On the Art of Reading, Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1916.17, By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, "Cambridge: The University Press, Pp, viii, 237. 15s, net. nog necessary to tell readers of these columns that Sir Arthur j Quiller-Couch writes 0 charmingly, or that. his book on reading is. a refreshment and a stimulus; but it may be well just to mention that, though he intended it in the first place for students, nothing cee academic, in the forbidding sense of that word, ever came from a university. There ig on every page a fresh,—infectious, boyish enthusiasm. On the Art of Reading" is a book foy all.
Sir Arthur wants us all to learn to read, and he assures ug that reading' is really the very simplest matter. By reading he means, of course, as we do, the power to understand and assimilate "great literature, the perception through the letters of the life. Humanism, he says, "is a quality which should and can condition all teaching, from a poor child's first. lesson in reading up to a tutor's last word to pupil on the eve of a Tripos."" Who will not agree with him that that is the ideal in education, and who will not be grateful to him for the confident energy with which, like a bracing wind, ho overrides scruples, sweeps away cobwebs, and creates the atmosphere he believes in? "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."
Now, if we are to get the full benefit of the bracing wind, we must stand up against—the blast, and there are, we believe, special reasons why the benefit of these great gusts of "Q's" is only to be had by resistance. He compares the simplicity of "the very highest Universal Truth' with that of love, and we know that though the simple message of love has been in the world two thousand years it is still but rarely felt and followed. Where conduct is concerned, a distinction seems to imose itself at once between what is simple and what is easy. Education is a branch of conduct, and the instill of humanism into all our children can only come schoolmasters
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.