may at first seem somewhat cryptic. What is meant by the attempt to
reach the enthusiasm of the child through the reason may not be at once
apparent. Yet the thing is simple. It is not difficult to lead children
to think, and to think deeply, of things which have touched their
feeling. If once their emotions are aroused, they will go actively
forward in every investigation of which their minds are capable,
and with whatever degree of appreciation they are equal to. A child
cannot, however, be reasoned into any vital admiration. The extent to
which an adult is to be touched emotionally by argument is extremely
limited. Few travelers, for instance, are able really to respond when
an officious verger or care-taker points out some historic spot, and
after glibly relating some event in his professional patter, ends with
a look which says almost more plainly than words: "Stand just here,
and thrill! Sixpence a thrill, please." Yet this is very much what is
expected of children. The teacher takes a famous book, laboriously
recounts its merits, its fame, its beauties, and then tacitly commands
the children: "Think of that, and thrill! One credit for every thrill."
It is true that the verger demands a fee and the teacher promises a
reward, but the result is the same. Do the children thrill? Is there a
conscientious teacher who has tried this method who has not with bitter
disappointment realized that the students have come out of the course
with nothing save a few poor facts and disfigured conventional opinions
which they reserve for examinations as they might save battered pennies
for the contribution-box? They have been personally conducted through
a course of literature. They come out of it in much the same condition
as return home the personally conducted through foreign art-galleries
who say: "Yes, I must have seen the 'Mona Lisa,' if it's in the Louvre.
I saw all the pictures there, you know." The chief difference is that
children are generally incapable, outside of examination-papers, of
pretending an enthusiasm which they do not feel.
One thing which is indisputable is that children know when they are
bored. Many adults become so proficient in the art of self-deception
as to be able to cheat themselves into thinking they are at the height
of enjoyment because they are doing what they consider to be the
proper thing; when in simple truth their only pleasure must lie in the
gratification of a futile vanity. Of children this is seldom true;
or, if it is true, it extends only to the fictions practiced by their
own childish world. If they have conventions, these differ from the
conventions of their elders, and they do not fool themselves with a
show of enjoyment when the reality is wanting. If they are wearied by a
book, the fact that it is a masterpiece does not in the least console
them. They may be forced by teachers to read or to study it, and to
say on examination-papers that it is beautiful; yet they not only know
they are not pleased, but to each other they are generally ready to
acknowledge it with perfect frankness.
The need of saying this in the present connection is that it is not
possible really to convince children they are enjoying the writing of
themes about Mrs. Primrose, or about Silas Marner and Effie, or on
the character of Lady Macbeth, unless they are vitally interested.
I am far from being so modern as to think that pupils should not be
asked to do anything which they do not wish to do; but I am radical
enough to believe that no other good which may be accomplished by the
study of literature in any other way can compensate for making good
books wearisome. The idea that literature is something to be vaguely
respected but not to be read for enjoyment is already sufficiently
prevalent; and rather than see it more widespread, I would have all the
so-called teaching of literature in the secondary schools abolished
altogether.
The last point which I mentioned as likely to diminish the value of
teaching is that it so often demands of teachers more than can be
surely or safely counted on in the way of fitness. This I do not mean
to dwell upon, nor is it my purpose to draw up a bill of arraignment
against my craft. I wish simply to comment that one essential, a prime
essential, in the teaching of literature is the power of imaginative
enthusiasm on the part of the teacher. This would be recognized if the
subject of instruction were any other of the fine arts. If teachers
were required to train school-children in the symphonies of Beethoven
or in the pictures of Titian, everybody would realize that some
special aptitude on the part of the instructor was requisite. Every
normal school or college graduate is set to teach the masterpieces of
Shakespeare or of Milton, and the fact that the poetry is as completely
a work of art as is symphony or picture, and that what holds true of
one as the product of artistic imagination must hold true of the other,
is quietly and even unconsciously ignored.
No amount of study will create in a teacher the artistic imagination in
its highest sense, although much may be done in the way of developing
artistic perception; but at least self-improvement may go far in the
nourishing of the important quality of self-honesty. An instructor
must learn to deal fairly with himself. He must be strong enough to
acknowledge to himself fearlessly if he is not able to care for some
work that is ranked as an artistic masterpiece. He must be willing to
say unflinchingly to himself that he cannot do justice to this work or
to that, because he is not in sympathy with it, or because he lacks any
experience which would give him a key to its mood and meaning.
One thing seems to me to be entirely above dispute in this delicate
inquiry: that it is idle to hope to impart to children what we have
not learned ourselves; and it follows that the first necessity is to
appreciate our shortcomings. I ask only for the same sort of honesty
which would by common consent be essential in teaching the more humble
branches. A teacher who could not solve quadratic equations would
manifestly be an ill instructor in algebra. By the same token it is
evident that a teacher who cannot enter into the heart of a poem, who
does not understand the mood of a play, who has not a real enthusiasm
for literature, is not fitted to help children to a comprehension and
an appreciation of these. Neither is the power to rehearse the praises
and phrases of critics or commentators a sufficient qualification for
teaching. In an examination-paper at the Institute of Technology a boy
recently wrote with admirable frankness and directness:
I confess that while I like Shakespeare, I like other poets
better, and while my teachers have told me that he was the
greatest writer, they never seemed to know why.
The boy unconsciously implies a most important fact, namely, that if
a teacher does not know why a poet is great, it is not only difficult
to convince the pupil of the reality of his claims, but also is it
impossible to disguise from the clever scholars the real ignorance
of the instructor. As well try to warm children by a description of
a fire as to endeavor to awake in them admiration and pleasure by
parrot-phrases, no matter how glibly or effectively repeated. They are
aroused only by the contagion of genuine feeling; they are moved only
by finding that the teacher is first genuinely moved himself.
It is bad enough when an instructor repeats unemotionally what he has
unemotionally acquired about arithmetic or geography. Pupils will
receive mechanically whatever is mechanically imparted; and in even
the most purely intellectual branches such training can at best only
distend the mind of the child without nourishing it. When it comes to
a study which is presented as of value precisely because it kindles
feeling, the absurdity becomes nothing less than monstrous.
Any child of ordinary intelligence comes sooner or later to perceive,
whether he reasons it out or not, that much of the literature presented
to him is not in the least worth the bother of study if it is to
be taken merely on its face-value. If "The Vicar of Wakefield" or
"Silas Marner" is to be read simply for the plot, either book might
be swept out of existence to-morrow and the world be little poorer.
A conscientious teacher will at least be honest with himself in
determining how much more than the obvious and often slight face-value
he is enabling his class to perceive.
An ordinary modern school-boy unconsciously but inevitably measures
the values of the books presented to him by the news of the day and
the facts of life as he sees it. If he is not made to feel that books
represent something more than a statement of outward fact or of
fiction, he is too clear-headed not to see that they are of little
real worth, and with the pitiless candor of youth he is too honest not
to acknowledge this to himself. Young people are apt to credit their
elders with enormous power of pretending. The conventionalities of
life, those arrangements which adults recognize as necessary to the
comfort and even to the continuance of society, are not infrequently
regarded by the young as rank hypocrisy. The same is true of any tastes
which they cannot share. Again and again I have come upon the feeling
among students that the respect for literature professed by their
elders was only one of the many shams of which adult life appears to
children to be so largely made up.
From the purely intellectual side of the matter, moreover, the youth
is right in feeling that there is nothing so remarkable in play or
poem as to justify the enthusiasm which he is told he should feel. If
he sees only what I have called the face-value, he would be a dunce
if he did not imagine an absurdity in the estimate at which the works
of great artists are held. He is precisely in the position of the man
who judges the great painting by its realistic fidelity to details,
and logically, from his point of view, ranks a well-defined photograph
above "The Night Watch" or the Dresden "Madonna." There is more thrill
and more emotion for the boy in the poorest newspaper account of a game
of football than in the greatest play of Shakespeare's,—unless the lad
has really got into the spirit of the poetry.
If nothing is to be taken into account but the intellectual content
of literature, the child is therefore perfectly right, and doubly so
from his own point of view. Regarded as a mere statement of fact it
is to be expected that the average modern boy will find "Macbeth" far
less exciting and absorbing than an account of a football match or of
President Roosevelt's spectacular hunting. If we expect the lad to
believe without contention and without mental reservation that the work
of literature is really of more importance and interest than these
articles of the newspaper or the magazine, we are forced to depend upon
the qualities which distinguish poetry as art. If books are to be used
only as glove-stretchers to expand mechanically the minds of the young,
it is better to throw aside the works of the masters, and to come down
frankly to able expositions of literal fact, stirring and absorbing.
It must be always borne in mind, moreover, that little permanent result
is produced except by what the pupil does for himself. The teacher is
there to encourage, to stimulate, to direct; but the real work is done
in the brain of the student. This limits what may wisely be attempted
in the line of instruction. What the teacher is able to lead the pupil
to discover or to think out for himself is within the limit of sound
and valuable work. With every class, and—what makes the problem much
more difficult—with every boy or girl in the class, the capacity will
vary. The signs, moreover, by which we determine how far a child is
thinking for himself, instead of more or less consciously mimicking
the mind of the master, are all well-nigh intangible, and must be
watched for with the nicest discernment. Often the teacher is obliged
to help the class or the individual as we help little children playing
at guessing-games with "Now you are hot," or "Now you are cold;" but
just as the game is a failure if the child has in the end to be told
outright the answer to the conundrum, so the instruction is a failure
if the student does not make his own discovery of the meaning and worth
of poem or play. The moment the instructor finds himself forced to do
the thinking for his class in any branch of study, he may be sure that
he has overstepped the boundary of real work, or at least that he has
been going too rapidly for his pupils to keep pace with him. This
is even likely to be true when he is obliged to do the phrasing, the
putting of the thought into word. He cannot profitably go farther at
that time. In another way, at another time, he may be able to bring
the class over the difficulty; but he is doing them an injury and not
a benefit, if he go on to do for them the thinking, or that realizing
of thought which belongs to putting thought into word. He is then not
educating, but "cramming." It is his duty to encourage, to assist, but
never to do himself what to be of value must be the actual work of the
learner himself.
All this is evident enough in those branches where results are definite
and concrete, like the learning of the multiplication-table or of the
facts of geography. It is equally true in subjects where reasoning is
essential, like algebra or syntax. Most of all, if not most evidently,
is it vitally true in any connection where are involved the feelings
and anything of the nature of appreciation of artistic values. We
evidently cannot do the children's memorizing for them; but no more
can we do for them their reasoning; and least of all is it possible
to manufacture for them their likings and their dislikings, their
appreciations and their enthusiasms. To tell children what feelings
they should have over a given piece of literature produces about the
same effect as an adjuration to stop growing so fast or a request that
they change the color of their eyes.
In any emotional as in any intellectual experience, intensity
and completeness must ultimately depend upon the capacity and the
temperament of the individual concerned. It is useless to hope that a
dull, stolid, unimaginative boy will have either the same appreciation
or the same enjoyment of art as his fellow of fine organization and
sensitive temperament. The personal limitation must be accepted, just
as is accepted the impossibility of making some youths proficient in
geometry or physics. It may be necessary under our present system—and
if so the fact is not to the credit of existing conditions—to present
the dull pupil with a set of ideas which he may use in examinations.
The proceeding would be not unlike providing the dead with an obolus by
way of fare across the Styx; and certainly in no proper sense could be
considered education. Difficult as it may be, the pupil must be made to
think and to feel for himself, or the work is naught.
Perhaps the tendency to try to do for the student what he should
accomplish for himself is the most general and the most serious of
all the errors into which teachers are likely to fall. The temptation
is so great, however, and the conditions so favorable to this sort of
mistake, that it is not possible to mete out to instructors who fall
into it an amount of blame at all equal to the gravity of the offense.
FOOTNOTES:
[42:1] I am unable to resist the temptation to call attention to the
intimation that the writer perceives some relation between poetry and
parsing. It would be interesting if he had developed this.
V
FOUNDATIONS OF WORK.
The foundation of any understanding or appreciation of literature is
manifestly the power of reading it intelligently. A truth so obvious
might seem to be taken for granted and to need no saying; but any
one who has dealt with entrance examination-papers is aware how
many students get to the close of their fitting-school life without
having acquired the power of reading with anything even approaching
intelligence. Primary as it may sound, I cannot help emphasizing as
the foundation of all study of literature the training of students in
reading, pure and simple.
The practical value of simple reading aloud seems to me to have been
too often overlooked by teachers of literature. Teachers read to their
pupils, and this is or should be of great importance; but the thing of
which I am now speaking is the reading of the students to the teacher
and to the class. In the first place a student cannot read aloud
without making evident the degree of his intelligent comprehension of
what he is reading. He must show how much he understands and how he
understands it.
The queer freaks in misinterpretation which come out in the reading
of pupils are often discouraging enough, but they are amusing and
enlightening. Any teacher can furnish absurd illustrations, and it is
not safe to assume of even apparently simple passages that the child
understands them until he has proved it by intelligent reading aloud.
The attention which oral reading is at present receiving is one of the
encouraging signs of the times, and cannot but do much to forward the
work of the teacher of literature.
Of so much importance is it, however, that the first impression of
a class be good, that the instructor must be sure either to find a
reasonably good reader among the pupils for the first rendering or must
give it himself. In plays this is hardly wise or practicable; but here
the parts are easily assigned beforehand, and the pride of the students
made a help in securing good results. In any work a class should be
made to understand that the first thing to do in studying a piece of
literature is to learn to read it aloud intelligently and as if it were
the personal utterance of the reader.
In dealing with a class it is often a saving of time and an easy method
of avoiding the effects of individual shyness to have the pupils read
in concert. In dealing with short pieces of verse this is, moreover,
a means of getting all the class into the spirit of the piece. The
method lacks, of course, in nicety; but it is in many cases practically
serviceable.
Above everything the teacher must be sure, before any attempt is
made to do anything further, that the pupil has a clear understanding
at least of the language of what he reads. My own experience with
boys who come from secondary schools even of good grade has shown me
that they not infrequently display an extraordinary incapability of
getting from the sentences and phrases of literature the most plain
and obvious meaning, especially in the case of verse; while as to
unusual expressions they are constantly at sea. On a recent entrance
examination-paper I had put, as a test of this very power, the lines
from "Macbeth:"
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff.
The play is one which they had studied carefully at school, and they
were asked to explain the force in these lines of "oblivious." Here are
some of the replies:
"Oblivious," used in this quotation, means that the person
speaking was not particular as to the kind of antidote that was
chosen.
A remedy that would not expose the lady to public suspicion.
The word "oblivious" implies a soothing cure, which will heal
without arousing the senses.
An antidote applied in a forgetful way, or unknown to the
person.
"Oblivious" here means some antidote that would put Lady
Macbeth to sleep while the doctor removed the cause of the
trouble.
"Oblivious antidote" means one that is very pleasing.
The word "oblivious" is beautifully used here. Macbeth wishes
the doctor to administer to Lady Macbeth some antidote which
will cure her of her fatal [_sic_] illness, but which will not
at all be any bitter medicine.
"Oblivious" here means relieving.
"Oblivious" means some remedy the doctor had forgotten, but
might remember if he thought hard enough.
Of course many of the replies were sensible and sound, but those hardly
better than these were discouragingly numerous.
In my own second-year work, in which the students have had all the
fitting-school training and the freshman drill besides, I am not
infrequently confounded by the inability of students to understand the
meaning of words which one uses as a matter of course. The statement
that Raleigh secretly married a Lady in Waiting, for instance,
reappeared in a note-book in the assertion that Sir Walter ran away
with Queen Elizabeth's waiting-maid; and a remark about something which
took place at Holland House brought out the unbelievable perversion
that the event happened "in a Dutch tavern." Personally I have never
discovered how far beyond words of one syllable a lecturer to students
may safely go in any assurance that his language will be understood by
all the members of his class; but this is one of the things which must
be decided if teaching is to be effective.
It must always be remembered that the vocabulary of literature is to
some extent different from that employed in the ordinary business of
life. The student is confronted with a set of terms which he seldom
or never uses in common speech; he must learn to appreciate fine
distinctions in the use of language; he must receive from words a
precision and a force of meaning, a richness of suggestion, which is
to be appreciated only by special and specific training. It will be
instructive for the teacher to take any ordinary high-school class, for
instance, and examine how far each member gets a complete and lucid
notion of what Burke meant in the opening sentence of the "Speech on
Conciliation:"
I hope, Sir, that notwithstanding the austerity of the Chair,
your good nature will incline you to some degree of indulgence
toward human frailty.
An instructor is apt to assume that the intent of a passage such as
this is entirely clear, yet I apprehend that not one high-school pupil
in twenty gets the real force of this unaided.
If this example seems in its diction too remote from every-day speech
to be a fair example, the teacher may try the experiment with the
sentence in "Books" in which Emerson speaks of volumes that are
So medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.
Every word is of common, habitual use, but most young people would be
well-nigh helpless when confronted with them in this passage.
The use in literature of allusion, of figures, of striking and unusual
employment of words, must become familiar to the student before he
is in a condition to deal with literature easily and with full
intelligence. The process must be almost like that of learning to read
in a foreign tongue. For a teacher to ignore this fact is to take the
position of a professor in Italian or Spanish who begins the reading
of his pupils not with words and simple sentences, but with intricate
prose and verse.
It must be remembered, moreover, that if the diction of literature
is removed from the daily experience of the pupil, the ideas and the
sentiments of literature are yet more widely apart from it. Literature
must deal largely with abstract thoughts and ideas, expressed or
implied; it is necessarily concerned with sentiments more elevated or
more profound than those with which life makes the young familiar. They
must be educated to take the point of view of the author, to rise to
the mental plane of a great writer as far as they are capable of so
doing. Until they can in some measure accomplish this, they are not
even capable of reading the literature they are supposed to study.
Fortunately it is with reading literature as it is with reading foreign
tongues. Often the context, the general tone, the spirit, will carry
us over passages in which there is much that is not clear to our exact
knowledge. Children are constantly able to get from a story or a poem
much more than would seem possible to their ignorance of the language
of literature. They are helped by truth to life even when they are far
from realizing what they are receiving; so that it would be manifestly
unjust to assume that the measure of a child's profit in a given case
is to be gauged too nicely by his acquaintance with the words, the
phrases, the tropes, the suggestions in which the author has conveyed
it. The fact remains, however, that in attempting to do anything
effective in the way of instruction the teacher has first of all to
train his pupil in the language of literature.