, what Professor Edward Dowden
writes in his article on 'The teaching of English literature,' contained
in his recent volume, 'New Studies in Literature': 'Few persons nowadays
seem to feel how powerful an instrument of culture may be found in
modest, intelligent, and sympathetic reading aloud. The reciter and the
elocutionist of late have done much to rob us of this which is one of
the finest of the fine arts. A mongrel something which, at least with
the inferior adepts, is neither good reading nor yet veritable acting,
but which sets agape the half-educated with the wonder of its airs and
attitudinizing, its pseudo-heroics and pseudo-pathos, has usurped the
place of the true art of reading aloud, and has made the word
"recitation" a terror to quiet folk who are content with intelligence
and refinement. Happily in their behalf the great sense-carrier to the
Empire, Mr. Punch, has at length seen it right to intervene. (Note 9.)
The reading which we should desire to cultivate is intelligent reading,
that is, it should express the meaning of each passage clearly;
sympathetic reading, that is, it should convey the feeling delicately;
musical reading, that is, it should move in accord with the melody and
harmony of what is read, be it in verse or prose.'

A training of the organs of speech which brings them into complete
obedience to the will and the feelings, and a perfect technique,
important and indispensable as they are, cannot, of themselves, avail
much in the interpretation of spiritualized thought. This must be mainly
the result of such education as induces an inward preparedness for
responding to and assimilating the essential life of a work of genius.
_Quicquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis_ (whatever is
received, is received according to the measure of the recipient). And it
is, or should be, the leading object of literary education to enlarge
the spiritual measure of the recipient.

Now it must be said that the schools, with all their grammars, their
rhetorics, their philologies, their psychologies, their histories and
cheap philosophies of literature, their commentaries and annotations, do
not prepare their students to know works of genius in their absolute
character; for such knowledge implies an adequate education of the
absolute, that is, spiritual man, and such education is not induced by
the above studies as at present conducted. It demands spiritual life to
respond to spiritual life; or, in th