On the Art of Writing | Page 8

the lecture room, whispering
monitions, cruel to be kind.
'But,' you will say alternatively, 'if we avoid loose talk on these matters
we are embarking on a mighty difficult business.' Why, to be sure we
are; and that, I hope, will be half the enjoyment. After all, we have a
number of critics among whose methods we may search for help--from
the Persian monarch who, having to adjudicate upon two poems,
caused the one to be read to him, and at once, without ado, awarded the
prize to the other, up to the great Frenchman whom I shall finally
invoke to sustain my hope of building something; that is if you,
Gentlemen, will be content to accept me less as a Professor than as an
Elder Brother.
The Frenchman is Sainte-Beuve, and I pay a debt, perhaps
appropriately here, by quoting him as translated by the friend of mine,
now dead, who first invited me to Cambridge and taught me to admire
her--one Arthur John Butler, sometime a Fellow of Trinity, and later a
great pioneer among Englishmen in the study of Dante. Thus while you
listen to the appeal of Sainte-Beuve, I can hear beneath it a more

intimate voice, not for the first time, encouraging me.
Sainte-Beuve then--_si magna licet componere parvis_--is delivering an
Inaugural Lecture in the École Normale, the date being April 12th,
1858. 'Gentlemen,' he begins, 'I have written a good deal in the last
thirty years; that is, I have scattered myself a good deal; so that I need
to gather myself together, in order that my words may come before you
with all the more freedom and confidence.' That is his opening; and he
ends:--
As time goes on, you will make me believe that I can for my part be of
some good to you: and with the generosity of your age you will repay
me, in this feeling alone, far more than I shall be able to give you in
intellectual freedom, in literary thought. If in one sense I bestow on you
some of my experience, you will requite me, and in a more profitable
manner, by the sight of your ardour for what is noble: you will
accustom me to turn oftener and more willingly towards the future in
your company. You will teach me again to hope.

LECTURE II.
THE PRACTICE OF WRITING.
Wednesday, February 12
We found, Gentlemen, towards the close of our first lecture, that the
argument had drawn us, as by a double chain, up to the edge of a bold
leap, over which I deferred asking you to take the plunge with me. Yet
the plunge must be taken, and to-day I see nothing for it but to harden
our hearts.
Well, then, I propose to you that, English Literature being (as we
agreed) an Art, with a living and therefore improvable language for its
medium or vehicle, a part--and no small part--of our business is _to
practise it._ Yes, I seriously propose to you that here in Cambridge we
_practise writing_: that we practise it not only for our own
improvement, but to make, or at least try to make, appropriate,

perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a recognisable hall-mark of
anything turned out by our English School. By all means let us study
the great writers of the past for their own sakes; but let us study them
for our guidance; that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped)
something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out
the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke. Portraits of other great
ones look down on you in your college halls: but while you are young
and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up
your hearts and movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its
inheritance?
I protest, Gentlemen, that if our eyes had not been sealed, as with wax,
by the pedagogues of whom I spoke a fortnight ago, this one habit of
regarding our own literature as a hortus siccus, this our neglect to
practise good writing as the constant auxiliary of an Englishman's
liberal education, would be amazing to you seated here to-day as it will
be starkly incredible to the future historian of our times. Tell me, pray;
if it concerned _Painting_--an art in which Englishmen boast a record
far briefer, far less distinguished--what would you think of a similar
acquiescence in the past, a like haste to presume the dissolution of
aptitude and to close accounts, a like precipitancy to divorce us from
the past, to rob the future of hope and even the present of lively interest?
Consider, for reproof of these null men, the Discourses addressed (in a
pedantic age, too) by