An old castle and other essays

Front matter

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Preface

Seldom is it the teacher's lot to have any of his work perpetuated in lasting literary form. But Professor Winchester's students will remember how the work in the classroom led up to finished summary lectures. They developed out of the rich autumn mould of his acquisitions, year after year,^ and showed us best of all how thorough and thoughtful study had enabled him to "see into the life of things." In these talks to students lay the origins of the public lectures which charmed and enlightened a far more widely ranging audience. Even the latter, Professor Winchester rarely published. Therefore certain typical examples, representative both of his power as a teacher and his appeal as a lecturer, it has now seemed best to give to the world. "Art," once wrote their author, "is the only way the individual has of perpetuating his personality." In this way these papers are not alone of intrinsic value but fitly memorial.

Professor Winchester admirably illustrated his own ideal of a critic,^ — one who could "quicken your feeling for what is essential and characteristic in an author's work." Hundreds can testify to the success with which he did this in the lecture-room or through the printed page. The range of these essays indicates in some measure the catholicity of his taste and the scope of his powers of literary appreciation. He was always, I think, especially interested in the man behind the book. Interest in character and in the work as an index to character was what led him into a method of criticism pronouncedly biographical. It was because he

* The actual writing of them out Professor Winchester often did very quickly; he told the editor that the Shakespeare lecture he thought his best, the Antony and Cleopatra, was dashed off at one sitting of a single aftervlii PREFACE

brought so broad and deep and wise an experience of life to his reading that he found so much there. Literature in turn increased his own understanding of human nature, and he made it the means of conveying that knowledge to others. Vivid and dear memories flash into the minds of many of us as we read these pages. We see that dignified figure come quietly into the crowded lecture-hall to make Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Burns live for us as never before. Upon all of us in some way this man made an indelible impression. I myself shall never forget Professor Winchester's reading and interpretation of the Ode to Duty. He brought out the impressiveness of the truth it teaches with such hushing conviction. Another friend spoke of the way in which he handled his books, which was characteristic, and suggestive of his bearing toward literature in the large. For, being one of the most genuinely modest of men, — judicial as was his criticism, — he always approached great works of literature with a very winning kind of respect. The loving way in which he taught literature, in itself, opened many a man's eyes. As has been well said, "he taught his students to think while feeling, and to feel while thinking, and he taught them to love literature while teaching them to know it." And whatever his audience, he always made the individuals that composed it feel that they were one with him in knowledge, insight, and appreciation. Or perhaps our fondest memory may be of Professor Winchester in the seminar where his way of welcoming every man's point of view, and yet bringing all the wandering question and comment round to some definite conclusion in the end was a marvel of generalship in teaching. And how we came to watch for the glint of humor in his eye ! — sign of a gift that kept his view of life wholesome, and enlivened many a page as well as many an hour. Or yet again we may best remember him as he conducted morning prayers at chapel, for religion was deep and essential in the man. He had the poet's love for beauty, and a sunniness of outlook upon life, but he had the poet's aspiration as well; he felt with distinguishing force "how near to good

PREFACE ix

is what is fair"; his predilection for Milton in Contus, for Wordsworth, Ruskin, Browning, was evidence of a trait in himself which made the desire of beauty lead to spiritual things.

More friends than any but the editor can realize have materially contributed toward the bringing out of this book. Of course it would never have been at all but for the generous devotion of her who was always nearest and dearest to him. We are especially fortunate in having the Introduction written by one whose peculiarly rich experience of life and fine cultural sense enabled him to place Professor Winchester among critics of literature, the more justly for being free of the bias of personal acquaintance. And collaboration has been far-reaching. It has extended all the way from former students who have helped in selection, colleagues, or professors in other colleges, who have given us the benefit of their advice or knowledge or service in proof-reading, even to utter strangers who have taken upon themselves irksome tasks merely out of sympathy with our endeavor. Professor Winchester's was just the spirit to appreciate such ministration of friendliness, and the book stands as witness to the generous aid and kindly co-operation of all. Let us inscribe it as it thus fitly goes forth fostered by manifold friendship :

To all those who were his students

in any sort

and are ever his friends.

Louis Bliss Gillet. 22 February, 1922.

NOTE

All the papers here collected are now printed for the first time except those on Ruskin, Clough, and Bronson Alcott. The latter are reprinted through the courtesy of the Methodist Review, where they appeared in the numbers for March 1900, September 1906, and July 19 19, respectively. No manuscript has been found of Professor Winchester's earliest and repeatedly called for ^ lecture, An Evening in London a Hundred Years Ago. Fewer examples of his lectures on the writers between 1789 and 1832 have been included, though Memories of the English Lakes was among the most popular, because of his books dealing with this period, Wordsworth: How to Know Him, and A Group of English Essayists. A Bibliography of nearly all his published writings will be found in the Memorial issued by Wesleyan University in 1921, the year following his death. Of course none of the following papers, except the three previously printed, received the benefit of Professor Winchester's revision for publication. But they are perhaps as interesting in their present state since, being in practically the form in which they were delivered, they show in what pure English and in what a finished style it was natural for their author to speak. The vignette on the title-page is a miniature reproduction of an old crayon drawing of Ludlow Castle by Mrs. Winchester, — one of a set which in the early days illustrated, and, as Professor Winchester was fond of telling his friends, greatly increased the popularity of his lecture. The texts of the Cambridge Editions published by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. have been used for the longer quotations from the poets. A British custom of using

* Professor Winchester told the editor in 1908 that he supposed he had delivered the companion lecture, An Old Castle, three hundred times.

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single quotation marks to indicate inexact or slightly appropriated quotations has been followed; and words and phrases that Professor Winchester in lecturing inserted for any reason into quoted texts are set off in brackets. The footnotes, unless signed by initials in brackets, are the author's own.

L. B. G.

Introduction

I am told that our Oxford Professor of English Literature, Sir Walter Raleigh, once said: "Of all the men I have met in America the most interesting was a man by the name of Winchester, from a place I never heard of called Wesleyan." I too had never heard of Winchester or Wesleyan till I was introduced to both through a friend during my first visit to America in 1920, about a month after Winchester's death.

"Interesting" is not the first epithet we generally apply to scholars or dons. Few teachers make even their teaching interesting. At all events, after the customary years in an English Public School and the greatest of our Universities, I remember only one who taught me anything interesting — anything vital, anything that touched my life. I suppose it is its effect upon life that is the test of teaching, and that is why the teacher is so much more important than the thing taught that the subject does not really matter in comparison. It is because so few Professors and dons have this influence upon life, or have even much intimacy with life, that so few are called interesting.

With distant but reverent admiration I think of the verbal scholar, the emendator of classic texts, the authority upon minute particles of speech, like the honoured corpse at the Grammarian's Funeral, of whom it was written,

This man decided not to Live but Know.

By all means let us rejoice at assisting in a grammarian's funeral — the elevated funeral upon the mountain top. But for interest we must go to life — the life common to all who pass from darkness into darkness through this dimly torchlit world.

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It might be thought an easy matter to make the teaching of literature interesting; for literature is closely connected with life; more closely than language, and quite as closely as history. Yet I believe English literature to be just the most difficult of all subjects to teach. So far as merely getting knowledge into the pupils' heads goes, it is far easier to make them learn Euclid or arithmetic or the Greek verbs. About all literature there is something intangible and indefinite as compared with other studies like mathematics or physical science ; and to an English-speaking student English literature appears so simple that it may be taken as a kind of relaxation, but I am old-fashioned and wise enough to know that good teaching draws a very sharp line between work and play. Besides, the teaching of most literature is inextricably complicated by an element which lurks in it as in all the arts, and can never be taught at all — the incalculable element of beauty. Everything else can be taught up to a certain point, either by sympathetic understanding or by the ancient method of cruelty. But no power on earth or in heaven can drive the perception of beauty into a head which has it not.

I once heard a lecturer begin by calling upon his audience "to join him in culling a few choice and fj-agrant flowers from the Shakespearian fields." Refusing to cull, I heard no more; for even to those who know what beauty is, a selection of beauties grows as tedious as a succession of anecdotes or jokes. If you get hold of a whole volume of Punch, you may think you are going to have a really good time, but within ten minutes you are bored so stiff that you long for Paradise Lost or the Differential Calculus or anything that is no joke. In the same way we soon sicken of special beauties that critics point out for our admiration, as Swinburne, for instance, sometimes did in his literary rhapsodies. That was not Professor Winchester's way. He presents us with no tempting tit-bits. He culls no pretty flowers. He does not pick the phrase, but leaves us to find it where it grew. Literature to him was no

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collection of labeled specimens, but a living thing, bounteous as nature. In an address of 19 19, he truly said (and in certain precious circles it would require some courage to say it), — "No really good literature was ever born of merely aesthetic impulse."

Some literary critics yield to another temptation — the temptation of running off into paradoxes and whimsies because the highroad of judgment seems so tame and welltrodden. One wasted part of genius so valuable to mankind in proving that the Odyssey was written by a girl, as though that mattered; another that Dante's Beatrice was a species of theology; another that Shakespeare wrote the Sonnets for fun or hire. A good many have wasted time (which, certainly, can have been of little value) in demonstrating that Bacon was Shakespeare, and a large number have set out to prove that one great writer is greater than another great writer, as though they could weigh genius by Apothecaries' Weight. From all these vagaries and mare's-nesting excursions Winchester was mercifully preserved by a certain "horse sense." Even Matthew Arnold was hardly a saner critic. He had no shrinking fear of sanity, no pernickety hesitation in permitting his judgment to coincide with the judgment of the "Orbis Terrarum." There are points in which I do not agree with him. I think he is inclined to insist too much upon the definitely moral teaching of great literature. In speaking of Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, I should not myself describe their relation as "sin." Their passion was too superb, their tragedy too overwhelming for the pulpit word. Again, I think Winchester too easily forgives Henry V for his callous betrayal of Falstaff, to me the greatest of all Shakespeare's creations. I do not agree that As You Like It is the best of the comedies. I doubt if it is a good acting comedy at all, though the charm of its language and of the characters enthralls us. Still less do I agree that Sterne is "sentimentaHsm incarnate." But these are small and possibly private objections. Almost without exception, xvi INTRODUCTION

Winchester keeps the broad highway of judgment. "Securus judicat." It is proverbially difficult to give a personal and individual touch to widely accepted themes. "Difficile est proprie communia dicere."

Let us take two examples of his criticism to illustrate both his common sense and his individuality. It is obvious from all his work that he felt the keenest delight in the Elizabethan and nineteenth century poets. In them he found the emotion and the beauty of expression that he most required in literature. Yet, when we are confronted with the modern school which regards imagery alone as constituting poetry, and in reading a poet takes no account of the intention, design, or "architecture" of the poem, but marks only the lines of images, similes, metaphors, or picturesque words, how encouraging it is for us who believe that these beautiful things should be but the ornaments and decorations of a great structure to come upon such a passage as this:

For my part, I should certainly prefer the poetry of the early nineteenth century to the poetry of the early eighteenth century; and yet, in these days when so much stress is laid upon the picturesque, the suggestive, or even the mere musical functions of poetry, — ^when Mr. Addington Symonds thinks Shelley has realized the miracle of "making words altogether detached from any meaning the substance of a new ethereal music," — I say it is not altogether unpleasant to take up this old-fashioned verse whose first charm is clear and pithy meaning. And the matter of which this poetry is made up, if it be neither novel nor moving, has at least that first mark of classic literature, universality.

And when critics plague us with ecstasy over the beauties of "poetic prose," or try to carry us away upon the glory of rolling periods and sounding rhetoric, what a city of refuge from them we may find in this passage about prose style in the essay upon my own favorite writer, Jonathan Swift:

Language to Swift was simply the vehicle of thought. No English writing better combines the three virtues of clearness, simplicity, vigor. "Proper words in proper places" is his curt definition

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of style. Admiration for style apart from the meaning beneath it he would have considered the mark of mere literary preciosity, — as it usually is. It is true indeed that the greatest masters of modern prose have at their command felicities of arrangement and cadence, and a subtle use of the suggestive power of words, by means of which they can convey their thought not only with all its flexures of meaning but with all its delicate nimbus of emotion. But Swift needed no such niceties, for there was no subtlety or delicacy in his nature. Literary elaboration always seemed to him to imply artifice or pedantry.

This quiet good sense, as solid and assured as Johnson's own, lies at the foundation of Winchester's excellence as a critic. But, above that, rose his fine sympathy with noble emotion, and that incommunicable sense of beauty of which we spoke. He possessed by birth, and he retained, a passionate love of the best literature; and I think it must be hard to retain such a passion for the subject that a man teaches. Literature to him was part of life, or rather it was life itself as viewed in human thought. It was the description and interpretation, often the inspiration, of life. As he said in his speech at the dinner given in his honor less than a year before he died :

Literature is the best thought that has been touched and vitalized with emotion and uttered in a manner of lasting charm. Thus defined, literature is obviously the best interpreter of life — the life of the individual man and the life of historical periods. For the temper of a man depends not merely nor principally upon what he thinks, but upon what he feels; the character of an age depends not merely upon its permanent intellectual qualities, but upon its dominant tone of feeling. It is not too much to say that if we wish to know any life outside the little circle of our own personal acquaintance, we must know it largely through books.

For literature under this definition his love, as I said, remained unshaken, in spite of all the weariness and repetition Implied In a Professor's labor. His appreciation was inspired by an Innate sense of beauty, and guided by an Imperturbable sanity. By his historic Imagination, as seen in Jn Old Castle, he was able to connect the literature of any age with its contemporary world, and by his wide xviii INTRODUCTION

tolerance, in matters of ordinary behavior as well as in questions of literary taste (as seen in his essays upon Swift and Burns), he escaped the snares of seclusiveness and preciosity. But, above all, it was his insistance upon the unity of life with literature that gave his writing and his teaching their finest value. For these reasons I can well understand what a radiant experience it must have been for the young to come under his influence; and I can well understand what a mature scholar meant by calling him the most interesting man he had met in America.

Henry W. Nevinson.

London, Oct. i, 192 1.