Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/147

 i2s. vii. AUG. 7, i92o.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 119 0n On the Art of Reading. Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1916-1917. By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. (Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 15s. net.) WE mean it as no trivial compliment to the Professor of English Literature at Cambridge when we say that, quite obviously, he himself is past master in the art of reading. That he has been this for many years, turns out as something of a disadvantage to his hearers and readers on the subject or so we think. For he reads so naturally, so well, and to such an unfailing con- summation of the end for which a person reads, that one half of the art of reading is no longer present to his consciousness. Almost exclusively these lectures are devoted to the other half. That is to say he discourses rather on what to do than on how to do it : on matter rather than on manner ; on the choice of books rather than on how to tackle what you have chosen. Now we are prepared to maintain that a poorer book better read profits more than a better book worse read. And Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch him- self illustrates this contention : for he tells us in his Introductory lecture of a certain pamphlet which fell into his hands and which he profited by mightily so much so that picking it up again after following out the track upon which it had set him, he found it no such wonderful book after all. Not an uncommon experience but possible orly to a good reader ; and to the making of a good reader goes more than a wise choice among good books. Once he is made, however by that exercise of the art of reading which Sir Arthur practices but does not preach he has it in him to render nugatory not a little of the lamentation, quoted and emphasised here, over excess of knowledge gorged and stored in brains bulging in a deformed repletion. For our part we think that elaborate parallels between knowledge and food, the brain and the stomach, easily work out into absurdity. We are all of us incommoded by the difficulty of acquiring knowledge, and by the difficulty of retaining knowledge but who has ever seen a person incommoded by knowledge once acquired and ready for use ? Indeed, knowledge may be called liberation as truly as nourishment ; and want of balance be viewed as a demand for greater freedom. On Apprehension v. Comprehension we have a lecture full of a fine, kindling enthusiasm, which speaks with a delightful eloquence and links itself to the enthusiasms of the past by very apt quotations. This pretty and delicate business of quotation displays our author's tact and skill most attractively. He might, perhaps, have relieved the imagination of his hearers, labouring in a nightmare of print, by reminding them that books repeat each other and, along many lines, cancel each other, so that their array, formidable though it be, is still not quite so formidable as it scenes. There are still only " some few " which " are to be read wholly, and with Diligence and Attention" : the accumulations consist for the most part of the " others" which are " to be read but not Curiously." (The writer of these lines would! urge that catching the right trick in this latter kind of reading deserves more attention than, teachers commonly bestow on it.) Of the two lectures " On Children's Reading" the first sets out many familiar consideration* wittily and charmingly : the second, equally delightful and not appreciably more novel, seems; to us to ignore two pertinent facts first, that reading as an effective art is really an affair between a person and a book whether or no the person be a child ; and secondly that an in- clination for reading we mean rather for litera- ture is by no means a universal property of the human mind. The spark " common to the king, the sage, the poorest child " we agree in what our author says of that : but we would urge that it is not " drawn up to a flame " in every person, by the same means, and, being but a little thing, if it flames up in one way usually will not in. another. We are sure there will always be many children to whom it will prove utterly vain to- read ' 1'Allegro,' however persuasively. They were made to take fire from the coal of some other- altar. The lecture ' On Reading for Examinations ' contains excellent counsels, and particularly so where the writer shows the relation of a know- ledge of facts about literature to a true realisation .. of literature in "its own and proper category of what is." ' On a School of English ' begins most unhappily upon a quibble of so crude a kind that we cannot but be astonished. The general argument of the lecture hardly rises above the beginning, though we get some amusing pages about the fiery pedantry of the first champions of English. Throughout this lecture, as through- put several passages of others, the top heavy insistence on a refusal to ' ' dissociate literature from life " forces one to recollect that " dis- sociation " is, after all, the prime step in know- ledge. That which the mind is to be engaged upon must first be disentangled and separated from the general mass of things. If this is not- effectively done, not only will the "subject" thus constituted never be known adequately in itself, but it will not be known truly either in its relation to the aforesaid general mass. One of the most thrilling and illuminating of all in- tellectual experiences is that of seeing a subject,, which has been thus studied in isolation, returned as it were, to its place in the scheme of things and exhibited there ; but it is an experience not to be had without the preliminary " dissociation." Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch rejoicing in the reunion,, for himself so long ago and so rarely well effected, . has perhaps forgotten how different a thing it is from the original tangle, and how much of his present insight he owes to that disconnexion from which but we think vainly he would fain altogether exempt his hearers. However, in the lectures ' On Reading the Bible,' he is forced upon- some good measure of dissociation again and again. In this matter of reading the Bible we think there is one factor which the Professor has left out of account, so far as concerns his plea for having a part of it included as an English classic in the studies of the School of English. There is