Napoleon I used to say that battles were won by the sudden flashing of an idea through the brain of a commander at a certain critical instant. The capacity for generating this sudden electric spark was military genius. … Napoleon seems always to have counted upon it, always to have believed that when the critical moment arrived the wild confusion of the battlefield would be illuminated for him by that burst of sudden flame. But if Napoleon had been ignorant of the prosaic business of his profession, to which he attended more closely than any other commander, would these moments of supreme clearness have availed him, or would they have come to him at all?
My author thinks not: and I am sure he is right. So, in writing, only out of long preparation can come the truly triumphant flash: and I ask you to push this analogy further, into the business of reading, even of reading for examination. You learn to discipline yourselves, you acquire the art of marshalling, of concentrating, driving your knowledge upon a point: and—for you are young—that point is by no means the final point. Say that it is only an examination, and silly at that. Still you have been learning the art, you have been training yourself to be, for a better purpose, effective.
IX
Yet, and when this has been granted, the crucial question abides and I must not shirk it—“you say that the highest literature deals with What Is rather than with What Knows. It is all very fine to assure us that testing our knowledge about Literature and around Literature, and on this side or that side of Literature, is healthy for us in some oblique way: but can you examiners examine, or can you not, on Literature in what you call its own and proper category of What Is?”
So I hear the question—the question which beats and has beaten, over and over again, good men trying to construct Schools of English in our universities.
With all sense of a responsibility, of a difficulty, that has lain on my mind for these five years, I answer, Gentlemen, “Yes, we ought: yes, we can: and yes, we will.”
But, for the achievement, we teachers must first know how to teach. When that is learned, Examination will come as a consequent, easy, almost trivial matter. I will, for example—having already allowed how hard it is to examine on literature—take the difficulty at its very extreme. I will select a piece of poetry, and the poet shall be Keats—on whom, if on anyone, is felt the temptation to write gush and loose aesthetic chatter. A pupil comes to read with me, and I open at the famous “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”
(1) We read it through together, perhaps twice; at the second attempt getting the emphasis right, and some, at any rate, of the modulations of voice. So we reach a working idea of the Ode and what Keats meant it to be.
(2) We then compare it with his other Odes, and observe that it is (a) regular in stanza form, (b) in spite of its outburst in the third stanza—“More happy love! more happy, happy love” etc.—much severer in tone than, e.g., the “Ode to a Nightingale” or the “Ode to Psyche,” (c) that the emotion is not luscious, but simple, (d) that this simplicity is Hellenic, so far as Keats can compass it, and (e) eminently well-suited to its subject, which is a carven urn, gracious but severe of outline; a moment of joy caught by the sculptor and arrested, for time to perpetuate; yet—and this is the point of the Ode—conveying a sense that innocent gaiety is not only its own excuse, but of human things one of the few eternal—and eternal just because it is joyous and fleeting.
(3) Then we go back and compare this kind of quiet immortal beauty with the passionate immortality hymned in the “Nightingale Ode”:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down …
with all the rest of that supreme stanza: from which (with some passages my reading supplies to illustrate the difference) we fall to contrasting the vibrating thrill of the “Nightingale” with the happy grace of the “Grecian Urn” and, allowing each to be appropriate, dispute for a while, perhaps, over the merits of classical calm and romantic thrill.
(4) From this we proceed to examine the Ode in detail line by line: which examination brings up a whole crowd of questions, such as:
(a) We have a thought enounced in the first stanza. Does the Ode go on to develop and amplify it, as an Ode should? Or does Pegasus come down again and again on the prints from which he took off? If he do this, and the action of the Ode be dead and unprogressive, is the defect covered by beauty of language? Can such defect ever be so covered?
(b) Lines 15 and 16 anticipate lines 21–24, which are saying the same thing and getting no forwarder.
(c) We come to the lines
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
with the answering lines
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
and we note Sir Sidney Colvin’s suggestion that this breaks in upon an arrest of art as though it were an arrest on reality: and remember that he raised a somewhat similar
