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On The Art of Reading, a non-fiction book by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
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Lecture 7. The Value Of Greek And Latin In English Literature |
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_ LECTURE VII. THE VALUE OF GREEK AND LATIN IN ENGLISH LITERATURE WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1918
I have promised you, Gentlemen, for to-day some observations on _The Value of Greek and Latin in English Literature_: a mild, academic title, a _camouflage_ title, so to say; calculated to shelter us for a while from the vigilance of those hot-eyed reformers who, had I advertised _The Value of Greek and Latin in English Life_ might even now be swooping from all quarters of the sky on a suggestion that these dry bones yet were flesh: for the eyes I dread are not only red and angry, but naturally microscopic--and that indeed, if they only knew it, is their malady. Yet 'surely' groaned patient job, 'there _is_ a path which the vulture's eye hath not seen!' You, at any rate, know by this time that wherever these lectures assert literature they assert life, perhaps even too passionately, allowing neither the fact of death nor the possibility of divorce.
But let us begin with the first word, '_Value_'--'The _Value_ of Greek and Latin in English Literature.' What do I mean by 'Value'? Well, I use it, generally, in the sense of 'worth'; but with a particular meaning, or shade of meaning, too. And, this particular meaning is not the particular meaning intended (as I suppose) by men of commerce who, on news of a friend's death, fall a-musing and continue musing until the fire kindles, and they ask 'What did So-and-so die worth?' or sometimes, more wisely than they know, 'What did poor old So-and-so die worth?' or again, more colloquially, 'What did So-and-so "cut up" for?' Neither is it that which more disinterested economists used to teach; men never (I fear me) loved, but anyhow lost awhile, who for my green unknowing youth, at Thebes or Athens--growing older I tend to forget which is, or was, which--defined the Value of a thing as its 'purchasing power' which the market translates into 'price.' For--to borrow a phrase which I happened on, the other day, with delight, in the Introduction to a translation of Lucian--there may be forms of education less paying than the commercial and yet better worth paying for; nay, above payment or computation in price[1]. No: the particular meaning I use to-day is that which artists use when they talk of painting or of music. To see things, near or far, in their true perspective and proportions; to judge them through distance; and fetching them back, to reproduce them in art so proportioned comparatively, so rightly adjusted, that they combine to make a particular and just perspective: that is to give things their true _Values._ Suppose yourself reclining on a bank on a clear day, looking up into the sky and watching the ascent of a skylark while you listen to his song. That is a posture in which several poets of repute have placed themselves from time to time: so we need not be ashamed of it. Well, you see the atmosphere reaching up and up, mile upon mile. There are no milestones planted there. But, wave on wave perceptible, the atmosphere stretches up through indeterminate distances; and according as your painter of the sky can translate these distances, he gives his sky what is called _Value._ You listen to the skylark's note rising, spiral by spiral, on 'the very jet of earth':
I suppose that if an ordinary man of my age were asked which has better helped him to bear the burs of life--religion or a sense of humour--he would, were he quite honest, be gravelled for an answer. Now the best part of a sense of humour, as you know without my telling you, consists in a sense of proportion; a habit, abiding and prompt at command, of seeing all human, affairs in their just perspective, so that its happy possessor at once perceives anything odd or distorted or overblown to be an excrescence, a protuberance, a swelling, literally a _humour_: and the function of Thalia, the Comic Spirit, as you may read in Meredith's "Essay on Comedy," is just to prick these humours. I will but refer you to Meredith's "Essay," and here cite you the words of an old schoolmaster: It would seem to be characteristic of the same mind to appreciate the beauty of ideas in just proportion and harmonious relation to each other, and the absurdity of the same ideas when distorted or brought into incongruous juxtaposition. The exercise of this sense of humour ... compels the mind to form a picture to itself, accompanied by pleasurable emotion; and what is this but setting the imagination to work, though in topsy-turvy fashion? Nay, in such a case, imagination plays a double part, since it is only by instantaneous comparison with ideal fitness and proportion that it can grasp at full force the grotesqueness of their contraries[2]. Let us play with an example for one moment. A child sees such an excrescence, such an offence upon proportion, in an immoderately long nose. He is apt to call attention to it on the visage of a visitor: it intrigues him in Perrault's 'Prince Charming' and many a fairy tale: it amuses him in Lear's "Book of Nonsense":
I have illustrated, crudely enough, how a sense of things in their right values will help us on one side of our dealings with life. But truly it helps us on every side. This was what Plato meant when he said that a philosopher must see things as they relatively are within his horizon--[Greek: o synoptikos dialektikos]. And for this it was that an English poet praised Sophocles as one Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole. And this of course is what Dean Inge meant when, the other day, in a volume of "Cambridge Essays on Education," he reminded us, for a sensible commonplace, that 'The wise man is he who knows the relative values of things.'
Applying this to literature, I note, but shall not insist here on the fact--though fact it is--that the Greek and Roman 'classical' writers (as we call them) laid more stress than has ever been laid among the subsequent tribes of men upon the desirability of getting all things into proportion, of seeing all life on a scale of relative values. And the reason I shall not insist on this is simply that better men have saved me the trouble. I propose this morning to discuss the value of the classics to students of English literature from, as the modern phrase goes, a slightly different angle. Reclining and looking up into that sky which is not too grandiose an image for our own English Literature, you would certainly not wish, Gentlemen, to see it as what it is not--as a cloth painted on the flat. No more than you would choose the sky overarching your life to be a close, hard, copper vault, would you choose this literature of ours to resemble such a prison. I say nothing, for the moment, of the thrill of comparing ours with other constellations--of such a thrill as Blanco White's famous sonnet imagines in Adam's soul when the first night descended on Eden and
Well, now, I put it to you that without mental breeding, without at least some sense of ancestry, an Englishman can hardly have this perception of value, this vision. I put to you what I posited in an earlier course of lectures, quoting Bagehot, that while a knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer of English, he should at least have a firm conviction that those two languages existed. I refer you to a long passage which, in one of those lectures, I quoted from Cardinal Newman to the effect that for the last 3000 years the Western World has been evolving a human society, having its bond _in a common civilisation_--a society to which (let me add, by way of footnote) Prussia today is firmly, though with great difficulty, being tamed. There are, and have been, other civilisations in the world --the Chinese, for instance; a huge civilisation, stationary, morose, to us unattractive; 'but _this_ civilisation,' says Newman, 'together with the society which is its creation and its home, is so distinctive and luminous in its character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing in its duration, and so utterly without rival upon the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume for itself the title of "Human Society," and its civilisation the abstract term "Civilisation".' He goes on:
I would press the point more rudely upon you, and more particularly, than does Newman. And first, for Latin-- I waive that Rome occupied and dominated this island during 400 years. Let that be as though it had never been. For a further 1000 years and more Latin remained the common speech of educated men throughout Europe: the 'Universal Language.' Greek had been smothered by the Turk. Through all that time--through the most of what we call Modern History, Latin reigned everywhere. Is this a fact to be ignored by any of you who would value 'values'? Here are a few particulars, by way of illustration. More wrote his "Utopia," Bacon wrote all the bulk of his philosophical work, in Latin; Newton wrote his "Principia" in Latin. Keble's Lectures on Poetry (if their worth and the name of Keble may together save me from bathos) were delivered in Latin. Our Vice-Chancellor, our Public Orator still talk Latin, securing for it what attention they can: nor have
My lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor reposed my head on my pillow, without giving this vent to my eternal abhorrence of such preposterous and enormous principles.
Let me read you a second passage; of _written_ prose:
_Abeunt studia in mores._ If, years ago, there had lacked anything to sharpen my suspicion of those fork-bearded professors who derived our prose from the stucco of Anglo-Saxon prose, it would have been their foolish deliberate practice of composing whole pages of English prose without using one word derivative from Latin or Greek. Esau, when he sold his birthright, had the excuse of being famished. These pedants, with a full board, sought frenetically to give it away-- board and birthright. _'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality'_ --almost, I say, these men had deserved to have a kind of speech more to their taste read over their coffins.
What, in the next place, can I say of Greek, save that, as Latin gave our fathers the model of prose, Greek was the source of it all, the goddess and genius of the well-head? And, casting about to illustrate, as well as may be, what I mean by this, I hit on a minor dialogue of Plato, the "Phaedrus," and choose you a short passage in Edward FitzGerald's rendering:
'O auspicious Pan, and ye other deities of this place, grant to me to become beautiful _inwardly,_ and that all my outward goods may prosper my inner soul. Grant that I may esteem wisdom the only riches, and that I may have so much gold as temperance can handsomely carry. 'Have we yet aught else to pray for, Phaedrus? For myself I seem to have prayed enough.' _Phaedrus_: 'Pray as much for me also: for friends have all in common.' _Socrates_: 'Even so be it. Let us depart'
Did time permit, I might quote you a chorus of Aeschylus, a passage from Thucydides or from Aristotle, to illustrate Gibbon's saying that the Greek language 'gave a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of metaphysics.' But there it is, and it has haunted our literature; at first filtering through Latin, at length breaking from Constantinople in flood and led to us, to Oxford and Cambridge, by Erasmus, by Grocyn:
They tell us that Greek is going, here. Well, I hold no brief for compulsory Greek; and I shall say but one word on it. I put it, rather idly, to a vote in a Cambridge Combination Room, the other day, and was amazed to find how the votes were divided. The men of science were by no means unanimous. They owned that there was much to be said even for compulsory Greek, if only Greek had been intelligently taught. And with that, of course, I agree: for to learn Greek is, after all, a baptism into a noble cult. The Romans knew _that._ I believe that, even yet, if the schools would rebuild their instruction in Greek so as to make it interesting, as it ought to be, from the first, we should oust those birds who croak and chatter upon the walls of our old Universities. I find the following in FitzGerald's "Polonius":
But, although a student of English Literature be ignorant of Greek and Latin as languages, may he not have Greek and Latin literature widely opened to him by intelligent translations? The question has often been asked, but I ask it again. May not _some_ translations open a door to him by which he can see them through an atmosphere, and in that atmosphere the authentic ancient gods walking: so that returning upon English literature he may recognise them there, too, walking and talking in a garden of values? The highest poetical speech of any one language defies, in my belief, translation into any other. But Herodotus loses little, and North is every whit as good as Plutarch.
I enjoin upon the adult female population ([Greek: gynaikes]), 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.
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
Tanagra! think not I forget A gift I promise: one I see There may be cities who refuse Sweetly where cavern'd Dirce flows O let thy children lean aslant [Footnote 1: The Works of Lucian of Samosata: translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (Introduction, p. xxix). Oxford, Clarendon Press.] [Footnote 2: "The Training of the Imagination": by James Rhoades. London, John Lane, 1900.] [Footnote 3: Landor: "AEsop and Rhodope."] _ |