On the Art of Reading quotes

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The old schoolmaster whom I quoted just now goes on:

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:

… 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-common-sense, 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.

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.

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;

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.

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.

The moving Moon went up the sky, And nowhere 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 hornèd Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip.

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?

To them, far more than to the old classical scholars, English was a shut book: a large book, but closed and clasped, material to heighten a desk for schoolmasters and schoolmistresses.

But schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, like chickens and curses, come home to roost.

Once set up your plea for a Tripos of English Language and Literature on the lower plea that it will provide for what they call a “felt want,” and sooner or later you give English Language and Literature into their hands, and then you get …

English Literature henceforth is a “subject,” divorced from life: and what they have made of it, let a thousand handbooks and so-called histories attest.

But this world is not a wilderness of classrooms.

English Language? They cannot write it, at all events. They do not (so far as I can discover) try to write it. They talk and write about it;

have formed themselves into professional Associations to protect “the study of the subject of English Literature” and bark off any intruder who would teach in another way than theirs.

But I say to you that Literature is not, and should not be, the preserve of any priesthood.

To write English, so as to make Literature, may be hard. But English Literature is not a mystery, not a Professors’ Kitchen.

I declare to you that Literature was not written for schoolmasters, nor for schoolmistresses.

I would not exchange it for a wilderness of schoolmasters.

It should be delivered from them, who, with their silly ablauts and “tendencies,” can themselves neither read nor write. For the proof? Having the world’s quintessential store of mirth and sharp sorrow, wit, humour, comfort, farce, comedy, tragedy, satire;

the unwieldy elephant, To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed His lithe proboscis.

Milton, like the elephant, jokes with difficulty, but he, too, is using all his might.

I have illustrated, crudely enough, how a sense of things in their right values will help us on one side of our dealings with life. But truly it helps us on every side.

… had lacked anything to sharpen my suspicion of those fork-bearded professors who derived our prose from the stucco of Anglo-Saxon prose, it would have been their foolish deliberate practice of composing whole pages of English prose without using one word derivative from Latin or Greek.

Esau, when he sold his birthright, had the excuse of being famished.

These pedants, with a full board, sought frenetically to give it away—board and birthright.

they were Catholics of the “old profession” who had either never heard or, having heard, abhorred them. These men were cheerful to die for the meaning of the Word and for its authorship—because it was spoken by Christ.

There is in fact, Gentlemen, no such thing as “mere literature.”

Pedants have coined that contemptuous term to express a figmentary concept of their own imagination or—to be more accurate, an hallucination of wrath—having about as much likeness to a vera causa as had the doll which (if you remember) Maggie Tulliver used to beat in …

and who have, even as I, a store of associated ideas, to be evoked by any chance phrase from it; beyond this, it may be, nothing that can be called scholarship by any stretch of the term.

Very well, then: my first piece of advice on reading the Bible is that you do it.

I have, of course, no reason at all to suppose or suggest that any member of this present audience omits to do it. But some general observations are permitted to an occupant of this Chair:

I choose two sentences from a book of “Memories” recently written by the survivor of the two ladies who together wrote the incomparable Irish R.M. The first was uttered by a small cultivator who was asked why his potato-crop had failed:

“I couldn’t hardly say” was the answer. “Whatever it was, God spurned them in a boggy place.”

Is that not the accent of Isaiah?

The other is the benediction bestowed upon the late Miss Violet Martin by a beggar-woman in Skibbereen:

Sure ye’re always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the Glory of Heaven!

But one now sees, or seems to see, that we children did, in our time, read the Bible a great deal, if perforce we were taught to read it in sundry bad ways:

You have all heard preachers trying to show that Jacob was a better fellow than Esau somehow. You have all, I hope, rejected every such explanation.

Esau was a gentleman: Jacob was not.

The instinct of a young man meets that wall, and there is no passing it.

And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal Saul’s daughter—

Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.

The whole story goes into about ten lines. Your psychological novelist nowadays, given the wit to invent it, would make it cover 500 pages at least.

Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.

The whole story goes into about ten lines. Your psychological novelist nowadays, given the wit to invent it, would make it cover 500 pages at least.

Or take the end of David in the first two chapters of the First Book of Kings, with its tale of Oriental intrigues, plots, treacheries, murderings in the depths of the horrible palace wherein the old man is dying.

with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up.” The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray’s.

It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.

If that be true, or less than gravely overstated: if the English Bible hold this unique place in our literature;

“Elsewhere,” says Longinus, “I have written as follows: Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.”

“Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.”

—It was worth repeating too—was it not?

And when he has searched and contrived to “ask us,” are we responsive to the ecstasy? Has he not—if I may employ an Oriental trope for once—let in the chill breath of cleverness upon the garden of beatitude?

No man can be clever and ecstatic at the same moment.

As for triple rhymes—rhymes of the comedian who had a lot o’ news with many curious facts about the square on the hypotenuse, or the cassiowary who ate the missionary on the plains of Timbuktu, with Bible, prayerbook, hymnbook too—they are for the facetious, and …

No! Men know not the value, the price of this gem; ’Tis not found in the land of the living with them. It is not in me, saith the depth; and the sea With the voice of an echo, repeats, Not in me.

(I have a suspicion somehow that what the sea really answered, in its northern vernacular, was “Me either.”)

Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place Understanding hath chosen, since this is the case? …

Nothing remains for them but to go and write vers libres as fine as those of Job in our English translation. Or suppose even that they write as well as M. Paul Fort, they will yet be writing ancestrally, not as innovators but as renewers.

Nothing is done in literature by arguing whether or not this or that be possible or permissible. The only way to prove it possible or permissible is to go and do it: and then you are lucky indeed if some ancient writers have not forestalled you.

Now for another question (much argued, you will remember, a few years ago) “Is there—can there be—such a thing as a Static Theatre, a Static Drama?”

These three made an appointment together to travel and visit Job. “And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept.” Then they went up and sat down opposite him on the ground.

But the majesty of suffering is silent:

Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it. …

Let us hark back, Gentlemen, to our original problem, and consider if our dilatory way have led us to some glimpse of a practical solution.

We may restate it thus: Assuming it to be true, as men of Science assure us, that the weight of this planet remains constant, and is today what it was when mankind carelessly laid it on the shoulders of Atlas;

… done to deserve it, he must surely wonder at times from what other corners of the earth Providence has been at pains to collect and compact the ingredients of the latest new volume he handles for a moment before fondly committing it to the cellars.

“Locked up, not lost.”

Or, to take it in reverse—When the great library of Alexandria went up in flames, doubtless its ashes awoke an appreciable and almost immediate energy in the crops of the Nile Delta.

Dum domus Æneae Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet.

Great enterprises (as we know) and little minds go ill together.

Someone veiled the statue. That, at least, was well done.

that in reading it—or in reading Hamlet, for that matter—the child has no sense at all of being patronised, of being “written down to.” And this has the strongest bearing on my argument.

The great authors, as Emerson says, never condescend.

Shakespeare himself speaks to a slip of a boy, and that boy feels that he is Ferdinand;

A child no more resents this because it is strange than he objects to read in a fairytale of robbers concealed in oil-jars or of diamonds big as a roc’s egg.

When will our educators see that what a child depends on is imagination, that what he demands of life is the wonderful, the glittering, possibility?

Now if, putting all this together and taking confidence from it, we boldly launch a child upon The Tempest we shall come sooner or later upon passages that we have arrived at finding difficult.