Of course there is an initial difficulty in the case of the
classics, that there is very little in either Greek or Latin which
really appeals to an immature taste at all; and such books as might
appeal to inquisitive and inexperienced minds, such as Homer or the
_Anabasis_ of Xenophon, are made unattractive by the method of giving
such short snippets, and insisting on what used to be called thorough
parsing. Even _Alice in Wonderland_, let me say, could only prove a
drearily bewildering book, if read at the rate of twenty lines a
lesson, and if the principal tenses of all the verbs had to be
repeated correctly. It is absolutely essential, if any love of
literature is to be superinduced, that something should be read fast
enough to give some sense of continuity and range and horizon. The
practice of dictionary-turning is sufficient by itself to destroy
intellectual pleasure, but it used to be defended as a base sort of
bribe to strengthen memory: it was argued that boys would try to
remember words to save themselves the trouble of looking them up. But
this has no origin in fact. Boys used not to be encouraged to guess at
words, but to be punished for shirking work if they had not looked
them out. It is to be hoped that English will be in the future
increasingly taught in schools; but even so there is the danger of
connecting it too much with erudition. The old _Clarendon Press
Shakespeare_ was an almost perfect example of how not to edit
Shakespeare for boys; the introductions were learned and scholarly,
the notes were crammed with philology, derivation, illustration.
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