There was an old man with a Nose,
Who said 'If you choose to suppose
That my nose is too long
You are certainly wrong'—
This old man he detects as lacking sense of proportion, sense of humour. Pass from the child to the working-man as we know him. A few weeks ago, a lady—featured, as to nose, on the side of excess—was addressing a North Country audience on the Economic Position of Women after the War. Said she, 'There won't be men to go round.' Said a voice 'Eh, but they'll have to, Miss!' Pass from this rudimentary criticism to high talent employed on the same subject, and you get "Cyrano de Bergerac." Pass to genius, to Milton, and you find the elephant amusing Adam and Eve in Paradise, and doing his best:
the unwieldy elephant, To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed His lithe proboscis.
Milton, like the elephant, jokes with difficulty, but he, too, is using all his might.
I have illustrated, crudely enough, how a sense of things in their right values will help us on one side of our dealings with life. But truly it helps us on every side. This was what Plato meant when he said that a philosopher must see things as they relatively are within his horizon—[Greek: o synoptikos dialektikos]. And for this it was that an English poet praised Sophocles as one
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
And this of course is what Dean Inge meant when, the other day, in a volume of "Cambridge Essays on Education," he reminded us, for a sensible commonplace, that 'The wise man is he who knows the relative values of things.'
IV
Applying this to literature, I note, but shall not insist here on the fact—though fact it is—that the Greek and Roman 'classical' writers (as we call them) laid more stress than has ever been laid among the subsequent tribes of men upon the desirability of getting all things into proportion, of seeing all life on a scale of relative values. And the reason I shall not insist on this is simply that better men have saved me the trouble.
I propose this morning to discuss the value of the classics to students of English literature from, as the modern phrase goes, a slightly different angle.