On Learning to Read
I
FOR the past twelve months or so I have been engaged, at two summer schools and a junior college, in ‘teaching literature.’ What precisely have I been teaching, and what benefits, if any, may my pupils have been deriving from the experiment? Experiment I must call it, for I have had neither the formal and severe training of professional scholarship nor any instruction in the science — if it be a science — of pedagogy. I came to these jobs as a man who had spent much of his life in reading and writing — as a ‘literary man.’ To minute, exhaustive knowledge of world literature I could not pretend. Such were and are my disqualifications. What compensating gifts may my employers have hopefully supposed me to be bringing with me?
They must have argued, I presume, that a lifetime devoted to literary pursuits could not, culturally, have been spent wholly in vain. Be it far from me to question this assumption! After all, if a man has written verse, novels, plays, essays, short stories, book reviews, and so forth, for thirty or more years, he is entitled to the benefit of the doubt; he may well have picked up some notions as to the differences between good writing and bad, and if he has put in most of his spare moments in reading he ought at least to have gained a bowing acquaintance with a number of satisfactory authors. It is only fair to add that the one advantage I claimed for myself over many (by no means all) teachers of literature was a really fanatic love for well-written books. This love, I suggested, being white-hot and ineradicable, could hardly fail to communicate a few sparks of its secret fire to my students.
Has it done so? In this cynical, debunking age, I know perfectly what answer the ungentle reader is expecting, and I am not at all sorry to disappoint him.
Yes, I believe that it has done so. Not, certainly, to all, and perhaps not extravagantly to any who were unmarked from their cradles by the bite of the Bookworm. But a year of teaching, or of teaching at, literature has convinced me, somewhat to my own surprise, that literature can indeed be taught. A desire to read, and to read good books, can at least be stimulated even in more or less obdurate youthful breasts.
Heaven forbid that I should now imagine myself, unaided and untrained, to have discovered some new and revolutionary technique for ‘teaching literature’! What little I have accomplished has doubtless been far better accomplished many times before by professional teachers. I have had one or two masters myself in past years who brought to their classrooms not only scholarship but a winning humor, humanity, and grace. Remembering them, I blush for my present temerity. However, one can do only what one can. What is it that I have at least been trying — and trying very hard — to do?
Briefly, I have been trying to teach my students how to read.
The fine art of reading, I quickly and painfully discovered, is in no little danger of being lost. Most of the students, I found, were quite unaware that reading is anything more than a mechanical acquirement. It seldom occurred to them that the great books of the world will not unbosom themselves to slovenly, incurious, inartistic readers. The page of a great book does not differ mechanically from the page of a worthless book — it is merely a sheet of paper with some black, oddlooking specks on it. It remains that, or is transformed into wisdom, beauty, joy. But this transformation depends finally upon the reader — upon the reader’s ability to read.
A printed poem, for example, is very like the printed score of a musical composition. The poem itself does not exist for you until you have correctly and artistically performed and interpreted it. With a poem, this performance, this interpretation, is usually a solitary joy, a purely mental re-creation from the printed page. It need not be so. The poem may be performed and interpreted for others, may be read aloud. Comparatively few of us, however, even if we are fond of poetry, can bear to listen to a poem thus recited or read aloud. Why? For a number of reasons, but for one chiefly: the reading aloud, nine times in ten, is wretchedly done. Not many people these days can read prose aloud acceptably; as for verse —! The mere presence of metre before its readers seems to reduce them to a condition of imbecility. They either gabble and stutter through it with no apparent awareness either of its natural movement or of its meaning, or they monotonously chant it in a somnolent singsong, or, worse still, they smother it in all the affected graces and overblown sentiment of professional ‘elocution.’ Our poets themselves suffer from this general artistic paralysis, and when they attempt to read out their own compositions they present the horrid spectacle of infanticides publicly butchering their children.
Now, obviously enough, if one cannot read a poem aloud without destroying it, this must partly be due to one’s inability to read it to one’s self. Partly, I say, because the selfconsciousness of unaccustomed public performance, even if the public be only a single suffering friend, tends to exaggerate all one’s errors of technique or taste. Nevertheless, if you can read a poem to yourself with pleasure, you should at least be a little better able to read it to others without giving them positive pain; and, if you cannot, the odds are that you have never, in any significant sense of the word, read that particular poem.
For what does reading — what I should like to call re-creative reading — imply? Many difficult things. A book might well be written — if sensitively written — to enumerate, analyze, discuss them. Such a book would necessarily have much to say of the delicate functions of rhythm (in heightening yet controlling emotion, in regulating emphasis, and so forth), much of the root meanings and sky-branching connotations (suggestive emotional overtones) of words, much of language as logic and of language as representation — of language as architecture, as line and mass, as color, as music. And the lurking presence of an often extremely subtle irony in almost all first-rate writing would have to be pointed out as a quality too frequently missed by the indifferent, unalert reader. We need, in short, a new rhetoric, not to teach good writing, which can hardly be taught, but to teach good reading, which can far more certainly be taught. Why readers go wrong is the underlying question to be dealt with; yet clearly, in a brief paper, I cannot deal with it here. Two widely differing illustrations of the process of going wrong may, however, be given.
II
A girl student — a lively and lightly sophisticated young modernist — was protesting against my cruelty. ‘I can’t do it!’ she almost wailed. ‘I simply can’t read stodgy old-fashioned stories like that! They bore me so. Aren’t you ever going to give me something to read that I don’t have to begin by hating?’
She had been assigned The Vicar of Wakefield, and we had met for a first conference upon it.
I might, fairly enough, have reminded her that since she had herself elected ‘A Survey of English Literature’ she could hardly expect me not to try, at least, to interest her in certain of the established classics. We were at the time supposed to be ‘surveying’ the eighteenth century. But why waste one’s breath? I held out the forbidding volume and asked her to read me the opening paragraph. She gave me a single desolated glance, sighed, accepted the book, and hurriedly and indifferently began as follows: —
‘"I was ever ’v the opinion that the hones’ man —"'
‘Oh, wait, please,’ I said. ‘Just read what’s there. Don’t add or subtract anything.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You put in a word, removed several letters, and subtracted a comma.’
Her impatient little wriggle was very expressive.
‘Begin again,’ I suggested. ‘Take it more slowly.’
She began again, with an exaggerated dragging of each syllable: —
‘"I . . was . . ev-er . . of . . the . . opinion . . that —’”
‘You’ve repeated two fatal mistakes in seven words,’ I interrupted.
‘You’re just trying to get my goat!’ she snapped.
‘Yes. I am. And now that I’ve got it —’
‘You haven’t! You can’t make me like this book by being angry. It’s a stupid, silly book — and just because people used to be dull enough to like it —’
‘Some people are still dull enough to like it. I am, for one.’
‘I don’t believe you really like it. You just think you ought to.’
‘Oh, no,’I said. ‘There’s no “ought” about it. I’ll admit I have n’t much respect for the plot of this story. I’ll admit the melodramatic coincidences toward the end of it are rather silly. But they’re not important. No one ever rereads The Vicar of Wakefield for its plot.’
‘I can’t imagine reading it again!’
‘I’ve read most of it a number of times,’ I said.
‘Oh, you have to — because you’re a teacher.’
‘No, I’m not that kind of teacher — and I’ve a fairly good memory. I like turning back to it now and then for the pure joy of appreciation.’
‘What is there to appreciate?’
‘A good deal. For one thing, Goldsmith’s deceptive simplicity. Whenever he’s being particularly deep and subtle, he pretends he is merely being naïve. That’s called irony, you know — or perhaps you don’t; but it is. Only, Goldsmith’s irony has a quite special flavor. There’s nothing harsh or ill-tempered about it. He has a secret process by which he blends irony with sympathy and charm — and the secret, worse luck, appears to have died with him.’
‘I don’t see what you mean.’ She was a little worried, however. ‘I just thought he was — sort of formal and silly and awfully sentimental.’
‘Yes. That’s because you haven’t read the book yet.’
‘Oh! I did read it. I told you I would, and it nearly killed me — but I honestly did!’
‘My dear girl,’ I said, ‘suppose I asked you to play a sonata by Mozart for me — and you rattled away at the notes, missing perhaps a third of them, without timing or expression, because you had decided in advance that Mozart’s music was silly and oldfashioned and you had no use for it.’
‘But I love Mozart!’
‘Exactly. And I love Goldsmith. So you can imagine how I feel when I ask you to play me some Goldsmith — and you promptly murder him.’
‘Well — I’m sorry. I didn’t know you felt that way. I don’t see how you can!’
‘And I don’t see how so bright a girl as you can occasionally be so obtuse. But, of course, girls in general are n’t very quick at detecting irony.’
‘I thought irony was saying one thing and meaning another.’
‘So, roughly, it is.’
‘But Goldsmith’s so deadly plain!’
‘Is he? Let me read you this first paragraph — slowly. It should n’t be read too slowly; the movement is Adagio ma non troppo. But Goldsmith is devilish sly. Until you’re familiar with him you have to watch him, or you’ll miss something delightful every few words.’ And I reached for the book and began, abominably enough, underlining each lurking point for her.
As I concluded the first page my pupil was actually blushing.
‘Please don’t go on!’ she begged. ‘I simply did n’t realize he was being as cagy as that. I never felt like such an idiot in my life!’
She jumped to her feet and held out her hand. ‘I’ll really read it for you this time,’ she said.
III
Another student came to me flushed with a great discovery. She had been reading for the first time the lyrics of William Blake.
‘They’re the loveliest things I ever read!’ she exclaimed. ‘They’re poetry — the real thing! I don’t see why you’ve had us poke through all that Pope and Gray and Cowper and stuff. The minute you read Blake you realize all that sort of thing is n’t poetry at all.’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘that’s splendid. It’s a wonderful gift to be able to distinguish true poetry from sham poetry at a glance.’
‘You just feel the difference at once,’ she said.
‘Read me one of the lyrics you like best,’ I suggested.
She opened the book.
‘I like all of them! . . . Well, of course, there’s “Tiger, Tiger."'
‘Yes. Read me that.’
She did so, with a breathless, happy excitement. ‘It just thrills me!’ she added.
‘Why?’
‘It’s so vivid! It makes you see and understand a tiger as you never have before. It makes you feel that he’s the most magnificent thing in the world.’
‘Rather terrifying, though?’
‘That’s part of it — that’s why it’s so exciting. It’s so — suggestive!’
‘What does the tiger suggest to you? ’
’Oh — strength and swiftness and fire and —’
‘Yes — ?’
‘But the main thing is — it works you all up so. When I read it the first time I just wanted to jump up and yell!’
‘And do you think that’s why Blake wrote the poem? Because he’d seen a tiger — or had imagined one so completely that he had to exclaim how magnificent and beautiful and terrifying it was?’
‘I . . yes . . I suppose so. That’s why it’s real poetry — he was so excited himself.’
‘I see. It hasn’t occurred to you, then, that the poem may mean something more than that — something quite definite that Blake wanted to say to you?’
A shade of disappointment crossed her face.
‘You see,’ I continued relentlessly, ‘Blake wasn’t the sort of man who just got vaguely, however gloriously, excited over tigers and lambs and things. He was a very positive, pugnacious man. He thought he had seized the hidden truth about pretty much everything by direct intuition or inspiration. He thought human reason was of the Devil, but that the poetic imagination was of God. He identified his imagination with Truth, with God himself. In short, he was as pure an example of the seer, of the convinced mystic, as you will find anywhere. His visions to him are reality — the one possible Reality. So you may be certain that through his Tiger he is expressing what he believes to be one aspect of Eternal Truth . . . and you have n’t really read that poem until you have read it as he intended it.’
She looked more disappointed than before, and even a little alarmed.
‘But I’ve read the poem over and over! I know it by heart. And I don’t see how you can tell just what he meant by it.’
‘You can’t,’ I explained, ‘unless you have studied all of Blake’s poems and prose writings and designs very closely, in order to discover what he intends by the symbols he uses. Like most mystics, Blake was a symbolist, and he had built up a whole system of symbolism. Moreover, he uses these symbols to express as exactly as he can all his ideas about life, death, and eternity. A symbol is nothing but a figure of speech which is used to stand for an idea — and with Blake a given symbol stands invariably for a given idea. Now it happens that the Tiger is one of Blake’s fixed symbols; and I repeat that you may know Blake’s poem by heart, but you have n’t really read it until you have discovered what Blake meant by his Tiger — discovered, that is, what he himself was excited about.’
‘Oh, good Lord,’ said the girl, ‘but that takes all the poetry out of it!’
‘Which is n’t my fault, you see, but Blake’s — if it’s anybody’s. Besides, Blake would violently have disagreed with you. Poetry, to Blake, was the expression of Eternal Truth.’
‘Oh . . . How can I find out . . . What did he mean by the Tiger?’
’He meant the wrath of God,’ I said. ‘Just as by the Lamb he meant always the love of God.’
‘Oh . . .I wish you had n’t spoiled it for me!’ she wailed. ‘It doesn’t seem nearly so wonderful any more. It takes the poetry out of it.’
‘Why? By adding a meaning?’
‘Yes — no — oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I guess I just like to feel things sort of vaguely and get excited about them.’
‘In other words, my dear girl, you are still a complete romantic. You like one kind of poetry, and so proclaim it to be the only kind there is. There are lots of supposed critics, even nowadays, who completely agree with you.’
She brightened a little at this.
‘Well, anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s awfully interesting — and I’m going to think it over.’ And she left me with a little puckered frown between her eyes. I was glad of that frown. It did n’t worry me that she should feel, temporarily, that I had spoiled something precious for her. I hoped, indeed, that it might lead her to take one more courageous step in the always difficult re-creative process of learning to read.
IV
These two illustrations of faulty reading — or, preferably, of non-reading — have perhaps been given at too great length, for in themselves they are far from exhausting the subject. Yet they do, I think, bring out two very general, opposite, and disastrous tendencies. Both these girls were students of more than average intelligence. Both, in the usual phrase, were ‘fond of reading.’ Neither had ever been taught, or had discovered for herself, how to read.
The failure of the first student with The Vicar of Wakefield was due to a very common contemporary prejudice. I have discovered that at least a third of my students, if not a good half of them, approach the masterpieces of former generations truculently, with obvious chips on disdainful shoulders; for our young people, it appears, are instinctive and convinced believers in progress. To-day, they assume, is necessarily better, more enlightened, than yesterday. At least I know not how else to interpret the widespread assumption that the best of our new books are necessarily superior to any written, or that could conceivably have been written, in the darker ages of the past.
The argument (seldom precisely formulated) would seem to run as follows: We know more than our ancestors; therefore we write better than our ancestors. So why waste time on inferior productions? The study of literature should rationally be confined to the best, which is clearly contemporary literature. Q.E.D.
That there are possibly a few dropped stitches in the fabric of this argument never seems to occur to them. It is not my purpose for the present to point these out. I am here concerned only with the effect of this attitude upon many promising students — upon their mere ability to read.
If you approach a book, any book, with rooted suspicion and bored indifference, the chances of your being able to read that book, re-creatively, are extremely small. To begin with, you will already have abandoned a first principle of good reading — namely, fair-mindedness, a desire to give the author before you a square deal. In other words, you must grant him your complete attention. You must really listen to what he has to say. If, having done so, you find what he has to say false, or dull, or his manner of saying it awkward or meretricious, you may excuse yourself and leave him. But until you have heard him with attention you have not really heard him, and any judgment you may pronounce must necessarily be unfair.
My first student, then, had not been courteously fair-minded to Goldsmith; she had not listened to him; her mind had been elsewhere while her eyes merely fulfilled an appointed task. Now Goldsmith always speaks quietly, politely, with a minimum of emphasis; he is too well bred to solicit attention; he assumes that his readers are equally well bred. This is evidently a dangerous assumption in a period of clamor, public posturing, and impervious ballyhoo.
As for the second student, her inability to read William Blake did not spring (Heaven knows) from lack of attention. She is the type of student, by no means uncommon, for whom reading is always an emotional debauch. If an author thrills her, she asks no more of him; the immediate æsthetic thrill is for her the beginning and end of art. To have been made to feel something — even if one is hardly aware what it is one has felt or why one has felt it — is enough. Intellectual curiosity, understanding, remain in abeyance. The cheek flushes, the heart beats faster, and the miracle has been accomplished — even if the revolutionary thinker and mystic, Blake, be transformed thereby into a spineless romantic and purveyor of golden gush to schoolgirls.
But the particular error is not the point. Twenty more might as easily have been illustrated and commented upon. The point, in the end, is but this, that a catholic appreciation of the better books of the world depends upon our ability to read them, and that reading is an art in itself — an art to be studied as other arts are studied and, within the limits of a given personality, more or less perfectly acquired. Teachers of literature are — if they are anything useful — teachers of reading. Such at least is my present conviction. It is almost the first and last duty of a teacher of literature to master the art of reading himself, and to help, by any means in his power, his students to master it. Our existence as teachers of literature is justified only so far as we are able to teach our pupils how to read.