On the Art of Writing | Page 4

uncharted, and for sailing directions I have but these words of your Ordinance:
It shall be the duty of the Professor to deliver courses of lectures on English Literature from the age of Chaucer onwards, and otherwise to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study in the University of the subject of English Literature.
And I never even knew that English Literature had a 'subject'; or, rather, supposed it to have several! To resume:
The Professor shall treat this subject on literary and critical rather than on philological and linguistic lines:
--a proviso which at any rate cuts off a cantle, large in itself, if not comparatively, of the new Professor's ignorance. But I ask you to note the phrase 'to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study'--not, you will observe, 'to teach'; for this absolves me from raising at the start a question of some delicacy for me, as Green launched his "Prolegomena to Ethics" upon the remark that 'an author who seeks to gain general confidence scarcely goes the right way to work when he begins with asking whether there really is such a subject as that of which he proposes to treat.' In spite of--mark, pray, that I say _in spite of_--the activity of many learned Professors, some doubt does lurk in the public mind if, after all, English Literature can, in any ordinary sense, be taught, and if the attempts to teach it do not, after all, justify (as Wisdom is so often justified of her grandparents) the silence sapience of those old benefactors who abstained from endowing any such Chairs.
But that the study of English Literature can be promoted in young minds by an elder one, that their zeal may be encouraged, their tastes directed, their vision cleared, quickened, enlarged--this, I take it, no man of experience will deny. Nay, since our two oldest Universities have a habit of marking one another with interest--an interest, indeed, sometimes heightened by nervousness--I may point out that all this has been done of late years, and eminently done, by a Cambridge man you gave to Oxford. This, then, Mr Vice-Chancellor--this or something like this, Gentlemen--is to be my task if I have the good fortune to win your confidence.
Let me, then, lay down two or three principles by which I propose to be guided. (1) For the first principle of all I put to you that in studying any work of genius we should begin by taking it _absolutely_; that is to say, with minds intent on discovering just what the author's mind intended; this being at once the obvious approach to its meaning (its [Greek: to ti en einai], the 'thing it was to be'), and the merest duty of politeness we owe to the great man addressing us. We should lay our minds open to what he wishes to tell, and if what he has to tell be noble and high and beautiful, we should surrender and let soak our minds in it.
Pray understand that in claiming, even insisting upon, the first place for this absolute study of a great work I use no disrespect towards those learned scholars whose labours will help you, Gentlemen, to enjoy it afterwards in other ways and from other aspects; since I hold there is no surer sign of intellectual ill-breeding than to speak, even to feel, slightingly of any knowledge oneself does not happen to possess. Still less do I aim to persuade you that anyone should be able to earn a Cambridge degree by the process (to borrow Macaulay's phrase) of reading our great authors 'with his feet on the hob,' a posture I have not even tried, to recommend it for a contemplative man's recreation. These editors not only set us the priceless example of learning for learning's sake: but even in practice they clear our texts for us, and afterwards--when we go more minutely into our author's acquaintance, wishing to learn all we can about him--by increasing our knowledge of detail they enchance our delight. Nay, with certain early writers--say Chaucer or Dunbar, as with certain highly allusive ones--Bacon, or Milton, or Sir Thomas Browne--some apparatus must be supplied from the start. But on the whole I think it a fair contention that such helps to studying an author are secondary and subsidiary; that, for example, with any author who by consent is less of his age than for all time, to study the relation he bore to his age may be important indeed, and even highly important, yet must in the nature of things be of secondary importance, not of the first.
But let us examine this principle a little more attentively--for it is the palmary one. As I conceive it, that understanding of literature which we desire in our Euphues, our