On the Art of Writing

bled away into Tweed and Avon: great spirits have been oared down the Thames to Traitor’s Gate and the Tower. Deeds done on the Cam have found their way into history. But I once traced the Avon to its source under Naseby battlefield, and found it issuing from the fragments of a stucco swan. No god mounts guard over the headwater of the Thames; and the only Englishman who boldly claims a divine descent is (I understand) an impostor who runs an Agapemone. In short we are a mixed race, and our literature is derivative. Let us confine our pride to those virtues, not few, which are honestly ours. A Roman noble, even today, has some excuse for reckoning a god in his ancestry, or at least a wolf among its wet-nurses: but of us English even those who came over with William the Norman have the son of a tanner’s daughter for escort. I very well remember that, the other day, writers who vindicated our hereditary House of Lords against a certain Parliament Act commonly did so on the ground that since the Reform Bill of 1832, by inclusion of all that was eminent in politics, war and commerce, the Peerage had been so changed as to know itself no longer for the same thing. That is our practical way.

At all events, the men who made our literature had never a doubt, as they were careless to dissimulate, that they were conquering our tongue to bring it into the great European comity, the civilisation of Greece and Rome. An Elizabethan writer, for example, would begin almost as with a formula by begging to be forgiven that he has sought to render the divine accent of Plato, the sugared music of Ovid, into our uncouth and barbarous tongue. There may have been some mock-modesty in this, but it rested on a base of belief. Much of the glory of English Literature was achieved by men who, with the splendour of the Renaissance in their eyes, supposed themselves to be working all the while upon pale and borrowed shadows.

Let us pass the enthusiasms of days when “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” and come down to Alexander Pope and the Age of Reason. Pope at one time proposed to write a History of English Poetry, and the draft scheme of that History has been preserved. How does it begin? Why thus:⁠—

Era I
1.	School of Provence	Chaucer’s Visions. Romaunt of the Rose. Piers Plowman. Tales from Boccace. Gower.
2.	School of Chaucer	Lydgate. T. Occleve. Walt. de Mapes (a bad error, that!). Skelton.
3.	School of Petrarch	E. of Surrey. Sir Thomas Wyatt. Sir Philip Sidney. G. Gascoyn.
4.	School of Dante	Lord Buckhurst’s “Induction.” Gorboduc. Original of Good Tragedy. Seneca his model.

—and so on. The scheme after Pope’s death came into the hands of Gray, who for a time was fired with the notion of writing the History in collaboration with his friend Mason. Knowing Gray’s congenital self-distrust, you will not be surprised that in the end he declined the task and handed it over to Warton. But, says Mant in his Life of Warton, “their design”⁠—that is, Gray’s design with Mason⁠—“was to introduce specimens of the Proveçal poetry, and of the Scaldic, British and Saxon, as preliminary to what first deserved to be called English poetry, about the time of Chaucer, from whence their history properly so called was to commence.” A letter of Gray’s on the whole subject, addressed to Warton, is extant, and you may read it in Dr. Courthope’s History of English Poetry.

Few in this room are old enough to remember the shock of awed surmise which fell upon young minds presented, in the late seventies or early eighties of the last century, with Freeman’s Norman Conquest or Green’s Short History of the English People; in which as through paring clouds of darkness, we beheld our ancestry, literary as well as political, radiantly legitimised; though not, to be sure, in the England that we knew⁠—but far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick! “Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there with meadows which crept down to the marshes and to the sea.” But what of that? There⁠—surely there, in Sleswick⁠—had been discovered for us our august mother’s marriage lines; and if the most of that bright assurance came out of an old political skit, the Germania of Tacitus, who recked at the time? For along followed Mr. Stopford Brooke with an admirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct the meanest of us in our common father’s actual name⁠—Beowulf.

Beowulf is an old English Epic.⁠ ⁠… There is not one word about our England in the poem.⁠ ⁠… The whole poem, pagan as it is, is English to its very root. It is sacred to us; our Genesis, the book of our origins.

Now I am not only incompetent to discuss with you the more recondite beauties of Beowulf but providentially forbidden the attempt by the conditions laid down for this Chair. I gather⁠—and my own perusal of the poem and of much writing about it confirms the belief⁠—that it has been largely overpraised by some critics, who have thus naturally provoked others to underrate it. Such things happen. I note, but without subscribing to it, the opinion of Vigfússon and York Powell, the learned editors of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, that in the Beowulf we have “an epic completely metamorphosed in form, blown out with long-winded empty repetitions and comments by a book poet, so that one must be careful not to take it as a type of the old poetry,” and I seem to hear as from the grave the very voice of my old friend the younger editor in that unfaltering pronouncement. But on the whole