been plastered,

Dum domus Æneae Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet.

Great enterprises (as we know) and little minds go ill together. Someone veiled the statue. That, at least, was well done.

I have not the information⁠—nor do I want it⁠—to make even a guess who was responsible for this particular outrage. I know the sort of man well enough to venture that he never had a liberal education, and, further, that he is probably rather proud of it. But he may nevertheless own some instinct of primitive kindliness: and I wish he could know how he afflicts men of sensitiveness who have sons at the War.

III

Secondly, let us consider what use we can make of even one selected classic. I refer you back to the work of an old schoolmaster, quoted in my first lecture:

I believe, if the truth were known, men would be astonished at the small amount of learning with which a high degree of culture is compatible. In a moment of enthusiasm I ventured once to tell my “English set” that if they could really master the ninth book of Paradise Lost, so as to rise to the height of its great argument and incorporate all its beauties in themselves, they would at one blow, by virtue of that alone, become highly cultivated men.⁠ ⁠… More and more various learning might raise them to the same height by different paths, but could hardly raise them higher.

I beg your attention for the exact words: “to rise to the height of its great argument and incorporate all its beauties in themselves.” There you have it⁠—“to incorporate.” Do you remember that saying of Wordsworth’s, casually dropped in conversation, but preserved for us by Hazlitt?⁠—“It is in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language or diction the dress of our thoughts.⁠ ⁠… It is the incarnation of our thoughts.” Even so, I maintain to you, the first business of a learner in literature is to get complete hold of some undeniable masterpiece and incorporate it, incarnate it. And, I repeat, there are a few great works for you to choose from: works approved for you by ancient and catholic judgment.

IV

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 fairytale, 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 lifetime 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 peas;
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 dismissèd 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. “Dismissèd 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

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