On The Art of Reading Part 7

Mirth, admit me of thy crew, To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, From his watch-towre in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise.

At this point--still as you read without stopping to explain, the child certainly feels that he is being led to something. He knows the lark: but the lark's 'watch-towre'--he had never thought of that: and 'the dappled dawn'-yes that's just _it,_ now he comes to think:

Then to come, in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good-morrow, Through the sweet-briar or the vine Or the twisted eglantine; While the c.o.c.k with lively din Scatters the rear of Darkness thin; And to the stack, or the barn door, Stoutly struts his dames before: Oft listening how the hounds and horn Cheerily rouse the slumbering Morn, From the side of some h.o.a.r hill, Through the high wood echoing shrill: Sometime walking, not unseen, By hedgerow elms on hillocks green, Right against the eastern gate, Where the great sun begins his state, Robed in flames and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight; While the ploughman, near at hand, Whistles o'er the furrow'd land, And the milkmaid singeth blithe, And the mower whets his sithe, And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale.

Don't stop (I say) to explain that Hebe was (for once) the legitimate daughter of Zeus and, as such, had the privilege to draw wine for the G.o.ds. Don't even stop, just yet, to explain who the G.o.ds were. Don't discourse on amber, otherwise ambergris; don't explain that 'gris' in this connexion doesn't mean 'grease'; don't trace it through the Arabic into Noah's Ark; don't prove its electrical properties by tearing up paper into little bits and attracting them with the mouth-piece of your pipe rubbed on your sleeve. Don't insist philologically that when every shepherd 'tells his tale' he is not relating an anecdote but simply keeping tally of his flock.

Just go on reading, as well as you can; and be sure that when the children get the thrill of it, for which you wait, they will be asking more questions, and pertinent ones, than you are able to answer.

IX

This advice, to be sure, presupposes of the teacher himself some capacity of reading aloud, and reading aloud is not taught in our schools. In our Elementary Schools, in which few of the pupils contemplate being called to Holy Orders or to the Bar, it is practised, indeed, but seldom taught as an art. In our Secondary and Public Schools it is neither taught nor practised: as I know to my cost--and you, to yours, Gentlemen, on whom I have had to practise.

But let the teacher take courage. First let him read a pa.s.sage 'at the long breath'--as the French say--aloud, and persuasively as he can. Now and then he may pause to indicate some particular beauty, repeating the line before he proceeds. But he should be sparing of these interruptions. When Laughter, for example, is already 'holding both his sides' it cannot be less than officious, a work of supererogation, to stop and hold them for him; and he who obeys the counsel of perfection will read straight to the end and then recur to particular beauties. Next let him put up a child to continue with the tale, and another and another, just as in a construing cla.s.s. While the boy is reading, the teacher should _never_ interrupt: he should wait, and return afterwards upon a line that has been slurred or wrongly emphasised. When the children have done reading he should invite questions on any point they have found puzzling: it is with the operation of poetry on _their_ minds that his main business lies.

Lastly, he may run back over significant points they have missed.

'And is that all the method?'-Yes, that is all the method. 'So simple as that?'-Yes, even so simple as that, and (I claim) even so wise, seeing that it just lets the author--Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton or Coleridge--have his own way with the young plant--just lets them drop 'like the gentle rain from heaven,' and soak in.

The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside.

Do you really want to chat about _that_? Cannot you trust it?

The stars were dim, and thick the night, The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white; From the sails the dew did drip-- Till clomb above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip.

_Must_ you tell them that for the Moon to hold a star anywhere within her circ.u.mference is an astronomical impossibility? Very well, then; tell it. But tell it afterwards, and put it away quietly. For the quality of Poetry is not strained. Let the rain soak; then use your hoe, and gently; and still trust Nature; by which, I again repeat to you, all spirit attracts all spirit as inevitably as all matter attracts all matter.

'Strained.' I am glad that memory flew just here to the word of Portia's: for it carries me on to a wise page of Dr Corson's, and a pa.s.sage in which, protesting against the philologers who cram our children's handbooks with irrelevant information that but obscures what Chaucer or Shakespeare _mean,_ he breaks out in Chaucer's own words:

Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde, And turnen substaunce into accident!

(Yes, and make the accident the substance!)--as he insists that the true subject of literary study is the author's meaning; and the true method a surrender of the mind to that meaning, with what Wordsworth calls 'a wise pa.s.siveness':

The eye--it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where'er they be, Against or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise pa.s.siveness.

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum Of things for ever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, But we must still be seeking?

X

I have been talking to-day about children; and find that most of the while I have been thinking, if but subconsciously, of poor children. Now, at the end, you may ask 'Why, lecturing here at Cambridge, is he preoccupied with poor children who leave school at fourteen and under, and thereafter read no poetry?'...Oh, yes!

I know all about these children and the hopeless, wicked waste; these with a common living-room to read in, a father tired after his day's work, and (for parental encouragement) just the two words 'Get out!' A Scots domine writes in his log:

I have discovered a girl with a sense of humour. I asked my qualifying cla.s.s to draw a graph of the attendance at a village kirk. 'And you must explain away any rise or fall,' I said.

Margaret Steel had a huge drop one Sunday, and her explanation was 'Special Collection for Missions.' Next Sunday the Congregation was abnormally large: Margaret wrote 'Change of Minister.'... Poor Margaret! When she is fourteen, she will go out into the fields, and in three years she will be an ignorant country b.u.mpkin.

And again:

Robert Campbell (a favourite pupil) left the school to-day. He had reached the age-limit.... Truly it is like death: I stand by a new made grave, and I have no hope of a resurrection.

Robert is dead.

Precisely because I have lived on close terms with this, and the wicked waste of it, I appeal to you who are so much more fortunate than this Robert or this Margaret and will have far more to say in the world, to think of them--how many they are. I am not sentimentalising. When an Elementary Schoolmaster spreads himself and tells me he looks upon every child entering his school as a potential Lord Chancellor, I answer that, as I expect, so I should hope, to die before seeing the world a Woolsack. Jack cannot ordinarily be as good as his master; if he were, he would be a great deal better. You have given Robert a vote, however, and soon you will have to give it to Margaret. Can you not give them also, in their short years at school, something to sustain their souls in the long Valley of Humiliation?

Do you remember this pa.s.sage in "The Pilgrim's Progress"--as the pilgrims pa.s.sed down that valley?

Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a Boy feeding his Father's Sheep. The Boy was in very mean Cloaths, but of a very fresh and well-favoured Countenance, and as he sate by himself he Sung. Hark, said Mr Greatheart, to what the Shepherd's Boy saith.

Well, it was a very pretty song, about Contentment.

He that is down need fear no fall He that is low, no Pride: He that is humble ever shall Have G.o.d to be his Guide.

But I care less for its subject than for the song. Though life condemn him to live it through in the Valley of Humiliation, I want to hear the Shepherd Boy singing.

[Footnote 1: The reference given is _Zeitschr. f. Ethnologie_, XIX. 30 ff.]

LECTURE V

ON READING FOR EXAMINATIONS

WEDNESDAY, MAY 9, 1917

I

You, Gentlemen, who so far have followed with patience this course of lectures, advertised, maybe too ambitiously, as 'On the Art of Reading,' will recall to your memory, when I challenge it across the intervals of Vacation, that three propositions have been pretty steadily held before you.

The _first_: (bear me out) that, man's life being of the length it is, and his activities multifarious as they are, out of the ma.s.s of printed matter already loaded and still being shot upon this planet, he _must_ make selection. There is no other way.

The _second_: that--the time and opportunity being so brief, the ma.s.s so enormous, and the selection therefore so difficult--he should select the books that are best for him, and take them _absolutely,_ not frittering his time upon books written about and around the best: that--in their order, of course--the primary masterpieces shall come first, and the secondary second, and so on; and mere chat about any of them last of all.

My _third_ proposition (perhaps more discutable) has been that, the human soul's activities being separated, so far as we can separate them, into _What Does, What Knows, What Is_--to _be_ such-and-such a man ranks higher than either _knowing_ or _doing_ this, that, or the other: that it transcends all man's activity upon phenomena, even a Napoleon's: all his housed store of knowledge, though it be a Casaubon's or a Mark Pattison's: that only by learning to _be_ can we understand or reach, as we have an instinct to reach, to our right place in the scheme of things: and that, any way, all the greatest literature commands this instinct. To be Hamlet--to feel yourself Hamlet--is more important than killing a king or even knowing all there is to be known about a text. Now most of us have been Hamlet, more or less: while few of us, I trust, have ever murdered a monarch: and still fewer, perhaps, can hope to know all that is to be known of the text of the play. But for value, Gentlemen, let us not rank these three achievements by order of their rarity. Shakespeare means us to feel--to _be_--Hamlet. That is all: and from the play it is the best we can get.

II

Now in talking to you, last term, about children I had perforce to lay stress on the point that, with all this glut of literature, the ma.s.s of children in our commonwealth who leave school at fourteen go forth starving.

But you are happier. You are happier, not in having your selection of reading in English done for you at school (for you have in the Public Schools scarce any such help): but happier (1) because the time of learning is so largely prolonged, and (2) because this most difficult office of sorting out from the ma.s.s what you should read as most profitable has been tentatively performed for you by us older men for your relief. For example, those of you-'if any,' as the Regulations say--who will, a week or two hence, be sitting for Section A of the Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos, have been spared, all along, the laborious business of choosing what you should read or read with particular attention for the good of your souls. Is Chaucer your author?

Then you will have read (or ought to have read) "The Parlement of Fowls," the "Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, "The Knight's Tale," "The Man of Law's Tale," "The Nun Priest's Tale," "The Doctor's Tale," "The Pardoner's Tale" with its Prologue, "The Friar's Tale." You were not dissuaded from reading "Troilus;" you were not forbidden to read all the Canterbury Tales, even the naughtiest; but the works that I have mentioned have been 'prescribed' for you. So, of Shakespeare, we do not discourage you (at all events, intentionally) from reading "Macbeth,"

"Oth.e.l.lo," "As You Like It," "The Tempest," any play you wish. In other years we 'set' each of these in its turn. But for this Year of Grace we insist upon "King John," "The Merchant of Venice,"

"King Henry IV, Part I," "Much Ado about Nothing," "Hamlet,"

"King Lear," 'certain specified works'--and so on, with other courses of study. Why is this done? Be fair to us, Gentlemen. We do it not only to accommodate the burden to your backs, to avoid overtaxing one-and-a-half or two years of study; not merely to guide you that you do not dissipate your reading, that you shall --with us, at any rate--know where you are. We do it chiefly, and honestly--you likewise being honest--to give you each year, in each prescribed course, a sound nucleus of knowledge, out of which, later, your minds can reach to more. We are not, in the last instance, praiseworthy or blameworthy for your range. I think, perhaps, too little of a man's _range_ in his short while here between (say) nineteen and twenty-two. For anything I care, the kernel may be as small as you please. To plant it wholesome, for a while to tend it wholesome, then to show it the sky and that it is wide--not a hot-house, nor a bra.s.sy cupola over a man, but an atmosphere shining up league on league; to reach the moment of saying 'All this now is yours, if you have the perseverance as I have taught you the power, _coelum nactus es, hoc exorna_': this, even in our present Tripos, we endeavour to do.

III