[Footnote 1: The annual address to the students of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, delivered at the Mansion House, February 26th, 1887.]
When my friend Mr. Goschen invited me to discharge the duty which has fallen to me this afternoon I confess that I complied with many misgivings. He desired me to say something on the literary side of education. Now, it is almost impossible--and I think those who know most of literature will be readiest to agree with me--to say anything new in recommendation of literature in a scheme of education. I have felt, however, that Mr. Goschen has worked with such zeal and energy for so many years on behalf of this good cause, that anybody whom he considered able to render him any co-operation owed it to him in its fullest extent. The Lord Mayor has been kind enough to say that I am especially qualified to speak on English literature. I must, however, remind the Lord Mayor that I have strayed from literature into the region of politics; and I am not at all sure that such a journey conduces to the aptness of one"s judgment on literary subjects, or adds much to the force of one"s arguments on behalf of literary study.
Politics are a field where action is one long second-best, and where the choice constantly lies between two blunders. Nothing can be more unlike in aim, in ideals, in method, and in matter, than are literature and politics. I have, however, determined to do the best that I can; and I feel how great an honour it is to be invited to partake in a movement which I do not hesitate to call one of the most important of all those now taking place in English society.
What is the object of the movement? What do the promoters aim at? I take it that what they design is to bring the very best teaching that the country can afford, through the hands of the most thoroughly competent men, within the reach of every cla.s.s of the community. Their object is to give to the many that sound, systematic, and methodical knowledge, which has. .h.i.therto been the privilege of the few who can afford the time and money to go to Oxford and Cambridge; to diffuse the fertilising waters of intellectual knowledge from their great and copious fountain-heads at the Universities by a thousand irrigating channels over the whole length and breadth of our busy, indomitable land. Gentlemen, this is a most important point. Goethe said that nothing is more frightful than a teacher who only knows what his scholars are intended to know. We may depend upon it that the man who knows his own subject most thoroughly is most likely to excite interest about it in the minds of other people. We hear, perhaps more often than we like, that we live in a democratic age. It is true enough, and I can conceive nothing more democratic than such a movement as this, nothing which is more calculated to remedy defects that are incident to democracy, more thoroughly calculated to raise modern democracy to heights which other forms of government and older orderings of society have never yet attained. No movement can be more wisely democratic than one which seeks to give to the northern miner or the London artisan knowledge as good and as accurate, though he may not have so much of it, as if he were a student at Oxford or Cambridge. Something of the same kind may be said of the new frequency with which scholars of great eminence and consummate accomplishments, like Jowett, Lang, Myers, Leaf, and others, bring all their scholarship to bear, in order to provide for those who are not able, or do not care, to read old cla.s.sics in the originals, brilliant and faithful renderings of them in our own tongue. Nothing but good, I am persuaded, can come of all these attempts to connect learning with the living forces of society, and to make industrial England a sharer in the cla.s.sic tradition of the lettered world.
I am well aware that there is an apprehension that the present extraordinary zeal for education in all its forms--elementary, secondary, and higher--may bear in its train some evils of its own. It is said that before long n.o.body in England will be content to practise a handicraft, and that every one will insist on being at least a clerk. It is said that the moment is even already at hand when a great deal of practical distress does and must result from this tendency. I remember years ago that in the United States I heard something of the same kind. All I can say is, that this tendency, if it exists, is sure to right itself. In no case can the spread of so mischievous a notion as that knowledge and learning ought not to come within reach of handicraftsmen be attributed to literature. There is a familiar pa.s.sage in which Pericles, the great Athenian, describing the glory of the community of which he was so far-shining a member, says, "We at Athens are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes; we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness." But then remember that after all Athenian society rested on a basis of slavery. Athenian citizens were able to pursue their love of the beautiful, and their simplicity, and to cultivate their minds without loss of manliness, because the drudgery and hard work and rude service of society were performed by those who had no share in all these good things. With us, happily, it is very different. We are all more or less upon a level.
Our object is--and it is that which in my opinion raises us infinitely above the Athenian level--to bring the Periclean ideas of beauty and simplicity and cultivation of the mind within the reach of those who do the drudgery and the service and rude work of the world. And it can be done--do not let us be afraid--it can be done without in the least degree impairing the skill of our handicraftsmen or the manliness of our national life. It can be done without blunting or numbing the practical energies of our people.
I know they say that if you meddle with literature you are less qualified to take your part in practical affairs. You run a risk of being labelled a dreamer and a theorist. But, after all, if we take the very highest form of all practical energy--the governing of the country--all this talk is ludicrously untrue. I venture to say that in the present Government [1887], including the Prime Minister, there are three men at least who are perfectly capable of earning their bread as men of letters. In the late Government, besides the Prime Minister, there were also three men of letters, and I have never heard that those three were greater simpletons than their neighbours. There is a Commission now at work on that very important and abstruse subject--the Currency. I am told that no one there displays so acute an intelligence of the difficulties that are to be met, and so ready an apprehension of the important arguments that are brought forward, and the practical ends to be achieved, as the chairman of the Commission, who is not what is called a practical man, but a man of study, literature, theoretical speculation, and university training.[1] Oh no, gentlemen, some of the best men of business in the country are men who have had the best collegian"s equipment, and are the most accomplished bookmen.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Arthur Balfour.]
It is true that we cannot bring to London, with this movement, the indefinable charm that haunts the grey and venerable quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge. We cannot take you into the stately halls, the silent and venerable libraries, the solemn chapels, the studious old-world gardens. We cannot surround you with all those elevated memorials and sanctifying a.s.sociations of scholars and poets, of saints and sages, that march in glorious procession through the ages, and make of Oxford and Cambridge a dream of music for the inward ear, and of delight for the contemplative eye. We cannot bring all that to you; but I hope, and I believe, it is the object of those who are more intimately connected with the society than I have been, that every partaker of the benefits of this society will feel himself and herself in living connection with those two famous centres, and feel conscious of the links that bind the modern to the older England. One of the most interesting facts mentioned in your report this year is that last winter four prizes of 10 each were offered in the mining district of Northumberland, one each to the male and female student in every term who should take the highest place in the examination, in order to enable them to spend a month in Cambridge in the long vacation for the purpose of carrying on in the laboratories and museums the work in which they had been engaged in the winter at the local centre. That is not a step taken by our society; but the University of Cambridge has inspired and worked out the scheme, and I am not without hope that from London some of those who attend these cla.s.ses may be able to realise in person the attractions and the a.s.sociations of these two great historic sites. One likes to think how poor scholars three or four hundred years ago used to flock to Oxford, regardless of cold, privation, and hardship, so that they might satisfy their hunger and thirst for knowledge. I like to think of them in connection with this movement. I like to think of them in connection with students like those miners in Northumberland, whom I know well, and who are mentioned in the report of the Cambridge Extension Society as, after a day"s hard work in the pit, walking four or five miles through cold and darkness and rough roads to hear a lecture, and then walking back again the same four or five miles. You must look for the same enthusiasm, the same hunger and thirst for knowledge, that presided over the foundation of the Universities many centuries ago, to carry on this work, to strengthen and stimulate men"s faith in knowledge, their hopes from it, and their zeal for it.
Speaking now of the particular kind of knowledge of which I am going to say a few words--how does literature fare in these important operations? Last term, out of fifty-seven courses in the Cambridge scheme, there were ten on literature: out of thirty-one of our courses, seven were on literature. I am bound to say I think that such a position for literature in the scheme is very reasonably satisfactory. I have made some inquiries, since I knew that I was going to speak here, in the great popular centres of industry in the North and in Scotland as to the popularity of literature as a subject of teaching, I find very much what I should have expected. The professors all tell very much the same story, and this is, that it is extremely hard to interest any considerable number of people in subjects that seem to have no direct bearing upon the practical work of everyday life. There is a disinclination to study literature for its own sake, or to study anything which does not seem to have a visible and direct influence upon the daily work of life. The nearest approach to a taste for literature is a certain demand for instruction in history with a little flavour of contemporary politics. In short, the demand for instruction in literature is strictly moderate. That is what men of experience tell me, and we have to recognise it, nor ought we to be at all surprised. Mr. Goschen, when he spoke some years ago, said there were three motives which might induce people to seek the higher education. First, to obtain greater knowledge for bread-winning purposes. From that point of view science would be most likely to feed the cla.s.ses. Secondly, the improvement of one"s knowledge of political economy, and history, and facts bearing upon the actual political work and life of the day. Thirdly, was the desire of knowledge as a luxury to brighten life and kindle thought. I am very much afraid that, in the ordinary temper of our people, and the ordinary mode of looking at life, the last of these motives savours a little of self-indulgence, and sentimentality, and other objectionable qualities. There is a great stir in the region of physical science at this moment, and it is likely, as any one may see, to take a chief and foremost place in the field of intellectual activity. After the severity with which science was for so many ages treated by literature, we cannot wonder that science now retaliates, now mightily exalts herself, and thrusts literature down into the lower place. I only have to say on the relative claims of science and literature what Dr Arnold said:--"If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. This, however, I believe cannot be; wherefore, rather than have it the princ.i.p.al thing in my son"s mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament" (Stanley"s _Life of Arnold_, ii.
31). It is satisfactory that one may know something of these matters, and yet not believe that the sun goes round the earth. But if there is to be exclusion, I, for one, am not prepared to accept the rather enormous pretensions that are nowadays sometimes made for physical science as the be-all and end-all of education.
Next to this we know that there is a great stir on behalf of technical and commercial education. The special needs of our time and country compel us to pay a particular attention to this subject. Here knowledge is business, and we shall never hold our industrial pre-eminence, with all that hangs upon that pre-eminence, unless we push on technical and commercial education with all our might. But there is a third kind of knowledge, and that too, in its own way, is business. There is the cultivation of the sympathies and imagination, the quickening of the moral sensibilities, and the enlargement of the moral vision. The great need in modern culture, which is scientific in method, rationalistic in spirit, and utilitarian in purpose, is to find some effective agency for cherishing within us the ideal. That is the business and function of literature. Literature alone will not make a good citizen; it will not make a good man. History affords too many proofs that scholarship and learning by no means purge men of acrimony, of vanity, of arrogance, of a murderous tenacity about trifles. Mere scholarship and learning and the knowledge of books do not by any means arrest and dissolve all the travelling acids of the human system. Nor would I pretend for a moment that literature can be any subst.i.tute for life and action. Burke said, "What is the education of the generality of the world? Reading a parcel of books? No!
Restraint and discipline, examples of virtue and of justice, these are what form the education of the world." That is profoundly true; it is life that is the great educator. But the parcel of books, if they are well chosen, reconcile us to this discipline; they interpret this virtue and justice; they awaken within us the diviner mind, and rouse us to a consciousness of what is best in others and ourselves.
As a matter of rude fact, there is much to make us question whether the spread of literature, as now understood, does awaken the diviner mind.
The numbers of the books that are taken out from public libraries are not all that we could wish. I am not going to inflict many figures on you, but there is one set of these figures that distresses booklovers,--I mean the enormous place that fiction occupies in the books that are taken out. In one great town in the North prose fiction forms 76 per cent of all the books lent. In another great town prose fiction is 82 per cent; in a third 84 per cent; and in a fourth 67 per cent. I had the curiosity to see what happens in the libraries of the United States; and there--supposing the system of cataloguing and enumeration to be the same--they are a trifle more serious in their taste than we are; where our average is about 70 per cent, at a place like Chicago it is only about 60 per cent. In Scotland, too, it ought to be said that they have a better average in respect to prose fiction.
There is a larger demand for books called serious than in England. And I suspect, though I do not know, that one reason why there is in Scotland a greater demand for the more serious cla.s.ses of literature than fiction, is that in the Scotch Universities there are what we have not in England--well-attended chairs of literature, systematically and methodically studied. Do not let it be supposed that I at all underrate the value of fiction. On the contrary, when a man has done a hard day"s work, what can he do better than fall to and read the novels of Walter Scott, or the Brontes, or Mrs. Gaskell, or some of our living writers. I am rather a voracious reader of fiction myself. I do not, therefore, point to it as a reproach or as a source of discouragement, that fiction takes so large a place in the objects of literary interest. I only suggest that it is much too large, and we should be better pleased if it sank to about 40 per cent, and what is cla.s.sified as general literature rose from 13 to 25 per cent.
There are other complaints of literature as an object of interest in this country. I was reading the other day an essay by the late head of my old college at Oxford, that very learned and remarkable man Mark Pattison, who was a booklover if ever there was one. He complained that the bookseller"s bill in the ordinary English middle cla.s.s family is shamefully small. It appeared to him to be monstrous that a man who is earning 1000 a year should spend less than 1 a week on books--that is to say, less than a shilling in the pound per annum. I know that Chancellors of the Exchequer take from us 8d. or 6d. in the pound, and I am not sure that they always use it as wisely as if they left us to spend it on books. Still, a shilling in the pound to be spent on books by a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year, or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more, I think, than can be reasonably expected. A man does not really need to have a great many books. Pattison said that n.o.body who respected himself could have less than 1000 volumes. He pointed out that you can stack 1000 octavo volumes in a bookcase that shall be 13 feet by 10 feet, and 6 inches deep, and that everybody has that small amount of s.p.a.ce at disposal. Still the point is not that men should have a great many books, but that they should have the right ones, and that they should use those that they have. We may all agree in lamenting that there are so many houses--even some of considerable social pretension--where you will not find a good atlas, a good dictionary, or a good cyclopaedia of reference. What is still more lamentable, in a good many more houses where these books are, they are never referred to or opened. That is a very discreditable fact, because I defy anybody to take up a single copy of the _Times_ newspaper and not come upon something in it, upon which, if their interest in the affairs of the day were active, intelligent, and alert as it ought to be, they would consult an atlas, dictionary, or cyclopaedia of reference.
No sensible person can suppose for a single moment that everybody is born with the ability for using books, for reading and studying literature. Certainly not everybody is born with the capacity of being a great scholar. All people are no more born great scholars like Gibbon and Bentley, than they are all born great musicians like Handel and Beethoven. What is much worse than that, many come into the world with the incapacity of reading, just as they come into it with the incapacity of distinguishing one tune from another. To them I have nothing to say. Even the morning paper is too much for them. They can only skim the surface even of that. I go further, and frankly admit that the habit and power of reading with reflection, comprehension, and memory all alert and awake, does not come at once to the natural man any more than many other sovereign virtues come to that interesting creature. What I do venture to press upon you is, that it requires no preterhuman force of will in any young man or woman--unless household circ.u.mstances are more than usually vexatious and unfavourable--to get at least half an hour out of a solid busy day for good and disinterested reading. Some will say that this is too much to expect, and the first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be those who waste their time most. At any rate, if I cannot get half an hour, I will be content with a quarter. Now, in half an hour I fancy you can read fifteen or twenty pages of Burke; or you can read one of Wordsworth"s masterpieces--say the lines on Tintern; or say, one-third--if a scholar, in the original, and if not, in a translation--of a book of the Iliad or the Aeneid. I do not think that I am filling the half-hour too full. But try for yourselves what you can read in half an hour. Then multiply the half-hour by 365, and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year; and what happiness, fort.i.tude, and wisdom they would have given you during all the days of your life.
I will not take up your time by explaining the various mechanical contrivances and aids to successful study. They are not to be despised by those who would extract the most from books, Many people think of knowledge as of money. They would like knowledge, but cannot face the perseverance and self-denial that go to the acquisition of it. The wise student will do most of his reading with a pen or a pencil in his hand.
He will not shrink from the useful toil of making abstracts and summaries of what he is reading. Sir William Hamilton was a strong advocate for underscoring books of study. "Intelligent underlining,"
he said, "gave a kind of abstract of an important work, and by the use of different coloured inks to mark a difference of contents, and discriminate the doctrinal from the historical or ill.u.s.trative elements of an argument or exposition, the abstract became an a.n.a.lysis very serviceable for ready reference,"[1] This a.s.sumes, as Hamilton said, that the book to be operated on is your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of perfection for most of us. Again, some great men--Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster was another, and the great Lord Strafford was a third--always before reading a book made a short, rough a.n.a.lysis of the questions which they expected to be answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge, and whither it would take them.
[Footnote 1: Veitch"s _Life of Hamilton_, pp. 314, 392.]
"After glancing my eye," says Gibbon, "over the design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had finished the task of self-examination; till I had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of some particular chapter: I was then qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition, of our ideas."[1]
[Footnote 1: Dr. Smith"s _Gibbon_, i. 64.]
I have sometimes tried that way of steadying and guiding attention; and I commend it to you. I need not tell you that you will find that most books worth reading once are worth reading twice, and--what is most important of all--the masterpieces of literature are worth reading a thousand times. It is a great mistake to think that because you have read a masterpiece once or twice, or ten times, therefore you have done with it. Because it is a masterpiece, you ought to live with it, and make it part of your daily life. Another practice is that of keeping a commonplace book, and transcribing into it what is striking and interesting and suggestive. And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you will put every entry under a head, division, or subdivision.[1] This Is an excellent practice for concentrating your thought on the pa.s.sage and making you alive to its real point and significance. Here, however, the high authority of Gibbon is against us. He refuses "strenuously to recommend." "The action of the pen," he says, "will doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as on the paper; but I much question whether the benefits of this laborious method are adequate to the waste of time; and I must agree with Dr.
Johnson (_Idler_, No. 74) that "what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.""[2]
[Footnote 1: "If I would put anything in my Common-place Book, I find out a head to which I may refer it. Each head ought to be some important and essential word to the matter in hand" (Locke"s _Works_, iii. 308, ed. 1801).]
[Footnote 2: This is for indexing purposes, but it is worth while to go further and make a t.i.tle for the pa.s.sage extracted, indicating its pith and purport.]
Various correspondents have asked me to say something about those lists of a hundred books that have been circulating through the world within the last few months. I have examined some of these lists with considerable care, and whatever else may be said of them--and I speak of them with deference and reserve, because men for whom one must have a great regard have compiled them--they do not seem to me to be calculated either to create or satisfy a wise taste for literature in any very worthy sense. To fill a man with a hundred parcels of heterogeneous sc.r.a.ps from the _Mahabharata_, and the _Sheking_, down to _Pickwick_ and _White"s Selborne_, may pa.s.s the time, but I cannot perceive how it would strengthen or instruct or delight. For instance, it is a mistake to think that every book that has a great name in the history of books or of thought is worth reading. Some of the most famous books are least worth reading. Their fame was due to their doing something that needed in their day to be done. The work done, the virtue of the book expires. Again, I agree with those who say that the steady working down one of these lists would end in the manufacture of that obnoxious product--the prig. A prig has been defined as an animal that is overfed for its size. I think that these bewildering miscellanies would lead to an immense quant.i.ty of that kind of overfeeding. The object of reading is not to dip into everything that even wise men have ever written. In the words of one of the most winning writers of English that ever existed--Cardinal Newman--the object of literature in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression. These are the objects of that intellectual perfection which a literary education is destined to give. I will not venture on a list of a hundred books, but will recommend you instead to one book well worthy of your attention. Those who are curious as to what they should read in the region of pure literature will do well to peruse Mr. Frederic Harrison"s admirable, volume, called _The Choice of Books_. You will find there as much wise thought, eloquently and brilliantly put, as in any volume of its size and on its subject, whether it be in the list of a hundred or not.
Let me pa.s.s to another topic. We are often asked whether it is best to study subjects, or authors, or books. Well, I think that is like most of the stock questions with which the perverse ingenuity of mankind torments itself. There is no universal and exclusive answer. My own answer is a very plain one. It is sometimes best to study books, sometimes authors, and sometimes subjects; but at all times it is best to study authors, subjects, and books in connection with one another.
Whether you make your first approach from interest in an author or in a book, the fruit will be only half gathered if you leave off without new ideas and clearer lights both on the man and the matter. One of the n.o.blest masterpieces in the literature of civil and political wisdom is to be found in Burke"s three performances on the American war--his speech on Taxation in 1774, on Conciliation in 1775, and his letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. I can only repeat to you what I have been saying in print and out of it for a good many years, and what I believe more firmly as observation is enlarged by time and occasion, that these three pieces are the most perfect manual in all literature for the study of great affairs, whether for the purpose of knowledge or action. "They are an example," as I have said before now, "an example without fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a theorist or an actor, of great political situations should strive by night and by day to possess. If their subject were as remote as the quarrel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between Rome and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which the world owes the opportunity of one of the most important of political experiments, we should still have everything to learn from the author"s treatment; the vigorous grasp of ma.s.ses of compressed detail, the wide illumination from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine feeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, the large and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, the vision, the n.o.ble temper." No student worthy of the name will lay aside these pieces, so admirable in their literary expression, so important for history, so rich in the lessons of civil wisdom, until he has found out something from other sources as to the circ.u.mstances from which such writings arose, and as to the man whose resplendent genius inspired them. There are great personalities like Burke who march through history with voices like a clarion trumpet and something like the glitter of swords in their hands. They are as interesting as their work. Contact with them warms and kindles the mind. You will not be content, after reading one of these pieces, without knowing the character and personality of the man who conceived it, and until you have spent an hour or two--and an hour or two will go a long way with Burke still fresh in your mind--over other compositions in political literature, over Bacon"s civil pieces, or Machiavelli"s _Prince_, and others in the same order of thought.
This points to the right answer to another question that is constantly asked. We are constantly asked whether desultory reading is among things lawful and permitted. May we browse at large in a library, as Johnson said, or is it forbidden to open a book without a definite aim and fixed expectations? I am for a compromise. If a man has once got his general point of view, if he has striven with success to place himself at the centre, what follows is of less consequence. If he has got in his head a good map of the country, he may ramble at large with impunity. If he has once well and truly laid the foundations of a methodical, systematic habit of mind, what he reads will find its way to its proper place. If his intellect is in good order, he will find in every quarter something to a.s.similate and something that will nourish.
Next I am going to deal with another question, with which perhaps I ought to have started. What is literature? It has often been defined.
Emerson says it is a record of the best thoughts. "By literature,"
says another author, "we mean the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent men and women arranged in a way that shall give pleasure to the reader." A third account is that "the aim of a student of literature is to know the best that has been thought in the world."
Definitions always appear to me in these things to be in the nature of vanity. I feel that the attempt to be compact in the definition of literature ends in something that is rather meagre, partial, starved, and unsatisfactory. I turn to the answer given by a great French writer to a question not quite the same, viz. "What is a cla.s.sic?"
Literature consists of a whole body of cla.s.sics in the true sense of the word, and a cla.s.sic, as Sainte-Beuve defines him, is an "author who has enriched the human mind, who has really added to its treasure, who has got it to take a step further; who has discovered some unequivocal moral truth, or penetrated to some eternal pa.s.sion, in that heart of man where it seemed as though all were known and explored, who has produced his thought, or his observation, or his invention under some form, no matter what, so it be great, large, acute, and reasonable, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself the style of everybody,--in a style that Is at once new and antique, and is the contemporary of all the ages." Another Frenchman, Doudan, who died in 1872, has an excellent pa.s.sage on the same subject:--
"The man of letters properly so called is a rather singular being: he does not look at things exactly with his own eyes, he has not impressions of his own, we could not discover the imagination with which he started. "Tis a tree on which have been grafted Homer, Virgil, Milton, Dante, Petrarch; hence have grown peculiar flowers which are not natural, and yet which are not artificial. Study has given to the man of letters something of the reverie of Rene; with Homer he has looked upon the plain of Troy, and there has remained in his brain some of the light of the Grecian sky; he has taken a little of the pensive l.u.s.tre of Virgil, as he wanders by his side on the slopes of the Aventine; he sees the world as Milton saw it, through the grey mists of England, as Dante saw it, through the clear and glowing light of Italy. Of all these colours he composes for himself a colour that is unique and his own; from all these gla.s.ses by which his life pa.s.ses on its journey to the real world, there is formed a special tint, and that is what makes the imagination of men of letters."
At a single hearing you may not take all that in; but if you should have any opportunity of recurring to it, you will find this a satisfactory, full, and instructive account of what is a cla.s.sic, and will find in it a full and satisfactory account of what those who have thought most on literature hope to get from it, and most would desire to confer upon others by it. Literature consists of till the books--and they are not so many--where moral truth and human pa.s.sion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.
My notion of the literary student is one who through books explores the strange voyages of man"s moral reason, the impulses of the human heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue. Poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political orators--they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature. This is what makes literature, rightly sifted and selected and rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling that it is so often and so erroneously supposed to be, but a proper instrument for a systematic training of the imagination and sympathies, and of a genial and varied moral sensibility.
From this point of view let me remind you that books are not the products of accident and caprice. As Goethe said, if you would understand an author, you must understand his age. The same thing is just as true of a book. If you would fully comprehend it, you must know the age. There is an order; there are causes and relations between great compositions and the societies in which they have emerged. Just as the naturalist strives to understand and to explain the distribution of plants and animals over the surface of the globe, to connect their presence or their absence with the great geological, climatic, and oceanic changes, so the student of literature, if he be wise, undertakes an ordered and connected survey of ideas, of tastes, of sentiments, of imagination, of humour, of invention, as they affect and as they are affected by the ever changing experiences of human nature, and the manifold variations that time and circ.u.mstances are incessantly working in human society.
Those who are possessed, and desire to see others possessed, by that conception of literary study must watch with the greatest sympathy and admiration the efforts of those who are striving so hard, and, I hope, so successfully, to bring the systematic and methodical study of our own literature, in connection with other literatures, among subjects for teaching and examination in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. I regard those efforts with the liveliest interest and sympathy. Everybody agrees that an educated man ought to have a general notion of the course of the great outward events of European history. So, too, an educated man ought to have a general notion of the course of all those inward thoughts and moods which find their expression in literature. I think that in cultivating the study of literature, as I have perhaps too laboriously endeavoured to define it, you will be cultivating the most important side of history.
Knowledge of it gives stability and substance to character. It furnishes a view of the ground we stand on. It builds up a solid backing of precedent and experience. It teaches us where we are. It protects us against imposture and surprise.
Before closing I should like to say one word upon the practice of composition. I have suffered, by the chance of life, many things from the practice of composition. It has been my lot, I suppose, to read more unpublished work than any one else in this room.
There is an idea, and, I venture to think, a very mistaken idea, that you cannot have a taste for literature unless you are yourself an author. I make bold entirely to demur to that proposition. It is practically most mischievous, and leads scores and even hundreds of people to waste their time in the most unprofitable manner that the wit of man can devise, on work in which they can no more achieve even the most moderate excellence than they can compose a Ninth Symphony or paint a Transfiguration. It Is a terrible error to suppose that because one is happily able to relish "Wordsworth"s solemn-thoughted idyll, or Tennyson"s enchanted reverie," therefore a solemn mission calls you to run off to write bad verse at the Lakes or the Isle of Wight. I beseech you not all to turn to authorship. I will even venture, with all respect to those who are teachers of literature, to doubt the excellence and utility of the practice of over-much essay-writing and composition. I have very little faith in rules of style, though I have an unbounded faith in the virtue of cultivating direct and precise expression. But you must carry on the operation inside the mind, and not merely by practising literary deportment on paper. It is not everybody who can command the mighty rhythm of the greatest masters of human speech. But every one can make reasonably sure that he knows what he means, and whether he has found the right word. These are internal operations, and are not forwarded by writing for writing"s sake. Everybody must be urgent for attention to expression, if that attention be exercised in the right way. It has been said a million times that the foundation of right expression in speech or writing is sincerity. That is as true now as it has ever been. Right expression is a part of character. As somebody has said, by learning to speak with precision, you learn to think with correctness; and the way to firm and vigorous speech lies through the cultivation of high and n.o.ble sentiments. So far as my observation has gone, men will do better if they seek precision by studying carefully and with an open mind and a vigilant eye the great models of writing, than by excessive practice of writing on their own account.
Much might here be said on what is one of the most important of all the sides of literary study. I mean its effect as helping to preserve the dignity and the purity of the English language. That n.o.ble instrument has never been exposed to such dangers as those which beset it to-day. Domestic slang, scientific slang, pseudo-aesthetic affectations, hideous importations from American newspapers, all bear down with horrible force upon the glorious fabric which the genius of our race has reared. I will say nothing of my own on this pressing theme, but will read to you a pa.s.sage of weight and authority from the greatest master of mighty and beautiful speech.
"Whoever in a state," said Milton, "knows how wisely to form the manners of men and to rule them at home and in war with excellent inst.i.tutes, him in the first place, above others, I should esteem worthy of all honour. But next to him the man who strives to establish in maxims and rules the method and habit of speaking and writing received from a good age of the nation, and, as it were, to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, the daring to overleap which let a law only short of that of Romulus be used to prevent.... The one, as I believe, supplies n.o.ble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy invading the territory. The other takes to himself the task of extirpating and defeating, by means of a learned detective police of ears, and a light band of good authors, that barbarism which makes large inroads upon the minds of men, and is a destructive intestine enemy of genius. Nor is it to be considered of small consequence what language, pure or corrupt, a people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in speaking it.... For, let the words of a country be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, any state, did not at least flourish in a middling degree as long as its own liking and care for its language lasted."[1]
[Footnote 1: Letter to Bonmattei, from Florence, 1638.]
The probabilities are that we are now coming to an epoch of a quieter style. There have been in our generation three strong masters in the aft of prose writing. There was, first of all, Carlyle, there was Macaulay, and there is Mr. Raskin. These are all giants, and they have the rights of giants. But I do not believe that a greater misfortune can befall the students who attend cla.s.ses here, than that they should strive to write like any one of these three ill.u.s.trious men. I think it is the worst thing that can happen to them. They can never attain to the high mark which they have set before themselves. It Is not everybody who can bend the bow of Ulysses, and most men only do themselves a mischief by trying to bend it. If we are now on our way to a quieter style, I am not sorry for it. Truth is quiet. Milton"s phrase ever lingers in our minds as one of imperishable beauty--where he regrets that he is drawn by I know not what, from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies. Moderation and judgment are, for most purposes, more than the flash and the glitter even of the genius. I hope that your professors of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate that golden art--the steadfast use of a language in which truth can be told; a speech that is strong by natural force, and not merely effective by declamation; an utterance without trick, without affectation, without mannerisms, without any of that excessive ambition which overleaps itself as disastrously in prose writing as in so many other things.
I will detain you no longer. I hope that I have made it clear that we conceive the end of education on its literary side to be to make a man and not a cyclopaedia, to make a citizen and not an alb.u.m of elegant extracts. Literature does not end with knowledge of forms, with inventories of books and authors, with finding the key of rhythm, with the varying measure of the stanza, or the changes from the involved and sonorous periods of the seventeenth century down to the _staccato_ of the nineteenth, or all the rest of the technicalities of scholarship. Do not think I contemn these. They are all good things to know, but they are not ends in themselves. The intelligent man, says Plato, will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and he will less value the others. Literature is one of the instruments, and one of the most powerful instruments, for forming character for giving us men and women armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfastness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit and public virtue of which it has been well said that they are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man. Bacon is right, as he generally is, when he bids us read not to contradict and refute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and to consider. Yes, let us read to weigh and to consider.
In the times before us that promise or threaten deep political, economical, and social controversy, what we need to do is to induce our people to weigh and consider. We want them to cultivate energy without impatience, activity without restlessness, inflexibility without ill-humour. I am not going to preach to you any artificial stoicism. I am not going to preach to you any indifference to money, or to the pleasures of social intercourse, or to the esteem and good-will of our neighbours, or to any other of the consolations and necessities of life. But, after all, the thing that matters most, both for happiness and for duty, is that we should strive habitually to live with wise thoughts and right feelings. Literature helps us more than other studies to this most blessed companionship of wise thoughts and right feelings, and so I have taken this opportunity of earnestly commending it to your interest and care.
VICTOR HUGO"S "NINETY-THREE."
"History has its truth, Legend has its truth. Legendary truth is of a different nature from historic truth. Legendary truth is invention with reality for result. For the rest, history and legend have the same aim--to paint under the man of a day eternal humanity." These words from his new and latest work (ii. 4) are a repet.i.tion of what Victor Hugo had already said in the introduction to his memorable _Legend of the Ages_[1]. But the occasion of their application is far more delicate. Poetry lends itself naturally to the s.p.a.cious, distant, vague, highly generalised way of present and real events. A prose romance, on the other hand, is of necessity abundant in details, in special circ.u.mstances, in particularities of time and place. This leaves all the more room for historic error, and historic error in a work of imagination dealing with actual and known occurrences is obviously fatal, not only to legendary truth, but to legendary beauty and poetic impressiveness. And then the pitfalls which lie about the feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,--the terrible year of the modern epoch! The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or that actor in it.
[Footnote 1: The references are to the "edition Definitive" in two volumes.]
It was hardly a breach, therefore, of one"s allegiance to Hugo"s superb imaginative genius, if one had misgivings as to the result of an attempt, even in his strong hands, to combine legend with truth on a disastrous field, in which grave writers with academic solemnity had confounded truth with the falsest kind of legend. The theme was so likely to emphasise the defects incident to his mighty qualities; so likely to provoke an exaggeration of those mannerisms of thought no less than of phrase, which though never ign.o.ble nor paltry, yet now and then take something from the loftiness and sincerity of the writer"s work. Wisdom, however, is justified of her children, and M.
Hugo"s genius has justified his choice of a difficult and perilous subject. _Quatrevingt-treize_ is a monument of its author"s finest gifts; and while those who are happily endowed with the capacity of taking delight in n.o.bility and beauty of imaginative work will find themselves in possession of a new treasure, the lover of historic truth who hates to see abstractions pa.s.sed off for actualities and legend erected in the place of fact escapes with his sensibilities almost unwounded.