the duty which
has fallen to me this afternoon I confess that I complied with many
misgivings. He desired me to say something on the literary side of
education. Now, it is almost impossible--and I think those who know
most of literature will be readiest to agree with me--to say anything
new in recommendation of literature in a scheme of education. I have
felt, however, that Mr. Goschen has worked with such zeal and energy
for so many years on behalf of this good cause, that anybody whom he
considered able to render him any co-operation owed it to him in its
fullest extent. The Lord Mayor has been kind enough to say that I am
especially qualified to speak on English literature. I must, however,
remind the Lord Mayor that I have strayed from literature into the
region of politics; and I am not at all sure that such a journey
conduces to the aptness of one's judgment on literary subjects, or
adds much to the force of one's arguments on behalf of literary study.
Politics are a field where action is one long second-best, and where
the choice constantly lies between two blunders. Nothing can be
more unlike in aim, in ideals, in method, and in matter, than are
literature and politics. I have, however, determined to do the best
that I can; and I feel how great an honour it is to be invited to
partake in a movement which I do not hesitate to call one of the most
important of all those now taking place in English society.
What is the object of the movement? What do the promoters aim at? I
take it that what they design is to bring the very best teaching that
the country can afford, through the hands of the most thoroughly
competent men, within the reach of every class of the community. Their
object is to give to the many that sound, systematic, and methodical
knowledge, which has hitherto been the privilege of the few who can
afford the time and money to go to Oxford and Cambridge; to diffuse
the fertilising waters of intellectual knowledge from their great and
copious fountain-heads at the Universities by a thousand irrigating
channels over the whole length and breadth of our busy, indomitable
land. Gentlemen, this is a most important point. Goethe said that
nothing is more frightful than a teacher who only knows what his
scholars are intended to know. We may depend upon it that the man
who knows his own subject most thoroughly is most likely to excite
interest about it in the minds of other people. We hear, perhaps more
often than we like, that we live in a democratic age. It is true
enough, and I can conceive nothing more democratic than such a
movement as this, nothing which is more calculated to remedy defects
that are incident to democracy, more thoroughly calculated to raise
modern democracy to heights which other forms of government and older
orderings of society have never yet attained. No movement can be more
wisely democratic than one which seeks to give to the northern miner
or the London artisan knowledge as good and as accurate, though he
may not have so much of it, as if he were a student at Oxford or
Cambridge. Something of the same kind may be said of the new frequency
with which scholars of great eminence and consummate accomplishments,
like Jowett, Lang, Myers, Leaf, and others, bring all their
scholarship to bear, in order to provide for those who are not able,
or do not care, to read old classics in the originals, brilliant and
faithful renderings of them in our own tongue. Nothing but good, I am
persuaded, can come of all these attempts to connect learning with the
living forces of society, and to make industrial England a sharer in
the classic tradition of the lettered world.
I am well aware that there is an apprehension that the present
extraordinary zeal for education in all its forms--elementary,
secondary, and higher--may bear in its train some evils of its own. It
is said that before long nobody in England will be content to practise
a handicraft, and that every one will insist on being at least a
clerk. It is said that the moment is even already at hand when a great
deal of practical distress does and must result from this tendency. I
remember years ago that in the United States I heard something of the
same kind. All I can say is, that this tendency, if it exists, is sure
to right itself. In no case can the spread of so mischievous a notion
as that knowledge and learning ought not to come within reach of
handicraftsmen be attributed to literature. There is a familiar
passage in which Pericles, the great Athenian, describing the glory of
the community of which he was so far-shining a member, says, "We at
Athens are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes; we
cultivate the mind without loss of manliness." But then remember that
after all Athenian society rested on a basis of slavery. Athenian
citizens were able to pursue their love of the beautiful, and their
simplicity, and to cultivate their minds without loss of manliness,
because the drudgery and hard work and rude service of society were
performed by those who had no share in all these good things. With us,
happily, it is very different. We are all more or less upon a level.
Our object is--and it is that which in my opinion raises us infinitely
above the Athenian level--to bring the Periclean ideas of beauty and
simplicity and cultivation of the mind within the reach of those who
do the drudgery and the service and rude work of the world. And it can
be done--do not let us be afraid--it can be done without in the least
degree impairing the skill of our handicraftsmen or the manliness of
our national life. It can be done without blunting or numbing the
practical energies of our people.
I know they say that if you meddle with literature you are less
qualified to take your part in practical affairs. You run a risk of
being labelled a dreamer and a theorist. But, after all, if we take
the very highest form of all practical energy--the governing of the
country--all this talk is ludicrously untrue. I venture to say that in
the present Government [1887], including the Prime Minister, there are
three men at least who are perfectly capable of earning their bread as
men of letters. In the late Government, besides the Prime Minister,
there were also three men of letters, and I have never heard that
those three were greater simpletons than their neighbours. There is
a Commission now at work on that very important and abstruse
subject--the Currency. I am told that no one there displays so acute
an intelligence of the difficulties that are to be met, and so ready
an apprehension of the important arguments that are brought forward,
and the practical ends to be achieved, as the chairman of the
Commission, who is not what is called a practical man, but a man
of study, literature, theoretical speculation, and university
training.[1] Oh no, gentlemen, some of the best men of business in the
country are men who have had the best collegian's equipment, and are
the most accomplished bookmen.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Arthur Balfour.]
It is true that we cannot bring to London, with this movement, the
indefinable charm that haunts the grey and venerable quadrangles of
Oxford and Cambridge. We cannot take you into the stately halls, the
silent and venerable libraries, the solemn chapels, the studious
old-world gardens. We cannot surround you with all those elevated
memorials and sanctifying associations of scholars and poets, of
saints and sages, that march in glorious procession through the ages,
and make of Oxford and Cambridge a dream of music for the inward ear,
and of delight for the contemplative eye. We cannot bring all that to
you; but I hope, and I believe, it is the object of those who are more
intimately connected with the society than I have been, that every
partaker of the benefits of this society will feel himself and herself
in living connection with those two famous centres, and feel conscious
of the links that bind the modern to the older England. One of the
most interesting facts mentioned in your report this year is that last
winter four prizes of £10 each were offered in the mining district of
Northumberland, one each to the male and female student in every term
who should take the highest place in the examination, in order to
enable them to spend a month in Cambridge in the long vacation for the
purpose of carrying on in the laboratories and museums the work in
which they had been engaged in the winter at the local centre. That is
not a step taken by our society; but the University of Cambridge has
inspired and worked out the scheme, and I am not without hope that
from London some of those who attend these classes may be able to
realise in person the attractions and the associations of these two
great historic sites. One likes to think how poor scholars three or
four hundred years ago used to flock to Oxford, regardless of cold,
privation, and hardship, so that they might satisfy their hunger and
thirst for knowledge. I like to think of them in connection with this
movement. I like to think of them in connection with students like
those miners in Northumberland, whom I know well, and who are
mentioned in the report of the Cambridge Extension Society as, after
a day's hard work in the pit, walking four or five miles through cold
and darkness and rough roads to hear a lecture, and then walking
back again the same four or five miles. You must look for the same
enthusiasm, the same hunger and thirst for knowledge, that presided
over the foundation of the Universities many centuries ago, to carry
on this work, to strengthen and stimulate men's faith in knowledge,
their hopes from it, and their zeal for it.
Speaking now of the particular kind of knowledge of which I am going
to say a few words--how does literature fare in these important
operations? Last term, out of fifty-seven courses in the Cambridge
scheme, there were ten on literature: out of thirty-one of our
courses, seven were on literature. I am bound to say I think that
such a position for literature in the scheme is very reasonably
satisfactory. I have made some inquiries, since I knew that I was
going to speak here, in the great popular centres of industry in the
North and in Scotland as to the popularity of literature as a subject
of teaching, I find very much what I should have expected. The
professors all tell very much the same story, and this is, that it
is extremely hard to interest any considerable number of people in
subjects that seem to have no direct bearing upon the practical work
of everyday life. There is a disinclination to study literature for
its own sake, or to study anything which does not seem to have a
visible and direct influence upon the daily work of life. The nearest
approach to a taste for literature is a certain demand for instruction
in history with a little flavour of contemporary politics. In short,
the demand for instruction in literature is strictly moderate. That is
what men of experience tell me, and we have to recognise it, nor ought
we to be at all surprised. Mr. Goschen, when he spoke some years ago,
said there were three motives which might induce people to seek the
higher education. First, to obtain greater knowledge for bread-winning
purposes. From that point of view science would be most likely to feed
the classes. Secondly, the improvement of one's knowledge of political
economy, and history, and facts bearing upon the actual political work
and life of the day. Thirdly, was the desire of knowledge as a luxury
to brighten life and kindle thought. I am very much afraid that, in
the ordinary temper of our people, and the ordinary mode of looking at
life, the last of these motives savours a little of self-indulgence,
and sentimentality, and other objectionable qualities. There is a
great stir in the region of physical science at this moment, and it is
likely, as any one may see, to take a chief and foremost place in the
field of intellectual activity. After the severity with which science
was for so many ages treated by literature, we cannot wonder that
science now retaliates, now mightily exalts herself, and thrusts
literature down into the lower place. I only have to say on the
relative claims of science and literature what Dr Arnold said:--"If
one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children
might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to
the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. This,
however, I believe cannot be; wherefore, rather than have it the
principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that
the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles
set in the bright blue firmament" (Stanley's _Life of Arnold_, ii.
31). It is satisfactory that one may know something of these matters,
and yet not believe that the sun goes round the earth. But if there
is to be exclusion, I, for one, am not prepared to accept the rather
enormous pretensions that are nowadays sometimes made for physical
science as the be-all and end-all of education.
Next to this we know that there is a great stir on behalf of technical
and commercial education. The special needs of our time and country
compel us to pay a particular attention to this subject. Here
knowledge is business, and we shall never hold our industrial
pre-eminence, with all that hangs upon that pre-eminence, unless we
push on technical and commercial education with all our might. But
there is a third kind of knowledge, and that too, in its own way, is
business. There is the cultivation of the sympathies and imagination,
the quickening of the moral sensibilities, and the enlargement of the
moral vision. The great need in modern culture, which is scientific
in method, rationalistic in spirit, and utilitarian in purpose, is to
find some effective agency for cherishing within us the ideal. That
is the business and function of literature. Literature alone will not
make a good citizen; it will not make a good man. History affords too
many proofs that scholarship and learning by no means purge men of
acrimony, of vanity, of arrogance, of a murderous tenacity about
trifles. Mere scholarship and learning and the knowledge of books do
not by any means arrest and dissolve all the travelling acids of the
human system. Nor would I pretend for a moment that literature can be
any substitute for life and action. Burke said, "What is the education
of the generality of the world? Reading a parcel of books? No!
Restraint and discipline, examples of virtue and of justice, these are
what form the education of the world." That is profoundly true; it is
life that is the great educator. But the parcel of books, if they are
well chosen, reconcile us to this discipline; they interpret this
virtue and justice; they awaken within us the diviner mind, and rouse
us to a consciousness of what is best in others and ourselves.
As a matter of rude fact, there is much to make us question whether the
spread of literature, as now understood, does awaken the diviner mind.
The numbers of the books that are taken out from public libraries are
not all that we could wish. I am not going to inflict many figures on
you, but there is one set of these figures that distresses
booklovers,--I mean the enormous place that fiction occupies in the
books that are taken out. In one great town in the North prose fiction
forms 76 per cent of all the books lent. In another great town prose
fiction is 82 per cent; in a third 84 per cent; and in a fourth 67 per
cent. I had the curiosity to see what happens in the libraries of the
United States; and there--supposing the system of cataloguing and
enumeration to be the same--they are a trifle more serious in their
taste than we are; where our average is about 70 per cent, at a place
like Chicago it is only about 60 per cent. In Scotland, too, it ought to
be said that they have a better average in respect to prose fiction.
There is a larger demand for books called serious than in England. And I
suspect, though I do not know, that one reason why there is in Scotland
a greater demand for the more serious classes of literature than
fiction, is that in the Scotch Universities there are what we have not
in England--well-attended chairs of literature, systematically and
methodically studied. Do not let it be supposed that I at all underrate
the value of fiction. On the contrary, when a man has done a hard day's
work, what can he do better than fall to and read the novels of Walter
Scott, or the Brontes, or Mrs. Gaskell, or some of our living writers. I
am rather a voracious reader of fiction myself. I do not, therefore,
point to it as a reproach or as a source of discouragement, that fiction
takes so large a place in the objects of literary interest. I only
suggest that it is much too large, and we should be better pleased if it
sank to about 40 per cent, and what is classified as general literature
rose from 13 to 25 per cent.
There are other complaints of literature as an object of interest in
this country. I was reading the other day an essay by the late head of
my old college at Oxford, that very learned and remarkable man Mark
Pattison, who was a booklover if ever there was one. He complained
that the bookseller's bill in the ordinary English middle class family
is shamefully small. It appeared to him to be monstrous that a man
who is earning £1000 a year should spend less than £1 a week on
books--that is to say, less than a shilling in the pound per annum. I
know that Chancellors of the Exchequer take from us 8d. or 6d. in the
pound, and I am not sure that they always use it as wisely as if they
left us to spend it on books. Still, a shilling in the pound to be
spent on books by a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year,
or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more, I
think, than can be reasonably expected. A man does not really need
to have a great many books. Pattison said that nobody who respected
himself could have less than 1000 volumes. He pointed out that you can
stack 1000 octavo volumes in a bookcase that shall be 13 feet by 10
feet, and 6 inches deep, and that everybody has that small amount of
space at disposal. Still the point is not that men should have a great
many books, but that they should have the right ones, and that they
should use those that they have. We may all agree in lamenting
that there are so many houses--even some of considerable social
pretension--where you will not find a good atlas, a good dictionary,
or a good cyclopaedia of reference. What is still more lamentable, in
a good many more houses where these books are, they are never referred
to or opened. That is a very discreditable fact, because I defy
anybody to take up a single copy of the _Times_ newspaper and not come
upon something in it, upon which, if their interest in the affairs of
the day were active, intelligent, and alert as it ought to be, they
would consult an atlas, dictionary, or cyclopaedia of reference.
No sensible person can suppose for a single moment that everybody
is born with the ability for using books, for reading and studying
literature. Certainly not everybody is born with the capacity of being
a great scholar. All people are no more born great scholars like
Gibbon and Bentley, than they are all born great musicians like Handel
and Beethoven. What is much worse than that, many come into the world
with the incapacity of reading, just as they come into it with the
incapacity of distinguishing one tune from another. To them I have
nothing to say. Even the morning paper is too much for them. They can
only skim the surface even of that. I go further, and frankly admit
that the habit and power of reading with reflection, comprehension,
and memory all alert and awake, does not come at once to the
natural man any more than many other sovereign virtues come to that
interesting creature. What I do venture to press upon you is, that
it requires no preterhuman force of will in any young man or
woman--unless household circumstances are more than usually vexatious
and unfavourable--to get at least half an hour out of a solid busy day
for good and disinterested reading. Some will say that this is too
much to expect, and the first persons to say it, I venture to predict,
will be those who waste their time most. At any rate, if I cannot get
half an hour, I will be content with a quarter. Now, in half an hour I
fancy you can read fifteen or twenty pages of Burke; or you can read
one of Wordsworth's masterpieces--say the lines on Tintern; or
say, one-third--if a scholar, in the original, and if not, in a
translation--of a book of the Iliad or the Aeneid. I do not think that
I am filling the half-hour too full. But try for yourselves what you
can read in half an hour. Then multiply the half-hour by 365, and
consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year;
and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they would have given you
during all the days of your life.
I will not take up your time by explaining the various mechanical
contrivances and aids to successful study. They are not to be despised
by those who would extract the most from books, Many people think of
knowledge as of money. They would like knowledge, but cannot face the
perseverance and self-denial that go to the acquisition of it. The
wise student will do most of his reading with a pen or a pencil in his
hand.
He will not shrink from the useful toil of making abstracts and
summaries of what he is reading. Sir William Hamilton was a strong
advocate for underscoring books of study. "Intelligent underlining,"
he said, "gave a kind of abstract of an important work, and by the
use of different coloured inks to mark a difference of contents,
and discriminate the doctrinal from the historical or illustrative
elements of an argument or exposition, the abstract became an analysis
very serviceable for ready reference,"[1] This assumes, as Hamilton
said, that the book to be operated on is your own, and perhaps is
rather too elaborate a counsel of perfection for most of us. Again,
some great men--Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster was another, and
the great Lord Strafford was a third--always before reading a book
made a short, rough analysis of the questions which they expected to
be answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge, and
whither it would take them.
[Footnote 1: Veitch's _Life of Hamilton_, pp. 314, 392.]
"After glancing my eye," says Gibbon, "over the design and order of
a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had finished the task of
self-examination; till I had revolved in a solitary walk all that I
knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of
some particular chapter: I was then qualified to discern how much the
author added to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied
by the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition, of our
ideas."[1]
[Footnote 1: Dr. Smith's _Gibbon_, i. 64.]
I have sometimes tried that way of steadying and guiding attention;
and I commend it to you. I need not tell you that you will find that
most books worth reading once are worth reading twice, and--what
is most important of all--the masterpieces of literature are worth
reading a thousand times. It is a great mistake to think that because
you have read a masterpiece once or twice, or ten times, therefore you
have done with it. Because it is a masterpiece, you ought to live with
it, and make it part of your daily life. Another practice is that of
keeping a commonplace book, and transcribing into it what is striking
and interesting and suggestive. And if you keep it wisely, as Locke
has taught us, you will put every entry under a head, division, or
subdivision.[1] This Is an excellent practice for concentrating your
thought on the passage and making you alive to its real point and
significance. Here, however, the high authority of Gibbon is against
us. He refuses "strenuously to recommend." "The action of the pen," he
says, "will doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as on the
paper; but I much question whether the benefits of this laborious
method are adequate to the waste of time; and I must agree with Dr.
Johnson (_Idler_, No. 74) that 'what is twice read is commonly better
remembered than what is transcribed.'"[2]
[Footnote 1: "If I would put anything in my Common-place Book, I
find out a head to which I may refer it. Each head ought to be some
important and essential word to the matter in hand" (Locke's _Works_,
iii. 308, ed. 1801).]
[Footnote 2: This is for indexing purposes, but it is worth while to
go further and make a title for the passage extracted, indicating its
pith and purport.]
Various correspondents have asked me to say something about those
lists of a hundred books that have been circulating through the world
within the last few months. I have examined some of these lists with
considerable care, and whatever else may be said of them--and I speak
of them with deference and reserve, because men for whom one must
have a great regard have compiled them--they do not seem to me to be
calculated either to create or satisfy a wise taste for literature
in any very worthy sense. To fill a man with a hundred parcels of
heterogeneous scraps from the _Mahabharata_, and the _Sheking_, down
to _Pickwick_ and _White's Selborne_, may pass the time, but I cannot
perceive how it would strengthen or instruct or delight. For instance,
it is a mistake to think that every book that has a great name in the
history of books or of thought is worth reading. Some of the most
famous books are least worth reading. Their fame was due to their
doing something that needed in their day to be done. The work done,
the virtue of the book expires. Again, I agree with those who say
that the steady working down one of these lists would end in the
manufacture of that obnoxious product--the prig. A prig has been
defined as an animal that is overfed for its size. I think that these
bewildering miscellanies would lead to an immense quantity of that
kind of overfeeding. The object of reading is not to dip into
everything that even wise men have ever written. In the words of one
of the most winning writers of English that ever existed--Cardinal
Newman--the object of literature in education is to open the mind, to
correct it, to refine it, to enable it to comprehend and digest its
knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application,
flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address, and
expression. These are the objects of that intellectual perfection
which a literary education is destined to give. I will not venture on
a list of a hundred books, but will recommend you instead to one book
well worthy of your attention. Those who are curious as to what they
should read in the region of pure literature will do well to peruse
Mr. Frederic Harrison's admirable, volume, called _The Choice of
Books_. You will find there as much wise thought, eloquently and
brilliantly put, as in any volume of its size and on its subject,
whether it be in the list of a hundred or not.
Let me pass to another topic. We are often asked whether it is best to
study subjects, or authors, or books. Well, I think that is like most
of the stock questions with which the perverse ingenuity of mankind
torments itself. There is no universal and exclusive answer. My own
answer is a very plain one. It is sometimes best to study books,
sometimes authors, and sometimes subjects; but at all times it is best
to study authors, subjects, and books in connection with one another.
Whether you make your first approach from interest in an author or in
a book, the fruit will be only half gathered if you leave off without
new ideas and clearer lights both on the man and the matter. One of
the noblest masterpieces in the literature of civil and political
wisdom is to be found in Burke's three performances on the American
war--his speech on Taxation in 1774, on Conciliation in 1775, and his
letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. I can only repeat to you
what I have been saying in print and out of it for a good many years,
and what I believe more firmly as observation is enlarged by time and
occasion, that these three pieces are the most perfect manual in all
literature for the study of great affairs, whether for the purpose of
knowledge or action. "They are an example," as I have said before
now, "an example without fault of all the qualities which the critic,
whether a theorist or an actor, of great political situations should
strive by night and by day to possess. If their subject were as remote
as the quarrel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between
Rome and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which the world owes the
opportunity of one of the most important of political experiments, we
should still have everything to learn from the author's treatment; the
vigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide illumination
from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine
feeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, the
large and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, the
vision, the noble temper." No student worthy of the name will lay
aside these pieces, so admirable in their literary expression, so
important for history, so rich in the lessons of civil wisdom, until
he has found out something from other sources as to the circumstances
from which such writings arose, and as to the man whose resplendent
genius inspired them. There are great personalities like Burke who
march through history with voices like a clarion trumpet and something
like the glitter of swords in their hands. They are as interesting as
their work. Contact with them warms and kindles the mind. You will not
be content, after reading one of these pieces, without knowing the
character and personality of the man who conceived it, and until you
have spent an hour or two--and an hour or two will go a long way with
Burke still fresh in your mind--over other compositions in political
literature, over Bacon's civil pieces, or Machiavelli's _Prince_, and
others in the same order of thought.
This points to the right answer to another question that is constantly
asked. We are constantly asked whether desultory reading is among
things lawful and permitted. May we browse at large in a library, as
Johnson said, or is it forbidden to open a book without a definite aim
and fixed expectations? I am for a compromise. If a man has once got
his general point of view, if he has striven with success to place
himself at the centre, what follows is of less consequence. If he has
got in his head a good map of the country, he may ramble at large with
impunity. If he has once well and truly laid the foundations of a
methodical, systematic habit of mind, what he reads will find its way
to its proper place. If his intellect is in good order, he will find
in every quarter something to assimilate and something that will
nourish.
Next I am going to deal with another question, with which perhaps I
ought to have started. What is literature? It has often been defined.
Emerson says it is a record of the best thoughts. "By literature,"
says another author, "we mean the written thoughts and feelings of
intelligent men and women arranged in a way that shall give pleasure
to the reader." A third account is that "the aim of a student of
literature is to know the best that has been thought in the world."
Definitions always appear to me in these things to be in the nature
of vanity. I feel that the attempt to be compact in the definition of
literature ends in something that is rather meagre, partial, starved,
and unsatisfactory. I turn to the answer given by a great French
writer to a question not quite the same, viz. "What is a classic?"
Literature consists of a whole body of classics in the true sense of
the word, and a classic, as Sainte-Beuve defines him, is an "author
who has enriched the human mind, who has really added to its treasure,
who has got it to take a step further; who has discovered some
unequivocal moral truth, or penetrated to some eternal passion,
in that heart of man where it seemed as though all were known and
explored, who has produced his thought, or his observation, or his
invention under some form, no matter what, so it be great, large,
acute, and reasonable, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to
all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself the style
of everybody,--in a style that Is at once new and antique, and is the
contemporary of all the ages." Another Frenchman, Doudan, who died in
1872, has an excellent passage on the same subject:--
"The man of letters properly so called is a rather singular being:
he does not look at things exactly with his own eyes, he has not
impressions of his own, we could not discover the imagination with
which he started. 'Tis a tree on which have been grafted Homer,
Virgil, Milton, Dante, Petrarch; hence have grown peculiar flowers
which are not natural, and yet which are not artificial. Study has
given to the man of letters something of the reverie of René; with
Homer he has looked upon the plain of Troy, and there has remained
in his brain some of the light of the Grecian sky; he has taken a
little of the pensive lustre of Virgil, as he wanders by his side
on the slopes of the Aventine; he sees the world as Milton saw it,
through the grey mists of England, as Dante saw it, through the
clear and glowing light of Italy. Of all these colours he composes
for himself a colour that is unique and his own; from all these
glasses by which his life passes on its journey to the real
world, there is formed a special tint, and that is what makes the
imagination of men of letters."
At a single hearing you may not take all that in; but if you should
have any opportunity of recurring to it, you will find this a
satisfactory, full, and instructive account of what is a classic, and
will find in it a full and satisfactory account of what those who have
thought most on literature hope to get from it, and most would
desire to confer upon others by it. Literature consists of till the
books--and they are not so many--where moral truth and human passion
are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.
My notion of the literary student is one who through books explores
the strange voyages of man's moral reason, the impulses of the human
heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken human ideals
of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting
fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue. Poets, dramatists,
humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers,
the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political
orators--they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know
man and to know human nature. This is what makes literature, rightly
sifted and selected and rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling
that it is so often and so erroneously supposed to be, but a
proper instrument for a systematic training of the imagination and
sympathies, and of a genial and varied moral sensibility.
From this point of view let me remind you that books are not the
products of accident and caprice. As Goethe said, if you would
understand an author, you must understand his age. The same thing is
just as true of a book. If you would fully comprehend it, you must
know the age. There is an order; there are causes and relations
between great compositions and the societies in which they have
emerged. Just as the naturalist strives to understand and to explain
the distribution of plants and animals over the surface of the globe,
to connect their presence or their absence with the great geological,
climatic, and oceanic changes, so the student of literature, if he be
wise, undertakes an ordered and connected survey of ideas, of tastes,
of sentiments, of imagination, of humour, of invention, as they affect
and as they are affected by the ever changing experiences of human
nature, and the manifold variations that time and circumstances are
incessantly working in human society.
Those who are possessed, and desire to see others possessed, by that
conception of literary study must watch with the greatest sympathy and
admiration the efforts of those who are striving so hard, and, I hope,
so successfully, to bring the systematic and methodical study of our
own literature, in connection with other literatures, among subjects
for teaching and examination in the Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge. I regard those efforts with the liveliest interest and
sympathy. Everybody agrees that an educated man ought to have a
general notion of the course of the great outward events of European
history. So, too, an educated man ought to have a general notion of
the course of all those inward thoughts and moods which find their
expression in literature. I think that in cultivating the study of
literature, as I have perhaps too laboriously endeavoured to define
it, you will be cultivating the most important side of history.
Knowledge of it gives stability and substance to character. It
furnishes a view of the ground we stand on. It builds up a solid
backing of precedent and experience. It teaches us where we are. It
protects us against imposture and surprise.
Before closing I should like to say one word upon the practice of
composition. I have suffered, by the chance of life, many things from
the practice of composition. It has been my lot, I suppose, to read
more unpublished work than any one else in this room.
There is an idea, and, I venture to think, a very mistaken idea, that
you cannot have a taste for literature unless you are yourself an
author. I make bold entirely to demur to that proposition. It is
practically most mischievous, and leads scores and even hundreds of
people to waste their time in the most unprofitable manner that the
wit of man can devise, on work in which they can no more achieve even
the most moderate excellence than they can compose a Ninth Symphony
or paint a Transfiguration. It Is a terrible error to suppose that
because one is happily able to relish "Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted
idyll, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie," therefore a solemn mission
calls you to run off to write bad verse at the Lakes or the Isle
of Wight. I beseech you not all to turn to authorship. I will even
venture, with all respect to those who are teachers of literature,
to doubt the excellence and utility of the practice of over-much
essay-writing and composition. I have very little faith in rules of
style, though I have an unbounded faith in the virtue of cultivating
direct and precise expression. But you must carry on the operation
inside the mind, and not merely by practising literary deportment on
paper. It is not everybody who can command the mighty rhythm of the
greatest masters of human speech. But every one can make reasonably
sure that he knows what he means, and whether he has found the right
word. These are internal operations, and are not forwarded by writing
for writing's sake. Everybody must be urgent for attention to
expression, if that attention be exercised in the right way. It has
been said a million times that the foundation of right expression in
speech or writing is sincerity. That is as true now as it has ever
been. Right expression is a part of character. As somebody has
said, by learning to speak with precision, you learn to think with
correctness; and the way to firm and vigorous speech lies through the
cultivation of high and noble sentiments. So far as my observation has
gone, men will do better if they seek precision by studying carefully
and with an open mind and a vigilant eye the great models of writing,
than by excessive practice of writing on their own account.
Much might here be said on what is one of the most important of all
the sides of literary study. I mean its effect as helping to preserve
the dignity and the purity of the English language. That noble
instrument has never been exposed to such dangers as those which
beset it to-day. Domestic slang, scientific slang, pseudo-aesthetic
affectations, hideous importations from American newspapers, all bear
down with horrible force upon the glorious fabric which the genius of
our race has reared. I will say nothing of my own on this pressing
theme, but will read to you a passage of weight and authority from the
greatest master of mighty and beautiful speech.
"Whoever in a state," said Milton, "knows how wisely to form the
manners of men and to rule them at home and in war with excellent
institutes, him in the first place, above others, I should esteem
worthy of all honour. But next to him the man who strives to establish
in maxims and rules the method and habit of speaking and writing
received from a good age of the nation, and, as it were, to fortify
the same round with a kind of wall, the daring to overleap which let a
law only short of that of Romulus be used to prevent.... The one, as I
believe, supplies noble courage and intrepid counsels against an
enemy invading the territory. The other takes to himself the task of
extirpating and defeating, by means of a learned detective police of
ears, and a light band of good authors, that barbarism which makes
large inroads upon the minds of men, and is a destructive intestine
enemy of genius. Nor is it to be considered of small consequence what
language, pure or corrupt, a people has, or what is their customary
degree of propriety in speaking it.... For, let the words of a country
be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by
wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by no light
indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent,
idly-yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of
servility? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, any
state, did not at least flourish in a middling degree as long as its
own liking and care for its language lasted."[1]
[Footnote 1: Letter to Bonmattei, from Florence, 1638.]
The probabilities are that we are now coming to an epoch of a quieter
style. There have been in our generation three strong masters in the
aft of prose writing. There was, first of all, Carlyle, there was
Macaulay, and there is Mr. Raskin. These are all giants, and they have
the rights of giants. But I do not believe that a greater misfortune
can befall the students who attend classes here, than that they should
strive to write like any one of these three illustrious men. I think
it is the worst thing that can happen to them. They can never attain
to the high mark which they have set before themselves. It Is not
everybody who can bend the bow of Ulysses, and most men only do
themselves a mischief by trying to bend it. If we are now on our way
to a quieter style, I am not sorry for it. Truth is quiet. Milton's
phrase ever lingers in our minds as one of imperishable beauty--where
he regrets that he is drawn by I know not what, from beholding the
bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful
studies. Moderation and judgment are, for most purposes, more than the
flash and the glitter even of the genius. I hope that your professors
of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate that golden art--the steadfast
use of a language in which truth can be told; a speech that is
strong by natural force, and not merely effective by declamation; an
utterance without trick, without affectation, without mannerisms,
without any of that excessive ambition which overleaps itself as
disastrously in prose writing as in so many other things.
I will detain you no longer. I hope that I have made it clear that we
conceive the end of education on its literary side to be to make a man
and not a cyclopaedia, to make a citizen and not an album of elegant
extracts. Literature does not end with knowledge of forms, with
inventories of books and authors, with finding the key of rhythm, with
the varying measure of the stanza, or the changes from the involved
and sonorous periods of the seventeenth century down to the _staccato_
of the nineteenth, or all the rest of the technicalities of
scholarship. Do not think I contemn these. They are all good things to
know, but they are not ends in themselves. The intelligent man, says
Plato, will prize those studies which result in his soul getting
soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and he will less value the
others. Literature is one of the instruments, and one of the most
powerful instruments, for forming character for giving us men
and women armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with
steadfastness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit and
public virtue of which it has been well said that they are the
brightest ornaments of the mind of man. Bacon is right, as he
generally is, when he bids us read not to contradict and refute, nor
to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but
to weigh and to consider. Yes, let us read to weigh and to consider.
In the times before us that promise or threaten deep political,
economical, and social controversy, what we need to do is to induce
our people to weigh and consider. We want them to cultivate energy
without impatience, activity without restlessness, inflexibility
without ill-humour. I am not going to preach to you any artificial
stoicism. I am not going to preach to you any indifference to money,
or to the pleasures of social intercourse, or to the esteem and
good-will of our neighbours, or to any other of the consolations and
necessities of life. But, after all, the thing that matters most, both
for happiness and for duty, is that we should strive habitually to
live with wise thoughts and right feelings. Literature helps us more
than other studies to this most blessed companionship of wise thoughts
and right feelings, and so I have taken this opportunity of earnestly
commending it to your interest and care.