On The Art of Reading Part 23

Let me point out further that within the last few months we have doubled the difficulty at a stroke by sharing the government of our country with women and admitting them to Parliament. It beseems a great nation to take great risks: to dare them is at once a sign and a property of greatness: and for good or ill--but for limitless good as we trust--our country has quietly made this enterprise amid the preoccupations of the greatest War in its annals. Look at it as you will--let other generations judge it as they will--it stands a monument of our faith in free self-government that in these most perilous days we gave and took so high a guerdon of trust in one another.

But clearly it implies that all the women of this country, down to the small girls entering our elementary schools, must be taught a great many things their mothers and grandmothers--happy in their generation--were content not to know[1].

It cannot be denied, I think, that in the long course of this War, now happily on the point of a victorious conclusion, we have suffered heavily through past neglect and present nescience of our literature, which is so much more European, so much more catholic, a thing than either our politics or our national religion: that largely by reason of this neglect and this nescience our statesmen have again and again failed to foresee how continental nations would act through failing to understand their minds; and have almost invariably, through this lack of sympathetic understanding, failed to interpret us to foreign friend or foe, even when (and it was not often) they interpreted us to ourselves. I note that America--a country with no comparable separate tradition of literature--has customarily chosen men distinguished by the grace of letters for amba.s.sadors to the Court of St James--Motley, Lowell, Hay, Page, in our time: and has for her President a man of letters--and a Professor at that!--whereas, even in these critical days, Great Britain, having a most n.o.ble cause and at least half-a-hundred writers and speakers capable of presenting it with dignity and so clearly that no neutral nation could mistake its logic, has by preference entrusted it to stunt journalists and film-artistes. If in these later days you have lacked a voice to interpret you in the great accent of a Chatham, the cause lies in past indifference to that literary tradition which is by no means the least among the glories of our birth and state.

VIII

Masterpieces, then, will serve us as prophylactics of taste, even from childhood; and will help us, further, to interpret the common mind of civilisation. But they have a third and yet n.o.bler use. They teach us to lift our own souls.

For witness to this and to the way of it I am going to call an old writer for whom, be it whim or not, I have an almost 18th century reverence--Longinus. No one exactly knows who he was; although it is usual to identify him with that Longinus who philosophised in the court of the Queen Zen.o.bia and was by her, in her downfall, handed over with her other counsellors to be executed by Aurelian: though again, as is usual, certain bold bad men affirm that, whether he was this Longinus or not, the treatise of which I speak was not written by any Longinus at all but by someone with a different name, with which they are unacquainted. Be this as it may, somebody wrote the treatise and its first editor, Francis Robertello of Basle, in 1554 called him Dionysius Longinus; and so shall I, and have done with it, careless that other MSS than that used by Robertello speak of Dionysius or Longinus. Dionysius Longinus, then, in the 3rd century A.D.--some say in the 1st: it is no great matter--wrote a little book [Greek: PERI UPSOUS] commonly cited as "Longinus on the Sublime." The t.i.tle is handy, but quite misleading, unless you remember that by 'Sublimity' Longinus meant, as he expressly defines it, 'a certain distinction and excellence in speech.' The book, thus recovered, had great authority with critics of the 17th and 18th centuries. For the last hundred years it has quite undeservedly gone out of vogue.

It is (I admit) a puzzling book, though quite clear in argument and language: pellucidly clear, but here and there strangely modern, even hauntingly modern, if the phrase may be allowed. You find yourself rubbing your eyes over a pa.s.sage more like Matthew Arnold than something of the 3rd century: or you come without warning on a few lines of 'comparative criticism,' as we call it --an ill.u.s.tration from Genesis--'G.o.d said, Let there be Light, and there was Light' used for a specimen of the exalted way of saying things. Generally, you have a sense that this author's lineage is mysterious after the fas.h.i.+on of Melchisedek's.

Well, to our point--Longinus finds that the conditions of lofty utterance are five: of which the first is by far the most important. And this foremost condition is innate: you either have it or you have not. Here it is:

'Elsewhere,' says Longinus, 'I have written as follows: _"Sublimity is the echo of a great soul."_ Hence even a bare idea sometimes, by itself and without a spoken word will excite admiration, just because of the greatness of soul implied. Thus the silence of Ajax in the underworld is great and more sublime than words.'

You remember the pa.s.sage, how Odysseus meets that great spirit among the shades and would placate it, would 'make up' their quarrel on earth now, with carneying words:

'Ajax, son of n.o.ble Telamon, wilt thou not then, even in death forget thine anger against me over that cursed armour.... Nay, there is none other to blame but Zeus: he laid thy doom on thee. Nay, come hither, O my lord, and hear me and master thine indignation:

So I spake, but he answered me not a word, but strode from me into the Darkness, following the others of the dead that be departed.

Longinus goes on:

It is by all means necessary to point this out--that the truly eloquent must be free from base and ign.o.ble (or ill-bred) thoughts. For it is not possible that men who live their lives with mean and servile aims and ideas should produce what is admirable and worthy of immortality. Great accents we expect to fall from the lips of those whose thoughts are dignified.

Believe this and it surely follows, as concave implies convex, that by daily converse and a.s.sociation with these great ones we take their breeding, their manners, earn their magnanimity, make ours their gifts of courtesy, unselfishness, mansuetude, high seated pride, scorn of pettiness, wholesome plentiful jovial laughter.

He that of such a height hath built his mind, And rear'd the dwelling of his soul so strong As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolved powers, nor all the wind Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong His settled peace, or to disturb the same; What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey!

And with how free an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil!

Where all the storms of pa.s.sions mainly beat On flesh and blood; where honour, power, renown, Are only gay afflictions, golden toil; Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet As frailty doth; and only great doth seem To little minds, who do it so esteem....

Knowing the heart of man is set to be The centre of this world, about the which These revolutions of disturbances Still roll; where all th' aspects of misery Predominate; whose strong effects are such As he must bear, being powerless to redress; And that, unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man![2]

IX

If the exhortation of these verses be somewhat too high and stoical for you, let me return to Longinus and read you, from his concluding chapter, a pa.s.sage you may find not inapposite to these times, nor without a moral:

'It remains' [he says] 'to clear up, my dear Terentia.n.u.s, a question which a certain philosopher has recently mooted. I wonder,' he says, 'as no doubt do many others, how it happens that in our time there are men who have the gift of persuasion to the utmost extent, and are well fitted for public life, and are keen and ready, and particularly rich in all the charms of language, yet there no longer arise really lofty and transcendent natures unless it be quite peradventure. So great and world-wide a dearth of high utterance attends our age.

Can it be,' he continued, 'we are to accept the common cant that democracy is the nursing mother of genius, and that great men of letters flourish and die with it? For freedom, they say, has the power to cherish and encourage magnanimous minds, and with it is disseminated eager mutual rivalry and the emulous thirst to excel. Moreover, by the prizes open under a popular government, the mental faculties of orators are perpetually practised and whetted, and as it were, rubbed bright, so that they s.h.i.+ne free as the state itself. Whereas to-day,' he went on, 'we seem to have learnt as an infant-lesson that servitude is the law of life; being all wrapped, while our thoughts are yet young and tender, in observances and customs as in swaddling clothes, bound without access to that fairest and most fertile source of man's speech (I mean Freedom) so that we are turned out in no other guise than that of servile flatterers. And servitude (it has been well said) though it be even righteous, is the cage of the soul and a public prison-house.'

But I answered him thus.--'It is easy, my good sir, and characteristic of human nature, to gird at the age in which one lives. Yet consider whether it may not be true that it is less the world's peace that ruins n.o.ble nature than this war illimitable which holds our aspirations in its fist, and occupies our age with pa.s.sions as with troops that utterly plunder and harry it. The love of money and the love of pleasure enslave us, or rather, as one may say, drown us body and soul in their depths. For vast and unchecked wealth marches with l.u.s.t of pleasure for comrade, and when one opens the gate of house or city, the other at once enters and abides. And in time these two build nests in the hearts of men, and quickly rear a progeny only too legitimate: and the ruin within the man is gradually consummated as the sublimities of his soul wither away and fade, and in ecstatic contemplation of our mortal parts we omit to exalt, and come to neglect in nonchalance, that within us which is immortal.'

I had a friend once who, being in doubt with what picture to decorate the chimney-piece in his library, cast away choice and wrote up two Greek words--[Greek: PSYCHES 'IATREION]; that is, the hospital--the healing-place--of the soul.

[Footnote 1: 'Well! ... my education is at last finished: indeed it would be strange, if, after five years' hard application, anything were left incomplete. Happily that is all over now; and I have nothing to do, but to exercise my various accomplishments.

'Let me see!--as to French, I am mistress of that, and speak it, if possible, with more fluency than English. Italian I can read with ease, and p.r.o.nounce very well: as well at least, and better, than any of my friends; and that is all one need wish for in Italian. Music I have learned till I am perfectly sick of it. But ... it will be delightful to play when we have company. I must still continue to practise a little;--the only thing, I think, that I need now to improve myself in. And then there are my Italian songs! which everybody allows I sing with taste, and as it is what so few people can pretend to, I am particularly glad that I can.

'My drawings are universally admired; especially the sh.e.l.ls and flowers; which are beautiful, certainly; besides this, I have a decided taste in all kinds of fancy ornaments.

'And then my dancing and waltzing! in which our master himself owned that he could take me no further! just the figure for it certainly; it would be unpardonable if I did not excel.

'As to common things, geography, and history, and poetry, and philosophy, thank my stars, I have got through them all! so that I may consider myself not only perfectly accomplished, but also thoroughly well-informed.

'Well, to be sure, how much have I f.a.gged through--; the only wonder is that one head can contain it all.'

I found this in a little book "Thoughts of Divines and Philosophers," selected by Basil Montagu. The quotation is signed 'J. T.' I cannot trace it, but suspect Jane Taylor.]

[Footnote 2: Samuel Daniel, "Epistle to the Lady Margaret, Countess of c.u.mberland."]