“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 forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?”
X
I have been talking today 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 today. 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 Clothes, but of a very fresh and well-favoured Countenance, and as he sat 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.
Lecture V
On Reading for Examinations
Wednesday, May 9, 1917
I
You, Gentlemen, who so far have followed with patience this course of lectures, advertised, maybe too ambitiously, as “On the Art of Reading,” will recall to your memory, when I challenge it across the intervals of Vacation, that three propositions have been pretty steadily held before you.
The first: (bear me out) that, man’s life being of the length it is, and his activities multifarious as they are, out of the mass of printed matter already loaded and still being shot upon this planet, he must make selection. There is no other way.
The second: that—the time and opportunity being so brief, the mass so enormous, and the selection therefore so difficult—he should select the books that are best for him, and take them absolutely, not frittering his time upon books written about and around the best: that—in their order, of course—the primary masterpieces shall come first, and the secondary second, and so on; and mere chat about any of them last of all.
My third proposition (perhaps more discutable) has been that, the human soul’s activities being separated, so far as we can separate them, into What Does, What Knows, What Is—to be such-and-such a man ranks higher than either knowing or doing this, that, or the other: that it transcends all man’s activity upon phenomena, even a Napoleon’s: all his housed store of knowledge,
