On the Art of Reading

unlamented urn.

what can you do with that? How can you examine on that? Well, yes, you can request the candidate, to “Write a short note on the word calumny above,” or ask “From what is it derived?” “What does he know of Blackwood’s Magazine?” “Can he quote any parallel allusion in Byron?” You can ask all that: but you are not getting within measurable distance of it. Your mind is not even moving on the right plane. Or let me turn back to some light and artless Elizabethan thing⁠—say to the Oenone duet in Peele’s Arraignment of Paris:

Oenone.	Fair and fair and twice so fair, As fair as any may be: The fairest shepherd on our green, A love for any lady.
Paris	Fair and fair and twice so fair, As fair as any may be: Thy love is fair for thee alone, And for no other lady.
Oenone	My love is fair, my love is gay, As fresh as bin the flowers in May, And of my love my roundelay, My merry merry merry roundelay Concludes with Cupid’s curse: They that do change old love for new, Pray gods they change for worse.⁠ ⁠… My love can pipe, my love can sing, My love can many a pretty thing, And of his lovely praises ring My merry merry merry roundelays “Amen” to Cupid’s curse: They that do change old love for new Pray gods they change for worse.
Ambo.	Fair and fair and twice so fair, As fair as any may be: The fairest shepherd on our green, A love for any lady.⁠ ⁠…

How can anyone examine on that? How can anyone solemnly explain, in a hurry, answering one of five or six questions selected from a three hours’ paper, just why and how that hits him? And yet, if it hit him not, he is lost. If even so simple a thing as that⁠—a thing of silly sooth⁠—do not hit him, he is all unfit to traffic with literature.

VIII

You see how delicate a business it is. Examination in Literature, being by its very nature so closely tied down to be a test of Knowledge, can hardly, save when used by genius, with care, be any final test of that which is better than Knowledge, of that which is the crown of all scholarship, of understanding.

But do not therefore lose heart, even in your reading for strict purposes of examination. Our talk is of reading. Let me fetch you some comfort from the sister and correlative, but harder, art of writing.

I most potently believe that the very best writing, in verse or in prose, can only be produced in moments of high excitement, or rather (as I should put it) in those moments of still and solemn awe into which a noble excitement lifts a man. Let me speak only of prose, of which you may more cautiously allow this than of verse. I think of St. Paul’s glorious passage, as rendered in the Authorised Version, concluding the 15th chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians. First, as you know, comes the long, swaying, scholastic, somewhat sophisticated argument about the evidence of resurrection; about the corn, “that which thou sowest,” the vivification, the change in vivification, and the rest. All this, almost purely argumentative, should be read quietly, with none of the bravura which your prize reader lavishes on it. The argument works up quietly⁠—at once tensely and sinuously, but very quietly⁠—to conviction. Then comes the hush; and then the authoritative voice speaking out of it, awful and slow, “Behold, I show you a mystery”⁠ ⁠… and then, all the latent emotion of faith taking hold and lifting the man on its surge, “For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible”⁠ ⁠… and so, incorruption tolling down corruption, the trumpet smashes death underfoot in victory: until out of the midst of tumult, sounds the recall; sober, measured, claiming the purified heart back to discipline. “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

I think of that triumphant passage. I think of the sentences with which Isaak Walton ends his life of Donne. I think of the last pages of Motley’s Dutch Republic, with its eulogy on William the Silent so exquisitely closing:

As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.

I think of two great prose passages in Thackeray’s Esmond; of Landor’s Dream of Boccaccio⁠ ⁠… and so on: and I am sure that, in prose or in verse, the best that man can utter flows from him either in moments of high mental excitement or in the hush of that Altitudo to which high excitement lifts him.

But, first now, observe how all these passages⁠—and they are the first I call to mind⁠—rise like crests on a large bulk of a wave⁠—St. Paul’s on a labouring argument about immortality; Motley’s at the conclusion of a heavy task. Long campaigning brings the reward of Harry Esmond’s return to Castlewood, long intrigue of the author’s mind with his characters closes that febrile chapter in which Harry walks home to break the news of the death of the Duke of Hamilton⁠—in the early morning through Kensington, where the newsboys are already shouting it:

The world was going to its business again, although dukes lay dead and ladies mourned for them.⁠ ⁠… So day and night pass away, and tomorrow comes, and our place knows us not. Esmond thought of the courier now galloping on the north road to inform him, who was Earl of Arran yesterday, that he was Duke of Hamilton today, and of a thousand great schemes, hopes, ambitions, that were alive in the gallant heart, beating but a few hours since, and now in a little dust quiescent.

And on top of this let me assure you that in writing, or learning