Aspects of the novelForster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
History
Aspects of the novel
Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
English fiction -- History and criticism; Fiction -- Technique
Clark was, I believe, a Yorkshireman. He was born in 1821, was at school
at Sedbergh and Shrewsbury, entered Trinity as an undergraduate in 1840,
became fellow four years later, and made the college his home for nearly
thirty years, only leaving it when his health broke, shortly before his
death. He is best known as a Shakespearian scholar, but he published two
books on other subjects to which we must here refer. He went as a young
man to Spain and wrote a pleasant lively account of his holiday called
_Gazpacho_: Gazpacho being the name of a certain cold soup which he ate
and appears to have enjoyed among the peasants of Andalusia: indeed he
appears to have enjoyed everything. Eight years later, as a result of a
holiday in Greece, he published a second book, _Peloponnesus_.
_Peloponnesus_ is a graver work and a duller. Greece was a serious place
in those days, more serious than Spain, besides, Clark had by now not
only taken Orders but become Public Orator, and he was, above all,
travelling with Dr. Thompson, the then Master of the college, who was
not at all the sort of person to be involved in a cold soup. The jests
about mules and fleas are consequently few, and we are increasingly
confronted with the remains of Classical Antiquity and the sites of
battles. What survives in the book--apart from its learning--is its
feeling for Greek country-side. Clark also travelled in Italy and
Poland.
To turn to his academic career. He planned the great _Cambridge
Shakespeare_, first with Glover, then with Aldis Wright (both librarians
of Trinity), and, helped by Aldis Wright, he issued the _Globe
Shakespeare_, a popular text. He collected much material for an edition
of Aristophanes. He also published some Sermons, but in 1869 he gave up
Holy Orders--which, by the way, will exempt us from excessive orthodoxy.
Like his friend and biographer Leslie Stephen, like Henry Sidgwick and
others of that generation, he did not find it possible to remain in the
Church, and he has explained his reasons in a pamphlet entitled _The
Present Dangers of the Church of England_. He resigned his post of
Public Orator in consequence, while retaining his college tutorship. He
died at the age of fifty-seven, esteemed by all who knew him as a
lovable, scholarly and honest man. You will have realized that he is a
Cambridge figure. Not a figure in the great world or even at Oxford, but
a spirit peculiar to these courts, which perhaps only you who tread them
after him can justly appreciate: the spirit of integrity. Out of a
bequest in his will, his old college has provided for a series of
lectures, to be delivered annually "on some period or periods of English
Literature not earlier than Chaucer," and that is why we meet here now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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