I put it to you, Sir, that Lucian needs not to say another word, but we know that Demonax had loved letters, and partly by aid of them had arrived at being such a man. No; by consent of all, Literature is a nurse of noble natures, and right reading makes a full man in a sense even better than Bacon’s; not replete, but complete rather, to the pattern for which Heaven designed him. In this conviction, in this hope, public spirited men endow Chairs in our Universities, sure that Literature is a good thing if only we can bring it to operate on young minds.
That he has in him some power to guide such operation a man must believe before accepting such a Chair as this. And now, Sir, the terrible moment is come when your ζἑνος must render some account—I will not say of himself, for that cannot be attempted—but of his business here. Well, first let me plead that while you have been infinitely kind to the stranger, feasting him and casting a gown over him, one thing not all your kindness has been able to do. With precedents, with traditions such as other professors enjoy, you could not furnish him. The Chair is a new one, or almost new, and for the present would seem to float in the void, like Muhammad’s coffin. Wherefore, being one who (in my Lord Chief Justice Crewe’s phrase) would “take hold of a twig or twine-thread to uphold it”; being also prone (with Bacon) to believe that “the counsels to which Time hath not been called, Time will not ratify”; I do assure you that, had any legacy of guidance been discovered among the papers left by my predecessor, it would have been eagerly welcomed and as piously honoured. O, trust me, Sir!—if any design for this Chair of English Literature had been left by Dr. Verrall, it is not I who would be setting up any new stage in your agora! But in his papers—most kindly searched for me by Mrs. Verrall—no such design can be found. He was, in truth, a stricken man when he came to the Chair, and of what he would have built we can only be sure that, had it been this or had it been that, it would infallibly have borne the impress of one of the most beautiful minds of our generation. The gods saw otherwise; and for me, following him, I came to a trench and stretched my hands to a shade.
For me, then, if you put questions concerning the work of this Chair, I must take example from the artist in Don Quixote, who being asked what he was painting, answered modestly, “That is as it may turn out.” The course is uncharted, and for sailing directions I have but these words of your Ordinance:
It shall be the duty of the professor to deliver courses of lectures on English Literature from the age of Chaucer onwards, and otherwise to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study in the University of the subject of English Literature.
And I never even knew that English Literature had a “subject”; or, rather, supposed it to have several! To resume:
The professor shall treat this subject on literary and critical rather than on philological and linguistic lines:
—a proviso which at any rate cuts off a cantle, large in itself, if not comparatively, of the new Professor’s ignorance. But I ask you to note the phrase “to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study.”—not, you will observe, “to teach”; for this absolves me from raising at the start a question of some delicacy for me, as Green launched his Prolegomena to Ethics upon the remark that “an author who seeks to gain general confidence scarcely goes the right way to work when he begins with asking whether there really is such a subject as that of which he proposes to treat.” In spite of—mark, pray, that I say in spite of—the activity of many learned Professors, some doubt does lurk in the public mind if, after all, English Literature can, in any ordinary sense, be taught, and if the attempts to teach it do not, after all, justify (as Wisdom is so often justified of her grandparents) the silence sapience of those old benefactors who abstained from endowing any such Chairs.
But that the study of English Literature can be promoted in young minds by an elder one, that their zeal may be encouraged, their tastes directed, their vision cleared, quickened, enlarged—this, I take it, no man of experience will deny. Nay, since our two oldest Universities have a habit of marking one another with interest—an interest, indeed, sometimes heightened by nervousness—I may point out that all this has been done of late years, and eminently done, by a Cambridge man you gave to Oxford. This, then, Mr. Vice-Chancellor—this or something like this, Gentlemen—is to be my task if I have the good fortune to win your confidence.
Let me, then, lay down two or three principles by which I propose to be guided. (1) For the first principle of all I put to you that in studying any work of genius we should begin by taking it absolutely; that is to say, with minds intent on discovering just what the author’s mind intended; this being at once the obvious approach to its meaning (its τὀ τἱ ἧν εἰναι, the “thing it was to be”), and the merest duty of politeness we owe to the great man addressing us. We should lay our minds open to what he wishes to tell, and if what he has
