A Brill Calendar: May 12

"Q"

Few mortals savoured pleasures of reading more than Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Bodmin, Cornwall November 21 1863 – Fowey, Cornwall, May 12 1944).

His essay ‘On the Art of Reading’ (1920) is a priceless classic. When it was published Quiller-Couch’s crisp pseudonym, ‘Q’, was already cherished by lovers of poetry world-wide for two decades.

Quiller-Couch compiled ‘The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250 – 1900’ (1900; revised 1939) and in 1910, ‘The Oxford Book of Ballads’, when the erstwhile Oxonian lecturer in classics and later editor in a London publishing firm had been transformed into a sophisticated author and a widely-read fashionable novelist in his own right, writing a limpid prose, seemingly summoned without effort. His two great anthologies became land-marks world-wide as sources of delight in poetry.

It is seldom that a wiser paragraph on the nature of scholarly knowledge was written than the following by that inveterate reader, ‘Old Q’, as his aficionados keep addressing Sir Arthur. Both in the arts and in the sciences nothing is more convincing than elegance.

“If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.”