Chapter V: Part 5

(3) _Generally, use transitive verbs, that strike their object; and use them in the active voice, eschewing the stationary passive, with its little auxiliary its's and was's, and its participles getting into the light of your adjectives, which should be few. For, as a rough law, by his use of the straight verb and by his economy of adjectives you can tell a man's style, if it be masculine or neuter, writing or 'composition.'_

The authors of that capital handbook "The King's English," which I have already recommended to you, add two rules:--

(4) _Prefer the short word to the long._ (5) _Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance._

But these two precepts you would have to modify by so long a string of exceptions that I do not commend them to you. In fact I think them false in theory and likely to be fatal in practice. For, as my last lecture tried to show, you no sooner begin to philosophise things instead of merely telling a tale of them than you must go to the Mediterranean languages: because in these man first learnt to discuss his 'why' and 'how,' and these languages yet guard the vocabulary.

Lastly, we saw how, by experimenting with rhythm, our prose 'broke its birth's invidious bar' and learnt to scale the forbidden heights.

Now by attending to the few plain rules given above you may train yourselves to write sound, straightforward, work-a-day English. But if you would write melodious English, I fear the gods will require of you what they ought to have given you at birth--something of an ear. Yet the most of us have ears, of sorts; and I believe that, though we can only acquire it by assiduous practice, the most of us can wonderfully improve our talent of the ear.

If you will possess yourselves of a copy of Quintilian or borrow one from any library (Bohn's translation will do) and turn to his 9th book, you will find a hundred ways indicated, illustrated, classified, in which a writer or speaker can vary his Style, modulate it, lift or depress it, regulate its balance.

All these rules, separately worth studying, if taken together may easily bewilder and dishearten you. Let me choose just two, and try to hearten you by showing that, even with these two only, you can go a long way.

Take the use of right emphasis. What Quintilian says of right emphasis--or the most important thing he says--is this:--

There is sometimes an extraordinary force in some particular word,
which, if it be placed in no very conspicuous position in the middle
part of a sentence, is likely to escape the attention of the hearer
and to be obscured by the words surrounding it; but if it be put at
the end of the sentence is urged upon the reader's sense and
imprinted on his mind.

That seems obvious enough, for English use as well as for Latin. 'The wages of sin is Death'--anyone can see how much more emphatic that is than 'Death is the wages of sin.' But let your minds work on this matter of emphasis, and discover how emphasis has always its right point somewhere, though it be not at all necessarily at the end of the sentence. Take a sentence in which the strong words actually repeat themselves for emphasis:--

Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.

Our first impulse would be to place the emphasis at the end:--

Babylon, that great city, is fallen, is fallen.

The Latin puts it at the beginning:--

Cecidit, cecidit, Babylonia illa magna.
Fallen, fallen, is Babylon, that great city.

The forty-seven preserved the 'falling close' so exquisite in the Latin; the emphasis, already secured by repetition, they accentuated by lengthening the pause. I would urge on you that in every sentence there is just a right point of emphasis which you must train your ears to detect. So your writing will acquire not only emphasis, but balance, and you will instinctively avoid such an ill-emphasised sentence as this, which, not naming the author, I will quote for your delectation:--

'Are Japanese Aprils always as lovely as this?' asked the man in the
light tweed suit of two others in immaculate flannels with crimson
sashes round their waists and puggarees folded in cunning plaits
round their broad Terai hats.

Explore, next, what (though critics have strangely neglected it) to my mind stands the first, or almost the first, secret of beautiful writing in English, whether in prose or in verse; I mean that inter-play of vowel-sounds in which no language can match us. We have so many vowel sounds indeed, and so few vowels to express them, that the foreigner, mistaking our modesty, complains against God's plenty. We alone, for example, sound by a natural vowel that noble _I_, which other nations can only compass by diphthongs. Let us consider that vowel for a moment or two and mark how it leads off the dance of the Graces, its sisters:--

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the
Lord is risen upon thee.

Mark how expressively it drops to the solemn vowel 'O,' and anon how expressively it reasserts itself to express rearisen delight:--

Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is
risen upon thee. For behold the darkness shall cover the earth, and
gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and
his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to
thy light, and Kings to the brightness of thy rising.

Take another passage in which the first lift of this _I_ vowel yields to its graver sisters as though the sound sank into the very heart of the sense.

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, 'Father,
I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more
worthy to be called thy son.'

'And am no more worthy to be called thy son.' Mark the deep O's. 'For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' 'O my son, my son Absalom'--observe the I and O how they interchime, until the O of sorrow tolls the lighter note down:--

O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died
for thee, O Absolom, my son, my son!

Or take this lyric, by admission one of the loveliest written in this present age, and mark here too how the vowels play and ring and chime and toll.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.[2]
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping
slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake-water lapping, with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

I think if you will but open your ears to this beautiful vowel-play which runs through all the best of our prose and poetry, whether you ever learn to master it or not, you will have acquired a new delight, and one various enough to last you though you live to a very old age.

All this of which I am speaking is Art: and Literature being an Art, do you not see how personal a thing it is--how it cannot escape being personal? No two men (unless they talk Jargon) say the same thing in the same way. As is a man's imagination, as is his character, as is the harmony in himself, as is his ear, as is his skill, so and not otherwise he will speak, so and not otherwise than they can respond to that imagination, that character, that order of his intellect, that harmony of his soul, his hearers will hear him. Let me conclude with this great passage from Newman which I beg you, having heard it, to ponder:--

If then the power of speech is as great as any that can be named,
--if the origin of language is by many philosophers considered
nothing short of divine--if by means of words the secrets of the
heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief
is carried off, sympathy conveyed, experience recorded, and wisdom
perpetuated,--if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity,
national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the
future, the East and the West are brought into communication with
each other,--if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and the
prophets of the human family--it will not answer to make light of
Literature or to neglect its study: rather we may be sure that, in
proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its
spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers
of like benefits to others--be they many or few, be they in the
obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life--who are united to
us by social ties, and are within the sphere of our personal
influence.

[Footnote 1: I append the following specimen translations of the famous passage in St Paul's "First Epistle to the Corinthians" xv. 51 sqq. I choose this because (1) it is an important passage; (2) it touches a high moment of philosophising; (3) the comparison seems to me to represent with great fairness to Tyndale the extent of the forty-seven's debt to him; (4) it shows that they meant exactly what they said in their Preface; and (5) it illustrates, towards the close, their genius for improvement. From the Greek, Wyclif translates:--

Lo, I seie to you pryvyte of holi thingis | and alle we schulen rise
agen | but not alle we schuln be chaungid | in a moment in the
twynkelynge of an yë, in the last trumpe | for the trumpe schal
sowne: and deed men schulen rise agen with out corrupcion, and we
schuln be changid | for it bihoveth this corruptible thing to clothe
uncorropcion and this deedly thing to putte aweye undeedlynesse. But
whanne this deedli thing schal clothe undeedlynesse | thanne schal
the word be don that is written | deeth is sopun up in victorie |
deeth, where is thi victorie? deeth, where is thi pricke?

Tyndale:--

Beholde I shewe you a mystery. We shall not all slepe: but we shall
all be chaunged | and that in a moment | and in the twinclinge of an
eye | at the sounde of the last trompe. For the trompe shall blowe,
and the deed shall ryse incorruptible and we shalbe chaunged. For
this corruptible must put on incorruptibilite: and this mortall must
put on immortalite. When this corruptible hath put on
incorruptibilite | and this mortall hath put on immortalite: than
shalbe brought to pass the saying that is written, 'Deeth is
consumed in to victory.' Deeth, where is thy stynge? Hell, where is
thy victory?

The Authorised Version:--

Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleepe, but wee shall
all be changed, in a moment, in the twinckling of an eye, at the
last trumpe, (for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be
raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed). For this corruptible
must put on incorruption, and this mortall must put on immortalitie.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this
mortall shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to
passe the saying that is written, 'Death is swallowed up in
victory.' O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy
victory?]

[Footnote 2: I E O : I O E
I O : E OU A
'As musing slow, I hail ('as m_u_sing sl_o_w _I_ ha_i_l)
Thy genial loved return.' (Th_y_ g_e_nial l_o_ved ret_u_rn.')
COLLINS, "Ode to Evening."]

LECTURE VIII.

ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (I)

Wednesday, October 22

You may think it strange, Gentlemen, that of a course of ten lectures which aim to treat English Literature as an affair of practice, I should propose to spend two in discussing our literary lineage: a man's lineage and geniture being reckoned, as a rule, among the things he cannot be reasonably asked to amend. But since of high breeding is begotten (as most of us believe) a disposition to high thoughts, high deeds; since to have it and be modestly conscious of it is to carry within us a faithful monitor persuading us to whatsoever in conduct is gentle, honourable, of good repute, and so silently dissuading us from base thoughts, low ends, ignoble gains; seeing, moreover, that a man will often do more to match his father's virtue than he would to improve himself; I shall endeavour, in this and my next lecture, to scour that spur of ancestry and present it to you as so bright and sharp an incentive that you, who read English Literature and practise writing here in Cambridge, shall not pass out from her insensible of the dignity of your studies, or without pride or remorse according as you have interpreted in practice the motto, _Noblesse oblige_.

'Tis wisdom, and that high,
For men to use their fortune reverently
Even in youth.

Let me add that, just as a knowledge of his family failings will help one man in economising his estate, or warn another to shun for his health the pleasures of the table, so some knowledge of our lineage in letters may put us, as Englishmen, on the watch for certain national defects (for such we have), on our guard against certain sins which too easily beset us. Nay, this watchfulness may well reach down from matters of great moment to seeming trifles. It is good for us to recognise with Wordsworth that

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

But, though less important, it is good also to recognise that, as sons of Cambridge, we equally offend against her breeding when in our scientific writings we allow ourselves to talk of a microbe as an 'antibody.'

Now, because a great deal of what I have to say this morning, if not heretical, will yet run contrary to the vogue and practice of the Schools for these thirty years, I will take the leap into my subject over a greater man's back and ask you to listen with particular attention to the following long passage from a writer whose opinion you may challenge, but whose authority to speak as a master of English prose no one in this room will deny.

When (says Cardinal Newman) we survey the stream of human affairs for
the last three thousand years, we find it to run thus:--At first sight
there is so much fluctuation, agitation, ebbing and flowing, that we
may despair to discern any law in its movements, taking the earth as
its bed and mankind as its contents; but on looking more closely and
attentively we shall discern, in spite of the heterogeneous materials
and the various histories and fortunes which are found in the race of
man during the long period I have mentioned, a certain formation amid
the chaos--one and one only,--and extending, though not over the whole
earth, yet through a very considerable portion of it. Man is a social
being and can hardly exist without society, and in matter of fact
societies have ever existed all over the habitable earth. The greater
part of these associations have been political or religious, and have
been comparatively limited in extent and temporary. They have been
formed and dissolved by the force of accidents, or by inevitable
circumstances; and when we have enumerated them one by one we have made
of them all that can be made. But there is one remarkable association
which attracts the attention of the philosopher, not political nor
religious--or at least only partially and not essentially such--which
began in the earliest times and grew with each succeeding age till it
reached its complete development, and then continued on, vigorous and
unwearied, and still remains as definite and as firm as ever it was.
Its bond is a _common civilisation_: and though there are other
civilisations in the world, as there are other societies, yet _this_
civilisation, 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
on the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume to
itself the title of 'Human Society,' and _its_ civilisation the
abstract term 'Civilisation.'

There are indeed great outlying portions of mankind which are not,
perhaps never have been, included in this Human Society; still they are
outlying portions and nothing else, fragmentary, unsociable, solitary
and unmeaning, protesting and revolting against the grand central
formation of which I am speaking, but not uniting with each other into
a second whole. I am not denying, of course, the civilisation of the
Chinese, for instance, though it be not our civilisation; but it is a
huge, stationary, unattractive, morose civilisation. Nor do I deny a
civilisation to the Hindoos, nor to the ancient Mexicans, nor to the
Saracens, nor (in a certain sense) to the Turks; but each of these
races has its own civilisation, as separate from one another as from
ours.

I do not see how they can be all brought under one idea....

Gentlemen, let me here observe that I am not entering upon the question
of races, or upon their history. I have nothing to do with ethnology; I
take things as I find them on the surface of history and am but
classifying phenomena. 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 to
deserve to be called the Intellect and the Mind of the Human Kind.
Starting as it does, and advancing from certain centres, till their
respective influences intersect and conflict, and then at length
intermingle and combine, a common Thought has been generated, and a
common Civilisation defined and established. Egypt is one such starting
point, Syria, another, Greece a third, Italy a fourth and North Africa
a fifth--afterwards France and Spain. As time goes on, and as
colonisation and conquest work their changes, we see a great
association of nations formed, of which the Roman Empire is the
maturity and the most intelligible expression: an association, however,
not political but mental, based on the same intellectual ideas and
advancing by common intellectual methods.... In its earliest age it
included far more of the Eastern world than it has since; in these
later times it has taken into its compass a new hemisphere; in the
Middle Ages it lost Africa, Egypt and Syria, and extended itself to
Germany, Scandinavia and the British Isles. At one time its territory
was flooded by strange and barbarous races, but the existing
civilisation was vigorous enough to vivify what threatened to stifle
it, and to assimilate to the old social forms what came to expel them:
and thus the civilisation of modern times remains what it was of old;
not Chinese, or Hindoo, or Mexican, or Saracen ... but the lineal
descendant, or rather the continuation--_mutatis mutandis_--of the
civilisation which began in Palestine and Greece.

To omit, then, all minor debts such as what of arithmetic, what of astronomy, what of geography, we owe to the Saracen, from Palestine we derive the faith of Europe shared (in the language of the Bidding Prayer) by all Christian people dispersed throughout the world; as to Greece we owe the rudiments of our Western art, philosophy, letters; and not only the rudiments but the continuing inspiration, so that--though entirely superseded in worship, as even in the Athens of Pericles they were worshipped only by an easy, urbane, more than half humorous tolerance--Apollo and the Muses, Zeus and the great ones of Olympus, Hermes and Hephaestus, Athene in her armour, with her vanquisher the foam-born irresistible Aphrodite, these remain the authentic gods of our literature, beside whom the gods of northern Europe--Odin, Thor, Freya--are strangers, unhomely, uncanny as the shadows of unfamiliar furniture on the walls of an inn. Sprung though great numbers of us are from the loins of Northmen, it is in these gracious deities of the South that we find the familiar and the real, as from the heroes of the sister-island, Cucullain and Concobar, we turn to Hercules, to Perseus, to Bellerophon, even to actual men of history, saying 'Give us Leonidas, give us Horatius, give us Regulus. These are the mighty ones we understand, and from whom, in a direct line of tradition, we understand Harry of Agincourt, Philip Sidney and our Nelson.'

Now since, of the Mediterranean peoples, the Hebrews discovered the Unseen God whom the body of Western civilisation has learnt to worship; since the Greeks invented art, philosophy, letters; since Rome found and developed the idea of imperial government, of imperial colonies as superseding merely fissiparous ones, of settling where she conquered (_ubi Romanus vicit ibi habitat_) and so extending with Government that system of law which Europe still obeys; we cannot be surprised that Israel, Greece, Rome--each in turn--set store on a pure ancestry. Though Christ be the veritable Son of God, his ancestry must be traced back through his supposed father Joseph to the stem of Jesse, and so to Abraham, father of the race. Again, as jealously as the Evangelist claimed Jesus for a Hebrew of the Hebrews, so, if you will turn to the "Menexenus" of Plato in the Oration of Aspasia over the dead who perished in battle, you hear her claim that 'No Pelopes nor Cadmians, nor Egyptians, nor Dauni, nor the rest of the crowd of born foreigners dwell with us; but ours is the land of pure Hellenes, free from admixture.' These proud Athenians, as you know, wore brooches in the shape of golden grasshoppers, to signify that they were [Greek: autochthones], children of Attica, sprung direct from her soil. And so, again, the true Roman, while enlarging Rome's citizenship over Asia, Africa, Gaul, to our remote Britain, insisted, even in days of the later Empire, on his pure descent from Æneas and Romulus--

Unde Remnes et Quirites proque prole posterum
Romuli matrem crearet et nepotem Cæsarem.

With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Cæsar-last, best of that blood, of that threw.

Here is a boast that we English must be content to forgo. We may wear a rose on St George's day, if we are clever enough to grow one. The Welsh, I dare say, have less difficulty with the leek. But April the 23rd is not a time of roses that we can pluck them as we pass, nor can we claim St George as a compatriot--_Cappadocius nostras_. We have, to be sure, a few legendary heroes, of whom King Arthur and Robin Hood are (I suppose) the greatest; but, save in some Celtic corners of the land, we have few fairies, and these no great matter; while, as for tutelary gods, our springs, our wells, our groves, cliffs, mountain-sides, either never possessed them or possess them no longer. Not of our landscape did it happen that

The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent.

--for the sufficient reason that no tutelary gods of importance were ever here to be dispersed.

Let me press this home upon you by an illustration which I choose with the double purpose of enforcing my argument and sending you to make acquaintance (if you have not already made it) with one of the loveliest poems written in our time.

In one of Pliny's letters you will find a very pleasant description of the source of the Clitumnus, a small Umbrian river which, springing from a rock in a grove of cypresses, descends into the Tinia, a tributary of the Tiber. 'Have you ever,' writes Pliny to his friend Romanus--

Have you ever seen the source of the Clitumnus? I suppose not, as I
never heard you mention it. Let me advise you to go there at once. I
have just visited it and am sorry that I put off my visit so long. At
the foot of a little hill, covered with old and shady cypress trees, a
spring gushes and bursts into a number of streamlets of various size.
Breaking, so to speak, forth from its imprisonment, it expands into a
broad basin, so clear and transparent that you may count the pebbles
and little pieces of money which are thrown into it. From this point
the force and weight of the water, rather than the slope of the ground,
hurry it onward. What was a mere spring becomes a noble river, broad
enough to allow vessels to pass each other as they sail with or against
the stream. The current is so strong, though the ground is level, that
barges of beam, as they go down, require no assistance of oars; while
to go up is as much as can be done with oars and long poles.... The banks
are clothed with abundant ash and poplar, so distinctly reflected in
the transparent waters that they seem to be growing at the bottom of
the river and can be counted with ease. The water is as cold as snow
and as pure in colour. Hard by the spring stands an ancient and
venerable temple with a statue of the river-god Clitumnus, clothed in
the customary robe of state. The Oracles here delivered attest the
presence of the deity. Close in the precinct stand several little
chapels dedicated to particular gods, each of whom owns his distinctive
name and special worship, and is the tutelary deity of a runlet. For
beside the principal spring, which is, as it were, the parent of all
the rest, there are several smaller ones which have their distinct
sources but unite their waters with the Clitumnus, over which a bridge
is thrown, separating the sacred part of the river from that which is
open to general use. Above the bridge you may only go in a boat; below
it, you may swim. The people of the town of Hispallum, to whom Augustus
gave this place, furnish baths and lodgings at the public expense.
There are several small dwelling-houses on the banks, in specially
picturesque situations, and they stand quite close to the waterside. In
short, everything in the neighbourhood will give you pleasure. You may
also amuse yourself with numberless inscriptions on the pillars and
walls, celebrating the praises of the stream and of its tutelary god.
Many of these you will admire, and some will make you laugh. But no!
You are too well cultivated to laugh at such things. Farewell.

Clitumnus still gushes from its rocks among the cypresses, as in Pliny's day. The god has gone from his temple, on the frieze of which you may read this later inscription--'_Deus Angelorum, qui fecit Resurrectionem._' After many centuries and almost in our day, by the brain of Cavour and the sword of Garibaldi, he has made a resurrection for Italy. As part of that resurrection (for no nation can live and be great without its poet) was born a true poet, Carducci. He visited the bountiful, everlasting source, and of what did he sing? Possess yourselves, as for a shilling you may, of his Ode "Alle fonte del Clitumno," and read: for few nobler poems have adorned our time. He sang of the weeping willow, the ilex, ivy, cypress and the presence of the god still immanent among them. He sang of Umbria, of the ensigns of Rome, of Hannibal swooping down over the Alps; he sang of the nuptials of Janus and Comesena, progenitors of the Italian people; of nymphs, naiads, and the moonlight dances of Oreads; of flocks descending to the river at dusk, of the homestead, the bare-footed mother, the clinging child, the father, clad in goat-skins, guiding the ox-wagon; and he ends on the very note of Virgil's famous apostrophe

_Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra..._

with an invocation of Italy--Italy, mother of bullocks for agriculture, of wild colts for battle, mother of corn and of the vine, Roman mother of enduring laws and mediaeval mother of illustrious arts. The mountains, woods and waters of green Umbria applaud the song, and across their applause is heard the whistle of the railway train bearing promise of new industries and a new national life.

E tu, pia madre di giovenchi invitti
a franger glebe e rintegrar maggesi
e d' annitrenti in guerra aspri polledri,
Italia madre,

madre di biade e viti e leggi eterne
ed incliti arti a raddolcir la vita
salve! a te i canti de l' antica lode
io rinovello.

Plaudono i monti al carme e i boschi e l' acque
de l' Umbria verde: in faccia a noi fumando
ed anelando nuove industrie in corsa
fischia il vapore.

And thou, O pious mother of unvanquished
Bullocks to break glebe, to restore the fallow,
And of fierce colts for neighing in the battle:
Italy, mother,

Mother of corn and vines and of eternal
Laws and illustrious arts the life to sweeten,
Hail, hail, all hail! The song of ancient praises
Renew I to thee!

The mountains, woods and waters of green Umbria
Applaud the song: and here before us fuming
And longing for new industries, a-racing
Whistles the white steam.

(I quote from a translation by Mr E.J. Watson, recently published by Messrs J.W. Arrowsmith, of Bristol.)

I put it to you, Gentlemen, that, worthy as are the glories of England to be sung, this note of Carducci's we cannot decently or honestly strike. Great lives have been bled away into Tweed and Avon: great spirits have been oared down the Thames to Traitor's Gate and the Tower. Deeds done on the Cam have found their way into history. But I once traced the Avon to its source under Naseby battlefield, and found it issuing from the fragments of a stucco swan. No god mounts guard over the head-water of the Thames; and the only Englishman who boldly claims a divine descent is (I understand) an impostor who runs an Agapemone. In short we are a mixed race, and our literature is derivative. Let us confine our pride to those virtues, not few, which are honestly ours. A Roman noble, even to-day, has some excuse for reckoning a god in his ancestry, or at least a wolf among its wet-nurses: but of us English even those who came over with William the Norman have the son of a tanner's daughter for escort. I very well remember that, the other day, writers who vindicated our hereditary House of Lords against a certain Parliament Act commonly did so on the ground that since the Reform Bill of 1832, by inclusion of all that was eminent in politics, war and commerce, the Peerage had been so changed as to know itself no longer for the same thing. That is our practical way.

At all events, the men who made our literature had never a doubt, as they were careless to dissimulate, that they were conquering our tongue to bring it into the great European comity, the civilisation of Greece and Rome. An Elizabethan writer, for example, would begin almost as with a formula by begging to be forgiven that he has sought to render the divine accent of Plato, the sugared music of Ovid, into our uncouth and barbarous tongue. There may have been some mock-modesty in this, but it rested on a base of belief. Much of the glory of English Literature was achieved by men who, with the splendour of the Renaissance in their eyes, supposed themselves to be working all the while upon pale and borrowed shadows.

Let us pass the enthusiasms of days when 'bliss was it in that dawn to be alive' and come down to Alexander Pope and the Age of Reason. Pope at one time proposed to write a History of English Poetry, and the draft scheme of that History has been preserved. How does it begin? Why thus:--

ERA I.

1. School of Provence Chaucer's Visions. _Romaunt of the Rose._
_Piers Plowman._ Tales from Boccace. Gower.

2. School of Chaucer Lydgate.
T. Occleve.
Walt. de Mapes (a bad error, that!).
Skelton.

3. School of Petrarch E. of Surrey.
Sir Thomas Wyatt.
Sir Philip Sidney.
G. Gascoyn.

4. School of Dante Lord Buckhurst's _Induction. Gorboduc._
Original of Good Tragedy. Seneca his model.

--and so on. The scheme after Pope's death came into the hands of Gray, who for a time was fired with the notion of writing the History in collaboration with his friend Mason. Knowing Gray's congenital self-distrust, you will not be surprised that in the end he declined the task and handed it over to Warton. But, says Mant in his Life of Warton, 'their design'--that is, Gray's design with Mason--'was to introduce specimens of the Proveçal poetry, and of the Scaldic, British and Saxon, as preliminary to what first deserved to be called English poetry, about the time of Chaucer, from whence their history properly so called was to commence.' A letter of Gray's on the whole subject, addressed to Warton, is extant, and you may read it in Dr Courthope's "History of English Poetry."

Few in this room are old enough to remember the shock of awed surmise which fell upon young minds presented, in the late 'seventies or early 'eighties of the last century, with Freeman's "Norman Conquest" or Green's "Short History of the English People"; in which as through paring clouds of darkness, we beheld our ancestry, literary as well as political, radiantly legitimised; though not, to be sure, in the England that we knew--but far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick! 'Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there with meadows which crept down to the marshes and to the sea.' But what of that? There--surely there, in Sleswick--had been discovered for us our august mother's marriage lines; and if the most of that bright assurance came out of an old political skit, the "Germania" of Tacitus, who recked at the time? For along followed Mr Stopford Brooke with an admirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct the meanest of us in our common father's actual name--Beowulf.

_Beowulf_ is an old English Epic.... There is not one word about our
England in the poem.... The whole poem, pagan as it is, is English
to its very root. It is sacred to us; our Genesis, the book of
our origins.

Now I am not only incompetent to discuss with you the more recondite beauties of "Beowulf" but providentially forbidden the attempt by the conditions laid down for this Chair. I gather--and my own perusal of the poem and of much writing about it confirms the belief--that it has been largely over-praised by some critics, who have thus naturally provoked others to underrate it. Such things happen. I note, but without subscribing to it, the opinion of Vigfússon and York Powell, the learned editors of the "Corpus Poeticum Boreale," that in the "Beowulf" we have 'an epic completely metamorphosed in form, blown out with long-winded empty repetitions and comments by a book poet, so that one must be careful not to take it as a type of the old poetry,' and I seem to hear as from the grave the very voice of my old friend the younger editor in that unfaltering pronouncement. But on the whole I rather incline to accept the cautious surmise of Professor W. P. Ker that 'a reasonable view of the merit of Beowulf is not impossible, though rash enthusiasm may have made too much of it; while a correct and sober taste may have too contemptuously refused to attend to Grendel and the Firedrake,' and to leave it at that. I speak very cautiously because the manner of the late Professor Freeman, in especial, had a knack of provoking in gentle breasts a resentment which the mind in its frailty too easily converted to a prejudice against his matter: while to men trained to admire Thucydides and Tacitus and acquainted with Lucian's 'Way to Write History' ([Greek: Pos dei istorian suggraphein]) his loud insistence that the art was not an art but a science, and moreover recently invented by Bishop Stubbs, was a perpetual irritant.

But to return to "Beowulf"--You have just heard the opinions of scholars whose names you must respect. I, who construe Anglo-Saxon with difficulty, must admit the poem to contain many fine, even noble, passages. Take for example Hrothgar's lament for Æschere:--

Hróthgar mathelode, helm Scyldinga:
'Ne frin thú æfter sælum; sorh is geniwod
Denigea leódum; deád is Æschere,
Yrmenláfes yldra bróthor,
Mín rún-wita, ond min ræd-bora;
Eaxl-gestealla, thonne we on orlege
Hafelan wéredon, thonne hniton fethan,
Eoferas cnysedan: swylc scolde eorl wesan
Ætheling ær-gód, swylc Æschere wæs.'

(Hrothgar spake, helm of the Scyldings: 'Ask not after good tidings.
Sorrow is renewed among the Dane-folk. Dead is Æschere, Yrmenlaf's
elder brother, who read me rune and bore me rede; comrade at shoulder
when we fended our heads in war and the boar-helms rang. Even so
should we each be an atheling passing good, as Æschere was.')

This is simple, manly, dignified. It avoids the besetting sin of the Anglo-Saxon gleeman--the pretentious trick of calling things 'out of their right names' for the sake of literary effect (as if e.g. the sea could be improved by being phrased into 'the seals' domain'). Its Anglo-Saxon _staccato_, so tiresome in sustained narrative, here happens to suit the broken utterance of mourning. In short, it exhibits the Anglo-Saxon Muse at her best, not at her customary. But set beside it a passage in which Homer tells of a fallen warrior--at haphazard, as it were, a single corpse chosen from the press of battle--

[Greek: polla de chermadia megal aspidas estuphelixam
marnamenon amph auton o d en strophaliggi konies
keito megas megalosti, lelasmenos ipposunaom.]

Can you--can anyone--compare the two passages and miss to see that they belong to two different kingdoms of poetry? I lay no stress here on 'architectonics.' I waive that the "Iliad" is a well-knit epic and the story of "Beowulf" a shapeless monstrosity. I ask you but to note the difference of note, of accent, of mere music. And I have quoted you but a passage of the habitual Homer. To assure yourselves that he can rise even from this habitual height to express the extreme of majesty and of human anguish in poetry which betrays no false note, no strain upon the store of emotion man may own with self-respect and exhibit without derogation of dignity, turn to the last book of the "Iliad" and read of Priam raising to his lips the hand that has murdered his son. I say confidently that no one unable to distinguish this, as poetry, from the very best of "Beowulf" is fit to engage upon business as a literary critic.

In "Beowulf" then, as an imported poem, let us allow much barbarian merit. It came of dubious ancestry, and it had no progeny. The pretence that our glorious literature derives its lineage from "Beowulf" is in vulgar phrase 'a put up job'; a falsehood grafted upon our text-books by Teutonic and Teutonising professors who can bring less evidence for it than will cover a threepenny-piece. Its run for something like that money, in small educational manuals, has been in its way a triumph of pedagogic _réclame_.

Our rude forefathers--the author of "The Rape of the Lock" and of the "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard"--knew nothing of the Exeter and Vercelli Books, nothing of the Ruthwell Cross. But they were poets, practitioners of our literature in the true line of descent, and they knew certain things which all such artists know by instinct. So, before our historians of thirty-odd years ago started to make Chaucer and Beowulf one, these rude forefathers made them two. 'Nor am I confident they erred.' Rather I am confident, and hope in succeeding lectures to convince you, that, venerable as Anglo-Saxon is, and worthy to be studied as the mother of our vernacular speech (as for a dozen other reasons which my friend Professor Chadwick will give you), its value is historical rather than literary, since from it our Literature is not descended. Let me repeat it in words that admit of no misunderstanding--_From Anglo-Saxon Prose, from Anglo-Saxon Poetry our living Prose and Poetry have, save linguistically, no derivation_. I shall attempt to demonstrate that, whether or not Anglo-Saxon literature, such as it was, died of inherent weakness, die it did, and of its collapse the "Vision of Piers Plowman" may be regarded as the last dying spasm. I shall attempt to convince you that Chaucer did not inherit any secret from Caedmon or Cynewulf, but deserves his old title, 'Father of English Poetry,' because through Dante, through Boccaccio, through the lays and songs of Provence, he explored back to the Mediterranean, and opened for Englishmen a commerce in the true intellectual mart of Europe. I shall attempt to heap proof on you that whatever the agency--whether through Wyat or Spenser, Marlowe or Shakespeare, or Donne, or Milton, or Dryden, or Pope, or Johnson, or even Wordsworth--always our literature has obeyed, however unconsciously, the precept _Antiquam exquirite matrem_, 'Seek back to the ancient mother'; always it has recreated itself, has kept itself pure and strong, by harking back to bathe in those native--yes, _native_--Mediterranean springs.

Do not presume me to be right in this. Rather, if you will, presume me to be wrong until the evidence is laid out for your judgment. But at least understand to-day how profoundly a man, holding that view, must deplore the whole course of academical literary study during these thirty years or so, and how distrust what he holds to be its basal fallacies.

For, literature being written in language, yet being something quite distinct, and the development of our language having been fairly continuous, while the literature of our nation exhibits a false start--a break, silence, repentance, then a renewal on right glorious lines--our students of literature have been drilled to follow the specious continuance while ignoring the actual break, and so to commit the one most fatal error in any study; that of mistaking the inessential for the essential.

As I tried to persuade you in my Inaugural Lecture, our first duty to Literature is to study it absolutely, to understand, in Aristotelian phrase, its [Greek: to ti en einae]; what it _is_ and what it _means_. If that be our quest, and the height of it be realised, it is nothing to us--or almost nothing--to know of a certain alleged poet of the fifteenth century, that he helped us over a local or temporary disturbance in our vowel-endings. It is everything to have acquired and to possess such a norm of Poetry within us that we know whether or not what he wrote was POETRY.

Do not think this easy. The study of right literary criticism is much more difficult than the false path usually trodden; so difficult, indeed, that you may easily count the men who have attempted to grasp the great rules and apply them to writing as an art to be practised. But the names include some very great ones--Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, Corneille, Boileau, Dryden, Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Arnold: and the study, though it may not find its pattern in our time, is not unworthy to be proposed for another attempt before a great University.

LECTURE IX.

ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (II)

Wednesday, November 5

Some of you whose avocations call them, from time to time, to Newmarket may have noted, at a little distance out from Cambridge, a by-road advertised as leading to Quy and Swaffham. It also leads to the site of an old Roman villa; but you need not interrupt your business to visit this, since the best thing discovered there--a piece of tessellated pavement--has been removed and deposited in the Geological Museum here in Downing Street, where you may study it very conveniently. It is not at all a first-class specimen of its kind: not to be compared, for example, with the wonderful pavement at Dorchester, or with that (measuring 35 feet by 20) of the great villa unearthed, a hundred years ago, at Stonesfield in Oxfordshire: but I take it as the handiest, and am going to build a small conjecture upon it, or rather a small suggestion of a guess. Remember there is no harm in guessing so long as we do not pretend our guess-work to be something else.

I will ask you to consider first that in these pavements, laid bare for us as 'the whistling rustic tends his plough,' we have work dating somewhere between the first and fifth centuries, work of unchallengeable beauty, work of a beauty certainly not rivalled until we come to the Norman builders of five or six hundred years later. I want you to let your minds dwell on these long stretches of time--four hundred years or so of Roman occupation (counting, not from Cæsar's raids, but from the serious invasion of 43 A.D. under Aulus Plautius, say to some while after the famous letter of Honorius, calling home the legions). You may safely put it at four hundred years, and then count six hundred as the space before the Normans arrive--a thousand years altogether, or but a fraction--one short generation--less than the interval of time that separates us from King Alfred. In the great Cathedral of Winchester (where sleep, by the way, two gentle writers specially beloved, Isaak Walton and Jane Austen) above the choir-screen to the south, you may see a line of painted chests, of which the inscription on one tells you that it holds what was mortal of King Canute.

Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropp'd from the ruin'd sides of Kings.

But if you walk around to the north of the altar you will find yourself treading on tiles not so very far short of twice that antiquity. Gentlemen, do not think that I would ever speak lightly of our lineage: only let us make as certain as we may what that lineage is.

I want you to-day to understand just what such a pavement as that preserved for your inspection in Downing Street meant to the man who saw it laid and owned it these fifteen hundred years--more or less--ago. _Ubi Romanus vicit, ibi habitat_--'where the Roman has conquered, there he settles': but whether he conquered or settled he carried these small tiles, these _tessellæ_, as religiously as ever Rachel stole her teraphin. 'Wherever his feet went there went the tessellated pavement for them to stand on. Even generals on foreign service carried in panniers on muleback the little coloured cubes or _tessellæ_ for laying down a pavement in each camping-place, to be taken up again when they moved forward. In England the same sweet emblems of the younger gods of poetic legend, of love, youth, plenty, and all their happy naturalism, are found constantly repeated.'[1] I am quoting these sentences from a local historian, but you see how these relics have a knack of inspiring prose at once scholarly and imaginative, as (for a more famous instance) the urns disinterred at Walsingham once inspired Sir Thomas Browne's. To continue and adapt the quotation--

Bacchus with his wild rout, Orpheus playing to a spell-bound audience,
Apollo singing to the lyre, Venus in Mars' embrace, Neptune with a host
of seamen, scollops, and trumpets, Narcissus by the fountain, Jove and
Ganymede, Leda and the swan, wood-nymphs and naiads, satyrs and fauns,
masks, hautboys, cornucopiæ, flowers and baskets of golden fruit--what
touches of home they must have seemed to these old dwellers in the
Cambridgeshire wilds!

Yes, touches of home! For the owner of this villa (you may conceive) is the grandson or even great-great-grandson of the colonist who first built it, following in the wake of the legionaries. The family has prospered and our man is now a considerable landowner. He was born in Britain: his children have been born here: and here he lives a comfortable, well-to-do, out-of-door life, in its essentials I daresay not so very unlike the life of an English country squire to-day. Instead of chasing foxes or hares he hunts the wolf and the wild boar; but the sport is good and he returns with an appetite. He has added a summer parlour to the house, with a northern aspect and no heating-flues: for the old parlour he has enlarged the præfurnium, and through the long winter evenings sits far better warmed than many a master of a modern country-house. A belt of trees on the brow of the rise protects him from the worst winds, and to the south his daughters have planted violet-beds which will breathe odorously in the spring. He has rebuilt and enlarged the slave-quarters and outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around the atrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, where stucco remains, has repainted it in fresh colours. He knows that there are no gaps or weak spots in his stockade fence--wood is always cheap. In a word he has improved the estate; is modestly proud of it; and will be content, like the old Athenian, to leave his patrimony not worse but something better than he found it.

Sensible men--and the Romans were eminently that--as a rule contrive to live decently, or, at least, tolerably. What struck Arthur Young more than anything else in his travels through France on the very eve of the Revolution seems to have been the general good-tempered happiness of the French gentry on their estates. We may moralise of the Roman colonists as of the French proprietors that 'unconscious of their doom the little victims played'; but we have no right to throw back on them the shadow of what was to come or to cloud the picture of a useful, peaceable, maybe more than moderately happy life, with our later knowledge of disaster mercifully hidden from it.

Although our colonist and his family have all been born in Britain, are happy enough here on the whole, and talk without more than half meaning it, and to amuse themselves with speculations half-wistful, of daring the tremendous journey and setting eyes on Rome some day, their pride is to belong to her, to Rome, the imperial City, the city afar: their windows open back towards her as Daniel's did towards Jerusalem--_Urbs quam dicunt Roman--the_ City. Along the great road, hard by, her imperial writ runs. They have never subscribed to the vow of Ruth, 'Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.' They dwell under the Pax Romana, not merely protected by it but as _citizens_. Theirs are the ancestral deities portrayed on that unfading pavement in the very centre of the villa--Apollo and Daphne, Bacchus and Ariadne--

For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young.

Parcels come to them, forwarded from the near military station; come by those trade-routes, mysterious to us, concerning which a most illuminating book waits to be written by somebody. There are parcels of seeds--useful vegetables and potherbs, helichryse (marigold as we call them now) for the flower garden, for the colonnade even roses with real Italian earth damp about their roots. There are parcels of books, too--rolls rather, or tablets--wherein the family reads about Rome; of its wealth, the uproar of its traffic, the innumerable chimneys smoking, _fumum et opes strepitumque_. For they are always reading of Rome; feeling themselves, as they read, to belong to it, to be neither savage nor even rustic, but by birthright _of the city_, urbane; and what these exiles read is of how Horace met a bore on the Sacred Road (which would correspond, more or less, with our Piccadilly)--

Along the Sacred Road I strolled one day
Deep in some bagatelle (you know my way)
When up comes one whose face I scarcely knew--
'The dearest of dear fellows! how d'ye do?'
--He grasped my hand. 'Well, thanks! The same to you?'

--or of how Horace apologises for protracting a summer jaunt to his country seat:--

Five days I told you at my farm I'd stay,
And lo! the whole of August I'm away.
Well but, Maecenas, you would have me live,
And, were I sick, my absence you'd forgive.
So let me crave indulgence for the fear
Of falling ill at this bad time of year.
When, thanks to early figs and sultry heat,
The undertaker figures with his suite;
When fathers all and fond mammas grow pale
At what may happen to their young heirs male,
And courts and levees, town-bred mortals' ills,
Bring fevers on, and break the seals of wills.

(Conington's translation.)