To one thing constant never
Suppose that rendered thus:
I enjoin upon the adult female population (γυναῑκες), not once but twice, that there be from this time forward, a total cessation of sighing. The male is, and has been, constantly addicted to inconstancy, treading the ocean and the mainland respectively with alternate feet.
That, more or less, is what Paley did upon Euripides, and how would you like it if a modern Greek did it upon Shakespeare? None the less I remember that my own first awed surmise of what Greek might mean came from a translated story of Herodotus—the story of Cleobis and Biton—at the tail of an old grammar-book, before I had learnt the Greek alphabet; and I am sure that the instinct of the old translators was sound; that somehow (as Wordsworth says somewhere) the present must be balanced on the wings of the past and the future, and that as you stretch out the one you stretch out the other to strength.
X
There is no derogation of new things in this plea I make specially to you who may be candidates in our School of English. You may remember my reading to you in a previous lecture that liberal poem of Cory’s invoking the spirit of “dear divine Comatas,” that
Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.
Well, I would have your minds, as you read our literature, reach back to that Dorian shepherd through an atmosphere—his made ours—as through veils, each veil unfolding a value. So you will recognise how, from Chaucer down, our literature has panted after the Mediterranean water-brooks. So through an atmosphere you will link (let me say) Collins’s “Ode to Evening,” or Matthew Arnold’s “Strayed Reveller” up to the “Pervigilium Veneris,” Mr. Sturge Moore’s “Sicilian Vine-Dresser” up to Theocritus, Pericles’ funeral oration down to Lincoln’s over the dead at Gettysburg. And as I read you just now some part of an English oration in the Latin manner, so I will conclude with some stanzas in the Greek manner. They are by Landor—a proud promise by a young writer, hopeful as I could wish any young learner here to be. The title—
Corinna, from Athens, to Tanagra
Tanagra! think not I forget
Thy beautifully storied streets;
Be sure my memory bathes yet
In clear Thermodon, and yet greets
The blithe and liberal shepherd-boy,
Whose sunny bosom swells with joy
When we accept his matted rushes
Upheav’d with sylvan fruit; away he bounds, and blushes.A gift I promise: one I see
Which thou with transport wilt receive,
The only proper gift for thee,
Of which no mortal shall bereave
In later times thy mouldering walls,
Until the last old turret falls;
A crown, a crown from Athens won,
A crown no god can wear, beside Latona’s son.There may be cities who refuse
To their own child the honours due,
And look ungently on the Muse;
But ever shall those cities rue
The dry, unyielding, niggard breast,
Offering no nourishment, no rest,
To that young head which soon shall rise
Disdainfully, in might and glory, to the skies.Sweetly where cavern’d Dirce flows
Do white-arm’d maidens chaunt my lay,
Flapping the while with laurel-rose
The honey-gathering tribes away;
And sweetly, sweetly Attic tongues
Lisp your Corinna’s early songs;
To her with feet more graceful come
The verses that have dwelt in kindred breasts at home.O let thy children lean aslant
Against the tender mother’s knee,
And gaze into her face, and want
To know what magic there can be
In words that urge some eyes to dance,
While others as in holy trance
Look up to heaven: be such my praise!
Why linger? I must haste, or lose the Delphic bays.
Lecture VIII
On Reading the Bible (I)
Wednesday, March 6, 1918
I
“Read not to Contradict and Confute,” says Bacon of Studies in general: and you may be the better disposed, Gentlemen, to forgive my choice of subject today if in my first sentence I rule that way of reading the Bible completely out of court. You may say at once that, the Bible being so full of doctrine as it is, and such a storehouse for exegesis as it has been, this is more easily said than profitably done. You may grant me that the Scriptures in our Authorised Version are part and parcel of English Literature (and more than part and parcel); you may grant that a professor of English Literature has therefore a claim, if not an obligation, to speak of them in that Version; you may—having granted my incessant refusal to disconnect our national literature from our national life, or to view them as disconnected—accept the conclusion which plainly flows from it; that no teacher of English can pardonably neglect what is at once the most majestic thing in our literature and by all odds the most spiritually living thing we inherit; in our courts at once superb monument and superabundant fountain of life; and yet you may discount beforehand what he must attempt.
For (say you) if he attempt the doctrine, he goes straight down to buffeted waters so broad that only stout theologians can win to shore; if, on the other hand, he ignore doctrine, the play is Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left out. He reduces our Bible to “mere literature,” to something “belletristic,” pretty, an artifice, a flimsy, a gutted thing.
II
Now of all ways of dealing with literature that happens to be the way we should least admire. By that way we disassociate literature from life; “what they said” from the men who said it and meant it, not seldom at the risk of their lives. My pupils will bear witness in their memories that when we talk together concerning poetry, for example, by “poetry” we mean “that which the poets wrote,” or (if you like) “the stuff the poets wrote”; and their intelligence tells them, of course, that anyone who in the simple proposition “Poets wrote Poetry” connects an object with a subject
