On the Art of Writing | Page 7

just here.
Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be
applied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal
persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive.
(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with me to Plato's
wayfarers, whom we have left so long under the cypresses; and loth as
we must be to lay hands on our father Parmenides, I feel we must treat
the gifted Athenian stranger to a little manhandling. For did you not
observe--though Greek was a living language and to his metropolitan
mind the only language--how envious he showed himself to seal up the
well, or allow it to trickle only under permit of a public analyst: to treat

all innovation as suspect, even as, a hundred odd years ago, the Lyrical
Ballads were suspect?
But the very hope of this Chair, Sir (as I conceive it), relies on the
courage of the young. As Literature is an Art and therefore not to be
pondered only, but practised, so ours is a living language and therefore
to be kept alive, supple, active in all honourable use. The orator can yet
sway men, the poet ravish them, the dramatist fill their lungs with
salutary laughter or purge their emotions by pity or terror. The historian
'superinduces upon events the charm of order.' The novelist--well, even
the novelist has his uses; and I would warn you against despising any
form of art which is alive and pliant in the hands of men. For my part, I
believe, bearing in mind Mr. Barrie's "Peter Pan" and the old bottles he
renovated to hold that joyous wine, that even Musical Comedy, in the
hands of a master, might become a thing of beauty. Of the Novel, at
any rate--whether we like it or not--we have to admit that it does hold a
commanding position in the literature of our times, and to consider how
far Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie was right the other day when he claimed,
on the first page of his brilliant study of Thomas Hardy, that 'the right
to such a position is not to be disputed; for here, as elsewhere, the right
to a position is no more than the power to maintain it.' You may agree
with that or you may not; you may or may not deplore the forms that
literature is choosing now-a-days; but there is no gainsaying that it is
still very much alive. And I would say to you, Gentlemen, 'Believe, and
be glad that Literature and the English tongue are both alive.' Carlyle,
in his explosive way, once demanded of his countrymen, 'Shakespeare
or India? If you had to surrender one to retain the other, which would
you choose?' Well, our Indian Empire is yet in the making, while the
works of Shakespeare are complete and purchasable in whole calf; so
the alternatives are scarcely _in pari materia_; and moreover let us not
be in a hurry to meet trouble half way. But in English Literature, which,
like India, is still in the making, you have at once an Empire and an
Emprise. In that alone you have inherited something greater than Sparta.
Let us strive, each in his little way, to adorn it.
But here at the close of my hour, the double argument, that Literature is
an Art and English a living tongue, has led me right up to a fourth

principle, the plunge into which (though I foresaw it from the first) all
the coward in me rejoices at having to defer to another lecture. I
conclude then, Gentlemen, by answering two suspicions, which very
likely have been shaping themselves in your minds. In the first place,
you will say, 'It is all very well for this man to talk about "cultivating
an increased sensibility," and the like; but we know what that leads
to--to quackery, to aesthetic chatter: "Isn't this pretty? Don't you admire
that?"' Well, I am not greatly frightened. To begin with, when we come
to particular criticism I shall endeavour to exchange it with you in plain
terms; a manner which (to quote Mr Robert Bridges' "Essay on Keats")
'I prefer, because by obliging the lecturer to say definitely what he
means, it makes his mistakes easy to point out, and in this way the true
business of criticism is advanced.' But I have a second safeguard, more
to be trusted: that here in Cambridge, with all her traditions of austere
scholarship, anyone who indulges in loose distinct talk will be quickly
recalled to his tether. Though at the time Athene be not kind enough to
descend from heaven and pluck him backward by the hair, yet the very
genius loci will walk home with him from