his wish would be answered, he supplicated, with a tender human sentiment,
as he wandered over the islands of the Ægean and the Asian coasts, that
those who had known and loved him would cherish his memory when he was
away. Unlike the proud boast of the Roman poet, if he spoke it in earnest,
“Exegi monumentum ære perennius,” he did but indulge the hope that one,
whose coming had been expected with pleasure, might excite regret when he
had departed, and be rewarded by the sympathy and praise of his friends
even in the presence of other minstrels. A set of verses remains, which is
ascribed to him, in which he addresses the Delian women in the tone of
feeling which I have described. “Farewell to you all,” he says, “and
remember me in time to come, and when any one of men on earth, a stranger
from far, shall inquire of you, O maidens, who is the sweetest of
minstrels here about, and in whom do you most delight? then make answer
modestly, It is a blind man, and he lives in steep Chios.”
The great poet remained unknown for some centuries,—that is, unknown to
what we call fame. His verses were cherished by his countrymen, they might
be the secret delight of thousands, but they were not collected into a
volume, nor viewed as a whole, nor made a subject of criticism. At length
an Athenian Prince took upon him the task of gathering together the
scattered fragments of a genius which had not aspired to immortality, of
reducing them to writing, and of fitting them to be the text-book of
ancient education. Henceforth the vagrant ballad-singer, as he might be
thought, was submitted, to his surprise, to a sort of literary
canonization, and was invested with the office of forming the young mind
of Greece to noble thoughts and bold deeds. To be read in Homer soon
became the education of a gentleman; and a rule, recognized in her free
age, remained as a tradition even in the times of her degradation.
Xenophon introduces to us a youth who knew both Iliad and Odyssey by
heart; Dio witnesses that they were some of the first books put into the
hands of boys; and Horace decided that they taught the science of life
better than Stoic or Academic. Alexander the Great nourished his
imagination by the scenes of the Iliad. As time went on, other poets were
associated with Homer in the work of education, such as Hesiod and the
Tragedians. The majestic lessons concerning duty and religion, justice and
providence, which occur in Æschylus and Sophocles, belong to a higher
school than that of Homer; and the verses of Euripides, even in his
lifetime, were so familiar to Athenian lips and so dear to foreign ears,
that, as is reported, the captives of Syracuse gained their freedom at the
price of reciting them to their conquerors.
Such poetry may be considered oratory also, since it has so great a power
of persuasion; and the alliance between these two gifts had existed from
the time that the verses of Orpheus had, according to the fable, made
woods and streams and wild animals to follow him about. Soon, however,
Oratory became the subject of a separate art, which was called Rhetoric,
and of which the Sophists were the chief masters. Moreover, as Rhetoric
was especially political in its nature, it presupposed or introduced the
cultivation of History; and thus the pages of Thucydides became one of the
special studies by which Demosthenes rose to be the first orator of
Greece.
But it is needless to trace out further the formation of the course of
liberal education; it is sufficient to have given some specimens in
illustration of it. The studies, which it was found to involve, were four
principal ones, Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, and Mathematics; and the science
of Mathematics, again, was divided into four, Geometry, Arithmetic,
Astronomy, and Music; making in all seven, which are known by the name of
the Seven Liberal Arts. And thus a definite school of intellect was
formed, founded on ideas and methods of a distinctive character, and (as
we may say) of the highest and truest character, as far as they went, and
which gradually associated in one, and assimilated, and took possession
of, that multitude of nations which I have considered to represent
mankind, and to possess the _orbis terrarum_.
When we pass from Greece to Rome, we are met with the common remark, that
Rome produced little that was original, but borrowed from Greece. It is
true; Terence copied from Menander, Virgil from Homer, Hesiod, and
Theocritus; and Cicero professed merely to reproduce the philosophy of
Greece. But, granting its truth ever so far, I do but take it as a proof
of the sort of instinct which has guided the course of Civilization. The
world was to have certain intellectual teachers, and no others; Homer and
Aristotle, with the poets and philosophers who circle round them, were to
be the schoolmasters of all generations, and therefore the Latins, falling
into the law on which the world’s education was to be carried on, so added
to the classical library as not to reverse or interfere with what had
already been determined. And there was the more meaning in this
arrangement, when it is considered that Greek was to be forgotten during
many centuries, and the tradition of intellectual training to be conveyed
through Latin; for thus the world was secured against the consequences of
a loss which would have changed the character of its civilization. I think
it very remarkable, too, how soon the Latin writers became text-books in
the boys’ schools. Even to this day Shakespeare and Milton are not studied
in our course of education; but the poems of Virgil and Horace, as those
of Homer and the Greek authors in an earlier age, were in schoolboys’
satchels not much more than a hundred years after they were written.
I need not go on to show at length that they have preserved their place in
the system of education in the _orbis terrarum_, and the Greek writers
with them or through them, down to this day. The induction of centuries
has often been made. Even in the lowest state of learning the tradition
was kept up. St. Gregory the Great, whose era, not to say whose influence,
is often considered especially unfavourable to the old literature, was
himself well versed in it, encouraged purity of Latinity in his court, and
is said figuratively by the contemporary historian of his life to have
supported the hall of the Apostolic See upon the columns of the Seven
Liberal Arts. In the ninth century, when the dark age was close at hand,
we still hear of the cultivation, with whatever success (according of
course to the opportunities of the times, but I am speaking of the nature
of the studies, not of the proficiency of the students), the cultivation
of Music, Dialectics, Rhetoric, Grammar, Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics,
and Geometry; of the supremacy of Horace in the schools, “and the great
Virgil, Sallust, and Statius.” In the thirteenth or following centuries,
of “Virgil, Lucian, Statius, Ovid, Livy, Sallust, Cicero, and Quintilian;”
and after the revival of literature in the commencement of the modern era,
we find St. Carlo Borromeo enjoining the use of works of Cicero, Ovid,
Virgil, and Horace.(33)
5.
I pass thus cursorily over the series of informations which history gives
us on the subject, merely with a view of recalling to your memory,
Gentlemen, and impressing upon you the fact, that the literature of
Greece, continued into, and enriched by, the literature of Rome, together
with the studies which it involves, has been the instrument of education,
and the food of civilization, from the first times of the world down to
this day;—and now we are in a condition to answer the question which
thereupon arises, when we turn to consider, by way of contrast, the
teaching which is characteristic of Universities. How has it come to pass
that, although the genius of Universities is so different from that of the
schools which preceded them, nevertheless the course of study pursued in
those schools was not superseded in the middle ages by those more
brilliant sciences which Universities introduced? It might have seemed as
if Scholastic Theology, Law, and Medicine would have thrown the Seven
Liberal Arts into the shade, but in the event they failed to do so. I
consider the reason to be, that the authority and function of the monastic
and secular schools, as supplying to the young the means of education, lay
deeper than in any appointment of Charlemagne, who was their nominal
founder, and were based in the special character of that civilization
which is so intimately associated with Christianity, that it may even be
called the soil out of which Christianity grew. The medieval sciences,
great as is their dignity and utility, were never intended to supersede
that more real and proper cultivation of the mind which is effected by the
study of the liberal Arts; and, when certain of these sciences did in fact
go out of their province and did attempt to prejudice the traditional
course of education, the encroachment was in matter of fact resisted.
There were those in the middle age, as John of Salisbury, who vigorously
protested against the extravagances and usurpations which ever attend the
introduction of any great good whatever, and which attended the rise of
the peculiar sciences of which Universities were the seat; and, though
there were times when the old traditions seemed to be on the point of
failing, somehow it has happened that they have never failed; for the
instinct of Civilization and the common sense of Society prevailed, and
the danger passed away, and the studies which seemed to be going out
gained their ancient place, and were acknowledged, as before, to be the
best instruments of mental cultivation, and the best guarantees for
intellectual progress.
And this experience of the past we may apply to the circumstances in which
we find ourselves at present; for, as there was a movement against the
Classics in the middle age, so has there been now. The truth of the
Baconian method for the purposes for which it was created, and its
inestimable services and inexhaustible applications in the interests of
our material well-being, have dazzled the imaginations of men, somewhat in
the same way as certain new sciences carried them away in the age of
Abelard; and since that method does such wonders in its own province, it
is not unfrequently supposed that it can do as much in any other province
also. Now, Bacon himself never would have so argued; he would not have
needed to be reminded that to advance the useful arts is one thing, and to
cultivate the mind another. The simple question to be considered is, how
best to strengthen, refine, and enrich the intellectual powers; the
perusal of the poets, historians, and philosophers of Greece and Rome will
accomplish this purpose, as long experience has shown; but that the study
of the experimental sciences will do the like, is proved to us as yet by
no experience whatever.
Far indeed am I from denying the extreme attractiveness, as well as the
practical benefit to the world at large, of the sciences of Chemistry,
Electricity, and Geology; but the question is not what department of study
contains the more wonderful facts, or promises the more brilliant
discoveries, and which is in the higher and which in an inferior rank; but
simply which out of all provides the most robust and invigorating
discipline for the unformed mind. And I conceive it is as little
disrespectful to Lord Bacon to prefer the Classics in this point of view
to the sciences which have grown out of his philosophy as it would be
disrespectful to St. Thomas in the middle ages to have hindered the study
of the Summa from doing prejudice to the Faculty of Arts. Accordingly, I
anticipate that, as in the middle ages both the teaching and the
government of the University remained in the Faculty of Arts, in spite of
the genius which created or illustrated Theology and Law, so now too,
whatever be the splendour of the modern philosophy, the marvellousness of
its disclosures, the utility of its acquisitions, and the talent of its
masters, still it will not avail in the event, to detrude classical
literature and the studies connected with it from the place which they
have held in all ages in education.
Such, then, is the course of reflection obviously suggested by the act in
which we have been lately engaged, and which we are now celebrating. In
the nineteenth century, in a country which looks out upon a new world, and
anticipates a coming age, we have been engaged in opening the Schools
dedicated to the studies of polite literature and liberal science, or what
are called the Arts, as a first step towards the establishment on Catholic
ground of a Catholic University. And while we thus recur to Greece and
Athens with pleasure and affection, and recognize in that famous land the
source and the school of intellectual culture, it would be strange indeed
if we forgot to look further south also, and there to bow before a more
glorious luminary, and a more sacred oracle of truth, and the source of
another sort of knowledge, high and supernatural, which is seated in
Palestine. Jerusalem is the fountain-head of religious knowledge, as
Athens is of secular. In the ancient world we see two centres of
illumination, acting independently of each other, each with its own
movement, and at first apparently without any promise of convergence.
Greek civilization spreads over the East, conquering in the conquests of
Alexander, and, when carried captive into the West, subdues the conquerors
who brought it thither. Religion, on the other hand, is driven from its
own aboriginal home to the North and West by reason of the sins of the
people who were in charge of it, in a long course of judgments and plagues
and persecutions. Each by itself pursues its career and fulfils its
mission; neither of them recognizes, nor is recognized by the other. At
length the Temple of Jerusalem is rooted up by the armies of Titus, and
the effete schools of Athens are stifled by the edict of Justinian. So
pass away the ancient Voices of religion and learning; but they are
silenced only to revive more gloriously and perfectly elsewhere. Hitherto
they came from separate sources, and performed separate works. Each leaves
an heir and successor in the West, and that heir and successor is one and
the same. The grace stored in Jerusalem, and the gifts which radiate from
Athens, are made over and concentrated in Rome. This is true as a matter
of history. Rome has inherited both sacred and profane learning; she has
perpetuated and dispensed the traditions of Moses and David in the
supernatural order, and of Homer and Aristotle in the natural. To separate
those distinct teachings, human and divine, which meet in Rome, is to
retrograde; it is to rebuild the Jewish Temple and to plant anew the
groves of Academus.
6.
On this large subject, however, on which I might say much, time does not
allow me to enter. To show how sacred learning and profane are dependent
on each other, correlative and mutually complementary, how faith operates
by means of reason, and reason is directed and corrected by faith, is
really the subject of a distinct lecture. I would conclude, then, with
merely congratulating you, Gentlemen, on the great undertaking which we
have so auspiciously commenced. Whatever be its fortunes, whatever its
difficulties, whatever its delays, I cannot doubt at all that the
encouragement which it has already received, and the measure of success
which it has been allotted, are but a presage and an anticipation of a
gradual advance towards its completion, in such times and such manner as
Providence shall appoint. For myself, I have never had any misgiving about
it, because I had never known anything of it before the time when the Holy
See had definitely decided upon its prosecution. It is my happiness to
have no cognizance of the anxieties and perplexities of venerable and holy
prelates, or the discussions of experienced and prudent men, which
preceded its definitive recognition on the part of the highest
ecclesiastical authority. It is my happiness to have no experience of the
time when good Catholics despaired of its success, distrusted its
expediency, or even felt an obligation to oppose it. It has been my
happiness that I have never been in controversy with persons in this
country external to the Catholic Church, nor have been forced into any
direct collision with institutions or measures which rest on a foundation
hostile to Catholicism. No one can accuse me of any disrespect towards
those whose principles or whose policy I disapprove; nor am I conscious of
any other aim than that of working in my own place, without going out of
my way to offend others. If I have taken part in the undertaking which has
now brought us together, it has been because I believed it was a great
work, great in its conception, great in its promise, and great in the
authority from which it proceeds. I felt it to be so great that I did not
dare to incur the responsibility of refusing to take part in it.
How far indeed, and how long, I am to be connected with it, is another
matter altogether. It is enough for one man to lay only one stone of so
noble and grand an edifice; it is enough, more than enough for me, if I do
so much as merely begin, what others may more hopefully continue. One only
among the sons of men has carried out a perfect work, and satisfied and
exhausted the mission on which He came. One alone has with His last breath
said “Consummatum est.” But all who set about their duties in faith and
hope and love, with a resolute heart and a devoted will, are able, weak
though they be, to do what, though incomplete, is imperishable. Even their
failures become successes, as being necessary steps in a course, and as
terms (so to say) in a long series, which will at length fulfil the object
which they propose. And they will unite themselves in spirit, in their
humble degree, with those real heroes of Holy Writ and ecclesiastical
history, Moses, Elias, and David, Basil, Athanasius, and Chrysostom,
Gregory the Seventh, St. Thomas of Canterbury, and many others, who did
most when they fancied themselves least prosperous, and died without being
permitted to see the fruit of their labours.
Lecture II.
Literature. A Lecture in the School of Philosophy and Letters.
1.
Wishing to address you, Gentlemen, at the commencement of a new Session, I
tried to find a subject for discussion, which might be at once suitable to
the occasion, yet neither too large for your time, nor too minute or
abstruse for your attention. I think I see one for my purpose in the very
title of your Faculty. It is the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Now
the question may arise as to what is meant by “Philosophy,” and what is
meant by “Letters.” As to the other Faculties, the subject-matter which
they profess is intelligible, as soon as named, and beyond all dispute. We
know what Science is, what Medicine, what Law, and what Theology; but we
have not so much ease in determining what is meant by Philosophy and
Letters. Each department of that twofold province needs explanation: it
will be sufficient, on an occasion like this, to investigate one of them.
Accordingly I shall select for remark the latter of the two, and attempt
to determine what we are to understand by Letters or Literature, in what
Literature consists, and how it stands relatively to Science. We speak,
for instance, of ancient and modern literature, the literature of the day,
sacred literature, light literature; and our lectures in this place are
devoted to classical literature and English literature. Are Letters, then,
synonymous with books? This cannot be, or they would include in their
range Philosophy, Law, and, in short, the teaching of all the other
Faculties. Far from confusing these various studies, we view the works of
Plato or Cicero sometimes as philosophy, sometimes as literature; on the
other hand, no one would ever be tempted to speak of Euclid as literature,
or of Matthiæ’s Greek Grammar. Is, then, literature synonymous with
composition? with books written with an attention to style? is literature
fine writing? again, is it studied and artificial writing?
There are excellent persons who seem to adopt this last account of
Literature as their own idea of it. They depreciate it, as if it were the
result of a mere art or trick of words. Professedly indeed, they are
aiming at the Greek and Roman classics, but their criticisms have quite as
great force against all literature as against any. I think I shall be best
able to bring out what I have to say on the subject by examining the
statements which they make in defence of their own view of it. They
contend then, 1. that fine writing, as exemplified in the Classics, is
mainly a matter of conceits, fancies, and prettinesses, decked out in
choice words; 2. that this is the proof of it, that the classics will not
bear translating;—(and this is why I have said that the real attack is
upon literature altogether, not the classical only; for, to speak
generally, all literature, modern as well as ancient, lies under this
disadvantage. This, however, they will not allow; for they maintain,) 3.
that Holy Scripture presents a remarkable contrast to secular writings on
this very point, viz., in that Scripture does easily admit of translation,
though it is the most sublime and beautiful of all writings.
2.
Now I will begin by stating these three positions in the words of a
writer, who is cited by the estimable Catholics in question as a witness,
or rather as an advocate, in their behalf, though he is far from being
able in his own person to challenge the respect which is inspired by
themselves.
“There are two sorts of eloquence,” says this writer, “the one indeed
scarce deserves the name of it, which consists chiefly in laboured and
polished periods, an over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures,
tinselled over with a gaudy embellishment of words, which glitter, but
convey little or no light to the understanding. This kind of writing is
for the most part much affected and admired by the people of weak judgment
and vicious taste; but it is a piece of affectation and formality the
sacred writers are utter strangers to. It is a vain and boyish eloquence;
and, as it has always been esteemed below the great geniuses of all ages,
so much more so with respect to those writers who were actuated by the
spirit of Infinite Wisdom, and therefore wrote with that force and majesty
with which never man writ. The other sort of eloquence is quite the
reverse to this, and which may be said to be the true characteristic of
the Holy Scriptures; where the excellence does not arise from a laboured
and far-fetched elocution, but from a surprising mixture of simplicity and
majesty, which is a double character, so difficult to be united that it is
seldom to be met with in compositions merely human. We see nothing in Holy
Writ of affectation and superfluous ornament.… Now, it is observable that
the most excellent profane authors, whether Greek or Latin, lose most of
their graces whenever we find them literally translated. Homer’s famed
representation of Jupiter—his cried-up description of a tempest, his
relation of Neptune’s shaking the earth and opening it to its centre, his
description of Pallas’s horses, with numbers of other long-since admired
passages, flag, and almost vanish away, in the vulgar Latin translation.