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 hornéd 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.]