But the matter is very much worse than your Statute makes it out. Take one of the papers in which some actual acquaintance with Literature is required—the Special Period from 1700 to 1785; then turn to your Cambridge History of English Literature, and you will find that the mere bibliography of those eighty-five years occupies something like five or six hundred pages—five or six hundred pages of titles and authors in simple enumeration! The brain reels; it already suffers “cerebral inconveniences.” But stretch the list back to Chaucer, back through Chaucer to those alleged prose writings in the Wessex dialect, then forward from 1785 to Wordsworth, to Byron, to Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, even to this year in which literature still lives and engenders; and the brain, if not too giddy indeed, stands as Satan stood on the brink of Chaos—
Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross—
and sees itself, with him, now plumbing a vast vacuity, and anon nigh-foundered, “treading the crude consistence.”
The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to know it in any reputable sense of the word—let alone your learning to write English—is, in short, impossible. And the framers of the Statute, recognising this, have very sensibly compromised by setting you to work on such things as “the Outlines of English Literature”; which are not Literature at all but are only what some fellow has to say about it, hastily summarising his estimates of many works, of which on a generous computation he has probably read one-fifth; and by examining you on (what was it all?) “language, metre, literary history and literary criticism,” which again are not Literature, or at least (as a Greek would say in his idiom) escape their own notice being Literature. For English Literature, as I take it, is that which sundry men and women have written memorably in English about Life. And so I come to my subject—the art of reading that, which is Literature.
V
I shall take leave to leap into it over another man’s back, or, rather over two men’s backs. No doubt it has happened to many of you to pick up in a happy moment some book or pamphlet or copy of verse which just says the word you have unconsciously been listening for, almost craving to speak for yourself, and so sends you off hotfoot on the trail. And if you have had that experience, it may also have happened to you that, after ranging, you returned on the track “like faithful hound returning,” in gratitude, or to refresh the scent; and that, picking up the book again, you found it no such wonderful book after all, or that some of the magic had faded by process of the change in yourself which itself had originated. But the word was spoken.
Such a book—pamphlet I may call it, so small it was—fell into my hands some ten years ago; The Aims of Literary Study—no very attractive title—by Dr. Corson, a distinguished American professor (and let me say that, for something more than ten—say for twenty—years much of the most thoughtful as well as the most thorough work upon English comes to us from America). I find, as I handle again the small duodecimo volume, that my own thoughts have taken me a little wide, perhaps a little astray, from its suggestions. But for loyalty’s sake I shall start just where Dr. Corson started, with a passage from Browning’s, “A Death in the Desert,” supposed (you will remember)—
Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene
narrating the death of St. John the Evangelist, John of Patmos; the narrative interrupted by this gloss:
[This is the doctrine he was wont to teach,
How divers persons witness in each man,
Three souls which make up one soul: first, to wit,
A soul of each and all the bodily parts,
Seated therein, which works, and is What Does,
And has the use of earth, and ends the man
Downward: but, tending upward for advice,
Grows into, and again is grown into
By the next soul, which, seated in the brain,
Useth the first with its collected use,
And feeleth, thinketh, willeth—is What Knows:
Which, duly tending upward in its turn,
Grows into, and again is grown into
By the last soul, that uses both the first,
Subsisting whether they assist or no,
And, constituting man’s self, is What Is—
And leans upon the former
(Mark the word, Gentlemen; “leans upon the former”—leaning back, as it were felt by him, on this very man who had leaned on Christ’s bosom, being loved)
And leans upon the former, makes it play,
As that played off the first: and, tending up,
Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man
Upward in that dread point of intercourse,
Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him.
What Does, What Knows, What Is; three souls, one man.
I give the glossa of Theotypas.]
What Does, What Knows, What Is—there is no mistaking what Browning means, nor in what degrees of hierarchy he places this, that, and the other. … Does it not strike you how curiously men today, with their minds perverted by hate, are inverting that order?—all the highest value set on What Does—What Knows suddenly seen to be of importance, but only as important in feeding the guns, perfecting explosives, collaring trade—all in the service of What Does, of “Get on or Get Out,” of “Efficiency”; no one stopping to think that “Efficiency” is—must be—a relative term! Efficient for what?—for What Does, What Knows or perchance, after all, for What Is? No! banish the humanities and throw everybody into practical science: not into that study of natural science, which can never conflict with the “humanities” since it seeks discovery for the pure sake of truth, or charitably to alleviate man’s lot—
Sweetly, rather, to ease, loose and bind
As need requires, this frail fallen humankind …
—but to invent what will be commercially serviceable in besting your neighbour, or in gassing him, or in slaughtering him neatly and wholesale. But still the whisper
