Reginald Bateman, Teacher and Soldier / A Memorial Volume of Selections from His Lectures and Other Writings

by Reginald Bateman

Personally, I am a firm believer in the historical method of dealing with literature, not only because I think that a knowledge of the history of literature greatly heightens one's appreciation of literary works, but because I believe that many students, who would otherwise never do so, are by this method led to take an interest in, and so gradually acquire a taste for, literature.

Some books (using the word book in the sense of any literary work) are for all time—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare; some books are for their own time only; some books are for their own time and a limited period afterwards. But whatever be the vitality of a book, no matter to which of these classes it belongs, there is no doubt that it belongs in the first instance to its own time, and cannot help being to some degree a reflection of the spirit of the age in which it was produced. This means that not only may the book be used as an historical document, as a means of catching the spirit of its age, but that, conversely, a study of the epoch at which it was produced cannot fail to illuminate to a greater or less degree the meaning of the book.

Critics like Taine and Sainte-Beuve looked on books as primarily historical documents. Behind the book one looked for the man, behind the man one found the innumerable circumstances which went to mould his personality. In this way of looking at things the individual becomes of comparatively small importance; he is interesting mainly because he is a type of his age; his book is interesting because it reveals the type.

Much can be said for this deterministic way of looking at literature, and some excellent results have been produced by Taine's style of criticism, but few critics of to-day would look on it with favour. To-day, the book is of primary importance; the man and the age are studied that they may throw light on the book. However exaggerated the historical method, as carried out by Taine, may appear, I think we must admit that in a modified form it may be of very great value.

We all know that a literary work is flavoured by the personality of the writer. From our experience as teachers we learn that we can read a personal document more sympathetically if we know who wrote it.

I have sometimes commenced to read an essay under the impression that it was written by a student A, and have been annoyed at certain ways of thinking and methods of expression that seemed to me forced and unnatural; I have turned to the back of the essay, seen the name of the writer, discovered my mistake, and re-read the essay with the personality of B instead of A at the back of my mind, and then the essay seemed to me to go smoothly, and to be characteristic of the writer.

Undoubtedly, the book takes a distinct and peculiar tinge from the personality of the author, and therefore to get the proper atmosphere, to read a book with thorough sympathy, we should find out all that we possibly can about the man who wrote it. Of course, the thing works both ways. We study the man that we may better appreciate his book; we study the book to find the man. How little can be done in some cases towards determining the personality of the man from his book is shown by the outstanding instance of Shakespeare. More than three hundred years' study of that marvellous book has entirely failed to reveal the personality of the author; upon that question critics are still in hopeless conflict.

Again, since the personality of a man is undoubtedly moulded, to a large extent, by his age and environment, we should go farther back still, and having studied our man, we should relate him to his age.

No writer is so individualistic that he can wholly escape the tinge of his epoch. I will venture to say that no one who has been accustomed to study literature by the historical method, and to recognize in books the contemporary flavour, would be likely to take, say, a piece of prose written in the first half of the seventeenth century for the product of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, or could possibly mistake a typical sixteenth-century lyric for a typical nineteenth-century one.

If we study our literature, then, historically as well as artistically, our books will be to us not only works of art, but something more; they will become linked to long trains of association, which will carry us out into the life and happiness and suffering of our fellow-men, and further still, out into the shock and sway of great world-movements, into the sphere where the Time-spirit weaves unceasingly the web of life.