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!]