You listen to the skylark’s note rising, spiral by spiral, on “the very jet of earth”:
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardour, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day:
and you long for the musical gift to follow up and up the delicate degrees of distance and thread the notes back as the bird ascending drops them—on a thread, as it were, of graduated beads, half music and half dew:
That was the chirp of Ariel
You heard, as overhead it flew,
The farther going more to dwell
And wing our green to wed our blue;
But whether note of joy, or knell,
Not his own Father-singer knew;
Nor yet can any mortal tell,
Save only how it shivers through;
The breast of us a sounded shell,
The blood of us a lighted dew.
Well in music, in painting, this graduating which gives right proportion and, with proportion, a sense of distance, of atmosphere, is called Value. Let us, for a minute or two, assay this particular meaning of Value upon life and literature, and first upon life, or, rather upon one not negligible facet of life.
I suppose that if an ordinary man of my age were asked which has better helped him to bear the burs of life—religion or a sense of humour—he would, were he quite honest, be gravelled for an answer. Now the best part of a sense of humour, as you know without my telling you, consists in a sense of proportion; a habit, abiding and prompt at command, of seeing all human affairs in their just perspective, so that its happy possessor at once perceives anything odd or distorted or overblown to be an excrescence, a protuberance, a swelling, literally a humour: and the function of Thalia, the Comic Spirit, as you may read in Meredith’s Essay on Comedy, is just to prick these humours. I will but refer you to Meredith’s Essay, and here cite you the words of an old schoolmaster:
It would seem to be characteristic of the same mind to appreciate the beauty of ideas in just proportion and harmonious relation to each other, and the absurdity of the same ideas when distorted or brought into incongruous juxtaposition. The exercise of this sense of humour … compels the mind to form a picture to itself, accompanied by pleasurable emotion; and what is this but setting the imagination to work, though in topsy-turvy fashion? Nay, in such a case, imagination plays a double part, since it is only by instantaneous comparison with ideal fitness and proportion that it can grasp at full force the grotesqueness of their contraries.8
Let us play with an example for one moment. A child sees such an excrescence, such an offence upon proportion, in an immoderately long nose. He is apt to call attention to it on the visage of a visitor: it intrigues him in Perrault’s “Prince Charming” and many a fairy tale: it amuses him in Lear’s Book of Nonsense:
There was an old man with a Nose,
Who said “If you choose to suppose
That my nose is too long
You are certainly wrong”—
This old man he detects as lacking sense of proportion, sense of humour. Pass from the child to the workingman as we know him. A few weeks ago, a lady—featured, as to nose, on the side of excess—was addressing a North Country audience on the Economic Position of Women after the War. Said she, “There won’t be men to go round.” Said a voice “Eh, but they’ll have to, Miss!” Pass from this rudimentary criticism to high talent employed on the same subject, and you get Cyrano de Bergerac. Pass to genius, to Milton, and you find the elephant amusing Adam and Eve in Paradise, and doing his best:
the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis.
Milton, like the elephant, jokes with difficulty, but he, too, is using all his might.
III
I have illustrated, crudely enough, how a sense of things in their right values will help us on one side of our dealings with life. But truly it helps us on every side. This was what Plato meant when he said that a philosopher must see things as they relatively are within his horizon—ὀ συνοπτικὸς διαλεκτικός. And for this it was that an English poet praised Sophocles as one
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
And this of course is what Dean Inge meant when, the other day, in a volume of Cambridge Essays on Education, he reminded us, for a sensible commonplace, that “The wise man is he who knows the relative values of things.”
IV
Applying this to literature, I note, but shall not insist here on the fact—though fact it is—that the Greek and Roman “classical” writers (as we call them) laid more stress than has ever been laid among the subsequent tribes of men upon the desirability of getting all things into proportion, of seeing all life on a scale of relative values. And the reason I shall not insist on this is simply that better men have saved me the trouble.
I propose this morning to discuss the value of the classics to students of English literature from, as the modern phrase goes, a slightly different angle.
Reclining and looking up into that sky which is not too grandiose an
