H LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES nglish Literature in Our
Universities (II)

Wednesday, December 3

We broke off, Gentlemen, upon the somewhat painful conclusion that our
Universities were not founded for the study of literature, and tardily
admitted it. The dates of our three literary chairs in Cambridge--I speak
of our Western literature only, and omit Arabic, Sanskrit, and
Chinese--clenched that conclusion for us. Greek in 1540, Latin not until
1869, English but three years ago--from the lesson of these intervals
there is no getting away.

Now I do not propose to dwell on the Renaissance and how Greek came in:
for a number of writers in our time have been busy with the Renaissance,
and have--I was going to say 'over-written the subject,' but no--it is
better to say that they have focussed the period so as to distort the
general perspective at the cost of other periods which have earned less
attention; the twelfth century, for example. At any rate their efforts,
with the amount they claim of your reading, absolve me from doing more
than remind you that the Renaissance brought in the study of Greek, and
Greek necessarily brought in the study of literature: since no man can
read what the Greeks wrote and not have his eyes unsealed to what I have
called a norm of human expression; a guide to conduct, a standard to
correct our efforts, whether in poetry, or in philosophy, or in art. For
the rest, I need only quote to you Gibbon's magnificent saying, that the
Greek language gave a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the
abstractions of metaphysics. [May I add, in parenthesis, that, while no
believer in compulsory Greek, holding, indeed, that you can hardly
reconcile learning with compulsion, and still more hardly force them to
be compatibles, I subscribe with all my heart to Bagehot's shrewd saying,
'while a knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer of
English, he should at least have a firm conviction that those two
languages existed.']

But, assuming you to know something of the Renaissance, and how it
brought Greek into Oxford and Cambridge, I find that in the course of the
argument two things fall to be said, and both to be said with some
emphasis.

In the first place, without officially acknowledging their native tongue
or its literature, our two Universities had no sooner acquired Greek than
their members became immensely interested in English. Take, for one
witness out of many, Gabriel