As for the child, he is not “grubbing for beauties”; he magnificently ignores what he cannot for the moment understand, being intent on What Is, the heart and secret of the adventure. He is Ferdinand (I repeat) and the isle is “full of voices.” If these voices were all intelligible, why then, as Browning would say, “the less Island it.”
V
I have purposely exhibited The Tempest at its least tractable. Who will deny that as a whole it can be made intelligible even to very young children by the simple process of reading it with them intelligently? or that the mysteries such a reading leaves unexplained are of the sort to fascinate a child’s mind and allure it? But if this be granted, I have established my contention that the Humanities should not be treated as a mere crown and ornament of education; that they should inform every part of it, from the beginning, in every school of the realm: that whether a child have more education or less education, what he has can be, and should be, a “liberal education” throughout.
Matthew Arnold, as everyone knows, used to preach the use of these masterpieces as prophylactics of taste. I would I could make you feel that they are even more necessary to us.
The reason why?—The reason is that every child born in these Islands is born into a democracy which, apart from home affairs, stands committed to a high responsibility for the future welfare and good governance of Europe. For three centuries or so it has held rule over vast stretches of the earth’s surface and many millions of strange peoples: while its obligations towards the general civilisation of Europe, if not intermittent, have been tightened or relaxed, now here, now there, by policy, by commerce, by dynastic alliances, by sudden revulsions or sympathies. But this War will leave us bound to Europe as we never have been: and, whether we like it or not, no less inextricably bound to foe than to friend. Therefore, I say, it has become important, and in a far higher degree than it ever was before the War, that our countrymen grow up with a sense of what I may call the soul of Europe. And nowhere but in literature (which is “memorable speech”)—or at any rate, nowhere so well as in literature—can they find this sense.
VI
There was, as we have seen, a time in Europe, extending over many centuries, when mankind dwelt under the preoccupation of making literature, and still making more of it. The 5th century BC in Athens was such a time; and if you will you may envy, as we all admire, the men of an age when to write at all was tantamount to asserting genius; the men who, in Newman’s words, “deserve to be Classics, both because of what they do and because they can do it.” If you envy—while you envy—at least remember that these things often paid their price; that the “Phaedo,” for example, was bought for us by the death of Socrates. Pass Athens and come to Alexandria: still men are accumulating books and the material for books; threshing out the Classics into commentaries and grammars, garnering books in great libraries.
There follows an age which interrupts this hive-like labour with sudden and insensate destruction. German tribes from the north, Turkish from the east, break in upon the granaries and send up literature in flames; the Christian Fathers from Tertullian to Gregory the Great (I regret to say) either heartily assisting or at least warming their benedictory hands at the blaze: and so thoroughly they do their work that even the writings of Aristotle, the Philosopher, must wait for centuries as “things silently gone out of mind or things violently destroyed” (to borrow Wordsworth’s fine phrase) and creep back into Europe bit by bit, under cover of Arabic translations.
The scholars set to work and begin rebuilding: patient, indefatigable, anonymous as the coral insects at work on a Pacific atoll-building, building, until on the near side of the gulf we call the Dark Age, islets of scholarship lift themselves above the waters: mere specks at first, but ridges appear and connect them: and, to first seeming, sterile enough:
Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho—
but as they join and become a terra firma, a thin soil gathers on them God knows whence: and, God knows whence, the seed is brought, “it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.” There is a price, again, for this resurrection: but how nobly, how blithely paid you may learn, without seeking recondite examples, from Cuthbert’s famous letter describing the death of Bede. Compare that story with that of the last conversation of Socrates; and you will surely recognise that the two men are brothers born out of time; that Bede’s work has been a legacy; that his life has been given to recreating—not scholarship merely nor literature merely—but, through them both, something above them both—the soul of Europe. And this may or may not lead you on to reflect that beyond our present passions, and beyond this War, in a common sanity Europe (and America with her) will have to discover that common soul again.
But eminent spirits such as Bede’s are, by their very eminence, less representative of the process—essentially fugitive and self-abnegatory—than the thousands of copyists who have left no name behind them. Let me read you a short paragraph from The Cambridge History of English Literature, Chapter 11, written, the other day, by one of our own teachers:
The cloister was the centre of life
