ertainly wrong'--

This old man he detects as lacking sense of proportion, sense of
humour. Pass from the child to the working-man as we know him. A
few weeks ago, a lady--featured, as to nose, on the side of
excess--was addressing a North Country audience on the Economic
Position of Women after the War. Said she, 'There won't be men to
go round.' Said a voice 'Eh, but they'll _have to,_ Miss!' Pass
from this rudimentary criticism to high talent employed on the
same subject, and you get "Cyrano de Bergerac." Pass to genius,
to Milton, and you find the elephant amusing Adam and Eve in
Paradise, and doing his best:

the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis.

Milton, like the elephant, jokes with difficulty, but he, too, is
using all his might.

I have illustrated, crudely enough, how a sense of things in
their right values will help us on one side of our dealings with
life. But truly it helps us on every side. This was what Plato
meant when he said that a philosopher must see things as they
relatively are within his horizon--[Greek: o synoptikos
dialektikos]. And for this it was that an English poet praised
Sophocles as one

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

And this of course is what Dean Inge meant when, the other day,
in a volume of "Cambridge Essays on Education," he reminded us,
for a sensible commonplace, that 'The wise man is he who knows
the relative values of things.'

IV

Applying this to literature, I note, but shall not insist here on
the fact--though fact it is--that the Greek and Roman 'classical'
writers (as we call them) laid more stress than has ever been
laid among the subsequent tribes of men upon the desirability of
getting all things into proportion, of seeing all life on a scale
of relative values. And the reason I shall not insist on this is
simply that better men have saved me the trouble.

I propose this morning to discuss the value of the classics to
students of English literature from, as the modern phrase goes, a
slightly different angle.

Reclining and looking up into that sky which is not too grandiose
an image for our own English Literature, you would certainly not
wish, Gentlemen, to see it as what it is not--as a cloth painted
on the flat. No more than you would choose the sky overarching
your life to be a close, hard, copper vault, would you choose
this literature of ours to resemble such a priso