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.
Lecture III
Children’s Reading (I)
Wednesday, January 24, 1917
I have often wished, Gentlemen, that some more winning name could be found for the thing we call Education; and I have sometimes thought wistfully that, had we made a better thing of it, we should long ago have found a more amiable, a blither, name.
For after all it concerns the child; and is it quite an accident that, weaning him away from lovely things that so lovelily call themselves “love,” “home,” “mother,” we can find no more alluring titles for the streets into which we entrap him than “Educational Facilities,” “Local Examinations,” “Preceptors,” “Pedagogues,” “Professors,” “Matriculations,” “Certificates,” “Diplomas,” “Seminaries,” “Elementary or Primary, and Secondary Codes,” “Continuation Classes,” “Reformatories,” “Inspectors,” “Local Authorities,” “Provided” and “Non-Provided,” “Denominational” and “Undenominational,” and “D.Litt.” and “Mus. Bac.”? Expressive terms, no doubt!—but I ask with the poet
Who can track
A Grace’s naked foot amid them all?
Take even such words as should be perennially beautiful by connotation—words such as “Academy,” “Museum.” Does the one (O, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy!”) call up visions of that green lawn by Cephissus, of its olives and plane trees and the mirrored statues among which Plato walked and held discourse with his few? 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; but an eliciting of what is within him. Now, if you followed my last lecture, we find that which is within him to be no less, potentially, than the Kingdom of God.
I grant that this potentiality is, between the ages of four and sixteen, not always, perhaps not often, evident. The boy—in Bagehot’s phrase “the small apple-eating urchin whom we know”—has this in common with the fruit for which he congenitally sins, that his very virtues in immaturity are apt, setting the teeth on edge, to be mistaken for vices. A writer, to whom I shall recur, has said:
If an Englishman who had never before tasted an apple were to eat one in July, he would probably come to the conclusion that it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit, “conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity,” fit only to be consigned to perdition (on a dust heap or elsewhere). But if the same man were to wait till October and then eat an apple from the same tree, he would find that the sourness had ripened into wholesome and refreshing acidity; the hardness into firmness of fibre which, besides being pleasant to the palate, makes the apple keep better than any other fruit; the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic qualities, and so on. …
In other words—trench, manure, hoe and water around your young tree, and patiently allow the young fruit to develop of its own juice from the root; your own task being, as the fruit forms, but to bring in all you can of air and sunshine upon it. It must, as every mother and nurse knows, be coaxed to realise itself, to develop, to grow from its individual root. 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. From the age of two or thereabouts he valiantly essays the conquest of articulate speech, using it first to identify his father or his mother amid the common herd of Gentiles; next, to demand a more liberal and varied dietary; anon, as handmaid of his imperious will to learn. This desire, still in the nursery, climbs—like dissolution in Wordsworth’s sonnet—from low to high: from a craving to discover experimentally what the stomach will assimilate and what reject, up to a kingly debonair interest in teleology. Our young gentleman is perfectly at ease in Zion. He wants to know why soldiers are (or were) red, and if they were born so; whence bread and milk is derived, and would it be good manners to thank the neat cow for both; why mamma married papa, and—that having been explained and thoughtfully accepted as the best possible arrangement—still thoughtfully, not in the least censoriously, “why the All-Father has not married yet?” He falls asleep weighing the eligibility of various spinsters, church-workers, in the parish.
His brain teeming with questions, he asks them of impulse
