CLASSICS IN CHILDHOOD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 April 1939, Page 7

CLASSICS IN CHILDHOOD

INFLUENCE OF “PILGRIM’S PROGRESS.” I had the good fortune to receive the “Pilgrim’s Progress” at an impressionable age, recalls Mr Hilaire Belloc in a recent article. I was, 'if I remember rightly, about nine years old when my nurse read it to me from end to end, and it left very vivid pictures in my mind. Indeed, I think it is the chief quality in Bunyan that he can thus exercise that most powerful of English talents, the visual imagination. Any man is fortunate who has had in childhood any one of the classics put before him; later on he will not have the time, or if he have the time he will no longer have the malleability to receive the stamp of them as it should be received. In later life we get occasional rare and disconnected revelations of really good writing; we retain them, they furnish our minds, but they have not the edge and sharp outline of the earlier things. Moreover, it is one of the misfortunes of our time that it has become haphazard in its selection of first-rate things. This is not to say that we moderns never recognise a contemporary masterpiece, still less that only secondrate or third-rate things appeal to the public today; that sort of judgment is common enough, but false. What is true is that in the mass and rapidity of modern book-making the critical faculty is swamped. '