Chapter 3
So evident is this calculated harmony that men, seeking to interpret it by what was most harmonious in themselves or in their human experience, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals: Plato as we see (who learned of Pythagoras) inventing his Octave of Sirens, perched on the whorls of the great spindle and intoning as they spin.
Dante (Chaucer copying him in "The Parlement of Fowls") makes the spheres nine: and so does Milton:
then listen I To the celestial _Sirens_ harmony, That sit upon the nine infolded Sphears, And sing to those that hold the vital shears, And turn the Adamantine spindle round On which the fate of gods and men is wound. Such sweet compulsion doth in musick lie To lull the daughters of _Necessity_, And keep unsteady Nature to her law, And the low world in measur'd motion draw After the heavenly tune....
If the sceptical mind object to the word _law_ as begging the question and postulating a governing intelligence with a governing will--if it tell me that when revolted Lucifer uprose in starlight--
and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he look'd, and sank. Around the ancient track march'd, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law--
he was merely witnessing a series of predictable or invariable recurrences, I answer that he may be right, it suffices for my argument that they _are_ recurrent, are invariable, can be predicted. Anyhow the Universe is not Chaos (if it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it at all). It stands and is renewed upon a harmony: and what Plato called 'Necessity' is the Duty--compulsory or free as you or I can conceive it--the Duty of all created things to obey that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth tells in his noble Ode.
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong: And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.
III
Now the other and second great belief is, that the Universe, the macrocosm, cannot be apprehended at all except as its rays converge upon the eye, brain, soul of Man, the microcosm: on you, on me, on the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense cosmic circle focuses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass--and he is not shrivelled up! Other creatures, he notes, share in his sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not in his percipience --or not in any degree worth measuring. So far as he can discover, he is not only a bewildered actor in the great pageant but 'the ring enclosing all,' the sole intelligent spectator. Wonder of wonders, it is all meant for _him_!
I doubt if, among men of our nation, this truth was ever more clearly grasped than by the Cambridge Platonists who taught your forerunners of the 17th century. But I will quote you here two short passages from the work of a sort of poor relation of theirs, a humble Welsh parson of that time, Thomas Traherne-- unknown until the day before yesterday--from whom I gave you one sentence in my first lecture. He is speaking of the fields and streets that were the scene of his childhood:
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.... The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me.... Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die....
The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars; and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.
Then:
News from a foreign country came, As if my treasure and my wealth lay there; So much it did my heart inflame, 'Twas wont to call my Soul into mine ear; Which thither went to meet The approaching sweet, And on the threshold stood To entertain the unknown Good....
What sacred instinct did inspire My Soul in childhood with a hope to strong? What secret force moved my desire To expect new joys beyond the seas, so young? Felicity I knew Was out of view,
And being here alone, I saw that happiness was gone From me! For this I thirsted absent bliss, And thought that sure beyond the seas, Or else in something near at hand-- I knew not yet (since naught did please I knew) my Bliss did stand.
But little did the infant dream That all the treasures of the world were by: And that himself was so the cream And crown of all which round about did lie. Yet thus it was: the Gem, The Diadem, The Ring enclosing all That stood upon this earthly ball, The Heavenly Eye, Much wider than the sky, Wherein they all included were, The glorious Soul, that was the King Made to possess them, did appear A small and little thing!
And then comes the noble sentence of which I promised you that it should fall into its place:
You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.
Man in short--you, I, any one of us--the heir of it all!
_Tot circa unum caput tumultuantes deos!_
Our best privilege to sing our short lives out in tune with the heavenly concert--and if to sing afterwards, then afterwards!
IV
But how shall Man ever attain to understand and find his proper place in this Universe, this great sweeping harmonious circle of which nevertheless he feels himself to be the diminutive focus? His senses are absurdly imperfect. His ear cannot catch any music the spheres make; and moreover there are probably neither spheres nor music. His eye is so dull an instrument that (as Blanco White's famous sonnet reminds us) he can neither see this world in the dark, nor glimpse any of the scores of others until it falls dark:
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?
Yet the Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to man save in so far as _he_ apprehends it: and lacking him (so far as he knows) it utterly lacks the compliment of an audience. Is all the great orchestra designed for nothing but to please its Conductor? Yes, if you choose: but no, as I think. And here my other quotation:
That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact.... Spirit to spirit-- as in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.
Yes and, all spirit being mutually attractive, far more than this! I preach to you that, through help of eyes that are dim, of ears that are dull, by instinct of something yet undefined--call it soul--it wants no less a name--Man has a native impulse and attraction and yearning to merge himself in that harmony and be one with it: a spirit of adoption (as St Paul says) whereby we cry _Abba, Father!_
And because ye are Sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying _Abba, Father._
That is to say, we know we have something within us correspondent to the harmony, and (I make bold to say) unless we have deadened it with low desires, worthy to join in it. Even in his common daily life Man is for ever seeking after harmony, in avoidance of chaos: he cultivates habits by the clock, he forms committees, governments, hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which (as he hopes) a system of society will work in tune. But these are childish imitations, underplay on the great motive:
The Kingdom of God is within you.
Quid aliud est anima quam Deus in corpore humano hospitans?
V
Gentlemen, you may be thinking that I have brought you a long way round, that the hour is wearing late, and that we are yet far from the prey we first hunted on the line of common-sense. But be patient for a minute or two, for almost we have our hand on the animal.
If the Kingdom of God, or anything correspondent to it, be within us, even in such specks of dust as we separately are, why that, and that only, can be the light by which you or I may hope to read the Universal: that, and that only, deserves the name of '_What Is_.' Nay, I can convince you in a moment. Let me recall a passage of Emerson quoted by me on the morning I first had the honour to address an audience in Cambridge:
It is remarkable (says he) that involuntarily we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures ... anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.
It is remarkable, as Emerson says; and yet, as we now see, quite simple. A learned man may patronise a less learned one: but the Kingdom of God cannot patronise the Kingdom of God, the larger the smaller. There _are_ large and small. Between these two mysteries of a harmonious universe and the inward soul are granted to live among us certain men whose minds and souls throw out filaments more delicate than ours, vibrating to far messages which they bring home, to report them to us; and these men we call prophets, poets, masters, great artists, and when they write it, we call their report literature. But it is by the spark in us that we read it: and not all the fire of God that was in Shakespeare can dare to patronise the little spark in me. If it did, I can see--with Blake--the angelic host
throw down their spears And water heaven with their tears.
VI
To nurse that spark, common to the king, the sage, the poorest child--to fan, to draw up to a flame, to 'educate' _What Is_--to recognise that it is divine, yet frail, tender, sometimes easily tired, easily quenched under piles of book-learning--to let it run at play very often, even more often to let it rest in what Wordsworth calls
a wise passiveness
passive--to use a simile of Coventry Patmore--as a photographic plate which finds stars that no telescope can discover, simply by waiting with its face turned upward--to mother it, in short, as wise mothers do their children--this is what I mean by the Art of Reading.
For all great Literature, I would lastly observe, is gentle towards that spirit which learns of it. It teaches by _apprehension_ not by _comprehension_--which is what many philosophers try to do, and, in trying, break their jugs and spill the contents. Literature understands man and of what he is capable. Philosophy, on the other hand, may not be 'harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,' but the trouble with most of its practitioners is that they try to _comprehend_ the Universe. Now the man who could comprehend the Universe would _ipso facto_ comprehend God, and be _ipso facto_ a Super-God, able to dethrone him, and in the arrogance of his intellectual conceit full ready to make the attempt.
[Footnote 1: Do you remember, by the by, Samuel Rogers's lines on Lady Jane Grey? They have always seemed to me very beautiful:
Like her most gentle, most unfortunate, Crown'd but to die--who in her chamber sate Musing with Plato, though the horn was blown, And every ear and every heart was won, And all in green array were chasing down the sun!]
LECTURE III
CHILDREN'S READING (I)
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24, 1917
I have often wished, Gentlemen, that some more winning name could be found for the thing we call Education; and I have sometimes thought wistfully that, had we made a better thing of it, we should long ago have found a more amiable, a blither, name.
For after all it concerns the child; and is it quite an accident that, weaning him away from lovely things that so lovelily call themselves 'love,' 'home,' 'mother,' we can find no more alluring titles for the streets into which we entrap him than 'Educational Facilities,' 'Local Examinations,' 'Preceptors,' 'Pedagogues,' 'Professors,' 'Matriculations,' 'Certificates,' 'Diplomas,' 'Seminaries,' Elementary or Primary, and Secondary Codes,' 'Continuation Classes,' 'Reformatories,' 'Inspectors,' 'Local Authorities,' 'Provided' and 'Non-Provided,' 'Denominational' and 'Undenominational,' and 'D.Litt.' and 'Mus. Bac.'? Expressive terms, no doubt!--but I ask with the poet
Who can track A Grace's naked foot amid them all?
Take even such words as should be perennially beautiful by connotation-words such as 'Academy,' 'Museum.' Does the one (O, "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy!") call up visions of that green lawn by Cephissus, of its olives and plane trees and the mirrored statues among which Plato walked and held discourse with his few? Does the other as a rule invite to haunts (O God! O Montreal!) where you can be secure of communion with Apollo and the Nine? Answer if the word Academy does not first call up to the mind some place where small boys are crammed, the word Museum some place where bigger game are stuffed?
And yet 'academy,' 'museum,' even 'education' are sound words if only we would make the things correspond with their meanings. The meaning of 'education' is a leading out, a drawing-forth; not an _imposition_ of something on somebody--a catechism or an uncle-- upon the child; but an eliciting of what is within him. Now, if you followed my last lecture, we find that which is within him to be no less, potentially, than the Kingdom of God.
I grant that this potentiality is, between the ages of four and sixteen, not always, perhaps not often, evident. The boy--in Bagehot's phrase 'the small apple-eating urchin whom we know'-- has this in common with the fruit for which he congenitally sins, that his very virtues in immaturity are apt, setting the teeth on edge, to be mistaken for vices. A writer, to whom I shall recur, has said:
If an Englishman who had never before tasted an apple were to eat one in July, he would probably come to the conclusion that it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit, `conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity,' fit only to be consigned to perdition (on a dust heap or elsewhere). But if the same man were to wait till October and then eat an apple from the same tree, he would find that the sourness had ripened into wholesome and refreshing acidity; the hardness into firmness of fibre which, besides being pleasant to the palate, makes the apple 'keep' better than any other fruit; the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic qualities, and so on....
In other words--trench, manure, hoe and water around your young tree, and patiently allow the young fruit to develop of its own juice from the root; your own task being, as the fruit forms, but to bring in all you can of air and sunshine upon it. It must, as every mother and nurse knows, be coaxed to realise itself, to develop, to grow from its individual root. It may be coaxed and trained. But the main secret lies in encouraging it to grow, and, to that end, in pouring sunshine upon it and hoeing after each visitation of tears parentally induced.
Every child wants to grow. Every child wants to learn. During his first year or so of life he fights for bodily nutriment, almost ferociously. From the age of two or thereabouts he valiantly essays the conquest of articulate speech, using it first to identify his father or his mother amid the common herd of Gentiles; next, to demand a more liberal and varied dietary; anon, as handmaid of his imperious will to learn. This desire, still in the nursery, climbs--like dissolution in Wordsworth's sonnet--from low to high: from a craving to discover experimentally what the stomach will assimilate and what reject, up to a kingly debonair interest in teleology. Our young gentleman is perfectly at ease in Sion. He wants to know why soldiers are (or were) red, and if they were born so; whence bread and milk is derived, and would it be good manners to thank the neat cow for both; why mamma married papa, and--that having been explained and thoughtfully accepted as the best possible arrangement--still thoughtfully, not in the least censoriously, 'why the All-Father has not married yet?' He falls asleep weighing the eligibility of various spinsters, church-workers, in the parish.
His brain teeming with questions, he asks them of impulse and makes his discoveries with joy. He passes to a school, which is supposed to exist for the purpose of answering these or cognate questions even before he asks them: and behold, he is not happy! Or, he is happy enough at play, or at doing in class the things that should not be done in class: his master writes home that he suffers in his school work 'from having always more animal spirits than are required for his immediate purposes.' What is the trouble? You cannot explain it by home-sickness: for it attacks day boys alike with boarders. You cannot explain it by saying that all true learning involves 'drudgery,' unless you make that miserable word a mendicant and force it to beg the question. 'Drudgery' is _what you feel to be drudgery_--
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th' action fine.
--and, anyhow, this child learned one language--English, a most difficult one--eagerly. Of the nursery through which I passed only one sister wept while learning to read, and that was over a scholastic work entitled "Reading Without Tears."
Do you know a chapter in Mr William Canton's book "The Invisible Playmate" in which, as Carlyle dealt in "Sartor Resartus" with an imaginary treatise by an imaginary Herr Teufelsdröckh, as Matthew Arnold in "Friendship's Garland" with the imaginary letters of an imaginary Arminius (Germany in long-past happier days lent the world these playful philosophical spirits), so the later author invents an old village grandpapa, with the grandpapa-name of Altegans and a prose-poem printed in scarecrow duodecimo on paper-bag pages and entitled "Erster Schulgang," 'first school-going,' or 'first day at school'?
The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace in fact. All over the world--and all under it too, when their time comes--the children are trooping to school. The great globe swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot--- shining companies and groups, couples and bright solitary figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about them.
He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely moorlands ... he sees them on the hillsides ... in the woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the seacliffs and on the water-ribbed sands; trespassing on the railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in the ferry-boats; he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only as a strange tradition.
The morning-side of the planet is alive with them: one hears their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents sweep `eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon' ... and as new nations with _their_ cities and villages, their fields, woods, mountains and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of these school-going children of the dawn.
What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful picture of all, he sees them travelling schoolward by the late moonlight which now and again in the winter months precedes the tardy dawn.
That vision strikes me as being poetically true as well as delightful: by which I mean that it is not sentimental: we know that it ought to be true, that in a world well-ordered according to our best wishes for it, it would be _naturally_ true. It expresses the natural love of Age, brooding on the natural eager joy of children. But that natural eager joy is just what our schools, in the matter of reading, conscientiously kill.
In this matter of reading-of children's reading--we stand, just now, or halt just now, between two ways. The parent, I believe, has decisively won back to the right one which good mothers never quite forsook. There was an interval, lasting from the early years of the last century until midway in Queen Victoria's reign and a little beyond, when children were mainly brought up on the assumption of natural vice. They might adore father and mother, and yearn to be better friends with papa: but there was the old Adam, a quickening evil spirit; there were his imps always in the way, confound them! I myself lived, with excellent grandparents, for several years on pretty close terms with Hell and an all-seeing Eye; until I grew so utterly weary of both that I have never since had the smallest use for either. Some of you may have read, as a curious book, the agreeable history called "The Fairchild Family," in which Mr Fairchild leads his naughty children afield to a gallows by a cross-road and seating them under the swinging corpse of a malefactor, deduces how easily they may come to this if they go on as they have been going. The authors of such monitory or cautionary tales understood but one form of development, the development of Original Sin. You stole a pin and proceeded, by fatal steps, to the penitentiary; you threw a stick at a pheasant, turned poacher, shot a gamekeeper and ended on the gallows. You were always Eric and it was always Little by Little with you.... Stay! memory preserves one gem from a Sunday school dialogue, one sharp-cut intaglio of childhood springing fully armed from the head of Satan:
Q. Where hast thou been this Sabbath morning? A. I have been coursing of the squirrel. Q. Art not afraid so to desecrate the Lord's Day with idle sport? A. By no means: for I should tell you that I am an Atheist.
I forget what happened to that boy: but doubtless it was, as it should have been, something drastic.
The spell of prohibition, of repression, lies so strong upon these authors that when they try to break away from it, to appeal to something better than fear in the child, and essay to amuse, they become merely silly. For an example in verse:
If Human Beings only knew What sorrows little birds go through, I think that even boys Would never think it sport or fun To stand and fire a frightful gun For nothing but the noise.
For another (instructional and quite a good _memoria technica_ so far as it goes):
William and Mary came next to the throne: When Mary died, there was William alone.
Now for a story of incident.--It comes from the book "Reading Without Tears," that made my small sister weep. She did not weep over the story, because she did not claim to be an angel.
Did you ever hear of the donkey that went into the sea with the little cart?... A lady drove the cart down to the beach. She had six children with her. Three little ones sat in the cart by her side. Three bigger girls ran before the cart. When they came to the beach the lady and the children got out.
Very good so far. It opens like the story of Nausicaa ["Odyssey," Book vi, lines 81-86].