IX
Is there, then, no better way? Yes there is a better way: for the French have it, with their language and literature. In France, as Matthew Arnold noted, a generation ago, the ordinary journeyman work of literature is done far better and more conscientiously than with us. In France a man feels it almost a personal stain, an unpatriotic lâche, to write even on a police-order anything so derogatory to the tradition of his language as our Cabinet Ministers read out as answers to our House of Commons. I am told that many a Maire in a small provincial town in N.E. France, even when overwhelmed—accablé—with the sufferings of his town-folk, has truly felt the iron enter into his soul on being forced to sign a document written out for him in the invaders’ French.
Cannot we treat our noble inheritance of literature and language as scrupulously, and with as high a sense of their appertaining to our national honour, as a Frenchman cherishes his language, his literature? Cannot we study to leave our inheritance—as the old Athenian put it temperately, “not worse but a little better than we found it”?
I think we can, and should. I shall close today, Gentlemen, with the most modest of perorations. In my first lecture before you, in January 1913, I quoted to you the artist in Don Quixote who, being asked what animal he was painting, answered diffidently “That is as it may turn out.”
The teaching of our language and literature is, after all, a new thing and still experimental. The main tenets of those who, aware of this, have worked on the scheme for a School of English in Cambridge, the scheme recently passed by your Senate and henceforth to be in operation, are three:—
The first. That literature cannot be divorced from life: that (for example) you cannot understand Chaucer aright, unless you have the background, unless you know the kind of men for whom Chaucer wrote and the kind of men whom he made speak; that is the national side with which all our literature is concerned.
The second. Literature being so personal a thing, you cannot understand it until you have some personal understanding of the men who wrote it. Donne is Donne; Swift, Swift; Pope, Pope; Johnson, Johnson; Goldsmith, Goldsmith; Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb; Carlyle, Carlyle. Until you have grasped those men, as men, you cannot grasp their writings. That is the personal side of literary study, and as necessary as the other.
The third. That the writing and speaking of English is a living art, to be practised and (if it may be) improved. That what these great men have done is to hand us a grand patrimony; that they lived to support us through the trial we are now enduring, and to carry us through to great days to come. So shall our sons, now fighting in France, have a language ready for the land they shall recreate and repeople.
Lecture VII
The Value of Greek and Latin in English Literature
Wednesday, February 6, 1918
I
I have promised you, Gentlemen, for today some observations on The Value of Greek and Latin in English Literature: a mild, academic title, a camouflage title, so to say; calculated to shelter us for a while from the vigilance of those hot-eyed reformers who, had I advertised The Value of Greek and Latin in English Life might even now be swooping from all quarters of the sky on a suggestion that these dry bones yet were flesh: for the eyes I dread are not only red and angry, but naturally microscopic—and that indeed, if they only knew it, is their malady. Yet “surely” groaned patient Job, “there is a path which the vulture’s eye hath not seen!”
You, at any rate, know by this time that wherever these lectures assert literature they assert life, perhaps even too passionately, allowing neither the fact of death nor the possibility of divorce.
II
But let us begin with the first word, “Value”—“The Value of Greek and Latin in English Literature.” What do I mean by “Value”? Well, I use it, generally, in the sense of “worth”; but with a particular meaning, or shade of meaning, too. And, this particular meaning is not the particular meaning intended (as I suppose) by men of commerce who, on news of a friend’s death, fall a-musing and continue musing until the fire kindles, and they ask “What did So-and-so die worth?” or sometimes, more wisely than they know, “What did poor old So-and-so die worth?” or again, more colloquially, “What did So-and-so ‘cut up’ for?” Neither is it that which more disinterested economists used to teach; men never (I fear me) loved, but anyhow lost awhile, who for my green unknowing youth, at Thebes or Athens—growing older I tend to forget which is, or was, which—defined the Value of a thing as its “purchasing power” which the market translates into “price.” For—to borrow a phrase which I happened on, the other day, with delight, in the Introduction to a translation of Lucian—there may be forms of education less paying than the commercial and yet better worth paying for; nay, above payment or computation in price.7
No: the particular meaning I use today is that which artists use when they talk of painting or of music. To see things, near or far, in their true perspective and proportions; to judge them through distance; and fetching them back, to reproduce them in art so proportioned comparatively, so rightly adjusted, that they combine to make a particular and just perspective: that is to give things their true Values.
Suppose yourself reclining on a bank on a
