Chapter 2

(2) I propose next, then, that since our investigations will deal largely with style, that curiously personal thing; and since (as I have said) they cannot in their nature be readily brought to rule-of-thumb tests, and may therefore so easily be suspected of evading all tests, of being mere dilettantism; I propose (I say) that my pupils and I rebuke this suspicion by constantly aiming at the concrete, at the study of such definite beauties as we can see presented in print under our eyes; always seeking the author's intention, but eschewing, for the present at any rate, all general definitions and theories, through the sieve of which the particular achievement of genius is so apt to slip. And having excluded them at first in prudence, I make little doubt we shall go on to exclude them in pride. Definitions, formulæ (some would add, creeds) have their use in any society in that they restrain the ordinary unintellectual man from making himself a public nuisance with his private opinions. But they go a very little way in helping the man who has a real sense of prose or verse. In other words, they are good discipline for some thyrsus-bearers, but the initiated have little use for them. As Thomas à Kempis 'would rather feel compunction than understand the definition thereof,' so the initiated man will say of the 'Grand Style,' for example--'Why define it for me?' When Viola says simply:

I am all the daughters of my father's house, And all the brothers too,

or Macbeth demands of the Doctor

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow..?

or Hamlet greets Ophelia, reading her Book of Hours, with

Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered!

or when Milton tells of his dead friend how

Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd Under the opening eyelids of the morn, We drove afield,

or describes the battalions of Heaven

On they move Indissolubly firm: nor obvious hill, Nor strait'ning vale, nor wood, nor stream divide Their perfect ranks,

or when Gray exalts the great commonplace

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour; The paths of glory lead but to the grave,

or when Keats casually drops us such a line as

The journey homeward to habitual self,

or, to come down to our own times and to a living poet, when I open on a page of William Watson and read

O ancient streams, O far descended woods, Full of the fluttering of melodious souls!...

'why then (will say the initiated one), why worry me with any definition of the Grand Style in English, when here, and here, and again here--in all these lines, simple or intense or exquisite or solemn--I recognise and feel the _thing_?'

Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie just here. Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be applied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive.

(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with me to Plato's wayfarers, whom we have left so long under the cypresses; and loth as we must be to lay hands on our father Parmenides, I feel we must treat the gifted Athenian stranger to a little manhandling. For did you not observe--though Greek was a living language and to his metropolitan mind the only language--how envious he showed himself to seal up the well, or allow it to trickle only under permit of a public analyst: to treat all innovation as suspect, even as, a hundred odd years ago, the Lyrical Ballads were suspect?

But the very hope of this Chair, Sir (as I conceive it), relies on the courage of the young. As Literature is an Art and therefore not to be pondered only, but practised, so ours is a living language and therefore to be kept alive, supple, active in all honourable use. The orator can yet sway men, the poet ravish them, the dramatist fill their lungs with salutary laughter or purge their emotions by pity or terror. The historian 'superinduces upon events the charm of order.' The novelist--well, even the novelist has his uses; and I would warn you against despising any form of art which is alive and pliant in the hands of men. For my part, I believe, bearing in mind Mr. Barrie's "Peter Pan" and the old bottles he renovated to hold that joyous wine, that even Musical Comedy, in the hands of a master, might become a thing of beauty. Of the Novel, at any rate--whether we like it or not--we have to admit that it does hold a commanding position in the literature of our times, and to consider how far Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie was right the other day when he claimed, on the first page of his brilliant study of Thomas Hardy, that 'the right to such a position is not to be disputed; for here, as elsewhere, the right to a position is no more than the power to maintain it.' You may agree with that or you may not; you may or may not deplore the forms that literature is choosing now-a-days; but there is no gainsaying that it is still very much alive. And I would say to you, Gentlemen, 'Believe, and be glad that Literature and the English tongue are both alive.' Carlyle, in his explosive way, once demanded of his countrymen, 'Shakespeare or India? If you had to surrender one to retain the other, which would you choose?' Well, our Indian Empire is yet in the making, while the works of Shakespeare are complete and purchasable in whole calf; so the alternatives are scarcely _in pari materia_; and moreover let us not be in a hurry to meet trouble half way. But in English Literature, which, like India, is still in the making, you have at once an Empire and an Emprise. In that alone you have inherited something greater than Sparta. Let us strive, each in his little way, to adorn it.

But here at the close of my hour, the double argument, that Literature is an Art and English a living tongue, has led me right up to a fourth principle, the plunge into which (though I foresaw it from the first) all the coward in me rejoices at having to defer to another lecture. I conclude then, Gentlemen, by answering two suspicions, which very likely have been shaping themselves in your minds. In the first place, you will say, 'It is all very well for this man to talk about "cultivating an increased sensibility," and the like; but we know what that leads to--to quackery, to aesthetic chatter: "Isn't this pretty? Don't you admire that?"' Well, I am not greatly frightened. To begin with, when we come to particular criticism I shall endeavour to exchange it with you in plain terms; a manner which (to quote Mr Robert Bridges' "Essay on Keats") 'I prefer, because by obliging the lecturer to say definitely what he means, it makes his mistakes easy to point out, and in this way the true business of criticism is advanced.' But I have a second safeguard, more to be trusted: that here in Cambridge, with all her traditions of austere scholarship, anyone who indulges in loose distinct talk will be quickly recalled to his tether. Though at the time Athene be not kind enough to descend from heaven and pluck him backward by the hair, yet the very _genius loci_ will walk home with him from the lecture room, whispering monitions, cruel to be kind.

'But,' you will say alternatively, 'if we avoid loose talk on these matters we are embarking on a mighty difficult business.' Why, to be sure we are; and that, I hope, will be half the enjoyment. After all, we have a number of critics among whose methods we may search for help--from the Persian monarch who, having to adjudicate upon two poems, caused the one to be read to him, and at once, without ado, awarded the prize to the other, up to the great Frenchman whom I shall finally invoke to sustain my hope of building something; that is if you, Gentlemen, will be content to accept me less as a Professor than as an Elder Brother.

The Frenchman is Sainte-Beuve, and I pay a debt, perhaps appropriately here, by quoting him as translated by the friend of mine, now dead, who first invited me to Cambridge and taught me to admire her--one Arthur John Butler, sometime a Fellow of Trinity, and later a great pioneer among Englishmen in the study of Dante. Thus while you listen to the appeal of Sainte-Beuve, I can hear beneath it a more intimate voice, not for the first time, encouraging me.

Sainte-Beuve then--_si magna licet componere parvis_--is delivering an Inaugural Lecture in the École Normale, the date being April 12th, 1858. 'Gentlemen,' he begins, 'I have written a good deal in the last thirty years; that is, I have scattered myself a good deal; so that I need to gather myself together, in order that my words may come before you with all the more freedom and confidence.' That is his opening; and he ends:--

As time goes on, you will make me believe that I can for my part be of some good to you: and with the generosity of your age you will repay me, in this feeling alone, far more than I shall be able to give you in intellectual freedom, in literary thought. If in one sense I bestow on you some of my experience, you will requite me, and in a more profitable manner, by the sight of your ardour for what is noble: you will accustom me to turn oftener and more willingly towards the future in your company. You will teach me again to hope.

LECTURE II.

THE PRACTICE OF WRITING.

Wednesday, February 12

We found, Gentlemen, towards the close of our first lecture, that the argument had drawn us, as by a double chain, up to the edge of a bold leap, over which I deferred asking you to take the plunge with me. Yet the plunge must be taken, and to-day I see nothing for it but to harden our hearts.

Well, then, I propose to you that, English Literature being (as we agreed) an Art, with a living and therefore improvable language for its medium or vehicle, a part--and no small part--of our business is _to practise it._ Yes, I seriously propose to you that here in Cambridge we _practise writing_: that we practise it not only for our own improvement, but to make, or at least try to make, appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a recognisable hall-mark of anything turned out by our English School. By all means let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes; but let us study them for our guidance; that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke. Portraits of other great ones look down on you in your college halls: but while you are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?

I protest, Gentlemen, that if our eyes had not been sealed, as with wax, by the pedagogues of whom I spoke a fortnight ago, this one habit of regarding our own literature as a _hortus siccus_, this our neglect to practise good writing as the constant auxiliary of an Englishman's liberal education, would be amazing to you seated here to-day as it will be starkly incredible to the future historian of our times. Tell me, pray; if it concerned _Painting_--an art in which Englishmen boast a record far briefer, far less distinguished--what would you think of a similar acquiescence in the past, a like haste to presume the dissolution of aptitude and to close accounts, a like precipitancy to divorce us from the past, to rob the future of hope and even the present of lively interest? Consider, for reproof of these null men, the Discourses addressed (in a pedantic age, too) by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the Members and Students of the Royal Academy. He has (as you might expect) enough to say of Tintoretto, of Titian, of Caracci, and of the duty of studying their work with patience, with humility. But why does he exhort his hearers to con them?--Why, because he is all the time _driving at practice_. Hear how he opens his second Discourse (his first to the Students). After congratulating the prize-winners of 1769, he desires 'to lead them into such a course of study as may render their future progress answerable to their past improvement'; and the great man goes on:--

I flatter myself that from the long experience I have had, and the necessary assiduity with which I have pursued these studies in which like you I have been engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in offering some hints to your consideration. They are indeed in a great degree founded upon my own mistakes in the same pursuit....

Mark the noble modesty of that! To resume--

In speaking to you of the Theory of the Art, I shall only consider it as it has relation to the method of your studies.

And then he proceeds to preach the Old Masters.--But how?--why?--to what end? Does he recite lists of names, dates, with formulae concerning styles? He does nothing of the sort. Does he recommend his old masters for copying, then?--for mere imitation? Not a bit of it!--he comes down like a hammer on copying. Then for what, in fine, will he have them studied? Listen:--

The more extensive your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention.

Yes, of _invention_, your power to make something new:

--and what may appear still more like a paradox, _the more original will be your conceptions_.

There spake Sir Joshua Reynolds: and I call that the voice of a true Elder Brother. He, standing face to face with the young, thought of the old masters mainly as spiritual begetters of practice. And will anyone in this room tell me that what Reynolds said of painting is not to-day, for us, applicable to writing?

We accept it of Greek and Latin. An old Sixth Form master once said to me, 'You may give up Latin Verse for this term, if you will: but I warn you, no one can be a real scholar who does not constantly practise verse.' He was mistaken, belike. I hold, for my part, that in our Public Schools, we give up a quite disproportionate amount of time to 'composition' (of Latin Prose especially) and starve the boys' reading thereby. But at any rate we do give up a large share of the time to it. Then if we insist on this way with the tongues of Homer and Virgil, why do we avoid it with the tongue of Shakespeare, our own living tongue? I answer by quoting one of the simplest wisest sayings of Don Quixote (Gentlemen, you will easily, as time goes on, and we better our acquaintance, discover my favourite authors):--

The great Homer wrote not in Latin, for he was a Greek; and Virgil wrote not in Greek, because he was a Latin. In brief, all the ancient poets wrote in the tongue which they sucked in with their mother's milk, nor did they go forth to seek for strange ones to express the greatness of their conceptions: and, this being so, it should be a reason for the fashion to extend to all nations.

Does the difference, then, perchance lie in ourselves? Will you tell me, 'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well'? Can he, indeed?... Can _you,_ sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.

Indeed, when we try to speak prose without having practised it the result is apt to be worse than our own vernacular. How often have I heard some worthy fellow addressing a public audience!--say a Parliamentary candidate who believes himself a Liberal Home Ruler, and for the moment is addressing himself to meet some criticism of the financial proposals of a Home Rule Bill. His own vernacular would be somewhat as follows:--

Oh, rot! Give the Irish their heads and they'll run straight enough. Look at the Boers, don't you know. Not half such a decent sort as the Irish. Look at Irish horses, too. Eh? What?

But this, he is conscious, would hardly suit the occasion. He therefore amends it thus:--

Mr Chairman--er--as regards the financial proposals of His Majesty's Government, I am of the deliberate--er--opinion that our national security--I may say, our Imperial security--our security as--er--a governing people--lies in trusting the Irish as we did in the--er --case of the Boers--H'm Mr Gladstone, Mr Chairman--Mr Chairman, Mr Gladstone----

and so on. You perceive that the style is actually worse than in the sample quoted before; it has become flabby whereas that other was at any rate nervous? But now suppose that, having practised it, our candidate was able to speak like this:--

'But what (says the Financier) is peace to us without money? Your plan gives us no revenue.' No? But it does--for it secures to the subject the power of Refusal, the first of all Revenues. Experience is a cheat, and fact is a liar, if this power in the subject of proportioning his grant, or of not granting at all, has not been found the richest mine of Revenue ever discovered by the skill or by the fortune of man. It does not indeed vote you 152,750 pounds 11 shillings 2 3/4 pence, nor any other paltry limited sum--but it gives you the strong box itself, the fund, the bank, from whence only revenues can arise among a people sensible of freedom: _Positâ luditur arcâ_.... Is this principle to be true in England, and false everywhere else? Is it not true in Ireland? Has it not hitherto been true in the Colonies? Why should you presume that in any country a body duly constituted for any function will neglect to perform its duty and abdicate its trust? Such a presumption would go against all Governments in all nations. But in truth this dread of penury of supply, from a free assembly, has no foundation in nature. For first, observe that, besides the desire which all men have naturally of supporting the honour of their own Government, that sense of dignity, and that security to property, which ever attend freedom, have a tendency to increase the stock of a free community. Most may be taken where most is accumulated. And what is the soil or climate where experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the politic machinery in the world?

That, whether you agree or disagree with its doctrine, is great prose. That is Burke. 'O Athenian stranger,' said the Cretan I quoted in my first lecture,--'inhabitant of Attica I will not call you, since you deserve the name of Athene herself, because you go back to first principles!'

But, you may object, 'Burke is talking like a book, and I have no wish to talk like a book.' Well, as a fact, Burke is here at the culmen of a long sustained argument, and his language has soared with it, as his way was--logic and emotion lifting him together as upon two balanced majestic wings. But you are shy of such heights? Very well again, and all credit to your modesty! Yet at least (I appeal to that same modesty) when you talk or write, you would wish to _observe the occasion_; to say what you have to say without impertinence or ill-timed excess. You would not harangue a drawing-room or a subcommittee, or be facetious at a funeral, or play the skeleton at a banquet: for in all such conduct you would be mixing up things that differ. Be cheerful, then: for this desire of yours to be appropriate is really the root of the matter. Nor do I ask you to accept this on my sole word, but will cite you the most respectable witnesses. Take, for instance, a critic who should be old enough to impress you--Dionysius of Halicarnassus. After enumerating the qualities which lend charm and nobility to style, he closes the list with 'appropriateness, which all these need':--

As there is a charming diction, so there is another that is noble; as there is a polished rhythm, so there is another that is dignified; as variety adds grace in one passage, so in another it adds fulness; _and as for appropriation, it will prove the chief source of beauty, or else of nothing at all_.

Or listen to Cicero, how he sets appropriateness in the very heart of his teaching, as the master secret:--

Is erit eloquens qui poterit parva summisse, modica temperate, magna graviter dicere.... Qui ad id quodcunque decebit poterit accommodare orationem. Quod quum statuerit, tum, ut quidque erit dicendum, ita dicet, nec satura jejune, nec grandia minute, nec item contra, sed erit rebus ipsis par et aequalis oratio.

'Whatever his theme he will speak as becomes it; neither meagrely where it is copious, nor meanly where it is ample, nor in _this_ way where it demands _that_; but keeping his speech level with the actual subject and adequate to it.'

I might quote another great man, Quintilian, to you on the first importance of this appropriateness, or 'propriety'; of speaking not only to the purpose but _becomingly_--though the two as (he rightly says) are often enough one and the same thing. But I will pass on to what has ever seemed, since I found it in one of Jowett's 'Introductions' to Plato, the best definition known to me of good style in literature:--

The perfection of style is variety in unity, freedom, ease, clearness, the power of saying anything, and of striking any note in the scale of human feelings, without impropriety.

You see, O my modest friend! that your gamut needs not to be very wide, to begin with. The point is that within it you learn to play becomingly.

Now I started by proposing that we try together to make appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a hall-mark of anything turned out by our English School here, and I would add (growing somewhat hardier) a hall-mark of all Cambridge style so far as our English School can influence it. I chose these four epithets _accurate, perspicuous, persuasive, appropriate_, with some care, of course as my duty was; and will assume that by this time we are agreed to desire _appropriateness_. Now for the other three:--

_Perspicuity._--I shall waste no words on the need of this: since the first aim of speech is to be understood. The more clearly you write the more easily and surely you will be understood. I propose to demonstrate to you further, in a minute or so, that the more clearly you write the more clearly you will understand yourself. But a sufficient reason has been given in ten words why you should desire perspicuity.

_Accuracy._--Did I not remind myself in my first lecture, that Cambridge is the home of accurate scholarship? Surely no Cambridge man would willingly be a sloven in speech, oral or written? Surely here, if anywhere, should be acknowledged of all what Newman says of the classics, that 'a certain unaffected neatness and propriety and grace of diction may be required of any author, for the same reason that a certain attention to dress is expected of every gentleman.' After all, what are the chief differentiae between man and the brute creation but that he clothes himself, that he cooks his food, that he uses articulate speech? Let us cherish and improve all these distinctions.