Chapter VII: Part 7

Five brothers of the noble family de la Penne lived together in a
Hospicium at Toulouse as students of the Civil and Canon Law. One of
them was Provost of a Monastery, another Archdeacon of Albi, another an
Archpriest, another Canon of Toledo. A bastard son of their father,
named Peter, lived with them as squire to the Canon. On Easter Day,
Peter, with another squire of the household named Aimery Béranger and
other students, having dined at a tavern, were dancing with women,
singing, shouting, and beating 'metallic vessels and iron culinary
instruments' in the street before their masters' house. The Provost and
the Archpriest were sympathetically watching the jovial scene from a
window, until it was disturbed by the appearance of a Capitoul and his
officers, who summoned some of the party to surrender the prohibited
arms which they were wearing. '_Ben Senhor, non fassat_' was the
impudent reply. The Capitoul attempted to arrest one of the offenders;
whereupon the ecclesiastical party made a combined attack upon the
official. Aimery Béranger struck him in the face with a poignard,
cutting off his nose and part of his chin and lips, and knocking out or
breaking no less than eleven teeth. The surgeons deposed that if he
recovered (he eventually did recover) he would never be able to speak
intelligibly. One of the watch was killed outright by Peter de la
Penne. That night the murderer slept, just as if nothing had happened,
in the house of his ecclesiastical masters. The whole household,
masters and servants alike, were, however, surprised by the other
Capitouls and a crowd of 200 citizens, and led off to prison, and the
house is alleged to have been pillaged. The Archbishop's Official
demanded their surrender. In the case of the superior ecclesiastics
this, after a short delay, was granted. But Aimery, who dressed like a
layman in 'divided and striped clothes' and wore a long beard, they
refused to treat as a clerk, though it was afterwards alleged that the
tonsure was plainly discernible upon his head until it was shaved by
order of the Capitouls. Aimery was put to the torture, admitted his
crime, and was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out by
hanging, after he had had his hand cut off on the scene of the crime,
and been dragged by horses to the place of execution. The Capitouls
were then excommunicated by the Official, and the ecclesiastical side
of the quarrel was eventually transferred to the Roman Court. Before
the Parlement of Paris the University complained of the violation of
the Royal privilege exempting scholars' servants from the ordinary
tribunals. The Capitouls were imprisoned, and after long litigation
sentenced to pay enormous damages to the ruffian's family and erect a
chapel for the good of his soul. The city was condemned for a time to
the forfeiture of all its privileges. The body was cut down from the
gibbet on which it had been hanging for three years, and accorded a
solemn funeral. Four Capitouls bore the pall, and all fathers of
families were required to walk in the procession. When they came to the
Schools, the citizens solemnly begged pardon of the University, and the
cortège was joined by 3000 scholars. Finally, it cost the city 15,000
livres tournois or more to regain their civic privileges.[3]

The late Mr Cecil Rhodes once summarized all Fellows of Colleges as children in matters of finance. Be that as it may, you will find nothing more constant in history than the talent of the Universities for extracting money or money's worth out of a riot. Time (I speak as a parent) has scarcely blunted that faculty; and still--since where young men congregate, noise there must be--our Universities like Wordsworth's Happy Warrior

turn their necessity to glorious gain.

These were the excesses of young 'bloods,' and their servants: but with them mingled scholars not less ferocious in their habits because almost desperately poor. You all know, I dare say, that very poor scholars would be granted licences to beg by the Chancellor. The sleeve of this gown in which I address you represents the purse or pocket of a Master of Arts, and may hint to you by its amplitude how many crusts he was prepared to receive from the charitable.

Now, choosing to ignore (because it has been challenged as overpainted) a picture of penury endured by the scholars of St John's College in this University, let me tell you two stories, one well attested, the other fiction if you will, but both agreeable as testifying to the spirit of youth which, ever blowing upon their sacred embers, has kept Oxford and Cambridge perennially alive.

My first is of three scholars so poor that they possessed but one 'cappa' and gown between them. They took it in turns therefore, and when one went to lecture the other two kept to their lodgings. I invite you even to reflect on the joy of the lucky one, in a winter lecture room, dark, with unglazed windows, as he listened and shuffled his feet for warmth in the straw of the floor. [No one, by the way, can understand the incessant harping of our early poets upon May-time and the return of summer until he has pictured to himself the dark and cold discomfort of a Middle-English winter.] These three poor scholars fed habitually on bread, with soup and a little wine, tasting meat only on Sundays and feasts of the Church. Yet one of them, Richard of Chichester, who lived to become a saint, _saepe retulit quod nunquam in vita sua tam jucundam, tam delectabilem duxerat vitam_--that never had he lived so jollily, so delectably.

That is youth, youth blessed by friendship. Now for my second story, which is also of youth and friendship.--

Two poor scholars, who had with pains become Masters of Arts and saved their pence to purchase the coveted garb, on the afternoon of their admission took a country walk in it, together flaunting their new finery. But, the day being gusty, on their return across the bridge, a puff of wind caught the _biretta_ of one and blew it into the river. The loss was irrecoverable, since neither could swim. The poor fellow looked at his friend. His friend looked at him. 'Between us two,' he said, 'it is all or naught,' and cast his own cap to float and sink with the other down stream.

You will never begin to understand literature until you understand something of life. These young men, your forerunners, understood something of life while as yet completely careless of literature. After the impulse of Abelard and others had died down, the mass of students betook themselves to the Universities, no doubt, for quite ordinary, mercenary reasons. The University led to the Church, and the Church, in England at any rate, was the door to professional life.

Nearly all the civil servants of the Crown--I am here quoting freely--the diplomatists, the secretaries or advisers of great nobles, the physicians, the architects, at one time the secular law-givers, all through the Middle Ages the then large tribe of ecclesiastical lawyers, were ecclesiastics.... Clerkship did not necessarily involve even minor orders. But as it was cheaper to a King or a Bishop or a temporal magnate to reward his physician, his legal adviser, his secretary, or his agent by a Canonry or a Rectory than by large salaries, the average student of Paris or Oxford or Cambridge looked toward the Church as the 'main chance' as we say, and small blame to him! He never at any rate looked towards Literature: nor did the Universities, wise in their generation, encourage him to do anything of the sort.

You may realise, Gentlemen, how tardily, even in later and more enlightened times, the study of Literature has crept its way into official Cambridge, if you will take down your "University Calendar" and study the list of Professorships there set forth in order of foundation. It begins in 1502 with the Lady Margaret's Chair of Divinity, founded by the mother of Henry VII. Five Regius Professorships follow: of Divinity, Civil Law, Physic, Hebrew, Greek, all of 1540. So Greek comes in upon the flush of the Renaissance; and the Calendar bravely, yet not committing itself to a date, heads with Erasmus the noble roll which concludes (as may it long conclude) with Henry Jackson. But Greek comes in last of the five. Close on a hundred years elapse before the foundation of the next chair--it is of Arabic; and more than a hundred before we arrive at Mathematics. So Sir William Hamilton was not without historical excuse when he declared the study of Mathematics to be no part of the business of this University! Then follow Moral Philosophy (1683), Music (1684), Chemistry (1702), Astronomy (1704), Anatomy (1707), Modern History and more Arabic, with Botany (1724), Geology (1727), closely followed by Mr Hulse's Christian Advocate, more Astronomy (1749), more Divinity (1777), Experimental Philosophy (1783): then in the nineteenth century more Law, more Medicine, Mineralogy, Archaeology, Political Economy, Pure Mathematics, Comparative Anatomy, Sanskrit and yet again more Law, before we arrive in 1869 at a Chair of Latin. Faint yet pursuing, we have yet to pass chairs of Fine Art (belated), Experimental Physics, Applied Mechanics, Anglo-Saxon, Animal Morphology, Surgery, Physiology, Pathology, Ecclesiastical History, Chinese, more Divinity, Mental Philosophy, Ancient History, Agriculture, Biology, Agricultural Botany, more Biology, Astrophysics, and German, before arriving in 1910 at a Chair of English Literature which by this time I have not breath to defend.

The enumeration has, I hope, been instructive. If it has also plunged you in gloom, to that atmosphere (as the clock warns me) for a fortnight I must leave you: with a promise, however, in another lecture to cheer you, if it may be, with some broken gleams of hope.

[Footnote 1: "What English Poetry may still learn from Greek": a paper read before the English Association on Nov. 17, 1911.]

[Footnote 2: See Mr E. K. Chambers' "Mediaeval Stage", Dr Courthope's "History of English Poetry," and Professor W. P. Ker's "The Dark Ages".]

[Footnote 3: Rashdall, "The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages", vol. ii, p. 684, from documents printed in Fournier's collection.]

LECTURE XI.

ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES nglish Literature in Our Universities (II)

Wednesday, December 3

We broke off, Gentlemen, upon the somewhat painful conclusion that our Universities were not founded for the study of literature, and tardily admitted it. The dates of our three literary chairs in Cambridge--I speak of our Western literature only, and omit Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese--clenched that conclusion for us. Greek in 1540, Latin not until 1869, English but three years ago--from the lesson of these intervals there is no getting away.

Now I do not propose to dwell on the Renaissance and how Greek came in: for a number of writers in our time have been busy with the Renaissance, and have--I was going to say 'over-written the subject,' but no--it is better to say that they have focussed the period so as to distort the general perspective at the cost of other periods which have earned less attention; the twelfth century, for example. At any rate their efforts, with the amount they claim of your reading, absolve me from doing more than remind you that the Renaissance brought in the study of Greek, and Greek necessarily brought in the study of literature: since no man can read what the Greeks wrote and not have his eyes unsealed to what I have called a norm of human expression; a guide to conduct, a standard to correct our efforts, whether in poetry, or in philosophy, or in art. For the rest, I need only quote to you Gibbon's magnificent saying, that the Greek language gave a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the abstractions of metaphysics. [May I add, in parenthesis, that, while no believer in compulsory Greek, holding, indeed, that you can hardly reconcile learning with compulsion, and still more hardly force them to be compatibles, I subscribe with all my heart to Bagehot's shrewd saying, 'while a knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer of English, he should at least have a firm conviction that those two languages existed.']

But, assuming you to know something of the Renaissance, and how it brought Greek into Oxford and Cambridge, I find that in the course of the argument two things fall to be said, and both to be said with some emphasis.

In the first place, without officially acknowledging their native tongue or its literature, our two Universities had no sooner acquired Greek than their members became immensely interested in English. Take, for one witness out of many, Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke Hall. His letters to Edmund Spenser have been preserved, as you know. Now Gabriel Harvey was a man whom few will praise, and very few could have loved. Few will quarrel with Dr Courthope's description of him as 'a person of considerable intellectual force, but intolerably arrogant and conceited, and with a taste vitiated by all the affectations of Italian humanism,' or deny that 'his tone in his published correspondence with Spenser is that of an intellectual bully.'[1] None will refuse him the title of fool for attempting to mislead Spenser into writing hexameters. But all you can urge against Gabriel Harvey, on this count or that or the other, but accumulates proof that this donnish man was all the while giving thought--giving even ferocious thought--to the business of making an English Literature.

Let me adduce more pleasing evidence. At or about Christmas, in the year 1597, there was enacted here in Cambridge, in the hall of St John's College, a play called "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus," a skittish work, having for subject the 'discontent of scholars'; the misery attending those who, unsupported by a private purse, would follow after Apollo and the Nine. No one knows the author's name: but he had a wit which has kept something of its salt to this day, and in Christmas, 1597, it took Cambridge by storm. The public demanded a sequel, and "The Return from Parnassus" made its appearance on the following Christmas (again in St John's College hall); to be followed by a "Second Part of the Return from Parnassus," the author's overflow of wit, three years later. Of the popularity of the first and second plays--"The Pilgrimage" and "The Return, Part I"--we have good evidence in the prologue to "The Return, Part II," where the author makes Momus say, before an audience which knew the truth:

"The Pilgrimage to Parnassus" and "The Returne from Parnassus" have
stood the honest Stagekeepers in many a crowne's expense for linckes
and vizards: purchased many a Sophister a knocke with a clubbe:
hindred the butler's box, and emptied the Colledge barrells; and now,
unlesse you have heard the former, you may returne home as wise as you
came: for this last is the last part of The Returne from Parnassus;
that is, the last time that the Author's wit will turne upon the toe
in this vaine.

In other words, these plays had set everybody in Cambridge agog, had been acted by link-light, had led to brawls--either between literary factions or through offensive personal allusions to which we have lost all clue--had swept into the box-office much money usually spent on Christmas gambling, and had set up an inappeasable thirst for College ale. The point for us is that (in 1597-1601) they abound in topical allusions to the London theatres: that Shakespeare is obviously just as much a concern to these young men of Cambridge as Mr Shaw (say) is to our young men to-day, and an allusion to him is dropped in confidence that it will be aptly taken. For instance, one of the characters, Gullio, will have some love-verses recited to him 'in two or three diverse veins, in Chaucer's, Gower's and Spenser's and Mr Shakespeare's.' Having listened to Chaucer, he cries, 'Tush! Chaucer is a foole'; but coming to some lines of Mr Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," he cries, 'Ey, marry, Sir! these have some life in them! Let this duncified world esteeme of Spenser and Chaucer, I'le worship sweet Mr Shakespeare, and to honoure him I will lay his "Venus and Adonis" under my pillowe.' For another allusion--'Few of the University pen plaies well,' says the actor Kempe in Part II of the "Returne"; 'they smell too much of that writer _Ovid_ and that writer _Metamorphosis_, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here's our fellow _Shakespeare_ puts them all downe, ay and _Ben Jonson_, too.' Here you have Cambridge assembling at Christmas-tide to laugh at well-understood hits upon the theatrical taste of London. Here you have, to make Cambridge laugh, three farcical quasi-Aristophanic plays all hinging on the tribulations of scholars who depart to pursue literature for a livelihood. For a piece of definite corroborative evidence you have a statute of Queens' College (quoted by Mr Bass Mullinger) which directs that 'any student refusing to take part in the acting of a comedy or tragedy in the College and absenting himself from the performance, contrary to the injunctions of the President, shall be expelled from the Society'--which seems drastic. And on top of all this, you have evidence enough and to spare of the part played in Elizabethan drama by the 'University Wits.' Why, Marlowe (of Corpus Christi) may be held to have invented its form--blank verse; Ben Jonson (of St John's) to have carried it on past its meridian and through its decline, into the masque. Both Universities claim Lyly and Chapman. Marston, Peel, Massinger, hailed from Oxford. But Greene and Nashe were of Cambridge--of St John's both, and Day of Caius. They sought to London, and there (for tragic truth underlay that Christmas comedy of "The Pilgrimage of Parnassus") many of them came to bitter ends: but before reaching their sordid personal ruin--and let the deaths of Marlowe and Greene be remembered--they built the Elizabethan drama, as some of them lived to add its last ornaments. We know what, meanwhile, Spenser had done. I think it scarcely needs further proof that Cambridge, towards the end of the sixteenth century, was fermenting with a desire to read, criticise, yes and write, English literature, albeit officially the University recognised no such thing.

There remains a second question--How happened it that Cambridge, after admitting Greek, took more than three hundred years to establish a Chair of Latin, and that a Chair of English is, so to speak, a mushroom (call it not toadstool!) of yesterday? Why simply enough. Latin continued to be the working language of Science. In Latin Bacon naturally composed his "Novum Organum" and indeed almost all his scientific and philosophical work, although a central figure of his age among English prose-writers. In Latin, in the eighteenth century, Newton wrote his "Principia": and I suppose that of no two books written by Englishmen before the close of that century, or indeed before Darwin's "Origin of Species," can it be less extravagantly said than of the "Novum Organum" and the "Principia" that they shook the world. Now, without forgetting our Classical Tripos (founded in 1822), as without forgetting the great names of Bentley and Porson, we may observe it as generally true, that whenever and wherever large numbers of scientific men use a particular language as their working instrument, they have a disposition to look askance on its refinements; to be jealous of its literary professors; to accuse these of treating as an end in itself what is properly a means. Like the Denver editor I quoted to you in a previous lecture, these scientific workers want to 'get there' in a hurry, forgetting that (to use another Americanism) the sharper the chisel the more ice it is likely to cut. You may observe this disposition--this suspicion of 'literature,' this thinly veiled contempt--in many a scientific man to-day; though because his language has changed from Latin to English, it is English he now chooses to cheapen. Well, we cannot help it, perhaps. Perhaps he cannot help it. It is human nature. We must go on persuading him, not losing our tempers.

None the less we should not shut our eyes to the fact that while a language is the working instrument of scientific men there will always be a number of them to decry any study of it for its beauty, and even any study of it for the sake of accuracy--its beauty and its accuracy being indeed scarcely distinguishable.

I fear, Gentlemen, you may go on from this to the dreadful conclusion that the date 1869, when Cambridge at length came to possess a Chair of Latin, marks definitely the hour at which Latin closed its eyes and became a dead language; that you may proceed to a yet more dreadful application of this to the Chair of English founded in 1910: and that henceforward (to misquote what Mr Max Beerbohm once wickedly said of Walter Pater) you will be apt to regard Professor Housman and me as two widowers engaged, while the undertaker waits, in composing the features of our belovèds.

But (to speak seriously) that is what I stand here to controvert: and I derive no small encouragement when--as has more than once happened--A, a scientific man, comes to me and complains that he for his part cannot understand B, another scientific man, 'because the fellow can't express himself.' And the need to study precision in writing has grown far more instant since men of science have abandoned the 'universal language' and taken to writing in their own tongues. Let us, while not on the whole regretting the change, at least recognise some dangers, some possible disadvantages. I will confine myself to English, considered as a substitute for Latin. In Latin you have a language which may be thin in its vocabulary and inelastic for modern use; but a language which at all events compels a man to clear his thought and communicate it to other men precisely.

Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into the narrow act

--may be all impossible of compression into the Latin speech. In English, on the other hand, you have a language which by its very copiousness and elasticity tempts you to believe that you can do without packing, without compression, arrangement, order; that, with the Denver editor, all you need is to 'get there'--though it be with all your intellectual belongings in a jumble, overflowing the portmanteau. Rather I preach to you that having proudly inherited English with its _copia fandi_, you should keep your estate in order by constantly applying to it that _jus et norma loquendi_ of which, if you seek to the great models, you will likewise find yourselves inheritors.

'But,' it is sometimes urged, 'why not leave this new study of English to the younger Universities now being set up all over the country?' 'Ours is an age of specialising. Let these newcomers have something--what better than English?--to specialise upon.'

I might respond by asking if the fame of Cambridge would stand where it stands to-day had she followed a like counsel concerning other studies and, resting upon Mathematics, given over this or that branch of Natural Science to be grasped by new hands. What of Electricity, for example? Or what of Physiology? Yes, and among the unnatural sciences, what of Political Economy? But I will use a more philosophical argument.

Some years ago I happened on a collection of Bulgarian proverbs of which my memory retains but two, yet each an abiding joy. In a lecture on English Literature in our Universities you will certainly not miss to apply the first, which runs, 'Many an ass has entered Jerusalem.'

The application of the second may elude you for a moment. It voices the impatience of an honest Bulgar who has been worried overmuch to subscribe to what, in this England of ours, we call Church Purposes; and it runs, 'All these two-penny saints will be the ruin of the Church.'

Now far be it from me to apply the term 'two-penny saint' to any existing University. To avoid the accusation I hereby solemnly declare my deep conviction that every single University at this moment in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland has reasons--strong in all, in some overwhelmingly strong--for its existence. That is plainly said, I hope? Yet I do maintain that if we go on multiplying Universities we shall not increase the joy; that the reign of two-penny saints lies not far off and will soon lie within measurable distance; and that it will be a pestilent reign. As we saw in out last lecture the word 'University'--_Universitas_--had, in its origin, nothing to do with Universality: it meant no more than a Society, organised (as it happened) to promote learning. But words, like institutions, often rise above their beginnings, and in time acquire a proud secondary connotation. For an instance let me give you the beautiful Wykehamist motto _Manners Makyeth Man_, wherein 'manners' originally meant no more than 'morals.' So there has grown around our two great Universities of Oxford and Cambridge a connotation (secondary, if you will, but valuable above price) of universality; of standing like great beacons of light, to attract the young wings of all who would seek learning for their sustenance. Thousands have singed, thousands have burned themselves, no doubt: but what thousands of thousands have caught the sacred fire into their souls as they passed through and passed out, to carry it, to drop it, still as from wings, upon waste places of the world! Think of country vicarages, of Australian or Himalayan outposts, where men have nourished out lives of duty upon the fire of three transient, priceless years. Think of the generations of children to whom their fathers' lives, prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if someone let fall the word 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge,' so that they themselves came to surmise an aura about the name as of a land very far off; and then say if the ineffable spell of those two words do not lie somewhere in the conflux of generous youth with its rivalries and clash of minds, ere it disperses, generation after generation, to the duller business of life. Would you have your mother University, Gentlemen, undecorated by some true study of your mother-English?

I think not, having been there, and known such thoughts as you will carry away, and having been against expectation called back to report them.

And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek,
And all the world and I seem'd far less cold,
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold,
And hope was strong, and life itself not weak.

My purpose here (and I cannot too often recur to it) is to wean your minds from hankering after false Germanic standards and persuade you, or at least point out to you, in what direction that true study lies if you are men enough to take up your inheritance and believe in it as a glory to be improved.

Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University on earth can study English Literature truthfully or worthily, or even at all profitably, unless by studying it in the category for which Heaven, or Nature (call the ultimate cause what you will), intended it; or, to put the assertion more concretely, in any other category than that for which the particular author--be his name Chaucer or Chesterton, Shakespeare or Shaw--designed it; as neither can Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University study English Literature, to understand it, unless by bracing itself to consider a living art. Origins, roots, all the gropings towards light--let these be granted as accessories; let those who search in them be granted all honour, all respect. It is only when they preach or teach these preliminaries, these accessories, to be more important than Literature itself--it is only when they, owing all their excuse in life to the established daylight, din upon us that the precedent darkness claims precedence in honour, that one is driven to utter upon them this dialogue, in monosyllables:

_And God said, 'Let there be light': and there was light.
'Oh, thank you, Sir,' said the Bat and the Owl; 'then we are off!'_

I grant you, Gentlemen, that there must always inhere a difficulty in correlating for the purposes of a Tripos a study of Literature itself with a study of these accessories; the thing itself being _naturally_ so much more difficult: being so difficult indeed that (to take literary criticism alone and leave for a moment the actual practice of writing out of the question) though some of the first intellects in the world--Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, Boileau, Dryden, Lessing, Goethe, Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve--have broken into parcels of that territory, the mass of it remains unexplored, and nobody as yet has found courage to reduce the reports of these great explorers to any system; so that a very eminent person indeed found it easy to write to me the other day, 'The principles of Criticism? What are they? Who made them?' To this I could only answer that I did not know Who made them; but that Aristotle, Dryden, Lessing, had, as it was credibly reported, discovered five or, it might be, six. And this difficulty of appraising literature absolutely inheres in your study of it from the beginning. No one can have set a General Paper on Literature and examined on it, setting it and marking the written answers, alongside of papers about language, inflexions and the rest, without having borne in upon him that _here_ the student finds his difficulty. While in a paper set about inflexions, etc., a pupil with a moderately retentive memory will easily obtain sixty or seventy per cent. of the total marks, in a paper on the book or play considered critically an examiner, even after setting his paper with a view to some certain inferiority of average, has to be lenient before he can award fifty, forty, or even thirty per cent. of the total.

You will find a somewhat illuminating passage--illuminating, that is, if you choose to interpret and apply it to our subject--in Lucian's "True History," where the veracious traveller, who tells the tale, affirms that he visited Hades among other places, and had some conversation with Homer, among its many inhabitants--

Before many days had passed, I accosted the poet Homer, when we were
both disengaged, and asked him, among other things, where he came
from; it was still a burning question with us, I explained. He said he
was aware that some derived him from Chios, others from Smyrna, and
others again from Colophon; but in fact he was a Babylonian, generally
known not as Homer but as Tigranes; but when later in life he was
given as a homer or hostage to the Greeks, that name clung to him.
Another of my questions was about the so-called spurious books; had he
written them or not? He said that they were all genuine: so I now knew
what to think of the critics Zenodotus and Aristarchus and all their
lucubrations. Having got a categorical answer on that point, I tried
him next on his reason for starting the "Iliad" with the wrath of
Achilles. He said he had no exquisite reason; it just came into his
head that way.

Even so diverse are the questions that may be asked concerning any great work of art. But to discover its full intent is always the most difficult task of all. That task, however, and nothing less difficult, will always be the one worthiest of a great University.

On that, and on that alone, Gentlemen, do I base all claims for our School of English Literature. And yet in conclusion I will ask you, reminding yourselves how fortunate is your lot in Cambridge, to think of fellow-Englishmen far less fortunate.

Years ago I took some pains to examine the examination papers set by a renowned Examining Body and I found this--'I humbly solicit' (to use a phrase of Lucian's) 'my hearers' incredulity'--that in a paper set upon three Acts of "Hamlet"--three Acts of "Hamlet"!--the first question started with 'G.tt. p..cha' 'Al..g.tor' and invited the candidate to fill in the missing letters correctly. Now I was morally certain that the words 'gutta-percha' and 'alligator' did not occur in the first three Acts of "Hamlet"; but having carefully re-read them I invited this examining body to explain itself. The answer I got was that, to understand Shakespeare, a student must first understand the English Language! Some of you on leaving Cambridge will go out--a company of Christian folk dispersed throughout the world--to tell English children of English Literature. Such are the pedagogic fetters you will have to knock off their young minds before they can stand and walk.

Gentlemen, on a day early in this term I sought the mound which is the old Castle of Cambridge. Access to it, as perhaps you know, lies through the precincts of the County Prison. An iron railing encloses the mound, having a small gate, for the key of which a notice-board advised me to ring the prison bell. I rang. A very courteous gaoler answered the bell and opened the gate, which stands just against his wicket. I thanked him, but could not forbear asking 'Why do they keep this gate closed?' 'I don't know, sir,' he answered, 'but I suppose if they didn't the children might get in and play.'

So with his answer I went up the hill and from the top saw Cambridge spread at my feet; Magdalene below me, and the bridge which--poor product as it is of the municipal taste--has given its name to so many bridges all over the world; the river on its long ambit to Chesterton; the tower of St John's, and beyond it the unpretentious but more beautiful tower of Jesus College. To my right the magnificent chine of King's College Chapel made its own horizon above the yellowing elms. I looked down on the streets--the narrow streets--the very streets which, a fortnight ago, I tried to people for you with that mediaeval throng which has passed as we shall pass. Still in my ear the gaoler's answer repeated itself--_'I suppose, if they didn't keep it locked, the children might get in and play'_: and a broken echo seemed to take it up, in words that for a while had no more coherence than the scattered jangle of bells in the town below. But as I turned to leave, they chimed into an articulate sentence and the voice was the voice of Francis Bacon--_Regnum Scientiae ut regnum Coeli non nisi sub persona infantis intratur.--Into the Kingdom of Knowledge, as into the Kingdom of Heaven, whoso would enter must become as a little child._

[Footnote 1: "Cambridge History of English Literature", vol. iii, p. 213.]

LECTURE XII.

ON STYLE

Wednesday, January 28, 1914

Should Providence, Gentlemen, destine any one of you to write books for his living, he will find experimentally true what I here promise him, that few pleasures sooner cloy than reading what the reviewers say. This promise I hand on with the better confidence since it was endorsed for me once in conversation by that eminently good man the late Henry Sidgwick; who added, however, 'Perhaps I ought to make a single exception. There was a critic who called one of my books "epoch-making." Being anonymous, he would have been hard to find and thank, perhaps; but I ought to have made the effort.'

May I follow up this experience of his with one of my own, as a preface or brief apology for this lecture? Short-lived as is the author's joy in his critics, far-spent as may be his hope of fame, mournful his consent with Sir Thomas Browne that 'there is nothing immortal but immortality,' he cannot hide from certain sanguine men of business, who in England call themselves 'Press-Cutting Agencies,' in America 'Press-Clipping Bureaux,' and, as each successive child of his invention comes to birth, unbecomingly presume in him an almost virginal trepidation. 'Your book,' they write falsely, 'is exciting much comment. May we collect and send you notices of it appearing in the World's Press? We submit a specimen cutting with our terms; and are, dear Sir,' etc.

Now, although steadily unresponsive to this wile, I am sometimes guilty of taking the enclosed specimen review and thrusting it for preservation among the scarcely less deciduous leaves of the book it was written to appraise. So it happened that having this vacation, to dust--not to read--a line of obsolete or obsolescent works on a shelf, I happened on a review signed by no smaller a man than Mr Gilbert Chesterton and informing the world that the author of my obsolete book was full of good stories as a kindly uncle, but had a careless or impatient way of stopping short and leaving his readers to guess what they most wanted to know: that, reaching the last chapter, or what he chose to make the last chapter, instead of winding up and telling 'how everybody lived ever after,' he (so to speak) slid you off his avuncular knee with a blessing and the remark that nine o'clock was striking and all good children should be in their beds.

That criticism has haunted me during the vacation. Looking back on a course of lectures which I deemed to be accomplished; correcting them in print; revising them with all the nervousness of a beginner; I have seemed to hear you complain--'He has exhorted us to write accurately, appropriately; to eschew Jargon; to be bold and essay Verse. He has insisted that Literature is a living art, to be practised. But just what we most needed he has not told. At the final doorway to the secret he turned his back and left us. Accuracy, propriety, perspicuity--these we may achieve. But where has he helped us to write with beauty, with charm, with distinction? Where has he given us rules for what is called _Style_ in short?--having attained which an author may count himself set up in business.'

Thus, Gentlemen, with my mind's ear I heard you reproaching me. I beg you to accept what follows for my apology.

To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is _not_; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not--can never be--extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it --whole-heartedly--and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. _Murder your darlings._'

But let me plead further that you have not been left altogether without clue to the secret of what Style is. That you must master the secret for yourselves lay implicit in our bargain, and you were never promised that a writer's training would be easy. Yet a clue was certainly put in your hands when, having insisted that Literature is a living art, I added that therefore it must be personal and of its essence personal.

This goes very deep: it conditions all our criticism of art. Yet it conceals no mystery. You may see its meaning most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes--say Pure Mathematics with Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things. In Pure Mathematics things are rarefied into ideas, numbers, concepts, but still farther and farther away from the individual man. Two and two make four, and fourpence is not ninepence (or at any rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleon keep the tally. In Acting on the other hand almost everything depends on personal interpretation--on the gesture, the walk, the gaze, the tone of a Siddons, the _rusé_ smile of a Coquelin, the exquisite, vibrant intonation of a Bernhardt. 'English Art?' exclaimed Whistler, 'there is no such thing! Art is art and mathematics is mathematics.' Whistler erred. Precisely because Art is Art, and Mathematics is Mathematics and a Science, Art being Art can be English or French; and, more than this, must be the personal expression of an Englishman or a Frenchman, as a 'Constable' differs from a 'Corot' and a 'Whistler' from both. Surely I need not labour this. But what is true of the extremes of Art and Science is true also, though sometimes less recognisably true, of the mean: and where they meet and seem to conflict (as in History) the impact is that of the personal or individual mind upon universal truth, and the question becomes whether what happened in the Sicilian Expedition, or at the trial of Charles I, can be set forth naked as an alegebraical sum, serene in its certainty, indifferent to opinion, uncoloured in the telling as in the hearing by sympathy or dislike, by passion or by character. I doubt, while we should strive in history as in all things to be fair, if history can be written in that colourless way, to interest men in human doings. I am sure that nothing which lies further towards imaginative, creative, Art can be written in that way.

It follows then that Literature, being by its nature personal, must be by its nature almost infinitely various. 'Two persons cannot be the authors of the sounds which strike our ear; and as they cannot be speaking one and the same speech, neither can they be writing one and the same lecture or discourse.' _Quot homines tot sententiae._ You may translate that, if you will, 'Every man of us constructs his sentence differently'; and if there be indeed any quarrel between Literature and Science (as I never can see why there should be), I for one will readily grant Science all her cold superiority, her ease in Sion with universal facts, so it be mine to serve among the multifarious race who have to adjust, as best they may, Science's cold conclusions (and much else) to the brotherly give-and-take of human life.

_Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas..._ Is it possible, Gentlemen, that you can have read one, two, three or more of the acknowledged masterpieces of literature without having it borne in on you that they are great because they are alive, and traffic not with cold celestial certainties, but with men's hopes, aspirations, doubts, loves, hates, breakings of the heart; the glory and vanity of human endeavour, the transience of beauty, the capricious uncertain lease on which you and I hold life, the dark coast to which we inevitably steer; all that amuses or vexes, all that gladdens, saddens, maddens us men and women on this brief and mutable traject which yet must be home for a while, the anchorage of our hearts? For an instance:--

Here lies a most beautiful lady,
Light of step and heart was she:
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes, beauty passes,
However rare, rare it be;
And when I crumble who shall remember
That lady of the West Country?

(Walter de la Mare.)

Or take a critic--a literary critic--such as Samuel Johnson, of whom we are used to think as of a man artificial in phrase and pedantic in judgment. He lives, and why? Because, if you test his criticism, he never saw literature but as a part of life, nor would allow in literature what was false to life, as he saw it. He could be wrong-headed, perverse; could damn Milton because he hated Milton's politics; on any question of passion or prejudice could make injustice his daily food. But he could not, even in a friend's epitaph, let pass a phrase (however well turned) which struck him as empty of life or false to it. All Boswell testifies to this: and this is why Samuel Johnson survives.

Now let me carry this contention--that all Literature is personal and therefore various--into a field much exploited by the pedant, and fenced about with many notice-boards and public warnings. _'Neologisms not allowed here,' 'All persons using slang, or trespassing in pursuit of originality....'_

Well, I answer these notice-boards by saying that, literature being personal, and men various--and even the "Oxford English Dictionary" being no Canonical book--man's use or defiance of the dictionary depends for its justification on nothing but his success: adding that, since it takes all kinds to make a world, or a literature, his success will probably depend on the occasion. A few months ago I found myself seated at a bump-supper next to a cheerful youth who, towards the close, suggested thoughtfully, as I arose to make a speech, that, the bonfire (which of course he called the 'bonner') being due at nine-thirty o'clock, there was little more than bare time left for 'langers and godders.' It cost me, who think slowly, some seconds to interpret that by 'langers' he meant 'Auld Lang Syne' and by 'godders' 'God Save the King.' I thought at the time, and still think, and will maintain against any schoolmaster, that the neologisms of my young neighbour, though not to be recommended for essays or sermons, did admirably suit the time, place, and occasion.

Seeing that in human discourse, infinitely varied as it is, so much must ever depend on _who_ speaks, and to _whom_, in what mood and upon what occasion; and seeing that Literature must needs take account of all manner of writers, audiences, moods, occasions; I hold it a sin against the light to put up a warning against any word that comes to us in the fair way of use and wont (as 'wire,' for instance, for a telegram), even as surely as we should warn off hybrids or deliberately pedantic impostors, such as 'antibody' and 'picture-drome'; and that, generally, it is better to err on the side of liberty than on the side of the censor: since by the manumitting of new words we infuse new blood into a tongue of which (or we have learnt nothing from Shakespeare's audacity) our first pride should be that it is flexible, alive, capable of responding to new demands of man's untiring quest after knowledge and experience. Not because it was an ugly thing did I denounce Jargon to you, the other day: but because it was a dead thing, leading no-whither, meaning naught. There is _wickedness_ in human speech, sometimes. You will detect it all the better for having ruled out what is _naughty_.

Let us err, then, if we err, on the side of liberty. I came, the other day, upon this passage in Mr Frank Harris's study of 'The Man Shakespeare':--

In the last hundred years the language of Molière has grown fourfold;
the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of the
engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for
special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it
may deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb
instrument, while English is positively poorer than it was in the time
of Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle
class.[1]

Well, let us not lose our heads over this, any more than over other prophecies of our national decadence. The "Oxford English Dictionary" has not yet unfolded the last of its coils, which yet are ample enough to enfold us in seven words for every three an active man can grapple with. Yet the warning has point, and a particular point, for those who aspire to write poetry: as Francis Thompson has noted in his Essay on Shelley:--

Theoretically, of course, one ought always to try for the best word.
But practically, the habit of excessive care in word-selection
frequently results in loss of spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit
of always taking the best word too easily becomes the habit of always
taking the most ornate word, the word most removed from ordinary
speech. In consequence of this, poetic diction has become latterly a
kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the precise
combinations into which the pieces will be shifted. There is, in fact,
a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of Poetry, whose
prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to the poetic purple....
Against these it is time some banner should be raised.... It is at any
rate curious to note that the literary revolution against the despotic
diction of Pope seems issuing, like political revolutions, in a
despotism of his own making;

and he adds a note that this is the more surprising to him because so many Victorian poets were prose-writers as well.

Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose should maintain
fresh and comprehensive a poet's diction, should save him from falling
into the hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should
react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by
taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping
him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For
it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits
of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the
stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood.

In diction, then, let us acquire all the store we can, rejecting no coin for its minting but only if its metal be base. So shall we bring out of our treasuries new things and old.

Diction, however, is but a part of Style, and perhaps not the most important part. So I revert to the larger question, 'What is Style? What its [Greek: to ti en einai], its essence, the law of its being?'

Now, as I sat down to write this lecture, memory evoked a scene and with the scene a chance word of boyish slang, both of which may seem to you irrelevant until, or unless, I can make you feel how they hold for me the heart of the matter.

I once happened to be standing in a corner of a ball-room when there entered the most beautiful girl these eyes have ever seen or now--since they grow dull--ever will see. It was, I believe, her first ball, and by some freak or in some premonition she wore black: and not pearls--which, I am told, maidens are wont to wear on these occasions--but one crescent of diamonds in her black hair. _Et vera incessu patuit dea._ Here, I say, was absolute beauty. It startled.

I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes, beauty passes....

She died a year or two later. She may have been too beautiful to live long. I have a thought that she may also have been too good.

For I saw her with the crowd about her: I saw led up and presented among others the man who was to be, for a few months, her husband: and then, as the men bowed, pencilling on their programmes, over their shoulders I saw her eyes travel to an awkward young naval cadet (Do you remember Crossjay in Meredith's "The Egoist"? It was just such a boy) who sat abashed and glowering sulkily beside me on the far bench. Promptly with a laugh, she advanced, claimed him, and swept him off into the first waltz.

When it was over he came back, a trifle flushed, and I felicitated him; my remark (which I forget) being no doubt 'just the sort of banality, you know, one does come out with'--as maybe that the British Navy kept its old knack of cutting out. But he looked at me almost in tears and blurted, 'It isn't her beauty, sir. You saw? It's--it's--my God, it's the _style_!'

Now you may think that a somewhat cheap, or at any rate inadequate, cry of the heart in my young seaman; as you may think it inadequate in me, and moreover a trifle capricious, to assure you (as I do) that the first and last secret of a good Style consists in thinking with the heart as well as with the head.

But let us philosophise a little. You have been told, I daresay often enough, that the business of writing demands _two_--the author and the reader. Add to this what is equally obvious, that the obligation of courtesy rests first with the author, who invites the séance, and commonly charges for it. What follows, but that in speaking or writing we have an obligation to put ourselves into the hearer's or reader's place? It is _his_ comfort, _his_ convenience, we have to consult. To _express_ ourselves is a very small part of the business: very small and almost unimportant as compared with _impressing_ ourselves: the aim of the whole process being to persuade.

All reading demands an effort. The energy, the good-will which a reader brings to the book is, and must be, partly expended in the labour of reading, marking, learning, inwardly digesting what the author means. The more difficulties, then, we authors obtrude on him by obscure or careless writing, the more we blunt the edge of his attention: so that if only in our own interest--though I had rather keep it on the ground of courtesy--we should study to anticipate his comfort.