J. W. Mackail's review was published in the TLS of February 6, 1913.
The School of English Literature at Oxford is still young, as age is reckoned
in national institutions. At first it was frail, a little despised, more
than a little criticized. It was called a “soft option,” a relief to
mediocrity, an encouragement to dilettantism. Those early difficulties or
prejudices have been, on the whole, surmounted. The work of the School is
now vindicating a place alongside of the old-established university studies,
and in particular alongside of, though not equal to, that of the august
School of the Humaner Letters. England, speaking through Oxford, has
asserted the dignity and organized the study of its own great literature.
The mutual benefit, the mutual support, which both fields of study receive
from this recognition is strikingly illustrated by the volume before us. It
is not an epoch-making be ok, even in the slatternly sense in which that
term is often misused. But it may be called, in a very real sense,
epoch-marking. For, besides the considerations on which we have already
touched, it is a notable instance of what may be called the co-operative
movement in the field of learning.
The present volume is a collection of nine lectures delivered in Oxford at the
invitation of the Board of English Studies during the winter of 1911–12.
They were addressed in the first instance to students in the School of
English Literature, “but in effect,” so the prefatory note states, “to all
students of modern literature in the University who cared to hear, from
students of ancient literature, something of what the classics mean in the
history of letters.” The names of the nine contributors are significant. All
of them are accomplished classical scholars, themselves trained in the
classical tradition. But only two of them are attached, as tutors or
lecturers, to the English School. Two others have won their reputation in
Latin studies as editors and textual critics. One is Professor of Latin in a
Scottish University, and two others occupy the Chairs of Greek and Moral
Philosophy at Oxford.
The list begins and ends with names which might seem deliberately so placed in
order to emphasize the diversity of Oxford culture; there are no two more
brilliant scholars in the University than the Regius Professor of Greek and
the Public Orator, and no two more disparate. They are the representatives
of academic ideals which are in many ways divergent or actually opposed. Yet
both, in their different ways, represent a certain fine flower of
scholarship to which the classics are, above all, literature, and Latin and
Greek are, in the fullest sense of the words, living languages.
The scheme of lectures appears to have been arranged so as to keep a certain
equipoise between those elements, contributed respectively by Greece and
Rome to civilization and letters, which have influenced English literature
or stand in vital relationship to it. Be this as it may, the result is to
bring out with astonishing clearness the distinction between the two
influences, however much they may be interwoven, and indeed inseparable in
history. On the one hand is the Greek genius, with its intangible potency,
laden with suggestions and anticipations, displaying before our eyes
everywhere dazzling “images of perfection”; as regards modern life, in
thought, art, and conduct remote and unkin, yet seeming sometimes “closer
than breathing and nearer than hands or feet”; an external and foreign
stimulus which yet seems in some strange way to act on us from within. On
the other hand is Latin, bone of our bone, the foundation on which our life
is built; it was the Latin architects who civilized life and passed on the
civilization they had made, who
Brought the work by wondrous art
Pontifical, a ridge of pendent rock,
Over the vext abyss.
And if it be so that the hand of Rome was once too strong, if
With pins of adamant
And chains they made all fast, too fast they made
And durable!
the world has, again and again, gone back to Greece for enlargement and
liberation. For all Europe, and even for this island and her children
overseas, “beyond the pathways of the year and the sun,” Rome is a mother,
Latin a second mother-tongue. Hellas is rather a witch-goddess, only
half-human, but also half-divine; Greek thought and art are at once
inevitable and unapproachable creations rather than structures, potent
solvents and recurrent inspirations.
In a collection like this, where each lecturer had a free hand and was not
obliged to adjust himself to a prescribed scheme, there is naturally much
variety both as regards scope and interest of subject and as regards quality
of treatment. The lectures are, of course, not all alike valuable, and their
value is of different kinds. This diversity is not to be deprecated; and it
may sometimes act as a warning of dangers which beset old and now courses of
study alike. Three of these lectures are less satisfactory than the rest,
and seem in some measure, to lose sight of the larger aim of the whole
course. One of them is on Theophrastus and his English imitators – Bishop
Hall and his successors in that genre. It is dull; but so, generally, are
the writers of books of Characters. Another is on Ovid and Romance. The
subject here is full of interest, and capable of illuminating treatment; but
the lecture does not do much more than give a sort of catalogue, necessarily
far from complete, and of little use if it wore, of borrowings from Ovid’s
stories by English poets from Chaucer to the present day. Little is added by
this to the broad fact that, for the Middle Ages and the ages which followed
them, Ovid was far the most important source or magazine of ancient stories.
This is a fact which does not need to be laboured by lists of instances;
what would be more to the point would be to discuss the art of Ovid as a
story-teller, and the sense in which he, the wittiest and most worldly of
ancient poets, is at the same time one of the fountain-heads of Romance. The
third, on Satura and Satire, is a rather confused essay which, starting
from the fact that these two words mean different things, wavers in its
treatment between an attempt to trace the development of the former and a
consideration of the classical influences which acted in England upon the
latter. In these lectures we see the lecturers obviously hampered by
examination requirements and the deadening thought of what will be useful in
the schools.
The remaining contributions to the volume are all remarkable, but one is of
outstanding excellence. This is Professor Stewart’s lecture on Platonism in
English poetry. It is difficult not to seem extravagant in speaking of its
wonderful mastery of handling. No one can have heard it, or can read it,
without gratitude for the now insight given by it both into Plato and into
poetry. In a few words of graceful apology for confining himself to a “plot
of ground” within the wide area of the subject, “I was aware,” Professor
Stewart says, “that I was undertaking a difficult task; but how difficult I
did not realize till it came to planning and writing.” No apology was
needed, for this is the sort of difficult writing that makes luminous and
inspiring reading. He is alike admirable in the description of platonism as
a personal mood and of traditional platonism as a doctrine or system of
doctrines. For the personality or mood of Plato, as he lucidly and
convincingly indicates, was what really lived, through eighteen or nineteen
centuries, from Plato himself to the developed platonism of the later
Renascence, and what was rekindled later in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Shelley. It was, through all its history, a genuine faith over and above a
mannerism; it was a mood appealing alike to theologians and poets, and to
poets most fully.
It is in the great poets, rather than in philosophers and theologians, that we
find the balance of the platonist mood the more justly kept. The philosopher
or theologian who is a platonist, unless he is endowed with great
sensibility, is apt, as thinker, to treat Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, and
the other Ideas dependent on them, as abstractions, for it is with
abstractions that we think; whereas the great poet who is also a platonist
is saved, by his poet’s sensibility, from the extreme of asceticism, or
abstraction, into which the theologian or philosopher is apt to fall. As
poet, he is one who cannot take his eyes off the things of this visible
world; and as he looks intently at them, or vividly recalls them in solitary
reflection, they charm him into dreaming them: he sees them with the eye not
of wayward fancy, but, since he is a born platonist, with the eye of steady
imagination – sees them altered, on a sudden, into their own eternal meaning
(I crave pardon for this hard saying) – sees them become vehicles of the
unseen and eternal world which is substantially present in them behind the
veil of their sensible attributes.
It is to the poets, then, that one must go “for the finest expression of the
platonist mood realized most adequately as a personal experience.” And from
this Professor Stewart proceeds to lay down another rule which, as regards
the study of poetry, is of the first importance: that the study of this
mood, as a personal experience expressed without the aid of traditional
forms, ought to precede the study of it as expressed with that aid; that,
for example to take two platonist poets who may be regarded as of the
highest rank, Spenser and Wordsworth, we ought to study platonism in
Wordsworth first. This process he works out for Wordsworth and Coleridge,
and, more briefly but most illuminatingly, for Shelley. He brings us into
real touch with all the three; he makes them intelligible, he links them up
as separate incarnations of the mood, as personal elements in a single great
movement. Coleridge, in his own words it may be (they have come to us as the
words used of him by Wordsworth), was “debarred from nature’s living images”
except rarely and briefly. It is only in intermittences that he is aware,
and makes us aware, of the world unseen and eternal. With Wordsworth, who
lived in these images from first to last, the sole meaning of any and every
one of them is simply itself; there is nothing to personify, nothing to play
with; nature’s living images, informed with the presence of the eternal
world, are already there. That is all; for that is everything: they are
there, and are, themselves and being what they are, sufficient. Shelley,
again, sees the images as persons; we may say he personifies them, if we
take care to notice that this is merely his way of seeing them; but this is
a completely different thing from the personification of the professedly
platonist poetry of the Petrarcan tradition, which “so often but ill
conceals the entire absence of personal platonism.” He does not invent them,
he creates them, or rather finds them created in him, by ecstatic passion.
The great triad have never perhaps before been so largely and so
illuminatingly characterized in so short a compass. We have space for no
more than the merest summary mention of Professor Phillimore’s interesting
account of the Greek romance-writers – a body of authors who, like the Greek
Christian poets, are oftener alluded to than read, and are more readable in
anticipation than in proof; of Mr. Garrod’s striking lecture on Virgil, in
which, with no little insight and eloquence, he renews the unending attempt
to shadow forth in words the indefinable Virgilian secret; and of Mr.
Clark’s instructive paper on Ciceronianism, following in the track of
Zielinski’s Cicero im Wandel dcr Jahrhunderte and summarizing it with the
grace and succinctness which we expect from the most distinguished of living
Ciceronian scholars in this country.
The volume begins and ends with two lectures on Tragedy – not an inordinate
allowance in view of the immense place which the drama occupies in current
interest as well as in English literature. The choice of subject in both
cases is happy, and the treatment of it highly characteristic. Mr. Murray,
with his usual charm of persuasiveness, traces the development of Greek
tragedy from its more than conjectural beginnings. Whether or not the key
which interprets Greek tragedy in terms of ritual dances and beliefs about
the vegetation-spirit is one which really opens any door may be questioned.
The present tendency is to find primitive religion in. everything, and to
explain everything by what primitive religion was or is supposed to have
been. There is no objection to that, so long as it is recognized that (like
the old interpretation of religion itself in terms of jurisprudence) it is
only an interpretation ad hoc, a transitory framework in which something
vital and fluid for the time takes shape. The drawback is that the framework
is apt to dominate over the content, and that to be regarded as the essence
or originating cause which is only the convenient – or, it may be, the
inconvenient – symbolism. Even Mr. Murray seems not wholly to escape this
fallacy. “But, you will say, is this not playing with words?" –
he asks this question in these words himself, and they anticipate any other
criticism. For here, as elsewhere, his conspicuous fairness supplies the
antidote to what some of his admirers (and they include all his readers) may
be inclined to regard as a sort of intellectual obsession. All scholars, all
lovers of literature, whether ancient or modern, will feel and appreciate
the truth of his concluding words about the Greek drama – they are used by
him of its last triumph, the Bacchae, but may bear a wider significance:
a thing never to be done again, scarcely to be understood, recognized as the
last witness to a beauty of which the secret was lost and the ancient mould
broken.
In Mr. Godley’s lecture on Senecan Tragedy we are in a different atmosphere:
we hear the accent of that Silver Age which he criticizes justly and even
severely, but to which at heart he really belongs. There is no derogation in
saying this; for the Silver Ago was one not only of high scholarship but of
fine criticism. Mr. Godley here and there reminds one of Quintilian in his
rectitude of judgment, his good sense, and his power of summing up a
position in a single phrase. “It is the consciousness of the stage that
makes plays”; “The things which interest the educated public are not always
the deepest things”; “Every nation gets the drama which is best suited to
it”: such aphorisms have quite the accent of the Roman master. But the whole
lecture in winch they occur, and in which they are dropped quite simply and
unaffectedly, is a masterly treatment of its subject. Only in its concluding
sentences does the comic spirit for a moment flash out. It is certainly
remarkable that a volume of such serious and high endeavour should end with
the words it does end with; and hardly less so that they should be the
parting shot of a scholar of the old type. But Mr. Godley (to our delight)
is a master of dry humour no less than of sound scholarship; and it is in
the former capacity that the “dying fall” of his discourse here is the
phrase, “the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw.” Otherwise it would surprise us: as
it is, it startles us, but that of course is what it is meant to do. Mr.
Godley is one of the dwindling band of scholars of the old rock, those
true-blue Tories whom friends and opponents alike regard with admiration,
and even their opponents with sympathy. But here one’s first impulse is to
ask whether visions are about. Is this the elderly enchantress once more
having one of her fits of irrepressible juvenility, dressing in the fashion
of the season before last in order to show that she too is dans le train and
up to date ? Or is it the queer hybrid, Tory democracy, breaking out even in
decorous academic precincts, and standing where it ought not, among the
groves with their dappled foresters and on the wet bird-haunted lawns?
English Literature and the Classics: Nine lectures by G. Murray, J. A.
Stewart, G. S. Gordon, J. S.Phillimore, A. C. Clark, H. W. Garrod, S. G.
Owen, R. J. E. Tiddy, A. D. Godley. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 6s. net.)
