Chapter IV: Part 4

Most of those whose real application to the Classics came to an end with their school-days will recall their early studies as being in so large a measure a struggle to acquire the form that the matter at the time impressed itself only secondarily on the mind. The strange words betrayed an obstinate angularity; no inflection was so minute that it could be disregarded without prejudice to sense; even their place in the puzzle was significant; and if in use they were roughly treated or jumbled together without due order, they refused either to reflect things or to express ideas. But imperceptibly this very quality disciplined the mind to realise that the words had a definite value. When rightly used, moreover, it seemed that these unworn words would give forth our thoughts or express a meaning with a directness and immediacy lacking even in our own speech. Perhaps it is that many centuries have elapsed since those words had been bandied about in everyday speech, and hence they have a freshness and keenness of impression which no vulgar association has had the chance to blur. In our own time the words which build up the most exquisite poem, we have known to be used in other contexts--to have provided a rhyme for a sentimental song or patter for a low comedian. It may be that when the trireme's rating in the Piraeus found his rations short, or the centurion was jostled in the crowded byways of the Suburra, winged words used by Homer or Virgil were pressed into the service of each to become the vehicle of their complaint and abuse, and that these same words in their day had many a frivolous or debasing task to do. But none of this has reached our ears; all the multitude of tongues which echoed in the Agora and Forum are hushed in silence and oblivion; and to listeners across the centuries alone of all the sounds of ancient Greece and Rome "still are their pleasant voices, their nightingales awake." Ruskin once said, "All inferior poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched commonality to good thoughts; and in general adds to the weight of human weariness in a most woeful and culpable manner." But the literary works of Greece and Rome which have reached us come burdened with no such poor relations; the poets whose reciting in the month of August was such a plague to Juvenal and his contemporaries have not survived to weary us, and everything second-rate has long fallen by the way into the gap of centuries over which only an eternal merit has enabled the survivors to waft themselves. Due again to the freshness of the words is another feature of the ancients' writing, its clarity and its conciseness. It cannot fail to strike the merest beginner who tries to translate our tongue into Greek or Latin, or _vice versa_, in how much fewer words in the old languages the thought can be expressed. It is distressing to find ourselves saying in ten lines what the Roman said in five; but at least it may give rise in us to a conscious effort to tighten up the belt of our speech, when we see the sentences of the ancients clean run like athletes and fit for their work as compared with the prolapsed and slovenly figures of so much of our own diction. Moreover, the ancients did not over-elaborate their thought, being content to leave something to the mental processes of their readers. How different from so many of our English scribblers who seem to have taken to heart Wilde's dictum that "nothing succeeds like excess," and who swathe the thinnest of thoughts in a profusion of words in the hope, maybe, that it will appear larger from its wrappings. Even our great writers are sometimes too eager that nothing that can be said on the theme they take shall remain unsaid, or any germ remain undeveloped to which the reader's own mind might give increase; and they are apt so to run their thought to a standstill that no potentiality remains in it to set the reader's mind agog. Why do we all know about the beauty of Argive Helen? Not because Homer gave us a catalogue of her charms with exhaustive precision, but just because he gave a hint and left it to us. I think he says no more than that, as one day she passed upon the walls, the elders said it was no wonder that for such loveliness men should die and cities should be sacked. Her loveliness is left to each of us to envisage as we will, and thus it is that it lives afresh in a myriad forms, newborn throughout the centuries in each man's heart.

The form then is ever fresh, and I have spoken of it first because to many of us so barely initiated this has made the earliest and most immediate impression. It is perhaps only as we get older that the beauty of the matter unfolds itself and reveals its eternal significance against our day-to-day experience.

The literature in which peoples with such an outlook found entertainment and instruction was not composed of novels or problem plays dealing with heroes and heroines struggling in the little traps that their own weakness had sprung for them, or with situations brought about by mean mistakes or obliquities of character. What was portrayed in the tragedies of the Greeks was nothing less than the human spirit at grips with the toils of destiny itself. As Seneca said, "A strong man matched with fortune is a sight for the gods to witness." For their characters and situations they had their beautiful mythology to draw on, and the materials which this provided eclipsed altogether the themes which ordinary everyday life could suggest. Always in these tragedies we are secure in the confidence that the characters will not prove unequal to the doom they have to bear; as it becomes more instant and inexorable so their spirit becomes more indomitable to meet it, and it is never otherwise than the mighty who is "mightily laid low." Whether it is a demi-god like Prometheus or a man like [OE]dipus who is on the rack; whether their sacrifice to what they deem their duty is demanded of a wife like Alcestis, or a young girl like Antigone, they show us one and all the spirit which is unperturbed by trial and undiverted by catastrophe. It may be said that this high bearing in trials so profound or so remote avails little to guide us among our practical daily perplexities; but surely the Greek tragedy, though not drawing on the smaller issues of life for its themes, shows how these should be faced by portraying to us the serene and the right spirit towards the ultimate issues.

If I may now strike a personal note, I think what I have gained is some sense of proportion, a standard of values, and a profound respect for the truth of words, which have been of use to me in my daily life. Add to these the perennial happiness I am fortunate enough to find in the sheer beauty of Latin and Greek and the thousand images they call up in the mind, and I am indebted to my early training more than I can ever hope to repay. I remember well the first election I fought. It was what was called an old-fashioned election in an ancient borough now disfranchised. The candidate was expected to spend three evenings a week during the time of his probation in one or another of the public houses which jostled each other through the constituency, listening to and vociferously applauding what, for want of a better name, was called, on the _lucus a non lucendo_ principle, comic or humorous song. After a time I felt the need of a moral purge and a literal sedative. It was the work of a moment to find what my soul needed. When I came home at night from these orgies I seldom went to bed without reading something of the _Odyssey_, the _Æneid_, or the _Odes_ of Horace. By the date of the election I had read all the last-named, and most of the others, not without labour in the dictionaries, not always with ease, but with care and increasing joy; and with the desired result that, though defeated, I had passed through the fire and the smell of burning was not on my garments.

Two years later, by my admission to the House of Commons at a by-election, I entered formally on political life. The possession of a sense of proportion, of a standard of values, and of respect for the truth of words proved an inestimable aid to political judgment. So far as I have had a sense of proportion it has helped me to assess the personal equation of the individuals, distinguished and undistinguished, who form the House of Commons. So far as I have acquired a standard of values, it has helped me to estimate speech and the written word, and has saved me many a time from bowing to the idols of the market-place. So far as I have had respect for the truth of words, I have been helped to detect the fallacy and the equivocal phrase lurking in the tropical growth of oratory, and I have endeavoured to use a speech plain and unambiguous. I have also been able to enjoy with unmixed pleasure the choice of words and the phrasing of those speakers who model themselves on the classical tradition. Without a rival in that style I would place one of the most distinguished members of this Association, the Earl of Oxford. Amongst our great speakers we have those whose inspiration is obviously of Athens and those whose debt is to Rome. The Earl of Oxford is a Roman in his lucidity, in his phrasing, in his felicity. It requires but little stretch of imagination to picture him in the Courts delivering a defence, shall we say, _Pro Georgia_, or in its greatest day addressing the Senate in a speech which for its incisive and dexterous advocacy, its compact and pregnant sentences, would be the despair alike of the translator and the most experienced writer of Latin prose.

And let me add in a sentence, a political leader should know his _Knights_ by heart, for there is no profounder truth than that the sausage-seller lies ever on the flank of Cleon.

But over and above these qualities which delight the intellect, there is the more subtle, deeper something which touches the heart and soul. The voices that speak to us across the death and rebirth of nations touch every emotion of each succeeding generation in these later days, as they touched those who had ears to hear in Athens and in Rome; but they reach us with the added solemnity and pathos which cling to remembered sayings of those we have loved and lost. Every ultimate problem was theirs, as it is ours, and the more you open your soul to their appeal the more profound your pity for stumbling humanity, the more eager your effort to bind together the family of man rather than to loosen it. It is no blind chance that has led one of our greatest scholars to devote his life to the ideal of the League of Nations. Rather it is his desire to make his contribution to redeeming the failure of those very Greeks whom he, more perhaps than any living man, has helped this modern world to understand.

But we are linked together in the shallows no less than in the deeps. Need I quote _Diffugere nives_ to those whose first home was in the country? Is not everything in those lines?--the passing of winter and the feathering out of the trees, the assurance of every spring in every world that ever was? How many a holiday and home-coming are recalled by the words,

peregrine
Labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto.

Have we not the eternal youth of the world in _dulce ridentem_ and _gratus puell[oe] risus ab angulo_?--a score of words and we see our own childhood, our children's, and every generation from the beginning to the end of time. What memories such lines call up! They knock at the heart like the drum taps of the Fifth Symphony.

I have little more to add. If I have convinced you of my sincerity as a member of the Association, I am happy. I may repeat to you what I have said to my friends, that when my work in politics is completed I shall take down all my old companions from my shelves and work once more with dictionary and grammar. I have always kept the embers aglow that they may easily be blown into flame to warm my senile bones.

I cannot end without an allusion to the Anthology which my dear friend Mackail has done much to make known to English readers. I would remind you of the epitaph on the Athenians who fell at Plataea: the lines might have been written for our own youth which hastened out to Flanders that late summer, eleven years ago:

Ει το καλως Θνλσκειν αρετης μερος εστι μεγιστον
ημιν εκ παντων τουτ απεεινειμε Τυχη
Ελλαρδι γαρ σπευδοντες ελευθεριην περιθειναι
κεινεθ αγηραντω χρωμενοι ευλογιη.

We stand together with bowed heads in a sorrow and pride that reach across the centuries.

I remember many years ago standing on the terrace of a beautiful villa near Florence. It was a September evening, and the valley below was transfigured in the long horizontal rays of the declining sun. And then I heard a bell, such a bell as never was on land or sea, a bell whose every vibration found an echo in my innermost heart. I said to my hostess, "That is the most beautiful bell I have ever heard." "Yes," she replied, "it is an English bell." And so it was. For generations its sound had gone out over English fields, giving the hours of work and prayer to English folk from the tower of an English abbey, and then came the Reformation, and some wise Italian bought the bell whose work at home was done and sent it to the Valley of the Arno, where after four centuries it stirred the heart of a wandering Englishman and made him sick for home.

Thus the chance word of a Latin inscription, a line in the anthology, a phrase of Horace, or a "chorus ending of Euripides" plucks at the heart-strings and stirs a thousand memories, memories subconscious and ancestral.

SHAKESPEARE

AT THE CITY OF LONDON SCHOOL

13_th June_, 1924

I vividly remember a Prime Minister, no less a man than Mr. Gladstone, coming down to my school. Politically opposed to him as I was, I waited eagerly for the message. Just before Mr. Gladstone's visit I had had a difference of opinion with my Headmaster, and relations were somewhat strained. When Mr. Gladstone opened with the words "Your admirable Headmaster," I felt that the Prime Minister was so out of touch with the whole of the life I was leading that I never listened to another word.

You who are here are entering into a blessed heritage that is the peculiar right of our own people. I am proud to be on the platform with Sir Sidney Lee, against whose shield all the iconoclasts of the world break their spears. Some wish to tear the laurels from Shakespeare's brow to place them on the brow of Bacon; others say that _Wuthering Heights_ was not written by Emily Brontë: and some even say that Mr. Lloyd George did not offer ninepence for fourpence. Long may their spears be broken!

I understand that Shakespeare is a compulsory subject at the School: do not rush to the conclusion that a man is any the worse for being a compulsory subject. When I was a boy I knew the _Odes_ of Horace backwards and forwards, and when I came to manhood year by year those odes came knocking at the door of my heart at the most unexpected times and places. So, even if you do not realise it now, the time will come when you will be thankful that you were steeped in Shakespeare as boys. In him we not only have, as Sir Gerald Du Maurier said here not long ago, perhaps the greatest man the world has ever seen, but one who had a profound knowledge of human nature and of the world. Shakespeare was one of those few poets in whom we find the magic which comes straight from heaven, and which is the prerogative of the very greatest: such magic as we find in the poetry of Keats, in the first scene of the last act of _The Merchant of Venice_, and throughout the sonnets.

Shakespeare's plays, no matter of what country he may be writing, are redolent of our own soil and of our own country people. The habit of thought and the outlook of Shakespeare's country people and of those wise men, Shakespeare's fools, may be found to-day in our rural counties. It is no mere coincidence that the School's "Beaufoy Day" was originally 23rd April, for besides being Shakespeare's birthday, it was St. George's Day. That brings us back to England.

The City of London is famed for so many things that people sometimes fail to realise what she has done for the education of our country people. Your School is the last of the great foundations for sending trained men into the world that is left within the boundaries of the city. One by one they have gone--Christ's Hospital, the Charterhouse, the Merchant Taylors'. I hope the City of London School will always remain as a witness to the great light that has burned throughout the ages in this great city.

You have a tremendous responsibility on your shoulders. Not all the tradition, not all the great men who have gone before, can keep our country as she should be kept, unless in each generation are found the men who will take the torch from the generation that is passing, keep it bright and hand it on.

To-day there are many things we have to struggle against in England, but the greatest is the loss of the men from the ages of twenty-six or twenty-seven to forty, the flower of the nation's early manhood that lies in France and Belgium. Not only have we lost the benefit of the work they might be doing to-day, but the natural leaders of the young men coming along are the school generations immediately preceding them, and the generations coming to manhood now are deprived of that natural leadership of the elder brothers who were at school about a decade before. The burden and the responsibility falls heavier, therefore, on those who have just come to manhood and on those about to do so. Never has the need of the country and of the world for men trained as you are being trained, been so great. When you come out into the larger world, though you may find the struggle harder than it has ever been, yet there is a warm welcome awaiting you from those who to-day are bearing the burden and the heat. You will find, too, a world that has never been more in need of the service that can be given by men with trained minds and clean, sound bodies.

BYRON

AT THE BYRON CENTENARY LUNCHEON

29_th April_, 1924

It is very difficult during a man's lifetime, or in the years immediately succeeding his death, to make any just estimate of his fame. The Reverend John Todd, who wrote a _Students' Guide_ shortly after Byron's death, told his students to beware of bad books, and included Byron's works and Walter Scott's together. As was his duty, he had read those books, and was convinced that Byron's works would quickly pass from notice and be exiled from the shelves of virtuous men. That is a contribution of literary taste and puritanism from the United States.

About the same year a young critic wrote of the peculiar strength evolved by Byron, a man who gave the world a better heart and a new pulse. That was Alfred Tennyson, who at the age of twenty-five put his finger on one of the causes why Byron's Centenary is being celebrated to-day.

What magic is it that brings people together a hundred years after the death of a famous man? The man who finds new pulses in the world is the man who will enjoy immortality. Byron was, if anything, a sower of new seed that had a great germinal force. It is difficult to realise what that force was when it first appeared, unless we can put ourselves in the place of the men who read his first poems. At the time the first cantos of _Childe Harold_ appeared the Continent for nearly a generation had been a sealed book to travellers, owing to the European wars; the Mediterranean, now known to almost everyone in England, was practically an unknown sea; and too often those who had escaped abroad went with no eyes to see. Byron found the eyes of the people sealed, and opened them, and for that reason the gratitude of the nation should be given to him. The spirit at home and in Europe was waiting for such a revelation as Byron had for it. In the epoch which immediately followed he pushed the Romantic movement begun by Scott with a strength and power which Scott himself could not achieve, and no one was quicker to recognise the genius of the younger man than that great-hearted poet himself. The spirit existing both at home and in Europe at, and after, the end of the Napoleonic War was the spirit that was waiting, all unconsciously, for the revelation that Byron had for it. It wanted, perhaps, without knowing it, force, strength and movement, and those things Byron gave as they had never been given before.

These things alone might not have made his name to-day what it was in his lifetime, but there was added the personality of which his contemporaries told, the loss of which made Scott say, "It is as if the sun had gone out."

The side of Byron which impresses me most is that of the great and persistent workman in his high profession of literature. He worked as an artist must work if he is to leave his mark on coming generations. That is the part of his life which he kept to himself as the holiest and best to him, and he knew, as great artists do, the worth of his own work.

Beyond all men Byron was happy in his death. I could not help thinking as I walked to this commemoration what a different history it might have been, what a different celebration might have been held in after years, if Byron had lived to return from Missolonghi. But in his death he established his immortality, and words not to be lightly used of any man might be used of him:

"If to die nobly be the chief part of excellence, to us of all men fortune gave this lot, for, hastening to set a crown of freedom upon Hellas, we lie possessed of praise that grows not old."

It is praise, which grows not old, for a man who grows not old, that is his immortality, and it is that immortality we are here to salute.

W. H. HUDSON

AT THE UNVEILING OF THE HUDSON MEMORIAL IN
HYDE PARK

19_th May_, 1925

We are gathered together this May morning to honour a rare and remarkable spirit. It is more than eighty years ago that Hudson was born in a land where, to use his own words, he heard "the little yellow finches in thousands amid the millions of pink peach blossoms, pouring out wonderful music against the blue sky." Yet just as those who grow older feel increasingly the pull of that earth from whence they are sprung--and to none is that pull stronger than to those who have had the joy to be raised in the red earth of England--so he felt the pull of that soil of Devonshire whence his forefathers had come.

Fifty years ago he landed in England, unknown, unheralded, unadvertised, and the greater part of those years were years of infinite struggle and toil. There is one thing which is not generally known, and which is a tribute rare in itself and significant of that high sense of honour and pride which was his. Early in the century the Civil List did honour to itself by giving him one of those small pensions which are within its competence. Then, a few years ago, when his wife died and his meagre income was minutely supplemented, he surrendered that pension at his own desire and in spite of the protests of those administering it, because he felt he could do without it and that, infinitesimal as the relief would be, he did not wish to let another grain of sand add to the weight of the already overburdened taxpayers of the country.

It has been a frequent experience in our history for Englishmen and Scotsmen to go out into the wilds of the earth and to come back and tell us what strange things they have seen; but Hudson came from the ends of the earth and rediscovered to the people, many of whom even if they had eyes saw not, and if they had ears heard not, something of the beauty of their own country. He it was who made familiar to thousands the hidden beauties of our southern counties. He taught Londoners who had never heard of them the names of places like Whitesheet Hill, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe and Fonthill Bishop--names of beauty and romance which always fill me with profound gratitude that the names of flowers, of villages, of stars and birds, were given in those dark centuries, long before our people were educated and had the advantage of cheap literature and a popular Press.

There were a few things which raised passion in Hudson: one certainly was the felling of the big elms in Kensington Gardens and the destruction of the Rookery; another was the sight of people whose palates could only be tickled by larks' or plovers' eggs; and another was the sight of ladies who had ransacked the hidden corners of the earth to decorate their hats. I think that to-day we are doing national penance for the sins we have committed in the past, and are resolving so far as we can to abstain from offence in the future.

It is not for me to say anything of Hudson as a writer, but I would like to remind you of Joseph Conrad's remark: "One can't tell how this fellow gets his effects; he writes as the grass grows." We cannot tell how anyone in the finest literature gets his effects, but we thank God for the effect.

There was one thing which bored Hudson, and that was politics, but it is only fair to remember the impartiality of Hudson's admiration for politicians. There were only two he could tolerate: one was a Liberal, Lord Grey, and the other a Tory, Lord Banbury. He was attached to them for obvious reasons: to Lord Grey for his love of nature and to Lord Banbury for his hatred of cruelty to living creatures.

In making this sanctuary a memorial to Hudson, we are doing something that would have touched his heart. The world never needed sanctuaries more than it does to-day. In old days it was comparatively easy for a man to run away and hide himself for a time in the desert or the monastery, but the spread of civilization has rendered that impossible. Mr. Cunninghame-Graham has spoken of St. Francis feeding the birds, but to-day St. Francis would be snapshotted, birds and all, to form an exclusive picture the next morning. There are three classes which need sanctuary more than others: birds, wild flowers and Prime Ministers. Prime Ministers want some place where they will not be snapshotted, where they can be private, and where they can perch for a moment on a fence and look at the landscape without being "shooed" off. Thanks to Lord Lee, I have my sanctuary at Chequers, and therefore I feel it incumbent upon me to be here to-day to open this sanctuary for my fellow-sufferers who find London at times a little crowded and a little lacking in that privacy they require for their best development.

There is another reason why we are beginning to feel the necessity for something of this kind. Those of us who love the country and country things feel in our bones the urbanisation of our land and the need that something should be done to preserve our birds and our flowers. It behoves us all to act because of that love which exists in English people wherever they may be found, the love and craving for beauty which they can rarely see, rarely know, and rarely realise in their own lives. We ought to do everything we can to foster that spirit, and it is in the belief that this day we are helping to draw people's attention to bird life that I rejoice to be allowed to unveil this memorial.

ART

DINNER OF THE ARTISTS' GENERAL BENEVOLENT
INSTITUTION

6_th May_, 1925

On an occasion such as this I recall my boyhood days, when some of my excitements consisted in coming to London from Worcestershire to visit my uncle, Sir Edward Poynter, who then lived in Wood Lane. It was a little old-fashioned country house with a garden, where now there is the power-station of an electric light company, and opposite, where the White City stands, were open fields. The friendship which I enjoyed with my uncle was one which lasted from the earliest days I can remember to the day of his death. I made my first acquaintance with Italy as a young man in his company.

It is strange and curious to look back on those days, and to remember that atmosphere of art and culture, of wit and humour, and to recognise what one owes to it. One learns, in having the privilege in youth of mixing with men like that, and their friends, the inestimable value of such an association for after life, even for one who has taken a far different career, and who, owing to a strange concatenation of circumstances, finds himself to-day Prime Minister. I learnt there, all unconsciously, the value of work. The men I am thinking of were workmen, first and foremost. They were men who worked at what they loved and who felt that it was due to the art they loved to give it every power that God had given them. If, at any time, they went for holidays they painted all the time, because they liked it. That is the secret of good work, and the secret, incidentally, of happiness. They would never tolerate scamped work. Burne-Jones, a keener critic of himself than any of his outside critics were, knew perfectly well where his own defects lay, and he worked for years in middle life to master that draughtsmanship that he had not learnt as a young man, because his decision to become an artist was only taken after he had left Oxford. All men who love their craft, and who believe in it and live for it, are their own best critics. I learnt from this man, in addition to the value of work, a complete indifference to all criticism, except that which combines the two essential gifts of sincerity and truth. I also learnt from the quality of those men and their friends, and from the conversations I unconsciously heard, to form my own standards of value in after life, rather than to attribute brilliancy, as I am so often asked to do in London, to something that I know is in itself essentially second-rate. I say these things to explain why I am present on this occasion. I know that if any relations of mine, to whom I have referred, had happened to die before they had achieved fame and reputation, their widows and orphans would have been dependent upon the funds of this institution (the Artists' General Benevolent Institution) for their livelihood. Therefore, I feel that I owe it to the memory of those I loved, who have played so large a part in my own spiritual and mental development, to help in however small a degree by saying something in aid of this great charity.

Art, in popular estimation, is going up in the world and politicians are going down; but the time was, and not so long ago, when if a man died who had been an artist, unless he had the good fortune to be a baronet and a millionaire, the newspapers always said, "The deceased, much against his family's wishes, became an artist." At that time it was thought a very desirable thing to be a statesman. I am not sure that to-day in the obituary notices you may not read that the deceased, much against his family's wishes, had embraced politics as a career.

I would like to emphasise the absolute necessity of the artist giving his whole time to concentration on his work, just as in political life a man has to devote his whole mind and strength to the almost superhuman task which is imposed upon him, and to confine his attention strictly to his work, lest the quality of that work should suffer.

The present are difficult times for those who try to live by the profession of art of any kind. They are difficult because times are bad. There is not a great deal of money about in this country, and we are not a people who naturally spend money on the encouragement of art if we can spend it on anything else. Those who have the most money, millionaires, not unnaturally are in the hands of the dealers.

One of the great difficulties always seems to me, as an outsider knowing nothing of these matters, to be that there has been worked up an entirely fictitious value in the pictures of the dead. I hope this may arise from a high motive; from a feeling that having let many artists and poets in the past starve in their lifetime, we should allow them to provide a living for anyone who can make it out of them. When a very rich man wants to invest money in pictures, he wants to invest it in something that will not lose its value, and as long as the dealer keeps up the value of the old masters he knows it is safe. But if he wants to buy a modern work of art he has to exercise his own judgment, and if his judgment is wrong he loses his money. So the artist to-day, however good he may be, has everything militating against him. There may be prizes from a worldly point of view for the few, but in these days there must be, financially, only too many failures; though whether they fail or succeed they have a real pleasure in the actual performance of their work. Taking artists as a whole, whether they have been what the world calls successful, or not, they are a very happy confraternity. The artist and the poet can, and often do, solace themselves with the thought that if the people of this generation do not appreciate their work, they may yet be painting or writing for generations to come, and the thought of recognition by posterity, provided that the wolf is kept from the door, is in itself a great comfort and strength.

ARTISTS AND POLITICIANS

AT THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY

2_nd May_, 1925

I should like, if I may, on behalf of my colleagues who are here to-night, to congratulate you, Mr. President, on your election to the great office which you hold, and to express our sympathy with the Academy in the loss they have sustained in the death of Mr. John Sargent--a great man, as well as a great artist. His memory will be cherished through his paintings, and his art will be a prized possession of posterity. And, Sir, I should like to congratulate you on this singular achievement in getting together an assembly of such distinction in London on a Saturday night. I remember trying to secure an eminent Englishman as a much-desired trustee of the National Gallery. He was a master of English and a scholar, and so he was able to express himself as I could not when he declined that great honour. He wrote to me: "No; they have a damnable habit of holding their meetings on a Saturday."

Now I understand these are friendly gatherings at which confidences may be given and exchanged, and I should like to tell you something of the difficulties of a Prime Minister's life. A Prime Minister has to form a Cabinet. I reflected when I was making mine that I should have to appear to-night at Burlington House, and I thought the greatest compliment I could pay the Academy would be to include, if possible, a painter in the Cabinet. I thought I would choose someone who could paint with a broad brush, and I regret extremely that he, at the last moment, had to cancel his engagement here to-night. I need hardly say I refer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. When I had secured my artist, the question was where to put him. I at once decided that the right place for him was where he would have problems to study of currency and exchange, and where he would be dealing with mathematics. Many of my critics were hostile, but they were not astonished. If they had known their Plato they would have known at once why I asked him to go to the Exchequer. Many here will remember what Plato said to the Delians. When the oracle set a problem, Plato said: "It must be supposed not that the god specially wished this problem solved, but that he would have the Greeks desist from war and wickedness and cultivate the Muses, so that, their passions being assuaged by philosophy and mathematics, they might live in innocent and mutually helpful intercourse with one another." It is an extraordinary thing how the solution of many of our difficulties was really found many years ago.

Now I said there were many points of resemblance between your careers and ours. Neither artists nor politicians can by any figure of speech be said to belong to organised labour. Labour, yes; organised, no. What power have we to strike? If every artist in this country laid down his brush to-night, would a ripple pass over the country? If I laid down my brush to-night, are there not fifty men who would be ready to take it up? But then, on the other hand, you cannot be nationalised, and neither can we. It is sometimes to your advantage, and sometimes the advantage rests with us. Now take criticism. We both either suffer or enjoy criticism. There I think the advantage is with us. We, if we think fit, can answer back. These canvases on the wall have to take it in contemptuous silence. Your instruments by which you work so well are dumb--pencils and paints. Ours are neither dumb nor inert. I often think that we rather resemble Alice in Wonderland, who tried to play croquet with a flamingo instead of a mallet.

Then, again, with both of us, to achieve success it is necessary to mix our colours, so as to produce a harmonious whole. But your colours have an advantage over those which are mixed on our palette. In the language of the trade, your colours are fast; ours are not so necessarily. You mix your colours to form a harmonious result, but it may be after four or five years some of the colours, which you thought the most beautiful, have faded and have been unable to stand the bright light of day, and those which you thought mixed well in the general scheme have come up hard and crude and dominate the whole picture. We politicians are, and must of necessity be, impressionists--impressionists, because we want to catch the public eye, and we hope that we can make our meaning clear. We also trust--my colleagues and I--that people will not examine our workmanship too closely, lest they find defects in it which are not visible at a distance. But there is one thing in which you have a great advantage. If when you complete a piece of work you do not like it, you can put your boot through it. With us the boot is on the other leg.

I have noticed sometimes that advice is given to the artists of this country to make a clean sweep of the Academy. It is always a revolutionary people who think a clean sweep must result in something which will give keen satisfaction. While, in the last four years, the Academy has remained without great change, we have made a clean sweep of three Governments, and we have a fourth in--and yet people are not satisfied. So may there not be something said even for keeping an Academy or keeping a Government?

There is one thing that we do have in common. No man in politics can ever hope to achieve his desire--he can never accomplish the veriest fragment of what he would will to do. In the same way, in the breast of every artist who is an artist--and it is not everyone who uses a brush who is an artist--there is a secret known only to himself and spoken of to none--that ideal which he is ever seeking and ever following up, and never in this world captures. It is that which drives men on to their best and finest work. I doubt if any real artist has ever satisfied himself. Occasionally, there comes what Kipling has called the "magic," whether it be in poetry, in prose, or in art, before which the voice of criticism is dumb--the art that speaks straight to the soul of the world. Few of us can hope to achieve that, and I think perhaps if I were to choose any words with which to conclude, I would choose those that may be taken either for your work or for ours--the words that Browning put into the mouth of Andrea del Sarto:

I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame
Or their praise either.

_ON EDUCATION_

SELF-EDUCATION

AT BIRKBECK COLLEGE

20_th March_, 1924

The faith that can remove mountains was the faith of the pioneers of Birkbeck College, and some of them lived to see the College as we know it to-day--a solid, stable and permanent institution. It is a great and triumphant story of which you may well be proud. But I think that it would be useful to remember that if you wished to understand history and sympathise with the founder and pioneers of the College, you must not make the fatal mistake of reading our history to-day, or of a hundred years ago, in the light of the present time; you must try to throw yourselves back a century, and consider a few of the ways in which the training you have had may help you in your after life.

A hundred years ago popular education, so far as any one thought of it, was regarded as a dangerous explosive. Those times have passed. A hundred years ago London was a comparatively small city compared with the one we know. There were no police. The parish constables were not allowed to go beyond the confines of their own parishes, and the night watchman kept the peace of the city. Old London Bridge was still in existence. Waterloo Bridge had only just been built. Gas had only just been introduced into the streets when the first students came to the College. Contrast the position of the Press to-day with what it was in those days. At that time there was a bye-law under which no man who contributed to the Press was eligible to be called to the Bar, and the Lord Chancellor of the day caused great consternation and indignation amongst his friends by asking the editor of the _Times_ to dine with him. To-day, which of us would not feel proud if we were asked to dine with a newspaper proprietor?

Again, to touch upon another aspect of life, the Elizabethan Poor Law was still the law of the land. Of the million and a quarter people in London at that time one in every eight was in receipt of Poor Law relief.

But hardly ever in the history of our country, or of any other country, was there a more wonderful and brilliant period in the literature of England than in and around the years when the College was founded. It shows that, although in many ways the country was what the people of to-day would call backward and unprogressive, yet a literary movement was going on which would be a glory to any country for all time. I need only name Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Byron (who died in 1824, within two years of Keats and Shelley), Carlyle, Tennyson, John Henry Newman (one of the greatest masters of English prose), Thackeray, Browning and Dickens. There was a galaxy of talent of the highest order in a literature that stands second to none in the world, and it was a great thing that the College took its origin from such a time. No country can compare with our own in the literature of that period, and yet at that time there was Goethe in Germany, while Dumas had just gone to Paris and was to present in the succeeding year his first play. That amazing efflorescence in literature was accompanied, as sometimes it is, by an efflorescence in art and music.

I have always firmly held that there is no race with more ability latent than our own, or with a higher aptitude for mechanical genius. When the College was founded, Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton, all sons of working men, were inventing the machines which brought in the cotton industry. I mention these names to show the stuff of which our people are made, and how that stuff is worth training and educating. It would be a very interesting subject, for anyone who cared to explore it, to see how many of the mechanical inventions which are light-heartedly attributed to Americans are really the product of British brains, whether they were British brains which have gone to work in that country, or the brains of children of British parents who have gone there. But, having regard to the foundation of this College and the men who went to it in its early days, it is a wonderful thing to reflect that practically the Industrial Revolution, for good or evil, was the work very largely of six or seven men who sprang from the ranks of the people, with no advantages such as you have had; and that they were men who changed the face of the country and the habits of the lives of the people.

It is probably true that the great number of men who sacrificed their time and their leisure to work and study did so to help themselves to get on in life. But that was not the fundamental reason: there lay behind it the desire of knowledge for its own sake, the will to force a way through those doors that lead to a kingdom of beauty, literature and art.

I am a fair sample myself of the evening student. Many people tried to educate me, but the reaction was not always successful. A great part of my education took place after I had gone into business, on railway journeys and at odd moments, and for some years, when I was working all day, I would read nearly every night. This was the education, I feel, that did me most good. I learned that all of us have to work hard for our living. Some may do work they enjoy; some may not. Then there comes a time when one feels that one is no use, and that the work itself is difficult and sordid. It is at these times that we may thank God for what we have learned in any school which will enable us to get away from our surroundings into an inner secret chamber. From this we may go with renewed strength to any work that is toward.

There are many definitions of education. The first thing is to be master of our own job; but to be educated we must know enough of the other man's job to be able to understand the part he is playing in life, and to play our own part in sympathy with him. We have also to learn to play our part as members of the commonwealth, or, in other words, to have humanity, by which I mean the knowledge of the things that pertain to humanity, of the way to go about among our fellows, ready to help and to sympathise with them. Do not go through life as a perpetual blister.

If it be not heresy to say so, do not pay too much attention to examinations. Do not be afflicted with pride of intellect. In my view, pride of intellect is more vulgar that the pride of the _nouveau riche_ in his wealth, for the simple reason that the _nouveau riche_ has made his own money, whereas your intellect is the gift of God. You may polish it up and get the best out of it, but for the instrument you are less responsible than any man.

Just as I would advise no man to become a political leader--although political leaders are necessary--so I would strongly advise no man to become merely a specialist. Always have other interests which will keep you in touch with your fellow-men and women. There is no real republicanism except that of literature. If I find a human face light up at some quotation which everyone ought to know, that man, be he duke or dustman, is my brother. That is the bond of literature. Study it, the glorious literature of the first country in the world--your own.

POLITICAL EDUCATION

AT THE PHILIP STOTT COLLEGE

27_th September_, 1923

Amidst all the multifarious duties that fall to my lot, some pleasant and some less pleasant, you have combined to give me to-day a really happy afternoon's outing. I have the greatest admiration, Sir Philip, for this great work upon which you have embarked. It is the grain of mustard seed which will become a great tree that may overshadow the earth, and I am proud to meet so many of those who are fired with the same enthusiasm that you have and that I have for education of the kind that you provide here. It is a great privilege to be allowed to speak to you for a few minutes on that subject. There are few movements in this country in my view that augur better for the future, or that in themselves bear a higher and truer tribute to the best that is in our nature than the great, voluntary efforts that are being made in this country for adult education; and if there be anyone here who may at times feel a passing regret for the closing of the great houses of England, it must be an immense consolation to see from the ashes of the past springing up a new and hopeful life like this within their walls. That can do nothing but good for the men who come here, and for the country of which they are a part.