Lecture II
The Practice of Writing
Wednesday, February 12
We found, Gentlemen, towards the close of our first lecture, that the argument had drawn us, as by a double chain, up to the edge of a bold leap, over which I deferred asking you to take the plunge with me. Yet the plunge must be taken, and today I see nothing for it but to harden our hearts.
Well, then, I propose to you that, English Literature being (as we agreed) an Art, with a living and therefore improvable language for its medium or vehicle, a part—and no small part—of our business is to practise it. Yes, I seriously propose to you that here in Cambridge we practise writing: that we practise it not only for our own improvement, but to make, or at least try to make, appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a recognisable hallmark of anything turned out by our English School. By all means let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes; but let us study them for our guidance; that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke. Portraits of other great ones look down on you in your college halls: but while you are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?
I protest, Gentlemen, that if our eyes had not been sealed, as with wax, by the pedagogues of whom I spoke a fortnight ago, this one habit of regarding our own literature as a hortus siccus, this our neglect to practise good writing as the constant auxiliary of an Englishman’s liberal education, would be amazing to you seated here today as it will be starkly incredible to the future historian of our times. Tell me, pray; if it concerned Painting—an art in which Englishmen boast a record far briefer, far less distinguished—what would you think of a similar acquiescence in the past, a like haste to presume the dissolution of aptitude and to close accounts, a like precipitancy to divorce us from the past, to rob the future of hope and even the present of lively interest? Consider, for reproof of these null men, the Discourses addressed (in a pedantic age, too) by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the members and students of the Royal Academy. He has (as you might expect) enough to say of Tintoretto, of Titian, of Caracci, and of the duty of studying their work with patience, with humility. But why does he exhort his hearers to con them?—Why, because he is all the time driving at practice. Hear how he opens his second Discourse (his first to the students). After congratulating the prize-winners of 1769, he desires “to lead them into such a course of study as may render their future progress answerable to their past improvement”; and the great man goes on:—
I flatter myself that from the long experience I have had, and the necessary assiduity with which I have pursued these studies in which like you I have been engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in offering some hints to your consideration. They are indeed in a great degree founded upon my own mistakes in the same pursuit. …
Mark the noble modesty of that! To resume—
In speaking to you of the Theory of the Art, I shall only consider it as it has relation to the method of your studies.
And then he proceeds to preach the Old Masters.—But how?—why?—to what end? Does he recite lists of names, dates, with formulae concerning styles? He does nothing of the sort. Does he recommend his old masters for copying, then?—for mere imitation? Not a bit of it!—he comes down like a hammer on copying. Then for what, in fine, will he have them studied? Listen:—
The more extensive your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention.
Yes, of invention, your power to make something new:
—and what may appear still more like a paradox, the more original will be your conceptions.
There spake Sir Joshua Reynolds: and I call that the voice of a true Elder Brother. He, standing face to face with the young, thought of the old masters mainly as spiritual begetters of practice. And will anyone in this room tell me that what Reynolds said of painting is not today, for us, applicable to writing?
We accept it of Greek and Latin. An old Sixth Form master once said to me, “You may give up Latin Verse for this term, if you will: but I warn you, no one can be a real scholar who does not constantly practise verse.” He was mistaken, belike. I hold, for my part, that in our Public Schools, we give up a quite disproportionate amount of time to “composition” (of Latin Prose especially) and starve the boys’ reading thereby. But at any rate we do give up a large share of the time to it. Then if we insist on this way with the tongues of Homer and Virgil, why do we avoid it with the tongue of Shakespeare, our own living tongue? I answer by quoting one of the simplest wisest sayings of Don Quixote (Gentlemen, you will easily, as time goes on, and we better our acquaintance, discover my favourite authors):—
The great Homer wrote not in Latin, for he was a Greek; and Virgil wrote not in Greek, because he was a Latin. In brief, all the ancient poets wrote in the tongue which they sucked in with their mother’s milk, nor did they go forth to seek for strange ones
