Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

Revival of taste for beauty in literature.

pression, took entire possession of the mind of Europe. The first period of the Renascence passed in adoration of the awakened beauty, and in efforts to copy and multiply it.”

§ 6. Here Mark Pattison speaks as if the conception of beauty of form belonged exclusively to the ancients and those who learnt of them. This seems to require some , abatement. There are points in which mediæval art far excelled the art of the Renascence. The thirteenth century, as Archbishop Trench has said, was "rich in glorious creations of almost every kind;" and in that century our great English architect, Street, found the root of all that is best in modern art. (See "Dublin Afternoon Lectures," 1868.)

But there are expressions of beauty to which the Greeks, and those who caught their spirit, were keenly alive, and to which the people of the Middle Age seem to have been blind. The first is beauty in the human form; the second is beauty in literature.

The old delight in beauty in the human form has never come back to us. Mr. Ruskin tells us we are an ugly race, with ill-shapen limbs, and well pleased with our ugliness and deformity, and in reply we only mutter something about the necessity of clothing both for warmth and decency. But as to the other expression of beauty, beauty in literature, the mind of Europe again became conscious of it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The re-awakening of this sense of beauty we call the Renascence.

§ 7. Before we consider the effect of this intellectual revolution on education, let us be sure that we are not "paying ourselves with words," and that we know exactly what we mean by "literature."

When the conceptions of an individual mind are ex

What is Literature ?

pressed in a permanent form of words, we get literature. The sum total of all the permanent forms of expression in one language make up the literature of that language; and if no one has given his conceptions a form which has been preserved, the language is without a literature. There are then two things essential to a literary work: first, the conceptions of an individual mind; second, a permanent form of expression. Hence it follows that the domain of literature is distinct from the domain of natural or mathematical science. Science does not give us the conceptions of an individual mind, but it tells us what every rational person who studies the subject must think. And science is entirely independent of any form of words: a proposition of Euclid is science; a sonnet of Wordsworth's is literature. We learn from Euclid certain truths which we should have learnt from some one else if Euclid had never existed, and the propositions may be conveyed equally well in different forms of words and in any language. But a sonnet of Wordsworth's conveys thought and feeling peculiar to the poet; and even if the same thought and feeling were conveyed to us in other words, we should lose at least half of what he has given us. Poetry is indeed only one kind of literature, but it is the highest kind; and what is true of literary works in verse, is true also in a measure of literary works in prose. So great is the difference between science and literature, that in literature, as the first Lord Lytton said, the best books are generally the oldest; in science they are the newest.

§ 8. At present we are concerned with literature only. There are two ways in which a work of literature may excite our adıniration and affect our minds. These are, first, by the beauty of the conceptions it conveys to us; and

Renascence loved beauty of expression.

second, by the beauty of the language in which it conveys In the greatest works the two excellences will be

them. combined.*

Now the literary taste proper fastens especially on the second of the two, i.e., on beauty of expression; and the Renascence was the revival of literary taste. "It was," as Mark Pattison says, "the conception of style or finished expression which had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric, and which re-entered the circle of ideas after a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance." If we lose sight of this, we shall be perplexed by the unbounded enthusiasm which we find in the sixteenth century for the old classics. What great evangel, we may ask, had Cicero and Virgil and Ovid, or even Plato and the Greek dramatists, for men who lived when Europe had experienced a thousand years of Christianity? The answer is simple. They had none whatever. Their thoughts and conceptions were not adapted to the wants of the new world. The civilization of the Christian nations of the sixteenth century was a very different thing from the civilization of Greece and Rome. It had its own thoughts, its own problems, its own wants. The old-world thoughts could not be thought over again by it. This indeed was felt though not admitted by the Renascence scholars themselves. Had it been the thoughts of the ancients which seemed to them so valuable they would have made some effort to diffuse those thoughts in the languages of the modern world. Much as a great literary work loses by translation, there may still be enough left of it to be a

• On the nature of literature see Cardinal Newman's "Lectures on the Nature of a University. University Subjects. II. Literature."

No translations. The "educated.

source of instruction and delight. The thoughts of Aristotle, conveyed in a Latin translation of an Arabic translation, profoundly affected the mind of Europe in the Middle Ages. The Bible, or Book par excellence, is known to few indeed in its original form. Some great writers-Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and the author of the "Arabian Nights"-please and instruct nations who know not the sound of the languages wherein their works are composed. If then the great writers of Greece and Rome had been valued for their matter, their works would have been translated by the Renascence scholars as the Bible was translated by the Reformers, and the history of modern education would have taken a very different turn from that which awaited it. But it was not so. The Renascence scholars did all they could to discourage translations. For the grand discovery which we call the Revival of Learning was, not that the ancients had something to say, but that whatever they had to say they knew how to say it.

§ 9. And thus it happens that in the period of change, when Europe was re-arranging its institutions, developing new ideas and settling into new grooves of habit, we find the men most influential in education entirely fascinated by beauty of expression, and this in two ancient languages, so that the one thing needful for the young seemed to them an introduction to the study of ancient writings. The inevitable consequence was this: education became a mere synonym for instruction in Latin and Greek. The only ideal set up for the "educated" was the classical scholar.

§ 10. Perhaps the absurdity of taking this ideal, an ideal which is obviously fitted for a small class of men only, and proposing it for general adoption, was partly concealed from the Renascence scholars by the peculiar circumstances

Spread of literature by printing.

of their age. No doubt they thought literature would in the future be a force capable of much wider application than it had ever been before. True, literature had till then affected a small class only. Literature meant books, books meant MSS., and MSS. were rare and costly. Literature, the embodiment of grand thoughts in grand words, had existed before letters, or at least without letters. The Homeric poems, for example, had been known to thousands. who could not read or write. But beauty of expression naturally got associated and indeed confounded with the art by which it was preserved; so the creations of the mind, when embodied in particular combinations of words, acquired the name of literature or letters, and became almost exclusively the affair of those who had opportunities of study, opportunities afforded only to the few. During the Middle Ages every one who could read was allowed his "privilege of clergy;" that is, he was assumed to be a clergyman. Literature then was not thought of as a means of instruction. But at the very time that the beauty of the ancient writings dawned on the mind of Europe, a mechanical invention seemed to remove all hindrances to the spread of literature. The scholars seized on the printing press and thought by means of it to give all "the educated" a knowledge of classics.

§ 11. We cannot help speculating what would have been the effect of the discovery of printing if it had been made at another time. As there may be literature without books, so there may be books without literature. If at the time of the invention of printing there had been no literature, no creations of individual minds embodied in permanent forms of speech, books might have been used as apparatus in a mental gymnasium, or they might have been made the

« ForrigeFortsæt »