Of a bridal, this is literature:
Open the temple gates unto my love,
Open them wide that she may enter in!
But so also is Suckling’s account of a wedding that begins
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been.
This is literature:
And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest;
As rivers of water in a dry place,
As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
But so is this literature:
One circle cannot touch another circle on the outside at more points than one.
For, if it be possible, let the circle ACK touch the circle ABC at the points A, C. Join AC.
Then because the two points A, C are in the circumference of the circle ACK the line which joins them falls within that circle.
But the circle ACK is without the circle ABC. Therefore the straight line AC is without the circle ABC.
But because the two points A, C are in the circumference of ABC therefore the straight line AC falls within that circle. Which is absurd.
Therefore one circle cannot touch another on the outside at more points than one.
All thoughts, as well as all passions, all delights
votum, timor, ira, voluptas—
whatsoever, in short, engages man’s activity of soul or body, may be deemed the subject of literature and is transformed into literature by process of recording it in memorable speech. It is so, it has been so, and God forbid it should ever not be so!
III
Now this, put so, is (you will say) so extremely, obvious that it must needs hide a fallacy or at best a quibble on a word. I shall try to show that it does not: that it directly opposes plain truth to a convention accepted by the Ordinance, and that the fallacy lies in that convention.
A convention may be defined as something which a number of men have agreed to accept in lieu of the truth and to pass off for the truth upon others: I was about to add, preferably when they can catch them young: but some recent travel in railway trains and listening to the kind of stuff men of mature years deliver straight out of newspapers for the products of their own digested thought have persuaded me that the ordinary man is as susceptible at fifty, sixty, or even seventy as at any earlier period of growth, and that the process of incubation is scarcely less rapid.
I am not, to be sure, concerned to deny that there may be conventions useful enough to society, serving it to maintain government, order, public and private decency, or the commerce on which it must needs rest to be a civilised society at all—commerce of food, commerce of clothing, and so on, up to commerce in knowledge and ideas. Government itself—any form of it—is a convention; marriage is a convention; money of course is a convention, and the alphabet itself I suppose to contain as many conventions as all the old Courts of Love and Laws of Chivalry put together, and our English alphabet one tremendous fallacy, that twenty-six letters, separately or in combination are capable of symbolising all the sounds produced by an Englishman’s organs of speech, let alone the sounds he hears from foreigners, dogs, guns, steam-engines, motor-horns and other friends and enemies to whom we deny the franchise. Also of course it ignores the whole system of musical notes—another convention—which yet with many of the older bards could hardly be separated from the words they used, though now only the words survive and as literature.
IV
But every convention has a fallacy somewhere at the root; whether it be useful and operative, as many a legal fiction is operative, for good; or senile, past service yet tyrannous by custom, and so pernicious; or merely foolish, as certain artistic conventions are traceable, when a Ruskin comes to judgment, back to nothing better than folly: and it becomes men of honest mind, in dealing with anything recognisable as a convention, to examine its accepted fallacy, whether it be well understood or ill understood; beneficent or pernicious or merely foolish or both foolish and pernicious: and this is often most handily done by tracing its history.
Now I shall assume that the framers of the Ordinance regulating the duties of this Chair knew well enough, of their own reading, that English Literature deals with a vast variety of subjects: and that, if any piece of writing miss to deal with its particular subject, so closely that theme and treatment can scarcely be separated, by so much will it be faulty as literature. Milton is fairly possessed with the story of Man’s fall, Boswell possessed with Johnson, Shelley with hatred of tyranny in all its manifestations, Mill again with the idea of Liberty: and it is only because we had knowledge presented to us at an age when we thought more attentively of apples, that we still fail to recognise in Euclid and Dr. Todhunter two writers who are excellent because possessed with a passion for Geometry.
I infer, then, that the framers of the Ordinance, when they employed this phrase “the study of the subject of English Literature,” knew well enough that no such thing existed in nature, but adopted the convention that English Literature could be separated somehow from its content and treated as a subject all by itself, for teaching purposes: and, for purposes of examination, could be yoked up with another subject called English Language, as other universities had yoked it.
V
I believe the following to be a fair account of how these examinations in English Language and Literature came to pass, and how a certain kind of student came to pass these Examinations. At any rate since the small revolution has happened in my lifetime and most of it since I was able to observe, the account here is drawn from my own observation and may be
