The Ignorant Reader

Britain's G. M. Trevelyan, famed historian son of a famed historian father, thinks the modern reader is getting less & less able to understand good writing. Last week, in a pamphlet published by the Oxford University Press, he told his countrymen why: "Literature, more than painting and music, is a matter of references, of play made with bits of knowledge common to author and reader." The trouble is, says Trevelyan, that this common knowledge is getting scantier & scantier.

For one thing, "many readers today are unfamiliar with that part of history which consists of the names and legends of classical mythology, so largely employed in the poems of Milton, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. This ignorance does not at all impede the appreciation of music or of painting. But a reader who has no conception of ancient Hellas and its mythology and no loving imagination of pastoral life must lose some at least of the enchantment of Keats's Ode to Mala:

Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!

May I sing to thee

As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiae? . . ."

Indeed, says Trevelyan, the modern reader is weak where "his grandfathers were strong--the Bible stories and the classical stories . . . Milton's words--'That twice-battered god of Palestine'--would have been understood at once by the majority of people who read books in the reign of Victoria. I fear it would be obscure to many readers of today."

The Bible and mythology are not the only things readers are ignorant about: they also know too little history and thus lose much of the meaning of what they might read. "Take," says Trevelyan, "two of the wittiest lines Pope ever wrote:

'Odious! In woollen! T'would a saint provoke!'

Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.

The key to their meaning lies in the fact that, to encourage the cloth trade, Parliament had passed an Act that all corpses were to be wrapped in British woollen . .

"To me," concludes Trevelyan, "history and literature have formed one study, one delight, woven together by a thousand crossing strands and threads . . . Our grandfathers were brought up on the classics and the Bible. Both were history and literature closely intertwined, and therefore formed a marvelous education, a much finer education than any which is at all usual today."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.