Chapter V

I shall take leave to leap into it over another man's back, or, rather over two men's backs. No doubt it has happened to many of you to pick up in a happy moment some book or pamphlet or copy of verse which just says the word you have unconsciously been listening for, almost craving to speak for yourself, and so sends you off hot-foot on the trail. And if you have had that experience, it may also have happened to you that, after ranging, you returned on the track 'like faithful hound returning,' in gratitude, or to refresh the scent; and that, picking up the book again, you found it no such wonderful book after all, or that some of the magic had faded by process of the change in yourself which itself had originated. But the word was spoken.

Such a book--pamphlet I may call it, so small it was--fell into my hands some ten years ago; "The Aims of Literary Study"--no very attractive title--by Dr Corson, a distinguished American Professor (and let me say that, for something more than ten--say for twenty--years much of the most thoughtful as well as the most thorough work upon English comes to us from America). I find, as I handle again the small duodecimo volume, that my own thoughts have taken me a little wide, perhaps a little astray, from its suggestions. But for loyalty's sake I shall start just where Dr Corson started, with a passage from Browning's, "A Death in the Desert," supposed (you will remember)--

Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene

narrating the death of St John the Evangelist, John of Patmos; the narrative interrupted by this gloss:

[This is the doctrine he was wont to teach,
How divers persons witness in each man,
Three souls which make up one soul: _first,_ to wit,
A soul of each and all the bodily parts,
Seated therein, which works, and is _What Does,_
And has the use of earth, and ends the man
Downward: but, tending upward for advice,
Grows into, and again is grown into
By the next soul, which, seated in the brain,
Useth the first with its collected use,
And feeleth, thinketh, willeth,--is _What Knows_:
Which, duly tending upward in its turn,
Grows into, and again is grown into
By the last soul, that uses both the first,
Subsisting whether they assist or no,
And, constituting man's self, is _What Is_--
And leans upon the former

(Mark the word, Gentlemen; '_leans_ upon the former'--leaning back, as it were felt by him, on this very man who had leaned on Christ's bosom, being loved)

And leans upon the former, makes it play,
As that played off the first: and, tending up,
Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man
Upward in that dread point of intercourse,
Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him.
_What Does, What Knows, What Is;_ three souls, one man.
I give the glossa of Theotypas.]

_What Does, What Knows, What Is_--there is no mistaking what Browning means, nor in what degrees of hierarchy he places this, that, and the other.... Does it not strike you how curiously men to-day, with their minds perverted by hate, are inverting that order?--all the highest value set on _What Does--What Knows_ suddenly seen to be of importance, but only as important in feeding the guns, perfecting explosives, collaring trade--all in the service of _What Does,_ of 'Get on or Get Out,' of 'Efficiency'; no one stopping to think that 'Efficiency' is--must be--a relative term! Efficient for what?--for _What Does, What Knows_ or perchance, after all, for _What Is_? No! banish the humanities and throw everybody into practical science: not into that study of natural science, which can never conflict with the 'humanities' since it seeks discovery for the pure sake of truth, or charitably to alleviate man's lot--

Sweetly, rather, to ease, loose and bind
As need requires, this frail fallen humankind ...

--but to invent what will be commercially serviceable in besting your neighbour, or in gassing him, or in slaughtering him neatly and wholesale. But still the whisper (not ridiculous in its day) will assert itself, that _What Is_ comes first, holding and upheld by God; still through the market clamour for a 'Business Government' will persist the voice of Plato murmuring that, after all, the best form of government is government by good men: and the voice of some small man faintly protesting 'But I don't want to be governed by business men; because I know them and, without asking much of life, I have a hankering to die with a shirt on my back.'