I

The title given to this Introduction may seem at first sight a strange one. You learned to read, in the usual sense of the term, in the primary school years ago, and since then you have read not only many textbooks in school, to say nothing of books of fairytales and travel and history, but also the newspapers, magazines like St. Nicholas and The Youth's Companion, and perhaps The Saturday Evening Post or The American. You have heard the names, at least, of other magazines that seem more like literature-The Atlantic, The Century; perhaps you have read them now and then. You have looked up references in encyclopedias and have read the Declaration of Independence. "Learning to Read" of course you know how to read already! Why, then, an introduction on such a subject, when you feel very sure that if you wished to do so you could sit down this very minute and read every word in these six hundred pages?

But are you sure that you really know how to read?

Thousands of people in the United States do not know how to read or write. Such persons are called "illiterate," that is, "not lettered." They don't know their letters. No doubt they seem very ignorant to you; you express some such idea when you speak of someone as being so stupid that he does not even know his abc's. The World War revealed an appalling amount of illiteracy among men of military age. Thousands could not read.

Now reading, in this sense, is a very elementary thing indeed. All that is required, in order to pass a literacy test, is to be able to read aloud some simple printed matter and to tell what it means. In such a test as this, of course you would come off with flying colors.

Again, among those who could pass a

literacy test easily enough are many who can indeed pronounce and define words but who do it in queer ways. You have seen them in street cars or on trains, poring over a newspaper, moving their lips as if pronouncing each word, making strange grimaces, reading with mouth and nose and eyes. They are like some people who write painfully, using nose and mouth and even tongue in comical contortions along with the pencil or pen. Such people, readers and writers alike, may know how to read after a fashion, and yet you would not say that they really know how to read.

So it may seem a matter of speed alone. These people can read, but they have to spell out their words. It is a slow process. You go along much better. When you are interested in a story you can get over a page like lightning. You pursue the end of the story as a dog pursues a flying rabbit. No need for you to learn to read. You have always, or nearly always, been able to do it, provided only you were interested enough.

Of course you are willing to admit that there are a good many things that you call "hard reading." The words may be difficult. The subject may not interest you, and that of course makes any reading hard. Your magazine, your favorite novel -these you read easily and with pleasure. Other magazines and books may seem "too deep." Perhaps you may want to read them later on. And of course you expect to use your dictionary, to “add to your vocabulary," and even to read "deep" books some day. But that doesn't seem like learning; it is merely getting more expert in reading, like getting more expert in swimming or tennis or basketball.

Now it is perfectly true that ability to read depends in part upon the size of your

vocabulary, that is, upon the number of words you recognize and understand without going to the dictionary. Knowing many words, and hard words, and being able to handle them rapidly, shows a certain expertness, just as it might seem to be a bigger thing to be able to spell dinosaur, and to know what it means, than it is to be able to spell words of one or two syllables.

Yet very simple words are sometimes hardest to spell, as in the case of to and too, for example, or the word separate. It is the same with reading.

A great writer once said that all the university, or final highest school, can do for us is to teach us to read. Think of this sentence carefully. Not the primary school, or the grammar school, or the high school-"all that the university, or final highest school, can do," it says. The university continues to do what the primary school began to do: it tries to teach us to read.

There must be something in this matter of learning to read that is beyond mere recognition of words, size of vocabulary, expertness in pronunciation. Let us see if we can find out what it is.

II

Learning to read is a fascinating game that you can play at will. Like any other game, it involves several factors. You can learn the rules and apply them in a mechanical manner. You may be able to play a good game in this way; a sure, steady game. But in any game that requires skill, there are many finer points, shades of skill that involve extreme delicacy, niceness of execution. The great player is the one who adds to his physical and mental mastery of the fundamental principles of his game a subtlety and skill that are hard to define, but easily felt. To get the most out of reading you must possess very much more than the merely technical ability to define and pronounce words or tell the meaning of sentences and paragraphs.

In these verses the delight you feel is due to the mere sound, not to the sense. You couldn't find definitions of many of the words even if you tried. Some of the words may have a sort of meaning, like "Jabberwock" for example. It must be a sort of dragon. There's a sort of meaning, now you come to think of it, in the whole thing. It's a quest, like the quest for the Grail or like the journey of the Red Cross Knight in search of the horrible dragon. Yet even here, your delight is not in any fact about a quest or even a fancied similarity; the lines are a delightful bur

You doubtless remember in Alice in

material. They sound like poetry. And they are poetry.

Reading, then, is a good deal more than a technical mastery of definition and pronunciation. The same stanza may be read in different ways, may seem one thing to a little boy and quite another to you. You add something of your own. Half the delight is in this thing that you add. Let us test this by an example that is a bit more dignified and sedate.

It is said that the young Keats, reading Spenser's Faerie Queene, shouted with delight when he came upon the phrase "sea-shouldering whales." Why was this? Not merely because he recognized the meaning of the words, surely, or because he knew what whales look like or how big they are. Reading this phrase, then, meant to him something more than we usually mean when we speak of knowing how to read. In part this something more, as in "The Jabberwock," must be the sound of the words. It is a magnificent, mouth-filling phrase. Repeat it aloud, several times, until you realize this fully. But this is not all. The poet gives you, in a single compound word, a better idea of the enormous size of the whale than you could get from reading, in an encyclopedia, all that is said about the animal. They are so enormous, Spenser says, that they shoulder their way through the waves, can take the ocean on their shoulders.

But whales have no shoulders! Here, then, is a statement that literally is not true, and yet is true, and its truth you see imaginatively. There is a clear picture in your mind's eye of these enormous creatures, inhabitants of the deep. When you see this picture, feel the delight that comes from the perception that in a single phrase the poet has expressed an astonishing amount of matter, you understand why Keats should have "shouted with delight." You have learned to read this phrase that is really a little poem.

Other illustrations could be given without number. Perhaps you can think of a story or a poem or some mere sentence that has always affected you in a quite quite peculiar way. It might not affect others in that way. This effect that it produces

on you is a part of your reading of it. Reading is a complex process. Sound,

picture, suggestion, your past reading, your own personality-these are some of the elements that enter into what we call reading.

III

Let us now test the conclusions that we have reached by applying them to a single short poem:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless
things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

To "read" this poem in the ordinary sense is not a difficult matter. You can soon get the little story that it tells about a traveler who once came upon the ruins of a mighty statue in a desert. There are no difficult words. Antique is used instead of ancient, visage for face; otherwise the language is not even poetic; it is just what you would use in prose. One line may give you a moment's pause, but you soon see that the "hand that mocked" these "passions" was the artist's, and the "heart that fed" them was the tyrant's. If you feel the need of further information, you may try to find who Ozymandias was, but you will get small satisfaction, and will soon come to the conclusion that the poet uses the name simply to indicate some Pharaoh or tyrant of one of the ancient nations, such as Egypt or Babylonia, or Assyria. You can easily find out, if you wish, that the poem was written by Shelley in 1819, and of course, you can look up the life of Shelley and learn the names of his chief poems and the characteristics of his style. You also can make some observations about the poem as a whole; it is a sonnet; it has four

teen lines; it rimes in a certain way; and it has five iambic feet or measures to a line. Perhaps, if you wish to exhaust the subject, you will notice that the distinction between the "octave," or first eight lines, and the "sestet," or last six lines, is carefully drawn, since in this sonnet the octave introduces the subject, or theme, the point, or application, of which is developed in the sestet.

All in all, you have acquired quite a bit of information. You could make a somewhat elaborate report on the poem, its author, and its form. But you have not yet read the poem. If you go over it once more in order to find out just what is its quality or chief characteristic, you will see that while it does not at all seem "poetic" in the witchery of language, melody of verse, or anything rhetorical, yet it does produce a single effect with great vividness. You can visualize it, see it clearly. The scene of desolation that is the setting or framework of the picture; the strength and compactness of the picture only a few details about the statue; the emphasis on the cold cruelty of the face and on the inscription that remains on the pedestal-all these make up a picture that you could paint if you were an artist. To see the picture is one great requirement in learning to read. "My eyes make pictures when they are shut," said Keats when he was a little boy. It is this picture-making power that is the most precious of all aids to good reading.

Here, then, are two kinds of reading: the gathering of facts about the poem and its author; the re-creation in your own imagination of the picture that the poet saw. But something more than this fact-collecting and picture-making is nec

essary.

Let us go through the poem once more. If the poet's purpose, were merely to put into sonnet form a bit of history he would have been more specific as to the monarch, the nation, and the time. If he wished merely to give a brief but vivid description of a statue or of a scene of ruin, so that his poem should do for us what the painter or sculptor might do, he would! not have placed so much emphasis on the inscription. It is not necessary to

the picture, and in a picture it could not be read. The last six lines of the poem must be more significant than we at first guessed. The first three of these tell you of the inscription. This king was a mighty monarch. His "works" must have been great buildings, a great city-a city like Babylon-filled with life and glory, the seat of a great king. But the last three lines tell you what you see as you look for these splendid works that were to surpass the achievements of all the kings of the earth. There is nothing. Only the colossal wreck of the statue and the lone and level sands that stretch as far as eye can reach. No ruins even. Not a tree. Only lone and level sands.

We can't find out anything about Ozymandias, yet we now feel that this poem is something more than an accurately written sonnet distinguished for its compact and vivid description. Perhaps if we know something more about Shelley we shall find a clue. So we go once more to the biography, this time with a more definite purpose. We find that Shelley was a hater of tyranny. He wrote one poem about Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to men. Shelley makes him the enemy of tyrants, the representative of the spirit of liberty. He wrote another poem about the West Wind in which he prayed that the wind might bear his words among mankind as it bore the leaves and seeds, so that after the winter ended, the spring might come and stir men to do some deed for freedom. So with many other poems, and with his letters and essays. Shelley hated the tyranny that Napoleon seemed to him to represent. He hated the materialism that based a nation's claim to greatness on its wealth and power. The French Revolution exerted a powerful effect on him, as it did on Wordsworth and Byron, his great contemporaries.

With this in mind, let us turn to the poem for a final reading.

Of the statue only the vast legs remain upright. The body is gone. The broken face, half buried, still preserves the wrinkled lip, the sneer, that showed how the sculptor mocked his subject. That this could have been done without detection

proves the sculptor's skill and the subject's stupidity, or the dense conceit that blinded the king to the sculptor's art. A certain immortality, then, has been gained by the tyrant; his evil passions are revealed after these many ages when all his works are gone and his very image is a wreck. The pedestal, too, remains. Mocking Time has preserved the inscription, filled with insolent pride, now bitter irony since all the mighty works have given way to desolation.

Selfish ambition, whether of individual or nation; overweening confidence in great buildings, vast wealth, as things of permanence these things perish. Ozymandias coveted an immortality of fame. The lone and level sands of the desert give the answer. To Napoleon, to the England of the poet's time, to individual or nation in our time, the poem may be applied as a test. Ozymandias is not a figure in history whose name and date you may learn; he is the personification of all the selfish greed, lust for power, and insolent pride in this world.

a

Such is the reading of the poem. To it one may bring even greater stores from his past reading; the prophecies of the desolation that was to come upon the haughty nations of Assyria and Egypt as depicted in the Old Testament; knowledge of the French Revolution, of the career of Napoleon, of the War for Greek Independence; a study of the life and works of Shelley and his contemporaries. A great English scholar and historian of the last century devoted years of his life to collecting books and documents on the history of human liberty. His books filled a great room; they numbered thousands of titles. He was a lover of liberty; his love of liberty was made wise and sane by his reading.

You cannot hope to bring to the reading of a poem like "Ozymandias" a background of experience so rich and varied as this, nor is it necessary. You need only to keep in mind the fact that the significance of your reading of this poem, or of any poem or prose work that has serious meaning, depends upon your ability to make use of something more than mere mechanical recognition of words and sen

tences. Power in reading is a constant growth, a power that is to develop with your experience in literature and life. This applies to your reading of prose exactly as much as to your reading of poetry. There are as many varieties of prose as of verse, some of them drawing on your ability to make mental pictures, some requiring from you the most intense thought, and some adding to your stores of information.

Sound, picture, suggestion, your past reading, your own personality-these are some of the elements that enter into what we call reading.

IV

This last illustration has perhaps seemed somewhat long and difficult. In reality its significance may be summed up very briefly. It shows the mistake in thinking that reading is just a process of receiving information or pleasure from a book, just as one may receive a piece of cake at the hands of a hostess. Giving is essential to receiving. You give your past experience in reading and in life; you give your personality. This done, you receive the message that lies concealed within the poem or the piece of finely wrought prose. If you have nothing to give, you receive nothing in return.

This means that reading is creative. It is active, not passive. The poet sees a vision of beauty, and weaves this vision into words. He creates a thing of beauty. Your task is to re-create this beauty in your own mind and soul.

You can tell someone how to swim or play tennis or make a table. But that someone may commit to memory every word you say and yet be unable to swim or play tennis or to make a table. It is the same with reading. You may tell someone what the story was about. You may even deceive yourself into thinking that if you can give an abstract of the story or rattle off some facts about the author you therefore have read it. A lady was once asked if she had read a certain great novel. "No," she said, "but I have had it told to me." She thought if she knew the plot and the names of the characters that was as good as reading it for