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2.
A Literature, when it is formed, is a national and historical fact; it is
a matter of the past and the present, and can be as little ignored as the
present, as little undone as the past. We can deny, supersede, or change
it, then only, when we can do the same towards the race or language which
it represents. Every great people has a character of its own, which it
manifests and perpetuates in a variety of ways. It developes into a
monarchy or republic;--by means of commerce or in war, in agriculture or in
manufactures, or in all of these at once; in its cities, its public
edifices and works, bridges, canals, and harbours; in its laws,
traditions, customs, and manners; in its songs and its proverbs; in its
religion; in its line of policy, its bearing, its action towards foreign
nations; in its alliances, fortunes, and the whole course of its history.
All these are peculiar, and parts of a whole, and betoken the national
character, and savour of each other; and the case is the same with the
national language and literature. They are what they are, and cannot be
any thing else, whether they be good or bad or of a mixed nature; before
they are formed, we cannot prescribe them, and afterwards, we cannot
reverse them. We may feel great repugnance to Milton or Gibbon as men; we
may most seriously protest against the spirit which ever lives, and the
tendency which ever operates, in every page of their writings; but there
they are, an integral portion of English Literature; we cannot extinguish
them; we cannot deny their power; we cannot write a new Milton or a new
Gibbon; we cannot expurgate what needs to be exorcised. They are great
English authors, each breathing hatred to the Catholic Church in his own
way, each a proud and rebellious creature of God, each gifted with
incomparable gifts.
We must take things as they are, if we take them at all. We may refuse to
say a word to English literature, if we will; we may have recourse to
French or to Italian instead, if we think either of these less
exceptionable than our own; we may fall back upon the Classics of Greece
and Rome; we may have nothing whatever to do with literature, as such, of
any kind, and confine ourselves to purely amorphous or monstrous specimens
of language; but if we do once profess in our Universities the English
language and literature, if we think it allowable to know the state of
things we live in, and that national character which we share, if we think
it desirable to have a chance of writing what may be read after our day,
and praiseworthy to aim at providing for Catholics who speak English a
Catholic Literature then--I do not say that we must at once throw open
every sort of book to the young, the weak, or the untrained,--I do not say
that we may dispense with our ecclesiastical indexes and emendations,
but--we must not fancy ourselves creating what is already created in spite
of us, and which never could at a moment be created by means of us, and we
must recognize that historical literature, which is in occupation of the
language, both as a fact, nay, and as a standard for ourselves.
There is surely nothing either "temerarious" or paradoxical in a statement
like this. The growth of a nation is like that of an individual; its tone
of voice and subjects for speech vary with its age. Each age has its own
propriety and charm; as a boy's beauty is not a man's, and the sweetness
of a treble differs from the richness of a bass, so it is with a whole
people. The same period does not produce its most popular poet, its most
effective orator, and its most philosophic historian. Language changes
with the progress of thought and the events of history, and style changes
with it; and while in successive generations it passes through a series of
separate excellences, the respective deficiencies of all are supplied
alternately by each. Thus language and literature may be considered as
dependent on a process of nature, and admitting of subjection to her laws.
Father Hardouin indeed, who maintained that, with the exception of Pliny,
Cicero, Virgil's Georgics, and Horace's Satires and Epistles, Latin
literature was the work of the medieval monks, had the conception of a
literature neither national nor historical; but the rest of the world will
be apt to consider time and place as necessary conditions in its
formation, and will be unable to conceive of classical authors, except as
either the elaboration of centuries, or the rare and fitful accident of
genius.