IV.
Good morning, gentlemen. Before I pass to the subject of my lecture today I must deal briefly with a personal matter of some delicacy. Since I began this series of lectures on the Art of Poetry I notice that the new Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. W.P. Ker, in what I think is questionable taste, has delivered an inaugural lecture on the same subject under the same title. On the question of good taste I do not wish to say much, except that I should have thought that any colleague of mine, even an entirely new Professor in a provincial university, would have recognised the propriety of at least communicating to me his intention before committing this monstrous plagiarism.
However, as I say, on that aspect of the matter I do not propose to dwell, though it does seem to me that decency imposes certain limits to that kind of academic piracy, and that those limits the Professor has overstepped. In these fermenting days of licence and indiscipline persons in responsible positions at our seats of learning have a great burden of example to bear before the world, and if it were to go forth that actions of this type may be taken with impunity by highly-paid Professors then indeed we are not far from Bimetallism and the breaking-up of laws.
Now let us glance for a moment at the substance of the lecture. I should have been glad if Professor Ker had had the courtesy to show it to me before it was delivered, instead of my having to wait till it was printed and buy it in a shop, because I might have induced him to repair the more serious errors and omissions in his work. For really, when you come to analyse the lecture, what thin and bodyless stuff it is. Let me at once pay tribute to my colleague's scholarship and learning, to the variety of his citations. But, after all, anyone can buy a Quotation Dictionary and quote bits out of Swinburne. That surely—(see Freidrich's Crime and Quotation, pp. 246-9)—is not the whole task of a Professor of Poetry.
Such a man, if he is to earn his pay, must be able—
(a) to show how poetry is written;
(b) to write poetry;
and it is no good his attempting (a) in the absence of (b). It is no good teaching a man to slope arms if you are unable to slope arms yourself, because a moment will come when he says, "Well, how the dickens do you slope them?" It is no good professing lawn-tennis and saying, "Top-spin is imparted by drawing the racquet up and over," and so on, if, when you try to impart top-spin yourself, the ball disappears on to the District Railway. Still less is it useful if you deliver a long address to the student, saying, "H.L. Doherty was a good player, and so was Renshaw, and I well remember the game between McLoughlin and Wilding, because Wilding hit the ball over the net more often than McLoughlin did."
Those students who have attended my lectures more regularly than others—and I am sorry there are not more of them—will do me the justice to remember that I have put forward no theory of writing which I was not prepared to illustrate in practice from my own work. My colleague, so far as I can discover, makes one single attempt at practical assistance; and even that is a minor plagiarism from one of my own lectures. He makes a good deal of play with what he calls the principle and influence of the Italian Canzone, which simply means having a lot of ten-syllable lines and a few six-syllable ones. Students will remember that in our second lecture we wrote a poem on that principle, which finished:—
Toroodle—umti—oodle—umti—knife (or strife)