On the Art of Writing Part 16

[Footnote 1: From "A History of Oxfordshire," by Mr J. Meade Falkner, author of Murray's excellent Handbook of Oxfordshire.]

LECTURE X.

ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES (I)

Wednesday, November 19

All lectures are too long. Towards the close of my last, Gentlemen, I let fall a sentence which, heard by you in a moment of exhausted or languid interest, has since, like enough, escaped your memory even if it earned pa.s.sing attention. So let me repeat it, for a fresh start.

Having quoted to you the words of our Holy Writ, 'I will sing and give praise with the best member that I have,' I added 'But the old Greek was an "all-round" man; he sought to praise and give thanks with all his members, and to tune each to perfection.' Now a great many instructive lectures might be written on that text: nevertheless you may think it a strange one, and obscure, for the discourse on 'English Literature in our Universities' which, according to promise, I must now attempt.

The term 'an all-round man' may easily mislead you unless you take it with the rest of the sentence and particularly with the words 'praise and give thanks.' Praise whom? Give thanks to whom? To _whom_ did our Greek train all his members to render adoration?

Why, to the G.o.ds--his G.o.ds: to Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite; and from them down to the lesser guardian deities of the hearth, the field, the farmstead. We modern men suffer a double temptation to misunderstand, by belittling, the reverence in which h.e.l.las and Rome held their G.o.ds. To start with, our religion has superseded theirs. We approach the Olympians with no bent towards venerating them; with minds easy, detached, to which a great deal of their theology--the amativeness of Zeus for example--must needs seem broadly comic, and a great deal of it not only comic but childish. We are encouraged in this, moreover, when we read such writers as Aristophanes and Lucian, and observe how they poked fun at the G.o.ds.

We a.s.sume--so modern he seems--Aristophanes' att.i.tude towards his immortals to be ours; that when, for example, Prometheus walks on to the stage under an umbrella, to hide himself from the gaze of all-seeing Zeus, the Athenian audience laughed just as we laugh who have read Voltaire. Believe me, they laughed quite differently; believe me, Aristophanes and Voltaire had remarkably different minds and worked on utterly different backgrounds. Believe me, you will understand Aristophanes only less than you will understand aeschylus himself if you confuse Aristophanes' mockery of Olympus with modern mockery. But, if you will not take my word for it, let me quote what Professor Gilbert Murray said, the other day, speaking before the English a.s.sociation on Greek poetry, how constantly connected it is with religion:

'All thoughts, all pa.s.sions, all desires' ... In our Art it is true, no doubt, that they are 'the ministers of love'; in Greek they are as a whole the ministers of religion, and this is what in a curious degree makes Greek poetry matter, makes it relevant. There is a sense in each song of a relation to the whole of things, and it was apt to be expressed with the whole body, or, one may say, the whole being.[1]

To a Greek, in short, his G.o.ds mattered enormously; and to a Roman. To a Roman they continued to matter enormously, down to the end. Do you remember that tessellated pavement with its emblems and images of the younger G.o.ds? and how I told you that a Roman general on foreign service would carry the little cubes in panniers on mule-back, to be laid down for his feet at the next camping place? Will you suggest that he did this because they were pretty? You know that practical men--conquering generals--don't behave in that way. He did it because they were sacred; because, like most practical men, he was religious, and his G.o.ds must go with him. They filled his literature: for why? He believed himself to be sprung from their loins. Where would Latin literature be, for example, if you could cut Venus out of it? Consider Lucretius' grand invocation:

aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas, Alma Venus!

Consider the part Virgil makes her play as moving spirit of his whole great poem. So follow her down to the days of the later Empire and open the "Pervigilium Veneris" and discover her, under the name of Dione, still the eternal Aphrodite sprung from the foam amid the churning hooves of the sea-horses--_inter et bipedes equos_:--

Time was that a rain-cloud begat her, impregning the heave of the deep, 'Twixt hooves of sea-horses a-scatter, stampeding the dolphins as sheep.

Lo! arose of that bridal Dione, rainbow'd and besprent of its dew!

_Now learn ye to love who loved never--now ye who have loved, love anew!_ Her favour it was fill'd the sails of the Trojan for Latium bound, Her favour that won her aeneas a bride on Laurentian ground, And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the Vestal, to Mars; As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome for its wars With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew From Romulus down to our Caesar--last, best of that blood, of that thew.

_Now learn ye to love who loved never--now ye who have loved, love anew!_

'Last, best of that blood'--her blood, _fusa Paphies de cruore_, and the blood of Teucer, _revocato a sanguine Teucri_, 'of that thew'--the thew of Tros and of Mars. Of these and no less than these our Roman believed himself the son and inheritor.

If we grasp this, that the old literature was packed with the old religion, and not only packed with it but permeated by it, we have within our ten fingers the secret of the 'Dark Ages,' the real reason why the Christian Fathers fought down literature and almost prevailed to the point of stamping it out. They hated it, not as literature; or at any rate, not to begin with; nor, to begin with, because it happened to be voluptuous and they austere: but they hated it because it held in its very texture, not to be separated, a religion over which they had hardly triumphed, a religion actively inimical to that of Christ, inimical to truth; so that for the sake of truth and in the name of Christ they had to fight it, accepting no compromise, yielding no quarter, foreseeing no issue save that one of the twain--Jupiter or Christ, Deus Optimus Maximus or the carpenter's son of Nazareth--must go under.

It all ended in compromise, to be sure; as all struggles must between adversaries so tremendous. To-day, in Dr Smith's "Cla.s.sical Dictionary,"

Origen rubs shoulders with Orpheus and Orcus; Tertullian reposes cheek by jowl with Terpsich.o.r.e. But we are not concerned, here, with what happened in the end. We are concerned with what these forthright Christian fighters had in their minds--to trample out the old literature _because_ of the false religion. Milton understood this, and was thinking of it when he wrote of the effect of Christ's Nativity--

The Oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.

Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

No mighty trance, or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding sh.o.r.e, A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; From haunted spring, and dale Edg'd with poplar pale, The parting Genius is with sighing sent; With flower-inwoven tresses torn The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

as Swinburne understands and expresses it in his "Hymn to Proserpine,"

supposed to be chanted by a Roman of the 'old profession' on the morrow of Constantine's proclaiming the Christian faith--

O G.o.ds dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!

From your wrath is the world released, redeem'd from your chains, men say.

New G.o.ds are crown'd in the city; their flowers have broken your rods; They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compa.s.sionate G.o.ds.

But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare; Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were...

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, The laurel, the palms and the paean, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the nymphs in the brake; Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

'Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean!' However the struggle might sway in this or that other part of the field, Literature had to be beaten to her knees, and still beaten flat until the breath left her body. You will not be surprised that the heavy hand of these Christian fathers fell first upon the Theatre: for the actor in Rome was by legal definition an 'infamous' man, even as in England until the other day he was by legal definition a vagabond and liable to whipping. The policy of religious reformers has ever been to close the theatres, as our Puritans did in 1642; and a recent p.r.o.nouncement by the Bishop of Kensington would seem to show that the instinct survives to this day. Queen Elizabeth--like her brother, King Edward VI--signalized the opening of a new reign by inhibiting stage-plays; and I invite you to share with me the pensive speculation, 'How much of English Literature, had she not relented, would exist to-day for a King Edward VII Professor to talk about?' Certainly the works of Shakespeare would not; and that seems to me a thought so impressive as to deserve the attention of Bishops as well as of Kings.

Apart from this instinct the Christian Fathers, it would appear, had plenty of provocation. For the actors, who had jested with the Old Religion on a ground of accepted understanding--much as a good husband (if you will permit the simile) may gently tease his wife, not loving her one whit the less, taught by affection to play without offending--had mocked at the New Religion in a very different way: savagely, as enemies, holding up to ridicule the Church's most sacred mysteries. Tertullian, in an uncompromising treatise "De Spectaculis," denounces stage-plays root and branch; tells of a demon who entered into a woman in a theatre and on being exorcised pleaded that the mistake might well be excused, since he had found her in his own demesne. Christians should avoid these shows and await the greatest _spectaculum_ of all--the Last Judgment. 'Then,' he promises genially, 'will be the time to listen to the tragedians, whose lamentations will be more poignant, for their proper pain. Then will the comedians turn and twist in capers rendered nimbler than ever by the sting of the fire that is not quenched.' By 400 A.D. Augustine cries triumphantly that the theatres are falling--the very walls of them tumbling--throughout the Empire. _'Per omnes paene civitates cadunt theatra ... cadunt et fora vel moenia in quibus demonia colebantur'_; the very walls within which these devilments were practised. But the fury is unabated and goes on stamping down the embers. In the eighth century our own Alcuin (as the school of Freeman would affectionately call him) is no less fierce. All plays are anathema to him, and he even disapproves of dancing bears--though not, it would appear, of bad puns: _'nec tibi sit ursorum saltantium cura, sed clericorum psallentium.'_[2]

The banning of _all_ literature you will find harder to understand; nay impossible, I believe, unless you accept the explanation I gave you. Yet there it is, an historical fact. 'What hath it profited posterity--_quid posteritas emolumenti tulit,_' wrote Sulpicius Severus, about 400 A.D., 'to read of Hector's fighting or Socrates' philosophising?' Pope Gregory the Great--St Gregory, who sent us the Roman missionaries--made no bones about it at all. '_Quoniam non cognovi literaturam,_' he quoted approvingly from the 70th Psalm, '_introibo in potentias Domini_': 'Because I know nothing of literature I shall enter into the strength of the Lord.' 'The praises of Christ cannot be uttered in the same tongue as those of Jove,' writes this same Gregory to Desiderius, Archbishop of Vienne, who had been rash enough to introduce some of his young men to the ancient authors, with no worse purpose than to teach them a little grammar. Yet no one was prouder than this Pope of the historical Rome which he had inherited. Alcuin, again, forbade the reading of Virgil in the monastery over which he presided: it would sully his disciples'

imagination. 'How is this, _Virgilian!_' he cried out upon one taken in the d.a.m.nable act,--'that without my knowledge and against my order thou hast taken to studying Virgil?' To put a stop to this unhallowed indulgence the clergy solemnly taught that Virgil was a wizard.

To us, long used as we are to the innocent gaieties of the Cla.s.sical Tripos, these measures to discourage the study of Virgil may appear drastic, as the mental att.i.tude of Gregory and Alcuin towards the Latin hexameter (so closely resembling that of Byron towards the waltz) not far removed from foolishness. But there you have in its quiddity the mediaeval mind: and the point I now put to you is, that _out of this soil our Universities grew._

We, who claim Oxford and Cambridge for our nursing mothers, have of all men least excuse to forget it. A man of Leyden, of Louvain, of Liepzig, of Berlin, may be pardoned that he pa.s.ses it by. More than a hundred years ago Salamanca had the most of her stones torn down to make defences against Wellington's cannon. Paris, greatest of all, has kept her renown; but you shall search the slums of the Latin Quarter in vain for the sixty or seventy Colleges that, before the close of the fifteenth century, had arisen to adorn her, the intellectual Queen of Europe. In Bologna, the ancient and stately, almost alone among the continental Universities, survive a few relics of the old collegiate system--the College of Spain, harbouring some five or six students, and a little house founded for Flemings in 1650: and in Bologna the system never attained to real importance.

But in England where, great as London is, the national mind has always harked to the country for the graces of life, so that we seem by instinct to see it as only desirable in a green setting, our Universities, planted by the same instinct on lawns watered by pastoral streams, have suffered so little and received as much from the years that now we can hardly conceive of Oxford or Cambridge as ruined save by 'the unimaginable touch of Time.' Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, she has lost not one; while Cambridge (I believe) has parted only with Cavendish. Some have been subsumed into newer foundations; but always the process has been one of merging, of blending, of justifying the new bottle by the old wine. The vengeance of civil war--always very much of a family affair in England--has dealt tenderly with Oxford and Cambridge; the more calculating malignity of Royal Commissions not harshly on the whole.

University reformers may accuse both Oxford and Cambridge of

Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade:

but with those sour men we have nothing here to do: like Isaak Walton's milkmaid we will not 'load our minds with any fears of many things that will never be.'

But, as they stand, Oxford and Cambridge--so amazingly alike while they play at differences, and both so amazingly unlike anything else in the wide world--do by a hundred daily reminders connect us with the Middle Age, or, if you prefer Arnold's phrase, whisper its lost enchantments.

The cloister, the grave grace in hall, the chapel bell, the men hurrying into their surplices or to lectures 'with the wind in their gowns,' the staircase, the nest of chambers within the oak--all these softly reverberate over our life here, as from belfries, the mediaeval mind.

And that mediaeval mind actively hated (of partial acquaintance or by antic.i.p.ation) almost everything we now study! Between it and us, except these memorials, nothing survives to-day but the dreadful temptation to learn, the dreadful instinct in men, as they grow older and wiser, to trust learning after all and endow it--that, and the confidence of a steady stream of youth.

The Universities, then, sprang out of mediaeval life, out of the mediaeval mind; and the mediaeval mind had for centuries been taught to abominate literature. I would not exaggerate or darken the 'Dark Ages'

for you by throwing too much bitumen into the picture. I know that at the beginning there had been a school of Origen which advocated the study of Greek poetry and philosophy, as well as the school of Tertullian which condemned it. There is evidence that the 'humanities' were cultivated here and there and after a fashion behind Gregory's august back. I grant that, while in Alcuin's cloister (and Alcuin, remember, became a sort of Imperial Director of Studies in Charlemagne's court) the wretched monk who loved Virgil had to study him with an illicit candle, to copy him with numbed fingers in a corner of the bitter-cold cloister, on the other hand many beautiful ma.n.u.scripts preserved to us bear witness of cloisters where literature was tolerated if not officially honoured. I would not have you so uncritical as to blame the Church or its clergy for what happened; as I would have you remember that if the Church killed literature, she--and, one may say, she alone--kept it alive.

Yet, and after all these reservations, it remains true that Literature had gone down disastrously. Even philosophy, unless you count the pale work of Boethius--_real_ philosophy had so nearly perished that men possessed no more of Aristotle than a fragment of his Logic, and '_the_ Philosopher' had to creep back into Western Europe through translations from the Arabic! But this is the point I wish to make clear.--Philosophy came back in the great intellectual revival of the twelfth century; Literature did not. Literature's hour had not come. Men had to catch up on a dreadful leeway of ignorance. The form did not matter as yet: they wanted science--to know. I should say, rather, that as yet form _seemed_ not to matter: for in fact form always matters: the personal always matters: and you cannot explain the vast crowds Abelard drew to Paris save by the fascination in the man, the fire communicated by the living voice. Moreover (as in a previous lecture I tried to prove) you cannot divorce accurate thought from accurate speech; but for accuracy, even for hair-splitting accuracy, of speech the Universities had the definitions of the Schoolmen. In literature they had yet to discover a concern.

Literature was a thing of the past, inanimate. Nowhere in Europe could it be felt even to breathe. To borrow a beautiful phrase of Wordsworth's, men numbered it among 'things silently gone out of mind or things violently destroyed.'

n.o.body quite knows how these Universities began. Least of all can anybody tell how Oxford and Cambridge began. In Bede, for instance--that is, in England as the eighth century opens--we see scholarship already moving towards the _thing_, treading with sure instinct towards the light.

Though a hundred historians have quoted it, I doubt if a feeling man who loves scholarship can read the famous letter of Cuthbert describing Bede's end and not come nigh to tears.

And Bede's story contains no less wonder than beauty, when you consider how the fame of this holy and humble man of heart, who never left his cloisters at Jarrow, spread over Europe, so that, though it sound incredible, our Northumbria narrowly missed in its day to become the pole-star of Western culture. But he was a disinterested genius, and his pupil, Alcuin, a pushing dull man and a born reactionary; so that, while Alcuin scored the personal success and went off to teach in the court of Charlemagne, the great chance was lost.

No one knows when the great Universities were founded, or precisely out of what schools they grew; and you may derive amus.e.m.e.nt from the historians when they start to explain how Oxford and Cambridge in particular came to be chosen for sites. My own conjecture, that they were chosen for the extraordinary salubrity of their climates, has met (I regret to say) with derision, and may be set down to the caprice of one who ever inclines to think the weather good where he is happy. Our own learned historian, indeed--Mr J. Ba.s.s Mullinger--devotes some closely reasoned pages to proving that Cambridge was chosen as the unlikeliest spot in the world, and is driven to quote the learned Poggio's opinion that the unhealthiness of a locality recommended it as a place of education for youth; as Plato, knowing naught of Christianity, but gifted with a soul naturally Christian, '_had selected a noisome spot for his Academe, in order that the mind might be strengthened by the weakness of the body._' So difficult still it is for the modern mind to interpret the mediaeval!

Most likely these Universities grew as a tree grows from a seed blown by chance of the wind. It seems easy enough to understand why Paris, that great city, should have possessed a great University; yet I surmise the processes at Oxford and Cambridge to have been only a little less fortuitous. The schools of Remigius and of William of Champeaux (we will say) have given Paris a certain prestige, when Abelard, a pupil of William's, springs into fame and draws a horde of students from all over Europe to sit at his feet. These 'nations' of young men have to be organised, brought under some sort of discipline, if only to make the citizens' lives endurable: and lo! the thing is done. In like manner Irnerius at Bologna, Vacarius at Oxford, and at Cambridge some innominate teacher, 'of importance,' as Browning would put it, 'in his day,'

possibly set the ball rolling; or again it is suggested that a body of scholars dissatisfied with Oxford (such dissatisfaction has been known even in historical times) migrated hither--a laborious journey, even nowadays--and that so

A brighter h.e.l.las rears its mountains From waves serener far!

These young or nascent bodies had a trick of breaking away after this fashion. For reasons no longer obvious they hankered specially towards Stamford or Northampton. Until quite recently, within living memory, all candidates for a Mastership of Arts at Oxford had to promise never to lecture at Stamford. A flood here in 1520, which swept away Garret Hostel Bridge, put Cambridge in like mind and started a prophecy (to which you may find allusion in the fourth book of "The Faerie Queene") that both Universities would meet in the end, and kiss, at Stamford. Each in turn broke away for Northampton, and the worthy Fuller (a Northamptonshire man) has recorded his wonder that so eligible a spot was not finally chosen.