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 trackA 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 animpositionof 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' iswhat 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 withtheircities 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 benaturallytrue. 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 idlesport?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 knewWhat sorrows little birds go through,I think that even boysWould never think it sport or funTo stand and fire a frightful gunFor nothing but the noise.
For another (instructional and quite a goodmemoria technicaso 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].
The lady wished the donkey to bathe its legs in the sea, to make it strong and clean. But the donkey did not like to go near the sea. So the lady bound a brown shawl over its eyes, and she bade the big girls lead it close to the waves. Suddenly a big wave rushed to the land. The girls started back to avoid the wave, and they let go the donkey's rein.
The donkey was alarmed by the noise the girls made, and it went into the sea, not knowing where it was going because it was not able to see. The girls ran screaming to the lady, crying out, 'The donkey is in the sea!'
There it was, going further and further into the sea, till the cart was hidden by the billows. The donkey sank lower and lower every moment, till no part of it was seen but the ears; for the brown shawl was over its nose and mouth. Now the children began to bawl and to bellow! But no one halloed so loud as the little boy of four. His name was Merty. He feared that the donkey was drowned….
Two fishermen were in a boat far away. They said 'We hear howls and shrieks on the shore. Perhaps a boy or girl is drowning. Let us go and save him: So they rowed hard, and they soon came to the poor donkey, and saw its ears peeping out of the sea. The donkey was just going to sink when they lifted it up by the jaws, and seized the bridle and dragged it along. The children on the shore shouted aloud for joy. The donkey with the cart came safe to land. The poor creature was weak and dripping wet. The fishermen unbound its eyes, and said to the lady, 'We cannot think how this thing came to be over its eyes.' The lady said she wished she had not bound up its eyes, and she gave the shillings in her purse to the fishermen who had saved her donkey.
Now every child knows that a donkey may change into a Fairy Prince: that is a truth of imagination. But to be polite and say nothing of the lady, every child knows that so donkey would be ass enough to behave as in this narrative. And the good parents who, throughout the later 18th century and the 19th, inflicted this stuff upon children, were sinning against the light. Perrault's Fairy Tales, and Madame D'Aulnoy's were to their hand in translations; "Le Cabinet des Fées", which includes these and M. Galland's "Arabian Nights" and many another collection of delectable stories, extends on my shelves to 41 volumes (the last volume appeared during the fury of the French Revolution!). The brothers Grimm published the first volume of their immortal tales in 1812, the second in 1814. A capital selection from them, charmingly rendered, was edited by our Edgar Taylor in 1823; and drew from Sir Walter Scott a letter of which some sentences are worth our pondering.
He writes:
There is also a sort of wild fairy interest in [these tales] which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy stories which have been in later years composed for them. In the latter case their minds are, as it were, put into the stocks … and the moral always consists in good moral conduct being crowned with temporal success. Truth is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred histories of Jemmy Goodchild.
Few nowadays, I doubt, remember Gammer Grethel. She has been ousted by completer, maybe far better, translations of the Grimms' "Household Tales". But turning back, the other day, to the old volume for the old sake's sake (as we say in the West) I came on the Preface—no child troubles with a Preface—and on these wise words:
Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic (we might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated by some. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise as our judgment or our memory.
And that admirable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real text of my discourse to-day. I lay no sentimental stress upon Wordsworth's Ode and its doctrine that 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy.' It was, as you know, a favourite doctrine with our Platonists of the 17th century: and critics who trace back the Ode "Intimations of Immortality" to Henry Vaughan's
Happy those early days, when IShined in my Angel-infancy.
might connect it with a dozen passages from authors of that century. Here is one from "Centuries of Meditations" by that poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, whom I quoted to you the other day:
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. By the Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His special favour I remember them till now…. Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.
And here is another from John Earle's Character of 'A Child' in his "Microcosmography":
His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what innocence he has out-liv'd. He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse: the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got Eternity without a burthen, and exchang'd but one Heaven for another.
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 God 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 repressionmustbe 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 God' 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 God 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, toeducate,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 passes 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 calledmimetic.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 toread.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 passport 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 tohim.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 assimilating 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 class up—- say a class 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 andseparatelyis excellent for several purposes. It tests capacity: it teaches correct pronunciation 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.
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 thisthe 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 cabbagesAnd—
—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 analysis 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 prévoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour déduire, 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 shore 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 "Othello" or in a "Divina Commedia."
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.
Now, having touched on mud-pies, let me say a few words upon these aesthetic imitative instincts of acting, dancing, singing before I follow Aristotle into his explanation of the origin of Poetry, which I think we may agree to be the highest subject of our Art of Reading and to hold promise of its highest reward.
Every wise mother sings or croons to her child and dances him on her knee. She does so by sure instinct, long before the small body can respond or his eyes—always blue at first and unfathomably aged—return her any answer. It lulls him into the long spells of sleep so necessary for his first growth. By and by, when he has found his legs, he begins to skip, and even before he has found articulate speech, to croon for himself. Pass a stage, and you find him importing speech, drama, dance, incantation, into his games with his playmates. Watch a cluster of children as they enact "Here we go gathering nuts in May"— eloquent line: it is just what they are doing!—or "Here come three Dukes a-riding," or "Fetch a pail of water," or "Sally, Sally Waters":
Sally, Sally Waters,Sitting in the sand,Rise, Sally—rise, Sally,For a young man.
Suitor presented, accepted [I have noted, by the way, that this game is more popular with girls than with boys]; wedding ceremony hastily performed—so hastily, it were more descriptive to say 'taken for granted'—within the circle; the dancers, who join hands and resume the measure, chanting
Now you are married, we wish you joy—First a girl and then a boy
—the order, I suspect, dictated by exigencies of rhyme rather than of Eugenics, as Dryden confessed that a rhyme had often helped him to a thought. And yet I don't know; for the incantation goes on to redress the balance in a way that looks scientific:
Ten years after, son and daughter,And now—
[Practically!]
And now, Miss Sally, come out of the water.
The players end by supplying the applause which, in these days of division of labour, is commonly left to the audience.
Well, there you have it all: acting, singing, dancing, choral movement—enlisted ancillary to the domestic drama: and, when you start collecting evidence of these imitative instincts blent in childhood the mass will soon amaze you and leave you no room to be surprised that many learned scholars, on the supposition that uncivilised man is a child more or less—and at least so much of child that one can argue through children's practice to his—have found the historical origin of Poetry itself in these primitive performances: 'communal poetry' as they call it. I propose to discuss with you (may be neat term) in a lecture not belonging to this 'course' the likelihood that what we call specifically 'the Ballad,' or 'Ballad Poetry,' originated thus. Here is a wider question. Did all Poetry develop out of this, historically, as a process in time and in fact? These scholars (among whom I will instance one of the most learned—Dr Gummere) hold that it did: and I may take a passage from Dr Gummere's "Beginnings of Poetry" (p. 95) to show you how they call in the practice of savage races to support their theory. The Botocudos of South America are— according to Dr Paul Ehrenreich who has observed them[1]—an ungentlemanly tribe, 'very low in the social scale.'
The Botocudos are little better than a leaderless horde, and pay scant respect to their chieftain; they live only for their immediate bodily needs, and take small thought for the morrow, still less for the past. No traditions, no legends, are abroad to tell them of their forbears. They still use gestures to express feeling and ideas; while the number of words which imitate a given sound `is extraordinarily great' An action or an object is named by imitating the sound peculiar to it; and sounds are doubled to express greater intensity…. To speak isaõ; to speak loudly or to sing, isaõ-aõ.And now for their aesthetic life, their song, dance, poetry, as described by this accurate observer. 'On festal occasions the whole horde meets by night round the camp fire for a dance. Men and women alternating … form a circle; each dancer lays his arms about the necks of his two neighbours, and the entire ring begins to turn to the right or to the left, while all the dancers stamp strongly and in rhythm the foot that is advanced, and drag after it the other foot. Now with drooping heads they press closer and closer together; now they widen the circle. Throughout the dance resounds a monotonous song to which they stamp their feet. Often one can hear nothing but a continually repeatedkalanî aha!…Again, however, short improvised songs, in which we are told the doings of the day, the reasons for rejoicing, what not, as "Good hunting," or "Now we have something to eat," or "Brandy is good."'
'As to the aesthetic value' of these South American utterances, Dr Gummere asks in a footnote, 'how far is it inferior to the sonorous commonplaces of our own verse—say "The Psalm of Life?"' I really cannot answer that question. Which do you prefer, Gentlemen?—'Life is real, life is earnest,' or 'Now we have something to eat'? I must leave you to settle it with the Food Controller.
The Professor goes on:
'Now and then, too, an individual begins a song, and is answered by the rest in chorus….They never sing without dancing, never dance without singing, and have but one word to express both song and dance.'
As the unprejudiced reader sees [Dr Gummere proceeds] this clear and admirable account confirms the doctrine of early days revived with fresh ethnological evidence in the writings of Dr Brown and of Adam Smith, that dance, poetry and song were once a single and inseparable function, and is in itself fatal to the idea of rhythmic prose, of solitary recitation, as foundations of poetry…. All poetry is communal, holding fast to the rhythm of consent as to the one sure fact.
Now I should tell you, Gentlemen, that I hold such utterances as this last—whatever you may think of the utterances of the Botocudos—to be exorbitant: that I distrust all attempts to build up (say) "Paradise Lost" historically from the yells and capers of recondite savages. 'Life is real, life is earnest' may be no better aesthetically (I myself think it a little better) than 'Now we have something to eat' 'Brandy is good' may rival Pindar's [Greek: Arioton men udor], and indeed puts what it contains of truth with more of finality, less of provocation (though Pindar at once follows up [Greek: Arioton men udor] with exquisite poetry): but you cannot—truly you cannot—exhibit the steps which lead up from 'Brandy is good' to such lines as
Thus with the yearSeasons return; but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of even or morn,Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.
I bend over the learned page pensively, and I seem to see aBotocudo Professor—though not high 'in the social scale,' theymay have such things—visiting Cambridge on the last night of theLent races and reporting of its inhabitants as follows:
They pay scant heed to their chiefs: they live only for their immediate bodily needs, and take small thought for the morrow. On festal occasions the whole horde meets by night round the camp fire for a dance. Each dancer lays his arms about the necks of his two neighbours, stamping strongly with one foot and dragging the other after it. Now with drooping heads they press closer and closer together; now they widen the circle. Often one can hear nothing but a continually repeatedkalanî aha,or again one hears short improvised songs in which we are told the doings of the day, the reasons for rejoicing, what not, as 'Good hunting,' 'Good old—'[naming a tribal God], or in former times 'Nowwe shall be but a short while,' or 'Woemma!' Now and then, too, an individual begins a song and is answered by the rest in chorus—such as
For he is an estimable personBeyond possibility of gainsaying.
The chorus twice repeats this and asseverates that they are following a custom common to the flotilla, the expeditionary force, and even their rude seats of learning.
And Dr Gummere, or somebody else, comments: 'As the unprejudiced reader will see, this clear and admirable account confirms our hypothesis that in communal celebration we have at once the origin and model of three poems, "The Faerie Queene," "Paradise Lost" and "In Memoriam," recorded as having been composed by members of this very tribe.'
Although we have been talking of instincts, we are not concerned here with the steps by which the child, or the savage, following an instinct attains towritepoetry; but, more modestly, with the instinct by which the childlikesit, and the way in which he can be best encouraged to read and improve this natural liking. Nor are we even concerned here to define Poetry. It suffices our present purpose to consider Poetry as the sort of thing the poets write.
But obviously if we find a philosopher discussing poetry without any reference to children, and independently basing it upon the very same imitative instincts which we have noted in children, we have some promise of being on the right track.
So I return to Aristotle. Aristotle (I shall in fairness say) does not anticipate Dr Gummere, to contradict or refute him; he may even be held to support him incidentally. But he sticks to business, and this is what he says ("Poetics," C. IV):
Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, and these natural causes. First the instinct to imitate is implanted in man from his childhood, and in this he differs from other animals, being the most imitative of them all. Man gets his first learning through imitation, and all men delight in seeing things imitated. This is clearly shown by experience….
To imitate, then, being instinctive in our nature, so too we have an instinct for harmony and rhythm, metre being manifestly a species of rhythm: and man, being born to these instincts and little by little improving them, out of his early improvisations created Poetry.
Combining these two instincts, with him, we arrive atharmonious imitation.Well and good. But what is it we imitate in poetry?— noble things or mean things? After considering this, putting mean things aside as unworthy, and voting for the nobler—which must at the same time be true, since without truth there can be no real nobility—Aristotle has to ask `In what way true? True to ordinary life, with its observed defeats of the right by the wrong? or true, as again instinct tells good men it should be,universally?' So he arrives at his conclusion that a true thing is not necessarily truth of fact in a world where truth in fact is so often belied or made meaningless—not the record that Alcibiades went somewhere and suffered something—but truth to the Universal, the superior demand of our conscience. In such a way only we know that "The Tempest" or "Paradise Lost" or "The Ancient Mariner" or "Prometheus Unbound" can be truer than any police report. Yet we know that they are truer in essence, and in significance, since they appeal to eternal verities—since they imitate the Universal—whereas the police report chronicles (faithfully, as in duty bound, even usefully in its way) events which may, nay must, be significant somehow but cannot at best be better to us than phenomena, broken ends and shards.
I return to the child. Clearly in obeying the instinct which I have tried to illustrate, he is searching to realise himself; and, as educators, we ought to help this effort—or, at least, not to hinder it.
Further, if we agree with Aristotle, in this searching to realise himself through imitation, what will the child most nobly and naturally imitate? He will imitate what Aristotle calls 'the Universal,' the superior demand. And does not this bring us back to consent with what I have been preaching from the start in this course—that to realise ourselves inWhat Isnot only in degree transcends mere knowledge and activity,What KnowsandWhat Does,but transcends it in kind? It is not only what the child unconsciously longs for: it is that for which (in St Paul's words) 'the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now'; craving for this (I make you the admission) as emotionally, as the heart may be thrilled, the breast surge, the eyes swell with tears, at a note drawn from the violin: feeling that somewhere, beyond reach, we have a lost sister, and she speaks to our soul.
Who, that has been a child, has not felt this surprise of beauty, the revelation, the call of it?
The sounding cataractHaunted me like a passion …
—yes, or a rainbow on the spray against a cliff; or a vista of lawns between descending woods; or a vision of fish moving in a pool under the hazel's shadow? Who has not felt the small surcharged heart labouring with desire to express it?
I preach to you that the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, of all Theology, is one, and stands on one rock:the very highest Universal Truth is something so simple that a child may understand it.This, surely, was in Jesus' mind when he said `I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.'
For as the Universe is one, so the individual human souls, that apprehend it, have no varying values intrinsically, but one equal value. They vary but in power to apprehend, and this may be more easily hindered than helped by the conceit begotten of finite knowledge. I shall even dare to quote of this Universal Truth, the words I once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley concerning divine Love: 'I see now that if God's love reach up to every star and down to every poor soul on earth, it must be vastly simple; so simple that all dwellers on Earth may be assured of it—as all who have eyes may be assured of the planet shining yonder at the end of the street—and so vast that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without considering their deserts.' I believe this to be strictly and equally true of the appeal which Poetry makes to each of us, child or man, in his degree. As Johnson said of Gray's "Elegy," it 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' It exalts us through the best of us, by telling us something new yet not strange, something that werecognise,something that we too have known, or surmised, but had never the delivering speech to tell. 'There is a pleasure in poetic pains,' says Wordsworth: but, Gentlemen, if you have never felt the travail, yet you have still to understand the bliss of deliverance.
If, then, you consent with me thus far in theory, let us now drive at practice. You have (we will say) a class of thirty or forty in front of you. We will assume that they knowa-b, ab,can at least spell out their words. You will choose a passage for them, and you will not (if you are wise) choose a passage from "Paradise Lost": your knowledge telling you that "Paradise Lost" was written, late in his life, by a greatvirtuoso,and older men (of whom I, sad to say, am one) assuring you that to taste the Milton of "Paradise Lost" a man must have passed his thirtieth year. You take the early Milton: you read out this, for instance, from "L'Allegro":
Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with theeJest and youthful Jollity,Quips, and Cranks, and wanton wiles,Nods and Becks, and wreathed SmilesSuch as hang on Hebe's cheek,And love to live in dimple sleek;Sport that wrinkled Care derides,And Laughter holding both his sides….
Go on: just read it to them. They won't know who Hebe was, but you can tell them later. The metre is taking hold of them (in my experience the metre of "L'Allegro" can be relied upon to grip children) and anyway they can see `Laughter holding both his sides': they recognise it as if they saw the picture. Go on steadily:
Come, and trip it as ye go,On the light fantastick toe;And in thy right hand lead with theeThe Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty;And, if I give thee honour due,Mirth, admit me of thy crew—
Do not pause and explain what a Nymph is, or why Liberty is the 'Mountain Nymph'! Go on reading: the Prince has always to break through briers to kiss the Sleeping Beauty awake. Go on with the incantation, calling him, persuading him, that he is the Prince and she is worth it. Go on reading—
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,To live with her, and live with thee,In unreprovéd pleasures free;To hear the lark begin his flight,And singing startle the dull night,From his watch-towre in the skies,Till the dappled dawn doth rise.
At this point—still as you read without stopping to explain, the child certainly feels that he is being led to something. He knows the lark: but the lark's 'watch-towre'—he had never thought of that: and 'the dappled dawn'-yes that's justit,now he comes to think:
Then to come, in spite of sorrow,And at my window bid good-morrow,Through the sweet-briar or the vineOr the twisted eglantine;While the cock with lively dinScatters the rear of Darkness thin;And to the stack, or the barn door,Stoutly struts his dames before:Oft listening how the hounds and hornCheerily rouse the slumbering Morn,From the side of some hoar hill,Through the high wood echoing shrill:Sometime walking, not unseen,By hedgerow elms on hillocks green,Right against the eastern gate,Where the great sun begins his state,Robed in flames and amber light,The clouds in thousand liveries dight;While the ploughman, near at hand,Whistles o'er the furrow'd land,And the milkmaid singeth blithe,And the mower whets his sithe,And every shepherd tells his taleUnder the hawthorn in the dale.
Don't stop (I say) to explain that Hebe was (for once) the legitimate daughter of Zeus and, as such, had the privilege to draw wine for the gods. Don't even stop, just yet, to explain who the gods were. Don't discourse on amber, otherwise ambergris; don't explain that 'gris' in this connexion doesn't mean 'grease'; don't trace it through the Arabic into Noah's Ark; don't prove its electrical properties by tearing up paper into little bits and attracting them with the mouth-piece of your pipe rubbed on your sleeve. Don't insist philologically that when every shepherd 'tells his tale' he is not relating an anecdote but simply keeping tally of his flock.
Just go on reading, as well as you can; and be sure that when the children get the thrill of it, for which you wait, they will be asking more questions, and pertinent ones, than you are able to answer.
This advice, to be sure, presupposes of the teacher himself some capacity of reading aloud, and reading aloud is not taught in our schools. In our Elementary Schools, in which few of the pupils contemplate being called to Holy Orders or to the Bar, it is practised, indeed, but seldom taught as an art. In our Secondary and Public Schools it is neither taught nor practised: as I know to my cost—and you, to yours, Gentlemen, on whom I have had to practise.
But let the teacher take courage. First let him read a passage 'at the long breath'—as the French say—aloud, and persuasively as he can. Now and then he may pause to indicate some particular beauty, repeating the line before he proceeds. But he should be sparing of these interruptions. When Laughter, for example, is already 'holding both his sides' it cannot be less than officious, a work of supererogation, to stop and hold them for him; and he who obeys the counsel of perfection will read straight to the end and then recur to particular beauties. Next let him put up a child to continue with the tale, and another and another, just as in a construing class. While the boy is reading, the teacher shouldneverinterrupt: he should wait, and return afterwards upon a line that has been slurred or wrongly emphasised. When the children have done reading he should invite questions on any point they have found puzzling: it is with the operation of poetry ontheirminds that his main business lies. Lastly, he may run back over significant points they have missed.
'And is that all the method?'-Yes, that is all the method. 'So simple as that?'-Yes, even so simple as that, and (I claim) even so wise, seeing that it just lets the author—Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton or Coleridge—have his own way with the young plant—just lets them drop 'like the gentle rain from heaven,' and soak in.
The moving Moon went up the sky,And no where did abide:Softly she was going up,And a star or two beside.
Do you really want to chat aboutthat? Cannot you trust it?
The stars were dim, and thick the night,The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;From the sails the dew did drip—Till clomb above the eastern barThe hornéd Moon, with one bright starWithin the nether tip.
Mustyou tell them that for the Moon to hold a star anywhere within her circumference is an astronomical impossibility? Very well, then; tell it. But tell it afterwards, and put it away quietly. For the quality of Poetry is not strained. Let the rain soak; then use your hoe, and gently; and still trust Nature; by which, I again repeat to you, all spirit attracts all spirit as inevitably as all matter attracts all matter.
'Strained.' I am glad that memory flew just here to the word of Portia's: for it carries me on to a wise page of Dr Corson's, and a passage in which, protesting against the philologers who cram our children's handbooks with irrelevant information that but obscures what Chaucer or Shakespearemean,he breaks out in Chaucer's own words:
Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde,And turnen substaunce into accident!
(Yes, and make the accident the substance!)—as he insists that the true subject of literary study is the author's meaning; and the true method a surrender of the mind to that meaning, with what Wordsworth calls 'a wise passiveness':
The eye—it cannot choose but see;We cannot bid the ear be still;Our bodies feel, where'er they be,Against or with our will.
Nor less I deem that there are PowersWhich of themselves our minds impress;That we can feed this mind of oursIn a wise passiveness.
Think you, 'mid all this mighty sumOf things for ever speaking,That nothing of itself will come,But we must still be seeking?
I have been talking to-day about children; and find that most of the while I have been thinking, if but subconsciously, of poor children. Now, at the end, you may ask 'Why, lecturing here at Cambridge, is he preoccupied with poor children who leave school at fourteen and under, and thereafter read no poetry?'…Oh, yes! I know all about these children and the hopeless, wicked waste; these with a common living-room to read in, a father tired after his day's work, and (for parental encouragement) just the two words 'Get out!' A Scots domine writes in his log:
I have discovered a girl with a sense of humour. I asked my qualifying class to draw a graph of the attendance at a village kirk. 'And you must explain away any rise or fall,' I said.
Margaret Steel had a huge drop one Sunday, and her explanation was 'Special Collection for Missions.' Next Sunday the Congregation was abnormally large: Margaret wrote 'Change of Minister.'… Poor Margaret! When she is fourteen, she will go out into the fields, and in three years she will be an ignorant country bumpkin.
And again:
Robert Campbell (a favourite pupil) left the school to-day. He had reached the age-limit…. Truly it is like death: I stand by a new made grave, and I have no hope of a resurrection. Robert is dead.
Precisely because I have lived on close terms with this, and the wicked waste of it, I appeal to you who are so much more fortunate than this Robert or this Margaret and will have far more to say in the world, to think of them—how many they are. I am not sentimentalising. When an Elementary Schoolmaster spreads himself and tells me he looks upon every child entering his school as a potential Lord Chancellor, I answer that, as I expect, so I should hope, to die before seeing the world a Woolsack. Jack cannot ordinarily be as good as his master; if he were, he would be a great deal better. You have given Robert a vote, however, and soon you will have to give it to Margaret. Can you not give them also, in their short years at school, something to sustain their souls in the long Valley of Humiliation?
Do you remember this passage in "The Pilgrim's Progress"—as the pilgrims passed down that valley?
Now as they were going along and talking, they espied aBoy feeding his Father's Sheep. The Boy was in very meanCloaths, but of a very fresh and well-favouredCountenance, and as he sate by himself he Sung. Hark, saidMr Greatheart, to what the Shepherd's Boy saith.
Well, it was a very pretty song, about Contentment.
He that is down need fear no fallHe that is low, no Pride:He that is humble ever shallHave God to be his Guide.
But I care less for its subject than for the song. Though life condemn him to live it through in the Valley of Humiliation, I want to hear the Shepherd Boy singing.
[Footnote 1: The reference given isZeitschr. f. Ethnologie,XIX. 30 ff.]
You, Gentlemen, who so far have followed with patience this course of lectures, advertised, maybe too ambitiously, as 'On the Art of Reading,' will recall to your memory, when I challenge it across the intervals of Vacation, that three propositions have been pretty steadily held before you.
Thefirst: (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, hemustmake selection. There is no other way.
Thesecond: 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 themabsolutely,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.
Mythirdproposition (perhaps more discutable) has been that, the human soul's activities being separated, so far as we can separate them, intoWhat Does, What Knows, What Is—tobesuch-and-such a man ranks higher than eitherknowingordoingthis, 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 tobecan 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—tobe—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 Fowls," 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'srangein 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 to tend 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,
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers?
'Yes,' I hear you ingeminate; 'but what about Examinations? We thank you, sirs, for thus relieving and guiding us: we acknowledge your excellent intentions. But in practice you hang up a bachelor's gown and hood on a pole, and right under and just in front of it you set the examination-barrier. For this in practice we run during three years or so, and to this all the time you are exhorting, directing us—whether you mean it or not, though we suspect that you cannot help yourselves.' Yes; and, as labouring swimmers will turn their eyes even to a little boat in the offing, I hear you pant 'This man at all events—always so insistent that good literature teachesWhat Israther thanWhat Knows—will bring word that we may float on our backs, bathe, enjoy these waters and be refreshed, instead of striving through them competitive for a goal. Hemustcondemn literary examinations, nine-tenths of which treat Literature as matter of Knowledge merely.'
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 aspessimum augurium,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 here, 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 theprocess.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 thejus docendi,'right to teach'—consisted of two parts, the Private Examination and the Public (conventus):
The private Examination was the real test of competence, the so-called public Examination being in practice a mere ceremony. Before admission to each of these tests the candidate was presented by the Consiliarius of his Nation to the Rector for permission to enter it, and swore that he had complied with all the statutable conditions, that he would give no more than the statutable fees or entertainments to the Rector himself, the Doctor, or his fellow-students, and that he would obey the Rector. Within a period of eight days before the Examination the candidate was presented by 'his own' Doctor or by some other Doctor or by two Doctors to the Archdeacon, the presenting Doctor being required to have satisfied himself by private examination of his presentee's fitness. Early on the morning of the Examination, after attending a Mass of the Holy Ghost, the candidate appeared before the assembled College and was assigned by one of the Doctors present two passages (puncta) in the Civil or Canon Law as the case might be. He then retired to his house to study the passages, in doing which it would appear that he had the assistance of the presenting Doctor. Later in the day the Doctors were summoned to the Cathedral, or some other public building, by the Archdeacon, who presided over but took no active part in the ensuing examination. The candidate was then introduced to the Archdeacon and Doctors by the presenting Doctor or Promotor as he was styled. The Prior of the College then administered a number of oaths in which the candidate promised respect to that body and solemnly renounced all the rights of which the College had succeeded in robbing all Doctors of other Colleges not included in its ranks. The candidate then gave a lecture or exposition of the two prepared passages: after which he was examined upon them by two of the Doctors appointed by the College. Other Doctors might ask supplementary questions of Law (which they were required to swear that they had not previously communicated to the candidate) arising more indirectly out of the passages selected, or might suggest objections to the answers. With a tender regard for the feelings of their comrades at this 'rigorous and tremendous Examination' (as they style it) the Statutes required the Examiner to treat the examinee ashis own son.
But, knowing what we do of parental discipline in the MiddleAges, we need not take this to enjoin a weak excess of leniency.
The Examination concluded, the votes of the Doctors present were taken by ballot and the candidate's fate determined by the majority, the decision being announced by the Archdeacon.
(2) Let us pass to the great and famous University of Paris. At Paris
In 1275, if not earlier, a preliminary test (or 'Responsions') was instituted to ascertain the fitness of those who wanted to take part in the public performance. At these 'Responsions' which took place in the December before the Lent in which the candidate was to determine, he had to dispute in Grammar and Logic with a Master. If this test was passed in a satisfactory manner, the candidate was admitted to theExamen Baccalariandorum,Examination for the Baccalaureate, which was conducted by a board of Examiners appointed by each Nation for its own candidates. The duty of the Examiners was twofold, firstly to ascertain by inspecting theschedulesgiven by his Masters that the candidate had completed the necessary residence and attended Lectures in the prescribed subjects, and secondly to examine him in the contents of his books. If he passed this Examination, he was admitted to determine.
Determination was a great day in the student's University life. It retained much of its primitive character of a student's festivity. It was not, it would seem, till the middle of the fifteenth century that the student's Master was required to be officially present at it. The Speech-day of a Public School if combined with considerably more than the license of the Oxford Encaenia or degree day here in May week would perhaps be the nearest modern equivalent of these medieval exhibitions of rising talent. Every effort was made to attract to the Schools as large an audience as possible, not merely of Masters or fellow-students, but if possible of ecclesiastical dignitaries and other distinguished persons. The friends of a Determiner who was not successful in drawing a more distinguished audience, would run out into the streets and forcibly drag chance passers-by into the School. Wine was provided at the Determiner's expense in the Schools: and the day ended in a feast [given in imitation of the Master's Inception-banquets], even if dancing or torch-light processions were forborne in deference to authority.