On the Art of Writing Part 15

Bytuene Mershe ant Averil When spray biginnith to spring, The lutel foul hath hire wyl On hire lud to synge: Ich libbe in love-longinge For semlokest of alle thynge, He may me blisse bringe, Icham in hire bandoun.

An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent, Ichot from hevene it is me sent, From alle wymmen my love is lent, And lyht on Alisoun.

Here you have alliteration in plenty; you even have what some hold to be the pattern of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (though in practice disregarded, may be, as often as not), the chosen initial used twice in the first line and once at least in the second:

From alle wymmen my _l_ove is _l_ent, And _l_yht on A_l_isoun.

But if a man cannot see a difference infinitely deeper than any similarity between this song of Alison and the old Anglo-Saxon verse--_a difference of nature_--I must despair of his literary sense.

What has happened? Well, in Normandy, too, and in another tongue, men are singing much the same thing in the same way:

A la fontenelle Qui sort seur l'araine, Trouvai pastorella Qui n'iert pas vilaine...

Merci, merci, douce Marote, N'ociez pas vostre ami doux,

and this Norman and the Englishman were singing to a new tune, which was yet an old tune re-set to Europe by the Provence, the Roman Province; by the troubadours--Pons de Capdeuil, Bernard de Ventadour, Bertrand de Born, Pierre Vidal, and the rest, with William of Poitou, William of Poitiers. Read and compare; you will perceive that the note then set persists and has never perished. Take Giraud de Borneil--

Bel companhos, si dormetz o velhatz Non dortmatz plus, qu'el jorn es apropchatz--

and set it beside a lyric of our day, written without a thought of Giraud de Borneil--

Heigh! Brother mine, art a-waking or a-sleeping: Mind'st thou the merry moon a many summers fled?

Mind'st thou the green and the dancing and the leaping?

Mind'st thou the hayc.o.c.ks and the moon above them creeping?...

Or take Bernard de Ventadour's--

Quand erba vertz, e fuelha par E'l flor brotonon per verjan, E'l rossinhols autet e clar Leva sa votz e mov son chan, Joy ai de luy, e joy ai de la flor, Joy ai de me, e de me dons maior.

Why, it runs straight off into English verse--

When gra.s.s is green and leaves appear With flowers in bud the meads among, And nightingale aloft and clear Lifts up his voice and p.r.i.c.ks his song, Joy, joy have I in song and flower, Joy in myself, and in my lady more.

And that may be doggerel; yet what is it but

It was a lover and his la.s.s, With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, That o'er the green cornfield did pa.s.s In the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time--

or

When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! the doxy over the dale, Why then comes in the sweet o' the year; For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.

Nay, flatter the Anglo-Saxon tradition by picking its very best--and I suppose it hard to find better than the much-admired opening of Piers Plowman, in which that tradition shot up like the flame of a dying candle:

Bote in a Mayes Morwnynge--on Malverne hulles Me bi-fel a ferly--a Feyrie me thouhte; I was weori of wandringe--and wente me to reste Under a brod banke--bi a Bourne syde, And as I lay and leonede--and lokede on the watres, I slumberde in a slepynge--hit sownede so murie.

This is good, solid stuff, no doubt: but tame, inert, if not actually lifeless. As M. Jusserand says of Anglo-Saxon poetry in general, it is like the river Saone--one doubts which way it flows. How tame in comparison with this, for example!--

In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long, Hit is full mery in feyre foreste To here the foulys song:

To se the dere draw to the dale And leve the hilles hee, And shadow hem in the leves grene Under the grene-wode tre.

Hit befel on Whitsontide, Erly in a May mornyng, The Son up feyre can shyne, And the briddis mery can syng.

'This is a mery mornyng,' said litell John, 'Be Hym that dyed on tre; A more mery man than I am one Lyves not in Cristiante.

'Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster,'

Litull John can sey, 'And thynk hit is a full fayre tyme In a mornyng of May.'

There is no doubting which way _that_ flows! And this vivacity, this new beat of the heart of poetry, is common to Chaucer and the humblest ballad-maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics printed yesterday, and it came straight to us out of Provence, the Roman Province. It was the Provencal Troubadour who, like the Prince in the fairy tale, broke through the hedge of briers and kissed Beauty awake again.

You will urge that he wakened Poetry not in England alone but all over Europe, in Dante before our Chaucer, in the trouveres and minnesingers as well as in our ballad-writers. To that I might easily retort, 'So much the better for Europe, and the more of it the merrier, to win their way into the great comity.' But here I put in my second a.s.sertion, that we English have had above all nations lying wide of the Mediterranean, the instinct to refresh and renew ourselves at Mediterranean wells; that again and again our writers--our poets especially--have sought them as the hart panteth after the water-brooks. If you accept this a.s.sertion, and if you believe as well that our literature, surpa.s.sing Rome's, may vie with that of Athens--if you believe that a literature which includes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley--the Authorised Version of Holy Writ, with Browne, Bunyan, Swift, Addison, Johnson, Arnold, Newman--has entered the circle to take its seat with the first-- why then, heartily believing this with you, I leave you to find some better explanation than mine if you can.

But what I content myself with a.s.serting here you can scarcely deny.

Chaucer's initial and enormous debt to Dante and Boccaccio stands in as little dispute as Dunbar's to Chaucer. On that favourite poet of mine, Sir Thomas Wyat, I descanted in a former lecture. He is one of your glories here, having entered St. John's College at the age of twelve (which must have been precocious even for those days.) Anthony Wood a.s.serts that after finishing his course here, he proceeded to Cardinal Wolsey's new College at Oxford; but, as Christchurch was not founded until 1524, and Wyat, still precocious, had married a wife two years before that, the statement (to quote Dr Courthope) 'seems no better founded than many others advanced by that patriotic but not very scrupulous author.' It is more to the point that he went travelling, and brought home from France, Italy, afterwards Spain--always from Latin altars--the flame of lyrical poetry to England; the flame of the Petrarchists, caught from the Troubadours, clarified (so to speak) by the salt of humane letters. On what our Elizabethan literature owes to the Cla.s.sical revival hundreds of volumes have been written and hundreds more will be written; I will but remind you of what Spencer talked about with Gabriel Harvey, what Daniel disputed with Campion; that Marlowe tried to re-incarnate Machiavelli, that Jonson was a sworn Latinist and the 'tribe of Ben' a cla.s.sical tribe; while, as for Shakespeare, go and reckon the proportion of Italian and Roman names in his _dramatis personae_. Of Donne's debt to France, Italy, Rome, Greece, you may read much in Professor Grierson's great edition, and I daresay Professor Grierson would be the first to allow that all has not yet been computed. You know how Milton prepared himself to be a poet. Have you realised that, in those somewhat strangely constructed sonnets of his, Milton was deliberately modelling upon the "Horatian Ode," as his confrere, Andrew Marvell, was avowedly attempting the like in his famous Horation Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland; so that if Cromwell had returned (like Mr Quilp), walked in and caught his pair of Latin Secretaries scribbling verse, one at either end of the office table, both might colourably have pleaded that they were, after all, writing Latin. Waller's task in poetry was to labour true cla.s.sical polish where Cowley laboured sham-cla.s.sical form. Put together Dryden's various Prefaces and you will find them one solid monument to his cla.s.sical faith. Of Pope, Gray, Collins, you will not ask me to speak. What is salt in Cowper you can taste only when you have detected that by a stroke of madness he missed, or barely missed, being our true English Horace, that almost more nearly than the rest he hit what the rest had been seeking. Then, of the 'romantic revival'-- enemy of false cla.s.sicism, not of cla.s.sicism--bethink you what, in his few great years, Wordsworth owed directly to France of the early Revolution; what Keats drew forth out of Lempriere: and again bethink you how Tennyson wrought upon Theocritus, Virgil, Catullus; upon what Arnold constantly shaped his verse; how Browning returned ever upon Italy to inspire his best and correct his worse.

Of Anglo-Saxon prose I know little indeed, but enough of the world to feel reasonably sure that if it contained any single masterpiece--or anything that could be paraded as a masterpiece--we should have heard enough about it long before now. It was invented by King Alfred for excellent political reasons; but, like other ready-made political inventions in this country, it refused to thrive. I think it can be demonstrated, that the true line of intellectual descent in prose lies through Bede (who wrote in Latin, the 'universal language'), and not through the Blickling Homilies, or, aelfric, or the Saxon Chronicle. And I am sure that Freeman is perversely wrong when he laments as a 'great mistake' that the first Christian missionaries from Rome did not teach their converts to pray and give praise in the vernacular. The vernacular being what it was, these men did better to teach the religion of the civilised world--_orbis terrarum_--in the language of the civilised world. I am not thinking of its efficiency for spreading the faith; but neither is Freeman; and, for that, we must allow these old missionaries to have known their own business. I am thinking only of how this 'great mistake' affected our literature; and if you will read Professor Saintsbury's "History of English Prose Rhythm" (pioneer work, which yet wonderfully succeeds in ill.u.s.trating what our prose-writers from time to time were trying to do); if you will study the Psalms in the Authorised Version; if you will consider what Milton, Clarendon, Sir Thomas Browne, were aiming at; what Addison, Gibbon, Johnson; what Landor, Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, Pater; I doubt not your rising from the perusal convinced that our nation, in this storehouse of Latin to refresh and replenish its most sacred thoughts, has enjoyed a continuous blessing: that the Latin of the Vulgate and the Offices has been a background giving depth and, as the painters say, 'value' to nine-tenths of our serious writing.

And now, since this and the previous lecture run something counter to a great deal of that teaching in English Literature which nowadays pa.s.ses most acceptably, let me avoid offence, so far as may be, by defining one or two things I am _not_ trying to do.

I am not persuading you to despise your linguistic descent. English is English--our language; and all its history to be venerated by us.

I am not persuading you to despise linguistic study. _All_ learning is venerable.

I am not persuading you to behave like Ascham, and turn English prose into pedantic Latin; nor would I have you doubt that in the set quarrel between Campion, who wished to divert English verse into strict cla.s.sical channels, and Daniel, who vindicated our free English way (derived from Latin through the Provencal), Daniel was on the whole, right, Campion on the whole, wrong: though I believe that both ways yet lie open, and we may learn, if we study them intelligently, a hundred things from the old cla.s.sical metres.

I do not ask you to forget what there is of the Northmen in your blood.

If I desired this, I could not worship William Morris as I do, among the later poets.

I do not ask you to doubt that the barbarian invaders from the north, with their myths and legends, brought new and most necessary blood of imagination into the literary material--for the time almost exhausted--of Greece and Rome.

Nevertheless, I do contend that when Britain (or, if you prefer it, Sleswick)

When Sleswick first at Heaven's command Arose from out the azure main,

she differed from Aphrodite, that other foam-born, in sundry important features of ear, of lip, of eye.

Lastly, if vehement a.s.sertions on the one side have driven me into too vehement dissent on the other, I crave pardon; not for the dissent but for the vehemence, as sinning against the very principle I would hold up to your admiration--the old Greek principle of avoiding excess.

But I _do_ commend the patient study of Greek and Latin authors--in the original or in translation--to all of you who would write English; and for three reasons.

(1) In the first place they will correct your insularity of mind; or, rather, will teach you to forget it. The Anglo-Saxon, it has been noted, ever left an empty s.p.a.ce around his houses; and that, no doubt, is good for a house. It is not so good for the mind.

(2) Secondly, we have a tribal habit, confirmed by Protestant meditation upon a Hebraic religion, of confining our literary enjoyment to the written word and frowning down the drama, the song, the dance. A fairly attentive study of modern lyrical verse has persuaded me that this exclusiveness may be carried too far, and threatens to be deadening. 'I will sing and give praise,' says the Scripture, 'with the best member that I have'--meaning the tongue. But the old Greek was an 'all-round man' as we say. He sought to praise and give thanks with all his members, and to tune each to perfection. I think his way worth your considering.

(3) Lastly, and chiefly, I commend these cla.s.sical authors to you because they, in the European civilisation which we all inherit, conserve the norm of literature; the steady grip on the essential; the clean outline at which in verse or in prose--in epic, drama, history, or philosophical treatise--a writer should aim.

So sure am I of this, and of its importance to those who think of writing, that were this University to limit me to three texts on which to preach English Literature to you, I should choose the Bible in our Authorised Version, Shakespeare, and Homer (though it were but in a prose translation). Two of these lie outside my marked province. Only one of them finds a place in your English school. But Homer, who comes neither within my map, nor within the ambit of the Tripos, would--because he most evidently holds the norm, the essence, the secret of all--rank first of the three for my purpose.