V.

A GUIDE TO ENGLISH LITERATURE.

PEOPLE repeat, till one is almost tired of hearing it, the story of the French Minister of Instruction who took out his watch and said complacently to a foreigner, that at that moment, in all the public grammar-schools of France, all boys of the same class were saying the same lesson. In England the story has been eagerly used to disparage State-meddling with schools. I have never been able to see that it was in itself so very lamentable a thing that all these French boys should be saying the same lesson at the same time. Everything, surely, depends upon what the lesson was. Once secure what is excellent to be taught, and you can hardly teach it with too much. insistence, punctuality, universality. The more one sees of the young, the more one is struck with two things: how limited is the amount which they can really learn, how worthless is much of what goes to make up this amount now. Mr. Grant Duff, misled by his own accomplishments and intelligence, is, I am convinced, far too encyclopædic in his requirements from young learners. But the heart-breaking thing is, that what they can be taught and do learn is often so ill-chosen. "An apple has a stalk, peel, pulp, core, pips, and juice; it is odorous and opaque,

and is used for making a pleasant drink called cider." There is the pedant's fashion of using the brief lessontime, the soon-tired attention, of little children. How much, how far too much, of all our course of tuition, early and late, is of like value !

I

For myself, I lament nothing more in our actual instruction than its multiformity,—a multiformity, too often, of false direction and useless labour. desire nothing so much for it as greater uniformity, -but uniformity in good. Nothing is taught well except what is known familiarly and taught often. The Greeks used to say: Δὶς ἢ τρὶς τὰ καλά,—Give us a fine thing two and three times over! And they were right.

In literature we have present, and waiting ready to form us, the best which has been thought and Isaid in the world. Our business is to get at this best and to know it well. But even to understand the thing we are dealing with, and to choose the best in it, we need a guide, a clue. The literature most accessible to all of us, touching us most nearly, is our own literature, English literature. To get at the best in English literature and to know that best well, nothing can be more helpful to us than a guide who will show us, in clear view, the growth of our literature, its series of productions, and their relative value. If such a guide is good and trustworthy, his instructions cannot be too widely brought into use, too diligently studied, too thoroughly fixed in the mind.

But to deserve such universal acceptance and such heedful attention our guide ought to have special qualifications. He ought to be clear. He ought to be brief, as brief as is consistent with not being dry. For dry he must not be; but we should be made to feel, in listening to him, as much as possible

of the power and charm of the literature to which he introduces us. His discourse, finally, ought to observe strict proportion and to observe strict sobriety. He should have one scale and should keep to it. And he should severely eschew all violence and exaggeration; he should avoid, in his judgments, even the least appearance of what is arbitrary, personal, fantastic.

Mr. Stopford Brooke has published a little book entitled A Primer of English Literature. I have read it with the most lively interest and pleasure. I have just been saying how very desirable is a good guide to English literature, and what are a good guide's qualifications. Mr. Stopford Brooke seems to me to possess them all. True, he has some of them in a higher degree than others. He is never dry, never violent; but occasionally he might, I think, be clearer, shorter, in more perfect proportion, more thoroughly true of judgment. To say this is merely to say that in a most difficult task, that of producing a book to serve as a guide to English literature, a man does not reach perfection all at once. The great thing was to produce a primer so good as Mr. Stopford Brooke's. It is easy to criticise it when it has once been produced, easy to see how in some points it might have been made better. To produce it at all, so good as it is, was not easy. On the whole, and compared with other workmen in the same field, Mr. Stopford Brooke has been clear, short, interesting, observant of proportion, free from exaggeration and free from arbitrariness. Yet with the book lying before one as a whole, one can see, I think, that with respect to some of these merits the work might be brought to a point of excellence higher than that at which it now stands. Mr. Stopford Brooke will not, I am sure, take it amiss if an attentive and

gratified reader of his book, convinced of the great importance of what it attempts, convinced of its merits, desirous to see it in every one's hands,-he will not take it ill, I say, if such a reader asks his leave to go rapidly through the book with him, to point out what seem imperfections, to suggest what might bring his book yet nearer towards the ideal of what such a book should be.

I will begin at the beginning, and will suggest that Mr. Stopford Brooke should leave out his first two pages, the pages in which he lays down what literature is, and what its two main divisions (as he calls them), prose and poetry, are. His primer is somewhat long, longer than most primers. It is a gain to shorten it by expunging anything superfluous. And the reader does not require to be told what literature is, and what prose and poetry are. For all practical purposes he knows this sufficiently well already. Or even if he were in doubt about it, Mr. Stopford Brooke's two pages would not make the matter much clearer to him; they are a little embarrassed themselves, and tend to embarrass the attentive reader. And a primer, at any rate, should be above all things quite plain and clear; it should contain nothing to embarrass its reader, nothing not perfectly thought out and lucidly laid down. So I wish Mr. Stopford Brooke would begin his primer with what is now the fourth section: "The history of English literature is the story of what English men and women thought and felt, and then wrote down in good prose or beautiful poetry in the English language. The story is a long one. It begins about the year 670 and it is still going on in the year 1875. Into this little book, then, is to be put the story of 1200 years." Nothing can be better.

The sentence which follows is questionable :

"No people that have ever been in the world can look back so far as we English can to the beginnings of our literature; no people can point to so long and splendid a train of poets and prosewriters, no nation has on the whole written so much and so well." The first part of this sentence makes an assertion of very doubtful truth; the second part is too much to the tune of Rule Britannia. Both parts offend against sobriety. The four cardinal virtues which are, as I have said, to be required in the writer of a primer of English literature are these: clearness, brevity, proportion, sobriety. Sobriety needs to be insisted upon, perhaps, the most, because in things meant, and rightly meant, to be popular, there is such danger of sinning against it. Anything of questionable and disputed truth, even though we may fairly hold it and in a longer performance might fairly lay it down and defend it, is out of place in a primer. It is an offence against sobriety to insert it there And let Mr. Stopford Brooke ask himself what foreigner, or who except an Englishman, would admit that "no people can point to so long and splendid a train of poets and prose-writers as the English people, no nation has on the whole written so much and so well?" Nay, it is not every Englishman who, with Greece before his eyes, would admit it. What follows is in a truer strain, in the right strain for a guide to take :

“Every English man and woman has good reason to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in prose and poetry. Every one who can write a good book or a good song may say to himself: 'I belong to a great company which has been teaching and delighting men for more than a thousand years.' And that is a fact in which those who write and those who read ought to feel a noble pride."

This is unquestionable, and it is sufficient.