George Steiner breaking my heart with his description of the way people used to memorise poems, Bible passages, classic works.
I'm going to memorise more poetry
Le Philosophe lisant, like the cultured men around him in a tradition which runs from classical antiquity to, roughly, the First World War, will know texts by heart (an idiom worth thinking about closely). They will know by heart considerable segments of Scripture, of the liturgy, of epic and lyric verse. Macaulay's formidable accomplishments in this respect — even as a schoolboy he had committed to memory a fair measure of Latin and English poetry — were only a heightened instance of a general practice. The ability to cite Scripture, to recite from memory large stretches of Homer, Virgil, Horace or Ovid, to cap on the instant a quotation from Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, generated the shared texture of echoes, of intellectual and emotive recognition and reciprocity, on which the language of British politics, law and letters was founded. Knowledge by heart of the Latin sources, of La Fontaine, of Racine, of the trumpet-calls in Victor Hugo, has given to the entire fabric of French public life its rhetorical stress. The classic reader, Chardin’s lisant, locates the text he is reading inside a resonant manifold. Echo answers echo, analogy is precise and contiguous, correction and emendation carry the justification of accurately remembered precedent. The reader replies to the text out of the articulate density of his own store of reference and remembrance. It is an ancient, formidable suggestion that the Muses of memory and of invention are one.
That is from ‘The Uncommon Reader’, an essay by George Steiner. Who can hope to reach Steiner’s standards? I’m sure there are such people, but I don’t believe this sort of practice has really survived. (Yes this opinion is ‘James Marriott coded’; no my general position has not changed: I remain less convinced of that thesis than many other people, but I respect it and am looking forward to reading James’s book: even though I think he’s largely wrong we share a nostalgia for the lost age of letters. If it seems like I’m not “on a side” of the argument—I’m not!)
Schools no longer require routine memorisation. Victoria Moul told me her children still do this in France, but I have heard from others it is not universal by any means. Who knows… And here’s a quotation from a 1991 New Yorker article.
Even when I became a don, there were dons teaching English literature who were not under the spell of words. They couldn’t quote anything from memory. There was a don who taught English—excellent person, very good scholar, knew a lot, but never quoted anything. He said he never remembered poetry. I also now have colleagues who teach Latin who are like that—they never quote from memory. Well, as for me, I wouldn’t have become a literary person if I hadn’t been able to remember words. What is important to me is that it is all in my mind.
When I was at school, the English department ran a (voluntary) verse speaking competition, in which we, well, spoke verse, competitively. It was immensely absorbing. One year, I did ‘Death, be not proud’ (alas, when I tried it just now, I only remember the first quatrain). Another year, I did a passage of Paradise Lost, (ending ‘Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms’) now lost to me. I knew other sections of Milton at university. I performed in several Shakespeare plays, and remember a fraction of them now, though I know my way around Hamlet reasonably well. In those days, though it was never a formal requirement, I took memorisation seriously. I once knew the whole of Ode to a Nightingale…
It didn’t all vanish, thankfully. And the poetry I learned subsequently has largely stayed with me, and I slowly add to my stocks, meagre though they are. (One thing I can recite in full on demand is Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, of all things.) I decided several years ago to start memorising more, (including several poems by Robert Frost, which I used to say by heart to my children when they were little), and though I am, and always have been, an insufficient pupil, bad at schedules and consistency, I am not entirely failing at that endeavour even now, though I do far too little.
Last year, I memorised ‘Daffodils’ by Herrick. I am currently learning ‘My true love hath my heart.’ Alan Lascelles, Private Secretary to King George VI (and also to the Abdicator—hiss) knew Gray’s Elegy by heart, as, once, did so many English school boys. Lascelles was appalled to learn that the king hadn’t even heard of it. Perhaps I shall learn that one next. I am resolved to take memorisation as seriously again as I used to at school. (Join me!—though you should expect me to fail!)
I have also been copying out passages from The Wings of the Dove. As well as memorisation, ruminatio is essential to the literary enterprise. Knowing the text is the essential thing, however much of it you know by heart.
I enjoyed Steiner’s essay so much I printed out Le Philosophe lisant, and pinned it to my office wall. Don’t miss the hourglass.
And here he is talking about Simenon in the Paris Review.
INTERVIEWER: Is the role of ideas in fiction subordinate then?
STEINER: What a very difficult question you ask. There are novels that one would call great but that will live because of their ideological, intellectual content. A lot of Thomas Mann might strike one that way. Musil’s Man without Qualities is written about by as many philosophers as literary critics. But this is rare. Don’t ask anything like that of the most extraordinary fictive shaper — don’t laugh at me — in our time, who is Georges Simenon. I can take from my shelf ten or twelve Maigrets and it doesn’t take five or ten pages, as in Balzac, or twenty, as in Dickens (who is really slow in getting going; so is Balzac): Simenon does it in two or three paragraphs. There’s a Maigret novel which opens with a loud noise. At three in the morning in Pigalle, the old Paris red-light district, a nightclub owner is pulling down the metal shade, to close up. Out of that single noise, focused against the first milk cart, focused against the steps of those who go home to sleep at that time and those who start coming into Les Halles to get the food ready for the day, Simenon gives you not only the city, not only something about France which no historian can surpass, but the two or three people who will matter in the story are already before you. Simenon somehow notes that the steps of the man who pulls down the shade, as they go away from the nightclub, have a curious hesitant drag. And there you are, that’s the first important clue in the story. Now that is the mysterium tremendum of the creation of the autonomous persona. But yes, there can be ideology.
Presumably he is talking about Maigret in Montmartre, but when I checked just now the noise is not actually mentioned, unless it is lost in translation…
Some of the old interviews with Steiner you can find on YouTube are truly impressive. Cheers to memorizing poetry!
There definitely was a culture of memorization in the past. I too was made to memorize poetry at school, and incentivized with competitions, both within the school and some inter-school competitions - and in my case it was Latin and Greek poetry as well as English, because I had the good fortune to study those languages in school. I can still remember most of it. And I grew up in a house where quoting poetry was just part of the normal discourse: my father knew a lot of poetry, and would insert it into the conversation wherever it seemed relevant. In my daughter's school there is nothing like that.
But that said, I wonder if the problem isn't about the practice of memorization, but WHAT is being memorized. I took my daughter to a concert by one of her favorite singers (Renee Rapp), and she was literally able to shout out every lyric to every song being played. And it isn't just that singer - she has hundreds, probably thousands of lines to songs in her head, and so do many of her friends. Obviously the music makes it easier to remember, but with some rap music it is certainly more the words than the accompaniment that sticks in her memory, and she quotes and recognizes apposite song-lines the whole time.
But that is all contemporary songs of variable quality: she studied Romeo and Juliet in detail at school last year, but I doubt she could quote a single line from it (except possibly "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", which she's come across in other contexts), and there seems to be no practice in the school of encouraging the students to do so. There seems to be almost an embarrassment about treating classic literature to students in school as something which they could remember and draw from with the same enthusiasm as they do their favorite rap artists.