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Title: On The Art of Reading

Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch

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Produced by James Tenison






CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON:

BENTLEY HOUSE NEW YORK.
TORONTO, BOMBAY
CALCUTTA. MADRAS:

MACMILLAN TOKYO:
MARUZEN COMPANY LTD

All rights reserved

Copyrighted in the United States of
America by G. P. Putnam's Sons

All rights reserved


On The Art of Reading

By

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS  1939



TO
H. F. S. and H. M. C.

First edition 1920
reprinted 1920,1921
Pocket edition 1924
reprinted 1925, 1928, 1933, 1939




PREFACE

The following twelve lectures have this much in common with a
previous twelve published in 1916 under the title "On the Art of
Writing"--they form no compact treatise but present their central
idea as I was compelled at the time to enforce it, amid the dust
of skirmishing with opponents and with practical difficulties.

They cover--and to some extent, by reflection, chronicle--a
period during which a few friends, who had an idea and believed
in it, were fighting to establish the present English Tripos at
Cambridge. In the end we carried our proposals without a vote:
but the opposition was stiff for a while; and I feared, on
starting to read over these pages for press, that they might be
too occasional and disputatious. I am happy to think that, on the
whole, they are not; and that the reader, though he may wonder at
its discursiveness, will find the argument pretty free from
polemic. Any one who has inherited a library of 17th century
theology will agree with me that, of all dust, the ashes of dead
controversies afford the driest.

And after all, and though it be well worth while to strive that
the study of English (of our own literature, and of the art of
using our own language, in speech or in writing, to the best
purpose) shall take an honourable place among the Schools of a
great University, that the other fair sisters of learning shall

     Ope for thee their queenly circle ...

it is not in our Universities that the general redemption of
English will be won; nor need a mistake here or there, at Oxford
or Cambridge or London, prove fatal. We make our discoveries
through our mistakes: we watch one another's success: and where
there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve. A youth
who can command means to enter a University can usually command
some range in choosing which University it shall be. If Cambridge
cannot supply what he wants, or if our standard of training be
low in comparison with that of Oxford, or of London or of
Manchester, the pressure of neglect will soon recall us to our
senses.

_The real battle for English lies in our Elementary Schools, and
in the training of our Elementary Teachers._ It is there that the
foundations of a sound national teaching in English will have to
be laid, as it is there that a wrong trend will lead to incurable
issues. For the poor child has no choice of Schools, and the
elementary teacher, whatever his individual gifts, will work
under a yoke imposed upon him by Whitehall. I devoutly trust that
Whitehall will make the yoke easy and adaptable while insisting
that the chariot must be drawn.

I foresee, then, these lectures condemned as the utterances of a
man who, occupying a Chair, has contrived to fall betwixt two
stools. My thoughts have too often strayed from my audience in a
University theatre away to remote rural class-rooms where the
hungry sheep look up and are not fed; to piteous groups of
urchins standing at attention and chanting "The Wreck of the
Hesperus" in unison. Yet to these, being tied to the place and
the occasion, I have brought no real help.

A man has to perform his task as it comes. But I must say this in
conclusion. Could I wipe these lectures out and re-write them in
hope to benefit my countrymen in general, I should begin and end
upon the text to be found in the twelfth and last--that a liberal
education is not an appendage to be purchased by a few: that
Humanism is, rather, a _quality_ which can, and should, condition
all our teaching; which can, and should, be impressed as a
character upon it all, from a poor child's first lesson in
reading up to a tutor's last word to his pupil on the eve of a
Tripos.

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH
July 7, 1920.




CONTENTS

LECTURE

I        INTRODUCTORY
II       APPREHENSION VERSUS COMPREHENSION
III      CHILDREN'S READING   (I)
IV            "        "      (II)
V        ON READING FOR EXAMINATIONS
VI       ON A SCHOOL OF ENGLISH
VII      THE VALUE OF GREEK AND LATIN IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
VIII     ON READING THE BIBLE   (I)
IX             "          "     (II)
X              "          "     (III)
XI       OF SELECTION
XI       ON THE USE OF MASTERPIECES

INDEX




LECTURE I

INTRODUCTORY

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1916


I

In the third book of the "Ethics", and in the second chapter,
Aristotle, dealing with certain actions which, though bad in
themselves, admit of pity and forgiveness because they were
committed involuntarily, through ignorance, instances 'the man
who did not know a subject was forbidden, like Aeschylus with the
Mysteries,' and 'the man who only meant to show how it worked,
like the fellow who let off the catapult' ([Greek: e deixai
Boulemos apheinai, os o ton katapelten]).

I feel comfortably sure, Gentlemen, that in a previous course of
lectures "On the Art of Writing", unlike Aeschylus, I divulged no
mysteries: but I am troubled with speculations over that man and
the catapult, because I really was trying to tell you how the
thing worked; and Aristotle, with a reticence which (as Horace
afterwards noted) may lend itself to obscurity, tells us neither
what happened to that exponent of ballistics, nor to the engine
itself, nor to the other person. My discharge, such as it was, at
any rate provoked another Professor (_emeritus,_ learned,
sagacious, venerable) to retort that the true business of a Chair
such as this is to instruct young men how to _read_ rather than
how to write. Well, be it so. I accept the challenge.

I propose in this and some ensuing lectures to talk of the Art
and Practice of Reading, particularly as applied to English
Literature: to discuss on what ground and through what faculties
an Author and his Reader meet: to enquire if, or to what extent,
Reading of the best Literature can be taught; and supposing it to
be taught, if or to what extent it can be examined upon; with
maybe an interlude or two, to beguile the way.

II

The first thing, then, to be noted about the reading of English
(with which alone I am concerned) is that for Englishmen it has
been made, by Act of Parliament, compulsory.

The next thing to be noted is that in our schools and Colleges
and Universities it has been made, by Statute or in practice, all
but impossible.

The third step is obvious--to reconcile what we cannot do with
what we must: and to that aim I shall, under your patience,
direct this and the following lecture. I shall be relieved at all
events, and from the outset, of the doubt by which many a
Professor, here and elsewhere, has been haunted: I mean the doubt
whether there really _is_ such a subject as that of which he
proposes to treat. Anything that requires so much human ingenuity
as reading English in an English University _must_ be an art.

III

But I shall be met, of course, by the question 'How is the
reading of English made impossible at Cambridge?' and I pause
here, on the edge of my subject, to clear away that doubt.

It is no fault of the University.

The late Philip Gilbert Hamerton, whom some remember as an
etcher, wrote a book which he entitled (as I think, too
magniloquently) "The Intellectual Life." He cast it in the form
of letters--'To an Author who kept very Irregular Hours,' 'To a
Young Etonian who thought of becoming a Cotton-spinner,' 'To a
Young Gentleman who had firmly resolved never to wear anything
but a Grey Coat' (but Mr Hamerton couldn't quite have meant
that). 'To a Lady of High Culture who found it difficult to
associate with persons of her Own Sex,' 'To a Young Gentleman of
Intellectual Tastes, who, without having as yet any Particular
Lady in View, had expressed, in a General Way, his Determination
to get Married: The volume is well worth reading. In the first
letter of all, addressed 'To a Young Man of Letters who worked
Excessively,' Mr Hamerton fishes up from his memory, for
admonishment, this salutary instance:

  A tradesman, whose business affords an excellent outlet for
  energetic bodily activity, told me that having attempted, in
  addition to his ordinary work, to acquire a foreign language
  which seemed likely to be useful to him, he had been obliged to
  abandon it on account of alarming cerebral symptoms. This man
  has immense vigour and energy, but the digestive functions, in
  this instance, are sluggish. However, when he abandoned study,
  the cerebral inconveniences disappeared, and have never
  returned since.

IV

Now we all know, and understand, and like that man: for the
simple reason that he is every one of us.

You or I (say) have to take the Modern Languages Tripos, Section
A (English), in 1917[1]. First of all (and rightly) it is
demanded of us that we show an acquaintance, and something more
than a bowing acquaintance, with Shakespeare. Very well; but next
we have to write a paper and answer questions on the outlines of
English Literature from 1350 to 1832--almost 500 years--, and
next to write a paper and show particular knowledge of English
Literature between 1700 and 1785--eighty-five years. Next comes a
paper on passages from selected English verse and prose writings
--the Statute discreetly avoids calling them literature--between
1200 and 1500, exclusive of Chaucer; with questions on language,
metre, literary history and literary criticism: then a paper on
Chaucer with questions on language, metre, literary history and
literary criticism: lastly a paper on writing in the Wessex
dialect of Old English, with questions on the cornet, flute,
harp, sackbut, language, metre and literary history.

Now if you were to qualify yourself for all this as a scholar
should, and in two years, you would certainly deserve to be
addressed by Mr Hamerton as 'A Young Man of Letters who worked
Excessively'; and to work excessively is not good for anyone.
Yet, on the other hand, you are precluded from using, for your
'cerebral inconveniences,' the heroic remedy exhibited by Mr
Hamerton's enterprising tradesman, since on that method you would
not attain to the main object of your laudable ambition, a
Cambridge degree.

But the matter is very much worse than your Statute makes it out.
Take one of the papers in which some actual acquaintance with
Literature is required the Special Period from 1700 to 1785; then
turn to your "Cambridge History of English Literature", and you
will find that the mere bibliography of those eighty-five years
occupies something like five or six hundred pages--five or six
hundred pages of titles and authors in simple enumeration! The
brain reels; it already suffers 'cerebral inconveniences.' But
stretch the list back to Chaucer, back through Chaucer to those
alleged prose writings in the Wessex dialect, then forward from
1785 to Wordsworth, to Byron, to Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson,
Browning, Meredith, even to this year in which literature still
lives and engenders; and the brain, if not too giddy indeed,
stands as Satan stood on the brink of Chaos--

     Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith
     He had to cross--

and sees itself, with him, now plumbing a vast vacuity, and anon
nigh-foundered, 'treading the crude consistence.'

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to
_know_ it in any reputable sense of the word--let alone your
learning to write English--is, in short, impossible. And the
framers of the Statute, recognising this, have very sensibly
compromised by setting you to work on such things as 'the
Outlines of English Literature'; which are not Literature at all
but are only what some fellow has to say about it, hastily
summarising his estimates of many works, of which on a generous
computation he has probably read one-fifth; and by examining you
on (what was it all?) 'language, metre, literary history and
literary criticism,' which again are not Literature, or at least
(as a Greek would say in his idiom) escape their own notice being
Literature. For English Literature, as I take it, is _that which
sundry men and women have written memorably in English about
Life._ And so I come to my subject--the art of reading _that,_
which is Literature.

V

I shall take leave to leap into it over another man's back, or,
rather over two men's backs. No doubt it has happened to many of
you to pick up in a happy moment some book or pamphlet or copy of
verse which just says the word you have unconsciously been
listening for, almost craving to speak for yourself, and so sends
you off hot-foot on the trail. And if you have had that
experience, it may also have happened to you that, after ranging,
you returned on the track 'like faithful hound returning,' in
gratitude, or to refresh the scent; and that, picking up the book
again, you found it no such wonderful book after all, or that
some of the magic had faded by process of the change in yourself
which itself had originated. But the word was spoken.

Such a book--pamphlet I may call it, so small it was--fell into
my hands some ten years ago; "The Aims of Literary Study"--no
very attractive title--by Dr Corson, a distinguished American
Professor (and let me say that, for something more than ten--say
for twenty--years much of the most thoughtful as well as the most
thorough work upon English comes to us from America). I find, as
I handle again the small duodecimo volume, that my own thoughts
have taken me a little wide, perhaps a little astray, from its
suggestions. But for loyalty's sake I shall start just where Dr
Corson started, with a passage from Browning's, "A Death in the
Desert," supposed (you will remember)--

     Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene

narrating the death of St John the Evangelist, John of Patmos;
the narrative interrupted by this gloss:

  [This is the doctrine he was wont to teach,
  How divers persons witness in each man,
  Three souls which make up one soul: _first,_ to wit,
  A soul of each and all the bodily parts,
  Seated therein, which works, and is _What Does,_
  And has the use of earth, and ends the man
  Downward: but, tending upward for advice,
  Grows into, and again is grown into
  By the next soul, which, seated in the brain,
  Useth the first with its collected use,
  And feeleth, thinketh, willeth,--is _What Knows_:
  Which, duly tending upward in its turn,
  Grows into, and again is grown into
  By the last soul, that uses both the first,
  Subsisting whether they assist or no,
  And, constituting man's self, is _What Is_--
  And leans upon the former

(Mark the word, Gentlemen; '_leans_ upon the former'--leaning
back, as it were felt by him, on this very man who had leaned
on Christ's bosom, being loved)

  And leans upon the former, makes it play,
  As that played off the first: and, tending up,
  Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man
  Upward in that dread point of intercourse,
  Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him.
  _What Does, What Knows, What Is;_ three souls, one man.
  I give the glossa of Theotypas.]

_What Does, What Knows, What Is_--there is no mistaking what
Browning means, nor in what degrees of hierarchy he places this,
that, and the other.... Does it not strike you how curiously men
to-day, with their minds perverted by hate, are inverting that
order?--all the highest value set on _What Does--What Knows_
suddenly seen to be of importance, but only as important in
feeding the guns, perfecting explosives, collaring trade--all in
the service of _What Does,_ of 'Get on or Get Out,' of
'Efficiency'; no one stopping to think that 'Efficiency' is--must
be--a relative term! Efficient for what?--for _What Does, What
Knows_ or perchance, after all, for _What Is_? No! banish the
humanities and throw everybody into practical science: not into
that study of natural science, which can never conflict with the
'humanities' since it seeks discovery for the pure sake of truth,
or charitably to alleviate man's lot--

     Sweetly, rather, to ease, loose and bind
     As need requires, this frail fallen humankind ...

--but to invent what will be commercially serviceable in besting
your neighbour, or in gassing him, or in slaughtering him neatly
and wholesale. But still the whisper (not ridiculous in its day)
will assert itself, that _What Is_ comes first, holding and
upheld by God; still through the market clamour for a 'Business
Government' will persist the voice of Plato murmuring that, after
all, the best form of government is government by good men: and
the voice of some small man faintly protesting 'But I don't want
to be governed by business men; because I know them and, without
asking much of life, I have a hankering to die with a shirt on my
back.'

VI

But let us postpone _What Is_ for a moment, and deal with _What
Does_ and _What Knows._ They too, of course, have had their
oppositions, and the very meaning of a University such as
Cambridge--its _fons,_ its _origo,_ its [Greek: to ti en einai]--
was to assert _What Knows_ against _What Does_ in a medieval
world pranced over by men-at-arms, Normans, English, Burgundians,
Scots. Ancillary to Theology, which then had a meaning vastly
different from its meaning to-day, the University tended as
portress of the gate of knowledge--of such knowledge as the
Church required, encouraged, or permitted--and kept the flag of
intellectual life, as I may put it, flying above that gate and
over the passing throngs of 'doers' and mailed-fisters. The
University was a Seat of Learning: the Colleges, as they sprang
up, were Houses of Learning.

But note this, which in their origin and still in the frame of
their constitution differentiates Oxford and Cambridge from all
their ancient sisters and rivals. These two (and no third, I
believe, in Europe) were corporations of Teachers, existing for
Teachers, governed by Teachers. In a Scottish University the
students by vote choose their Rector: but here or at Oxford no
undergraduate, no Bachelor, counts at all in the government, both
remaining alike _in statu pupillari_ until qualified as Masters--
_Magistri._ Mark the word, and mark also the title of one who
obtained what in those days would be the highest of degrees (but
yet gave him no voting strength above a Master). He was a
Professor-'Sanctae Theologiae Professor.' To this day every
country clergyman who comes up to Cambridge to record his
_non-placet,_ does so by virtue of his capacity to teach what he
learned here--in theory, that is. Scholars were included in
College foundations on a sort of pupil-teacher-supply system:
living in rooms with the lordly masters, and valeting them for
the privilege of 'reading with' them. We keep to this day the
pleasant old form of words. Now for various reasons--one of
which, because it is closely germane to my subject, I shall
particularly examine--Oxford and Cambridge, while conserving
almost intact their medieval frame of government, with a hundred
other survivals which Time but makes, through endurance, more
endearing, have, insensibly as it were, and across (it must be
confessed) intervals of sloth and gross dereliction of duty,
added a new function to the cultivation of learning--that of
furnishing out of youth a succession of men capable of fulfilling
high offices in Church and State.

Some may regret this. I think many of us must regret that a
deeper tincture of learning is not required of the average
pass-man, or injected into him perforce. But speaking roughly about
fact, I should say that while we elders up here are required--
nay, presumed to _know_ certain things, we aim that our young men
shall be of a certain kind; and I see no cause to disown a
sentence in the very first lecture I had the honour of reading
before you--'The man we are proud to send forth from our Schools
will be remarkable less for something he can take out of his
wallet and exhibit for knowledge, than for _being_ something,
and that something recognisable for a man of unmistakable
intellectual breeding, whose trained judgment we can trust to
choose the better and reject the worse.'

The reasons which have led our older Universities to deflect
their functions (whether for good or ill) so far from their first
purpose are complicated if not many. Once admit young men in
large numbers, and youth (I call any Dean or Tutor to witness)
must be compromised with; will construe the laws of its seniors
in its own way, now and then breaking them; and will inevitably
end, by getting something of its own way.. The growth of
gymnastic, the insensible gravitation of the elderly towards
Fenner's--there to snatch a fearful joy and explain that the walk
was good for them; the Union and other debating societies;
College rivalries; the festivities of May Week; the invasion of
women students: all these may have helped. But I must dwell
discreetly on one compelling and obvious cause--the increased and
increasing unwieldiness of Knowledge. And that is the main
trouble, as I guess.

VII

Let us look it fair in the face: because it is the main practical
difficulty with which I propose that, in succeeding lectures, we
grapple. Against Knowledge I have, as the light cynic observed of
a certain lady's past, only one serious objection--that there is
so much of it. There is indeed so much of it that if with the
best will in the world you devoted yourself to it as a mere
scholar, you could not possibly digest its accumulated and still
accumulating stores. As Sir Thomas Elyot wrote in the 16th
century (using, you will observe, the very word of Mr Hamerton's
energetic but fed-up tradesman), 'Inconveniences always doe
happen by ingurgitation and excessive feedings.' An old
schoolmaster and a poet--Mr James Rhoades, late of Sherborne--
comments in words which I will quote, being unable to better
them:

  This is no less true of the mind than of the body. I do not
  know that a well-informed man, as such, is more worthy of
  regard than a well-fed one. The brain, indeed, is a nobler
  organ than the stomach, but on that very account is the less
  to be excused for indulging in repletion. The temptation, I
  confess, is greater, because for the brain the banquet stands
  ever spread before our eyes, and is, unhappily, as
  indestructible as the widow's meal and oil.

  Only think what would become of us if the physical food,
  by which our bodies subsist, instead of being consumed by
  the eater, was passed on intact by every generation to the
  next, with the superadded hoards of all the ages, the earth's
  productive power meanwhile increasing year by year
  beneath the unflagging hand of Science, till, as Comus
  says, she

    would be quite surcharged with her own weight
    And strangled with her waste fertility.

  Should we rather not pull down our barns, and build
  smaller, and make bonfires of what they would not hold?
  And yet, with regard to Knowledge, the very opposite of
  this is what we do. We store the whole religiously, and that
  though not twice alone, as with the bees in Virgil, but
  scores of times in every year, is the teeming produce
  gathered in. And then we put a fearful pressure on
  ourselves and others to gorge of it as much as ever we can
  hold.

_Facit indignatio versus._ My author, gathering heat, puts it
somewhat dithyrambically: but there you have it, Gentlemen.

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and
groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still
putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the
difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out
inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly
paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the
Creator has an idea, of a man, so long shall I be sure that no
uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at
Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but
that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.

VIII

The old schoolmaster whom I quoted just now goes on:

  I believe, if the truth were known, men would be
  astonished at the small amount of learning with which a
  high degree of culture is compatible. In a moment of enthusiasm
  I ventured once to tell my 'English set' that if they could
  really master the ninth book of "Paradise Lost", so as to rise
  to the height of its great argument and incorporate all its
  beauties in themselves, they would at one blow, by virtue
  of that alone, become highly cultivated men.... More and
  more various learning might raise them to the same height
  by different paths, but could hardly raise them higher.

Here let me interpose and quote the last three lines of that
Book--three lines only; simple, unornamented, but for every man
and every woman who have dwelt together since our first parents,
in mere statement how wise!

     Thus they in mutual accusation spent
     The fruitless hours, _but neither self-condemning;_
     And of their vain contest appear'd no end.

A parent afterwards told me (my schoolmaster adds) that his son
went home and so buried himself in the book that food and sleep
that day had no attraction for him. Next morning, I need hardly
say, the difference in his appearance was remarkable: he had
outgrown all his intellectual clothes.

The end of this story strikes me, I confess, as rapid, and may be
compared with that of the growth of Delian Apollo in the Homeric
hymn; but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so
much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.

IX

_What Does--What Knows--What Is...._

I am not likely to depreciate to you the value of _What Does,_
after spending my first twelve lectures up here, on the art and
practice of Writing, encouraging you to _do_ this thing which I
daily delight in trying to do: as God forbid that anyone should
hint a slightening word of what our sons and brothers are doing
just now, and doing for us! But Peace being the normal condition
of man's activity, I look around me for a vindication of what is
noblest in _What Does_ and am content with a passage from George
Eliot's poem "Stradivarius", the gist of which is that God
himself might conceivably make better fiddles than Stradivari's,
but by no means certainly; since, as a fact, God orders his best
fiddles of Stradivari. Says the great workman,

     'God be praised,
  Antonio Stradivari has an eye
  That winces at false work and loves the true,
  With hand and arm that play upon the tool
  As willingly as any singing bird
  Sets him to sing his morning roundelay,
  Because he likes to sing and likes the song.'
  Then Naldo: ''Tis a pretty kind of fame
  At best, that comes of making violins;
  And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go
  To purgatory none the less.'
     But he:
  ''Twere purgatory here to make them ill;
  And for my fame--when any master holds
  'Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine,
  He will be glad that Stradivari lived,
  Made violins, and made them of the best.
  The masters only know whose work is good:
  They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill
  I give them instruments to play upon,
  God choosing me to help Him.'
     'What! Were God
  At fault for violins, thou absent?'
     'Yes;
  He were at fault for Stradivari's work.'
  'Why, many hold Giuseppe's
  violins As good as thine.'
     'May be: they are different.
  His quality declines: he spoils his hand
  With over-drinking. But were his the best,
  He could not work for two. My work is mine,
  And heresy or not, if my hand slacked
  I should rob God--since He is fullest good--
  Leaving a blank instead of violins.
  I say, not God Himself can make man's best
  Without best men to help him....
     'Tis God gives skill,
  But not without men's hands: He could not make
  Antonio Stradivari's violins
  Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel.'

So much then for _What Does_: I do not depreciate it.

X

Neither do I depreciate--in Cambridge, save the mark!--_What
Knows._ All knowledge is venerable; and I suppose you will find
the last vindication of the scholar's life at its baldest in
Browning's "A Grammarian's Funeral":

  Others mistrust and say, 'But time escapes:
     Live now or never!'
  He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dog and apes!
     Man has Forever.'
  Back to his book then; deeper drooped his head:
     Calculus racked him:
  Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead:
     Tussis attacked him....
  So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,
     Ground he at grammar;
  Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
     While he could stammer
  He settled Hoti's business--let it be!--
     Properly based Oun--
  Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
     Dead from the waist down.
  Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place:
     Hail to your purlieus,
  All ye highfliers of the feathered race,
     Swallows and curlews!
  Here's the top-peak; the multitude below
     Live, for they can, there:
  This man decided not to Live but Know--
     Bury this man there.

Nevertheless Knowledge is not, cannot be, everything; and indeed,
as a matter of experience, cannot even be counted upon to
educate. Some of us have known men of extreme learning who yet
are, some of them, uncouth in conduct, others violent and
overbearing in converse, others unfair in controversy, others
even unscrupulous in action--men of whom the sophist Thrasymachus
in Plato's "Republic" may stand for the general type. Nay, some
of us will subscribe with the old schoolmaster whom I will quote
again, when he writes:

  To myself personally, as an exception to the rule that
  opposites attract, a very well-informed person is an object of
  terror. His mind seems to be so full of facts that you cannot,
  as it were, see the wood for the trees; there is no room for
  perspective, no lawns and glades for pleasure and repose, no
  vistas through which to view some towering hill or elevated
  temple; everything in that crowded space seems of the same
  value: he speaks with no more awe of "King Lear" than of the
  last Cobden prize essay; he has swallowed them both with the
  same ease, and got the facts safe in his pouch; but he has no
  time to ruminate because he must still be swallowing; nor does
  he seem to know what even Macbeth, with Banquo's murderers
  then at work, found leisure to remember--that good digestion
  must wait on appetite, if health is to follow both:

Now that may be put a trifle too vivaciously, but the moral is
true. Bacon tells us that reading maketh a full man. Yes, and too
much of it makes him too full. The two words of the Greek upon
knowledge remain true, that the last triumph of Knowledge is
_Know Thyself._ So Don Quixote repeats it to Sancho Panza,
counselling him how to govern his Island:

  First, O son, thou hast to fear God, for in fearing Him is
  wisdom, and being wise thou canst not err.

  But secondly thou hast to set thine eyes on what thou art,
  endeavouring to _know thyself--which is the most difficult_
  _knowledge that can be conceived._

But to know oneself is to know that which alone can know _What
Is._ So the hierarchy runs up.

XI

_What Does, What Knows, What Is...._
I have happily left myself no time to-day to speak of _What Is_:
happily, because I would not have you even approach it
towards the end of an hour when your attention must be languishing.
But I leave you with two promises, and with two sayings from which
as this lecture took its start its successors will proceed.

The first promise is, that _What Is,_ being the spiritual element
in man, is the highest object of his study.

The second promise is that, nine-tenths of what is worthy to be
called Literature being concerned with this spiritual element,
for that it should be studied, from firstly up to ninthly, before
anything else.

And my two quotations are for you to ponder:

(1) This, first:

  That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is
  mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact beyond which we cannot
  go.... Spirit to spirit--as in water face answereth to face, so
  the heart of man to man.

(2) And this other, from the writings of an obscure Welsh
clergyman of the 17th century:

  You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself
  floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens
  and crowned with the stars.



[Footnote 1: The reader will kindly turn back to p.1, and observe
the date at the head of this lecture. At that time I was engaged
against a system of English teaching which I believed to be
thoroughly bad. That system has since given place to another,
which I am prepared to defend as a better.]




LECTURE II

APPREHENSION VERSUS COMPREHENSION

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1916


I

Let us attempt to-day, Gentlemen, picking up the scent where we
left at the conclusion of my first lecture, to hunt the Art of
Reading (as I shall call it), a little further on the line of
common-sense; then to cast back and chase on a line somewhat more
philosophical. If these lines run wide and refuse to unite, we
shall have made a false cast: if they converge and meet, we shall
have caught our hare and may proceed, in subsequent lectures, to
cook him.

Well, the line of common-sense has brought us to this point--
that, man and this planet being such as they are, for a man to
read all the books existent on it is impossible; and, if
possible, would be in the highest degree undesirable. Let us, for
example, go back quite beyond the invention of printing and try
to imagine a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the
Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the
number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be
gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly
that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen
one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of
Euripides. It is incredible that he could gratify us.

There was, as I have said, a great burning at Alexandria in 47
B.C., when Caesar set the fleet in the harbour on fire to prevent
its falling into the hands of the Egyptians. The flames spread,
and the great library stood but 400 yards from the quayside, with
warehouses full of books yet closer. The last great burning was
perpetrated in A.D. 642. Gibbon quotes the famous sentence of
Omar, the great Mohammedan who gave the order: 'If these writings
of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and
need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and
ought to be destroyed,' and goes on:

  The sentence was executed with blind obedience; the
  volumes of paper or parchment were distributed to the four
  thousand baths of the city; and such was their incredible
  multitude that six months were barely sufficient for the
  consumption of this precious fuel.... The tale has been
  repeatedly transcribed; and every scholar, with pious
  indignation, has deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the
  learning, the arts, and the genius, of antiquity. For my own
  part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and the
  consequences.

Of the consequence he writes:

  Perhaps the church and seat of the patriarchs might be
  enriched with a repository of books: but, if the ponderous
  mass of Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed
  consumed in the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with
  a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of
  mankind. I sincerely regret the more valuable libraries,
  which have been involved in the ruin of the Roman empire;
  but, when I seriously compute the lapse of ages, the waste of
  ignorance, and the calamities of war, our treasures, rather
  than our losses, are the object of my surprise. Many curious
  and interesting facts are buried in oblivion: the three great
  historians of Rome have been transmitted to our hands in a
  mutilated state, and we are deprived of many pleasing
  compositions of the lyric, iambic, and dramatic poetry of the
  Greeks. Yet we should gratefully remember that the
  mischances of time and accident have spared the classic
  works to which the suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the
  first place of genius and glory; the teachers of ancient
  knowledge, who are still extant, had perused and compared
  the writings of their predecessors; nor can it fairly be
  presumed that any important truth, any useful discovery in
  art or nature, has been snatched away from the curiosity of
  modern ages.

I certainly do not ask you to subscribe to all that. In fact when
Gibbon asks us to remember gratefully 'that the mischances of
time and accident have spared the classic works to which the
suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the first place of genius and
glory,' I submit with all respect that he talks nonsense. Like
the stranger in the temple of the sea-god, invited to admire the
many votive garments of those preserved out of shipwreck, I ask
'at ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata perierunt?'--
or in other words 'Where are the trousers of the drowned?' 'What
about the "Sthenoboea" of Euripides, the "Revellers" of Ameipsias--
to which, as a matter of simple fact, what you call the suffrage of
antiquity did adjudge the first prize, above Aristophanes' best?'

But of course he is equally right to this extent, that the fire
consumed a vast deal of rubbish: solid tons more than any man
could swallow,--let be, digest--'read, mark, learn and inwardly
digest.' And that was in A.D. 642, whereas we have arrived at
1916. Where would our voracious Alexandrian be to-day, with all
the literature of the Middle Ages added to his feast and on top
of that all the printed books of 450 years? 'Reading,' says
Bacon, 'maketh a Full Man.' Yes, indeed!

Now I am glad that sentence of Bacon falls pat here, because it
gives me, turning to his famous Essay "Of Studies", the
reinforcement of his great name for the very argument which I am
directing against the fallacy of those teachers who would have
you use 'manuals' as anything else than guides to your own
reading or perspectives in which the authors are set out in the
comparative eminence by which they claim priority of study or
indicate the proportions of a literary period. Some of these
manuals are written by men of knowledge so encyclopaedic that (if
it go with critical judgment) for these purposes they may be
trusted. But to require you, at your stage of reading, to have
even the minor names by heart is a perversity of folly. For later
studies it seems to me a more pardonable mistake, but yet a
mistake, to hope that by the employ of separate specialists you
can get even in 15 or 20 volumes a perspective, a proportionate
description, of what English Literature really is. But worst of
all is that Examiner, who--aware that you must please him, to get
a good degree, and being just as straight and industrious as
anyone else--assumes that in two years you have become expert in
knowledge that beats a lifetime, and, brought up against the
practical impossibility of this assumption, questions you--not on
a little selected first-hand knowledge--but on massed information
which at the best can be but derivative and second-hand.

Now hear Bacon.

  Studies serve for Delight--

(Mark it,--he puts delight first)

  Studies serve for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability.
  Their Chiefe use for Delight, is in Privatenesse and
  Retiring[1]; for Ornament, is in Discourse; and for Ability,
  is in the Judgement and Disposition of Businesse.... To spend
  too much Time in Studies is Sloth; to use them too much for
  Ornament is Affectation; to make judgement wholly by their
  Rules is the Humour of a Scholler. They perfect Nature, and
  are perfected by Experience: for Naturall Abilities are like
  Naturall Plants, they need Proyning by Study. And Studies
  themselves doe give forth Directions too much at Large,
  unless they be bounded in by experience.

Again, he says:

  Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed,
  and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested: that is, some
  Bookes are to be read onely in Parts; Others to be read but
  not Curiously; and some Few are to be read wholly, and with
  Diligence and Attention. Some Bookes also may be read by
  Deputy, and Extracts made of them by Others. But that
  would be onely in the lesse important Arguments, and the
  Meaner Sort of Bookes: else distilled Bookes are like
  Common distilled Waters, Flashy Things.

So you see, Gentlemen, while pleading before you that Reading is
an Art--that its best purpose is not to accumulate Knowledge but
to produce, to educate, such-and-such a man--that 'tis a folly to
bite off more than you can assimilate--and that with it, as with
every other art, the difficulty and the discipline lie in
selecting out of vast material, what is fit, fine, applicable--I
have the great Francis Bacon himself towering behind my shoulder
for patron.

Some would push the argument further than--here and now, at any
rate--I choose to do, or perhaps would at all care to do. For
example, Philip Gilbert Hamerton, whom I quoted to you three
weeks ago, instances in his book "The Intellectual Life" an
accomplished French cook who, in discussing his art, comprised
the whole secret of it under two heads--the knowledge of the
mutual influences of ingredients, and the judicious management of
heat:

  Amongst the dishes for which my friend had a deserved
  reputation was a certain _gateau de foie_ which had a very
  exquisite flavour. The principal ingredient, not in quantity
  but in power, was the liver of a fowl; but there were several
  other ingredients also, and amongst these a leaf or two of
  parsley. He told me that the influence of the parsley was a
  good illustration of his theory about his art. If the parsley
  were omitted, the flavour he aimed at was not produced at all;
  but, on the other hand, if the quantity of the parsley was in
  the least excessive, then the _gateau_ instead of being a
  delicacy for gourmets became an uneatable mess. Perceiving that
  I was really interested in the subject, he kindly promised a
  practical evidence of his doctrine, and the next day
  intentionally spoiled the dish by a trifling addition of
  parsley. He had not exaggerated the consequences; the delicate
  flavour entirely departed, and left a nauseous bitterness in
  its place, like the remembrance of an ill-spent youth.

I trust that none of you are in a position to appreciate the full
force of this last simile; and, for myself, I should have taken
the chef's word for it, without experiment. Mr Hamerton proceeds
to draw his moral:

  There is a sort of intellectual chemistry which is quite as
  marvellous as material chemistry and a thousand times more
  difficult to observe. One general truth may, however, be
  relied upon.... It is true that everything we learn affects the
  _whole_ character of the mind.

  Consider how incalculably important becomes the
  question of _proportion_ in our knowledge, and how that which
  we are is dependent as much upon our ignorance as our
  science. What we call ignorance is only a smaller proportion--
  what we call science only a larger.

Here the argument begins to become delicious:

  The larger quantity is recommended as an unquestionable
  good, but the goodness of it is entirely dependent _on the
  mental product that we want._ Aristocracies have always
  instinctively felt this, and have decided that a gentleman
  ought not to know too much of certain arts and sciences. The
  character which they had accepted as their ideal would have
  been destroyed by indiscriminate additions to those
  ingredients of which long experience had fixed the exact
  proportions....

  The last generation of the English country aristocracy
  was particularly rich in characters whose unity and charm
  was dependent upon the limitations of their culture, and
  which would have been entirely altered, perhaps not for the
  better, by simply knowing a science or a literature that was
  dosed to them.

If anything could be funnier than that, it is that it is, very
possibly, true. Let us end our quest-by-commonsense, for the
moment, on this; that to read all the books that have been
written---in short to keep pace with those that are being
written--is starkly impossible, and (as Aristotle would say)
about what is impossible one does not argue. We _must_ select.
Selection implies skilful practice. Skilful practice is only
another term for Art. So far plain common-sense leads us. On this
point, then, let us set up a rest and hark back.

II

Let us cast back to the three terms of my first lecture--_What
does, What knows, What is._

I shall here take leave to recapitulate a brief argument much
sneered at a few years ago when it was still fashionable to
consider Hegel a greater philosopher than Plato. Abbreviating it
I repeat it, because I believe in it yet to-day, when Hegel (for
causes unconnected with pure right and wrong) has gone somewhat
out of fashion for a while.

As the tale, then, is told by Plato, in the tenth book of "The
Republic", one Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian, was slain in
battle; and ten days afterwards, when they collected the dead for
burial, his body alone showed no taint of corruption. His
relatives, however, bore it off to the funeral pyre; and on the
twelfth day, lying there, he returned to life, and he told them
what he had seen in the other world. Many wonders he related
concerning the dead, for example, with their rewards and
punishments: but what had impressed him as most wonderful of all
was the great spindle of Necessity, reaching up to Heaven, with
the planets revolving around it in graduated whorls of width and
spread: yet all concentric and so timed that all complete the
full circle punctually together--'The Spindle turns on the knees
of Necessity; and on the rim of each whorl sits perched a Siren
who goes round with it, hymning a single note; the eight notes
together forming one harmony.'

Now as--we have the divine word for it--upon two great
commandments hang all the law and the prophets, so all
religions, all philosophies, hang upon two steadfast and
faithful beliefs; the first of which Plato would show by the
above parable.

It is, of course, that the stability of the Universe rests upon
ordered motion--that the 'firmament' above, around, beneath,
stands firm, continues firm, on a balance of active and
tremendous forces somehow harmoniously composed. Theology asks
'by What?' or 'by Whom?' Philosophy inclines rather to ask 'How?'
Natural Science, allowing that for the present these questions
are probably unanswerable, contents itself with mapping and
measuring what it can of the various forces. But all agree about
the harmony; and when a Galileo or a Newton discovers a single
rule of it for us, he but makes our assurance surer. For
uncounted centuries before ever hearing of Gravitation men knew
of the sun that he rose and set, of the moon that she waxed and
waned, of the tides that they flowed and ebbed, all regularly, at
times to be predicted; of the stars that they swung as by
clockwork around the pole. Says the son of Sirach:

     At the word of the Holy One they will stand in due order,
     And they will not faint in their watches.

So evident is this calculated harmony that men, seeking to
interpret it by what was most harmonious in themselves or in
their human experience, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres
inaudible to mortals: Plato as we see (who learned of Pythagoras)
inventing his Octave of Sirens, perched on the whorls of the
great spindle and intoning as they spin.

Dante (Chaucer copying him in "The Parlement of Fowls") makes the
spheres nine: and so does Milton:

     then listen I
  To the celestial _Sirens_ harmony,
  That sit upon the nine infolded Sphears,
  And sing to those that hold the vital shears,
  And turn the Adamantine spindle round
  On which the fate of gods and men is wound.
  Such sweet compulsion doth in musick lie
  To lull the daughters of _Necessity_,
  And keep unsteady Nature to her law,
  And the low world in measur'd motion draw
  After the heavenly tune....

If the sceptical mind object to the word _law_ as begging the
question and postulating a governing intelligence with a
governing will--if it tell me that when revolted Lucifer uprose
in starlight--

     and at the stars,
  Which are the brain of heaven, he look'd, and sank.
  Around the ancient track march'd, rank on rank,
  The army of unalterable law--

he was merely witnessing a series of predictable or invariable
recurrences, I answer that he may be right, it suffices for my
argument that they _are_ recurrent, are invariable, can be
predicted. Anyhow the Universe is not Chaos (if it were, by the
way, we should be unable to reason about it at all). It stands
and is renewed upon a harmony: and what Plato called 'Necessity'
is the Duty--compulsory or free as you or I can conceive it--the
Duty of all created things to obey that harmony, the Duty of
which Wordsworth tells in his noble Ode.

  Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong:
  And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and
     strong.

III

Now the other and second great belief is, that the Universe, the
macrocosm, cannot be apprehended at all except as its rays
converge upon the eye, brain, soul of Man, the microcosm: on you,
on me, on the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense
cosmic circle focuses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass--and
he is not shrivelled up! Other creatures, he notes, share in his
sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not in his percipience
--or not in any degree worth measuring. So far as he can discover,
he is not only a bewildered actor in the great pageant but 'the
ring enclosing all,' the sole intelligent spectator. Wonder of
wonders, it is all meant for _him_!

I doubt if, among men of our nation, this truth was ever more
clearly grasped than by the Cambridge Platonists who taught your
forerunners of the 17th century. But I will quote you here two
short passages from the work of a sort of poor relation of
theirs, a humble Welsh parson of that time, Thomas Traherne--
unknown until the day before yesterday--from whom I gave you one
sentence in my first lecture. He is speaking of the fields and
streets that were the scene of his childhood:

  Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the
  womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the
  best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe.... The
  corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be
  reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from
  everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street
  were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of
  the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one
  of the gates transported and ravished me.... Boys and girls
  tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I
  knew not that they were born or should die....

  The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people
  were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as
  much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces.
  The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars;
  and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and
  enjoyer of it.

Then:

  News from a foreign country came,
  As if my treasure and my wealth lay there;
  So much it did my heart inflame,
  'Twas wont to call my Soul into mine ear;
  Which thither went to meet
  The approaching sweet,
  And on the threshold stood
  To entertain the unknown Good....

  What sacred instinct did inspire
  My Soul in childhood with a hope to strong?
  What secret force moved my desire
  To expect new joys beyond the seas, so young?
  Felicity I knew
  Was out of view,

  And being here alone,
  I saw that happiness was gone
  From me! For this
  I thirsted absent bliss,
  And thought that sure beyond the seas,
  Or else in something near at hand--
  I knew not yet (since naught did please
  I knew) my Bliss did stand.

  But little did the infant dream
  That all the treasures of the world were by:
  And that himself was so the cream
  And crown of all which round about did lie.
  Yet thus it was: the Gem,
  The Diadem,
  The Ring enclosing all
  That stood upon this earthly ball,
  The Heavenly Eye,
  Much wider than the sky,
  Wherein they all included were,
  The glorious Soul, that was the King
  Made to possess them, did appear
  A small and little thing!

And then comes the noble sentence of which I promised you that it
should fall into its place:

  You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth
  in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and
  crowned with the stars.

Man in short--you, I, any one of us--the heir of it all!

_Tot circa unum caput tumultuantes deos!_

Our best privilege to sing our short lives out in tune with the
heavenly concert--and if to sing afterwards, then afterwards!

IV

But how shall Man ever attain to understand and find his proper
place in this Universe, this great sweeping harmonious circle of
which nevertheless he feels himself to be the diminutive focus?
His senses are absurdly imperfect. His ear cannot catch any music
the spheres make; and moreover there are probably neither spheres
nor music. His eye is so dull an instrument that (as Blanco
White's famous sonnet reminds us) he can neither see this world
in the dark, nor glimpse any of the scores of others until it
falls dark:

     If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?

Yet the Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to man save
in so far as _he_ apprehends it: and lacking him (so far as he
knows) it utterly lacks the compliment of an audience. Is all the
great orchestra designed for nothing but to please its Conductor?
Yes, if you choose: but no, as I think. And here my other
quotation:

  That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is
  mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact.... Spirit to spirit--
  as in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.

Yes and, all spirit being mutually attractive, far more than
this! I preach to you that, through help of eyes that are dim, of
ears that are dull, by instinct of something yet undefined--call
it soul--it wants no less a name--Man has a native impulse and
attraction and yearning to merge himself in that harmony and be
one with it: a spirit of adoption (as St Paul says) whereby we
cry _Abba, Father!_

And because ye are Sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of
His Son into your hearts, crying _Abba, Father._

That is to say, we know we have something within us correspondent
to the harmony, and (I make bold to say) unless we have deadened
it with low desires, worthy to join in it. Even in his common
daily life Man is for ever seeking after harmony, in avoidance of
chaos: he cultivates habits by the clock, he forms committees,
governments, hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which (as he
hopes) a system of society will work in tune. But these are
childish imitations, underplay on the great motive:

     The Kingdom of God is within you.

Quid aliud est anima quam Deus in corpore humano hospitans?

V

Gentlemen, you may be thinking that I have brought you a long way
round, that the hour is wearing late, and that we are yet far
from the prey we first hunted on the line of common-sense. But be
patient for a minute or two, for almost we have our hand on the
animal.

If the Kingdom of God, or anything correspondent to it, be within
us, even in such specks of dust as we separately are, why that,
and that only, can be the light by which you or I may hope to
read the Universal: that, and that only, deserves the name of
'_What Is_.' Nay, I can convince you in a moment. Let me recall a
passage of Emerson quoted by me on the morning I first had the
honour to address an audience in Cambridge:

  It is remarkable (says he) that involuntarily we always read
  as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the
  romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures ... anywhere
  make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but
  rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel most
  at home. All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of
  a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.

It is remarkable, as Emerson says; and yet, as we now
see, quite simple. A learned man may patronise a less learned
one: but the Kingdom of God cannot patronise the Kingdom
of God, the larger the smaller. There _are_ large and small.
Between these two mysteries of a harmonious universe and
the inward soul are granted to live among us certain men
whose minds and souls throw out filaments more delicate
than ours, vibrating to far messages which they bring home,
to report them to us; and these men we call prophets, poets,
masters, great artists, and when they write it, we call their
report literature. But it is by the spark in us that we read it:
and not all the fire of God that was in Shakespeare can dare
to patronise the little spark in me. If it did, I can see--with
Blake--the angelic host

     throw down their spears
     And water heaven with their tears.

VI

To nurse that spark, common to the king, the sage, the
poorest child--to fan, to draw up to a flame, to 'educate'
_What Is_--to recognise that it is divine, yet frail, tender,
sometimes easily tired, easily quenched under piles of
book-learning--to let it run at play very often, even more
often to let it rest in what Wordsworth calls

     a wise passiveness

passive--to use a simile of Coventry Patmore--as a photographic
plate which finds stars that no telescope can discover, simply by
waiting with its face turned upward--to mother it, in short, as
wise mothers do their children--this is what I mean by the Art of
Reading.

For all great Literature, I would lastly observe, is gentle
towards that spirit which learns of it. It teaches by
_apprehension_ not by _comprehension_--which is what many
philosophers try to do, and, in trying, break their jugs and
spill the contents. Literature understands man and of what he is
capable. Philosophy, on the other hand, may not be 'harsh and
crabbed, as dull fools suppose,' but the trouble with most of its
practitioners is that they try to _comprehend_ the Universe. Now
the man who could comprehend the Universe would _ipso facto_
comprehend God, and be _ipso facto_ a Super-God, able to dethrone
him, and in the arrogance of his intellectual conceit full ready
to make the attempt.



[Footnote 1:  Do you remember, by the by, Samuel Rogers's lines
on Lady Jane Grey? They have always seemed to me very beautiful:

  Like her most gentle, most unfortunate,
  Crown'd but to die--who in her chamber sate
  Musing with Plato, though the horn was blown,
  And every ear and every heart was won,
  And all in green array were chasing down the sun!]




LECTURE III

CHILDREN'S READING (I)

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24, 1917


I have often wished, Gentlemen, that some more winning name could
be found for the thing we call Education; and I have sometimes
thought wistfully that, had we made a better thing of it, we
should long ago have found a more amiable, a blither, name.

For after all it concerns the child; and is it quite an accident
that, weaning him away from lovely things that so lovelily call
themselves 'love,' 'home,' 'mother,' we can find no more alluring
titles for the streets into which we entrap him than 'Educational
Facilities,' 'Local Examinations,' 'Preceptors,' 'Pedagogues,'
'Professors,' 'Matriculations,' 'Certificates,' 'Diplomas,'
'Seminaries,' Elementary or Primary, and Secondary Codes,'
'Continuation Classes,' 'Reformatories,' 'Inspectors,' 'Local
Authorities,' 'Provided' and 'Non-Provided,' 'Denominational' and
'Undenominational,' and 'D.Litt.' and 'Mus. Bac.'? Expressive
terms, no doubt!--but I ask with the poet

     Who can track
     A Grace's naked foot amid them all?

Take even such words as should be perennially beautiful by
connotation-words such as 'Academy,' 'Museum.' Does the one (O,
"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy!") call up visions
of that green lawn by Cephissus, of its olives and plane trees
and the mirrored statues among which Plato walked and held
discourse with his few? Does the other as a rule invite to haunts
(O God! O Montreal!) where you can be secure of communion with
Apollo and the Nine? Answer if the word Academy does not first
call up to the mind some place where small boys are crammed, the
word Museum some place where bigger game are stuffed?

And yet 'academy,' 'museum,' even 'education' are sound words if
only we would make the things correspond with their meanings. The
meaning of 'education' is a leading out, a drawing-forth; not an
_imposition_ of something on somebody--a catechism or an uncle--
upon the child; but an eliciting of what is within him. Now, if
you followed my last lecture, we find that which is within him to
be no less, potentially, than the Kingdom of God.

I grant that this potentiality is, between the ages of four and
sixteen, not always, perhaps not often, evident. The boy--in
Bagehot's phrase 'the small apple-eating urchin whom we know'--
has this in common with the fruit for which he congenitally sins,
that his very virtues in immaturity are apt, setting the teeth on
edge, to be mistaken for vices. A writer, to whom I shall recur,
has said:

  If an Englishman who had never before tasted an apple
  were to eat one in July, he would probably come to the
  conclusion that it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit,
  `conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity,' fit only to be
  consigned to perdition (on a dust heap or elsewhere). But if
  the same man were to wait till October and then eat an apple
  from the same tree, he would find that the sourness had
  ripened into wholesome and refreshing acidity; the hardness
  into firmness of fibre which, besides being pleasant to the
  palate, makes the apple 'keep' better than any other fruit;
  the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic qualities,
  and so on....

In other words--trench, manure, hoe and water around your young
tree, and patiently allow the young fruit to develop of its own
juice from the root; your own task being, as the fruit forms, but
to bring in all you can of air and sunshine upon it. It must, as
every mother and nurse knows, be coaxed to realise itself, to
develop, to grow from its individual root. It may be coaxed and
trained. But the main secret lies in encouraging it to grow, and,
to that end, in pouring sunshine upon it and hoeing after each
visitation of tears parentally induced.

Every child wants to grow. Every child wants to learn. During his
first year or so of life he fights for bodily nutriment, almost
ferociously. From the age of two or thereabouts he valiantly
essays the conquest of articulate speech, using it first to
identify his father or his mother amid the common herd of
Gentiles; next, to demand a more liberal and varied dietary;
anon, as handmaid of his imperious will to learn. This desire,
still in the nursery, climbs--like dissolution in Wordsworth's
sonnet--from low to high: from a craving to discover
experimentally what the stomach will assimilate and what reject,
up to a kingly debonair interest in teleology. Our young
gentleman is perfectly at ease in Sion. He wants to know why
soldiers are (or were) red, and if they were born so; whence
bread and milk is derived, and would it be good manners to thank
the neat cow for both; why mamma married papa, and--that having
been explained and thoughtfully accepted as the best possible
arrangement--still thoughtfully, not in the least censoriously,
'why the All-Father has not married yet?' He falls asleep
weighing the eligibility of various spinsters, church-workers, in
the parish.

His brain teeming with questions, he asks them of impulse and
makes his discoveries with joy. He passes to a school, which is
supposed to exist for the purpose of answering these or cognate
questions even before he asks them: and behold, he is not happy!
Or, he is happy enough at play, or at doing in class the things
that should not be done in class: his master writes home that he
suffers in his school work 'from having always more animal
spirits than are required for his immediate purposes.' What is the
trouble? You cannot explain it by home-sickness: for it attacks
day boys alike with boarders. You cannot explain it by saying
that all true learning involves 'drudgery,' unless you make that
miserable word a mendicant and force it to beg the question.
'Drudgery' is _what you feel to be drudgery_--

     Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
     Makes that and th' action fine.

--and, anyhow, this child learned one language--English, a most
difficult one--eagerly. Of the nursery through which I passed
only one sister wept while learning to read, and that was over a
scholastic work entitled "Reading Without Tears."

Do you know a chapter in Mr William Canton's book "The Invisible
Playmate" in which, as Carlyle dealt in "Sartor Resartus" with an
imaginary treatise by an imaginary Herr Teufelsdroeckh, as Matthew
Arnold in "Friendship's Garland" with the imaginary letters of an
imaginary Arminius (Germany in long-past happier days lent the
world these playful philosophical spirits), so the later author
invents an old village grandpapa, with the grandpapa-name of
Altegans and a prose-poem printed in scarecrow duodecimo on
paper-bag pages and entitled "Erster Schulgang," 'first
school-going,' or 'first day at school'?

The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as
it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace
in fact. All over the world--and all under it too, when their
time comes--the children are trooping to school. The great globe
swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always
morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the
morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot---
shining companies and groups, couples and bright solitary
figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about
them.

He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely
moorlands ... he sees them on the hillsides ... in the woods, on
the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the
seacliffs and on the water-ribbed sands; trespassing on the
railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in the
ferry-boats; he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities,
in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is
known only as a strange tradition.

The morning-side of the planet is alive with them: one hears
their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents
sweep `eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the
moon' ... and as new nations with _their_ cities and villages,
their fields, woods, mountains and sea-shores, rise up into the
morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet
again fresh troops of these school-going children of the dawn.

What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of
childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on
moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be
daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and
bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful picture of all, he sees them
travelling schoolward by the late moonlight which now and again in
the winter months precedes the tardy dawn.

That vision strikes me as being poetically true as well as
delightful: by which I mean that it is not sentimental: we know
that it ought to be true, that in a world well-ordered according
to our best wishes for it, it would be _naturally_ true. It
expresses the natural love of Age, brooding on the natural eager
joy of children. But that natural eager joy is just what our
schools, in the matter of reading, conscientiously kill.

In this matter of reading-of children's reading--we stand, just
now, or halt just now, between two ways. The parent, I believe,
has decisively won back to the right one which good mothers never
quite forsook. There was an interval, lasting from the early
years of the last century until midway in Queen Victoria's reign
and a little beyond, when children were mainly brought up on the
assumption of natural vice. They might adore father and mother,
and yearn to be better friends with papa: but there was the old
Adam, a quickening evil spirit; there were his imps always in the
way, confound them! I myself lived, with excellent grandparents,
for several years on pretty close terms with Hell and an
all-seeing Eye; until I grew so utterly weary of both that I have
never since had the smallest use for either. Some of you may have
read, as a curious book, the agreeable history called "The
Fairchild Family," in which Mr Fairchild leads his naughty
children afield to a gallows by a cross-road and seating them
under the swinging corpse of a malefactor, deduces how easily
they may come to this if they go on as they have been going. The
authors of such monitory or cautionary tales understood but one
form of development, the development of Original Sin. You stole a
pin and proceeded, by fatal steps, to the penitentiary; you threw
a stick at a pheasant, turned poacher, shot a gamekeeper and
ended on the gallows. You were always Eric and it was always
Little by Little with you.... Stay! memory preserves one gem from
a Sunday school dialogue, one sharp-cut intaglio of childhood
springing fully armed from the head of Satan:

  Q. Where hast thou been this Sabbath morning?
  A. I have been coursing of the squirrel.
  Q. Art not afraid so to desecrate the Lord's Day with idle
  sport?
  A. By no means: for I should tell you that I am an Atheist.

I forget what happened to that boy: but doubtless it was, as it
should have been, something drastic.

The spell of prohibition, of repression, lies so strong upon
these authors that when they try to break away from it, to appeal
to something better than fear in the child, and essay to amuse,
they become merely silly. For an example in verse:

  If Human Beings only knew
  What sorrows little birds go through,
     I think that even boys
  Would never think it sport or fun
  To stand and fire a frightful gun
     For nothing but the noise.

For another (instructional and quite a good _memoria technica_ so
far as it goes):

     William and Mary came next to the throne:
     When Mary died, there was William alone.

Now for a story of incident.--It comes from the book "Reading
Without Tears," that made my small sister weep. She did not weep
over the story, because she did not claim to be an angel.

Did you ever hear of the donkey that went into the sea with the
little cart?... A lady drove the cart down to the beach. She had
six children with her. Three little ones sat in the cart by her
side. Three bigger girls ran before the cart. When they came to
the beach the lady and the children got out.

Very good so far. It opens like the story of Nausicaa ["Odyssey,"
Book vi, lines 81-86].

The lady wished the donkey to bathe its legs in the sea, to make
it strong and clean. But the donkey did not like to go near the
sea. So the lady bound a brown shawl over its eyes, and she bade
the big girls lead it close to the waves. Suddenly a big wave
rushed to the land. The girls started back to avoid the wave, and
they let go the donkey's rein.

The donkey was alarmed by the noise the girls made, and it went
into the sea, not knowing where it was going because it was not
able to see. The girls ran screaming to the lady, crying out,
'The donkey is in the sea!'

There it was, going further and further into the sea, till the
cart was hidden by the billows. The donkey sank lower and lower
every moment, till no part of it was seen but the ears; for the
brown shawl was over its nose and mouth. Now the children began
to bawl and to bellow! But no one halloed so loud as the little
boy of four. His name was Merty. He feared that the donkey was
drowned....

Two fishermen were in a boat far away. They said 'We hear howls
and shrieks on the shore. Perhaps a boy or girl is drowning. Let
us go and save him: So they rowed hard, and they soon came to the
poor donkey, and saw its ears peeping out of the sea. The donkey
was just going to sink when they lifted it up by the jaws, and
seized the bridle and dragged it along. The children on the shore
shouted aloud for joy. The donkey with the cart came safe to
land. The poor creature was weak and dripping wet. The fishermen
unbound its eyes, and said to the lady, 'We cannot think how this
thing came to be over its eyes.' The lady said she wished she had
not bound up its eyes, and she gave the shillings in her purse to
the fishermen who had saved her donkey.

Now every child knows that a donkey may change into a Fairy
Prince: that is a truth of imagination. But to be polite and say
nothing of the lady, every child knows that so donkey would be
ass enough to behave as in this narrative. And the good parents
who, throughout the later 18th century and the 19th, inflicted
this stuff upon children, were sinning against the light.
Perrault's Fairy Tales, and Madame D'Aulnoy's were to their hand
in translations; "Le Cabinet des Fees", which includes these and
M. Galland's "Arabian Nights" and many another collection of
delectable stories, extends on my shelves to 41 volumes (the last
volume appeared during the fury of the French Revolution!). The
brothers Grimm published the first volume of their immortal tales
in 1812, the second in 1814. A capital selection from them,
charmingly rendered, was edited by our Edgar Taylor in 1823; and
drew from Sir Walter Scott a letter of which some sentences are
worth our pondering.

He writes:

  There is also a sort of wild fairy interest in [these tales]
  which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken
  the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the
  good-boy stories which have been in later years composed
  for them. In the latter case their minds are, as it were, put
  into the stocks ... and the moral always consists in good
  moral conduct being crowned with temporal success. Truth
  is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding
  Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred
  histories of Jemmy Goodchild.

Few nowadays, I doubt, remember Gammer Grethel. She has been
ousted by completer, maybe far better, translations of the
Grimms' "Household Tales". But turning back, the other day, to
the old volume for the old sake's sake (as we say in the West) I
came on the Preface--no child troubles with a Preface--and on
these wise words:

  Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic (we
  might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy
  and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated
  by some. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of
  improvement by exercise as our judgment or our memory.

And that admirable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real text of my
discourse to-day. I lay no sentimental stress upon Wordsworth's
Ode and its doctrine that 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy.'
It was, as you know, a favourite doctrine with our Platonists of
the 17th century: and critics who trace back the Ode "Intimations
of Immortality" to Henry Vaughan's

     Happy those early days, when I
     Shined in my Angel-infancy.

might connect it with a dozen passages from authors of that
century. Here is one from "Centuries of Meditations" by that poor
Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, whom I quoted to you the other
day:

  Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the
  womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the
  best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the
  Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His
  special favour I remember them till now.... Certainly Adam
  in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions
  of the world, than I when I was a child.

And here is another from John Earle's Character of 'A Child' in
his "Microcosmography":

  His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein
  he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and
  sighs to see what innocence he has out-liv'd. He is the
  Christian's example, and the old man's relapse: the one
  imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his
  simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat,
  he had got Eternity without a burthen, and exchang'd but one
  Heaven for another.

Bethinking me again of 'the small apple-eating urchin whom we
know,' I suspect an amiable fallacy in all this: I doubt if when
he scales an apple-bearing tree which is neither his own nor his
papa's he does so under impulse of any conscious yearning back to
Hierusalem, his happy home,

     Where trees for evermore bear fruit.

At any rate, I have an orchard, and he has put up many excuses,
but never yet that he was recollecting Sion.

Still the doctrine holds affinity with the belief which I firmly
hold and tried to explain to you with persuasion last term:
that, boy or man, you and I, the microcosms, do--sensibly,
half-sensibly, or insensibly--yearn, through what we feel to be
best in us, to 'join up' with the greater harmony; that by poetry
or religion or whatnot we have that within us which craves to be
drawn out, 'e-ducated,' and linked up.

Now the rule of the nursery in the last century rested on
Original Sin, and consequently and quite logically tended not to
educate, but to repress. There are no new fairy-tales of the days
when your grandmothers wore crinolines--I know, for I have
searched. Mothers and nurses taught the old ones; the Three Bears
still found, one after another, that 'somebody has been sleeping
in my bed'; Fatima continued to call 'Sister Anne, do you see
anyone coming?' the Wolf to show her teeth under her nightcap and
snarl out (O, great moment!) 'All the better to eat you with, my
dear.' But the Evangelicals held field. Those of our grandfathers
and grandmothers who understood joy and must have had fairies for
ministers--those of our grandmothers who played croquet through
hoop with a bell and practised Cupid's own sport archery--those
of our grandfathers who wore jolly peg-top trousers and Dundreary
whiskers, and built the Crystal Palace and drove to the Derby in
green-veiled top-hats with Dutch dolls stuck about the brim--_tot
circa unum caput tumultuantes deos_--and those splendid uncles
who used to descend on the old school in a shower of gold--
half-a-sovereign at the very least--all these should have trailed
fairies with them in a cloud. But in practice the evangelical
parent held the majority, put away all toys but Noah's Ark on
Sundays, and voted the fairies down.

I know not who converted the parents. It may have been that
benefactor of Europe, Hans Christian Andersen, born at Odensee in
Denmark in April 1805. He died, near Copenhagen, in 1875, having
by a few months outlived his 70th birthday. I like to think that
his genius, a continuing influence over a long generation, did
more than anything else to convert the parents. The schools,
always more royalist than the King, professionally bleak,
professionally dull, professionally repressive rather than
educative, held on to a tradition which, though it had to be on
the sly, every intelligent mother and nurse had done her best to
evade. The schools made a boy's life penitential on a system.
They discovered athletics, as a safety-valve for high spirits
they could not cope with, and promptly made that safety-valve
compulsory! They went on to make athletics a religion. Now
athletics are not properly a religious exercise, and their
meaning evaporates as soon as you enlist them in the service of
repression. They are being used to do the exact opposite of that
for which God meant them. Things are better now: but in those
times how many a boy, having long looked forward to it, rejoiced
in his last day at school?

I know surely enough what must be in your minds at this point: I
am running up my head hard against the doctrine of Original Sin,
against the doctrine that in dealing with a child you are dealing
with a 'fallen nature,' with a human soul 'conceived in sin,'
unregenerate except by repression; and therefore that repression
and more repression _must_ be the only logical way with your
Original Sinners.

Well, then, I am. I have loved children all my life; studied them
in the nursery, studied them for years--ten or twelve years
intimately--in elementary schools. I know for a surety, if I have
acquired any knowledge, that the child is a 'child of God' rather
than a 'Child of wrath'; and here before you I proclaim that to
connect in any child's mind the Book of Joshua with the Gospels,
to make its Jehovah identical in that young mind with the Father
of Mercy of whom Jesus was the Son, to confuse, as we do in any
school in this land between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m., that bloodthirsty
tribal deity whom the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true
God the Father, is a blasphemous usage, and a curse.

But let me get away to milder heresies. If you will concede for a
moment that the better way with a child is to draw out, to
_educate,_ rather than to repress, what is in him, let us observe
what he instinctively wants. Now first, of course, he wants to
eat and drink, and to run about. When he passes beyond these
merely animal desires to what we may call the instinct of growth
in his soul, how does he proceed? I think Mr Holmes, whom I have
already quoted, very fairly sets out these desires as any
grown-up person can perceive them. The child desires

  (1) to talk and to listen;
  (2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word);
  (3) to draw, paint and model;
  (4) to dance and sing;
  (5) to know the why of things
  (6) to construct things.

Now I shall have something to say by and by on the amazing
preponderance in this list of those instincts which Aristotle
would have called _mimetic._ This morning I take only the least
imitative of all, the desire to know the why of things.

Surely you know, taking only this, that the master-key admitting
a child to all, or almost all, palaces of knowledge is his ability
to _read._ When he has grasped that key of his mother-tongue he
can with perseverance unlock all doors to all the avenues of
knowledge. More--he has the passport to heavens unguessed.

You will perceive at once that what I mean here by 'reading' is
the capacity for silent reading, taking a book apart and
mastering it; and you will bear in mind the wonder that I
preached to you in a previous lecture--that great literature
never condescends, that what yonder boy in a corner reads of a
king is happening to _him._ Do you suppose that in an elementary
school one child in ten reads thus? Listen to a wise ex-inspector,
whose words I can corroborate of experience:

  The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an
  ordinary elementary school while a reading lesson is in
  progress is that the children are not reading at all, in the
  accepted sense of the word. They are not reading to
  themselves, not studying, not mastering the contents of the
  book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual nutriment that
  it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up one by
  one and reading aloud to their teacher.

Ah! but I have seen far worse than that. I have visited and
condemned rural schools where the practice was to stand a class
up--- say a class of thirty children--and make them read in
unison: which meant, of course, that the front row chanted out
the lesson while the back rows made inarticulate noises. I well
remember one such exhibition, in a remote country school on the
Cornish hills, and having my attention arrested midway by the
face of a girl in the third row. She was a strikingly beautiful
child, with that combination of bright auburn, almost flaming,
hair with dark eyebrows, dark eyelashes, dark eyes, which of
itself arrests your gaze, being so rare; and those eyes seemed to
challenge me half scornfully and ask, 'Are you really taken in by
all this?' Well, I soon stopped the performance and required each
child to read separately: whereupon it turned out that, in the
upper standards of this school of 70 or 80 children, one only--
this disdainful girl--could get through half a dozen easy
sentences with credit. She read well and intelligently, being
accustomed to read to herself, at home.

I daresay that this bad old method of block-reading is dead by
this time.

Reading aloud and _separately_ is excellent for several purposes.
It tests capacity: it teaches correct pronunciation by practice,
as well as the mastery of difficult words: it provides a good
teacher with frequent opportunities of helping the child to
understand what he reads.

But as his schooling proceeds he should be accustomed more and
more to read to himself: for that, I repeat, is the master-key.




LECTURE IV

CHILDREN'S READING (II)

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1917


I

In our talk, Gentlemen, about Children's Reading we left off upon
a list, drawn up by Mr Holmes in his book 'What Is, and What
Might Be,' of the things that, apart from physical nourishment
and exercise, a child instinctively desires.

He desires
  (1) to talk and to listen;
  (2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word);
  (3) to draw, paint and model;
  (4) to dance and sing;
  (5) to know the why of things;
  (6) to construct things.

Let us scan through this catalogue briefly, in its order.

No. (1). _To talk and to listen_--Mr Holmes calls this _the
communicative instinct._ Every child wants to talk with those
about him, or at any rate with his chosen ones--his parents,
brothers, sisters, nurse, governess, gardener, boot-boy (if he
possess these last)--with other children, even if his dear papa
is poor: to tell them what he has been doing, seeing, feeling:
and to listen to what they have to tell him.

Nos. (2), (3), (4). _To act_--our author calls this the
'dramatic instinct': _to draw, paint and model_--this the
'artistic instinct'--_to dance and sing_--this the 'musical
instinct.' But obviously all these are what Aristotle would call
'mimetic' instincts: 'imitative' (in a sense I shall presently
explain); even as No. (2)--acting--like No. (1)--talking and
listening--comes of craving for sympathy. In fact, as we go on,
you will see that these instincts overlap and are not strictly
separable, though we separate them just now for convenience.

No. (5). _To know the why of things_--the 'inquisitive instinct.'
This, being the one which gives most trouble to parents, parsons,
governesses, conventional schoolmasters--to all grown-up persons
who pretend to know what they don't and are ashamed to tell what
they do--is of course the most ruthlessly repressed.

  'The time is come,' the Infant said,
  'To talk of many things:
  Of babies, storks and cabbages
  And--

--having studied the Evangelists' Window facing the family pew--

  And whether cows have wings.'

The answer, in my experience, is invariably stern, and 'in the
negative': in tolerant moments compromising on 'Wait, like a good
boy, and see.'

But we singled out this instinct and discussed it in our last
lecture.

No. (6). _To construct things_--the 'constructive instinct.' I
quote Mr Holmes here:

  After analysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys
  to pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct
  them. The ends that he sets before himself are those which
  Comte Set before the human race--_savoir pour prevoir, afin
  de pouvoir: induire pour deduire, afin de construire._ The
  desire to make things, to build things up, to control ways
  and means, to master the resources of nature, to put his
  knowledge of her laws and facts to practical use, is strong in
  his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours
  in building and rebuilding houses, churches.... Set him on a
  sandy shore with a spade and a pail, and he will spend hours
  in constructing fortified castles with deep encircling moats.

Again obviously this constructive instinct overlaps with the
imitative ones. Construction, for example, enters into the art of
making mud-pies and has also been applied in the past to great
poetry. If you don't keep a sharp eye in directing this instinct,
it may conceivably end in an "Othello" or in a "Divina Commedia."

II

Without preaching on any of the others, however, I take three of
the six instincts scheduled by Mr Holmes--the three which you
will allow to be almost purely imitative.

They are:

  Acting,
  Drawing, painting, modelling,
  Dancing and singing.

Now let us turn to the very first page of Aristotle's "Poetics,"
and what do we read?

  Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic poetry,
  and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the
  lyre, are all, in general, modes of imitation....

  For as their are persons who represent a number of things
  by colours and drawings, and others vocally, so it is with
  the arts above mentioned. They all imitate by rhythm,
  language, harmony, singly or combined.

Even dancing (he goes on)

  imitates character, emotion and action, by rhythmical
  movement.

Now, having touched on mud-pies, let me say a few words upon
these aesthetic imitative instincts of acting, dancing, singing
before I follow Aristotle into his explanation of the origin of
Poetry, which I think we may agree to be the highest subject of
our Art of Reading and to hold promise of its highest reward.

Every wise mother sings or croons to her child and dances him on
her knee. She does so by sure instinct, long before the small
body can respond or his eyes--always blue at first and
unfathomably aged--return her any answer. It lulls him into the
long spells of sleep so necessary for his first growth. By and
by, when he has found his legs, he begins to skip, and even
before he has found articulate speech, to croon for himself. Pass
a stage, and you find him importing speech, drama, dance,
incantation, into his games with his playmates. Watch a cluster
of children as they enact "Here we go gathering nuts in May"--
eloquent line: it is just what they are doing!--or "Here come
three Dukes a-riding," or "Fetch a pail of water," or "Sally,
Sally Waters":

  Sally, Sally Waters,
  Sitting in the sand,
  Rise, Sally--rise, Sally,
  For a young man.

Suitor presented, accepted [I have noted, by the way, that this
game is more popular with girls than with boys]; wedding ceremony
hastily performed--so hastily, it were more descriptive to say
'taken for granted'--within the circle; the dancers, who join
hands and resume the measure, chanting

  Now you are married, we wish you joy--
  First a girl and then a boy

--the order, I suspect, dictated by exigencies of rhyme rather
than of Eugenics, as Dryden confessed that a rhyme had often
helped him to a thought. And yet I don't know; for the incantation
goes on to redress the balance in a way that looks scientific:

  Ten years after, son and daughter,
  And now--

[Practically!]

  And now, Miss Sally, come out of the water.

The players end by supplying the applause which, in these days of
division of labour, is commonly left to the audience.

III

Well, there you have it all: acting, singing, dancing, choral
movement--enlisted ancillary to the domestic drama: and, when you
start collecting evidence of these imitative instincts blent in
childhood the mass will soon amaze you and leave you no room to
be surprised that many learned scholars, on the supposition that
uncivilised man is a child more or less--and at least so much of
child that one can argue through children's practice to his--have
found the historical origin of Poetry itself in these primitive
performances: 'communal poetry' as they call it. I propose to
discuss with you (may be neat term) in a lecture not belonging to
this 'course' the likelihood that what we call specifically 'the
Ballad,' or 'Ballad Poetry,' originated thus. Here is a wider
question. Did all Poetry develop out of this, historically, as a
process in time and in fact? These scholars (among whom I will
instance one of the most learned--Dr Gummere) hold that it did:
and I may take a passage from Dr Gummere's "Beginnings of Poetry"
(p. 95) to show you how they call in the practice of savage races
to support their theory. The Botocudos of South America are--
according to Dr Paul Ehrenreich who has observed them[1]--an
ungentlemanly tribe, 'very low in the social scale.'

  The Botocudos are little better than a leaderless horde, and
  pay scant respect to their chieftain; they live only for their
  immediate bodily needs, and take small thought for the
  morrow, still less for the past. No traditions, no legends, are
  abroad to tell them of their forbears. They still use gestures
  to express feeling and ideas; while the number of words which
  imitate a given sound `is extraordinarily great' An action or
  an object is named by imitating the sound peculiar to it; and
  sounds are doubled to express greater intensity.... To speak is
  _ao_; to speak loudly or to sing, is _ao-ao._ And now for their
  aesthetic life, their song, dance, poetry, as described by this
  accurate observer. 'On festal occasions the whole horde meets
  by night round the camp fire for a dance. Men and women
  alternating ... form a circle; each dancer lays his arms about
  the necks of his two neighbours, and the entire ring begins to
  turn to the right or to the left, while all the dancers stamp
  strongly and in rhythm the foot that is advanced, and drag
  after it the other foot. Now with drooping heads they press
  closer and closer together; now they widen the circle.
  Throughout the dance resounds a monotonous song to which
  they stamp their feet. Often one can hear nothing but a
  continually repeated _kalani aha!_...Again, however, short
  improvised songs, in which we are told the doings of the day,
  the reasons for rejoicing, what not, as "Good hunting," or "Now
  we have something to eat," or "Brandy is good."'

'As to the aesthetic value' of these South American utterances,
Dr Gummere asks in a footnote, 'how far is it inferior to the
sonorous commonplaces of our own verse--say "The Psalm of Life?"'
I really cannot answer that question. Which do you prefer,
Gentlemen?--'Life is real, life is earnest,' or 'Now we have
something to eat'? I must leave you to settle it with the Food
Controller.

The Professor goes on:

  'Now and then, too, an individual begins a song, and is
  answered by the rest in chorus.... _They never sing without
  dancing, never dance without singing, and have but one word
  to express both song and dance._'

  As the unprejudiced reader sees [Dr Gummere proceeds]
  this clear and admirable account confirms the doctrine of
  early days revived with fresh ethnological evidence in the
  writings of Dr Brown and of Adam Smith, that dance, poetry
  and song were once a single and inseparable function, and is
  in itself fatal to the idea of rhythmic prose, of solitary
  recitation, as foundations of poetry.... All poetry is
  communal, holding fast to the rhythm of consent as to the
  one sure fact.

IV

Now I should tell you, Gentlemen, that I hold such utterances as
this last--whatever you may think of the utterances of the
Botocudos--to be exorbitant: that I distrust all attempts to
build up (say) "Paradise Lost" historically from the yells and
capers of recondite savages. 'Life is real, life is earnest' may
be no better aesthetically (I myself think it a little better)
than 'Now we have something to eat' 'Brandy is good' may rival
Pindar's [Greek: Arioton men udor], and indeed puts what it
contains of truth with more of finality, less of provocation
(though Pindar at once follows up [Greek: Arioton men udor] with
exquisite poetry): but you cannot--truly you cannot--exhibit the
steps which lead up from 'Brandy is good' to such lines as

     Thus with the year
  Seasons return; but not to me returns
  Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
  Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
  Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.

I bend over the learned page pensively, and I seem to see a
Botocudo Professor--though not high 'in the social scale,' they
may have such things--visiting Cambridge on the last night of the
Lent races and reporting of its inhabitants as follows:

  They pay scant heed to their chiefs: they live only for their
  immediate bodily needs, and take small thought for the
  morrow. On festal occasions the whole horde meets by night
  round the camp fire for a dance. Each dancer lays his arms
  about the necks of his two neighbours, stamping strongly
  with one foot and dragging the other after it. Now with
  drooping heads they press closer and closer together; now
  they widen the circle. Often one can hear nothing but a
  continually repeated _kalani aha,_ or again one hears short
  improvised songs in which we are told the doings of the day,
  the reasons for rejoicing, what not, as 'Good hunting,' 'Good
  old--'[naming a tribal God], or in former times '_Now_ we shall
  be but a short while,' or '_Woemma!_' Now and then, too, an
  individual begins a song and is answered by the rest in
  chorus--such as

     For he is an estimable person
     Beyond possibility of gainsaying.

  The chorus twice repeats this and asseverates that they
  are following a custom common to the flotilla, the
  expeditionary force, and even their rude seats of learning.

And Dr Gummere, or somebody else, comments: 'As the unprejudiced
reader will see, this clear and admirable account confirms our
hypothesis that in communal celebration we have at once the
origin and model of three poems, "The Faerie Queene," "Paradise
Lost" and "In Memoriam," recorded as having been composed by
members of this very tribe.'

Although we have been talking of instincts, we are not concerned
here with the steps by which the child, or the savage, following
an instinct attains to _write_ poetry; but, more modestly, with
the instinct by which the child _likes_ it, and the way in which
he can be best encouraged to read and improve this natural
liking. Nor are we even concerned here to define Poetry. It
suffices our present purpose to consider Poetry as the sort of
thing the poets write.

But obviously if we find a philosopher discussing poetry without
any reference to children, and independently basing it upon the
very same imitative instincts which we have noted in children, we
have some promise of being on the right track.

V

So I return to Aristotle. Aristotle (I shall in fairness say)
does not anticipate Dr Gummere, to contradict or refute him; he
may even be held to support him incidentally. But he sticks to
business, and this is what he says ("Poetics," C. IV):

  Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, and
  these natural causes. First the instinct to imitate is
  implanted in man from his childhood, and in this he differs
  from other animals, being the most imitative of them all. Man
  gets his first learning through imitation, and all men delight
  in seeing things imitated. This is clearly shown by
  experience....

  To imitate, then, being instinctive in our nature, so too
  we have an instinct for harmony and rhythm, metre being
  manifestly a species of rhythm: and man, being born to these
  instincts and little by little improving them, out of his early
  improvisations created Poetry.

Combining these two instincts, with him, we arrive at _harmonious
imitation._ Well and good. But what is it we imitate in poetry?--
noble things or mean things? After considering this, putting mean
things aside as unworthy, and voting for the nobler--which must
at the same time be true, since without truth there can be no
real nobility--Aristotle has to ask `In what way true? True to
ordinary life, with its observed defeats of the right by the
wrong? or true, as again instinct tells good men it should be,
_universally_?' So he arrives at his conclusion that a true thing
is not necessarily truth of fact in a world where truth in fact
is so often belied or made meaningless--not the record that
Alcibiades went somewhere and suffered something--but truth to
the Universal, the superior demand of our conscience. In such a
way only we know that "The Tempest" or "Paradise Lost" or "The
Ancient Mariner" or "Prometheus Unbound" can be truer than any
police report. Yet we know that they are truer in essence, and in
significance, since they appeal to eternal verities--since they
imitate the Universal--whereas the police report chronicles
(faithfully, as in duty bound, even usefully in its way) events
which may, nay must, be significant somehow but cannot at best be
better to us than phenomena, broken ends and shards.

VI

I return to the child. Clearly in obeying the instinct which I
have tried to illustrate, he is searching to realise himself;
and, as educators, we ought to help this effort--or, at least,
not to hinder it.

Further, if we agree with Aristotle, in this searching to realise
himself through imitation, what will the child most nobly and
naturally imitate? He will imitate what Aristotle calls 'the
Universal,' the superior demand. And does not this bring us back
to consent with what I have been preaching from the start in this
course--that to realise ourselves in _What Is_ not only in degree
transcends mere knowledge and activity, _What Knows_ and _What
Does,_ but transcends it in kind? It is not only what the child
unconsciously longs for: it is that for which (in St Paul's
words) 'the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain
together until now'; craving for this (I make you the admission)
as emotionally, as the heart may be thrilled, the breast surge,
the eyes swell with tears, at a note drawn from the violin:
feeling that somewhere, beyond reach, we have a lost sister, and
she speaks to our soul.

VII

Who, that has been a child, has not felt this surprise of beauty,
the revelation, the call of it?

     The sounding cataract
     Haunted me like a passion ...

--yes, or a rainbow on the spray against a cliff; or a vista of
lawns between descending woods; or a vision of fish moving in a
pool under the hazel's shadow? Who has not felt the small
surcharged heart labouring with desire to express it?

I preach to you that the base of all Literature, of all Poetry,
of all Theology, is one, and stands on one rock: _the very
highest Universal Truth is something so simple that a child may
understand it._ This, surely, was in Jesus' mind when he said `I
thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast
hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed
them unto babes.'

For as the Universe is one, so the individual human souls, that
apprehend it, have no varying values intrinsically, but one equal
value. They vary but in power to apprehend, and this may be more
easily hindered than helped by the conceit begotten of finite
knowledge. I shall even dare to quote of this Universal Truth,
the words I once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley
concerning divine Love: 'I see now that if God's love reach up to
every star and down to every poor soul on earth, it must be
vastly simple; so simple that all dwellers on Earth may be
assured of it--as all who have eyes may be assured of the planet
shining yonder at the end of the street--and so vast that all
bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without
considering their deserts.' I believe this to be strictly and
equally true of the appeal which Poetry makes to each of us,
child or man, in his degree. As Johnson said of Gray's "Elegy,"
it 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and
with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' It exalts
us through the best of us, by telling us something new yet not
strange, something that we _recognise,_ something that we too
have known, or surmised, but had never the delivering speech to
tell. 'There is a pleasure in poetic pains,' says Wordsworth:
but, Gentlemen, if you have never felt the travail, yet you have
still to understand the bliss of deliverance.

VIII

If, then, you consent with me thus far in theory, let us now
drive at practice. You have (we will say) a class of thirty or
forty in front of you. We will assume that they know _a-b, ab,_
can at least spell out their words. You will choose a passage for
them, and you will not (if you are wise) choose a passage from
"Paradise Lost": your knowledge telling you that "Paradise Lost"
was written, late in his life, by a great _virtuoso,_ and older
men (of whom I, sad to say, am one) assuring you that to taste
the Milton of "Paradise Lost" a man must have passed his
thirtieth year. You take the early Milton: you read out this, for
instance, from "L'Allegro":

  Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
  Jest and youthful Jollity,
  Quips, and Cranks, and wanton wiles,
  Nods and Becks, and wreathed Smiles
  Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
  And love to live in dimple sleek;
  Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
  And Laughter holding both his sides....

Go on: just read it to them. They won't know who Hebe was, but
you can tell them later. The metre is taking hold of them (in my
experience the metre of "L'Allegro" can be relied upon to grip
children) and anyway they can see `Laughter holding both his
sides': they recognise it as if they saw the picture. Go on
steadily:

  Come, and trip it as ye go,
  On the light fantastick toe;
  And in thy right hand lead with thee
  The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty;
  And, if I give thee honour due,
  Mirth, admit me of thy crew--

Do not pause and explain what a Nymph is, or why Liberty is the
'Mountain Nymph'! Go on reading: the Prince has always to break
through briers to kiss the Sleeping Beauty awake. Go on with the
incantation, calling him, persuading him, that he is the Prince
and she is worth it. Go on reading--

  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 cock 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 hoar 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 gods. Don't even stop, just yet, to explain who
the gods 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 passage
'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 class. 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 circumference 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 passage 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 passiveness':

  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 passiveness.

  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 class 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 bumpkin.

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 passage in "The Pilgrim's Progress"--as the
pilgrims passed 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 God 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
mass 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
mass 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 mass 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 mass
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,"
"Othello," "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 brassy 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

All very well. But, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked,

     Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers?

'Yes,' I hear you ingeminate; 'but what about Examinations? We
thank you, sirs, for thus relieving and guiding us: we
acknowledge your excellent intentions. But in practice you hang
up a bachelor's gown and hood on a pole, and right under and just
in front of it you set the examination-barrier. For this in
practice we run during three years or so, and to this all the
time you are exhorting, directing us--whether you mean it or not,
though we suspect that you cannot help yourselves.' Yes; and, as
labouring swimmers will turn their eyes even to a little boat in
the offing, I hear you pant 'This man at all events--always so
insistent that good literature teaches _What Is_ rather than
_What Knows_--will bring word that we may float on our backs,
bathe, enjoy these waters and be refreshed, instead of striving
through them competitive for a goal. He _must_ condemn literary
examinations, nine-tenths of which treat Literature as matter of
Knowledge merely.'

IV

I am sorry, Gentlemen: I cannot bring you so much of comfort as
all that. I have a love of the past which, because it goes down
to the roots, has sometimes been called Radicalism: I could never
consent with Bacon's gibe at antiquity as _pessimum augurium,_
and Examinations have a very respectable antiquity. Indeed no
University to my knowledge has ever been able in the long run to
do without them: and although certain Colleges--King's College
here, and New College at Oxford--for long persevered in the
attempt, the result was not altogether happy, and in the end they
have consigned with custom.

Of course Universities have experimented with the _process._ Let
me give you two or three ancient examples, which may help you to
see (to vary Wordsworth) that though 'the Form decays, the
function never dies.'

(1) I begin with most ancient Bologna, famous for Civil Law. At
Bologna the process of graduation--of admission to the _jus
docendi,_ 'right to teach'--consisted of two parts, the Private
Examination and the Public (_conventus_):

  The private Examination was the real test of
  competence, the so-called public Examination being in
  practice a mere ceremony. Before admission to each of these
  tests the candidate was presented by the Consiliarius of his
  Nation to the Rector for permission to enter it, and swore
  that he had complied with all the statutable conditions, that
  he would give no more than the statutable fees or
  entertainments to the Rector himself, the Doctor, or his
  fellow-students, and that he would obey the Rector. Within a
  period of eight days before the Examination the candidate
  was presented by 'his own' Doctor or by some other Doctor
  or by two Doctors to the Archdeacon, the presenting Doctor
  being required to have satisfied himself by private
  examination of his presentee's fitness. Early on the morning
  of the Examination, after attending a Mass of the Holy
  Ghost, the candidate appeared before the assembled College
  and was assigned by one of the Doctors present two passages
  (_puncta_) in the Civil or Canon Law as the case might be. He
  then retired to his house to study the passages, in doing which
  it would appear that he had the assistance of the presenting
  Doctor. Later in the day the Doctors were summoned to the
  Cathedral, or some other public building, by the Archdeacon,
  who presided over but took no active part in the ensuing
  examination. The candidate was then introduced to the
  Archdeacon and Doctors by the presenting Doctor or Promotor
  as he was styled. The Prior of the College then administered a
  number of oaths in which the candidate promised respect to
  that body and solemnly renounced all the rights of which the
  College had succeeded in robbing all Doctors of other Colleges
  not included in its ranks. The candidate then gave a lecture or
  exposition of the two prepared passages: after which he was
  examined upon them by two of the Doctors appointed by the
  College. Other Doctors might ask supplementary questions of
  Law (which they were required to swear that they had not
  previously communicated to the candidate) arising more
  indirectly out of the passages selected, or might suggest
  objections to the answers. With a tender regard for the
  feelings of their comrades at this 'rigorous and tremendous
  Examination' (as they style it) the Statutes required the
  Examiner to treat the examinee as _his own son._

But, knowing what we do of parental discipline in the Middle
Ages, we need not take this to enjoin a weak excess of leniency.

  The Examination concluded, the votes of the Doctors present
  were taken by ballot and the candidate's fate determined by the
  majority, the decision being announced by the Archdeacon.

(2) Let us pass to the great and famous University of Paris. At
Paris

  In 1275, if not earlier, a preliminary test (or 'Responsions')
  was instituted to ascertain the fitness of those who wanted to
  take part in the public performance. At these 'Responsions'
  which took place in the December before the Lent in which the
  candidate was to determine, he had to dispute in Grammar and
  Logic with a Master. If this test was passed in a satisfactory
  manner, the candidate was admitted to the _Examen
  Baccalariandorum,_ Examination for the Baccalaureate, which
  was conducted by a board of Examiners appointed by each Nation
  for its own candidates. The duty of the Examiners was twofold,
  firstly to ascertain by inspecting the _schedules_ given by
  his Masters that the candidate had completed the necessary
  residence and attended Lectures in the prescribed subjects, and
  secondly to examine him in the contents of his books. If he
  passed this Examination, he was admitted to determine.

  Determination was a great day in the student's University
  life. It retained much of its primitive character of a
  student's festivity. It was not, it would seem, till the middle
  of the fifteenth century that the student's Master was required
  to be officially present at it. The Speech-day of a Public
  School if combined with considerably more than the license of
  the Oxford Encaenia or degree day here in May week would
  perhaps be the nearest modern equivalent of these medieval
  exhibitions of rising talent. Every effort was made to attract
  to the Schools as large an audience as possible, not merely of
  Masters or fellow-students, but if possible of ecclesiastical
  dignitaries and other distinguished persons. The friends of a
  Determiner who was not successful in drawing a more
  distinguished audience, would run out into the streets and
  forcibly drag chance passers-by into the School. Wine was
  provided at the Determiner's expense in the Schools: and the
  day ended in a feast [given in imitation of the Master's
  Inception-banquets], even if dancing or torch-light processions