years ago started to make Chaucer and Beowulf one, these rude forefathers made them two.  ’Nor am I confident they erred.’  Rather I am confident, and hope in succeeding lectures to convince you, that, venerable as Anglo-Saxon is, and worthy to be studied as the mother of our vernacular speech (as for a dozen other reasons which my friend Professor Chadwick will give you), its value is historical rather than literary, since from it our Literature is not descended.  Let me repeat it in words that admit of no misunderstanding—­From Anglo-Saxon Prose, from Anglo-Saxon Poetry our living Prose and Poetry have, save linguistically, no derivation.  I shall attempt to demonstrate that, whether or not Anglo-Saxon literature, such as it was, died of inherent weakness, die it did, and of its collapse the “Vision of Piers Plowman” may be regarded as the last dying spasm.  I shall attempt to convince you that Chaucer did not inherit any secret from Caedmon or Cynewulf, but deserves his old title, ‘Father of English Poetry,’ because through Dante, through Boccaccio, through the lays and songs of Provence, he explored back to the Mediterranean, and opened for Englishmen a commerce in the true intellectual mart of Europe.  I shall attempt to heap proof on you that whatever the agency—­whether through Wyat or Spenser, Marlowe or Shakespeare, or Donne, or Milton, or Dryden, or Pope, or Johnson, or even Wordsworth—­always our literature has obeyed, however unconsciously, the precept Antiquam exquirite matrem, ’Seek back to the ancient mother’; always it has recreated itself, has kept itself pure and strong, by harking back to bathe in those native—­yes, native—­Mediterranean springs.

Do not presume me to be right in this.  Rather, if you will, presume me to be wrong until the evidence is laid out for your judgment.  But at least understand to-day how profoundly a man, holding that view, must deplore the whole course of academical literary study during these thirty years or so, and how distrust what he holds to be its basal fallacies.

For, literature being written in language, yet being something quite distinct, and the development of our language having been fairly continuous, while the literature of our nation exhibits a false start—­a break, silence, repentance, then a renewal on right glorious lines—­our students of literature have been drilled to follow the specious continuance while ignoring the actual break, and so to commit the one most fatal error in any study; that of mistaking the inessential for the essential.

As I tried to persuade you in my Inaugural Lecture, our first duty to Literature is to study it absolutely, to understand, in Aristotelian phrase, its [Greek:  to ti en einae]; what it is and what it means.  If that be our quest, and the height of it be realised, it is nothing to us—­or almost nothing—­to know of a certain alleged poet of the fifteenth century, that he helped us over a local or temporary disturbance in our vowel-endings.  It is everything to have acquired and to possess such a norm of Poetry within us that we know whether or not what he wrote was POETRY.