1. The idea of an ‘English School’
The title of this paper is unfortunate in recalling that of Newman's best book. It is doubly unfortunate in so far as it not only suggests, on my part, an arrogant intention of pitting myself against so great a writer, but also carries with it an omen of failure on the practical side; for none of the things which Newman advised has come to pass. Yet some such title is unavoidable. I intend, it is true, to talk a good deal about the Final Honour School of English as it actually exists at Oxford. But I am concerned with that School not as an historical fact but as an approximation to an ideal. What we are doing at Oxford is of universal interest only as an indication of what, on my view, we are trying to do or ought to do. We are doubtless full of faults and do not shun criticism, provided such criticism is based on an understanding of our aims. You may not agree with these aims – though I hope that you will – but do not blame a man for making slow progress to the North when he is trying to get to the East.
We are under no illusions as to our reputation in the outer world. What our enemies think of us is vigorously enough, if not always very lucidly, conveyed by the expressions they use – by their references to ‘the Germanic jungle’, ‘all this philology’, ‘Verner's law’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and (most damning of all) ‘Gothic’. When we listen attentively to this buzz of condemnation, we think that we can distinguish two strains in it. The confusion between ‘Germanic’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on the one hand and ‘philology’ or ‘Verner's law’ on the other, is made, we believe, by two classes of people. In the first class we find the man who is still living in the Renaissance, the belated Ascham, who is quite sure that literature he cannot translate must be bad literature – must be ‘Gothic’ in the classical sense of the word. He does not like the poetry of the Dark, and Middle Ages (ignoti nulla cupido) and he uses ‘philology’ simply as a term of abuse. He is not really thinking of philology at all. In the second class we find a much more respectable opponent, probably a real scholar who knows that he does not know any medieval language. His objection is not to the unknown literatures – in such a man it could not be – but to comparative philology. He has in his mind the picture of a promising academic discipline, in which the young might have been guided to a systematic study of our English classics, not without some subsidiary Greek and Latin to steady their judgement, perverted and thwarted by irrelevant excursions into Germanic philology; he sees the interest which ought to have been concentrated on Shakespeare and Johnson dissipated on mere comparisons between English and cognate languages; and he wonders why English should have been selected to carry this purely scientific and unliterary burden which might, with equal propriety or impropriety, have been bound on the back of several other subjects.
To this second, and reasonable, type of critic, our reply is a simple one. His information is out of date. No undergraduate at Oxford is obliged to know a single word of Gothic, old High German, or Old Norse, or to study the relations between these languages and his own. The English student can choose between three alternative courses, all of which can conduct him to the highest honours. One of these is frankly medieval, and if a student chooses it he does so because he is interested in early English and its immediate relatives. The second is a halfway house – a complicated affair that need not now concern us. The third is the literary course proper, which the vast majority of our students take.
But here comes the rub. This third and literary course, I must confess, contains three papers which the enemy will be tempted to describe as ‘philological’. The first is on Modern English, and deals mainly with the history of meaning, whether in syntax or vocabulary. The second is on Anglo-Saxon texts, and the third on Middle English texts. I do not imagine that the critic I have in view will object very strongly to the first of these. If he does, the official voice of our English School will reply with the very pertinent question, ‘Do you wish students to understand what they read or not?’ For the fact is that those who have had no experience in the teaching of English are living a fool's paradise as regards the ability of the average undergraduate to construe his mother tongue. Again and again curious statements in the essays of our pupils can be traced back to an original failure to make out the sense of Milton or Johnson or Coleridge, as a schoolboy fails to make out the sense of Caesar or Xenophon. And with this answer I expect that the critics will be satisfied. But the other two papers – the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts – I fear he will regard as vestigial, as relics of that philological period in which, admittedly, English studies at Oxford began – ein Theil des Theils, der anfangs alles war. He will be in danger of looking upon them as a rearguard which has not yet been defeated but whose defeat may be hourly expected. His hopes are vain; and it is at this point that I must join issue with him. If any of the three papers is really vestigial, it is the paper on Modern English. I have just stated the official defence for it; but it would be disingenuous not to confess that this paper is a subject of dispute among ourselves. I am, in fact, one of those who disapprove of it. But that is not our present concern. I mention it only to emphasize the fact that this paper is incomparably the most philological of the three, and that the other two, so far from being vestigial, are essential to the idea of an English School as I see it.
Before I attempt to explain why, I must remove two possible misconceptions. One is the belief that Anglo-Saxon is a language other than English, or even, as used to be said, that English is a third language born from the union of two earlier languages, Anglo-Saxon and French. This is an error so gross that six weeks’ study would remove it from the minds of the most prejudiced. You might as well say that Latin was a new language born from the union of Roman and Greek. Anglo-Saxon is simply early English. Norman-French is simply one of the foreign languages which, from time to time, have enriched our vocabulary. Most of the changes which separate what we call Anglo-Saxon from what we call Middle English had begun before the Normans landed, and would have followed much the same course if no Conquest had ever occurred. Brevity compels me to be dogmatic; but it is not really a subject that admits of discussion.
The second misconception turns on our old friend ‘philology’. There is no philology in the papers on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. They are papers on texts, consisting of a core of passages for translation surrounded by questions on archaeological, textual, cultural, or historical matters relevant to the texts. The student is asked to know about Beowulf or Pearl just those things which the classical examiner demands that he should know about Virgil or Sophocles. Philology is absent, unless you call grammar philology. Before some audiences I should feel it my duty to insist rather strongly on the value of grammar. I am told that there have been critics of Chaucer who perpetrated serious blunders in translation, and built up formidable aesthetic superstructures on a purely intuitive, and sometimes erroneous, conception of their author's meaning. But I presume that every one present agrees that if you are going to read a book at all, it is desirable to be able to tell which words are in the Nominative and which are in the Accusative.
We are now, at last, in a position to come to grips with the main question. Granted that these old books are written in what is unmistakably English, and granted that we do not set philological questions on them, still, it will be asked, why should we read them? What relevance has the study of Beowulf for the man who wants to read modern English literature? If we are looking for sheer poetical merit, are there not many poems greater than Beowulf and no more difficult? Why not the Iliad, or the Aeneid? If, on the other hand, we are looking for the origins of Modern literature, shall we not find them in Rome and Greece? None of our great poets could read Anglo-Saxon: nearly all of them could and did read Latin, and some knew Greek.
I will take the second question first, and before I attempt to answer it, let me protest that I am no enemy of the classics. I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem; I have just finished re-reading the Iliad; to lose what I owe to Plato and Aristotle would be like the amputation of a limb. Hardly any lawful price would seem to me too high for what I have gained by being made to learn Latin and Greek. If any question of the value of classical studies were before us, you would find me on the extreme right. I do not know where the last ditch in our educational war may be at the moment; but point it out to me on the trench-map and I will go to it. At present, however, we are only asking whether it is true that the origins of English literature are to be found in the classics. And perhaps if ‘the origins’ here means ‘all the origins’ no one, however, ignorant, would answer Yes. At most our critics can only mean that of the innumerable debts which our literary tradition owes, the debt to Rome and Greece is the greatest and most important. I do not think this is true.
The first step in an inquiry into its truth is to rule out the greatest Greek poets and philosophers. Except on a few isolated writers such as Milton and Gray, these have no influence worth talking about before the nineteenth century. Chapman's Homer, and even Pope's, might almost have been written to prove that Homer was invisible to Englishmen until the Romantic Revival had cleared their eyes. In drama, Seneca is of far more importance than all the Greek tragedians put together. The real Plato counts for less in our tradition than that strange theosophy which Ficino and others called ‘Platonic theology’. Aristotle, I admit, in a slightly Thomized form, bit deeply into the minds of the Middle Ages; but where are the literary results of this? On seventeenth-century criticism we can trace his influence at every step, but it is an influence almost wholly mischievous.
Having got rid of these august but irrelevant names, it may be well to remind ourselves of the authors who have really affected us deeply and over long periods. Of the Romans those naturally come first who enjoyed the same degree and nearly the same kind of prestige both before and after the Renaissance – the great Kings whose reign had begun before Beowulf was written and has not ended yet. I mean, of course Boethius, Ovid, and Virgil – and I would put them roughly in that order of importance. Immediately below these, in length and security of reign, we might put Juvenal, the moral works of Cicero and Seneca, Horace, Statius, Claudian, and a few others. Apuleius and the elder Pliny would come a good deal higher than they do in our modern scholastic tradition. Of the Greeks, the great gossiping authors, the repositories of anecdote, like Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius, would stand at the top of the list. Second to these we should find, indistinguishably blended, the joint influence of Theocritus and the novelists – Longus, Heliodorus, and the like; and perhaps – but I am doubtful about my facts here – the influence of the Anthology.
Having identified the influential authors it remains to consider what their influence really was. It is clear, in the first place, that our literature is not greatly indebted to them for its forms. We are apt to forget that Milton's classical epic and classical tragedy are lonely exceptions. Most attempts to transplant an ancient form into English literature have failed. Milton is the single survivor in a forlorn hope where Cowley, Blackmore, and Glover fell: Samson lives, but Gorboduc, Cato, and Caratacus do not. A list of our best narrative poems would contain Troilus, The Faerie Queene, The Prelude, Don Juan, and Endymion, and would leave out all our classical epics save one. A list of our greatest dramas would give an even more striking result. Our lyric poetry is, no doubt, richly decorated in certain periods with borrowings from ancient Latin and Greek, though they are not more numerous than its borrowings from medieval Latin, from Italian, and from old and modern French. Its chief serious attempt to adopt an ancient form, however, has left behind it only one or two successes by Gray amidst a ruinous waste of ‘Pindarique Odes’; and in the very nature of things formal similarities between quantitative lyric and rhymed accentual lyric must be very superficial. Already in Summer is icumen in we are basing our lyrical poetry on discoveries in music which the Greeks never made. The novel, born from the marriage of the periodical essay and the romance, or the sonnet, descending from the Provençals, are even farther removed from ancient literature. The Satire and the Pastoral are more instructive, for in them we can see side by side the unhappy attempts to adhere to the classical form and the happy departures from it. The Roman model – the static, rambling diatribe – is preserved by Donne, Hall, Marston, and Churchill, and by Pope in his inferior works; our great satires, deserting this in favour of extravagant satiric fiction and owing something, perhaps, to Lucian and the Margites, but much more to Rabelais and Cervantes, have given us Hudibras, Absalom, The Rape, The Dunciad, Gulliver, Don Juan, Erewhon, and Brave New World. In the Pastoral we can trace both developments in the same writer (and that, not only in English) as we gratefully lay aside Sannazaro's tedious Piscatory Eclogues and open his Arcadia or turn from the fussy futility of the Shepherd's Calendar to the sixth book of The Faerie Queene. The little drop of Theocritus properly mixed with northern romance and Provençal love poetry improves the drink: offer it neat, and our stomachs turn. We can read Sidney and William Browne, but who, unbribed, would open the pastorals of Mantuan, Barclay, or Googe?
But perhaps I have argued too long on a point that is obvious. No one can really be maintaining that the best and most characteristic English work is deeply indebted to the classics for its form. We are more likely to be told that something subtler than a form – a spirit or temper or attitude – has been transferred. And, of course, I have no wish to deny that many individual English authors have in this way been deeply affected by their classical reading. We cannot even imagine Chapman without the Stoics, Burke without Cicero, or Tennyson without Virgil. It is equally true, however, that we cannot imagine Chaucer without Guillaume de Lorris, or Spenser without Ariosto, or Morris without Froissart and the Edda. Of tracing such individual affinities there would be no end. What the argument requires is to show that the spirit of our literature, or our best literature, or most of our best literature, is closer to that of the classics than to that of other cultures. And this, I think, has never been shown.
Ovid's erotic poetry, received by our culture, becomes the poetry of Courtly Love; his mythological poetry becomes the wonder of Chaucer and Gower, the allegorical and astrological pantheon of Fulgentius and Lydgate, the gods of Botticelli, Titian, and Tintoretto, the emblematic deities of masque and ballet and pantomime, and the capitalized abstractions of eighteenth-century verse. The tale of Troy wears casque and habergeon in the fourteenth, lace and periwig in the eighteenth, century. The Pastoral, snatched from those realistic Sicilian slopes, is carried into the depths of an Arcadian golden age and there enchanted. The change which the classics undergo when we take them into our own imagination is precisely a change of spirit or temper. Names and myths remain, but all is romanticized, darkened here and softened there, filled with new shadows and assimilated to our needs. There is no question of new wine being poured into old bottles: rather, a little new wine is poured into a lot of old wine. We were not an emptiness which the classics filled, nor a patient on which they acted. We had our own idiosyncrasy. We also were a spirit, an ancient, complex, and intensely active spirit. We let in what we could turn to our own substance, and the process of digestion was thorough. Quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis. Of this recipiens, the real English Muse, the mother of us all, I shall have more to say in a few moments. She is, you will notice, the person who has hitherto been left out of the story.
My present duty, however, is to answer the question I set myself: what did the influence of the classics really amount to? And already, I fear, it may seem to you that I have proved too much. If they gave us neither form nor spirit, then what, in heaven's name, is this debt to them which even I acknowledge? The answer to that is a very simple one. They gave us Matter: not a new way of writing and feeling, but new things to write and feel about – theories, histories, facts, myths, anecdotes, people. That is why the gossiping or encyclopaedic authors, like Plutarch, Pliny, Diogenes Laertius, Aulus Gellius, and Macrobius are so important. This is the real impress which classical education has left on our literature. You can read English poetry for days on end without coming across classic form or classic feeling; but you will have been inundated with references to how Acteon died or what birds saved the Capitol, what Agesilaus said or Pompey did, the constitution of Sparta, the matrimonial troubles of Socrates, and some one's witty reply to Alexander. It is this kind of influence that lies on the surface of our literature and meets every one's gaze; and it is of this that most people are really thinking when they say that our origins are in Greece and Rome.
But a source of matter is a very different thing from a source of inspiration, a real influence on form and spirit. The difference becomes clear if we compare the effect of the Classics upon us with the effect of a force that reached us a few centuries before the Renaissance. I promised, a minute ago, to say something more of our mother, the English Muse – the recipiens who receives everything in her own fashion. It is now time to remind you that long before this mother of ours met with Greek literature, she had already had a lover – a much more masterful lover whom she has never yet been able to forget. I mean, of course, Old French. I have said that you can read English poetry for a long time without coming across classic form. You cannot read one verse, unless it is vers libre, without meeting Old French form. It was Old French that overthrew our native prosody: we have been singing an old French tune ever since. It was Old French that taught us those species of sentiment and refinement which we still use. Whenever you think of a rhyme for a limerick, or accept fictitious prose narrative as an obvious form of serious literature, or offer a chair to a lady, or build a castle instead of a villa in the air, you are being Old French. You can choose, to some extent, how classical you will be; you cannot choose how Old French you will be. The thing is in our system, bred in the bone. This is a real influence. Compared with it the influence of the classics is recent, superficial, almost negligible.
You will have noticed that this casts a disquieting light on our educational problem. If we are to seek the true sources of our own literature, then the serious rival to Anglo-Saxon is not the classics, but Old French. If we abandon Beowulf we must put in not Homer but the Romance of the Rose, and that for two reasons. In the first place, as I have said, the Old French influence is incomparably greater in degree. But secondly, it is of a kind that cannot be studied at second hand. A real transfusion of spirit involves intangibles: to study it is to study things that can only be known by long and sympathetic reading of originals. But the matter, which is what we have mainly borrowed from Greece and Rome can be quite adequately learned from Classical Dictionaries, historical text-books, and translations. Do not misunderstand the word ‘adequately’. I do not mean that we shall thus have an adequate knowledge of the classics, but that we shall have an adequate preparation for the study of English. We shall have learned what our authors learned and often in the same way. A great deal of the classical ornament in English poetry was learned from text-books like Natalis Comes and Lemprière, and from translations like North's Plutarch. Pope found that he could very comfortably make a version of Homer without seriously learning Greek.
The real choice, then, is between Anglo-Saxon and Old French (or, perhaps, medieval Latin), and if I choose the former it is again in virtue of the principle Quidquid recipitur. Our mother surrendered more to Old French than to the classics, but she did not surrender completely: even in the eleventh century she had a spirit of her own capable of transforming and assimilating what she received, modifying its gallantries with a homelier affection, hardening its heroisms, neglecting its ironies, broadening its humour, deepening its pathos, shading its marvels with a more awe-inspiring obscurity, and accentualizing its syllabic verse. And so, in the end, I am driven back to our ancient alliterative poetry. There for the first time I find a prosody based on the speech rhythms that I hear in conversation to-day. I find a sense of language so native to us all that the phrases which hit the eighth-century audience hard, hit me hard too as soon as I have learned to understand them; I see at once that words like gold and wolf and heart and blood and winter and earth, had the same overtones for them as for me. Everything is already unmistakably English. This mere Englishness is usually called Romanticism by those who do not know Anglo-Saxon. They are fond of tracing it to the French Revolution or even to the Celtic strain in our blood. They bring far-fetched explanations why the English wrote melancholy poems about ruins in the eighteenth century, not knowing that the English had begun to do so in the eighth. When they read of remote wanderings upon strange seas in Morris or Coleridge they think the emotion in which such things are steeped by these poets essentially modern, and contrast it with the unambiguous simplicity of the Odyssey where the wanderer desires nothing but to get home. The contrast is just; but the English mood is not modern. The same thing is to be found in Anglo-Saxon poetry, associated, too, as Wordsworth might associate it, with the call of the cuckoo. Indeed the Odyssey is everywhere instructive as a contrast to our oldest poetry; Grendel and the Cyclops, at the very beginning of the two literatures, symbolize their difference – the one so dark, so mysterious, so fitted to be the central symbol of evil in a great poem; the other so matter of fact, so accidental, so blasphemously tracing his descent from a god though he is the enemy of man. Virgil, as in space, so in temper, is the middle point between Homer and Beowulf, holding out his left hand to the colour and clarity of the Greek, his right to our English poet whom he so resembles in melancholy without pessimism, in half-articulate piety, and, above all, in his sense of the past. I doubt if Homer would really have appreciated horrendum silvis et religione parentum or the whole conception of Latium as Lurkwood (quia his latuisset in oris) as any Englishman of any period must do.
If, then, we are concerned with origins, Anglo-Saxon must keep its place in any English syllabus – nor is it improper, at this stage, to add that the majority of the students like it. In the old philological days they did not; now they do. But, of course, continuity is not everything, and we have not yet considered the man who says: ‘The origins of English literature may be as you say. All I know is I had rather my boy read Homer than Beowulf.’ This is a very legitimate preference, and of course the most natural way of gratifying it is to persuade the young man to take up classics instead of English. We are to suppose, however, that this is for some reason impossible: what the father wants is not classics instead of English but classics somehow included in English.
I would like to pass over all the practical difficulties of such a proposal, great as they are, because the question of principle involved goes right down to the roots of a man's educational theory. The English School as it stands has chosen unity and continuity: that is to say, taking a given area of reality, it has chosen, so far as possible, to explore it thoroughly, following the natural structure of that area, and neglecting all the interesting and delightful things over the frontier. The alternative school which is suggested, with Greek, Latin, and perhaps French classics side by side with the greatest English writers would be based on a different principle – the principle of selection. In the one you turn the young out into a single, untidy country to make what they can of it; in the other you take them to what their elders think the five or six most interesting places in a whole continent. It is the difference between knowing, say, Worcestershire inside out, while remaining ignorant of the rest of the world, and knowing four or five European capitals while striking no roots in any single European soil. The choice is a very difficult one. On the one hand we have Arnold's ideal – ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’; on the other Spartam nactus es. Embrace the latter and you may become insular and provincial; embrace the former and you may be a mere tourist, glib in all countries and rooted in none. Which is the more deeply ignorant, the shepherd who has never left the Cotswolds, or the Peripatetic millionaire – the taproom of the ‘Red Lion’, or the lounge of the Palace Hotel?
Where a final choice is so difficult I would recommend a compromise. I think that the high lights chosen by his elders and the wide area of ordinary country explored on his own, are both necessary elements in a man's education. But I feel very strongly that the place for the selected high lights is the school, and the place for the other is the University. It is natural and necessary that we should begin by giving a boy the keys to some four or five chambers of knowledge which we think the best, but it is equally natural to let a man choose which he will to live in. The true nature of this change is obscured if we say that we believe in ‘increasing specialization’: for specialization suggests narrowing and narrowing suggests confinement. Now there is, of course, an obvious sense in which the specialist is narrower than the man reading a selection of ‘great literatures’. But is there not a sense in which he is freer? Any balanced course of English and Classics which we could draw up would bear the imprint of cultural ideals peculiar to an age and a class much more unmistakably than a school of mere English need do. ‘English’, including Anglo-Saxon and Middle English along with modern English, including what we ordinarily call the ‘dull’ periods as well as the ‘great’ ones, is an object more or less presented to us by nature: the balanced course would be our selection, a selection which, in obedience to our local and momentary ideals, would cut across the joints, or veins, or grain of reality. The one is given, the other a construction. And it must be our construction, not the student's. We are doing for him one of the things he ought to do for himself. Our wild, rough English course has already thrown up interesting discoveries: the dull and difficult periods which any one working on the selective principle twenty years ago would have omitted to make room for foreign dainties, are turning out not to be dull at all, and Anglo-Saxon technical influences have appeared in the work of our younger poets. In other words, having kept our eye on the object and not on our own preconceptions, we are learning; we know more than we did. But this would have been quite impossible if we had begun with a syncretism of the ‘best’ in two or three different literatures. ‘The best’ could only have meant what a committee of four or five dons, brought up in a particular tradition, happened to think the best. We should have been dictating the course of future knowledge and taste on the authority of our existing taste and ignorance. A discipline so formed would be incapable of growth. No more would come out of it than had been put into it; and real advance in our knowledge of English would be made, if at all, by real scholars working privately in country rectories and London lodging-houses in contemptuous independence of us.
Such is my idea of an English school, and that is why the classics find no place in it. Need I say that I should like English students to know Greek and Latin? But they must not come to an English school to learn them. If they have not learned them before they come to me, I should like them to learn them after they leave me. Any proposal which enables them to do so in those postgraduate years which are increasingly spent at the university will always have all the support I can give it; and to that end I am ready to sacrifice any amount of what is called ‘Research’.