On the Use of Masterpieces

But let us take something far simpler than the Ninth Book of Paradise Lost and more direct than any translated masterpiece can be in its appeal; something of high genius, written in our mother tongue. Let us take The Tempest.

Of The Tempest we may say confidently: that it is a literary masterpiece: the last most perfect "fruit of the noblest tree in our English Forest"; that its story is quite simple; intelligible to a child: (its basis in fact is fairytale, pure and simple -- as I tried to show in a previous lecture); that in reading it -- or in reading Hamlet, for that matter -- the child has no sense at all of being patronised, of being "written down to. " And this has the strongest bearing on my argument. The great authors, as Emerson says, never condescend. Shakespeare himself speaks to a slip of a boy, and that boy feels that he is Ferdinand; that, though Shakespeare uses his loftiest, most accomplished and, in a sense, his most difficult language: a way of talking it has cost him a lifetime to acquire, in line upon line inviting the scholar's, prosodist's, poet's most careful study; that language is no bar to the child's enjoyment: but rather casts about the whole play an aura of magnificence which, with the assistant harmonies, doubles and redoubles the spell. A child no more resents this because it is strange than he objects to read in a fairytale of robbers concealed in oil-jars or of diamonds big as a roc's egg. When will our educators see that what a child depends on is imagination, that what he demands of life is the wonderful, the glittering, possibility?