SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE ON THE MONUMENTAL CHARACTER OF LITERATURE.
SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE'S address on Literature at Birmingham, as President of the Suburban Institutes Union, was certainly not suburban. His general view, that the words and thoughts and imaginations and songs in which the nations express *their various characters are by far the most im- portant of the monuments of energy which they leave behind them, more characteristic than their greatest buildings, more characteristic than their tillage, more characteristic even than their art, may be true or false, but it is not vulgar or conven- tional. For our own parts, we should: say that it is not neces- sarily true, and is sometimes misleading, if not false. Take the case of Rome. It is, we suppose, true that with the literature of Rome in our hands, and no other trace of Rome's conquests, we could give a better account of what Rome had aspired to do in the world, than her innumerable camps and viaducts and baths and amphitheatres and roads and mighty walls would give -without the books. But would the literature without the mighty and wide-spread remains impress us with anything like the same sense of the dumb fidelity and energy of her legions ? Is Livy, or juvenal, or Tacitus, or even Virgil, half as expressive of the genius of Rome as the Coliseum, or even our own Roman Wall ? Roman literature expresses the thoughts of the thinking and writing men, in a nation that had comparatively few thinkers and writers. But can the thoughts of the thinkers and writers express adequately the silent power and purpose of those who were neither thinkers nor writers, and who, if they had ever been given to studying the thoughts and writings of others, would have lived very differ- ent lives ? You may say, perhaps, that the stately eloquence of Livy, and the terse intensity of Tacitus, and the fierce scorn of Juvenal, and the magnificent pathos of Virgil, reflect the attitudes of minds that could never have expressed them- selves in words ;—that Livy was a sort of mouthpiece for Tarquin and Coriolanus, Tacitus for Agricola, Juvenal for Trajan, and Virgil for Octavia or Augustus. But even granting this, the- most characteristic monument of Roman energy can hardly be the voice of its interpreters, when the most striking thing about it was that it yearned after no better interpretation than that of deeds, and that even in its amusements it preferred the sight of blood and danger to the wit of the player or the passion of the poet. Of course, in the "case of Palestine and Greece it would be much- truer to say, with Sir Stafford Northcote, that by far the greatest monument which the natives of those countries have left to us is the monument of their Literature. The Books of the Old and New Testament strictly represent the characteristic achievement of the Hebrew people, the one achievement which has made a country not much bigger than Wales more important to the earth than the rest of Asia, Africa, and America. But even here the monument is not so much the work of the people, as the work of a few chosen minds carved upon the rocky hearts of the people, as the inscriptions in some of the Arabian fastnesses are carved upon the lonely rocks of that desolate land. The Hebrew literature is the monument not of a people, bat of the inspired teachers of a people who required line upon line and precept upon precept, before any lasting impression could be made upon their minds. In the case of Greece, perhaps, the literature,— at all events if taken together with the art of Athens,— does more truly represent, if not exactly the achievements of a race, yet the true delight of the race in the achieve- ments of its greatest minds. Homer, Herodotus, the great tragedians and comedians, the Parthenon and the Amphitheatre, Demosthenes, Plato, and Aristotle, represent probably more adequately the highest delights of the popular mind in Greece than any other literature and art in the world succeed in representing the highest delights of• the people in whose service that literature and art have been produced. There was, probably, less of noteworthy character in Greece which found no reflection in its literature and art, and less of Greek literature and art that had no answering feature in the life of the Greek people, than we could find in comparing any other national literature with the actual life of the people. But even In relation to Greece, how much of dumb, inarticulate life there must have been of which we see only the fragmentary reflection in. such writers as Plutarch or Athenaens.
The truth is that Sir Stafford Northcote's notion of Literature as a monument of national character and energy, is only half true. It is really the monument of the character and energy of a few select minds, partly stimulated by their love or hate of what they see in the life around them, and partly by their yearning for that which they do not see, but have dimly- heard of, and very much desire to see. Nothing, we fancy, can be more dubious that Sir Stafford Northcote's asser- tion that we can always tell from the literature of any age whether it approved wars of aggrandisement or only wars of self-defence, whether its commerce was greedy or only boldly en- terprising, whether its civilisation was stationary or advancing. Take the case of Chaucer. He served in the army during the invasion of France by Edward ILL; but could you gather from his poetry whether the English people condemned or approved that invasion of France, or whether they had not made up their minds on the subject? Take the poet whom we are rather surprised to infer is Sir Stafford Northcote's own favourite, Milton,—could we judge from his poetry whether the mass of the English people approved or rejected his own Puritan- ism, and whether they admired or disliked his own elaborate and somewhat pedantic learning ,We might perhaps justly infer from Shakespeare that the aggressive wars of the Plantagenets, so far as tradition passed judgment on them, were not unpopular, and that anything like either Puritanism or pedantry was unpopular in England ; but then, Shakespeare is the most faithful of national mirrors. Still we hold that all literature is by no means a mirror of the life of the nation, nay,. is often a completely false light upon it,—representing often the writer's yearning for what he does not find in the national life, rather than his delight in what he does. Spenser will no more tell us what England was in the days of Elizabeth, than Scott will tell us what Scotland was in the days of George IV. Both writers were more or less dreaming of a life that they could not touch or handle, though they had the vision of it in their imagination. Spenser lived in the world of fancy, and Scott in the world of tradition. Thus, the latter doubtless built the monument of a generation that had passed away, while the former built the menu- mentonly of his own exquisite reveries. Shelley and Keats would not furnish us with any materials for reconstructing the early part of this century, and if we attempted to recast the life of the last generation from the writings of Ruskin, we should inevitably read it backwards, as well as represent it out of all drawing. Certain parts of literature are the monuments of what men have been ; other parts are but the monuments of the re- volt of certain imaginations against the restraints of reality, —excursions into the world of the might-have-been.
And again, there is a very great part of the life of every people which cannot get itself imaged in Literature at all. Sir Stafford Northcote virtually admits this, when he says that science and the arts, in this last hundred years, have been making great strides, with which literature has not kept up. Science and the arts are, of course, part and parcel of the lire of the nation, and if there is no proper reflection of them in literature,—which there certainly is not,—then there is a large part of the life of the nation to which literature builds either no adequate monument or no monument at all. Minute, technical, monotonous effort, literature can commemorate only in its picturesque results ; and hence a great part of life, and even of the most char- acteristic life of such a people as the English, is hardly re- flected in English literature at all. Is it not this, indeed, which irritates the genies of men like Mr. Raskin against such minute, technical, and monotonous life, and leads them to affirm that it ought not to be at all ? Perhaps the false literary canon, " All that can be rightly done at all can be made fascinat- ing in literature," is at the bottom of a good deal of the denun- ciation which is launched against the more dismal pursuits and industries of men. If so, those who see the falseness of this literary canon should protest against such large generalisations as Sir Stafford Northcote's, which really tend to inspire a sort of disgust for any sort of energy of which you cannot paint the fruits as at once beautiful and imposing.
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