VII
I do not propose to discuss the toll of her work this morning. I wish that those of you who aspire to write, and are here learning to write, would study it—for two reasons. For the first, while I admit many flaws, it seems to me elementally of the best literary breeding, so urbane it is, so disposedly truthful; so much of the world, quizzing it; so well aware, all the while, of another. For my second, that here you have, refuting, an exception to all hasty generalisations about the nineteenth century, the Victorian Age, horsehair sofas, the Evangelicals, the Prince Consort, the Great Exhibition of 1851 and all that bagful of cheap rubbish. In 1851 this lady was writing Cranford: in 1863 she was writing Cousin Phillis: and considering that most lovely idyll, I am moved to ask, “Do you, at any rate, know it, this Sicilian yet most English thing of the mid-nineteenth century?” I am moved to say, “Yes, Keats is lovely, and was lovely to me alas! before ever you were born: but quit your gushing and your talk about ‘romantic revivals’—which are but figments invented by fellows who walk round and round a Grecian urn, appraising it scholastically. Quit it, and try to make a Grecian urn. The horses on the frieze of the Parthenon are good horses: but you have as good to study to-day or to-morrow if you will but take a short journey out to Newmarket and study them. Which is better?—to watch a gallop between two colts on a heath, or to bend a congested nose over Ferrex and Porrex?”
To be classical is not to copy the classics: to be classical is to learn the intelligence of the classics and apply just that to this present world and particularly to this island of ours so familiar and yet so romantic.