On The Art of Reading Part 5

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 Sion.

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 fairy-tales 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d' 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 9.5 and 9.45 a.m., that bloodthirsty tribal deity whom the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true G.o.d 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 pa.s.ses 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

(1) to talk and to listen; (2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word); (3) to draw, paint and model; (4) to dance and sing; (5) to know the why of things (6) 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 pa.s.sport 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 a.s.similating 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 cla.s.s up--- say a cla.s.s 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 70 or 80 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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.

LECTURE IV

CHILDREN'S READING (II)

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1917

I

In our talk, Gentlemen, about Children's Reading we left off upon a list, drawn up by Mr Holmes in his book 'What Is, and What Might Be,' of the things that, apart from physical nourishment and exercise, a child instinctively desires.

He desires (1) to talk and to listen; (2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word); (3) to draw, paint and model; (4) to dance and sing; (5) to know the why of things; (6) to construct things.

Let us scan through this catalogue briefly, in its order.

No. (1). _To talk and to listen_--Mr Holmes calls this _the communicative instinct._ Every child wants to talk with those about him, or at any rate with his chosen ones--his parents, brothers, sisters, nurse, governess, gardener, boot-boy (if he possess these last)--with other children, even if his dear papa is poor: to tell them what he has been doing, seeing, feeling: and to listen to what they have to tell him.

Nos. (2), (3), (4). _To act_--our author calls this the 'dramatic instinct': _to draw, paint and model_--this the 'artistic instinct'--_to dance and sing_--this the 'musical instinct.' But obviously all these are what Aristotle would call 'mimetic' instincts: 'imitative' (in a sense I shall presently explain); even as No. (2)--acting--like No. (1)--talking and listening--comes of craving for sympathy. In fact, as we go on, you will see that these instincts overlap and are not strictly separable, though we separate them just now for convenience.

No. (5). _To know the why of things_--the 'inquisitive instinct.'

This, being the one which gives most trouble to parents, parsons, governesses, conventional schoolmasters--to all grown-up persons who pretend to know what they don't and are ashamed to tell what they do--is of course the most ruthlessly repressed.

'The time is come,' the Infant said, 'To talk of many things: Of babies, storks and cabbages And--

--having studied the Evangelists' Window facing the family pew--

And whether cows have wings.'

The answer, in my experience, is invariably stern, and 'in the negative': in tolerant moments compromising on 'Wait, like a good boy, and see.'

But we singled out this instinct and discussed it in our last lecture.

No. (6). _To construct things_--the 'constructive instinct.' I quote Mr Holmes here:

After a.n.a.lysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys to pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them. The ends that he sets before himself are those which Comte Set before the human race--_savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour deduire, afin de construire._ The desire to make things, to build things up, to control ways and means, to master the resources of nature, to put his knowledge of her laws and facts to practical use, is strong in his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in building and rebuilding houses, churches.... Set him on a sandy sh.o.r.e with a spade and a pail, and he will spend hours in constructing fortified castles with deep encircling moats.

Again obviously this constructive instinct overlaps with the imitative ones. Construction, for example, enters into the art of making mud-pies and has also been applied in the past to great poetry. If you don't keep a sharp eye in directing this instinct, it may conceivably end in an "Oth.e.l.lo" or in a "Divina Commedia."

II

Without preaching on any of the others, however, I take three of the six instincts scheduled by Mr Holmes--the three which you will allow to be almost purely imitative.

They are:

Acting, Drawing, painting, modelling, Dancing and singing.

Now let us turn to the very first page of Aristotle's "Poetics,"

and what do we read?

Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre, are all, in general, modes of imitation....

For as their are persons who represent a number of things by colours and drawings, and others vocally, so it is with the arts above mentioned. They all imitate by rhythm, language, harmony, singly or combined.

Even dancing (he goes on)

imitates character, emotion and action, by rhythmical movement.