out of long preparation can come the truly triumphant flash:
and I ask you to push this analogy further, into the business of
reading, even of reading for examination. You learn to discipline
yourselves, you acquire the art of marshalling, of concentrating,
driving your knowledge upon a point: and--for you are young--that
point is by no means the final point. Say that it is only an
examination, and silly at that. Still you have been learning the
art, you have been training yourself to be, for a better purpose,
effective.

IX

Yet, and when this has been granted, the crucial question abides
and I must not shirk it 'you say that the highest literature
deals with _What Is_ rather than with _What Knows._ It is all
very fine to assure us that testing our knowledge _about_
Literature and _around_ Literature, and on this side or that side
of Literature, is healthy for us in some oblique way: but can you
examiners examine, or can you not, on Literature in what you call
its own and proper category of _What Is_?'

So I hear the question--the question which beats and has beaten,
over and over again, good men trying to construct Schools of
English in our Universities.

With all sense of a responsibility, of a difficulty, that has
lain on my mind for these five years, I answer, Gentlemen, 'Yes,
we ought: yes, we can: and yes, we will.'

But, for the achievement, we teachers must first know how to
teach. When that is learned, Examination will come as a
consequent, easy, almost trivial matter. I will, for example--
having already allowed how _hard_ it is to examine on literature
--take the difficulty at its very extreme. I will select a piece
of poetry, and the poet shall be Keats--on whom, if on any one,
is felt the temptation to write gush and loose aesthetic chatter.
A pupil comes to read with me, and I open at the famous "Ode to a
Grecian Urn."

(1) We read it through together, perhaps twice; at the
second attempt getting the emphasis right, and some, at any
rate, of the modulations of voice. So we reach a working
idea of the Ode and what Keats meant it to be.

(2) We then compare it with his other Odes, and observe that it
is (a) regular in stanza form, (b) in spite of its outburst in
the 3rd stanza--'More happy love! more happy, happy love' etc.--
much severer in tone than, e.g., the "Ode to a Nightingale" or
the "Ode to Psyche," (c) that the emotion is not luscious, but
simple, (d) that this simplicity is Hellenic,