THE SERVICES WE MAY EXPECT LITERATURE TO RENDER IN THE EDUCATION OF
CHILDREN
It would seem to be no part of the present discussion to go into the
fundamental processes of determining and defining a child's needs and
tastes. In this matter we may assume and build upon the larger
conclusions of psychology and educational philosophy. And it is only the
larger and more general conclusions that we need, both because there is
no doubt concerning them, as there may be concerning those more detailed
and remote, and because when we are dealing with children in school, and
in class, we are dealing with the type-child--with a composite child, as
it were, to whom we can apply only the larger conclusions.
Everyone who helps to train a child must realize as a practical fact
that he has both needs and tastes. The emphasis wisely placed in our day
upon enlisting a child's interests and tastes has tended to mislead the
unwary and undo the unobservant, so as to produce a blindness or an
indifference as to his needs. Though, as a matter of mere justice, one
must add that the blindness and indifference have had their existence
chiefly in the indictments of those who opposed the movement when it was
new.
Few parents or teachers may now be found so benighted as to deny the
delight and profit of letting the child grow in all the joy and freedom
possible, following his instinctive interests, expressing his original
primitive impulses. But we must grant, however sadly, that the modern
child is not to be a member of a primitive society; that he is living
and to live in a complex, advanced community, to whose standards he must
be, on the whole, adjusted and adapted. Therefore, his interests and
activities must be channeled and guided; new interests must be awakened;
he must be in a certain sense put, while he is still a child, into
possession of what his race has acquired only after many generations.
In literature then, as in the other subjects, we must try to do three
things: (1) allow and meet appropriately the child's native and
instinctive interests and tastes; (2) cultivate and direct these; (3)
awaken in him new and missing interests and tastes. What is there in
literature serviceable for any or all of these purposes, and is there in
literature anything that is distinctively and uniquely useful in the
whole process? It seems only reasonable to look for the answers to
these questions among the distinctive features of literature.
The most conspicuous and distinguishing fact about literature is, of
course, its relation to the imagination. Now, when the student of
literature or any other art talks about the imagination, he must be
allowed to begin, as one may say, where the psychologist leaves off,
because, while the psychologist as a scientist likes to limit his
attention to the mind acting as imagination, the literary critic must
consider, not only this activity of the mind, but its product--a product
that presents itself as an elaborate phenomenon. This is the reason why
the natural process of the literary critic seems to the student of
psychology a beginning at the wrong end; because it is a beginning with
an objective product, and with the larger and more salient features of
that product.
Literature finds its material in nature, and in human nature and life.
It has no source of supply other than that of every other kind of human
thought. But before this material becomes literature, the imagination
has lifted it from its place in the actual world and elevated it to the
plane of art. Working upon this plane with this material, the
imagination modifies, transforms, rearranges it, making new
combinations, discovering unsuspected relations, bringing to light
hidden qualities, revealing new likenesses and unlikenesses; and at last
returns to us a product that is a new creation. Working in its larger
creative capacity, the imagination constructs out of material which may
be scattered or chaotic when gathered by observation, unified and
organic wholes.
Indeed this large whole, this completed edifice that the art-product
presents is itself an image, a vision present from the beginning of the
process of creating. As the architect sees before he begins to build,
the plan of his house as a whole and measurably complete thing, so the
literary artist has from the beginning this large image, this plan
presenting the main features of the thing he is to produce. This allows
for the fact that new details are added as he goes on, the plan modified
or transformed. But the artist's final result starts as an image.
This is not mere aesthetic prosing. We must set it down as vitally
important in the point of view of the teacher of literature, that he
must look at his material as the product of the imagination in these
four ways: first, the imagination presents the large image or plan;
second, it chooses the material; third, it decorates, purifies, or
otherwise modifies it; fourth, it organizes or recombines it. This
recombination into a new whole, no matter how simple it is, will, if it
be art at all, display in some degree the large qualities common to all
art-form--unity, variety, symmetry, proportion, harmony. It is the fact
that in literature you have a large but manageable whole got together
under laws producing these qualities and making for completeness and
beauty--it is this fact that gives to literature a large share of its
power in cultivating the child's imagination.
Now, there is a very common misapprehension of this phrase "cultivation
of the imagination," many people taking it for granted that it
invariably and exclusively means increasing the amount of a child's
fancy, or the number of his fancies. Undoubtedly this is one of the
effects of literature, and undoubtedly it is sometimes a desirable
thing. There are children born without imagination, or so early crushed
down by the commonplaceness of the adult world that they seem never to
have a fancy--to be entirely without an inner life or a spiritual
playground. But the average child has abundant imagination, and an
abundance of imaginations; while children of the artistic or emotional
temperament may often be found, especially in the period gathering about
the seventh year, living in a world of their own creating, moving in a
maze of fantastic notions and combinations of notions, unable to see
actual things, and unable to report the facts of an observation or an
experience, because of the throng of purely fanciful and invented
details that fills their consciousness. To increase the amount of such a
child's imaginative material would be a mistake; to throttle or ignore
his imaginative activities would be a mistake still more serious.
We all know the two paths, one of which is likely to be followed by such
a child. Either he drifts on, indulging his dreams, inventing unguided
fancies, following new vagaries, and later reading those loose, wild,
and sentimental things into which his own taste guides him, till all his
mental processes become untrustworthy; or he is taken in hand, given
fact-studies exclusively, becomes ashamed of his fancies, or loses
interest in them because they bear no relation to anything in the actual
world as he is learning to know it, and finally loses completely his
artistic imaginative power.
As an aid toward averting either of these disasters, the imaginative
child--who is the average child--as well as the over-fanciful one, needs
to have developed in him some ability to select among his fancies, so as
to cling to the beautiful and useful, and discard the idle ones. To do
this, he must get the ability to put them together in some plan or
system that satisfies both his taste and his judgment. They are
permanently serviceable either for work or for play only when they
attach one to another and cohere into a somewhat orderly whole. One is
tempted to think that to put the children into possession of such a
faculty or such an accomplishment is the most important step in
elementary training, because, as a matter of course, it at once radiates
from the handling of their invented or fanciful material into the
ordering of that which they gather from deliberate observation; and, as
most often happens, the artistic imagination lends a helping hand to the
scientific imagination. Undoubtedly the pleasantest way and the way that
lies most readily open in helping the children to acquire and develop
this faculty, is the way of literature. Here it is that they see most
easily and learn to know most thoroughly those complete and orderly
wholes made up from beautiful or significant details, with nothing left
fragmentary or unattached. Of course the teacher must choose his bit of
literature with a view to this effect--a lyric, a ballad, a story, that
actually does show economy of material, reasonable and effective
arrangement of details, and a satisfying issue. Not all the literature
available for children does display these qualities. Compare, for
example, Perrault's _Cinderella_ with Grimm's version of the same tale.
The former, whatever the faults of style in the English version we all
know, is so far as structure goes, a little classic, having plenty of
fancy, to be sure, but exhibiting also perfect economy of incident,
certainty and delicacy in the selection and arrangement of details,
restraint and truthfulness in the outcome; while the Grimm story shows
the chaotic, unguided, wasteful choice and arrangement of the mind which
remains the victim of its own fancies. The one is mere art-stuff, the
other is art.
Now, one would hasten to add that there are children in every class, and
it may be in every family--unimaginative, matter-of-fact, commonplace
children--who need to have given them, and to learn to enjoy, if
possible, the mere vagaries and haphazard inventions; and it would be a
pity to deprive any child of them in his hours of intellectual play. But
it is from his contact, frequent and deep, with the more artistic and
ordered bits of literature that we may expect the child to find that
special cultivation of the imagination, the power of seeing an organized
imaginative whole; and out of this experience should grow the further
power, so important in this stage of his education--that of grasping,
and constructing out of his own material, such complete and ordered
wholes.
Another way in which the imagination works in literature is of peculiar
importance, for the children. This, too, is precisely one of those
characteristics that distinguish literature from everything else. It
lies in the fact that, unlike other kinds of writing, literature
proceeds by the presentation of concrete, specific details, the actual
image, or images, combined into a definite picture, elevated from the
world of actuality to the plane of art, or created on that plane out of
details gathered from any source. In proportion as we find in literature
abstract thinking, statement of general truth or plain fact, facsimile
description or mere sentimentalizing, in that proportion do we find it
dull and inartistic. "The orange is a reddish-yellow semi-tropical
fruit," is a statement of fact plain and scientific. It would be so
inartistic as to be absurd in a line of poetry. "Among the dark boughs
the golden orange glows," lifts the object into the world of art, sets
it in a picture, even gives it to us in the round, makes it moving and
vital. "The foxglove blooms centripetally," one may say as dry fact, but
when the poet says
The fox-gloves drop from throat to top
A daily lesser bell,
while he conveys the same fact, he does it in the terms of a definite
single image, a specific individual process, that gives reality and
distinction. It is by virtue of this method of presenting its material
that literature performs another valuable and definite service for the
child. This lies in increasing and supplementing in many directions his
store of images. Of course, even the ordinary child has many images,
since he has eyes and ears always open and fingers always active. But
the sights and sounds he sees are not widely varied, and are rarely
beautiful. It is the extraordinary, the occasional child who sees in his
home many beautiful objects, who often hears good music, who sees in his
street noble buildings, who is taken to the woods, the mountains, the
sea, where he may store up many beautiful and distinguished images to
serve him later for inner joy and as material for thinking. The other
child whose experience is bounded by the streets, the shops, or the
farm, will find his store of images increased and enriched by
contributions from literature. And the fact that the images and pictures
in literature are given with concreteness, with vividness, with vitality
in them, not as abstractions nor as technical description, gives them
place in the consciousness side by side with those registered by the
memory from actual experience, and they serve the same purposes.
Indeed, the mere raising of a detail to the plane of art, the fitting of
an image or a picture into a poem or a story, gives it new distinction
and increases its value. Says Fra Lippo:
... we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.
So the child, when the details he knows or may know in real life are set
in literature, sees them surrounded with a halo of new beauty and value.
This halo, this well-known radiance of art, spreads itself over the
objects that he sees about him, and they, too, take on a new beauty, and
so pass into his storehouse of images with their meaning and usefulness
increased.
Whatever else may be the function of the imagination in literature it
has these two--that of seeing and creating organic wholes, and that of
presenting concrete images and pictures; these two would entitle it to a
distinctive place in the training of a child's imagination.
As an accompaniment, perhaps as a consequence, of the tendency of the
imagination to unify and harmonize its material by seeking always a
deeper basis and a larger category, and the other tendency to use in
literature the specific detail rather than the generalization, we have
the fact of figurative thinking and speaking as a characteristic of this
art. A figure involves the discovery of a striking or essential contrast
or contradiction between objects, or the recognition of a likeness or
affinity ranging in closeness from mere similarity to complete
identification. Whichever be the process, the result is the universal
and typical meanings of literature, its pleasing indirection of
statement, its enlarged outlook upon many other spheres, the vista of
suggestion and association opening in every direction, the surprised,
the shocked or delighted recognitions, that await us on every page. We
will pass by as mystical and not demonstrable the inviting theory that a
contact with these contrasts and resemblances may put into the hands of
the child a clue to the better arrangement of the fragments that compose
his world, and may help on in him that process of unification and
identification which is the paramount human task; we must leave out of
sight here, as too speculative and unpractical, the enlargement and
definition of his categories that would come to the child as it comes to
everyone, with even the most elementary recognition of the fundamental
separations and unions involved in figures; these we may leave aside,
while we take the simple and quite obvious aspect of the matter--that
the study and understanding of even the commoner figures quicken the
child's intelligence, and help to develop mental alertness and
certainty. Not even a sense of humor is so useful in his intellectual
experience as the ability to understand and use figures of speech. What
makes so pathetic or so appalling a spectacle as the person who never
catches the transferred and ironic turns of expression of which even
ordinary conversation is full? The poor belated mind stands helpless
amidst the play of allusion that flashes all about him, and not even
fear of thunder, which is the most alert sensation Emerson can attribute
to him, can put him into touch with his kind. The best place to train a
child toward quickness, the mental ease and adroitness that come of a
ready understanding and use of figure is in literature, one of whose
signal characteristics is the use of figure. The appreciation of remote
and delicate figures will, of course, come later in a student's
experience than the elementary years, after he has had more contact with
life and the world and a much widened experience in literature. But the
child who has been taught to understand and to use any of the simpler
figures has been helped a long way on the road of art and philosophy.
Literature differs from other kinds of writing in its use of language,
since it constantly aims at beautiful and striking expression. Since it
often seeks beautiful and delicate effects, it is more often closely
accurate than other kinds of writing; and since it sometimes seeks
strong, noble effects, it is sometimes more vigorous than other writing.
For the same and kindred reasons it seeks variety of expression, and so
displays a larger choice of words, including new and rare words. These
facts have an immediate and beneficial effect upon the style and
vocabulary of the children. The fact is plainly obvious to anyone who
has observed the superiority as to vocabulary and form of those children
who have had much reading or who come from a literary family, and has
seen the improvement of all the children in these matters as they add to
their experience in literature. This enrichment and refinement of
language must be reckoned among the distinctive services of literature.
Literature, in common with the other arts, but unlike other kinds of
writing, aims at beauty--cares first of all for beauty. One must
understand the term, of course, as artistic or aesthetic beauty, as it
has been interpreted for us from Plato down, as quite other than mere
prettiness or superficial attractiveness. First, in the selection of its
subject-matter it is the strikingly beautiful in nature, in character,
in action, and in experience that it seeks out for presentation. When it
uses ugly or horrible material, it is for one of these purposes: by way
of bringing into stronger relief beauty actually presented beside it; by
way of implying beauty not actually presented; by way of producing the
grotesque as a form of beauty; by way of awakening fear or terror, which
are elements in one kind of beauty; or by way of accomplishing some
exploitation or reform conceived by the artist as his duty or his
opportunity; so that the artist's use of ugly material produces in every
case some effect of beauty. Now the problem of the child's contact with
beauty as the material or subject-matter of literature is the problem of
his contact with it anywhere else. We cannot too often remind ourselves
that the material in literature is that of life and the actual world
chosen out, often freed from accidental and temporary qualities, and put
into suitable setting in art. It therefore makes an appeal not different
in kind, and in many cases not different in intensity, from the appeal
of objects perceived by the actual senses. Accepting once for all the
conditions of the imagination, we must conclude that the effect upon
the child's taste is the same as in his contact with beautiful and noble
objects under conditions of outer space. And as, when we adopt the
psychology and pedagogy of Whitman's "There was a child went forth,"
believing that all that the little traveler encounters becomes really
and truly a part of him, we are eager to have him encounter the most
beautiful sights and sounds of the physical world, so we earnestly
desire for him contact with the noble and beautiful objects and persons
of the other-world of literature.
In the second place, literature, whether it be handling beautiful
material or for any reason dealing with ugly material, is always seeking
beauty of form. There are the larger matters of art-form, such as unity,
harmony, completeness, balance--those large beneficent elements of
beauty which should be in the child's literature as in all his other
art, constituting the genial atmosphere which he breathes in without
knowing it. Of course, one does not talk to him about them, but there
they are in his story, his picture, his song, bringing their gift of
certainty and repose. Then there are the more concrete and obvious
details of formal beauty that belong distinctively to the literary art,
and are partly matters of craftsmanship--the musical effect of the
spoken word, prose or verse, the choice word or phase, the beautiful
arrangement of clause or sentence. Certain of these elements may be
deliberately brought to the child's attention, others may not. But in
either case they help to form the whole atmosphere of beauty and
distinction that surrounds a bit of good literature. And we cannot fail
to believe in the refining and stimulating influence upon the child's
taste of his contact with formal beauty in this as in the other arts.
As distinctive of literature, setting it apart from other kinds of
writing, one must note that it always has in it the warmth, the fervor,
of emotion, "Dowered with the scorn of scorn, the love of love, the hate
of hate," is the poet, and always the glow of feeling lights up his
line. "The foxglove blooms centripetally," is cold and colorless,
however interesting it may be as technical fact,
The fox-gloves drop from throat to top,
A daily lesser bell
quivers with emotional associations. "I come to bury Caesar not to
praise him"--the caesura of that line is Mark Antony's sob, and the
sympathetic throb of the elementary class.
The king sits in Dumfermline toun
Drinking the blude-red wine.
What strange thrill is this that goes down the eight-year-old's spine
at the sound of these words?
It was an ancient mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
The mere lines submerge us at once in a new atmosphere tingling with
charmed excitement.
One would like to say with some new meaning and emphasis that it is
precisely this emotion, permeating, warming, and coloring literature,
that gives it its reality, that establishes its hold, that gives it its
relation to the world--on the one side reflecting life on the other
producing life.
But it is about this matter of emotion that the teacher's dangers and
misgivings lie. There are those who fix upon its emotional nature as
grounds for suspicion, if not of condemnation, of literature as a means
of discipline. And we must all hasten to confess that this atmosphere of
emotion is the snare of the weak teacher and the curse of weak
literature. Emotion displayed or aroused unworthily, or attached to
inadequate or ignoble stimuli, is either mere sentimentality or undue
enthusiasm. It should be reckoned nothing short of a crime to stimulate
unduly a child's emotion, and to awaken in him feelings for which his
nature is not ripe. But the policy or theory of ignoring his emotions,
of suppressing them, or of keeping them subdued in school within the
bounds of his mild pleasure in scientific observation or mathematical
achievement, is surely short-sighted. If the day has not already come,
it is fast approaching when we shall see that education means also the
calling out and exercising of the feelings--when we shall realize the
dessicating influence of American school training upon the emotional
nature of children. It should not be difficult for any teacher who has
studied the problems of childhood, and who has learned something about
judging literature, to choose such literary things as reflect and invite
the kind and degree of feeling suitable for a child, as give him
legitimate occasion for legitimate emotion, as exercise and cultivate
this side of his nature, effecting in him that purifying discharge of
emotion which Aristotle regarded as one of the helpful offices of
literature. It is a matter for rejoicing that in the atmosphere of
feeling which surrounds literature and music we may counteract and
balance in the child the hardening influence of his fact-studies and his
general school discipline.
The mere pragmatism of the teaching often turned against literature as a
discipline, that every emotional state should eventuate in activity, is
met by the contention that the admiration or contempt called out by the
record of the courageous or cowardly deed, the apprehension and
enjoyment of the musical line or the beautiful image, contain their own
issue and event. They register at once a higher moral standard or a
quickened and deepened taste.
It has already been said, and it must be said again, that it is by
virtue of this emotional grip coupled with the powerful and
ever-to-be-reckoned-with instinct for imitation, that literature takes
hold upon us, passes into our lives, affecting our judgment, our ideals,
our conduct.
We live by admiration, hope, and love,
And even as these are well and wisely placed,
In dignity of being we ascend.
says Wordsworth; and literature affords many opportunities of placing
well and wisely these living and life-giving emotions.
This brings us at once to the vision of another service rendered the
child by literature. Here he is as if he looked upon life. He sees
events worked out to the issue; he sees people expressing themselves in
deeds and words, transforming themselves and others for good or bad,
calling upon him for approval or condemnation, or for sympathy. He finds
here his heroes, his ideals, his models. He learns manners without tears
and morals without a sermon. In some sense he sees life steadily, and
sees it whole, so that he widens his social horizon to take in these
many groups of all sorts of men; mentally and morally he must enlarge to
contain the persons and events he learns to know. It is impossible to
overestimate the importance in a child's moral life, whether we
interpret this as a social or an individual matter, of the contribution
made by literature to his vision, his pattern, of society and of
character. This ability of literature to influence the child's inner
life and his conduct is so real that it has as many dangers as
advantages. There must be no mistakes in selecting for him, if he is to
ascend in dignity of being by the steps of literature. It must contain
those pictures of life and conduct that are fit and suitable for the
child to witness, and possible for him to comprehend. They must be sound
to the core, arousing and permanently engaging his genuine interest and
his best feelings.
And after all, the best thing we can do for a child in teaching him
literature is to give him a permanent and innocent joy. We all have our
moods in which we are ready to say that the first unconscious,
unpremeditated pleasure that comes of a bit of literature is the only
result worth having. And we who are professing teachers of literature
have times of abnormal sensitiveness to the scorn of the dilettante
critics who call us academical and pedagogical. And though we know that
pleasure in literature has its elements and its causes, both easily
observable, and that taste may be fostered and grown by well-known
processes, it is always a wholesome hour for us when we are thrust back
upon the fact that, though we may have disciplined his imagination, and
may have quickened his fancy; we may have awakened and strengthened his
sense of beauty; we may have exercised and cultivated his emotions; we
may have enlarged his outlook upon life, and have provided him with
social and personal ideals; it is nevertheless, better than all these
because it includes most of them, if we have opened up for our scholar
this permanent avenue of noble enjoyment.
Now, not all these results will appear in all the children. Some of them
the teacher will not see in any child of certain classes. They are not
easily ponderable and measurable--even less so than those of other
disciplines. It is easy to know when a child can multiply and divide. It
is not easy to know when he is in a hopeful stage of literary
experience. But it is only in the direction of the results we have been
discussing that the teacher of literature can always hopefully work.