Why read?

McMaster, Juliet

Traditional defences of literary culture, like Sidney's, Shelley's, and Arnold's, are deployed against the zealotries of puritanism and commercial utilitarianism. The existence of such a conference as this, suggesting that literacy is yet again under pressure, stems from a somewhat different cause of concern. Utilitarian rigour, following the outburst of student hedonism in the nineteen-sixties--one might say in revenge for it--certainly exerts a strong pressure on learning of all sorts, one which we see clearly enough in the desire of our own province to relate learning to manpower, job-getting, and accounting. In part such an attitude bespeaks a commendable conviction that people should work for a living and have the equipment to do so; in part it presents the familiar face of Babbitry, the evaluation of life and action according to the ideals, if one can call them that, of the Chamber of Commerce. Dickens typified this view of life in a great series of edifying characters: Ebeneezer Scrooge, Murdstone, Bounderby, Merdle, and Grandfather Smallweed, "whose mind holds, as well as it ever held, the first four rules of arithmetic, and a certain small collection of the hardest facts. In respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly" (Bleak House 287). Such grim philosophers are always with us, but in defending literacy we now find ourselves not simply confronting the familiar adversaries, Mammon and Dr Bowdler, nor the more general spirit that H. L. Mencken described as the "Anglo-Saxon zeal for ugliness," but a view that quality in learning and the power to discriminate are "elitist" The issue is not whether the reading that students do will corrupt them, but whether they should read anything other than what they please, what seems momentarily "relevant"--indeed, whether it is necessary for anyone to read much at all when by turning on a tv set he can become another global village idiot (see Durrant 98).

One can see behind such slackness a debased and muzzy notion of democracy that tells us we can develop the student's unique and individual self without exposing him to what is first rate in conception and articulation, that we can have a nation that thinks clearly without special training in the use of language and ideas, that we can have a sense of national identity without a knowledge of the culture from which we grow, that we can realize our full humanity without bothering about the greatest expressions of the human spirit, in short, that we can get along well enough spinning the thread of our unique and individual selves, personally, nationally, or humanly, out of a vacuum. Democracy has to do with making choices, and the choice we are here confronted with is, as Matthew Arnold put it, between "the best which has been thought and said in the world" and "our natural taste for the bathos" (x 56; v 156). Arnold sees this choice as fundamental to the calibre of any democratic system of education, determining the difference between a life clogged by inertia and one of energy, judgment, and creativity. He would have agreed with Burke that while "the effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints" (7).

The benefits of literary culture are not obscure: they are intellectual, moral, and aesthetic, and, acknowledging in advance that this is a convenient rather than tidy division, I shall talk about them in that order. The first two usually get most emphasis. Arnold puts their case simply and well in saying that the aim of culture is "to know ourselves and the world" (x 56). The aesthetic pleasure of literature, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, often gets less attention, though Wordsworth speaks of the creation of delight in poetry as "homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves" (794). The pleasure deserves attention because, in a desire to defend the value of literature, even very good critics are apt to treat it as religion, social studies, political commentary, or psychological analysis rather than as art. The boundaries, of course, are far from firm. As Arnold says, "Literature is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed in a book. Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia are thus literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature" ("Literature and Science" 58). To deal with literary culture, therefore, is to deal with two things: the whole written record of man's experience, and also a special mode of that experience in which object and subject coalesce: the mode of art--poetry, drama, the novel.

To start, then, with the intellectual, it has been said that "literature is to man in some sort what autobiography is to the individual; it is his Life and Remains" (Newman 173). Satisfaction of curiosity about that human experience extended in time and space is a leading motive and benefit of literary study, the satisfaction of a scientific desire to see things as they really are and, by knowing others, to know ourselves. Gibbon stresses the immense advantage of the literate person over the illiterate in this respect: "The former," he says, "by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same and even greater difference will be found between nations than between individuals" (1218). In a more industrial age, Carlyle, who likewise saw biography and history as magical talismans bringing the remote and separate into a vibrant communal life, makes the same point in speaking of the human tragedy of illiteracy:

   Who would suppose, [he says] that Education were a thing which had
   to be advocated on the ground of local expediency, or indeed on any
   ground? As if it stood not on the basis of everlasting duty, as a
   prime necessity of man. It is a thing that should need no
   advocating; much as it does actually need. To impart the gift of
   thinking to those who cannot think, and yet who could in that case
   think: this, one would imagine, was the first function a government
   had to set about discharging ....For six thousand years the sons of
   Adam, in sleepless effort, have been devising, doing, discovering;
   in mysterious, infinite, indissoluble communion, warring, a little
   band of brothers, against a black empire of Necessity and Night;
   they have accomplished such a conquest and conquests: and to [the
   illiterate] man it is all as if it had not been ....He passes by on
   the other side: and that great Spiritual Kingdom, the toilworn
   conquest of his own brothers, all that his brothers have conquered,
   is a thing nonexistent for him. An invisible empire; he knows it
   not, suspects it not. he knows not that such an empire is his,
   that such an empire is at all.. Heavier wrong is not done under the
   sun. (228-29)

The study of literature expands our unique and personal lives by making our own the great variety of human responses to the cosmos in that never-ending personal and general struggle of free will against necessity. The consequence of such an expansion of consciousness is liberation, liberation from the many insularities, spiritual, social, racial, or political, that compete with sullen malice to claim and narrow us, what Orwell calls "the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls" (60). The study is one which not only expands and liberates us but one which, in satisfying our intellectual curiosity, provides a profound pleasure, for, as that ancient elitist Aristotle observed, "to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general" (21). Expansion of our personal awareness by the assimilation of other minds remote in time and place, liberation, and the pleasure of knowledge itself--these, though thoroughly familiar, are no mean advantages.

In addition to the general intellectual satisfaction of seeing the world as others have seen it, and thus releasing us from our insularities of thought and feeling, the study of literature also involves specific knowledge of the mediums in which these visions are preserved, not only particular genres and manners of expression, but the essential building blocks of the imagination. To the uneducated, literature is a vast and miscellaneous collection of random stories, exasperating to the scientific spirit which likes to educe principles, patterns, and systems from the general mess of experience. One of the more interesting results of the modern study of literature, combining the insights of several different disciplines, is a deeper understanding of the basic mental patterns evident in literature as a whole. The writing of literature is a symbolic activity manifesting certain fundamental oft-repeated designs, myths, and components of myths, structures that psychiatrists find in the dreams of the uneducated, that anthropologists find in the folklore of primitive Amazonian tribes, that classicists find in ancient mythology, and that critics find in highly sophisticated works of literary art. The anthropologist Levi-Strauss argues that man's capacity for linguistic symbolism is the base upon which all culture is built and that the universal structures of myth suffusing ritual and literature arise from certain universal characteristics of the human brain. In studying what man does with mythology, therefore, one is studying something essential about the nature of the mind as well as of literature. Perhaps this is a rather advanced phase of the study of literature, but as with other advanced studies, the orderly acquisition of preliminaries, of ordinary groundwork, saves time; gives point to effort and makes for the satisfaction of coherence, the sense that what one has learned is helping one to go forward. The preliminary knowledge most useful here, in the imagination's basic structures, is that of Greek mythology and the Bible, neither remarkably present to the consciousness of beginners any more.

The common element in literature and the human activities about which it speaks is design. Desire for pattern, both an intellectual and aesthetic craving, seems born in us. As Albert Camus writes:

   There is not one human being who, above a certain elementary level
   of consciousness, does not exhaust himself in trying to find
   formulas or attitudes that will give his existence the unity it
   lacks .... This passion which lifts the mind above the commonplaces
   of a dispersed world, from which it nevertheless cannot free
   itself, is the passion for unity. Religion or crime, every human
   endeavour in fact, finally obeys this unreasonable desire and
   claims to give life a form it does not have. The same impulse,
   which can lead to the adoration of the heavens or the destruction
   of man, also leads to creative literature, which derives its
   serious content from this source. (262)

Imaginative designs, in short, crystallize themselves not only in literature but in life. Though we are accustomed to thinking of man's social life as real and literary designs as imaginary, the distinction is a very slippery one. If, as Shelley asserted, poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" (435), legislators are also, more or less consciously, unacknowledged poets, fleshing out the detail of imaginative conceits (I am not, of course, denying that there are good poets and bad), for human society, as both Edmund Burke and T. H. Huxley observe, is an artifice. Huxley sees society as an imposition of human order on the moral chaos and indifference of nature (see Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics"). Burke's more reverent view is that social strata and responsibilities, political arrangements, and the economic layout of society articulate the design inherent in a great chain of being, "linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world" (Reflections 93). The imaginative metaphor, in this case the great chain, once accepted and acted upon, becomes inextricably mixed with social reality. The great chain, however, may seem quaint. A more immediate example of metaphorical design determining governmental policy and views of social responsibility might be that of "nature red in tooth and claw," the pattern implied in the struggle for survival and survival of the fittest, familiar notions articulated gradually from Malthusian population theory, laissez-faire economics, and, forming a keystone, Darwin's biology of natural selection. Much of this particular design is still with us, especially in North America, a giant poetic image or myth informing the everyday detail of our lives. John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, in his book The Affluent Society, gives an amusing account of such mythologizing in action. He says:

As John D. Rockefeller explained to a fortunate Sunday School class: "The growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest ....The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it."

As with the rose, so with the Standard Oil Company: "This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God." This aligned God and the American Beauty rose with railroad rebates, exclusive control of pipelines, systematic price discrimination, and some other remarkably aggressive business practices. (Galbraith 60)

In mid-twentieth century, a perversion of the same Darwinian myth supports the superman racial theories of Nazi Germany and their obscene working out. Interplay between the raw material of life and the imaginative designs intermingled with it is clearly a matter of the first importance. As Professor Frye says, "a great work of literature is also a place in which the whole cultural history of the nation that produced it comes into focus ... you can get from [Robinson Crusoe] a kind of detached vision of the British Empire, imposing its own pattern wherever it goes, catching its man Friday and trying to turn him into an eighteenth-century Nonconformist, never dreaming of 'going native,' that history alone would hardly give" (52). For the citizen, to be conscious of the underlying myths and imaginative patterns that operate in our lives rather than being unconsciously controlled by them is an obvious asset. To have many such citizens is an asset to a country.

Though man's capacity for imaginative design is as much a part of his everyday life as it is of literature, literature gives us a splendid laboratory for studying the interrelationship. As Frye says in his excellent little book The Educated Imagination, "imagination is what our whole social life is really based on," and, he continues, "The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life ... is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in" (57, 60). In literature imagination achieves this end in two ways: by constructing conceptions of the world as the heart desires it and, conversely, conceptions of the world as what the spirit rejects. The process is a constant struggle of free will with necessity. Man is par excellence the creature who can triumph over what Carlyle called "the great black empire of Necessity and Night," because he is not simply at the mercy of nature--he can manipulate it, turn one natural force against another, alter, design, and control to change things from how they are to how they might be. "Art," says Burke, "art is man's nature" (An Appeal 105). Imaginative structures in literature provide models for the social imagination to work towards or away from. The function is clearest, of course, in utopias--whether positive and idyllic, like Morris's News from Nowhere, or horrific, like Orwell's 1984, a vision of an urban, controlled, automatic, antisexual society of total government. Designs of the literary imagination serve us by correcting and criticizing morbid designs of the social imagination. "We live," says Frye, "in both a social and a cultural environment, and only the cultural environment, the world we study in the arts and sciences, can provide the kind of standards and values we need if we're to do anything better than adjust" (The Educated Imagination 66).

Literature then, in addition to the intellectual excitement it provides in the inherent structures and textures of individual works, bestows an intellectual benefit in satisfying curiosity about other minds and cultures and about our own. And, because of the intricate criss-crossing of life and literature, it encourages a critical assessment of our personal and social values. It helps us, as Arnold said, "to know ourselves and the world."

The social context of literature, however, naturally brings us to the second benefit of literary culture, the moral. Literature's moral claims are perhaps the most ancient and most constant--one might almost say, the most flagrant. Poets have traditionally spoken well of themselves as possessed intermediaries between the human and divine, as priests. Such pretension makes us hesitate. That good is going to be done to us arouses a natural suspicion and uneasiness in our postlapsarian breasts, a suspicion that the golden world the poets sing may give our brazen stomachs indigestion. The poet, says Sidney, "cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. And, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue: even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste" (92). Asking, "Have you read any good books lately," can, on this view, be tantamount to inquiring, "Have you taken your medicine?" We sense a suggestion of effort and discomfort. Well, dealing with the skill and range of a great work may indeed tax us, stretch our comprehension to breaking point, exercise us to exhaustion, challenge our fashionable notions, and leave us, as Aristotle so medicinally put it, purged. So much the better--growth doesn't come of staying within the comfortable bounds of ease and popular relevance, but from effort. Perhaps, in our smugger moments, we harbour in our heads a model of the masterpiece that is totally available--brilliant in thought but perfectly tuned to our unique intellects, delightful in execution but in perfect harmony with our aesthetic sense, profound in vision but within our depth--not an elitist bone in its body. But in fact great works are often very troublesome--they accept us on their terms, not ours, and demand that we stretch to fit them. It has been argued that though we think we read them, with exasperation at their longueurs and crotchets, masterpieces actually read us. (1) On first acquaintance they may find us tiresome, lacking in depth, skimpy in knowledge, slow on the uptake, short-winded, dull as ditchwater, and only later, when we have acquired some wisdom and polish, will they consent to favour us with their intimacy. Any curriculum worth its salt should contain a fair number of such thorny acquaintances. Supposing, for the moment, we have a course of reading that demands such effort from us, we run into another problem, the student's all too ready conviction that books--good books--must indeed have a moral, that lurking about them somewhere is a convenient formula, a quintessential paraphrase, in a very literal sense a password to repeat on challenge by an examiner. Our very readiness to find moral depth in great works can lead to moralizing rather than moral perception, extraction of messages rather than involvement in art. On the principle of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, that "Everything's got a moral if you can only find it," many a class discussion must go like the one between Alice and the Duchess on the subject of mustard:

"It's a mineral, I think," said Alice.

"Of course it is," said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything that Alice said: "there's a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that is--'the more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.'"

"Oh, I know!" exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark. "It's a vegetable. It doesn't look like one, but it is."

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is--'Be what you would seem to be'--or, if you'd like it put more simply--'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'"

"I think I should understand that better," Alice said very politely, "if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it."

"That's nothing to what I could say if I chose," the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone. (71-72)

One imagines the Duchess going to work on Shakespeare, Othello say: "And the moral of that is--'Don't lose track of your handkerchiefs.'" There are, no doubt, works of happy simplicity, but on the whole, the greater the work the less likely it is to accommodate itself to a simple formula. In its ethical dimension, literature is a confrontation with the cosmos, and "What," says T. H. Huxley, "is a more common motive of the ancient tragedy in fact, than the unfathomable injustice of the nature of things" ("Evolution and Ethics" 59). Unfathomable. The Duchess within us resists such a state of affairs and urges us to tidy up the universe. Any freshman can put the most complex tragedy shipshape in seconds by a lightning application of the tragic-flaw theory--the hero, though he may have some points in his favour, gets what he deserves. But it is really very hard to see why Oedipus, say, is responsible for his terrible fate. And the confrontation with nature in King Lear, kept always before us but, ever more elusively, by the repetition of the word "nature" itself: "Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?"; "a tardiness in nature"; "Thou, Nature, art my goddess"; "though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus"; "Crack Nature's moulds"; "Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beast's"; the confrontation with nature in King Lear ends with so little reassurance that even Dr Johnson found it too painful to read until his duty as an editor drove him to it. The realist in him strives with the Duchess in his uneasy comment: "A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue" (Johnson vii 704). The audience thought so too, and for many years Lear was played with a tidy, happy ending provided by Nahum Tate, a victory this time, as Arnold might say, of our natural taste for bathos over the best that has been thought and said in the world.

Some works, the Aeneid or on a lesser scale Stalky and Co., comfort and inspire their public by celebrating the ideals which a social, national, or imperial group holds in common, by reinforcing bonds of loyalty, purpose, and cohesiveness. Modern literature, on the other hand, as Freud remarks in Civilization and its Discontents, is characteristically hostile to civilization, questioning its loyalties, suspecting its purposes, rejecting its bonds as chains. The representative figures of modern literature are nasty quarrelers like Dostoevsky's underground man, lapsed moralists like Aschenbach in Death in Venice, hollow men like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, troubled anarchists like Tarrou in The Plague, frantic opters-out like Yossarian in Catch-22, doubters, exiles, iconoclasts, criminals, inhabiting a fictional world whose dominant tone is irony. Its prevailing sense is that conventional wisdom, the optimism of technocrats, the utopianism of growth economists, the solemnities of politicians, are not only tedious but treacherous. The most civilized of novelists, Henry James, registers that feeling in a letter of 5 August 1914: "The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness," he says, "by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really make for a meaning is too tragic for any words" (676). Orwell, in 1984, reduces this modern sense of betrayal to an aphorism: "Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." While classical tragedy reminds us that we are smaller than we like to boast, modern literature puts in a word even for our apparent defects in the face of schemes, systems, and orthodoxies that insist on marshaling our humanity. Whether past or present, however, the ethical interest of literature is not to be found in the indulgence of propaganda, dogmatism, or smug reassurance, but as Arnold again said, in seeing the object "as in itself it really is" ("On Translating Homer" 140). The ironic, subversive, iconoclastic element of modern literature does not, of course, cover the whole ground. In his controversy with T. H. Huxley, who like C. P. Snow dwelt on the innovative stance of scientists sturdily knocking about and breaking up literary culture's "medieval way of thinking," Arnold drew attention to a compensating and conservative function of literature in all ages. If men live within the matrices of generally accepted imaginative patterns, and science is busy shattering them, literature, since the mind hates disintegration as much as nature is said to abhor a vacuum, assimilates the new knowledge into fresh interpretations of the world. It humanizes that knowledge by relating it to man's social, intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic being. Peculiarly sensitive, as his poetry shows, to our modern experience of fragmentation, loneliness, and alienation, Arnold was concerned to emphasize the conservative virtues of integration, harmony, and tradition, pursuing both in literature and society at large a communal sense of identity just as the individual, integrating his own varied and often troubled experience, achieves a personal sense of identity.

The notion that literary culture is simply conservative, however, while science is radical and innovative is both understandable and superficial; understandable because literary art does not operate according to the scientific model of obsolescence, progress, and improvement. It derives its conventional forms from a past which is always present, possibly from the very constitution of the human mind. Aeschylus, Chaucer, and Shakespeare inhabit a permanent present, addressing themselves with consummate skill to what is permanent and universal in man and his condition and therefore permanently relevant. Often the detail that fleshes out the design of a radical modern work simultaneously relates our immediate sense of the world to that larger inherited pattern. The combination occurs at various levels of consciousness. In works such as The Waste Land and Ulysses the method is deliberate and ironic. The sustaining of "a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity," says Eliot, "is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (123). Nevertheless, while it uses its inherited patterns to articulate and reflect upon modern experience, literature is not therefore socially retrogressive. I have touched already on the radical energy of typical modern literature, and if we think of literature in Arnold's expanded sense of the term, as including writers like Gibbon, Mill, Marx, Freud, and Darwin, it is simply silly to think of literature as in its nature conservative. It may not always have the locker-room bravado and cheer which C. P. Snow seems to cherish, but there are situations where cheer is the sign of moral idiocy.

In the utilitarian modern world, and nowhere more than in North America, we are apt to confuse material standard of living, commodities and cash, with civilization as a whole, and to think, like Bentham, that the business part of human affairs is the whole of human affairs. It was just such a base conception of civilization that Morris had in mind when he argued apocalyptically that for art and human decency to survive civilization would have to be destroyed. More temperately Coleridge reminds us that

   the permanency of the nation ... and ... its progressiveness and
   personal freedom ... depend on a continuing and progressive
   civilization. But civilization is itself but a mixed good, if not
   far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the
   bloom of health, and a nation so distinguished more fitly to be
   called a varnished than a polished people, where this civilization
   is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious development of
   those qualities and features that characterize our humanity. (51)

To move from the ethical to the aesthetic interest of literature is to move, in Arnold's words, from Hebraism to Hellenism. A tension is felt of the sort succinctly registered by Ogden Nash in his "Kind of an Ode to Duty":

   Oh Duty,
   Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?

In defences of literary culture, the emphasis placed on knowledge and virtue tends to overshadow the pleasure of literature. In Anglo-Saxon countries, the serious business of life has traditionally focused on saving one's soul and saving one's cash. Pleasure, with its aura of idleness and play, as well perhaps as its suggestion of personal indulgence and freedom from social and economic constraint, has always been suspect. In 1764, for example, John Wesley wrote to the Mayor of Bristol to protest the building of a theatre as "peculiarly hurtful to a trading city, giving a wrong turn to youth especially, gay, trifling, and directly opposite to the spirit of industry and close application to business" (quoted in Hammond 257). We need not rehearse how puritanism and commerce made one of the most powerful alliances in modern history. The values of one saturate and become indistinguishable from those of the other, and to both pleasure is anathema, leading in the view of one to damnation and in the view of the other to loss of profit. Against the one, Sidney's "Apology for Poetry" is a response to a puritan attack on poetry's immorality, against the other, Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" is a response to Peacock's tongue-in-cheek attack on its commercial and scientific inutility. Cheerless distrust of literature is a tradition of our culture. The signs of this puritanical attitude are evident both in T. H. Huxley's disparagement of literary culture's merely ornamental value and in C. P. Snow's emphasis, to the detriment of writers, on the comparatively hard-working and earnest zeal of scientists. Snow particularly might seem to have taken to heart the fate of the young man in Butler's Erewhon who was sent down from college "for having written an article on a scientific subject without having made free enough use of the words 'carefully,' 'patiently,' and 'earnestly'" (212). Pleasure in our society is a radical idea, a threat both to righteousness and the Chamber of Commerce. Nevertheless, poetry, plays, and novels are works of art, and art's appeal as Wordsworth says is "to the grand elementary principle of pleasure." He quite specifically does not mean passive and untrained indulgence in raw emotion and stock response but, rather, the enjoyment of a practised intellect operating on the design and context of skilled speech. The reader, he says, "is invigorated and inspired by his leader in order that he may exert himself; for he cannot proceed in quiescence, he cannot be carried like a dead weight" ("Essay" 815).

The poet, says Wordsworth, is a man talking to men, not to part of a man. Mid-nineteenth century autobiography provides some famous cautionary examples of the stunting of spirit that results from developing other sides of our humanity while neglecting aesthetic pleasure. Even in so great a mind as Darwin's, exclusive dedication to scientific rationalism took its toll. Regretting his loss of pleasure in Shakespeare, painting, and music, he writes, "it is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except Science. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. It sometimes makes me hate Science" (a conflation of Darwin's thoughts in Fleming 219). And though John Stuart Mill's famous education gave him "an advantage of a quarter of a century" over his contemporaries, it too, in its rationalistic imbalance, led to a crisis of spiritual desiccation. Dickens presents the results of such excess brilliantly in Hard Times, where a much-shaken Mr Gradgrind appeals to his former model student, Bitzer, the prize pupil of McChoakumchild's grim utilitarian school:

"Bitzer," said Mr. Gradgrind, broken down, and miserably submissive to him, "have you a heart?"

"The circulation, Sir," returned Bitzer, smiling at the oddity of the question, "couldn't be carried on without one. No man, Sir, acquainted with the facts established by Harvey relating to the circulation of the blood, can doubt that I have a heart."

"Is it accessible," cried Mr. Gradgrind, "to any compassionate influence?"

"It is accessible to Reason, Sir," returned the excellent young man. "And nothing else." (287)

Why should the study of literature have any restraining effect on our becoming Bitzers? And why should Shelley and Dickens see a connection between the pleasure of imaginative exercise and human sympathy? For one thing, a major difference between the study of literature and the study of science is that, as art, literature involves an experience which is in competition with the study of that experience as a means of knowing (the distinction is Morton W. Bloomfield's). The scientist justly prides himself on his detachment from the matter he is examining. He can study mice or microbes or atoms without strong feelings of personal or emotional attachment. He murders a microbe, meddles with a mouse, or splits an atom with commendable aplomb. One scientist may be an eye man and another a giblets man--we all have our weaknesses and passions--but essentially their interest is in process impartially observed. In extreme cases this detachment can spread to produce the sad results that Darwin laments in himself. Knowledge of a poem, a play, or a novel, however, is differently arrived at. Science and detachment are certainly necessary, but, first, communion and involvement. Georges Poulet, for example, writes that critical intimacy with a work "is only possible to the extent that critical thought becomes the thought criticized, which it can succeed in doing only by re-feeling, re-thinking, re-imagining this thought from the inside. Nothing could be less objective than such a movement of mind ... what must be arrived at is a subject, which is to say a spiritual activity that one cannot understand except by putting oneself in its place and causing it to play again within us its role as subject" (Les lettres nouvelles, 24 June 1959, quoted in Scholes 7). This seems to me an accurate enough account of one stage in the process. To know a work of art is to submit to it, knowing by experiencing. The study is nevertheless both existential and scientific, for even when our minds are most caught up in an imaginative vision or design--Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"--we find ourselves moving back and forth between these two dimensions, involved and watching ourselves being involved, experiencing and assessing the experience, relating it to frameworks of reality, of other literature, and of our inner selves.

The proper enjoyment and understanding of works of art, involving this particular double mode of knowing, require that they be taught as art, not merely as social indoctrination, rebellion, moral message, or other substitutes with which we may wish to fill the time. Poetry is the greatest of the arts and most complex, the deepest imbedded in our nature as language-using creatures. It is the greatest of the arts because its raw material is language, and language itself is complex, dense with moral, social, political, historical, and imaginative association and implication; but it is art and as art involves an endlessly exciting range of strategies and choices in phrase and structure. As verbal art, art that stems from speech, it also profits from being performed. Reading aloud faces the student again with a range of tones and possibilities, confronting him with further layers of ambiguity, irony, or meaning than he may have seen in the black marks on the page, and thus expanding again his sense of verbal skill. In spite of all the self-expression that is said to go on in schools today, it is really surprising how few students can read aloud with any sense of style or meaning. Expressiveness, I remember, used to be encouraged in Grade Two. Even in graduate classes, however, I have occasionally asked students to read some piece of Dickens, say, or Browning, that shimmered with vitality, lithe, nimble, each word moving precisely in an elegant ballet of tones and meanings, only to find the ballet performed by a troupe, as it were, of knock-kneed, splay-footed, spavined creatures stumbling precariously from one comma to the next. The problem is partly shyness and certainly lack of practice, but with some patience, the translation of marks on a page into audible human speech engenders a special sense of excitement, making the abstract personal and alive, transforming study into delight. Reading aloud occasions a co-operative effort between author and reader, putting the reader more firmly in possession of the work. If he memorizes it, so much the better, its continuous presence in him will put him more deeply in touch with its own particular inwardness. But here, I suspect, I reveal myself as either a desperate radical or a hopeless stick in the mud--in views about education, it is evidently possible now to be both at once.

I would like to conclude with some comments on the relationship of reading to writing. In a time when everyone is justly upset about the inability of students to write well, it is especially important to emphasize the value of example, of many examples, and of the best examples. An obvious advantage of reading, and especially of reading poetry, where the art of language is at its most concentrated and profound, is that it develops an appreciation of expressive skill, of the whys and wherefores of saying things one way rather than another. You don't improve literacy by sacrificing literature in favour of the rules in composition books or composition books with a few expository essays tacked on, just as you don't learn fencing by studying a fencing manual but rather by encountering a variety of styles in action, learning the consequence of this feint and that thrust, and the elegance and delight of the supremely skilful combination of movements that makes it all look so deceptively easy. The study of literature is a study of what is possible in the effective use of language. For the example to take hold, of course, the teacher must help the student see how rhetorical structures, how particular combinations of words, work in the hands of a master, and not be content with asking the journalist's perennial fatuous question, "How does it feel?" "How does it feel?" though not insignificant, is not enough. Nevertheless, as the study of literature is not an excuse for random emotionalizing, composition, though it requires them, is not simply a matter of rules. "I have no patience," says the great Erasmus, "with the stupidity of the average teacher of grammar who wastes precious years in hammering rules into children's heads. For it is not by learning rules that we acquire the power of speaking a language, but by daily intercourse with those accustomed to express themselves with exactness and refinement, and by copious reading of the best authors" (De Ratione Studii in Woodward 163-64).

Exactness, refinement, copious reading of the best authors. A society persuaded that such achievement is elitist and dispensable is either in its dotage or indulging in a suicidal frame of mind. It may be true that the humanist society in which an educated elite assumed the function of articulating and asserting the norms of society as a whole has disappeared. (2) That notion of society was sustained by an educational system in which academic attainment was by and large the prerogative of a privileged group. It does not follow that the ability to think exactly, read discerningly, and write with precision is elitist in any graver sense than skill in plumbing, carpentry, or sewing is elitist.

Competence in language is the necessary basic equipment for most sorts of learning and the means of participating fully in humanity. I have dwelt mainly on the personal benefits of reading: expansion, tolerance, liberation, informed pleasure, knowing ourselves and the world: but through sensible programs of education they become the possessions of society at large. "The use of letters," says Gibbon, "is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages" (1218). A good deal of purportedly democratic objection to elitism in education is in fact thinly veiled anti-intellectualism aimed at depriving not a special group but a whole society. There is a good deal of mean shrewdness in Caliban's jealous advice about Prospero:

       Remember
   First to possess his books; for without them
   He's but a sot as I am.

Works Cited

Aristotle. "Poetics." Criticism: The Major Texts. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.

Arnold, Matthew. "Culture and Anarchy." The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 10. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975.

--. "Literature and Science." The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 5. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965.

--. "On Translating Homer." The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 1. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965.

Barzun, Jacques. Teacher in America. Boston: Little Brown, 1945.

Bloomfield, Morton W., ed. "The Two Cognitive Dimensions of the Humanities." In Search of Literary Theory. Ithaca: Cornell up, 1972. 73-89.

Burke, Edmund. An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. Ed. John M. Robson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.

--. Reflections on the French Revolution. London: Dent, 1910. Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. New York: Random House, 1927.

Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

Carlyle, Thomas. "Chartism." English and Other Critical Essays. London: Dent, 1915. 165-238.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: Norton, 1971.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. On the Constitution of Church and State. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6. Ed. W. G. T. Shedd. New York: Harper, 1884.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. New Oxford Illustrated Edition. London: Oxford up, 1948.

--. Hard Times. New Oxford Illustrated Dickens. London: Oxford up, 1955.

Durrant, Geoffrey. "The New Barbarians." In the Name of Language! Ed. Joseph Gold. Toronto: Macmillan, 1975.

Eliot, T. S. "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." Forms of Modern Fiction: Essays Collected in Honor of Joseph Warren Beach. Bloomington: Indiana up, 1948.

Fleming, Donald. "Charles Darwin, The Anaesthetic Man." Victorian Studies 4 (March 1961): 219-36.

Frye, Northrop. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana up, 1971,

--. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: cbc Publications, 1963.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols. Ed. J. B. Bury. London: Methuen, 1896.

Hammond, J. L., and Barbara Hammond. The Age of the Chartists, 1832-1854: A Study of Discontent. London: Longmans, 1930.

Huxley, T. H. "Evolution and Ethics: Prolegomena." Collected Essays, vol. 9. London: Macmillan, 1894.

James, Henry. The Portable Henry James. New York: Viking Press, 1951.

Johnson, Samuel. Johnson on Shakespeare. Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols. 7-8. Ed. Arthur Sherbo. New Haven: Yale up, 1968.

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Ed. Martin J. Svaglic. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960.

Orwell, George. "Charles Dickens." Critical Essays. London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1946. 7-56.

Scholes, Robert. Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale up, 1974.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "A Defence of Poetry." Criticism: The Major Texts. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1952. 429-35.

Sidney, Sir Philip. "An Apology for Poetry." Criticism: The Major Texts. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1952. 82-106.

Woodward, William Harrison. Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1904.

Wordsworth, William. "Essay, Supplementary." The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Cambridge edition. Ed. A. J. George. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.

--. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Cambridge edition. Ed. A. J. George. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.

(1) Jacques Barzun has interesting things to say about the unpalatability of classics in Teacher in America, chapter 11, "The Classics off the Shelf"

(2) For a discussion of literature and "elitism" see Northrop Frye's The Critical Path, especially 71-75.

Rowland McMaster was a member of the English Department at the University of Alberta from 1958 to 1997, and a very distinguished member too. He was largely responsible for the creation of the Department's Graduate Program, and he supervised dozens of ma and doctoral theses. He was an inspired and valued teacher, and he was at the forefront of the department's research, editing widely used editions of two of Dickens's novels, writing books on Trollope and Thackeray, editing Canada's major literary journal English Studies in Canada for many years, winning the University's Research Prize, and becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

He died in July of this year. At the recent Memorial in his honour, there were eloquent tributes to him as teacher and scholar. Shirley Neuman, whose doctoral dissertation he supervised, and whose remembrance of Rowland is included in this issue of esc, came from Toronto to celebrate his life. Shirley invoked "Why Read?" as the "strongest defence of the humanities in the twentieth century of the many dozens it has been my fate to read," while Pat Clements, former Dean of Arts at the University of Alberta, echoed that statement in calling the essay "a powerful defence of the liberal arts, bringing to the task his extraordinary knowledge of and love for literature and his exciting leaps in diction and tone"

Not surprisingly, since the Memorial many people have been asking if they can get a copy of that essay. In these times, an effective defence of the humanities is what we sorely need. And given that this paper has been accessible only as part of a conference proceedings published more than three decades ago, it seems to me that it deserves to be freshly available. Our thanks to Patricia Clements, Robert Merrett, and Gordon Moyles for permission to reprint this essay from Literature, Language, and Culture: Papers Read at the University of Alberta Conference on Literacy (Athabascan Publishing 1977).

Juliet McMaster

Distinguished University Professor Emeritus

University of Alberta