On the Art of Writing | Page 5

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 gracefully-minded youth, will include
knowledge in varying degree, yet is itself something distinct from
knowledge. Let us illustrate this upon Poetry, which the most of us will
allow to be the highest form of literary expression, if not of all artistic
expression. Of all the testimony paid to Poetry, none commands better
witness than this--that, as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy 'it abounds with
images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to
which every heart returns an echo.' When George Eliot said, 'I never
before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should
like them,' she but repeated of Wordsworth (in homelier, more familiar
fashion) what Johnson said of Gray; and the same testimony lies
implicit in Emerson's fine remark that 'Universal history, the poets, the
romancers'--all good writers, in short--'do not anywhere make us feel
that we intrude, that this is for our betters. Rather it is true that, in their
greatest strokes, there we feel most at home.' The mass of evidence, of
which these are samples, may be summarised thus:--As we dwell here
between two mysteries, of a soul within and an ordered Universe
without, so among us are granted to dwell certain men of more delicate
intellectual fibre than their fellows--men whose minds have, as it were,
filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to us stray

messages between these two mysteries, as modern telegraphy has learnt
to search out, snatch, gather home human messages astray over waste
waters of the Ocean.
If, then, the ordinary man be done this service by the poet, that (as Dr
Johnson defines it) 'he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but
he feels it _with a great increase of sensibility_'; or even if, though the
message be unfamiliar, it suggests to us, in Wordsworth's phrase, to
'feel that we are greater than we know,' I submit that we respond to it
less by anything that usually passes for knowledge, than by an
improvement of sensibility, a tuning up of the mind to the poet's pitch;
so that the man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will be
remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibit
for knowledge, than for being something, and that 'something,' a man
of unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose trained judgment we can
trust to choose the better and reject the worse.
But since this refining of the critical judgment happens to be less easy
of practice than the memorising of much that passes for knowledge--of
what happened to Harriet or what Blake said to the soldier--and far less
easy to examine on, the pedagogic mind (which I implore you not to
suppose me confusing with the scholarly) for avoidance of trouble
tends all the while to dodge or obfuscate what is essential, piling up
accidents and irrelevancies before it until its very face is hidden. And
we should be the more watchful not to confuse the pedagogic mind
with the scholarly since it is from the scholar that the pedagogue
pretends to derive his sanction; ransacking the great genuine
commentators--be it a Skeat or a Masson or (may I add for old
reverence' sake?) an Aldis Wright--fetching home bits of erudition, non
sua poma, and announcing 'This must be the true Sion, for we found it
in a wood.'
Hence a swarm of little school books pullulates annually, all upside
down and wrong from beginning to end; and hence a worse evil afflicts
us, that the English schoolboy starts with a false perspective of any
given masterpiece, his pedagogue urging, obtruding lesser things upon
his vision until what is really important, the poem or the play itself, is

seen in distorted glimpses, if not quite blocked out of view.
This same temptation--to remove a work of art from the category for
which the author designed it into another where it can be more
conveniently studied--reaches even above the schoolmaster to assail
some very eminent critics. I cite an example from a book of which I
shall hereafter have to speak with gratitude as I shall always name it
with respect--"The History of English Poetry," by Dr Courthope,
sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In his fourth volume, and in
his estimate of Fletcher as a dramatist, I find this passage:--
But the