ABC of Reading Read online

  And make the stones to understand.

  …..

  The student will note that up to now the writers exhibited are all intent on what they are saying, they are all conscious of having something to tell the reader, something he does not already know, and their main effort is spent in TELLING him.

  The next phase appears in authors who are gradually more and more concerned with the way they are saying it.

  . . . . .

  Similar change in painting: Simone Memmi, the painters of the Quattrocento, intent on their MAIN subject, Virgin sitting on bed with child, etc., unity in picture. Renaissance decadence: painters intent on painting a bit of drapery, this or that bit of a picture, or chiaroscuro or what not.

  Contrast

  Chaucer

  the European. Shakespeare

  the Englishman.

  FOUR PERIODS

  I. When England was part of Europe.

  II. When England was England, containing her own best

  writers, her own most intelligent men.

  III. The period when England no longer had room for, or

  welcomed her best writers.

  Landor in Italy.

  Beddoes in Germany.

  Byron, Keats, Shelley in Italy.

  Browning in Italy, Tennyson the official

  literature of England.

  IV. The period of exotic injection.

  As distinct from the classic tradition, Latin had belonged to all Europe. There are various flows of Latinization in English, but the ‘injection’ is something different.

  Wordsworth and Shelley were both conscious of importing Italian canzone forms.

  Swinburne: Greek injection.

  Browning, in a different way, uses Italian subject matter. Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat (Persian).

  Wm. Morris : Norse sagas, and old French matter.

  Rossetti: Italian poets. Pre-Raphaelite mediaevalism.

  Victorian minor fiddling with slighter French forms.

  The ‘Celtic’: i.e. French symboliste tendencies mixed with subject matter first from Celtic myth, then from modern Ireland.

  The American colonization: Henry James (Whistler, W. H. Hudson), etc.

  EXHIBIT MARK ALEXANDER BOYD 1563-1601

  Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin

  Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie

  Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree

  Or til a reed ourblawin with the wind,

  Two gods guides me, the ane of them is blin,

  Yea, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie,

  The next a wife ingenrit of the sea

  And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

  Unhappy is the man for evermair

  That tills the sand and sawis in the air,

  But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,

  That feidis in his heart a mad desire

  And follows on a woman throw the fire

  Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.

  * * *

  Sonnet properly divided in octave and sestet. There is in Perugia a painting of Christ emerging from the tomb; one sees what Perugino was trying to do, and how he was endeavouring to improve on his predecessors. These works of perfect ripeness often have nothing wrong in themselves, and yet serve as points from which we can measure a decadence.

  Boyd is ‘saying it in a beautiful way’.

  The apple is excellent for a few days or a week before it is ripe, then it is ripe; it is still excellent for a few days after it has passed the point of maturity.

  I suppose this is the most beautiful sonnet in the language, at any rate it has one nomination.

  EXHIBIT CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 1564-93

  Now on the sea from her olde loue comes shee

  That drawes the day from heaven’s cold axle-tree,

  Aurora whither slidest thou down againe,

  And brydes from Memnon yeerly shall be slaine.

  Now in her tender arms I sweetlie bide,

  If ever, now well lies she by my side,

  The ayre is colde and sleep is sweetest now

  And byrdes send foorth shrill notes from every bow.

  Whither runst thou, that men and women loue not?

  Holde in thy rosie horses that they moue not!

  Ere thou rise, stars teach seamen where to saile

  But when thou comest, they of their courses faile.

  Poore trauilers though tired rise at thy sight,

  The painful1 Hinde by thee to fild is sent,

  Slow oxen early in the yoke are pent,

  Thou cousenest boys of sleep and dost betray them

  To Pedants that with cruel lashes pay them.

  1 Fr. cf. homme de peine, one who must work

  * * *

  The apex, period of maximum power in English versification, the vigour full and unspent, the full effect of study of Latin metre. The Elizabethan age was concerned with this problem. The men who tried to fit English to rules they found in Latin grammarians have been largely forgotten, but the men who filled their minds with the feel of the Latin have left us the deathless criteria.

  Marlowe’s version of Ovid’s Amores, printed in HOLLAND, Puritan pest already beginning.

  The lay reader can use these exhibits as signposts for further reading. Where the book is used for class work, the teacher will naturally make his own additions and amplifications from easily obtainable texts, or pick the sound work from the general welter of mediocre performance exhibited in the current anthologies where the best is often obscured. I take it that texts of Shakespeare, Marlowe, FitzGerald’s Omar are so easily obtainable as to make it needless to print selections from them in this brief book, and that the traditional miscellanies copied one from another with no critical plan, small honesty, and almost no personal estimate, or re-examination of their matter, contain fair testimony as to the value of many writers of short poems, ‘lyrics’, etc., and that this section entitled exhibits serves, you might say, to trace the course of English poesy, and to indicate in a general way the ‘development’ or at any rate the transmutation of style in the writing of verse.

  I have pointed out in a longer essay, that one could almost trace the changes in British manner without wider reading than the series of attempts to give an English version of Horace.

  JOHN DONNE 1573-1631

  THE ECSTASY

  Where like a pillow on a bed

  A pregnant bank swell’d up to rest

  The violet’s reclining head

  Sat we two, one another’s best.

  Our hands were firmly cémented

  By a fast balm which thence did spring,

  Our eye-beams twisted and did thread

  Our eyes upon one double string

  So to engraft our hands, as yet

  Was all the means to make us one,

  And pictures in our eyes to get

  Was all our propagation.

  As twixt two equal armies Fate

  Suspends uncertain victory,

  Our souls, which to advance their state

  Were gone out, hung twixt her and me.

  And whilst our souls negotiate there,

  We like sepulchral statues lay.

  All day the same our postures were

  And we said nothing all the day.

  If any, so by love refined

  That he soul’s language understood

  And by good love were grown all mind,

  Within convenient distance stood,

  He, though he knew not which soul spake

  (Because both meant, both spoke the same),

  Might thence a new concoction1 take

  And part far purer than he came.

  This ecstasy doth unperplex,

  We said, and tell us what we love,

  We see by this it was not sex

  We see, we saw not what did move,

  But as all several souls contain

  Mixture of things they know not what,

  Love these mixed souls doth mix again
r />   And make both one, each this and that.

  A single violet transplant,

  The strength, the colour and the size,

  All, which before was poor and scant,

  Redoubles still and multiplies,

  When love with one another so

  Interinanimates two souls

  That abler soul which thence doth flow

  Defects of loneliness controls,

  We then, who are this new soul, know

  Of what we are composed and made,

  For th’ anatomies of which we grow

  Are souls whom no change can invade.

  1 Technical alchemical term

  But O alas, so long, so far

  Our bodies why do we forbear?

  They are ours though they’re not we. We are

  Th’ intelligences, they the spheres.

  We owe them thanks because they thus

  Did us to us at first convey;

  Yielded their forces to us

  Nor are dross to us, but allay.1

  On man heaven’s influence works not so

  But that it first imprints the air,

  So soul into soul may flow

  Though it to body first repair

  As our blood labours to beget

  Spirits as like souls as it can

  Because such fingers need to knit

  That subtle knot which makes us man

  So must pure lovers’ souls descend

  To affections and to faculties

  Which sense may reach and apprehend

  Else a great prince in prison lies.

  To our bodies turn we then that so

  Weak men on love reveal’d may look,

  Loves mysteries in souls do grow

  But yet the body is his book

  1alloy, i.e. that makes metal fit for a given purpose

  And if some lover such as we

  Have heard this dialogue of one,

  Let him still mark us, he shall see

  Small change when we’re to bodies1 gone.

  1 probably technical for atoms.

  * * *

  Platonism believed. The decadence of trying to make pretty speeches and of hunting for something to say, temporarily checked. Absolute belief in the existence of an extra-corporeal soul, and its incarnation, Donne stating a thesis in precise and even technical terms. Trivial half-wits always looking for the irrelevant, boggle over Donne’s language. You have here a clear statement, worthy to set beside Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi Prega’ for its precision, less interesting metrically, but certainly not less interesting in content.

  It would take a bile specialist to discover why the Oxford Book of Verse includes the first five of the strophes and then truncates the poem with no indication that anything has been omitted.

  Donne’s work is uneven, there is a great deal of it, but he is the one English metaphysical poet who towers above all the rest. This doesn’t mean there weren’t other learned and convinced Platonists who have left beautiful poems. Neither does it mean that Donne at his lowest potential doesn’t march coterminous with his dallying contemporaries.

  In Donne’s best work we ‘find again’ a real author saying something he means and not simply ‘hunting for sentiments that will fit his vocabulary’.

  It might be well to emphasize the difference between an expert and inexpert metaphysician. For centuries a series of men thought very thoroughly and intently about certain problems which we find unsusceptible to laboratory proof and experiment. The results of such thinking can be known and compared, gross follies and self-contradiction can be eliminated. The difference between a metaphysical treatise that could satisfy my late friend, the Father José Maria de Elizondo, and contemporary religious works whose authors cite Mr. Wells and Mr. Balfour, is very considerable.

  Equations of psychology worked out by knowers of Avicenna may not be wholly convincing, but a number of such equations exist, and cannot be disproved by experience, even though belief and predilection must depend on the introspective analysis of highly sensitized persons.

  Between 1250 and the Renaissance, people did manage to communicate with each other in respect to such perceptions and such modalities of feeling and perception.

  EXHIBIT

  ROBT. HERRICK 1591-1674

  Violets

  Welcome, maids of honour,

  You do bring

  In the Spring

  And wait upon her.

  She has virgins many,

  Fresh and fair;

  Yet you are

  More sweet than any.

  You’re the maiden posies

  And so graced

  To be placed

  ’Fore damask roses.

  By comparison with troubadours the rhyming is infantile. That does not mean that a maximum of singability is unattained. The number of rhymes that can be used to advantage in one language is NOT the numerical measure for any other.

  In an inflected language like Latin there is such a frequency of -um-arum,-orum and -abat that identical sounds would be intolerable if they were stuck into prominence, or repeated at regular instead of irregular intervals.

  Yet, though thus respected,

  By-and-by

  Ye do die,

  Poor girls, neglected. Rhyming can be used to zone sounds, as stones are heaped into walls in mountain ploughland.

  Verses of probably no literary value, but illustrating a kind of rhythm, a melodic innovation that you will not find in Chaucer, though there is ample precedence in Provence.

  In the case of the madrigal writers the words were not published apart from the music in their own day, and one supposes that only a long-eared, furry-eared epoch would have thought of printing them apart from their tunes as has been done in our time.

  We observe that William Young’s music has just been edited by Dr. Whittaker and that John Jenkins was still in MSS. on January 1, 1934.

  Herrick, as you observe, lived to a ripe old age. It is unlikely that the above brief mouthful of melody was an early effort.

  EXERCISE

  I Let the student try to decide whether there are 100 good poems in whatever general anthology he possesses; or fifty, or thirty.

  II How many of the poems he first thinks of will be poems having one good line, or two or three lines that stick in the memory, but which he will have great difficulty in reading to the end, or from which he can remember nothing save the pleasing line?

  III How often will he remember a line and be utterly unable to remember the subject of the poem as a whole?

  IV Do the following poems:

  The early Alisoun, Walsinghame, Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’, Peele’s ‘Batsabe sings’, Henry VIII’s ‘Pastime and good company’, contain any element not represented in the present set of ‘exhibits’.

  V Let the student hunt for a dozen poems that are different from any of the exhibits, or that introduce some new component, or enlarge his conception of poetry, by bringing in some kind of matter, or mode of expression not yet touched on.

  MY LORD ROCHESTER 1647 (or 48)-80

  Were I (who to my cost already am

  One of those strange prodigious Creatures, Man)

  A Spirit, free to choose for my own share,

  What sort of Flesh and Blood I pleas’d to wear,

  I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear,

  Or anything but that vain Animal,

  Who is so proud of being Rational.

  * * *

  The modest editor of the Tonson, 1696, edition contents himself with a six-page preface, and for the sake of comparison gives Boileau’s fourteen lines,

  A Monsieur M …..

  Docteur de SORB;

  Oldham’s Engish version which runs to seventeen, and the above by Rochester with the observation that: ‘It might vex a patient Reader, shou’d I go about very minutely to shew the difference here betwixt these two Authors, tis sufficient to set them together.’

  I cite this preface to show that intell
igent criticism is not my personal invention. God’s apes like B. d S., X.Z.Q.K., etc., hadn’t the excuse of there not having been a decent English criticism or enlightened modes of estimation for them to learn from. When the style of a period is good, it will probably be possible to discover that good writers had an educated periphery capable of knowing eagle from buzzard.

  JOHN EARL OF ROCHESTER 1648-80

  in 1660 aged 12

  To His Sacred MAJESTY On His Restoration.

  Vertues triumphant Shrine! who do’st engage

  At once three Kingdoms in a Pilgrimage;

  Which in extatic Duty strive to come

  Out of themselves, as well as from their home:

  Whilst England grows one Camp, and London is

  It self the Nation, not Metropolis;

  And Loyal Kent renews her Arts agen,

  Fencing her ways with moving Groves of Men;

  Forgive this distant Homage, which does meet

  Your blest approach on sedentary feet:

  And though my Youth, not patient yet to bear

  The weight of Arms, denies me to appear

  In steel before you, yet, Great SIR, approve