universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of Eschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardours even under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes! "And Latin-the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the state, inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying of passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in sustaining the measured march of history; and superior to it in the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark of an imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus. "These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful in human language. 66 The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and of Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his maturer years. No avocations of professional labour will make him abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons-to reperuse them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and to the world with superior profit. "The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a circle of schoolfellow friends, and end his secular studies as he began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare." This beautiful appeal for the classics will, I fear, fall on deaf ears in many clamant educational circles where mathematics and science are held to be of more value to the mind and character than human letters; but I myself have not found in advancing age that memories of conic sections, the differential calculus, and the binomial theorem, with which at Cambridge I temporarily dulled my sense of beauty, and sterilised my taste for letters and my judgment in human affairs, have afforded me any consolation. A book of logarithms by the bedside on a sleepless night is a poor substitute for the glorious poets and prose writers of the world. I suppose Darwin is the approved type of the character produced by a devotion to science and a neglect of letters, and this is what he said of himself : "Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great delight, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. "But now for many years I cannot enjoy a line of poetry. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. "It may be truly said," he confesses, "that I am like a man who has become colour blind.” And Darwin, blind to beauty, deaf to music, and soured to literature, is the idol of the scientific world! From such a fate as his, good Lord, deliver my readers! Cardinal Newman has expressed the same love of the classics that Henry Nelson Coleridge records, and in as beautiful language : 'Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply; which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have past, and he has experience of life, and pierce him as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival or among the Sabine Hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years; with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival." 66 And thus the early study of the great writers of old leaves "Deposited upon the silent shore Of memory images and precious thoughts CHAPTER XLVII CARDINAL NEWMAN JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN, from whom I quoted in the last chapter, was a considerable poet, a great preacher, a masterly controversialist, a saintly character, and a writer of luminous prose. Much of his best writing has failed to receive general appreciation from its being impregnated with an ecclesiastical bias. Few people are ready to accept his prophecy, though couched in beautiful language, that in a hundred years Ireland will become "the centre of the world," and Dublin its capital, with a flourishing Roman Catholic University to which will flock from all over the earth peoples "all owning one faith." But his description of Athens in his Historical Sketches is quite free from this misfortune that from the purely literary point of view mars so much of his work. He asks his readers to imagine a London Philistine describing Athens, and thus proceeds: He would not think of writing word, how that clear air, of which I have spoken, brought out, yet blended and subdued, the colours on the marble, till they had a softness and harmony, for all their richness, which in a picture looks exaggerated, yet is after all within the truth. He would not tell, how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere freshened up the pale olive, till the olive forgot its monotony, and its cheek glowed like the arbutus or beech of the Umbrian hills. "He would say nothing of the thyme and thousand fragrant herbs which carpeted Hymettus; he would hear nothing of the hum of bees; nor take much account of the rare flavour of its honey, since Gozo and Minorca were sufficient for the English demand. "He would look out over the Egean from the height he had ascended; he would follow with his eye the chain ́ of islands, which, starting from the Sunian headland, seemed to offer the fabled divinities of Attica, when they would visit their Ionian cousins, a sort of viaduct thereto across the sea; but that fancy would not occur to him, nor any admiration of the dark violet billows with their white edges down below; nor of those graceful fan-like jets of silver upon the rocks, which slowly rise aloft like water spirits from the deep, then shiver, and break, and spread, and shroud themselves, and disappear in a soft mist of foam; nor of the gentle, incessant heaving and panting of the whole liquid plain; nor of the long waves, keeping steady time, like a line of soldiery, as they resound upon the hollow shore, he would not deign to notice that restless living element at all, except to bless his stars that he was not upon it. "Nor the distinct detail, nor the refined colouring, nor graceful outline and roseate golden hue of the jutting crags, nor the bold shadows cast from Otus or Laurium by the declining sun. "Rather must we turn for the sympathy we seek to yon pilgrim student come from a semi-barbarous land to that small corner of the earth, as to a shrine, where he might take his fill of gazing on those emblems and coruscations of invisible unoriginate perfection. "It was the stranger from a remote province, from Britain or from Mauritania, who in a scene so different from that of his chilly woody swamps, or of his fiery choking sands, learned at once what a real university must be, by coming to understand the sort of country, which was its suitable home.” Deep in a volume of sermons, a lovely prize for the patient student, lies Newman's precious utterance on the effect of music on the human heart : |