Transcriber's Notes: Words in italics in the original are surrounded by
_underscores_. A row of asterisks represents a thought break. Ellipses
match the original. A complete list of corrections as well as other
notes follows the text.
TALKS ON TEACHING
LITERATURE
BY
ARLO BATES
[Illustration: Riverside Press colophon]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1906
COPYRIGHT 1906 BY ARLO BATES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1906_
These Talks are founded upon lectures delivered before the Summer
School of the University of Illinois in June, 1905. The interest which
was shown in the subject and in the views expressed encouraged me to
state rather more elaborately and in book form what I felt in regard to
a matter which is certainly of great importance, and concerning which
so many teachers are in doubt. I wish here to express my obligation to
Assistant-Professor Henry G. Pearson, who has very kindly gone over the
manuscript, and to whom I am indebted for suggestions of great value.
CONTENTS
I. THE PROBLEM 1
II. THE CONDITIONS 11
III. SOME DIFFICULTIES 28
IV. OTHER OBSTACLES 39
V. FOUNDATIONS OF WORK 61
VI. PRELIMINARY WORK 74
VII. THE INSPIRATIONAL USE OF LITERATURE 88
VIII. AN ILLUSTRATION 96
IX. EDUCATIONAL 109
X. EXAMINATIONAL 121
XI. THE STUDY OF PROSE 136
XII. THE STUDY OF THE NOVEL 152
XIII. THE STUDY OF _MACBETH_ 165
XIV. CRITICISM 193
XV. LITERARY WORKMANSHIP 207
XVI. LITERARY BIOGRAPHY 222
XVII. VOLUNTARY READING 227
XVIII. IN GENERAL 237
INDEX 245
TALKS ON TEACHING
LITERATURE
I
THE PROBLEM
Few earnest teachers of literature have escaped those black moments
when it seems perfectly evident that the one thing sure in connection
with the whole business is that literature cannot be taught. If they
are of sensitive conscience they are likely to have wondered at times
whether it is honest to go on pretending to give instruction in a
branch in which instruction was so obviously impossible. The more
they consider, the more evident it is that if a pupil really learns
anything _in_ literature,—as distinguished from learning _about_
literature,—he does it himself; and they cannot fail to see that as
an art literature necessarily partakes of the nature of all art, the
quality of being inexpressible and unexplainable in any language except
its own.
The root of whatever difficulty exists in fulfilling the requirements
of modern courses of training which have to do with literature is just
this fact. Any art, as has been said often and often, exists simply and
solely because it embodies and conveys what can be adequately expressed
in no other form. A picture or a melody, a statue or a poem, gives
delight and inspiration by qualities which could belong to nothing
else. To teach painting or music or literature is at best to talk about
these qualities. Words cannot express what the work or art expresses,
or the work itself would be superfluous; and the teacher of literature
is therefore apparently confronted with the task of endeavoring to
impart what language itself cannot say.
So stated the proposition seems self-contradictory and absurd. Indeed
it too often happens that in actual practice it is so. Teachers weary
their very souls in necessarily fruitless endeavors to achieve the
impossible, and fail in their work because they have not clearly
apprehended what they could effect and what they should endeavor to
effect. In any instruction it is of great importance to recognize
natural and inevitable limitations, and nowhere is this more true than
in any teaching which has to do with the fine arts. In other branches
failure to perceive the natural restrictions of the subject limits the
efficiency of the teacher; in the arts it not only utterly vitiates all
work, but it gives students a fundamentally wrong conception of the
very nature of that with which they are dealing.
In most studies the teacher has to do chiefly with the understanding,
or, to put it more exactly, with the intellect of the pupil. In dealing
with literature he must reckon constantly with the emotions also. If
he cannot arouse the feelings and the imaginations of his students,
he does not succeed in his work. Not only is this difficult in itself,
but it calls for an emotional condition in the instructor which is
not easily combined with the didactic mood required by teaching; a
condition, moreover, which begets a sensitiveness to results much
more keen than any disappointment likely to be excited by failure to
carry a class triumphantly through a lesson in arithmetic or history.
This sensitiveness constantly brings discouragement, and this in turn
leads to renewed failure. In work which requires the happiest mood
on the part of the teacher and the freest play of the imagination,
the consciousness of any lack of success increases the difficulty a
hundredfold. The teacher who is able by sheer force of determination to
manage the stupidities of a dull algebra class, may fail signally in
the attempt to make the same force carry him through an unappreciated
exercise in "Macbeth." It is true that no teaching is effective unless
the interest as well as the attention of the pupils is enlisted;
but whereas in other branches this is a condition, in the case of
literature it is a prime essential.
The teaching of literature, moreover, is less than useless if it is
not educational as distinguished from examinational. It is greatly to
be regretted that necessity compels the holding of examinations at
all in a subject of which the worth is to be measured strictly by the
extent to which it inspires the imagination and develops the character
of the student. Any system of examinations is likely to be at best a
makeshift made inevitable by existing conditions, and it is rendered
tolerable only where teachers—often at the expense, under present
school methods, of a stress of body and of soul to be appreciated
only by those who have taught—are able to mingle a certain amount of
education with the grinding drill of routine work. Examination papers
hardly touch and can hardly show the results of literary training which
are the only excuse for the presence of this branch in the school
curriculum. Every faithful worker who is trying to do what is best for
the children while fulfilling the requirements of the official powers
above him is face to face with the fact that the tabulated returns of
intermediates and finals do not in the least represent his best or most
laboriously achieved success.
Under these conditions it is not strange that so many teachers are at a
loss to know what they are expected to do or what they should attempt
to do. If the teachers in the secondary schools of this country were
brought together into some Palace of Truth where absolute honesty was
forced upon them, it would be interesting and perhaps saddening to
find how few could confidently assert that they have clear and logical
ideas in regard to the teaching of literature. They would all be able
to say that they dealt with certain specified books because such work
is a prominent part of the school requirement; and many would, unless
restrained by the truth-compelling power of their environment, add
vague phrases about broadening the minds of the children. A pitiful
number would be forced to confess that they had no clear conception of
what they were to do beyond loading up the memories of the luckless
young folk with certain dead information about books to be unloaded at
the next examination, and there left forever. Too often "broadening the
mind" of the young is simple flattening it out by the dead weight of
lifeless and worthless fact.
This uncertainty in regard to what they are to do and how they are
to do it is constantly evident in the complaints and inquiries of
teachers. "How would you teach 'Macbeth'?" one asked me. "Do you think
the sources of the plot should be thoroughly mastered?" Another wrote
me that she had always tried to make the moral lesson of "Silas Marner"
as clear and strong as possible, but that one of her boys had called
her attention to the fact that no question on such a matter had ever
appeared in the college entrance examination papers, and that she did
not know what to do. A third said frankly that she could never see
what there was in literature to teach, so she just took the questions
suggested by a text-book and confined her attention to them. If these
seem extreme cases, it is chiefly because they are put into words.
Certainly the number of instructors who are virtually in the position
of the third teacher is by no means small.
Even the editors of "school classics" are sometimes found to be no more
enlightened than those they profess to aid, and not infrequently seem
more anxious to have the appearance of doing a scholarly piece of work
than one fitted for actual use. The devices they recommend for fixing
the attention and enlightening the darkness of children in literary
study are numerous; but not infrequently they are either ludicrous or
pathetic. A striking example is that conspicuously futile method, the
use of symbolic diagrams. The attempt to represent the poetry, the
pathos, the passion of "The Merchant of Venice" or "Romeo and Juliet"
by a diagram like a proposition in geometry seems to me not only the
height of absurdity, but not a little profane. I have examined these
cryptic combinations of lines, tangents, triangles, and circles,
with more bewilderment than comprehension, I confess; generally with
irritation; and always with the profound conviction that they could
hardly be surpassed as a means of producing confusion worse confounded
in the mind of any child whatever. Other schemes are only less wild,
and while excellent and helpful text-books are not wanting, not a
few show evidence that the writers were as little sure of what they
were trying to effect, or of how it were best effected, as the most
bewildered teacher who might unadvisedly come to them for enlightenment.
Instruction in literature as it exists to-day in the common schools of
this country is almost always painstaking and conscientious; but it is
by no means always intelligent. The teachers who resort to diagrams are
sincerely in earnest, and no less faithful are those who at the expense
of most exhausting labor are dragging classes through the morass of
questions suggested by the least desirable of school editions of
college requirements. They dose their pupils with notes as Mrs. Squeers
dosed the poor wretches at Dotheboys Hall with brimstone and treacle.
The result is much the same in both cases.
"Oh! Nonsense," rejoined Mrs. Squeers. . . . "They have
brimstone and treacle, partly because if they hadn't something
or other in the way of medicine they'd be always . . . giving a
world of trouble, and partly because it spoils their appetites,
and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner."
Certainly any child, no matter how great his natural appetite for
literature, must find the desire greatly diminished after a dose of
text-book notes.
The difficulties of teachers in handling this branch of instruction
have been increased by the system under which work must be carried
on. The tremendous problem of educating children in masses has yet
to be solved, and it is at least doubtful if it can be worked out
successfully without a very substantial diminution of the requirements
now insisted upon. Certainly it is hardly conceivable that with the
curriculum as crowded as it is at present any teacher could do much
in the common schools with the teaching of literature. The pedagogic
committees who have fixed the college entrance requirements, moreover,
seem to have acted largely along conventional lines. In the third
place the spirit of the time is out of sympathy with art, and the
variety and insistence of outside calls on the attention and interest
of the children make demands so great as to leave the mind dull to
finer impressions. To the boy eager over football, the circus, and
the automobile race he is to see when school is out, even an inspired
teacher may talk in vain about Dr. Primrose, Lady Macbeth, or any other
of the immortals. Ears accustomed to the strident measures of the
modern street-song are not easily beguiled by the music of Milton, and
yet the teacher of to-day is expected to persuade his flock that they
should prefer "L'Allegro" to the vulgar but rollicking "rag-time" comic
songs of dime-museum and alley. Under circumstances so adverse, it is
not to be wondered at that teachers are not only discouraged but often
bewildered.
What happens in many cases is sufficiently well shown by this extract
from a freshman composition, in which the writer frankly gives an
account of his training in English literature in a high school not
twenty-five miles from Boston:
Very special attention was paid to the instruction of the
classics as to what the examinations require. As closely as
possible the faculty determine the scope of the examinations,
and the class is drilled in that work especially. Examination
papers are procured for several years back, and are given
to the students as regular high school examinations, and
as samples of the kind of questions to be expected. The
instructors notice especial questions that are often repeated
in examination papers, warn the pupils of them, and even go so
far as to estimate when the question will be used again. I have
heard in the classroom, "This question was given three years
ago, and it is about due again. They ask it every three or four
years."
Another boy wrote, in the same set of themes, that he had taken the
examination in the autumn, and added:
On the June examinations I noticed that there was nothing about
Milton, so I studied Milton with heart and soul.
Here we find stated plainly what everybody connected with teaching
knows to be common, and indeed what under the present system is almost
inevitable. I know of many schools of no inconsiderable standing where
in all branches old examination papers, if not used as the text-books,
are at least the actual guide to all work done in the last year of
fitting for college. This is perhaps only human, and it is easy to
understand; but it certainly is not education, and of that fact both
students and teachers are entirely well aware. All this I say with
no intention of blaming anybody for what is the result of difficult
conditions. It is not well, however, to ignore what is perfectly well
known, and what is one of the important difficulties of the situation.
The problem, then, which confronts the teacher in the secondary school
is twofold. He has to decide in the first place what the teaching of
literature can and should legitimately accomplish, and in the second,
by what means this may most surely and effectively be done. In a word,
although work in this line has been going on multitudinously and
confusedly for years, we are yet far from sufficiently definite ideas
why and how literature should be taught to children.
II
THE CONDITIONS
The inclusion of literature in the list of common school studies,
however the original intent may have been lost sight of, was
undoubtedly made in the interest of general culture. It is not certain
that those who put it in had definite conceptions of methods or
results, but unquestionably their idea was to aid the development of
the children's minds by helping them to appreciate and to assimilate
thoughts of nobility and of beauty, and by fostering a love for
literature which should lead them to go on acquiring these from the
masterpieces. How clear and well defined in the minds of educators
this idea was it is needless to inquire. It is enough that it was
undoubtedly sincere, and that it was founded on a genuine faith in the
broadening and elevating influence of art.
The importance of literature as a means of mental development used to
be taken for granted. Our fathers and grandfathers had for the classics
a reverence which the rising generation looks back to as a phase of
antiquated superstition, hardly more reasonable than the worship of
sacred wells or a belief in goblins. So much stress is now laid
upon the tangible and the material as the only genuine values, that
everything less obvious is discredited. The tendency is to take only
direct results into consideration; and influences which serve rather to
elevate character than to aid in money-getting are at best looked upon
with toleration.
That sense of mankind, however, which depends upon the perception of
the few, and which in the long run forms the opinion of society in
spite of everything, holds still to the importance of literature in any
intelligent scheme of education. The popular disbelief makes enormously
difficult the work of the teacher, but the force of the conviction
of the wise minority keeps this branch in the schools. The sincere
teacher, therefore, naturally tries to analyze effects, and to discern
possibilities, in order to discover upon what facts the belief in the
educational value of the study of literature properly rests.
The most obvious reasons for the study of literature may be quickly
disposed of. It is well for a student to be reasonably familiar with
the history of literature, with the names and periods of great writers.
This adds to his chances of appearing to advantage in the world,
and especially in that portion of society where he can least afford
to be at a disadvantage. He is provided with facts about books and
authors quite as much to protect him from the ill effects of appearing
ignorant as for any direct influence this knowledge will have on his
mind. Whatever the tendency of the times to undervalue in daily
life acquaintance with the more refined side of human knowledge, the
fact remains that to betray ignorance in these lines may bring real
harm to a person's social standing. Every one recognizes that among
educated people a lad is better able to make his way if he does not
confound the age of Shakespeare with that of Browning, and if he is
able to distinguish between Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer. Such
information may not be specially vital, but it is worth possessing.
Considerations of this sort, however, are evidently not of weight
enough to account for the place of the study in the schools, and still
less to excuse the amount of time and attention bestowed upon it. The
same line of reasoning would defend the introduction of dancing, because
Those move easiest who have learned to dance.
More important and more far-reaching reasons must be found to satisfy
the teacher, and to hearten him for the severe labor of working with
class after class in the effort, not always successful, of arousing
interest and enthusiasm over the writings which go by the name of
English Classics. Some of these I may specify briefly. To deal with
them exhaustively would take a book in itself, and would leave no room
for the consideration of methods.
A careful and intelligent study of masterpieces of prose or verse,
the teacher soon perceives, must develop greatly the student's sense
of the value of words. This is not the highest function of this work,
but it is by no means one to be despised. Literary study affords
opportunities for training of this sort which are not to be found
elsewhere; and a sensitiveness to word-values is with a child the
beginning of wisdom.
Children too often acquire and adults follow the habit of accepting
words instead of ideas. A genuine appreciation of the worth of language
is after all the chief outward sign of the distinction between the wise
man and the dullard. One is content to receive speech as sterling coin,
and the other perceives that words are but counters. If students could
but appreciate the difference between apprehending and comprehending
what they are taught, between learning words and assimilating ideas,
the intellectual millennium would be at hand. Children need to learn
that the sentence is after all only the envelope, only the vehicle for
the thought. Everybody agrees to this theoretically, but practically
the fact is generally ignored. The child is father to the man in
nothing else more surely than in the trait of accepting in perfect good
faith empty words as complete and satisfactory in themselves. The habit
of being content with phrases once bred into a child can be eradicated
by nothing short of severe intellectual surgery.
To say that words are received as sufficient in themselves and not as
conveying ideas sounds like a paradox; but there are few of us who
may not at once make a personal application and find an illustration
in the common phrases and formulas of our life. Perhaps none of us
are free from the fault of sometimes substituting empty phrases for
vital rules of conduct. The most simple and the most tremendous
facts of human life are often known only as lifeless statements
rather than realized as vibrant truths. With children the language
of text-book or classroom is so likely to be repeated by rote and
remembered mechanically that constant vigilance on the part of the
teacher can hardly overcome the evil. Force the boy who on the college
entrance examination paper writes fluently that "Milton is the poet
of sublimity" to try to define, even to himself, what the statement
means, and the result is confusion. He meant nothing. He had the words,
but they had never conveyed to him a thought. Language should be the
servant of the mind, but never was servant that so constantly and so
successfully usurped the place of master.
Children must be taught, and taught not simply by precept but by
experience, to realize that the value of the word lies solely in its
efficiency as a vehicle of thought. They must learn to appreciate as
well as to know mechanically that language is to be estimated by its
effect in communicating the idea, and that to be satisfied with words
for themselves is obvious folly. For enforcing this fact literature is
especially valuable. It is hardly possible in even the most superficial
work on a play of Shakespeare, for instance, for the reader to fail
to perceive how the idea burns through the word, how wide is the
difference between the mere apprehension of the language and the
comprehension of the poet's meaning. In the study of great poetry the
impossibility of resting satisfied with anything short of the ideas is
so strongly brought out that it cannot be ignored or forgotten; and in
this way pupils are impressed with the value of words.
This sensitiveness to the value of words in general is closely coupled
with an appreciation of the force of words in particular, of what may
be called word-values. The power of appreciating that a word is merely
a messenger bringing an idea, is naturally connected with the ability
to distinguish with exactness the nature and the value of the thought
which the messenger presents. To feel the need of knowing clearly and
surely the thought expressed inevitably leads to precision and delicacy
in distinguishing the significance and force of language. When once a
child appreciates the difference between the accepting of what he reads
vaguely or mechanically and the getting from it its full meaning, he
is eager to have it all; he finds delight in the intellectual exercise
of searching out each hidden suggestion and in the sense of possession
which belongs to achieving the thought of the master. It is not to be
expected that our pupils shall be able to receive in its full richness
the deepest thought of the poets, but they none the less find delight
in possessing it to the extent of their abilities. The point is too
obvious to need expansion; but every instructor will recognize its
great importance.
Obvious as is this importance of the sense of the value of words and
a sensitiveness to word-values, it is not infrequently overlooked.
Teachers see the need of a knowledge of the meaning of terms and
phrases in a particular selection without stopping to think of the
prime value of the principle involved, or indeed that a general
principle is involved at all. Still more often they fail to perceive
all that logically follows. In exact, vital realization of the full
force of language lies the secret of sharing the wisdom of the ages. If
students can be trained to penetrate through the word of the printed
page to the thought, they are brought into communication with the
master-minds of the race. It is not learning to read in the common,
primary acceptation of the term that opens for the young the thought
of the race; but learning to read in the higher and deeper sense of
receiving the word only as a symbol behind and beyond which the thought
lies concealed from the ordinary and superficial reader.
Most of all is it the business of the young to learn about life.
Whatever does not tend, directly or indirectly, to make the child
better acquainted with the world he has come into, with how he must
and how he should bear himself under its complex conditions, is of
small value as far as education goes. Of rules for conduct he is given
plenty as to matters of morality and of religion. Moral laws and
religious precepts are good, and could they accomplish all that is
sometimes expected of them, life would quickly be a different matter,
and teachers would find themselves living in an earthly paradise.
Unhappily these excellent maxims effect in actual life far less than
is to be desired. Not infrequently the urchin who has been stuffed
with moral admonitions as a doll with sawdust shows in his conduct
no regard for them other than a fine zeal in scorning them. Children
are seldom much affected by explicit directions in regard to conduct.
They must be reached by indirection, and they are moulded less by what
they recognize as intentionally wise views of life than by those which
they receive unconsciously. The more just these unrecognized ideas
of themselves and of the world are, the greater is the chance that
they will develop a character well balanced and well adjusted to the
conditions of human life.
Children live in a world largely made up of half-perceptions, of
misunderstandings, and of dreams; a world pathetically full of guesses.
They must depend largely upon appearances, and constantly confound
what seems with what really is. They learn but slowly, however, to
shape their beliefs or their emotions by conventionality. They do not
easily acquire the vice of accepting shams because some authority has
endorsed these. All of us are likely to have had queerly uncomfortable
moments when we have found ourselves confounded and reproved by
the unflinching honesty of the child; and we have been forced to
confess, at least to ourselves, that much of our admiration is mere
affectation, many of our professions unadulterated truckling to some
authority in which after all we have little real faith. Children are
naturally too unsophisticated for self-deception of this sort. They
confound substance and shadow, but they do it in good faith and with
no affectations. They are therefore at the place where they most need
sound and sure help to apprehend and to comprehend those things which
their elders call the realities of life.
What human nature and human life are like is learned most quickly
and most surely from the best literature. The outward, the evident
conditions of society and of humanity may perhaps be best obtained by
children from the events of every-day existence; but in all that goes
deeper the wisdom of great writers is the surest guide.
On the face of it such a proposition may not seem self-evident,
and to not a few teachers it is likely to appear a little absurd.
Children, it is evident, learn the realities of life by living. They
perceive physical truth by the persuasive force of actual experience:
by tumbling down and bumping their precious noses; by unmistakably
impressive contact with the fist of a pugnacious school-fellow; by
being hungry or uncomfortably stuffed with Thanksgiving turkey; by
heat and by cold, by sweets or by sours, by hardness or by softness.
Certainly through such means as these the child gains knowledge and
develops mentally; but the process is inevitably slow. Most of all
is the growth in the youthful mind of general deductions and the
perception of underlying principles extremely gradual. He does not
learn quickly enough that certain lines of conduct are likely to lead
to unfortunate ends. Even when this is grasped, he has not come to
appreciate what human laws underlie the whole matter; nor is he in the
least likely to realize them so fully as to shape by them his conduct
in the steadily more and more complicated affairs of life.
The small boy learns the wisdom of moderation from the stomach-ache
which follows too much plum-pudding or too many green apples—if the
pain is often enough repeated. The matter, however, is apt to present
itself to his mind as a sort of tacit bargain between himself and Fate:
so many green apples, so much stomach-ache; so much self-indulgence and
so much pain, and the account is balanced. Life is not so simple as
this; and that Fate does not make bargains so direct is learned from
experience so gradually as often to be learned too late. To tell this
to a child is of very little effect; for even if he believes it with
his childish intelligence, he can hardly feel the intimate links which
bind all humanity together, and make him subject to the same conditions
that rule his elders and instructors.
The phrase "realities of life," moreover, includes not only
sensible—that is, material—facts and conditions, but the more subtle
things of inner existence. A hundred persons are able to gather facts,
while very few are capable of drawing from them adequate conclusions
or of perceiving how one truth bears upon another. A very moderate
degree of intelligence is required for analysis as compared to that
necessary for synthesis. The power "to put two and two together," as
the common phrase has it, grows slowly in the mind of a child. Within
a limited range children appreciate that one fact is somehow joined to
another; and indeed the education which life gives consists chiefly in
expanding this perception. The connection between touching a hot coal
and being burned brings home the plain physical relations early. The
connection between disobedience and unpleasant consequences will be
borne in upon the youthful consciousness according to the sharpness
of discipline by which it is enforced; and so on to the end of the
chapter. To perceive a relation and to appreciate what that relation
is are, however, different matters. The understanding of the nature
of breaking rules and suffering in consequence involves a perception
of underlying principle, and some comprehension of the real nature of
these principles.
The part which literature may play in giving children, and for that
matter their elders, a vivid perception of moral laws is shown by the
use which has been made of fables and moral tales. The parables of
Scripture illustrate the point. Of the habit of making literature
directly a vehicle for moral instruction by the drawing of morals I
shall have something to say later; but the extent to which this has
been done at least serves here to make clearer what we mean by saying
that in this study the child learns general principles and their
relation. The small child, for instance, who is told in tender years
that ingeniously virtuous fable which relates the heroic doings of
little George Washington and his immortal hatchet, gets some idea of a
connection between virtue and joy in the abstract. A notion faint, but
none the less genuine, remains in his mind that some real connection
exists between truth and desirability; and the same sort of thing holds
true in cases where the teaching is less directly didactic.
The directly didactic is likely to be most in evidence in the training
of children, and so affords convenient illustration of the illuminating
effect of literature on young minds. Despite the fact that I disbelieve
in reading into any tale or poem a moral which is not expressly put
there by the author, and that I hold more strongly yet to the belief
that the most marked and most lasting effects of imaginative work are
indirect, I am not without a perception of the value at a certain stage
of human development of the direct moral of the fable and the improving
tale. A small lad of ten within the range of my observation, upon whom
had been lavished an abundance, and perhaps even a superabundance, of
moral precept, astonished and disconcerted his mother by remarking
with delightful naïveté that he had at school been reading "The Little
Merchant," in Miss Edgeworth's "Parents' Assistant," and that from it
he had learned how mean and foolish it is to lie. "But, my dear boy,"
the mother cried in dismay, "I've been telling you that ever since
you were born!" "Oh, well," responded the lad, with the unconsciously
brutal frankness of his years, "but that never interested me." The
obvious moral teaching that had made no impression when offered as a
bare precept had been effective to him when presented as an appeal to
his feeling.
Through imaginative literature abstract truths are made to have for
the child a reality which is given to them by the experiences of daily
life only by the slowest of degrees. Children rarely generalize,
except in matters of personal feeling and in the regions of general
misapprehension. A child easily receives the fact of the moment for a
truth of all time: if he is miserable, for instance, he is very apt to
feel that he must always be in that doleful condition; but this is in
no real sense a generalization. It is more than half self-deception.
Any child, however, who has been thrilled by a single line of
imaginative poetry has—even if unconsciously—come into direct touch
with a wide and humanly universal truth.
Especially and essentially is this to be said of truth which has to do
with human feeling, the universal truth of the emotions. The man or
the woman into whom the school-boy or girl is to grow will in shaping
life be guided chiefly by the feelings. Whether the ordinary mortal
lives well or ill, basely or nobly, dully or vividly, is practically
determined by what he feels. However much the convictions have to do
in ordering conduct, feeling has more, and conviction itself is with
most mortals inseparably bound up with the emotions. The highest office
of education is to develop the emotions highly and nobly; and it is no
less essential to the intellectual than to the moral well-being of the
child that he be bred to feel as deeply and as wholesomely as possible.
Every teacher knows that in dealing with children the ultimate appeal
is to their feelings. If a crisis arises in school-life it is to the
emotions that the matter is inevitably referred, whether the instructor
likes this or not, and whether the appeal is made openly or is indirect
and tacit. Teaching must deal with the sentiments as well as with the
understanding. That no other means of training and properly developing
the feelings of youth is so efficient as literature seems to me a
proposition too self-evident to need further comment.
Enthusiasm is so closely connected with the cultivation and training
of the emotions that it is not easy to draw a line between them. While
there is certainly no need to enlarge here upon the worth of enthusiasm
in education or in life, or upon literature as a means of arousing it,
it is worth while to emphasize the extent to which the mind of youth
may be affected by enthusiasm. The effects are naturally often so
indirect or intangible as not to be easily measured, but often, too,
they are direct and practical. Some years ago in a country school in
eastern Maine was still paramount the old-time Greenleaf's "Arithmetic"
which we elders remember with mixed feelings. The law of education
in those days, when children were still expected to do things which
were mapped out for them and to follow a course of study whether it
chanced to please their individual fancy or not, enforced the mastering
of everything in the text-book, even to sundry weird processes with
queer names such as "Alligation Alternate" and the like. The teacher
of this particular school, a plucky morsel of New England womanhood,
not much bigger than a chickadee, set herself resolutely to carry
through the arithmetic a class of farmer lads, better at the plow than
in mathematics. What happened she told me twenty-five years ago, and
I am still able to call up the vision of the air half of defiance,
half of amusement with which she said: "The boys were in a perfectly
hopeless muddle. I had explained and explained, until I wished I could
either cry like a woman or be a man and swear! The third day I had
an inspiration. In the very middle of the recitation, I told them to
shut up their books, and I cleaned every mark of the lesson off of
the blackboard. Then without a word of explanation I began to tell
them a little about the pamphlet Sir Walter Raleigh wrote about the
'Revenge;' and then I began to recite Tennyson's ballad—which was new
then. I was wrought up to the very top-notch anyway, and I just gave
that ballad for all there was in me. They were dazed a minute, and
then they pricked up their ears, their eyes began to shine, and I had
them. We kindled each other, and by the time I got through the tears
were running down my cheeks for simple excitement. When I got to the
end, you could just feel the hush. Then I told them to go outdoors and
snow-ball for ten minutes, and then to come in and conquer that lesson.
They were great, rough farmer boys, you understand; but the moment they
were outside, they gave a cheer, just to express things they couldn't
have put into words. When they came in they were alive to the ends of
their fingers, and we went over that old Alligation with a perfect
rush." This sort of thing would not be possible anywhere outside of the
old-fashioned country school, but it is a capital illustration of the
way in which poetry may stir the enthusiasm.
More valuable still, because at once deeper and most lasting, is the
effect of literature in nourishing imagination. The real progress which
children make in education—the assimilation of the knowledge which
they receive—depends largely upon this power. In many branches of
study this is easily evident. What a child actually knows of geography
or of history obviously depends upon the extent to which his mind is
able to make real places or events remote in space or in time. The
same is true of those studies where the fact is not so evident; and it
is hardly too much to say that the advance of any student in higher
education is measured by the development of his imagination.
The teacher of literature in the secondary schools, then, is to
consider that although his work is primarily done as a part of the
school requirement, he need not be without some clear and deliberate
intention in regard to the permanent effect upon the education and
so upon the character of the pupil. He may treat the getting of his
charges through the examinations as a purely secondary matter; a
matter, moreover, which is practically sure to be accomplished if the
greater and better purposes of the study have been secured. Besides a
general knowledge of literary history, the student should gain from
his training in the secondary school a vivid sense of the importance
and value of words; an appreciation of word-values as shown in actual
use by the masters; should increase in knowledge of life, and as it
were gain experience vicariously, so as to advance in perception of
intellectual and moral values; should be advanced in the control of
the feelings; in enthusiasm; and in the development of that noblest of
faculties, the imagination.
III
SOME DIFFICULTIES
To deal clearly with the work of teaching, it is first of all essential
to deal frankly. In order that suggestions in regard to instruction
in literature may be of practical value, we must be entirely honest
in admitting and in facing whatever difficulties lie in the way and
whatever limitations are imposed by the conditions under which the work
is done.
As things are at present arranged, an instructor, it seems not unjust
to say, must decide how far he is able to mingle genuine education with
the routine work which the system imposes upon him. If he has not the
power to settle this question, or if he is lacking in the disposition
to propose the question to himself, his labor is inevitably confined
chiefly to routine. His students are turned out examination-perfect,
it may be, but with minds as fatally cramped and checked as the feet
of a Chinese lady. If literature has a high and important function in
education, the teacher must consider deeply both what that function is
and how he is best to develop it.
The failure on the part of instructors to do this makes much of the
work done in the secondary grades so mechanical as to be of the
smallest possible use so far as the expansion of the mind and of
the character of children is concerned. For a pupil in the lower
grades the first purpose of any and of all school-work should be
to teach him to use his mind,—to think. The actual acquirement of
facts is of importance really slight as compared to the value of
this. If at twelve he knows how to read and to write, is sound on the
multiplication-table, is familiar with the outlines of grammar and the
broadest divisions of geography, yet is accustomed to think for himself
in regard to the facts which he perceives from life or receives from
books, he may be regarded as admirably well on in the education which
he is to gain from the schools. Indeed, if he have learned to think,
he is excellently started even if he have accomplished nothing further
than simply to read and to write.
In these years of child-life the study of literature can legitimately
have but two objects: it may and should minister to the delight of
youth, that so the taste for good books be fostered and as it were
inbred; and it should nourish the power of thinking. Whatever is beyond
this has no place in the lower grades, and personally I am entirely
free to say that much that is now called "the study of literature" is
the sort of elaborate work which belongs in the college or nowhere.
Few students are qualified to "study"—as the term is commonly
interpreted—literature until they are advanced further than the boys
and girls admitted to our high schools; further, indeed, than many who
are allowed to enter the universities. The great majority of those who
grind laboriously through the college entrance requirements in English
are utterly unequal to the work and get from it little of value and a
good deal of harm.
What should be done in the lower grades, and usually all that can
with profit be attempted in the secondary schools anywhere, is to
cultivate in the children a love of literature and some appreciation
of it: appreciation intelligent, I mean, but not analytic. I would
have the secondary schools do little with the history of authors,
less with the criticism of style, and have no more explanation of
difficulties of language and of structure than is necessary for the
student's enjoyment. In a time when the draughts made by daily life
upon the attention of the young are so tremendous, when the pressure
of the more immediately practical branches of instruction is so great,
to add drudgery in connection with literature seems to me completely
futile and doubly wrong. The supreme test of success in whatever work
in literature is done in schools of the secondary grades should be,
according to my conviction, whether it has given delight, has fostered
a love of whatever is best in imaginative writings and in life.
The natural abilities of children differ widely, and perhaps more
difference still is made by the home influences in which they pass
their earliest years. What should be done in the nursery can never be
fully made up in the school, and what should be breathed in from an
atmosphere of cultivation can never be imparted by instruction. It is
manifestly impossible to interest all in the artistic side of life to
the same extent, just as it is idle to hope to teach all to draw with
equal skill. This does not alter the direction of effort. The teacher
must recognize and accept natural limitations, but not on that account
be satisfied with aiming at less admirable results.
Whatever are the conditions, it is possible to do something to
foster a love of what is really good in literature, and to avoid the
substitution of formal drill in the history of authors, the study of
conundrums concerning the sources of plots, the meaning of obsolete
words, and like pedantic pedagogics, for the friendly and vital study
of what should be a warm, live topic. If young folk can be made really
to care for good books, not only is substantial and lasting good
gained, but most that is now attempted is more surely secured. William
Blake declares that the truth can never be told so as to be understood
and not be believed. In the same way it may be said that if children
can be trained to recognize the characteristics of good literature,
they are sure, in nine cases out of ten at least, to care for it.
This is the work which properly belongs to the secondary schools; and
it is quite as much as they can be expected to do even up to the close
of the high school course. I am personally unable to see what good
is accomplished by taking any body of school-children that ever came
under my own observation,—and the question must be judged by personal
experience,—and drilling them in such matters as the following. I have
taken these notes almost at random from approved school editions of the
classics, and they seem to me to be fairly representative.
Some striking resemblances in the incantation scenes in
"Macbeth" and Middleton's "Witch" have led to a somewhat
generally accepted belief that Thomas Middleton was answerable
for the alleged un-Shakespearean portions of "Macbeth."
* * * * *
Shakespeare's indebtedness in "Midsummer's Night's Dream" to
"Il Percone" admits of no dispute.
The incident of a Jew whetting his knife like Shylock occurs in
a Latin play, "Machiavellus," performed at St. John's College,
Cambridge, at Christmas, 1597.
The opening note in a popular edition of "Silas Marner" is a comment
upon this passage:
The questionable sound of Silas's loom, so unlike the natural,
cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, or the simple
rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the
Raveloe boys.
The note reads as follows:
The hand-loom, once found in every village and hamlet, was
controlled by the action of the feet on the treadles, and
worked by the hands. A figure representing the parts may
be found in "Johnson's Cyclopædia." The longer article on
"Weaving" in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" may also be
consulted. The rattle of the loom was in direct contrast
to the "cheerful trotting" of the winnowing-machine—an
old-fashioned hand-machine for separating the chaff from the
grain by means of wind produced by revolving fans. The flail,
still in common use for threshing grain by hand, consists of a
wooden staff or handle, hung on a club called a swiple, so as
to turn easily.
If the end of the study of fiction is the acquirement of dry facts,
this note may pass. I have purposely selected an example which is not
worse than the average, and which may perhaps be supposed to have an
excuse in the consideration that so many readers may be ignorant of all
the contrivances mentioned; but can any person with a sense of humor
suppose that a real boy is to get any proper enjoyment out of a story
when he is at the outset asked to consult a couple of cyclopædias, and
is interrupted in his reading by comments of this sort? The real point
of the passage, moreover,—the literary significance,—the fact that
the boys of Raveloe heard the winnowing-machine and threshing-flail
daily, and so were attracted by the novelty of Marner's weaving, with
the use of this by George Eliot to emphasize the weaver's isolation in
the neighborhood, is left utterly unnoticed.