THE CAMBRIDGE READING BOOKS.* WE have only one serious complaint
to bring against this excel- lent series, and we may as well discharge it from our mind at once. The price is too high—not that the contents are not • Cambridge Readings in Literature. Edited by George Sampson. Cambridge at the trairenny Press. Fels. I., III„ 53. Et: Vols. 11'. sad V., Os. net.;
worth all the money and more, but that the cost must limit the circulation of volumes intended primarily for " the middle forms of secondary schools, the four years of central and higher grade schools, the upper standards of elementary schools, and the literature courses of continuation schools." This, however, is a drawback doubtless due to war conditions, and will, we trust, be remedied later on. We cannot refrain from a doubt whether in some of his selections Mr. Sampson has not over. rated the receptivity of his youthful readers. But he goes far to disarm this criticism in his remarks on the three forms of reading in schools :—
" Audible reading by individual pupils, silent reading by all members of a class, and reading by the teacher to the clam. . . . Pupils can appreciate poetry and prose well read to them which they could not themselves read aloud with intelligence. Some parts therefore of the available material should reach the third grade of difficulty. It must not all be kept down to the level of a stumbler's precarious fluency. Literature should be measured out to readers by their capacity to receive rather than by their ability to deliver."
That is a sound precept ; in teaching literature as in preaching to young people extreme condescension is to be avoided. There is nothing that schoolboys dislikemore in a sermon than the deliberate resort to schoolboy slang or metaphors drawn from school games. Mr. Sampson points out that while young people do not fully understand much of their reading, they can be deeply impressed even when they do not comprehend :—
" Difficulty is not are affair of words. Pupils of fifteen can get more from Wordsworth's Immortality ode than from such apparently simple poems as The Fountain and The Two April Mornings—more, even, from the great narrative passages of Paradise Lost than from the exquisite traceries of Lyridas. They can understand, in a sense, a scene from ramie:hew. but they will hardly understand in any sense a Conversation of Landor. The nearer prose or verse lies to the elemental, the nearer it lies to the young reader's understanding."
While the selection is governed by this broad principle, Mr. Sampson exhibits his emancipation from conventional text. book methods in four important respects : in his audacious disregard for chronology ; in tho wide range of styles and literatures represented ; in his free resort to the works of modern and contemporary authors ; and in his happy choice of pictorial illustration. His collection is "purely a miscellany " ; passages and extracts are occasionally grouped under a heading, or linked together by some kinship of spirit. But it does not pretend to be representative of any special age or country. You jump from Addison to Julian Grenfell, from Barrie to Boswell, from Tolstoy to Leigh Hutt, from Dickens to W. B. Yeats, from Cunninghame Graham to Dante! Mr. Sampson expressly disavows the intention of making a selection from the " hundred best books." It is rather his aim "to give young readers the pleasure that is also a profit, to afford them the varied excitements (and incitements) of miscellaneous reading" ; steering a middle course between too vague general knowledge— the fault of the old absence of method—and too restricted selection—the fault of the new system :—
"The indiscriminate young reader of old at least got to know some of the landmarks in general literature. To-day, the student of twenty who can read (say) Francis Thompson with appreciation, has been known to refer, in the more expansive momenta of his essays, to the epic poems of Plato and the tragic dramas of Dante."
Mr. Sampson is not only catholic In his tastebut he is bold in his outlook. In no "readers" that we have come across have living writers been more freely drawn upon, not for short snippets but good solid passages. But for difficulties of copyright, they would doubtless have made an even braver show; as it is, we cannot be too grateful for the enterprise of Mr. Sampson and the accom- modating spirit of authors and publishers, when the result is the inclusion of some of the splendours of Mr. Conrad's Youfh, and the serene beauties of Mr. W. H. Hudson. Then are only two out of many : the list includes Masefield, Belloe, Chesterton, E. V. Lucas, Arnold Bennett, Sir Henry• Newbolt, among the living ; T. E. Brown, Samuel Butler, Dean Bombing, and half- a-dozen of the soldier poets of the war among the more or less re- cently dead. Mr. Sampson is not afraid to include familiar pieces —e.g., Campbell's Batae of the Baltic—but he contrives to do very well without hackneyed popular poems such as Casablanca, which few school "readers" avoid. He draws freely from the Bible, including the Apocrypha, from good translations of the Greek dramatists and Homer, from Burke and Halifax—we are glad to see the famous passage about "The Moat "— Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. In the poems on Sleep he might have included Daniel's noble sonnet, but there is hardly anything we could wish away. In proof of his audacity we may note Mr. Sampson's printing Tennyson's Brook and following it up with Calverley's famous parody. The volumes are rich in diversion ; Mr. Sampson is not afraid of excitement, and lets na have Poe's Gold Bug and the Masque of the Red Death as well as bin Raven, with plenty of Dickens and Thaekeray. We have mentioned some of the welcome and unexpected appearances in a collection of this sort, and may add Whitman's Ethiopia Saluting the Colours, the happy collocation of Tom Brown's last Match with Matthew Arnold's Rugby Chapel, and, meet delightful of all, Dr. John Brown's immortal Marjorie Fleming, which was " discovered " about a dozen years ago by a well-known modern writer and solemnly reintroduced to the publio in the columns of an evening paper ! Mr. Sampson is perhaps too frugal in notes, but the short biographical notices are very well done. Take for example this on Dr. John Brown :— " John Brown (1810-1882) was born at Biggar and educated at the High School and University of Edinburgh. He became a doctor, but gave to art and literature the leisure hours—Home Subsecivae--which he chose as the title of his essays. Like Sir Walter, John Brown was a famous dog-lover, and the hero of his best-known eesay, Rah and his Friends, is a great dog. The combined pathos and humour of his work attracted much loving admiration—beet expressed in Swinburne's fine sonnet, which desires for the spirit of the writer
Some happier island in the Elysian sea Where Rab may lick the hand of Marjorie."
But the strongest point in these "readers" is the illustrations. t i s not merely that Mr. Sampson has drawn freely upon Turner, Piranesi and Pottieelli, Hogarth and Albrecht Dtirer ; it is the felicity of his choice that compels our admiration, as when he reproduces Alfred Stevens's sketch for the Wellington Memorial to accompany Tennyson's memorial ode, or Fred Walker's " Vagrants " to illustrate the tenth stanza of The Scholar Gipsy, or brackets Rubella's Maximilian and Orpen's Airman to contrast the old and new style of fighting man, or works in Della Robbia's bambino, Raeburn'e gorgeous "Leslie Boy," Diner's St George and Old Man to illustrate four of Shakespeare's seven ages of man.
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