On the Art of Writing | Page 4

of the most beautiful minds of our
generation. The gods saw otherwise; and for me, following him, I came
to a trench and stretched my hands to a shade.
For me, then, if you put questions concerning the work of this Chair, I
must take example from the artist in Don Quixote, who being asked
what he was painting, answered modestly, 'That is as it may turn out.'
The course is 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,