VI

Teaching literature is like teaching religion. You can give only the

dry bones of the matter in either case. But the dry bones of theology

are not religion, and the dry bones of rhetoric are not literature. The

flesh-and-blood reality is alone of value, and this cannot be taught,

it must be felt and experienced.

The class in literature studies an author’s sentence-structure and

paragraphing, and doubtless could tell the author more about it than

he knows himself. The probabilities are that he never thought a moment

about his sentence-structure or his paragraphing. He has thought only

of his subject-matter and how to express himself clearly and forcibly;

the structure of his sentences takes care of itself. From every art

certain rules and principles may be deduced, but the intelligent

apprehension of those rules and principles no more leads to mastery

in that art, or even helps to mastery in it, than a knowledge of the

anatomy and the vital processes of the stomach helps a man to digest

his dinner, or than the knowledge of the gunsmith helps make a good

marksman. In other words the science of any art is of little use to him

who would practice that art. To be a fiddler you must fiddle and see

others fiddle; to be a painter you must paint and study the painting

of others; to be a writer you must write and familiarize yourself with

the works of the best authors. Studying an author from the outside by

bringing the light of rhetoric to bear upon him is of little profit.

We must get inside of him, and we can only get inside of him through

sympathy and appreciation. There is only one way to teach literature,

only one vital way, and that is by reading it. The laboratory way

may give one the dry bones of the subject, but not the living thing

itself. If the teacher, by his own living voice and an occasional word

of comment, can bring out the soul of a work, he may help the student’s

appreciation of it; he may, in a measure, impart to him his own larger

and more intelligent appreciation of it. And that is a true service.

Young men and young women actually go to college to take a course in

Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dante or the Arthurian legends. The course

becomes a mere knowledge course, as Professor Corson suggests. My own

first acquaintance with Milton was through an exercise in grammar.

We parsed “Paradise Lost.” Much of the current college study of

Shakespeare is little better than parsing him. The minds of the pupils

are focused upon every word and line of the text, as the microscope

is focused upon a fly’s foot in the laboratory. The class probably

dissects a frog or a star-fish one day, and a great poet the next, and

it does both in about the same spirit. It falls upon one of these great

plays like hens upon a bone in winter: no meaning of word or phrase

escapes it, every line is literally picked to pieces; but of the poet

himself, of that which makes him what he is, his tremendous dramatic

power, how much do the students get? Very little, I fear. They have had

an intellectual exercise and not an emotional experience. They have

added to their knowledge, but have not taken a step in culture. To dig

into the roots and origins of the great poets is like digging into the

roots of an oak or a maple, the better to increase your appreciation of

the beauty of the tree. There stands the tree in all its summer glory;

will you really know it any better after you have laid bare every root

and rootlet? There stand Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer. Read

them, give yourself to them, and master them if you are man enough.

The poets are not to be analyzed, they are to be enjoyed; they are not

to be studied, but to be loved; they are not for knowledge, but for

culture--to enhance our appreciation of life and our mastery over its

elements. All the mere facts about a poet’s work are as chaff compared

with the appreciation of one fine line or fine sentence. Why _study_

a great poet at all after the manner of the dissecting-room? Why not

rather seek to make the acquaintance of his living soul and to feel its

power?

The mere study of words, too,--of their origin and history, or of the

relation of your own language to some other,--how little that avails!

As little as a knowledge of the making and tempering of a sword would

help a man to be a good swordsman. What avails in literature is a quick

and delicate sense of the life and individuality of words--“a sense

practiced as a blind man’s touch,” or as a musician’s ear, so that the

magic of the true style is at once felt and appreciated; this, and

an equally quick and delicate sense of the life and individuality of

things. “Is there any taste in the white of an egg?” No more is there

in much merely correct writing. There is the use of language as the

vehicle of knowledge, and there is the use of it as an instrument of

the imagination. In Wordsworth’s line,

“The last to parley with the setting sun,”

in Whitman’s sentence,

“Oh, waves, I have fingered every shore with you,”

in Emerson’s description of an Indian-summer day, “the day,

immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm, wide

fields”--in these and such as these we see the imaginative use of words.

Most of the Dantean and Homeric and Shakespearean scholarship is the

mere dust of time that has accumulated upon these names. In the course

of years it will accumulate upon Tennyson, and then we shall have

Tennysonian scholars and learned dissertations upon some insignificant

detail of his work. Think of the Shakespeareana with which literature

is burdened! It is mostly mere shop litter and dust. In certain moods I

think one may be pardoned for feeling that Shakespeare is fast becoming

a curse to the human race. Of mere talk about him, it seems, there is

to be no end. He has been the host of more literary parasites probably

than any other name in history. He is edited and re-edited as if a

cubit could be added to his stature by marginal notes and comments. On

the contrary, the result is, for the most part, like a mere growth of

underbrush that obscures the forest trees. The reader’s attention is

being constantly diverted from the main matter--he is being whipped in

the face by insignificant twigs. Criticism may prune away what obscures

a great author, but what shall we say when it obstructs the view of him

by a multitude of unimportant questions?

The main aim of the teacher of literature should be to train and

quicken the student’s taste--his sense of the fitness and proportion of

things--till he can detect the true from the false, or the excellent

from the common. There is but one way to learn to detect the genuine

from the counterfeit in any department of life, and that is by

experience. Familiarize the student with the works of the real masters

of literature and you have safeguarded him against the pretenders.

After he has become acquainted with the look and the ring of the pure

gold he is less likely to be imposed upon by the counterfeit. The

end here indicated cannot be reached by analysis, or by a course in

rhetoric and sentence structure, or by a microscopical examination of

the writer’s vocabulary, but by direct sympathetic intercourse with the

best literature, through the living voice, or through your own silent

perusal of it. The great Dantean and Shakespearean scholar is usually

the outcome of a mental habit that would make Dante and Shakespeare

impossible.

So eminent a critic as Frederic Harrison is reported as praising this

sentence from the new British author Maurice Hewlett: “In the milk

of October dawns her calm brows had been dipped.” The instructor in

literature should be able to show his class why this is not good

literature. The suggestion of brows dipped in milk is not a pleasant

one. One cannot conceive of any brow the beauty of which would be

enhanced by it, even by the milk of October dawns, if there were

anything in October dawns that in the remotest way suggested milk. Mr.

Hewlett is so in love with a crisp style that he describes his heroine

as lying white and twisting on a couch, crisping and uncrisping her

little hands.

Such things come from straining after novelty. They proceed from an

unripe taste. Men of real genius and power are at times guilty of such

lapses, or go astray in quest of novel images. Walter Bagehot sometimes

did. Writing of Sydney Smith, his rhetoric shows its teeth in this

fashion: “Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders;

Sydney Smith was a molar. He did not run a long sharp argument into

the interior of a question; he did not, in the common phrase, go

deeply into it; but he kept it steadily under the contact of a strong,

capable, jawlike understanding, pressing its surface, effacing its

intricacies, grinding it down.” Such a comparison has the merit of

being vivid; it also has the demerit of an unworthy alliance,--it

marries the noble and the ignoble. You cannot lift mastication up to

the level of intellectual processes, and to seriously compare the two

is to degrade the latter. Sydney Smith himself could not have been

guilty of such bad taste.

Let me finish this chapter with a bit of prose from Ben Jonson.

“Some words are to be culled out for ornament and color, as we gather

flowers to strow houses or make garlands; but they are better when

they grow to our style; as in a meadow where, though the mere grass

and greenness delight, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and

beautify.”