Part 5

As the constitution of this School is still open to amendment, it is devoutly to be hoped that Oxford will see its way to reconsidering a matter so seriously affecting the interests of education and culture. It is neither too late to remedy what has been done, nor to devise a remedy. Let it be remembered that there is an essential distinction between what should constitute an Honour School and what should constitute a Pass School, between what is to educate those who are to educate others, and what guarantees nothing more than a smattering. The present institution could be reformed in two ways. By reducing the philological part of its provisions to the level of the literary part, it could, with a little further simplification, be made into an excellent Pass School, which would supply a real want. By eliminating the literary part, and adding proportionately to the philological, it could be transformed into a perfectly satisfactory Honour School of Modern Languages. But no modification could make it into an Honour School of English Literature correspondingly adequate, for the simple reason that the study of English Literature cannot be isolated from the study of those literatures with which it is inseparably linked. The absurdity of assuming that the student of Philology could separate a single language or dialect from the group to which it belongs, that he could isolate Anglo-Saxon from Gothic, or Middle English from Anglo-Saxon, the Celtic of the Cymbry from the Celtic of the Gaels, is not greater than to assume that the study of our Literature can be severed from the study of those literatures which stand in precisely the same relation to it as one of those dialects stands to the others in the same group.

If the legislators of this School decline to reform it, then it is the duty of Oxford--a duty which she owes alike to education and to her own honour--to counteract the mischief which this institution must, by degrading throughout England and the colonies the whole level of liberal instruction and study on its most important side, inevitably do. To the herd of imperfectly and erroneously disciplined teachers which this institution will turn loose on education, let her oppose, at least, a minority which shall worthily represent her. Let her establish a proper degree or diploma in Literature. There exist, as we have already said, scattered throughout the various institutions of the University, nearly all the facilities for a complete course in this subject, and nothing more is needed than to encourage and render possible their co-ordination. Let it be open to a man who has obtained a high class in Moderations and in the Final Classical Schools, who has availed himself of the opportunities offered for the study of Modern Languages and Literatures in the Taylorian Institute, and who has studied what he would at present have to study for himself, our own Literature--let it be open to him to present himself for examination in these subjects, and to obtain, as the result of such an examination, a degree analogous to the Bachelorship of Civil Law. It would no doubt not be possible for these studies to be pursued, systematically, side by side with the work required for a high class in Moderations and _Literæ Humaniores_. Nor is it necessary. There need be no limit assigned to the time at which a candidate would be free to qualify himself for obtaining this diploma. As a general rule it would probably be about six months, possibly a year, after the attainment of the present degree in Arts. And, considering the high prizes open to teachers in Literature, it would be well worth a student’s while to spend this additional time in preparing himself for the examination. If a post-graduate scholarship, analogous to the Craven or the Derby scholarships, could be founded for the encouragement of a comparative study of Classical and Modern Literature, an important step would, at any rate, be taken in a right direction; something would be done for the competent equipment of future Professors of Literature.

Thus would a precedent, disastrous beyond expression to the interests of liberal instruction and culture, as well as to the reputation of the University--we mean the severance of the study of Classical Literature from that of our own--be at least deprived of its authority. Thus would the mass at any rate be leavened, and such institutions in the provinces and elsewhere as have, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, had the wisdom to separate their Chairs of Language and Literature, know where to go for those who should fill them; and thus, finally, would there be some chance of the literary curriculum in Oxford ceasing to be a by-word in the Universities of the Continent and America.

Since the first edition of these essays appeared the liberality of Mr. John Passmore Edwards has supplied the scholarship here desiderated, and Oxford has instituted a University scholarship, bearing the donor’s name, “for the encouragement and promotion of the study of English Literature in connection with the Classical Literatures of Greece and Rome.”

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: For the sort of textbook from which the student who is a candidate for “honours in English” will be required to get his knowledge of this poem, see _infra_, the review of the Clarendon Press Edition of Shelley’s _Adonais_.]

[Footnote 4: The Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, one of the chief legislators for the new School, thinks otherwise, and we should like to place the following passage on record. In his extraordinary _History of English Prose_ (p. 485) he writes thus: “The idea that English literature rests upon a classical basis has been formulated and industriously circulated as the watchword of a pedantic faction, and hardly any organ of current literature has proved itself strong enough, or vigilant enough, to secure itself against the insidious entrance of the above indoctrination.” And so it comes to pass that we read in the account of the debate in Congregation, on the occasion of the former attempt to establish this School:--

“The proposal to add the Professors of Greek and Latin to the Board of Studies was rejected by thirty-eight votes to twenty-four, Professor Earle maintaining that the fallacious notion that English literature was derived from the classics was so strong that it was unwise to place even the Professor of Latin on the Board.”--_Times_, May 26, 1887.]

[Footnote 5:

και μην πεπωκως γ’, ὡς θρασυνεσθαι πλεον, βροτειον αιμα, κωμος εν δομοις μενει δυσπεμπτος εξω ξυγγονων Ερινυων.

--_Agamem._, 1159-61. ]

[Footnote 6: For ample illustration of this, see _infra_ the review of the Clarendon Press edition of Shelley’s _Adonais_.]

[Footnote 7: They may all be found in full in a _Pall Mall “Extra”_ (January, 1887), and in the present writer’s _Study of English Literature_.]

[Footnote 8: It is amusing to notice how carefully the greater part of what is most precious and instructive in Johnson’s work, the lives namely of Cowley and Dryden, and the noble critique of _Paradise Lost_, is expressly excluded, and the greater part of what is most trivial, and regarded by himself as trivial, the lives of the minor poets of the eighteenth century, selected instead. Macaulay ranks the lives of Cowley and Dryden, with that of Pope, as the masterpieces of the work; and Johnson himself considered the life of Cowley to be the best.]

ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITIES[9]

II. TEXT BOOKS

[Footnote 9: Shelley’s _Adonais_, edited with introduction and notes by William Michael Rossetti. (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press.)]

If any proof were needed of what has been insisted on over and over again, that, until the Universities provide adequately for the proper study of English Literature--for the study of it side by side with Classical Literature--there will be small hope of its finding competent critics and interpreters, it would be afforded by the volume before us. For this volume the delegates of the Oxford University Press are responsible; and in allowing it their _imprimatur_ they have been guilty of a very grave error. No such standard of editing would have been tolerated in any other subject in which they undertake to provide books. A work pertaining to Classics, to History, to Philosophy, to Science, marked by corresponding deficiencies, would have been suppressed at once, until those deficiencies had been supplied. To Mr. Rossetti himself we attach no blame. What he was competent to do he has, for the most part, done well and conscientiously,--conscientiously, as may be judged from the fact that, while the poem itself occupies twenty pages in large type, Mr. Rossetti’s dissertations and notes occupy one hundred and twenty-eight in small type. It was, indeed, his misfortune, rather than his fault, to be entrusted with a work which required a peculiar qualification, an intimate acquaintance, that is to say, with Classical Literature. That he has no pretension to this is abundantly plain from his Introduction and from every page of his notes.

When one of the Universities undertakes to provide our colleges and schools with comments and notes on a poem so saturated with classicism as _Adonais_, the least that could be expected from bodies who are, as it were, the guardians of classical literature, is the provision that the classical part of the work should be done at least competently; it would be hardly too much, perhaps, to expect that it should be done excellently. Of this part of Mr. Rossetti’s work we scarcely know which are the worse--his sins of commission or his sins of omission. His classical qualifications for commenting on a poem as unintelligible, critically speaking, without constant reference to the Platonic dialogues, particularly to the _Symposium_ and the _Timæus_, and to the Greek poets, as the _Æneid_ would be without reference to the Homeric poems and the _Argonautica_ of Apollonius, appear to begin and end with some acquaintance with Mr. Lang’s version of Bion and Moschus. We will give a few specimens. Mr. Rossetti is greatly puzzled with Shelley’s allusion to Urania in stanzas 2 to 4.

“Where was lone Urania When Adonais died?”

“Most musical of mourners, weep again. Lament, anew, Urania!”

“Why out of the nine sisters,” he asks, “should the Muse of Astronomy be selected? Keats never wrote about astronomy.” Perhaps, he suggests, Shelley was not thinking of the Muse Urania, “but of Aphrodite Urania.” Yet, if so, why should she be called “musical”?--a question to be asked, no doubt, as our old friend Falstaff would say. However, after balancing the respective claims of both, he finally comes to the conclusion that the Urania of _Adonais_ is Aphrodite. If Mr. Rossetti had been acquainted with a work to which he never even refers, but which exercised immense influence over Shelley’s poem--the _Symposium_ of Plato--it would have saved him two pages of speculation. His ignorance of this is the more surprising as Shelley has himself translated the dialogue. But Mr. Rossetti need not, in this case, have gone so far afield. Has he never read the prologue to the seventh book of Milton’s _Paradise Lost_? In his note on the lines--

“The one remains, the many change and pass,”

it is really pitiable to find him supposing that this is an allusion to “the universal mind,” and “the individuated minds which we call human beings,” when any schoolboy could have told him that the allusion is, of course, a technical one to the Platonic “forms” or archetypes; while “the power” in stanza 42, the “sustaining love” in stanza 54, and the “one spirit” in stanza 43, are allusions respectively to the Aphrodite Urania in the discourse of Eryximachus in the _Symposium_, and to the Divine Artificer in the _Timæus_. And these dialogues form the proper commentary on Shelley’s metaphysics in this poem.

Still more extraordinary is Mr. Rossetti’s note on “wisdom the mirrored shield”--

“What was then Wisdom, the mirrored shield?”

(st. 27), which is as follows: “Shelley was, I apprehend, thinking of the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto (!). In that poem we read of a magic shield which casts a supernatural and intolerable splendour ... a sea monster, not a dragon, so far as I recollect, becomes one of the victims of the mirrored shield.” This slovenly and perfunctory mode of reference is, we may remark in passing, hardly the sort of thing to be expected in works issued from University Presses. We wonder what the Universities would say to an editor of Virgil who, in commenting on some Homeric allusion in his author, contented himself with observing that Virgil “is here thinking of the _Iliad_,” and, “so far as I can recollect,” etc. The reference is, we need hardly remark, not to any magic shield in the _Orlando_, but to the _scutum crystallinum_ of Pallas Athene, as any well-informed fourth-form schoolboy would know. If Mr. Rossetti will turn to Bacon’s _Wisdom of the Ancients_, chap. vii., he will find some information on this subject, which may be of use to him, should this work run into a second edition. Take, again, the note on the symbolism of the flowers and cypress cone in stanza 33:--

“His head was bound with pansies overblown, And faded violets, white and pied and blue; And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew.”

Here the editor’s ignorance of ancient Classical Literature has led him into a whole labyrinth of blunders and misconceptions. “The ivy,” he says, “indicates constancy in friendship”! Is it credible that a Clarendon Press editor should be ignorant that ivy--_doctarum hederæ præmia frontium_--is the emblem of the poet? The violet, he remarks, indicates modesty. It neither indicates, nor can possibly indicate, anything of the kind. Its traditional signification, deduced perhaps from Pliny’s remark (_Nat. Hist._, xxi. c. 38), that it is one of the longest-lived of flowers, is fidelity. But the passage of which Shelley was thinking when he wrote this stanza--a passage to which Mr. Rossetti makes no reference at all, was _Hamlet_, act iv. sc. 1: “There is pansies that’s for thoughts.... I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.” So that it is quite possible that the “faded violets,” associated as these flowers are with the Muses and the Graces, merely symbolize the fading and drooping towards what may be further symbolized in the cypress cone,--death. We are by no means sure, however, that the cypress cone does, as Mr. Rossetti remarks, “explain itself.” Shelley, assuming he gave the image another application, was doubtless thinking of Silvanus--“teneram ab radice ferens, Silvane, cupressum,” _Georg._ i. 20 (see, too, Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_, I. vi. st. 14), and may possibly have been symbolizing his sympathy with the genius of the woods--have been referring to that “gazing on Nature’s naked loveliness,” which he describes in stanza 31. In any case, Mr. Rossetti has entirely misinterpreted the meaning of the whole passage.

Wherever classical knowledge is required--as it is in almost every stanza--he either gives no note at all, or he blunders. Thus in stanza 24 he gives no note on the use of the word “secret.” In stanza 28 he has evidently not the smallest notion of the meaning of the word “obscene” as applied to ravens. The fine adaptations from _Lucretius_ (II. 578-580) in stanza 21, and again from II. 990-1010 in stanzas 20 and 42; the adaptation from the _Agamemnon_ (49-51) in stanza 17; from the fragments of the _Polyidus_ of Euripides in stanza 39; from the _Iliad_ (vi. 484) in stanza 34; from Theocritus, _Idyll._, i. 66, and Virg., _Ecl._, x. 9-10 in stanza 2; and again from Theocritus, _Idyll._, i. 77 seqq., from which the procession of the mourners is adapted, and on which the whole architecture of the poem is modelled--all these are alike unnoticed. Nor is Mr. Rossetti more fortunate in explaining allusions to passages in other literatures. The adaptation of the sublime passage in Isaiah (xiv. 9, 10), by which one of the finest parts of the poem was suggested, stanzas 45 and 46; the singular reminiscence in stanza 28:--

“The vultures ... Whose wings rain contagion;”

of Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_, act ii. sc. 1, where he speaks of the raven which

“Doth shake contagion from her sable wings;”

the obvious reminiscence of Dante, _Inf._, 44 seqq. in stanza 44; of Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_, v. 3, which forms the proper commentary on lines 7 and 8 of stanza 3; of none of these is any notice taken. On many important points of interpretation we differ _toto cœlo_ from Mr. Rossetti. The “fading splendour,” for example, in stanza 22, cannot possibly mean “fading as being overcast by sorrow and dismay” (cf. stanza 25), it simply means vanishing, receding from sight--a magnificently graphic epithet. Is Mr. Rossetti acquainted with the proleptic use of adjectives and participles? We may add that Mr. Rossetti has not even taken the trouble to ascertain who was the writer of the famous article, of which so much is said both in the preface of the poem and in the poem itself, but “presumes,” etc. _Et sic omnia._ And _sic omnia_ it will inevitably continue to be, until the Universities are prepared to do their duty to education by placing the study of our national Literature on a proper footing.

It is, we repeat, no reproach to Mr. Rossetti, who has distinguished himself in more important studies than the production of scholastic text-books, that he should have failed in an undertaking which happened to require peculiar qualifications. Indeed, our respect for Mr. Rossetti and our sense of his useful services to Belles Lettres would have induced us to spare him the annoyance of an exposure of the deficiencies of this work, had it not illustrated, so comprehensively and so strikingly, the disastrous effects of the severance of the study of English Literature from that of Ancient Classical Literature at our Universities.

ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITIES[10]

III. TEXT BOOKS

[Footnote 10: _Shakespeare--Select Plays. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark_ (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. MDCCCXC.)]

More than a century and a half has passed since Pope thus expressed himself about philologists,--

“‘Tis true on words is still our whole debate, Dispute of _Me_ or _Te_, of _aut_ or _at_, To sound or sink in _Cano_ O or A, To give up Cicero or C or K; The critic eye, that microscope of wit, Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit; How parts relate to parts or they to whole, The body’s harmony, the beaming soul, Are things which Kuster, Burmann, Wasse shall see, When man’s whole frame is obvious to a _Flea_.”

We need scarcely say that we have far too much respect for Dr. Aldis Wright and for his distinguished coadjutor to apply such a description as this to them as individuals, for no one can appreciate more heartily than we do their monumental contribution to the textual criticism of Shakespeare, but we can make no such reserve in speaking of this edition of _Hamlet_. A more deplorable illustration, we do not say of the subjection of Literature to Philology, for that would very imperfectly represent the fact, but of the absolute substitution of Philology, and of Philology in the lowest sense of the term, for Literature it would be impossible to imagine. Had it been expressly designed to prove that its editors were wholly unconscious of the artistic, literary, and philosophical significance of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, it could scarcely have taken a more appropriate form.

The volume contains 117 pages of Shakespeare’s text, printed in large type; the text is preceded by a preface of twelve pages, and followed by notes occupying no less than 121 pages in very small type; so that the work of the poet stands in pretty much the same relation to that of his commentators as Falstaff’s bread stood to his sack. In the case of a play like _Hamlet_, so subtle, so suggestive, so pregnant with critical and philosophical problems of all kinds, commentary on a scale like this might have been quite appropriate. But in this stupendous mass of exegesis and illustration there is, with the exception of one short passage, literally not a line about the play as a work of art, not a line about its structure and architecture, about its style, about its relations to æsthetic, about its metaphysic, its ethic, about the character of Hamlet, or about the character of any other person who figures in the drama. The only indication that it is regarded in any other light than as affording material for philological and antiquarian discussion is a short quotation, huddled in at the conclusion of the preface, from Goethe’s _Wilhelm Meister_, and an intimation that “Hamlet’s madness has formed the subject of special investigation by several writers, among others by Dr. Conolly and Sir Edward Strachey.”

A more comprehensive illustration of the truth of the indictment brought against philologists by Voltaire, Pope, Lessing, and Sainte-Beuve than is supplied by the notes in this volume it would be difficult to find. Dulness, of course, may be assumed, and of mere dulness we do not complain; but a combination of prolixity, irrelevance, and absolute incapacity to distinguish between what to ninety-nine persons in every hundred must be purely useless and what to ninety-nine persons in every hundred is the information which they expect from a commentator, is intolerable. We will give a few illustrations. A plain man or a student for examination comes to these lines:--

“‘Tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar;”

and, though he knows what the general sense is wishes to know exactly what Shakespeare means. He turns to the note for enlightenment, and the enlightenment he gets is this:--

“_Enginer._ Changed in the quarto of 1676 to the more modern form of engineer. Compare _Troilus and Cressida_ ii. 3. 8, “Then there’s Achilles a rare enginer.” For a cognate form mutiner see note on iii. 4. 83. So we have pioner for pioneer _Othello_ iii. 3. 346. _Hoist_ may be the participle either of the verb ‘hoise’ or ‘hoist.’ In the latter case it would be the common abbreviated form for the participles of verbs ending in a dental. _Petar._ So spelt in the quartos, and by all editors to Johnson, who writes ‘petards.’ In Cotgrave we have ‘Petart: a Petard or Petarre; an Engine (made like a bell or morter) wherewith strong gates,’ etc.”--

And so the hungry sheep looks up and is not fed. Again, he finds--

“He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice,”

turns to the note, and reads:--

“_Polacks._ The quartos have ‘pollax,’ the two earliest folios read ‘Pollax,’ the third ‘Polax,’ the fourth ‘Poleaxe.’ Pope read ‘Polack’ and Malone ‘Polacks.’ The word occurs four times in _Hamlet_. For ‘the sledded Polacks’ Molke reads ‘his leaded pole-axe.’ But this would be an anticlimax, and the poet, having mentioned ‘Norway’ in the first clause, would certainly have told us with whom the ‘parle’ was held.”

The poet Young noted how

“Commentators each dark passage shun, And hold their farthing candles to the sun.”

The Clarendon Press editors are certainly adepts in these accomplishments. Take one out of a myriad illustrations. The line in Act i. sc. 2, “The dead vast and middle of the night,” is the signal for a note extending to twelve closely printed lines. “’Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart,” says Francisco. If any note were needed here, it might have been devoted to pointing out to tiros the fine subjective touch. The note is this:--