We come to the last stanza and lament “O Attic shape! Fair attitude” for its jingle: but note how the poet recovers himself and brings the whole to a grand close.
I have, even yet, mentioned but a few of the points. For one, I have omitted its most beautiful vowel-play, on which teacher and pupil can dwell and learn together. And heaven forbid that as a teacher I should insist even on half of those I have indicated. A teacher, as I hold, should watch for what his pupil divines of his own accord; but if, trafficking with works of inspiration, he have no gift to catch that inspiration nor power to pass it on, then I say “Heaven help him! but he has no valid right on earth to be in the business.”
And if a teacher have all these chances of teaching—mind you, of accurate teaching—supplied him by a single Ode of Keats, do you suppose we cannot set in an Examination paper one intelligent question upon it, in its own lawful category?
Gentlemen, with the most scrupulous tenderness for aged and even decrepit interests, we have been trying to liberate you from certain old bad superstitions and silently laying the stones of a new School of English, which we believe to be worthy even of Cambridge.
Our proposals are before the University. Should they be passed, still everything will depend on the loyalty of its teachers to the idea; and on that enthusiasm which I suppose to be the nurse of all studies and know to be the authentic cherishing nurse of ours. We may even have conceded too much to the letter, but we have built and built our trust on the spirit “which maketh alive.”
Lecture VI
On a School of English
Wednesday, October 17, 1917
I
It is now, Gentlemen, five years less a term since, feeling (as they say of other offenders) my position acutely, I had the honour of reading an Inaugural before this University and the impudence to loose, in the course of it, a light shaft against a phrase in the very Ordinance defining the duties of this Chair.
“It shall be the duty of the professor,” says the Ordinance, “to deliver courses of lectures on English Literature from the age of Chaucer onwards, and otherwise to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study in the University of the subject of English Literature.”
That was the phrase at which I glanced—“the subject of English Literature”; and I propose that we start today, for reasons that will appear, by subjecting this subject to some examination.
II
“The Subject of English Literature.” Surely—for a start—there is no such thing; or rather, may we not say that everything is, has been or can be, a subject of English Literature? Man’s loss of Paradise has been a subject of English Literature, and so has been a Copper Coinage in Ireland, and so has been Roast Sucking-pig, and so has been Holy Dying, and so has been Mr. Pepys’s somewhat unholy living, and so have been Ecclesiastical Polity, The Grail, Angling for Chub, The Wealth of Nations, The Sublime and the Beautiful, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Prizefights, Grecian Urns, Modern Painters, Intimations of Immortality in early Childhood, Travels with a Donkey, Rural Rides and Rejected Addresses—all these have been subjects of English Literature: as have been human complots and intrigues as wide asunder as Othello and The School for Scandal; persons as different as Prometheus and Dr. Johnson, Imogen and Moll Flanders, Piers the Plowman and Mr. Pickwick; places as different as Utopia and Cranford, Laputa and Reading Gaol. Epipsychidion is literature: but so is A Tale of a Tub.
Listen, for this is literature:
If some king of the earth have so large an extent of dominion, in north, and south, so that he hath winter and summer together in his dominions, so large an extent east and west as that he hath day and night together in his dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy summer out of winter, though thou have no spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.6
But listen again, for this also is literature:
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoestring, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.
Here again is literature:
When I was a child, at seven years old, my friends on a holiday filled my pockets with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children; and being charmed with the sound of a whistle that I met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered him all my money for one. I then came home and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle but disturbing all the family. My brothers and sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth … The reflection gave me more chagrin than the
