snuggled up against my knee and laid hold of my fingers, and I knew
some sense of the matter was working in him. After a moment or two I
asked him if he could repeat the first verse of the poem as if he were
the man who thought of the tiger in the jungle there, with fierce eyes
shining out of the dark, and who had so clear an idea of the mighty
creature that he couldn't help thinking what a wonderful thing it was
that it could be created. The boy fixed his eyes on mine as if he were
getting moved and half-consciously desired to be assured that I was
utterly serious and sympathetic; and in his clear childish voice he
repeated in a way that had really something of a thrill in it:
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
"If a traveller were in the jungle in the dark night," I went on after
a word of praise for his recitation, "I suppose he couldn't see much
around him, the trees would be so thick. He'd have to look up to the
sky to see anything but the tiger's eyes."
"He'd see the stars there," the boy observed, just as I had hoped he
would. "I've seen stars through the trees. I was out in the woods long
after dark once."
"Were you really? The man must have thought the stars looked like the
eyes, as if when the animal was made the Creator went to the sky itself
for that fire. Think of a Being that could rise to the very stars and
take their light in His hand."
"Ouf!" the small man cried naïvely. "I shouldn't want to take fire in
my hand!"
"The writer of the poem was thinking what a wonderful Being He must be
that could do it; but that if He could make a creature like the tiger,
He would be able to do anything."
The boy reflected a moment, and then, with a frank look, asked: "Did
the fire in a tiger's eyes really come out of the stars?"
"I don't think that the poem means that it really did," was my answer.
"I think it means that when the poet thought how wonderful a tiger is,
with the life and the fierceness shining like a flame in his eyes,
and how we cannot tell where that fire came from, and that the stars
overhead were scarcely brighter, it seemed as if that was where the
green light came from. He was trying to say how wonderful and terrible
it was to him,—especially when he thought of coming upon the beast all
alone in the forest in the night with nobody near to defend him."
The boy was silent, and thinking hard. He had evidently not yet clearly
grasped all the idea.
"But God didn't make a tiger on an anvil and put pieces of stars in for
eyes," he objected.
"You told me yesterday that Bruno swims like a duck. He doesn't really,
for a duck goes on the top of the water."
"Oh, but I meant that Bruno goes as fast as a duck."
"And you wanted me to know how well he swims, I suppose."
"Why, of course. Bruno can swim twice as fast as Tom Talcott's dog."
"You said that about the duck to make me know what a wonderful swimmer
Bruno is, and the man who wrote the poem wanted you when you read it to
feel how wonderful the tiger seemed to him; its eyes as if they were of
fire brought from the stars, its strength so great that it seemed as if
his muscles had been beaten out on an anvil from red-hot steel by some
Being mighty enough to do something no man could begin to do. The poem
doesn't mean that a tiger was really made in this way; but it does mean
that when you think of the strength and fearfulness of the creature,
able to carry off a man or even a horse in its jaws, this is the best
way to give an idea of how terrible the animal seemed."
The boy accepted this, and so we came to the fifth verse. The range
of ideas here is so much beyond the mind of any child that it was
necessary to suggest most of them, to go very slowly, and in the end
to be content with a childishly inadequate notion of the magnificent
conception. I gave frankly a suggestion of the creation of all the
animals at the beginning, and of how the angels might have stood around
like stars, watching full of interest and of kindness. The boy was
easily made to feel as if he had seen the making of the deer and the
lamb and the horse, and of how the angels might see in one or another
of the animals a help or a friend to man.
"Then suppose," I said, "that the angels should see God make the great
tiger, royal and terrible. What would they see?"
"Oh, a great fierce thing," the lad returned. "Do you suppose he'd jump
right at the deer and the lambs?"
"He would make the angels think how he could. How different from the
other animals he'd be."
"Yes, he'd have big, big, sharp teeth, and he'd lash his tail, and he'd
put out his claws. Do you suppose he'd sharpen his claws the way Muff
does on the leather chairs?"
"Very likely he would," I said. "At any rate the angels would think
how the other animals would be torn to pieces if the tiger got hold of
them; and they would think of what would happen to men. Perhaps they
would imagine some poor Hindu woman, with her baby on her back going
through a path in the jungle, and how the tiger might leap out suddenly
and tear them both to pieces. The angels couldn't understand how God
could bear to make any animal so cruel, or how He could be willing to
have anything so wicked in the world. They would be so sorry for all
the suffering that was to come that they would throw down their spears
and not be able to keep back the tears."
"But angels wouldn't have spears, would they?"
I went to a shelf of the library in which we were talking and took down
a volume in which I found a picture of St. Michael in full armor.
"It is like the fire from the stars," I said. "Of course nobody ever
saw an angel to know how he would look, but to show how strong and
powerful an angel might be, a good many men that make pictures have
painted them like knights."
"But men that had spears wouldn't cry; I shouldn't think angels would."
"Even the strongest men cry sometimes, my boy; only it has to be
something tremendous to make them. A thing that would make the angels
'water heaven with their tears' must be something so terrible that you
couldn't tell how sad it was."
"Well, anyway, I'd rather be a tiger than a lamb," he proclaimed rather
unexpectedly.
"Very likely," I assented, "but I think you'd rather have a lamb come
after Baby Lou than a tiger."
"Oh, I wouldn't want a tiger to get Baby Lou!" he cried with a tremor.
"I suppose that is the way the angels might feel at the idea of the
tiger's killing anybody," I rejoined.
With a lad somewhat older one would have gone on to develop the
thought that to the watching angels the tiger, leaping out fierce
and bloodthirsty from the hand of the Creator, would be like the
incarnation of evil, and that in their weeping was represented all the
sorrowful problem of the existence of evil in the Universe; but this on
the present occasion I did not touch upon.
"So the angels," I went on, "couldn't keep back their tears; but what
did God do?"
"Why, He smiled!" the boy answered, evidently with astonishment at the
thought which now for the first time came home to him. "I shouldn't
think He'd have smiled."
"When you were so disappointed the other day because the carriage was
broken and you couldn't go over to the lake in it, do you remember that
Uncle Jo laughed?"
"Oh, he knew we could go in his automobile."
"He knew."
"Yes, he knew," began the boy, "and so—" He stopped, and looked at me
with a sudden soberness. "What did God know?" he asked seriously.
"He must have known that somehow everything was right, don't you think?
He knew why He had made the tiger, just as He knew why He had made the
lamb, and so He could see that everything would be as it should be in
the end."
"But—but—"
The boy was speechless in face of the eternal problem, as so many
greater and wiser have been before him. It seemed to me that we had
done quite enough for once, so I broke off the talk with a suggestion
that we try the boy's favorite game. That was the end of the matter for
the time, but in the library of the lad's father the copy of Blake is
so befingered at the page on which "The Tiger" is printed that it is
evident that the boy, with the soiled fingers of his age, has turned it
often. How much he made out of the talk I cannot pretend to say, but at
least he came to love the poem.
I said at the start that I do not give the conversation, which is
actual, as a sample, but as an illustration. The poem called for more
leading on of the pupil than would many, for as Blake is one of the
most imaginative of English writers, his conceptions are the more
subtle and profound. A class, moreover, cannot be treated always with
the same deliberation as that which is natural in the case of a single
child; but the essential principle, I believe, is the same everywhere.
IX
EDUCATIONAL
Educational in the broadest sense must anything be which is
inspirational; for to interest the child in literature, to make him
enter into it as into a charming heritage, is more truly to educate
him than would be any pedantic or formal instruction whatever. I have
used the term specifically, however, as a convenient word by which
to designate that form of instruction which is more deliberately
and formally an effort to make clear what literature may be held to
teach. To regard any work of art as directly and didactically teaching
anything is perhaps to fail in so far to treat it as art; but the
point which such a consideration raises is too deep for our present
inquiry, and may be disregarded except in the case of unintelligent
attempts to make every tale or poem embody and convey a set moral. To
endeavor to aid pupils to perceive fully the relation of what they read
to themselves and to the society in which they live is part of the
legitimate work of the teacher of literature. In a word, while the term
is perhaps not the best, I have used the word educational to designate
such study as is directed to helping the student to gain from books a
wider knowledge of life and human nature.
It is not my idea that in actual practice a formal division is
to be made, and still less that what I have called inspirational
consideration of literature is ever to be discontinued. In the growth
of a child's mind comes naturally a simple and unreflecting pleasure
in literature, beginning, as has been said, with unsophisticated
delight in the marked rhythms of Mother Goose or in the wholesome joy
of the fairy-story. To this is gradually added an equally unreflecting
absorption of certain ideas concerning life, which by slow degrees
gives place to reflection conscious and deliberate. The delight and the
unconscious yielding to the influence of the work of art remain, and to
the end they are more effective than any deliberate and conscious ideas
can be. Nothing that we teach our pupils about a poem can compare in
influence with what they absorb without realizing what they are doing.
One of the great dangers of this whole matter is that we shall hurry
them from an instinctive to a cultivated attitude toward literature;
that we shall replace natural and healthful pleasure by laborious and
conscientious study. In dealing with any piece of real literature the
wise method, it seems to me, is to take it up first for the absolute,
straightforward emotional enjoyment.[110:1] It is of very little use
to study any work which the children have not first come to care for.
After they see why a piece is worth while from the point of view of
pleasure, then study may go further and consider what is the core of
the work intellectually and emotionally.
In speaking of treating literature educationally I do not refer to
that sort of instruction which so generally and unfortunately takes
the place of the true study of masterpieces. The history of a poem or
a drama, the biography of authors, and all work of this sort should
in any case be kept subordinate and should generally, I believe,
come after the student has at least a tolerable idea and a fair
appreciation of the writings themselves. What is important and what I
mean by the educational treatment of literature is the development of
those general truths concerning human nature and human feeling which
form the tangible thought of a play or poem. The line of distinction
between this and the less tangible ideas which are conveyed by form,
by melody, by suggestion,—the ideas, in short, which are the secret
of the inspirational effect of a work,—cannot be sharply drawn. Many
of the tangible ideas will have been obvious in the reading of which
the recognized purpose has been mere delight and inspiration; and on
the other hand the two classes of ideas are so closely interwoven that
it is not possible, even were it advisable, to separate them entirely.
It is possible, however, after the pupil has come to take pleasure in
a work,—though it should never be attempted sooner,—to go on to the
deliberate study of the intellectual content, and to take up broad and
general truths.
One way of preparing a class for the work which is now to be done
is to speak to them of literature as a sort of high kind of algebra;
to let them see, that is, how the distinction between the great mass
of reading-matter and what is fairly to be called literature is not
unlike the difference with which they are familiar in mathematics
between arithmetic and the higher grade of work which comes after. The
newspaper, the text-book, the history, the scientific treatise all
deal with the concrete, just as arithmetic has to do with absolute
quantities. In the mental development of the pupil the time comes when
he is considered sufficiently advanced to go on from the handling of
concrete things to the dealing with the abstract. When he is able to
understand the relation between the sum paid for one bushel of wheat
and the amount needed to purchase fifty, he may be advanced to the lore
of general formulæ, and be made to understand how _x_ may represent
any price and _y_ any number of bushels. In the same way from reading
in a newspaper the story of the assassination of the late King of
Servia, the concrete case, he may go on to read "Macbeth," wherein
Duncan represents any monarch of given character, and Macbeth not a
particular, actual, concrete assassin, but a murderer of a sort, a
type, the general or abstract character. The student has gone on from
the particular to the general; from the concrete to the abstract; from
the arithmetic of human nature to its algebra.
A similar comparison between history and poetry is on the same grounds
easily to be made between the history lesson and the chronicle plays
of Shakespeare. The student who in his nursery days started out with
the instinctive question in regard to the fairy-tale: "Is it true?"
begins to perceive the difference between literal and essential truth.
He perceives that verity in literature is not simple and obvious
fidelity to the specific fact or event; he learns to appreciate that
the truth of art, like the truth of algebra, lies in its accuracy
in representing truth in the abstract: he comes to appreciate the
narrowness of the nursery question, which asked only for the literal
fact, and he begins to comprehend something of the symbolic.
An excellent illustration for practical use is a poem like "How they
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." Any live, wholesome boy is
sure to tingle with the swing and fervor of the verse, the sense of
the open air, the excitement, the doubt, the hope, the joyful climax.
It is easy to lead the class on to consider how exhilarating such an
experience would be, and to go on from this to point out that the
poem does not describe a literal, actual occurrence; but that it is a
generalized expression of the zest and exhilaration of a superb, all
but impossible ride, with the added excitement of being responsible for
the freedom or even the lives of the folk of a whole city.
The first feeling of the class on learning that such a ride was not
taken is sure to be one of disappointment. It is better to meet
this frankly, and to compensate for it by arousing interest in the
embodiment of abstract feeling. One great source of the lack of
interest in literature at the present time is that the material,
practical character of the age makes it difficult for the general
reader to respect anything but the concrete fact. Literature is apt to
present itself to the hard-headed young fellow of the public school
as a lot of make-believe stuff, and therefore at best a matter of
rather frivolous amusement. The surest way of correcting this common
attitude of mind is to nourish the appreciation of what fact in art
really means; to cultivate a clear perception of how a poem or a tale
may be the truest thing in the world, although dealing with imaginary
personages and with incidents which never happened.[114:1]
As an illustration of the sense in which literature is a sort of
algebra of human feeling somewhat more remote from the ordinary life
of a child may be taken another poem of Browning's, "The Lost Leader."
My experience is that most youth of the school age start out by being
able to make little or nothing of this. By a little talk, however,
beginning perhaps as simply as with the way in which a lad feels when
a school-fellow he had faith in has failed in a crisis, has for some
personal advantage gone over to the other party in a school election,
or of how the class would feel if some teacher who had been with the
students in some effort to obtain an extension of privilege to which
the scholars felt themselves to be honestly entitled had for his
own purposes swung over to the opposite side, the whole thing may be
brought home. The boys may be led on to imagine what are the feelings
of a youth eager for the cause of freedom and the uplifting of man,
when one whom he has looked to as a leader, one in whom he has had
absolute faith, deserts the rank for honors or for money. Once the
young minds are on the right track it is by no means impossible to
bring them to see pretty clearly that in the poem is not the question
of a particular man or a particular cause; but that Browning is dealing
with a universal expression of the pain that would come to any man, to
any one of them, in believing that the leader who had been most trusted
and revered had in reality been unworthy, and had betrayed the cause
his followers believed he would gladly die to defend.
These two examples from Browning I have taken almost at random, and
not because they are unusual in this respect, for this quality is the
universal property of all real literature, and indeed is one of the
tests by which real literature is to be identified. Any selection which
it is worth while to give students at all must have this relation which
I have called "algebraic," but of which the true name is imaginative;
and it is certainly one of the important parts of anything which in a
high sense is properly to be called "teaching" literature to make the
scholars realize and appreciate this.
The next step is more difficult because far more subtle; and I confess
frankly that it is all but impossible to propose methods by which
formal instruction may deal with it. The aim of literature is largely
the attempt to produce a mood. The prime aim of the poet is to induce
in the reader a state of feeling which will lead inevitably to the
reception of whatever he offers in the same mood in which he offers
it. In the simplest cases no instruction is needed, for even with
school-boys a ringing metre, to take a simple and obvious example,
has somewhat the same effect as the dashing swing of martial music;
whoever comes under its influence falls insensibly into the frame of
mind in which the ideas of the verse should be received. The thoughts
are accepted in the exhilarated spirit in which they were written, and
the effects of the metre are as great or greater than the influence of
the literal meaning. It is a commonplace to call attention to the part
which the melody of poetry or the rhythm of prose plays in the effect,
but how to aid pupils to a responsiveness to this language of form is
not the least of the problems of the teacher.
The means by which an author establishes or communicates his mood
do not always appeal to the young. Indeed, beyond a certain limited
extent they appeal to most adults only after careful cultivation in the
understanding of art-language. It is as idle to suppose that literature
appeals to everybody and without æsthetic education as it is to suppose
that sculpture or music will surely meet with a response everywhere.
Nobody expects Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony" or Bach's "Passion Music"
to arouse enthusiasm in accidentally assorted school-children, yet to
all the pupils in a mixed public school are offered the parallel works
of Shakespeare and Milton. Unless a class is made up of boys or girls
with unusual aptitude or wisely and carefully trained to responsiveness
to metrical effect, it seems hardly less idle to offer them "Comus" or
"Lycidas" than it would be to expect them to enjoy a classic concert.
The language of form in the higher range of literature is to them an
unknown tongue.
Children are likely to be susceptible to marked metrical effects, as
witness their love of "Mother Goose;" but to the more delicate music
of verse they are often largely or completely insensitive. A musical
ear is not, it is probable, to be created, but it is certainly possible
to develop the metrical sense. Children who are born with good native
responsiveness to rhythm often are so badly trained or so neglected
as to seem to have none, and it is part of the office of instruction
to call out whatever powers lie in them latent. This is largely
accomplished by the sort of use of literature which I have called
"inspirational." In the ideal home-training children are so taken
on from the rhymes of the nursery to more advanced literature that
development of the rhythmical sense is continuous and inevitable; but
one of the things which every school-teacher knows best is that this
sort of home-training is rare and the work must be done in the class.
The substitute is a poor one, but it has at least some degree of the
universal human responsiveness to rhythm to appeal to.
Another difficulty is that children have to learn the verbal language
of literature. Much of the atmosphere of a poem, for instance, is
likely to be produced by suggestion, by the mention of legend or
tale or hero, when the reader must find in previous knowledge and
association a key to what is intended. All this is likely to be
largely or entirely lost on children; and yet this is often the
very quintessence of what the author tries to convey. Children are
constantly at the same disadvantage in understanding literature that
they are in comprehending life. They have not gathered the associations
or experienced the emotions which make so large a part of the language
of great writers. All this renders it difficult for the instructor to
be sure that his class has any inkling even of the mood in which a
piece is intended; yet he must first of all be sure that as far as is
possible he has put them, each pupil according to his character and
acquirements, in touch with the spirit of the work to be studied.
This cannot be done entirely. We cannot hope that a lad of a dozen
years will enter into all the emotions, all the passions of the great
poets. He may, however, be absorbingly interested and thrilled by
"Macbeth," or the "Tempest," or the "Merchant of Venice." He does not
get from these plays all that his elders might get, any more than he
would perceive the full meaning and passion of a tremendous situation
in real life; but he does get some portion of the message, some
perception of the deeps and heights of human nature. Even if he find no
more than simple, unreasoning enjoyment, he is gaining unconsciously,
and he is obviously nourishing a love for good literature.