On the Art of Reading · Chapter 3 (2/2)

On the Art of Reading · Chapter 3 (2/2)

Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic (we might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated by some. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise as our judgment or our memory.

And that admirable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real text of my discourse today. I lay no sentimental stress upon Wordsworth’s Ode and its doctrine that “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” It was, as you know, a favourite doctrine with our Platonists of the 17th century: and critics who trace back the Ode “Intimations of Immortality” to Henry Vaughan’s

Happy those early days, when I

Shined in my Angel-infancy.

might connect it with a dozen passages from authors of that century. Here is one from Centuries of Meditations by that poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, whom I quoted to you the other day:

Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His special favour I remember them till now.⁠ ⁠… Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

And here is another from John Earle’s Character of “A Child” in his Microcosmography:

His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what innocence he has out-liv’d.

He is the Christian’s example, and the old man’s relapse: the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got Eternity without a burden, and exchang’d but one Heaven for another.

Bethinking me again of “the small apple-eating urchin whom we know,” I suspect an amiable fallacy in all this: I doubt if when he scales an apple-bearing tree which is neither his own nor his papa’s he does so under impulse of any conscious yearning back to Hierusalem, his happy home,

Where trees for evermore bear fruit.

At any rate, I have an orchard, and he has put up many excuses, but never yet that he was recollecting Zion.

Still the doctrine holds affinity with the belief which I firmly hold and tried to explain to you with persuasion last term: that, boy or man, you and I, the microcosms, do⁠—sensibly, half-sensibly, or insensibly⁠—yearn, through what we feel to be best in us, to “join up” with the greater harmony; that by poetry or religion or whatnot we have that within us which craves to be drawn out, “e‑ducated,” and linked up.

Now the rule of the nursery in the last century rested on Original Sin, and consequently and quite logically tended not to educate, but to repress. There are no new fairytales of the days when your grandmothers wore crinolines⁠—I know, for I have searched. Mothers and nurses taught the old ones; the Three Bears still found, one after another, that “somebody has been sleeping in my bed”; Fatima continued to call “Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?” the Wolf to show her teeth under her nightcap and snarl out (O, great moment!) “All the better to eat you with, my dear.” But the Evangelicals held field. Those of our grandfathers and grandmothers who understood joy and must have had fairies for ministers⁠—those of our grandmothers who played croquet through hoop with a bell and practised Cupid’s own sport archery⁠—those of our grandfathers who wore jolly peg-top trousers and Dundreary whiskers, and built the Crystal Palace and drove to the Derby in green-veiled top-hats with Dutch dolls stuck about the brim⁠—tot circa unum caput tumultuantes deos⁠—and those splendid uncles who used to descend on the old school in a shower of gold⁠—half-a-sovereign at the very least⁠—all these should have trailed fairies with them in a cloud. But in practice the evangelical parent held the majority, put away all toys but Noah’s Ark on Sundays, and voted the fairies down.

I know not who converted the parents. It may have been that benefactor of Europe, Hans Christian Andersen, born at Odensee in Denmark in April 1805. He died, near Copenhagen, in 1875, having by a few months outlived his 70th birthday. I like to think that his genius, a continuing influence over a long generation, did more than anything else to convert the parents. The schools, always more royalist than the King, professionally bleak, professionally dull, professionally repressive rather than educative, held on to a tradition which, though it had to be on the sly, every intelligent mother and nurse had done her best to evade. The schools made a boy’s life penitential on a system. They discovered athletics, as a safety-valve for high spirits they could not cope with, and promptly made that safety-valve compulsory! They went on to make athletics a religion. Now athletics are not properly a religious exercise, and their meaning evaporates as soon as you enlist them in the service of repression. They are being used to do the exact opposite of that for which God meant them. Things are better now: but in those times how many a boy, having long looked forward to it, rejoiced in his last day at school?

I know surely enough what must be in your minds at this point: I am running up my head hard against the doctrine of Original Sin, against the doctrine that in dealing with a child you are dealing with a “fallen nature,” with a human soul “conceived in sin,” unregenerate except by repression; and therefore that repression and more repression must be the only logical way with your Original Sinners.

Well, then, I am. I have loved children all my life; studied them in the nursery, studied them for years⁠—ten or twelve years intimately⁠—in elementary schools. I know for a surety, if I have acquired any knowledge, that the child is a “child of God” rather than a “Child of wrath”; and here before you I proclaim that to connect in any child’s mind the Book of Joshua with the Gospels, to make its Jehovah identical in that young mind with the Father of Mercy of whom Jesus was the Son, to confuse, as we do in any school in this land between 9:30 and 9:45 a.m., that bloodthirsty tribal deity whom the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true God the Father, is a blasphemous usage, and a curse.

But let me get away to milder heresies. If you will concede for a moment that the better way with a child is to draw out, to educate, rather than to repress, what is in him, let us observe what he instinctively wants. Now first, of course, he wants to eat and drink, and to run about. When he passes beyond these merely animal desires to what we may call the instinct of growth in his soul, how does he proceed? I think Mr. Holmes, whom I have already quoted, very fairly sets out these desires as any grown-up person can perceive them. The child desires

to talk and to listen;
to act (in the dramatic sense of the word);
to draw, paint and model;
to dance and sing;
to know the why of things;
to construct things.

Now I shall have something to say by and by on the amazing preponderance in this list of those instincts which Aristotle would have called “mimetic.” This morning I take only the least imitative of all, the desire to know the why of things.

Surely you know, taking only this, that the master-key admitting a child to all, or almost all, palaces of knowledge is his ability to read. When he has grasped that key of his mother-tongue he can with perseverance unlock all doors to all the avenues of knowledge. More⁠—he has the passport to heavens unguessed.

You will perceive at once that what I mean here by “reading” is the capacity for silent reading, taking a book apart and mastering it; and you will bear in mind the wonder that I preached to you in a previous lecture⁠—that great literature never condescends, that what yonder boy in a corner reads of a king is happening to him. Do you suppose that in an elementary school one child in ten reads thus? Listen to a wise ex-inspector, whose words I can corroborate of experience:

The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress is that the children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word. They are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering the contents of the book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up one by one and reading aloud to their teacher.

Ah! but I have seen far worse than that. I have visited and condemned rural schools where the practice was to stand a class up⁠—say a class of thirty children⁠—and make them read in unison: which meant, of course, that the front row chanted out the lesson while the back rows made inarticulate noises. I well remember one such exhibition, in a remote country school on the Cornish hills, and having my attention arrested midway by the face of a girl in the third row. She was a strikingly beautiful child, with that combination of bright auburn, almost flaming, hair with dark eyebrows, dark eyelashes, dark eyes, which of itself arrests your gaze, being so rare; and those eyes seemed to challenge me half scornfully and ask, “Are you really taken in by all this?” Well, I soon stopped the performance and required each child to read separately: whereupon it turned out that, in the upper standards of this school of seventy or eighty children, one only⁠—this disdainful girl⁠—could get through half a dozen easy sentences with credit. She read well and intelligently, being accustomed to read to herself, at home.

I daresay that this bad old method of block-reading is dead by this time.

Reading aloud and separately is excellent for several purposes. It tests capacity: it teaches correct pronunciation by practice, as well as the mastery of difficult words: it provides a good teacher with frequent opportunities of helping the child to understand what he reads.

But as his schooling proceeds he should be accustomed more and more to read to himself: for that, I repeat, is the master-key.