First and Last (12 page)

Our Universities were framed for many purposes, of which the cultivation of learning was but one; in that one field, however, a particular form of learning was taken very seriously, and was pursued with admirable industry; I mean an acquaintance with and an imitation of the Latin and Greek Classics.

It was a particular character of this form of learning that proficiency in it would lead to undisputed honours. The scholar recognized the superior scholar; the field of inquiry was by convention highly limited; it had been thoroughly explored; discussion upon such results as were doubtful did not involve a difference in general philosophy.

With history it is otherwise. Whether such things have or have not happened, and, above all, if they have happened, the
way
in which they have happened, is to our general judgment of contemporary men what evidence is to a criminal trial. Facts won't give way. If, therefore, there are vested interests, moral or material, to be maintained, history is, of all the sciences or arts, that one most likely to suffer at the hands of those connected with such interests. Even where the truth will be of advantage to those interests, they are afraid of it, because the thorough discussion of it will involve the presentation of views disadvantageous to privilege.

Where, as is much more commonly the case (for vested interests, moral or material, are unreasoning and selfish things), the truth would certainly offend them, they are the more determined to prevent its appearance.

But of all vested interests none deal with such assured incomes, none are so immune by influence and tradition as the Universities.

Now, if the rich man has no temptation by way of popular fame, and the poor man no opportunity for endowment, in any branch of letters, there remains but a third form of support, and that is the support of the buying public. And the public will not buy.

I will suppose the case of a popular novelist, who in a few months shall write, not an historical novel, but a piece of so-called history. He shall call it, for instance, "England's Heroes." Before you tell me his name, or what he has written, I can tell you here and now what he will write on any number of points. He will call Hastings Senlac. In the Battle of Hastings he will make out Harold to be the head of a highly patriotic nation called the "Anglo-Saxons"; they shall be desperately defending themselves against certain French-speaking Scandinavians called Normans. He will deplore the defeat, but will say it was all for the best. Magna Charta he will have signed at Runnymede--probably he will have it drawn up there as well. He will translate the most famous clause by the modern words "Judgment of his peers" and "law of the land." He will represent the Barons as having behind them the voice of the whole nation--and so forth. When he comes to Crécy he will make Edward III speak English. When he comes to Agincourt he will leave his readers as ignorant as himself upon the boundaries, numbers and power of the Burgundian faction. In the Civil War Oliver Cromwell will be an honest and not very rich gentleman of the middle-classes. The Parliamentary force will be that of the mass of the people against a few gallant but wicked aristocrats who follow the perfidious Charles. He will make no mention of the pay of the Ironsides. James II will be driven out by a popular uprising, in which the great Churchill will play an honourable and chivalric part. The loss of the American Colonies will be deplored, and will be ascribed to the folly of attempting to tax men of "Anglo-Saxon" blood, unless you grant them representation. The Continental troops will be treated as the descendants of Englishmen! The guns at Saratoga will be Colonial guns; the incapacity of the Fleet will not be touched upon. Here again, as in the case of the Battle of Hastings, all will be for the best, and there will be a few touching words upon the passionate affection now felt for Great Britain by the inhabitants of the United States. The defensive genius of Wellington will be represented as that of a general particularly great in the offensive. Talavera will be a victory. The Spanish Auxiliaries in the Peninsula will be contemptible. No guns will be abandoned before Coruña, but what are left at Coruña will be mentioned and re-embarked. The character of Nelson will receive a curious sort of glutinous praise; Emma Hamilton, not Naples, will be the stain upon his name; the Battle of Trafalgar will prevent the invasion of England.

This is a lengthy but not unjust description of what this gentleman would write; it is rubbish from beginning to end. It would sell, because every word of it would foster in the reader the illusion that the community of which he is a member is invincible under all circumstances, that effort and self-denial and suffering are spared him alone out of all mankind, and that a little pleasurable excitement, preferably that to be obtained from his favourite game, is the chief factor in military success.

I have omitted Alfred. Alfred in such a book will be the "teller of truth"--but he will not go to Mass.

Given that the name is sufficiently well known, there is hardly any limit to the sale of a book modelled upon these lines. Contrast with its fate the fate of a book, written no matter how powerfully, that should insist upon truths, no matter how valuable to the English people at the present moment. These truths need by no means be unpleasant, though at the present moment an unpleasant truth is undoubtedly more valuable than a pleasant one. They could make as much or more for the glory of the country; they could be at any rate of infinitely greater service, but they would not be received, simply because they would compel close attention and brain-work in the reader as well as in the writer of them. An established groove would have to be abandoned; to use a strong metaphor, the reader would have to get out of bed, and that is what the modern reader will not do. Tell him that the men who fought on either side at Hastings' plain cared nothing for national but everything for feudal allegiance; that
lex terrae
means the local custom of ordeal and not the "law of the land"; tell him that
judicium parium
means the right of a noble to be judged by nobles, and has nothing to do with the jury system; tell him that Magna Charta was certainly drawn up before the meeting at Runnymede; that not until the Lancastrians did English kings speak English; that Oliver Cromwell owed his position to the enormous wealth of the Williamses, of whom had he not been a cadet, he would never have been known; tell him that the whole force of the Parliament resided in the squires and that the Civil Wars turned England into an oligarchy; tell him the exact truth about the infamy of Churchill; tell him what proportion of Englishmen during the American War were taxed without being represented; tell him what proportion of Washington's troops were of English blood; tell him any one illuminating and true thing about the history of his country, and the novelty will so offend him that a direct insult would have pleased him better.

What is true of history is true of nearly all the rest, and the upshot of the whole matter is that there is not, either in private patronage or in popular demand, a chance for history in modern England.

You can have excellent literature in journalism, and it will be widely read. I would say more--I would say that the better literature a newspaper admits, the more widely will that paper be read, or at any rate the greater will its influence be on modern Englishmen. But when it comes to the kneaded and wrought matter of the true Book, neither the public nor the centres of learning will have any of it, and the last medium which might make it possible, patronage, has equally disappeared, because the modern patron does not work in the daylight in the full view of the nation and with its full approbation, and he is no longer a public man (though he is richer than ever he was before). His patronage, therefore, though it is still considerable, is expended in satisfying his private demand. Private architects build him doubtful castles, private collectors get him manuscripts and jewels, but Letters, which are a public thing, he can no longer command.

It might be asked, by way of conclusion, whether there is any remedy for this state of things. There is none. Its prime cause resides in a certain attitude of the national mind, and this kind of broadly held philosophy is not changed save by slow preaching or external shock. As long as modern England remains what we know it, and follows the lines of change which we see it following, the Book will necessarily decline more and more, and we must make up our minds to it.

Of other evil tendencies of our time, one can say of some that they are obviously mending, of others that such and such an applicable remedy would mend them. Our public architecture is certainly getting better; so is our painting. Our gross and increasing contempt of self-government (to take quite another sphere) is curable by one or two simple reforms in procedure, registration, the expenses of election, and voting at the polls, which would restore the House of Commons to life, and give it power to express English will. But a regard for, a cultivation of, above all a sinking of wealth upon, English Letters is past praying for. We must wait until the tide changes; we can do nothing, and the waiting will be long.

The French have a phrase "la beauté du verbe" by which they would express a something in the sound and in the arrangement of words which supplements whatever mere thought those words were intended to express. It is evident that no definition of this beauty can be given, but it is also evident that without it letters would not exist. How it arises we cannot explain, yet the process is familiar to us in everything we do when we are attempting to fulfil an impulse towards whatever is good. An integration not of many small things but of an infinite series of infinitely small things build up the perfect gesture, the perfect line, the perfect intonation, and the perfect phrase. So indeed are all things significant built up: every tone of the voice, every arrangement of landscape or of notes in music which awake us and reveal the things beyond. But when one says that this is especially true of perfect expression one means that sometimes, rarely, the integration achieves a steadfast and sufficient formula. The mind is satisfied rather than replete. It asks no more; and if it desires to enjoy further the pleasure such completion has given it, it does not attempt to prolong or to develop the pleasure under which it has leapt; it is content to wait a while and to return, knowing well that it has here a treasure laid up for ever.

All this may be expressed in two words: the Classical Spirit. That is Classic of which it is true that the enjoyment is sufficient when it is terminated and that in the enjoyment of it an entity is revealed.

When men propose to bequeath to their fellows work of so supreme a kind it is to be noticed that they choose by instinct a certain material.

It has been said that the material in which he works affects the achievement of the artist: it is truer to say that it helps him. A man designing a sculpture in marble knows very well what he is about to do. A man attempting the exact and restrained rendering of tragedy upon the stage does not choose the stage as one among many methods, he is drawn to it: he needs it; the audience, the light, the evening, the very slope of the boards, all minister to his efforts. And so a man determined to produce the greatest things in verse takes up by nature exact and thoughtful words and finds that their rhythm, their combination, and their sound turn under his hand to something greater than he himself at first intended; he becomes a creator, and his name is linked with the name of a masterpiece. The material in which he has worked is hard; the price he has paid is an exceeding effect; the reward he has earned is permanence.

José de Heredia was an artist of this kind. The mass of the verse he produced, or rather published, was small. It might have been very large. It is not (as a foolish modern affectation will sometimes pretend) necessary to the endurance or even the excellence of work that it should be the product of exceptional moments; nor is it even true (as the wise Ancients believed) that great length of time must always mature it. But the small volume of Heredia's legacy to European letters does argue this at least in the poet, that he passionately loved perfection and that, finding himself able to achieve it (for perfection can be achieved) but now and then, he chose only to be remembered by the contentment which, now and then, his own genius had given him.

He worked upon verse as men work upon the harder metals; all that he did was chiselled very finely, then sawn to an exact configuration and at last inlaid, for when he published his completed volume it is true to say that every piece fitted in with the sound of one before and of one after. He was careful in the heroic degree.

His blood and descent are worthy of notice. He was a Spaniard, inheriting from the first Conquerors of the New World, nor was it remarkable to those who have received a proper enthusiasm for the classical spirit that the energy and even the violence natural to such a lineage should express themselves in the coldest and the most exalted form when, for the second time, a member of the family attempted verse. It is in the essence of that spirit that it alone can dare to be disciplined. It never doubts the motive power that will impel it; it is afraid, if anything, of an excess of power, and consciously imposes upon itself the limits which give it form.

Heredia in his person expressed the activity which impelled him, for he was strong, brown, erect, a rapid walker, and a man whose voice was perpetually modulated in resonant and powerful tones. In his last years during his administration of the Library at the Arsenal this vitality of his took on an aspect of good nature very charming and very fruitful. His organization of the place was thorough, his knowledge of the readers intimate. He refused the manuscripts of none, he advised, laughed, and consoled. His criticism was sure. Several, notably Marcel Prevost, were launched by his authority. The same deep security of literary judgment which had permitted him to chastise and to perfect his impeccable sonnets into their final form permitted him also to hold up before his eyes, grasp, and judge the work of every other man.