and Quintilian, whose writings have been preserved to us just because they were prized. Nor can I imagine an earthly gift more covetable by you, Gentlemen, than that of persuading your fellows to listen to your views and attend to what you have at heart.
Suppose, sir, that you wish to become a journalist? Well, and why not? Is it a small thing to desire the power of influencing day by day to better citizenship an unguessed number of men, using the best thought and applying it in the best language at your command? … Or are you, perhaps, overawed by the printed book? On that, too, I might have a good deal to say; but for the moment would keep the question as practical as I can.
Well, it is sometimes said that Oxford men make better journalists than Cambridge men, and some attribute this to the discipline of their great School of Literae Humaniores, which obliges them to bring up a weekly essay to their tutor, who discusses it. Cambridge men retort that all Oxford men are journalists, and throw, of course, some accent of scorn on the word. But may I urge—and remember please that my credit is pledged to you now—may I urge that this is not a wholly convincing answer? For, to begin with, Oxford men have not changed their natures since leaving school, but are, by process upon lines not widely divergent from your own, much the same pleasant sensible fellows you remember. And, next, if you truly despise journalism, why then despise it, have done with it and leave it alone. But I pray you, do not despise it if you mean to practise it, though it be but as a step to something better. For while the ways of art are hard at the best, they will break you if you go unsustained by belief in what you are trying to do.
In asking you to practise the written word, I began with such low but necessary things as propriety, perspicuity, accuracy. But persuasion—the highest form of persuasion at any rate—cannot be achieved without a sense of beauty. And now I shoot a second rapid—I want you to practise verse, and to practise it assiduously. … I am quite serious. Let me remind you that, if there ever was an ancient state of which we of Great Britain have great right and should have greater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual heirs, that state was Imperial Rome. And of the Romans (whom you will allow to have been a practical people) nothing is more certain than the value they set upon acquiring verse. To them it was not only (as Dr. Johnson said of Greek) 'like old lace—you can never have too much of it.' They cultivated it with a straight eye to national improvement. Among them, as a scholar reminded us the other day, you find 'an educational system deliberately and steadily directed towards the development of poetical talent. They were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the Greeks, that they were born to art and literature. … The characteristic Roman triumphs are the triumphs of a material civilisation.' Rome's rôle in the world was 'the absorption of outlying genius.' Themselves an unimaginative race with a language not too tractable to poetry, they made great poetry, and they made it of patient set purpose, of hard practice. I shall revert to this and maybe amplify reasons in another lecture. For the moment I content myself with stating the fact that no nation ever believed in poetry so deeply as the Romans.
Perpend this then, and do not too hastily deride my plea that you should practise verse-writing. I know most of the objections, though I may not remember all. Mediocribus esse poetis, etc.—that summarises most of them: yet of an infliction of much bad verse from you, if I am prepared to endure it, why should anyone else complain? I say that the youth of a University ought to practise verse-writing; and will try to bring this home to you by an argument convincing to me, though I have never seen it in print.
What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well-to-do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well-to-do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well-to-do, he would no more have attained to writing "Saul" or "The Ring and the Book" than Ruskin would have attained to writing "Modern Painters" if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of the last ten years in watching some 320 Elementary Schools—we may prate of democracy, but actually a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.
What do I argue from this? I argue that until we can bring more intellectual freedom into our State, more 'joy in widest commonalty spread,' upon you, a few favoured ones, rests an obligation to see that the springs of English poetry do not fail. I put it to you that of this glory of our birth and state you are the temporary stewards. I put it to the University, considered as a dispenser of intellectual light, that to treat English poetry as though it had died with Tennyson and your lecturers had but to compose the features of a corpse, is to abnegate high hope for the sake of a barren convenience. I put it to the Colleges, considered as disciplinary bodies, that the old way of letting Coleridge slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns to drape Doctors of Letters?'
In the life of Benvenuto Cellini you will find this passage worth your pondering.—He is telling how, while giving the last touches to his Perseus in the great square of Florence, he and his workmen inhabited a shed built around the statue. He goes on:—
The folk kept on attaching sonnets to the posts of the door. … I believe that, on the day when I opened it for a few hours to the public, more than twenty were nailed up, all of them overflowing with the highest panegyrics. Afterwards, when I once more shut it off from view, everyone brought sonnets, with Latin and Greek verses: for the University of Pisa was then in vacation, and all the doctors and scholars kept vying with each other who could produce the best.
I may not live to see the doctors and scholars of this University thus employing the Long Vacation; as perhaps we shall wait some time for another Perseus to excite them to it. But I do ask you to consider that the Perseus was not entirely cause nor the sonnets entirely effect; that the age when men are eager about great work is the age when great work gets itself done; nor need it disturb us that most of the sonnets were, likely enough, very bad ones—in Charles Lamb's phrase, very like what Petrarch might have written if Petrarch had been born a fool. It is the impetus that I ask of you: the will to try.
Lastly, Gentlemen, do not set me down as one who girds at your preoccupation, up here, with bodily games; for, indeed, I hold 'gymnastic' to be necessary as 'music' (using both words in the Greek sense) for the training of such youths as we desire to send forth from Cambridge. But I plead that they should be balanced, as they were in the perfect young knight with whose words I will conclude to-day:—
Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtained the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent by that sweet enemy France;
