My illustrious colleague in Geneva, John Starobinski, never had a book of criticism on any desk. He read the text. He read it at four levels, which I then tried to do. I said we will start with the dictionary, the infinite poetry, the poetics of looking up words, of knowing, trying to know their history. Secondly, we will proceed with something difficult: grammar. Grammar is the music of the mind and of thought. I can’t take seriously someone who waffles to me about Milton’s greatness and can’t explain to me why there are four gerunds in the beginning of “Lycidus,” someone, in short, who probably doesn’t know what a gerund is. Milton did. Milton was a supreme musician of syntax. It is no accident. He is no latinate show-off. Imagine the music student who would dare say to the teacher, “No, no scales. I have deep feelings about Chopin.” This is what we in Letters have done. We have sold out to trash. We ask less and less of our students. We no longer ask for the ancient languages, without which I did not take students in comparative literature. It is criminal nonsense to say that you can talk about European literature without some attempt to know Greek and Latin and how they live in the vulgate. And then I’m told, “How, for God’s sake, can you ask that?”

When you pass from the first year, which is an apprentice year – provisional, tentative – to the second in the Harvard Medical School, you can only go on to the second year if you take the pharmacology exam, which comports learning by heart some twelve hundred formulas, many of them intricate. And it is the same story every year. For the first few weeks, it is “I will commit suicide. I will quit medicine. I have ten Valiums a night.” Slowly, slowly these perfectly wonderful young human beings realize they can do it. The powers of memory are infinite. The muscles of memory, once you wake them and exercise them, they can take the exam. It’s not a sadistic or trivial demand. If you get the wrong formula, the patient dies. So it’s about something – something real and important. And we in the arts ask less and less; how deeply ashamed we should be. As Spinoza said, “All things excellent are difficult.”

The way you honour a human being is to ask of him an effort. In the hopeless popularization and down-marketing of our crafts we don’t honour the student. We condescend to him and that is a hideous contempt. You honour him by what you ask and demand. If the dear old Lombards had passed eleven kilometres nearer to St. Gal when they poured down the Alps and set it on fire as they did every other monastery, we would not have our Horace, our Virgil, our Catullus, our Ovid. One monastery hung by a thread, the monks copying the text, copying day and night and saving for us what was, until very recently, the literacy, the alphabet of civilization.