Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944). On the Art of Reading. 1920.
V. On Reading for ExaminationsWednesday, May 9, 1917
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The first: (bear me out) that, man’s life being of the length it is, and his activities multifarious as they are, out of the mass of printed matter already loaded and still being shot upon this planet, he must make selection. There is no other way.
The second: that—the time and opportunity being so brief, the mass so enormous, and the selection therefore so difficult—he should select the books that are best for him, and take them absolutely, not frittering his time upon books written about and around the best: that—in their order, of course—the primary masterpieces shall come first, and the secondary second, and so on; and mere chat about any of them last of all.
My third proposition (perhaps more discutable) has been that, the human soul’s activities being separated, so far as we can separate them, into What Does, What Knows, What Is—to be such-and-such a man ranks higher than either knowing or doing this, that, or the other: that it transcends all man’s activity upon phenomena, even a Napoleon’s: all his housed store of knowledge, though it be a Casaubon’s or a Mark Pattison’s: that only by learning to be can we understand or reach, as we have an instinct to reach, to our right place in the scheme of things: and that, any way, all the greatest literature commands this instinct. To be Hamlet—to feel yourself Hamlet—is more important than killing a king or even knowing all there is to be known about a text. Now most of us have been Hamlet, more or less: while few of us, I trust have ever murdered a monarch: and still fewer, perhaps, can hope to know all that is to be known of the text of the play. But for value, Gentlemen, let us not rank these three achievements by order of their rarity. Shakespeare means us to feel—to be—Hamlet. That is all: and from the play it is the best we can get.
Now in talking to you, last term, about children I had perforce to lay stress on the point that, with all this glut of literature, the mass of children in our commonwealth, who leave school at fourteen go forth starving.
But you are happier. You are happier, not in having your selection of reading in English done for you at school (for you have in the Public Schools scarce any such help): but happier (1) because the time of learning is so largely prolonged, and (2) because this most difficult office of sorting out from the mass what you should read as most profitable has been tentatively performed for you by us older men for your relief. For example, those of you—‘if any,’ as the Regulations say—who will, a week or two hence, be sitting for Section A of the Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos, have been spared, all along, the laborious business of choosing what you should read or read with particular attention for the good of your souls. Is Chaucer your author? Then you will have read (or ought to have read) The Parlement of Fowles, the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, The Knight’s Tale, The Man of Law’s Tale, The Nun Priest’s Tale, The Doctor’s Tale, The Pardoner’s Tale with its Prologue, The Friar’s Tale. You were not dissuaded from reading Troilus; you were not forbidden to read all the Canterbury Tales, even the naughtiest; but the works that I have mentioned have been ‘prescribed’ for you. So, of Shakespeare, we do not discourage you (at all events, intentionally) from reading Macbeth, Othello, As You Like It, The Tempest, any play you wish. In other years we ‘set’ each of these in its turn. But for this Year of Grace we insist upon King John, The Merchant of Venice, King Henry IV, Part I, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, King Lear, ‘certain specified works’—and so on, with other courses of study. Why is this done? Be fair to us, Gentlemen. We do it not only to accommodate the burden to your backs, to avoid overtaxing one-and-a-half or two years of study; not merely to guide you that you do not dissipate your reading, that you shall—with us, at any rate—know where you are. We do it chiefly, and honestly—you likewise being honest—to give you each year, in each prescribed course, a sound nucleus of knowledge, out of which, later, your minds can reach to more. We are not, in the last instance, praiseworthy or blameworthy for your range. I think, perhaps, too little of a man’s range in his short while here between (say) nineteen and twenty-two. For anything I care, the kernel may be as small as you please. To plant it wholesome, for a while tend to it wholesome, then to show it the sky and that it is wide—not a hot-house, nor a brassy cupola over a man, but an atmosphere shining up league on league; to reach the moment of saying ‘All this now is yours, if you have the perseverance as I have taught you the power, coelum nactus es, hoc exorna’: this, even in our present Tripos, we endeavour to do.
All very well. But, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked
I am sorry, Gentlemen: I cannot bring you so much of comfort as all that. I have a love of the past which, because it goes down to the roots, has sometimes been called Radicalism: I could never consent with Bacon’s gibe at antiquity as pessimum conjurium, and Examinations have a very respectable antiquity. Indeed no University to my knowledge has ever been able in the long run to do without them: and although certain Colleges—King’s College and New College at Oxford—for long persevered in the attempt, the result was not altogether happy, and in the end they have consigned with custom.
Of course Universities have experimented with the process. Let me give you two or three ancient examples, which may help you to see (to vary Wordsworth) that though ‘the Form decays, the function never dies.’
(1) I begin with most ancient Bologna, famous for Civil Law. At Bologna the process of graduation—of admission to the jus docendi, ‘right to teach’—consisted of two parts, the Private Examination and the Public (conventus):
(2) Let us pass to the great and famous University of Paris. At Paris
I may add here in parenthesis that the thirstiness, always so remarkable in the medieval man whether it make him strange to you or help to ingratiate him as a human brother, seems to have followed him even into the Tripos. ‘It was not only after a University exercise,’ says the historian (Rashdall, Vol.
Now when we come to England—that is, to Oxford and Cambridge, which ever had queer ways of their own—we find, strange to say, for centuries no evidence at all of any kind of examination. As for competitive examinations like the defunct Mathematical and Classical Triposes here—with Senior Wranglers, Wooden Spoons and what lay between—of all European Universities, Louvain alone used the system and may have invented it. At Louvain the candidates for the Mastership were placed in three classes, in each of which the names were arranged in order of merit. The first class were styled Rigorosi (Honour-men), the second Transibiles (Pass-men), the third Gratiosi (Charity-passes); while a fourth class, not publicly announced, contained the names of those who could not be passed on any terms. ‘Si autem (quod absit!),’ says the Statute, ‘aliqui inveniantur refutabiles, erunt de quarto ordine.’ ‘These competitive examinations’—I proceed in the historian’s words—‘contributed largely to raise Louvain to the high position as a place of learning and education which it retained before the Universities were roused from their 15th century torpor by the revival of Learning.’ Pope Adrian VI was one of its famous Primuses, and Jansen another. The College which produced a Primus enjoyed three days’ holiday, during which its bell was rung continuously day and night.
At Oxford and Cambridge (I repeat) we find in their early days no trace of any examination at all. To be sure—and as perhaps you know—the first archives of this University were burned in the ‘Town and Gown’ riots of 1381 by the Townsmen, whose descendants Erasmus describes genially as ‘combining the utmost rusticity with the utmost malevolence.’ But no student will doubt that Cambridge used pretty much the same system as Oxford, and the system was this:—When a candidate presented himself before the Chancellor for a License in Arts, he had to swear that he had heard certain books, and nine Regent Masters (besides his own Master, who presented him) were required to depose to their knowledge (de scientia) of his sufficiency: and five others to their credence (de credulitate), says the Statute. Only in the School of Theology was no room allowed to credulity: there all the Masters had to depose ‘of their knowledge,’ and one black ball excluded.
Well, you may urge that this method has a good deal to be said for it. I will go some way to meet you too: but first you must pay me the compliment of supposing me a just man. Being a just man, and there also being presumed in me some acquaintance with English Literature—not indeed much—not necessarily much—but enough to distinguish good writing from bad or, at any rate, real writing from sham, and at least to have an inkling of what these poets and prose-writers were trying to do—why then I declare to you that, after two years’ reading with a man and talk with him about literature, I should have a far better sense of his industry, of his capacity, of his performance and (better) of his promise, than any examination is likely to yield me. In short I could sign him up for a first, second or third class, or as refutabilis, with more accuracy and confidence than I could derive from taking him as a stranger and pondering his three or four days’ performance in a Tripos. For some of the best men mature slowly: and some, if not most, of the best writers write slowly because they have a conscience; and the most original minds are just those for whom, in a literary examination, it is hardest to set a paper.
But the process (you will admit) might be invidious, might lend itself to misunderstanding, might conceivably even lead to re-imposition of an oath forbidding the use of a knife or other sharp implement. And among Colleges rivalry is not altogether unknown; and dons, if unlike other men in outward aspect, sometimes resemble them in frailty; and in short I am afraid we shall have to stick to the old system for a while longer. I am sorry, Gentlemen: but you see how it works.
Yet—and I admit it—the main objection abides: that, while Literature deals with What Is rather than with What Knows, Examinations by their very nature test mere Knowledge rather than anything else: that in the hands of a second-rate examiner they tend to test knowledge alone, or what passes for knowledge: and that in the very run of this world most examiners will be second-rate men: which, if we remind ourselves that they receive the pay of fifth-rate ones is, after all, considerably better than we have a right to expect.
We are dealing, mind you, with English Literature—our own literature. In examining upon a foreign literature we can artfully lay our stress upon Knowledge and yet neither raise nor risk raising the fatal questions ‘What is it all about?’ ‘What is it, and why is it it?’—since merely to translate literally a chorus of the Agamemnon, or an ode of Pindar’s, or a passage from Dante or Molière is a creditable performance; to translate either well is a considerable feat; and to translate either perfectly is what you can’t do, and the examiner knows you can’t do, and you know the examiner can’t do, and the examiner knows you know he can’t do. But when we come to a fine thing in our own language—to a stanza from Shelley’s Adonais for instance:
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 shew 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 stedfast, 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:
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:
Yet, and when this has been granted, the crucial question abides and I must not shirk it—‘you say that the highest literature deals with What Is rather than with What Knows. It is all very fine to assure us that testing our knowledge about Literature and around Literature, and on this side or that side of Literature, is healthy for us in some oblique way: but can you examiners examine, or can you not, on Literature in what you call its own and proper category of What Is?’
So I hear the question—the question which beats and has beaten, over and over again, good men trying to construct Schools of English in our Universities.
With all sense of a responsibility, of a difficulty, that has lain on my mind for these five years, I answer, Gentlemen, ‘Yes, we ought: yes, we can: and yes, we will.’
But, for the achievement, we teachers must first know how to teach. When that is learned, Examination will come as a consequent, easy, almost trivial matter. I will, for example—having already allowed how hard it is to examine on literature—take the difficulty at its very extreme. I will select a piece of poetry, and the poet shall be Keats—on whom, if on any one, is felt the temptation to write gush and loose aesthetic chatter. A pupil comes to read with me, and I open at the famous Ode to a Grecian Urn.
(1) We read it through together, perhaps twice; at the second attempt getting the emphasis right, and some, at any rate, of the modulations of voice. So we reach a working idea of the Ode and what Keats meant it to be.
(2) We then compare it with his other Odes, and observe that it is (a) regular in stanza form, (b) in spite of its outburst in the 3rd stanza—‘More happy love! more happy, happy love’ etc.—much severer in tone than, e.g., the Ode to a Nightingale or the Ode to Psyche, (c) that the emotion is not luscious, but simple, (d) that this simplicity is Hellenic, so far as Keats can compass it, and (e) eminently well-suited to its subject, which is a carven urn, gracious but severe of outline; a moment of joy caught by the sculptor and arrested, for time to perpetuate; yet—and this is the point of the Ode—conveying a sense that innocent gaiety is not only its own excuse, but of human things one of the few eternal—and eternal just because it is joyous and fleeting.
(3) Then we go back and compare this kind of quiet immortal beauty with the passionate immortality hymned in the Nightingale Ode
(4) From this we proceed to examine the Ode in detail line by line: which examination brings up a whole crowd of questions, such as
([Greek5 alpha]) We have a thought enounced in the first stanza. Does the Ode go on to develop and amplify it, as an Ode should? Or does Pegasus come down again and again on the prints from which he took off? If he do this, and the action of the Ode be dead and unprogressive, is the defect covered by beauty of language? Can such defect ever be so covered?
([Greek6 beta]) Lines 15 and 16 anticipate lines 21–24, which are saying the same thing and getting no forwarder.
([Greek7 gamma]) We come to the lines
We come to the last stanza and lament ‘O Attic shape! Fair attitude’ for its jingle: but note how the poet recovers himself and brings the whole to a grand close.
I have, even yet, mentioned but a few of the points. For one, I have omitted its most beautiful vowel-play, on which teacher and pupil can dwell and learn together. And heaven forbid that as a teacher I should insist even on half of those I have indicated. A teacher, as I hold, should watch for what his pupil divines of his own accord; but if, trafficking with works of inspiration, he have no gift to catch that inspiration nor power to pass it on, then I say ‘Heaven help him! but he has no valid right on earth to be in the business.’
And if a teacher have all these chances of teaching—mind you, of accurate teaching—supplied him by a single Ode of Keats, do you suppose we cannot set in an Examination paper one intelligent question upon it, in its own lawful category?
Gentlemen, with the most scrupulous tenderness for aged and even decrepit interests, we have been trying to liberate you from certain old bad superstitions and silently laying the stones of a new School of English, which we believe to be worthy even of Cambridge.
Our proposals are before the University. Should they be passed, still everything will depend on the loyalty of its teachers to the idea; and on that enthusiasm which I suppose to be the nurse of all studies and know to be the authentic cherishing nurse of ours. We may even have conceded too much to the letter, but we have built and built our trust on the spirit ‘which maketh alive.’