Literary taste not common.

minority. The rest have of course read Shakespeare and Milton and Walter Scott and Tennyson, but they do not read them. The lion's share of our time and thoughts and interests must be given to our business or profession, whatever that may be; and in few instances is this connected with literature. For the rest, whatever time or thought a man can spare from his calling is mostly given to his family, or to society, or to some hobby which is not literature.

common.

And love of literature is not shown in such reading as is The literary spirit shows itself, as I said, in appreciating beauty of expression, and how far beauty of expression is cared for we may estimate from the fact that few people think of reading anything a second time. The ordinary reader is profoundly indifferent about style, and will not take the trouble to understand ideas. He keeps to periodicals or light fiction, which enables the mind to loll in its easy chair (so to speak) and see pass before it a series of pleasing images. An idea, as Mark Pattison says, "is an excitant, comes from mind and calls forth mind; an image is a sedative;" and most people when they take up a book are seeking a sedative.

So literature is after all a very small force in the lives of most men, and perhaps even less in the lives of most women. Why then are the employments of the schoolroom arranged on the supposition that it is the grand force of all? The reason is, that we have inherited from the Renascence a false notion of the function of literature.

§ 15. III. I must now point out a fault in the Renascence ideal which is perhaps the most remarkable of all. Those by whom this ideal was set up were entirely possessed by an enthusiasm for literature, and they made the mistake

Third: Literature banished from school.

of attributing to literature a share in general culture which literature seems incapable of taking. After this we could little have expected that the new ideal would exclude literature from the schoolroom, and yet so it has actually turned out.

As a literary creation contains the conceptions of an individual mind expressed in a permanent form of words, it exists only for those who can understand the words or at least the conceptions.

From this it follows that literature for the young must have its expression in the vernacular. The instances are rare indeed in which any one below the age of fifteen or sixteen (perhaps I might put the limit a year or two higher) understands any but the mother tongue. In the mother tongue indeed some forms of literature exercise a great influence over young minds. Ballad literature seems especially to belong to youth, the youth of nations and of individuals. Aristotle educated Alexander with Homer; and we can easily imagine the effect which the Iliad must have had on the young Greeks. Although in the days of Plato instruction was not confined to literature, he gives this account of part of the training in the Athenian schools: "Placing the pupils on benches, the instructors make them read and learn by heart the poems of good poets in which are many moral lessons, many tales and eulogies and lays of the brave men of old; that the boys may imitate them with emulation and strive to become such themselves." Here we see a very important function attributed to literature in the bringing up of the young; but the literature so used must obviously be in the language of the learners. The influence of a literary work may, however, extend itself far beyond the limits of its own language. When our minds

Translations would be literature.

can receive and take pleasure in the conceptions of a great writer, he may speak to us by an interpreter. At the Renascence there were books in the world which might have affected the minds of the young-Plutarch, Herodotus, and above all Homer. But, as I have already said, it was not the conceptions, but the literary form of the ancients, which seemed to the Renascence scholars of such inestimable value, so they refused to give the conceptions in any but the original words. "Studying the ancients in translations," says Melancthon, "is merely looking at the shadow." He could not have made a greater mistake. As far as the young are concerned the truth is exactly the reverse. The translation would give the substance: the original can give nothing but the shadow. Let us take the experience of Mr. Kinglake, the author of "Eothen." This distinguished Eton man, fired by his remembrances of Homer, visited the Troad. He had, as he tells us, "clasped the Iliad line by line to his brain with reverence as well as love." Well done, Eton! we are tempted to exclaim when we read this passage: here at least is proof that some literature was taught in those days of the dominion of the classics. But stop! It seems that this clasping did not take place at Eton, but in happy days before Eton, when Kinglake knew no Greek and read translations. "Heroic days are these," he writes, "but the Dark Ages of schoolboy life come closing over them. I suppose it's all right in the end: yet, by Jove! at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall. The dismal change is ordained and thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody) with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile monkish doggrel, grammars and graduses, dictionaries ană lexicons, horrible odds and ends of dead

The classics not written for children.

languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of 'Scriptores Romani'-from Greek poetry down, down, to the cold rations of Poetæ Græci,' cut up by commentators and served out by schoolmasters!" ("Eothen," the Troad.)

We see from this how the Renascence ideal had the extraordinary effect of banishing literature from the schoolroom. Literature has indeed not ceased to influence the young; it still counts for much more in their lives than in the lives of their seniors; but we all know who are the writers who affected our own minds in childhood and youth, and who affect the minds of our pupils now-not Eutropius or Xenophon, or Cæsar or Cicero, but Defoe and Swift and Marryatt and Walter Scott. The ancient writings which were literature to Melancthon and Erasmus, as they are still to many in our universities and elsewhere, can never be literature to the young. Most of the classical authors read in the schoolroom could not be made literature to young people even by means of translations, for they were men who wrote for men and women only. We see that it would be absurd to make an ordinary boy of twelve or fourteen study Burke or Pope. And if we do not make him read Burke, whose language he understands, why do we make him read Cicero whose language he does not understand? If he cannot appreciate Pope, why do we teach him Horace? The Renascence gives us the explanation of this singular anomaly. The scholars of that age were so delighted with the "composite harmony" of the ancient classics that the study of those classics seemed to them the one thing worth living for. The main, if not the only object they kept in view in bringing up the young was to gain for them admission to the treasure house; and though young people could not understand the

Language versus Literature.

ancient writings as literature, they might at least study them as language and thus be ready to enjoy them as literature in after-life. Thus the subject of instruction in the schoolroom came to be, not the classics but, the classical languages. The classics were used as school books, but the only meaning thought of was the meaning of the detached word or at best of the detached sentence. You ask a child learning to read if he understands what he is reading about, and he says, "I can't think of the meaning because I am thinking of the words." The same thing happened in the schoolboy's study of the classics, and so it has come to pass that to this day the great writers of antiquity discharge a humble function which they certainly never contemplated.

"Great Cæsar's body dead and turned to clay
May stop a hole to keep the wind away,"

And great Cæsar's mind has been turned to uses almost as paltry. He has in fact written for the schoolroom not a commentary on the Wars of Gaul-nothing of the kindbut simply a book of exercises in Latin construing; and an excellent book it would be if he had only graduated the difficulties better.

§ 16. IV. There is yet another weakness about the Renascence ideal-a weakness from which most ideals are free.

Most ideals have this merit at least, that he who makes even a feeble and abortive attempt to reach them is benefited in proportion to his advance, however small that advance may be. If he fails to seize the coat of gold, he carries away, as the proverb tells us, at least one of the sleeves; or, to use George Herbert's metaphor—