Alumni Oration

"'Literature in Relation to Life' the Alumni Oration" Daily Gleaner (16 May 1935). (UA Case 67a, Box 2)

According to the entertaining myth that Plato puts upon the lips of Aristophanes in the Symposium, the form or shape of a human being was originally quite different from what it is at present. Man was, in his primeval state, round not flat, or approximately flat. His back and sides were joined together so as to form a circle and each individual had four arms and as many legs and ears. But men having rebelled against the gods, Zeus called an Olympic Council and contrived a way to curb their arrogance, "Methinks," he said, "I have a plan which will humble their pride and men their manners. They shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two, and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers. They shall walk upright on two legs and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg." Zeus, then, carried his threat into execution, cutting men in two as one might divide an apple. Every one of us is, therefore, only the half of what may properly be termed a man. We are but a cross-section having one side only like a flatfish, the imperfect portion of an entire whole.

I shall not attempt top follow Plato’s ingenious interpretation of this myth as symbolic of his doctrines of Platonic love. Our younger generation at least, is more apt to turn to Freud rather than to Plato as an authority in matters of sex-appeal.

But with due apology to the shade of the great philosopher, I venture upon a different application. This myth it seems to me, may serve to illustrate the penalty that every individual must pay for being a member of a social group, and it has particular point in a modern age of specialization. The complex machinery of our twentieth century civilization split the individual into sections as the hand is divided into fingers. We are either absorbed in a special business or profession or focusing all our energies with a view to entering upon a definite business or profession. Law, Engineering, Commerce, Politics, Medicine, Theology—these are jealous gods and they seem to exact from their followers absolute concentration and devotion. And so as life peddles out to us the wares of a particular occupation, we tend to lose sight of the essential integrity and wholeness of our manhood. "Nature," as Emerson says, "is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere." Enrolled in the ranks of our profession "we come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression."

Opposed to Narrowness

And yet an occasion such as this reminds us that there is something in the spirit and genius of a University that is for ever at war with tendencies that threaten to sweep the individual into side-currents and eddies away from the central stream of life. The very name University implies an organization that has universal aim, and is, therefore, opposed to all narrowness and sectionalism. "I have taken all knowledge to be my province," writes Francis Bacon in one of his letters, voicing the noble ambition of a great scholar of a generous age. These words might be the charter or the motto of a University. All knowledge is its province, and nothing of human interest can be alien to it. Cardinal Newman has defined the aim of a University as the cultivation of the intellect as an end in itself, and the goal of a University education as enlargement or enlightenment of mind. The primary business, therefore, of a college of liberal arts is neither technical nor professional. It deals with human values that are absolute, not relative. It has to do first and foremost with man as man, not man as an engineer, a doctor or a lawyer. Whatever it amy contribute to a man’s worldly success, it has failed in its purpose if it has not taught how to escape the consequences of worldly success.

Return of the Spirit

If a cultural education is based on a vision of life as a whole, if its centers on that humane nurture of the intellect that, apart from practical and utilitarian ends, aims at enlightenment of minds, then the renewal of our contact with our foster-mother, the University, ought to have a bracing and a clarifying effect upon our lives. It should be a return of the human spirit upon itself; one of those red letter days of experience and insight when

A man becomes aware of his life’s flow
And hears its winding murmur, and he
Sees
The meadows where it glides—the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth forever chase
That flying and elusive shadow—Rest.
And then he thinks he knows
The Hills where his life rose,
And the Sea where it goes.

The Keystone

Through its place amongst the Humanities, English Literature, as a subject of University study, professes to be in vital relationship with life. And today, it seems to me to be the very keystone of the humanistic arch. The Classics have fallen on evil days, and for the time being at any rate, have lost that proud position which they held in the days of our fathers. For the majority of University students today, the two central humanistic and cultural disciplines are those of English Literature and History. It is, therefore, all the more necessary that we keep steadily in view the primary humanistic quality of literature that lies in its contact with life. To some, such an emphasis on the importance of the Humanities may seem to be a clinging to an archaic tradition of the past. I should rather regard it as an imperative gospel of the greatest practical urgency that holds in it the hope of the present and the promise of the future.

For if here is one truth that is certain in our confused and troubled times, it is that only a shift of emphasis from reliance on material things to a fresh appreciation of human values can save our western civilization. The Humanities, it has been said, are not in the good graces of Democracy: which is one of the reasons why Democracy today is on the rocks.

Threat of Science

We have travelled far in our worship of material things and mechanical invention. From the days of Lord Macaulay down to the present, we have witnessed the triumphant march of science. And now we have reached a closed door. Like a gigantic Frankenstein or a Robot, the machine we have created threatens to turn and rend us.

The tremendous tools that Science has placed in our hands are in themselves unmoral. They may be instruments of good or evil. Sciences has filled the earth with her products, and we are in the midst of a world wide depression and economic distress. Science performs miracles of surgery, and at the same time forges weapons for a war of poison gas and bacteria. The most highly educated and scientific nation in modern Europe reels back into paganism space.

Back of all our political, economic, and social difficulties lies the basic human problems. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, we have advanced beyond calculation in our control of the material resources of life, but in our ways of dealing with each other, in the cultivation of a sane and understanding human spirit, we seem to lag immeasurably behind. Knowledge has indeed come, but Wisdom everywhere lingers. In a more critical sense than Matthew Arnold ever dreamt of, we are today:

"Wandering between two worlds, one
Dead,
The other powerless to be born."

Civilization is at the cross-roads, and unless we can substitute a Society built on human values for one which is but a cunning piece of mechanism, we shall witness what Spengler has predicted in "The Decline and Fall of the West."

In our than an age when University men and women can afford to neglect the study of the Humanities; disciplines based on those very human values which are of such fundamental import in the life of mankind today?

Form of Teaching Criticized

We must, however, at this point face a criticism. It is frequently said that while literature should be one of the Humanities, its relationship to life is often hidden by the way in which English is taught and studied as a University subject. This is a grave charge and cannot be dismissed lightly. We must, in the first place admit that our study of literature is to a large degree concerned with criticism and analysis. Such criticism and analysis, it is urged, removes literature into a scientific laboratory and destroys its touch with life.

"Our meddling intellect
Misshapen the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect."

A common confusion in snap judgments of this nature is a failure to discriminate between criticism and analysis as an end in itself and as a means to an end. Literature is an art and the goal of all literary study is aesthetic enjoyment. But there is a wide difference between a vague and merely nebulous appreciation of literature and an enlightened understanding appreciation of it. The true function of criticism is to travel through an analysis of particulars on to the vision of a work of art as a whole that is as an organic structure.

In recapturing that vision of the whole, the student in the sense, returns to his starting point. But he returns to it as a man who voyaging around the world comes home enriched by all the landscapes of his journey. He has learnt that it is too dear a bargain to purchase centrality of life and clearness of intellectual vision by dependence on the obvious, the immediate, the abstract. He has been taught that all growth of mind involves a Pilgrim’s progress, and not to step out of a lighted circle into the darkness perchance with a faith that when he regains the light the circumference of the circle will be enlarged is, in reality to abide in the city of Destruction.

And yet is there not some justice in the accusation that in our University study of literature we have at times lost sight of the forest in the trees, and wandered by—by paths into the labyrinth where a jungle growth conceals the highroad of life?

Appreciation of Research

One "Idol of the Academic Market-Place" is the way in which we have applied the methods of historical and scientific research to English Literature. It would be folly to deny the relative value of these methods. Science with its respect for facts, its eye for details, and its analytic tools, is the born foe of vague impressionism. And how often has the teacher of literature to insist that there can be no sound judgment or appreciation that is not based on accurate and precise information. "Knowledge," Newman says, "is the indispensible condition of expansion of mind, and the instrument of attaining to it." Impressionism without Knowledge may lead to devastating conclusions.

The antidote to impressionism of this order is to be found in the advice of Tindale: "Cleave unto the text and plain story."

Yet to forget that literature is a creative and humanistic art; to be content with the raw materials of facts without building upon them judgments of values, is a greater error than lawless impressionism. Sometimes our researches into sources, documents and the meaning of words, suggest the activities of weasels hunting for eggs or the labours of ants in their burrows rather than the work of adventurous and constructive minds.

Relative to Life

To turn to the consideration of Literature as a fine art in its relation to life.

Literature is not life in its immediate practical aspect. It is an artistic reconstruction of life through vision and imagination.

Literature holds the mirror up to life and nature, but not through a bald photographic realism. It is a painting rather than a photograph of life and nature. Life in art is not drive on by the urge of the will, hurrying restlessly from point to point,—it is an object of contemplation and reflection. This step away from reality may seem to weaken the connection of literature with life, but viewed from another angle, it adds to the insight into life we gain through literature. In the actual world of affairs we so often are distracted and confused by what is merely trivial and accidental. We are pulled this way and that by practical considerations or aims, and we fail to realize the true meaning and significance of our experiences. The soldier in the front trenches is in the midst of the conflict, but the smoke and roar of cannon cloud his vision. The general behind the lines is farther from the scene of action, but he has a clearer insight into the nature and the fortunes of the battle.

Echo of Experience

Literature has sometimes been defined as an escape form life and yet, if one may state it is the form of a paradox in this lies part of the value of its relation to life. As A.C. Bradely writes: "There is plenty of connection between life and poetry, but it is, so to say, a connection underground." Through its rebuilding of life in the realm of the imagination, art is an echo of experience rather than its actuality.

As Pater described it: "All life in art is conceived of as a kind of listening." But the weakness of our ordinary human experience is precisely that we do not listen. We are distracted by practical considerations, by our own particular desires and convenience. Our minds are concentrated on the profits we hope to reap from our actions and we lose sight of the quality or character of these actions. In seeking for the rewards of life we somehow miss the significance of life itself, and we find no time for pleasure trips into the land of thought. Art by representing life in the form of a pictures frees us from the tyranny of practical aims and ends and enables us to realize the intrinsic values of living. TO quote Stevenson: "To sit still and contemplate—to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are—is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness."

Wordsworth defined poetry as "emotion collected in tranquility," and in Tintern abbey he has given us an unforgettable description of the spirit of the artistic experience:

...that blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened—that serene and blessed
mood.
In which the affections gently lead us on.
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

We are perhaps apt to think of the contemplative mood of which Stevenson and Wordsworth speak as a special type of experience confined to the sphere of art. Yet a little reflection ought to show us that it is an experience shared by ordinary men and women.

We all on occasion adopt the artistic attitude towards life, and find wisdom, sanity and humour in it. When a man seems unable to free his mind from worries that are bound up with a practical situation we frequently urge him—as a commonsense piece of advice—to laugh at himself. Do not take yourself, we say, so seriously, try to look at life with a certain detachment, be interested in the quality of your experience, and have the courage and insight to believe that all human experience, whether or pleasure or pain, met in the right way leads to enrichment and enlargement of life. And is not this akin to the artistic consciousness that is primarily interested in life itself and the fruitage of life in character rather than in its gains and losses from the point of view of mere worldly and utilitarian calculation?

The Artistic Standpoint

In other connections we can all recall times and occasions when we have looked on life form an artistic rather than a practical standpoint. If I may venture on a personal illustration, I remember, particularly, in sailing from Galveston, Texas, to New York, my first impressions of the Gulf of Mexico. On the evening I have in mind, day had passed into night with that suddenness characteristic of tropical or semi-tropical regions.

"The Sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark."

The water of the Gulf are of a vivid blue and that night were flocked with a broad band of moonlight undulating with the gently rising and falling of the waves:

"And with joy the stars perform their shining.
And the sea its long moon-silvered roll."

The air and the waters were almost incredibly soft and mild to one whose boyhood was spent by the shores of the Bay of Fundy.

On the deck of the ship young people were dancing, absorbed in the immediate pleasure of living, while I, as perhaps, belittled my years, was on the sidelines, a spectator rather than a participant. But through that detachment the imagination was set free to grasp the significance of the scene. Over these waters Cortez had sailed with his handful of adventurers on his voyage from Cuba to Mexico—the prelude to his amazing conquest of the empire of Montezuma. Here hardy Elizabethan sea captains of the breed of Drake and Hawkins had singed the Spanish king’s beard when they preyed on the commerce of Spain. Here buccaneers, such as Sir Henry Morgan, sallying forth from their piratical haunts in the neighbourhood of the Spanish Main had pillaged stately galleons sailing from Mexico with their golden treasure. Here were clustering memories of

...the sea tides tossing free;
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.

Nor was a thread of association lacking to link the traditions of these southern waters with those of Canadian history. Quebec, Fort Frontenac, the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico, are bound together by the adventurous career of the French-Canadian explorer La Salle. After his discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi, you will recall, La Salle sailed from France with the intention of establishing a colony on the present site of New Orleans. But voyaging through the Gulf of Mexico he missed the delta of the Mississippi and landed finally in Western Texas. Then he plunged gallantly into the wilderness, hunting vainly for the lost river, till his crew mutinied and assassinated him. Is there any anecdote of more moving pathos in the history of western exploration than La Salle’s martyrdom in a futile search for the mouth of that great river which he himself had discovered?

Such were the imaginative associations of that scene. The dancing on the deck was the thrill of a moment to the young people engaged in it, but to me, because the experience was reflective and artistic, it left a memory of that quality which Keats describes in Endymion: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

Experience Through Language

But if art is a captured loveliness, if through intuition and imagination the beauty of a fleeting moment of time is garnered up as a joy for ever, this must not be confounded with the fallacy that art is static and merely traditional. Literature is the communication of experience through the medium of language. But in order to communicate experience it is necessary that the receiver as well as the transmitter be a sensitized one. The life that is bottled up in books must be released as the genie in the old tale of the Arabian Nights was set free when the fisherman withdrew the cork from the bottle. The error the pedant and the book-worm is that they keep on shaking the bottle but never withdraw the cork. In other words the reading of literature ought to be an experience, a voyage of discovery, not a mere acquisition of knowledge. There is a formal element in language that is subject to the conditions of its age, and, if we lack imagination and insight, the archaic garb of a book may hide the spirit of life beneath it. This is one of the reasons why I think it perilous for young readers and writers to neglect the study of contemporary authors, who in their literary idiom and modes of thought reflect the time spirit of the age in which we live.

Modernism

The classics of literature must ever remain the foundation, and perhaps, the main substance of our reading. Yet ultra-conservativism in judgments of art may be as disastrous as radicalism, if you feel that T.S. Eliot has written some of the finest poetry of the Georgian epoch, if you believe that the School of Seven has made a valuable contribution to Canadian landscape painting through its originality and daring use of colour, if you regard Epstein’s recent bust of The Tiger King as a masterpiece of modern sculpture. If you sympathize with Bernard Shaw’s struggle with Sir Henry Irving in order to give modern drama a place in the sun when it was being crushed by the dead hand of Mid-Victorian Shakesperian tradition, do not be ashamed of your convictions—proclaim them from the housetops if need be.

The True Reward

"The best things are eternal." I have always thought that this motto enscribed on the Douglas Gold Medal of the University of New Brunswick expresses the true spirit of art in its relation to life. Like art it stresses a value that is absolute, not, utilitarian. To the practically minded man a prize is an end, the goal of endeavour; to the artist it is but a signpost on the road of life. For art, with its emphasis on the quality and significance of experience, it is life that really matters. The reward is in the process rather than in the badge that acclaims it. When the prize is regarded as an end in itself rather than as a symbol that spurs man on in his unceasing quest of the true, the beautiful, the good, those best things that are eternal, it becomes haunted by an element of illusion. The search of the scientist for truth, of the artist for beauty, of the saint for goodness, is never ending, but to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

"'Tis not the grapes of Cannan that repay
But the high faith that falled not by the way."