Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944). On the Art of Reading. 1920.
IV. Childrens Reading (II)Wednesday, February 21, 1917
I
He desires
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.
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:
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.
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:
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’:
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 next 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 develope 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—an ungentlemanly tribe, ‘very low in the social scale.’
‘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 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 [Greek3] and indeed puts what it contains of truth with more of finality, less of provocation (though Pindar at once follows up [Greek4] with exquisite poetry): but you cannot—truly you cannot—exhibit the steps which lead up from ‘Brandy is good’ to such lines as
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 two poems, 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.
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,
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.
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.
Who, that has been a child, has not felt this surprise of beauty, the revelation, the call of 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 his 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.
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 their 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:
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.
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 own way with the young plant—just lets them drop ‘like the gentle rain from heaven,’ and soak in.
Do you really want to chat about that? Cannot you trust it?
‘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:
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:
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?