IX

This advice, to be sure, presupposes of the teacher himself some capacity of reading aloud, and reading aloud is not taught in our schools. In our Elementary Schools, in which few of the pupils contemplate being called to Holy Orders or to the Bar, it is practised, indeed, but seldom taught as an art. In our Secondary and Public Schools it is neither taught nor practised: as I know to my cost—and you, to yours, Gentlemen, on whom I have had to practise.

But let the teacher take courage. First let him read a passage 'at the long breath'—as the French say—aloud, and persuasively as he can. Now and then he may pause to indicate some particular beauty, repeating the line before he proceeds. But he should be sparing of these interruptions. When Laughter, for example, is already 'holding both his sides' it cannot be less than officious, a work of supererogation, to stop and hold them for him; and he who obeys the counsel of perfection will read straight to the end and then recur to particular beauties. Next let him put up a child to continue with the tale, and another and another, just as in a construing class. While the boy is reading, the teacher should never interrupt: he should wait, and return afterwards upon a line that has been slurred or wrongly emphasised. When the children have done reading he should invite questions on any point they have found puzzling: it is with the operation of poetry on their minds that his main business lies. Lastly, he may run back over significant points they have missed.

'And is that all the method?'-Yes, that is all the method. 'So simple as that?'-Yes, even so simple as that, and (I claim) even so wise, seeing that it just lets the author—Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton or Coleridge—have his own way with the young plant—just lets them drop 'like the gentle rain from heaven,' and soak in.

  The moving Moon went up the sky,
  And no where did abide:
  Softly she was going up,
  And a star or two beside.

Do you really want to chat about that? Cannot you trust it?

  The stars were dim, and thick the night,
  The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
  From the sails the dew did drip—
  Till clomb above the eastern bar
  The hornéd Moon, with one bright star
  Within the nether tip.

Must you tell them that for the Moon to hold a star anywhere within her circumference is an astronomical impossibility? Very well, then; tell it. But tell it afterwards, and put it away quietly. For the quality of Poetry is not strained. Let the rain soak; then use your hoe, and gently; and still trust Nature; by which, I again repeat to you, all spirit attracts all spirit as inevitably as all matter attracts all matter.

'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 for ever speaking,
  That nothing of itself will come,
  But we must still be seeking?