But let us take something far simpler than the Ninth Book of
"Paradise Lost" and more direct than any translated masterpiece
can be in its appeal; something of high genius, written in our
mother tongue. Let us take "The Tempest."
Of "The Tempest" we may say confidently:
(1) that it is a literary masterpiece: the last most perfect
'fruit of the noblest tree in our English Forest';
(2) that its story is quite simple; intelligible to a child: (its
basis in fact is fairy-tale, pure and simple--as I tried to show
in a previous lecture);
(3) 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;
(4) that, though Shakespeare uses his loftiest, most accomplished
and, in a sense, his most difficult language: a way of talking it
has cost him a life-time to acquire, in line upon line inviting
the scholar's, prosodist's, poet's most careful study; that
language is no bar to the child's enjoyment: but rather casts
about the whole play an aura of magnificence which, with the
assistant harmonies, doubles and redoubles the spell. 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. We shall come, for example, to the Masque of Iris,
which Iris, invoking Ceres, thus opens:
Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatched with stover, them to keep:
Thy banks with pionèd and twillèd brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims--
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves,
Whose shadow the dismisséd bachelor loves,
Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard;
And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky hard,
Where thou thyself dost air--the Queen o' th' sky,
Whose watry arch and messenger am I,
Bids thee leave these....
The passage is undeniably hard for any child, even when you have
paused to explain who Ceres is, who Iris, who the Queen o' the
sky, and what Iris means by calling herself 'her watery arch and
messenger.' The grammatical structure not only stands on its head
but maintains that posture for an extravagant while. Naturally
(or rather let us say, ordinarily) it would run, 'Ceres, the
Queen o' the sky bids thee leave--thy rich leas, etc.' But, the
lines being twelve-and-a-half in number, we get no hint of there
being any grammatical subject until it bursts on us in the second
half of line eleven, while the two main verbs and the object of
one of them yet linger to be exploded in the last half-line,
'Bids thee leave these.' And this again is as nothing to the
difficulties of interpretation. 'Dismisséd bachelor' may be easy;
'pole-clipt vineyard' is certainly not, at first sight. 'To make
cold nymphs chaste crowns.' What cold nymphs? You have to wait
for another fifty odd lines before being quite sure that
Shakespeare means Naiads (and 'What are Naiads?' says the child)
--'temperate nymphs':
You nymphs, called Naiads, of the windring brooks,
With your sedged crowns...
--and if the child demand what is meant by 'pionèd and twillèd
brims,' you have to answer him that nobody knows.
These difficulties--perhaps for you, certainly for the young
reader or listener--are reserved delights. My old schoolmaster
even indulges this suspicion--'I never can persuade myself that
Shakespeare would have passed high in a Civil Service Examination
on one of his own plays.' At any rate you don't _begin_ with
these difficulties: you don't (or I hope you don't) read the
notes first: since, as Bacon puts it, 'Studies teach not their
own use.'
As for the child, he is not '_grubbing_ for beauties'; he
magnificently ignores what he cannot for the moment understand,
being intent on _What Is,_ the heart and secret of the adventure.
He _is_ Ferdinand (I repeat) and the isle is 'full of voices.' If
these voices were all intelligible, why then, as Browning would
say, 'the less Island it.'
V
I have purposely exhibited "The Tempest" at its least tractable.
Who will deny that _as a whole_ it can be made intelligible even
to very young children by the simple process of reading it with
them intelligently? or that the mysteries such a reading leaves
unexplained are of the sort to fascinate a child's mind and
allure it? But if this be granted, I have established my
contention that the Humanities should not be treated as a mere
crown and ornament of education; that they should inform every
part of it, from the beginning, in every school of the realm:
that whether a child have more education or less education, what
he has can be, and should be, a 'liberal education' throughout.
Matthew Arnold, as every one knows, used to preach the use of
these masterpieces as prophylactics of taste. I would I could
make you feel that they are even more necessary to us.
The reason why?--The reason is that every child born in these
Islands is born into a democracy which, apart from home affairs,
stands committed to a high responsibility for the future welfare
and good governance of Europe. For three centuries or so it has
held rule over vast stretches of the earth's surface and many
millions of strange peoples: while its obligations towards the
general civilisation of Europe, if not intermittent, have been
tightened or relaxed, now here, now there, by policy, by
commerce, by dynastic alliances, by sudden revulsions or
sympathies. But this War will leave us bound to Europe as we
never have been: and, whether we like it or not, no less
inextricably bound to foe than to friend. Therefore, I say, it
has become important, and in a far higher degree than it ever was
before the War, that our countrymen grow up with a sense of what
I may call the _soul_ of Europe. And nowhere but in literature
(which is `memorable speech')--or at any rate, nowhere so well as
in literature--can they find this sense.