Lectures by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Piffka

I'm game.
I'll need a day or so to find the site and read a little though.

Count me in Piffka, sounds wonderful but will take time as I have trouble reading on line so will have to make the library trip. Love the smell of libraries and have not been in one for a while.

They really are reasonably short lectures and they are divided one per chapter. Here's a link:

http://www.bartleby.com/people/QuillerC.html


The reason I thought about this is the new Book Forum Guide, LarryBS, and I were chatting about books. He mentioned 84 Charing Cross Road and that he had started a collection of the books mentioned in the correspondence, including both sets of lectures (On the Art of Writing, On the Art of Reading). Cool, huh?

I am leaving tomorrow and won't be back 'til Sunday and then in and out for a week, so my comments may be long and drawn out. Hope you don't mind!

I have been reading these out loud to myself (pretending I'm in a lecture hall.) I find them interesting and amusing as well as edifying. Here's a nice bit from the first chapter, Inaugural:

"Let us illustrate this upon Poetry, which the most of us will allow to be the highest form of literary expression, if not of all artistic expression. Of all the testimony paid to Poetry, none commands better witness than this -- that, as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy 'it abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every heart returns an echo.' When George Eliot said, 'I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should like them,' she but repeated of Wordsworth (in homelier, more familiar fashion) what Johnson said of Gray; and the same testimony lies implicit in Emerson's fine remark that 'Universal history, the poets, the romancers' -- all good writers, in short -- 'do not anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for our betters. Rather it is true that, in their greatest strokes, there we feel most at home.' "

I like that. This Cambridge professor believes that the best poetry should give us a feeling of familiarity... not a feeling of inferiority.

Thanks Piffka, what a great idea. Guess I'll have to cut those pages after all.

Joanne, I hope you can find his lectures at the library, but these books may be hard to find.

Hi Larry! Hmmm, maybe it is time to cut those pages, but I don't think it is so difficult to read online. A tough decision, use those books or burn out your eyes. Just go slowly, I think! I am truly enjoying Sir Q-C though, quite a knightly gentleman. This was an old story I have heard before, still I was surprised that his second lecture ends with this note:

.............
The date of the above lecture was Wednesday, February 12th, 1913, the date on which our morning newspapers printed the first telegrams giving particulars of the fate of Captain Scott's heroic conquest of the South Pole, and still more glorious, though defeated, return. The first brief message concerning Captain Oates, ran as follows:"From the records found in the tent where the bodies were discovered it appeared that Captain Oates's feet and hands were badly frost-bitten, and, although he struggled on heroically, his comrades knew on March 16 that his end was approaching. He had borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and he did not give up hope to the very end.

"He was a brave soul. He slept through the night hoping not to wake; but he awoke in the morning.

-- "It was blowing a blizzard. Oates said: "I am just going outside, and I may be some time." He went out into the blizzard, and we have not seen him since.
-- "We knew that Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman."

Thanks Piffka - I just heard that last comment about Oates last night in a PBS special on Scott and the expedition. Am also going to read someday the book The Worst Journey in the World, supposedly a great book of adventure, on Scott's ordeal.

Isn't Q great, very enjoyable reading. If I didn't mention it before, Helene Hanff's book, kind of a prequel to 84 Charing Cross Road, called Q's Legacy, is about her first encounter with Q and what his books meant to her.

Eeek. Another book I should be reading.

It is very short and is a very easy read, like 84.