But, as a theory, the strict classical argument gives itself away, as well by its intolerance as by its obvious distrust of the genius of our own wonderful language. I have in these five years, and from this place, Gentlemen, counselled you to seek back ever to those Mediterranean sources which are the wellheads of our civilisation: but always (I hope) on the understanding that you use them with a large liberty. They are effete for us unless we add and mingle freely the juice of our own natural genius.
And in practice the strict classical theory, with its implied contempt of English, has been disastrous: disastrous not only with the ordinary man—as with my Sixth Form boy who could not put two sentences together, and had read no English authors; but disastrous even to highly eminent scholars. Listen, pray, to this passage from one of them, Frederick Paley, who condescended (Heaven knows why) to turn the majestic verse of Pindar into English Prose—
From the VIII Isthmian:
And now that we are returned from great sorrows, let us not fall into a dearth of victories, nor foster griefs; but as we have ceased from our tiresome troubles, we will publicly indulge in a sweet roundelay.
From the IV Pythian:
It had been divinely predicted to Pelias, that he should die by the doughty sons of Aeolus and an alarming oracle had come to his wary mind, delivered at the central point of tree-clad mother-earth, “that he must by all means hold in great caution the man with one shoe, when he shall have come from a homestead on the hills.”
And he accordingly came in due time, armed with two spears, a magnificent man. The dress he wore was of a double kind, the national costume of the Magnesians. … Nor as yet had the glossy clusters of his hair been clipped away, but dangled brightly adown his back.
Forward he went at once and took his stand among the people. … Him then they failed to recognise: but some of the reverent-minded went so far as to say, “Surely this cannot be Apollo!”
It needs no comment, I think. Surely this cannot be Apollo!
Frederick Paley flourished—if the word be not exorbitant for so demure a writer—in the middle of the last century (he was born in the year of Waterloo and died in the year after Queen Victoria’s first jubilee). Well, in that period there grew up a race of pioneers who saw that English Literature—that proud park and rolling estate—lay a tangled, neglected wilderness for its inheritors, and set themselves bravely to clear broad ways through it. Furnivall and Skeat, Aldis Wright, Clark, Grosart, Arber, Earle, Hales, Morris, Ellis and the rest—who can rehearse these names now but in deepest respect? Oh, believe me, Gentlemen! they were wonderful fighters in a cause that at first seemed hopeless. If I presume to speak of foibles today, you will understand that I do so because, lightly though I may talk to you at times, I have a real sense of the responsibilities of this Chair. I worship great learning, which they had: I loathe flippant detraction of what is great; I have usually a heart for men-against-odds and the unpopular cause. But these very valiant fighters had, one and all, some very obvious foibles: and because, in the hour of success, these foibles came to infect the whole teaching of English in this country, and to infect it fatally for many years, I shall dare to point them out.
VI
(a) To begin with, then, these valiant fighters, intent on pushing their cause to the front, kept no sense of proportion. All their geese were swans, and Beowulf a second Iliad. I think it scarcely too much to say that, of these men, all so staunch in fighting for the claims of English Literature, not one (with the exception of Dr. Hales) appears to have had any critical judgment whatever, apart from the rhyme, verse and inflectional tests on which they bestowed their truly priceless industry. Criticism, as Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold or Pater understood and practised it, they merely misprized.
(b) I think it was of true scholarly desire to vindicate English Literature from the charge of being “too easy,” that—as their studies advanced—they laid more and more stress on Middle-English and Old English writings than on what our nations of England and Scotland have written since they learned to write. I dare to think also that we may attribute to this dread of “easiness” their practice of cumbering simple texts with philological notes; on which, rather than on the text, we unhappy students were carefully examined. For an example supplied to Dr. Corson—I take those three lines of Cowper’s Task (Book I, 86–88):
Thus first necessity invented stools,
Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs,
And luxury th’ accomplish’d Sofa last.
Now in these three lines the word “accomplish’d” is the only one that needs even the smallest explanation. “But,” says Dr. Corson, “in two different editions of The Task in my library, prepared for the use of the young, no explanation is given of it, but in both the Arabic origin of ‘sofa’ is given. In one the question is asked what other words in English have been derived from the Arabic.” (“Abracadabra” would be my little contribution.)
(c) These valiant fighters—having to extol what Europe had, wrongly enough, forgotten to count among valuable things—turned aggressively provincial, parted their beards in the Anglo-Saxon fashion; composed long sentences painfully innocent of any word not derivable from Anglo-Saxon, sentences in which the “impenetrability of matter” became the “un-go-throughsomeness of stuff” (but that may have happened in a parody), and in general comported themselves like the Anglo-Saxons they claimed for their forbears; rightly enough for anything anyone cared, but wrongly enough for the rest of us who had no yearning toward
