BOOKS OF THE DAY
PAGE
Studies in Humanism (John Sparrow) .. . . 754 Odo Russell and Bismarck (Lord Rennell) 756 The English Prison (Christopher Hobhouse) 758 But We Shall Rise Again (Honor Croome) 760 The Life of Lord Darling (W. T. Wells) 760 The New Abyssinia (Major R. E. Cheesmans 762 Angles on Peace and War (Anthony Powell) Others to Adorn (L. A. G. Strong) .. British Consul Pray for the Wanderer (Evelyn Waugh) Fiction (Forrest Reid) Current Literature ..
A HUMANIST IN SCHOLARSHIP
By JOHN SPARROW
To be a humanist, Sur Dr. Mackail, means to be at once a scholar, versed in the cultures of Greece and Rome, and a consciously political being, a "man, who feels for all man- kind." For him, these two aspects of humanism are inextricably interwoven : mere knowledge of the classics, he would main- tain, is barren unless it is informed with the spirit which ennobled the finest productions of the Greek genius, a spirit whic'.1, in his opinion, has a supreme practical value for the world today ; while, on the other hand, zeal for the improve- ment of the human race and the conditions under which it lives is in danger of being misdirected and of contenting itself with something short of the best, of worshipping alien and inferior gods, unless it is enriched and fortified by familiarity with the ideals which have inspired the poets and philosophers of the ancient as well as those of the modern world.
Dr. Mackail would, I think, express his notion of humanism, though much more elegantly, in some such words as the fore- going. He himself well fulfils his own ideal of the humanist, for he is both a scholar and a man of wide interests and liberal ideals, and these papers, originally printed or delivered as lectures between 1907 and 1933, touching on the literatures and cultures of Greece and Rome, of Italy and England and Scot- land, in classical times, in the Middle Ages, at the Renaissance and during the last three centuries, prove how active and how versatile he has been in the cause of humanism as he sees it. The most interesting of them are those in which the scholar is predominant, in which he confines his attention most strictly to some matter of historical or literary detail, expounding the letter of the text rather than explaining its connexion with a wide humanitarian ideal.
One essay may be taken—indeed, it is offered by Dr. Mackail —as an example of the humanistic as opposed to the scholastic method of treating classical literature ; it is called "A Lesson on an Ode of Horace." The Ode is the famous Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa, in which Horace sighs reminiscently over the fickleness of a mistress whom he calls Pyrrha. Who, he asks, is your present victim ? On whom are you practising your simple-seeming wiles ? What sad disillusion is in store for him ! Happy am I that the days of my bondage are over ! The poem is redeemed from triviality by the curiosa felicitas of its wording.
Dr. Mackail, explaining how "this lyrical commonplace on scrutiny unfolds, expands, yields secret after secret, connects itself with the whole of literature, opens out the marvel of language and the rhythm of life," gives a very different inter- pretation of it. "The notion that the poem is a personal address to a former mistress of the poet's own must be dis- carded at once. The picture, the chosc vue, is a couple in a rose- arbour, just seen ; a slim boy with his arms clasped tight round a girl, who sits knotting back her hair." Dr. Mackail suggests that a glimpse of some such scene as this was caught by Horace, that it "remained with him and germinated. That chance sight summoned up thoughts, memories, a wistful reflex of emotions : the envy of advancing years for youth ; the sense of transitoriness and disillusionment in those immature passions; and finally, the philosophic mind with its recognition of lift's compensations and of life itself as a whole."
To vindicate this reading of the poem Dr. Mackail is forced : (I) to disregard the proper name Pyrrha, translating it " Fair- hair " ; (2) to omit from his translation the phrase simplex munditiis ; (3) to treat flavant religas comam as part of the chose vile, a gesture which the girl contrives to perform at the very moment at which she is caught in her lover's embrace.
Studies in Huma:iism. By J. W. Mackail, O.M. (Longnians. US. 6d.)
All these features Dr. Mackail is at pains to eliminate because they imply familiarity on the part of Horace with Pyrrha and her meretricious ways, and are therefore inconsistent with the theory that the poem simply records a glimpse of a "lover and his lass" who were quite unknown to Horace. There is a further difficulty in the last stanza, where Horace, knowing well (it would seem) the character of the girl he is addressing, exclaims : miseri, quibus intentata nites ! This cannot be cir- cumvented in translation, but Dr. Mackail thus generalises it in his commentary or paraphrase : "Poor children of men, for whom the unexplored world glitters as a Paradise ! "
Doubtless some such reflections may be evoked by reading this Ode ; but ought the Ode to be treated as if it itself en- shrined them, as if it expressed the emotions which it arouses ? There is a strong tendency nowadays, not confined to critics of any one school, to treat a reader's reflections as if they were the poet's thoughts and to incorporate them into poetry as part of its " meaning " (or its "meaning to us ")—a word whose connotation is thus conveniently extended So as to embrace all the thoughts and feelings which the poem evokes, including even all the ambiguities which might be read into it by an ingenious critic. Dr. Mackail, anxious to convey into the teaching of literature "a sense of the human value of what is being read." infuses a wide significance into the literal text of a poem like Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa, since otherwise it will indeed seem "Trivial and unworthy of the high function of poetry."
Dr. Mackail's conception of the function of poetry is indeed a high one, and the occasion for the longest essay in this volume, the inauguration of a new University in the New World, gave him an opportunity of expounding fully that wide view of humanism to which reference has above been made. After pursuing the inquiry "What is Poetry ? " he proceeds to a discussion of "Poetry and Science," "Poetry and Business" and "Poetry and Democracy."
Dr. Mackail does well to emphasise the importance of the element of pattern in poetry ; all poetry is evidently (whatever else it is), as far as its form is concerned, either language in a pattern or language so arranged as to deviate from without forsaking or losing sight of an underlying pattern. But it seems that Dr. Mackail is making an unjustified transition— almost a play upon the word "pattern "—when he tells us that poetry " teaches us the pattern of life as ordered by imaginative insight and creates in us a new meaning, a new beauty and value for the world and for ourselves," that its task is to" fashion a structure of life into imaginative patterns and give it thereby organic form and vital interpretation," that it is a "function- interpretation and pattern of life." It is not always easy to see exactly what such phrases mean, but it does appear that the word " pattern " has taken on the secondary meaning of "model " or " ideal."
There is danger in this extension of the sphere of poetry and scholarship : not only the danger that, in the hands of a critic who is not as fine a scholar as Dr. Mackail, it may lead to actual distortion or misinterpretation of the text before. him, but a danger which becomes apparent when Dr. Mackai7 discusses Poetry and Democracy : unconsciously, he passe- almost into the opposite camp, the camp of the propaganda- poets who see in art nothing but a " function " of politics and think of poetry as a weapon with which they can fight theirway to a new world-order. Dr. Mackail is on the brink of this precipice when he tells us that "A poetry which is out of sympathy with democracy is thereby out of touch with actual life "—and leaves us wondering whether he imam that is therefore so much the worse as poetry. No doubt he would reject that imputation : his sensitiveness, his fineness of taste, his penetration of mind—indeed, his humanism— would save him from such a conclusion. Poets and scholars, after all, are none the less humanists because they are content to be merely poets or to spend their lives in settling ;;T t business.
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