TEACHING LITERATURE.
Literature, History, Algebra, Civil Government--these have been
favorite subjects of mine. The teaching of each has brought me
pleasure. Perhaps literature in many schools is most neglected. I wish
that I might say something which would call the attention of teachers
to this subject. Let us discuss briefly the principles that should be
made clear to the class and then apply these to that beautiful poem of
Lowell’s: “The Vision of Sir Launfal.” This poem has been reprinted
in numerous cheap editions, and no teacher but can afford a copy and
secure a copy for each of his class.
The successful teacher of literature must believe in his subject. He
must believe with his whole heart that to lead a pupil to the proper
appreciation of a piece of pure literature is to place that pupil on a
higher spiritual plane; that it will lift that pupil above much that is
low and groveling and vicious, and give to him a constant companion and
monitor, which, like Copperfield’s Agnes, always points upward.
The teacher of literature must have read critically much of the
best literature. He must be especially familiar with the particular
selections he is to teach. He must know the selection in its bearings.
He must have studied it earnestly and critically, and in addition he
must have planned how he can best present it to his class so that they
may get most out of it. Less than this is apt to make the study of
literature in the school a mere farce.
But what is pure literature? By what criterion do we draw the line
between literature and other forms of writing? What distinguishes pure
literature from the news article? What distinguishes literature from
the statements of history or of scientific truths? I should reply
that the constructive energy of pure literature is “universal, ideal,
emotional life.”
_Pure literature must be universal._--Lowell tells us that a literary
man cannot air his private liver complaint to the public. He also
gives us his conception of literature in another place. “Literature
that loses its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets beyond
the parish steeple, is not what I understand by literature. To tell
you when you cannot fully taste a book that it is because it is too
thoroughly national, is to condemn the book. To say it of a poem is
even worse, for it is to say that what should be true of the whole
compass of human nature is true only to some north-and-by-half-east
point of it. I can understand the nationality of Firdusa when, looking
sadly back to the former glories of his country, he tells us that ‘the
nightingale still sings old Persian.’ I can understand the nationality
of Burns when he turns his plow aside to spare the rough burr thistle,
and hopes he may sing a song or two for dear old Scotie’s sake.
That sort of nationality belongs to a country of which we are all
citizens--that country of the heart that has no boundaries laid down on
the map.”
_Literature must be ideal._--The lessons it brings are the ideals
of the soul’s possibilities. It quickens in the individual soul the
inspirations that are universal. The beautiful friendship of Damon and
Pythias is above our selfishness--an ideal lifting us above ourselves,
creating in us higher aspirations and showing us our own possibilities.
There are, it is true, various degrees of idealizations. Heroism may
be idealized and uplifting and yet not be to the degree of idealization
in Enoch Arden. The strength and beauty of women’s devotion may be
worthy of emulation and yet not reach the standard of Evangeline.
_Literature must be emotional._--It deals more with the heart than with
the head. The emotions of literature are of various kinds, but these
may be all summed up in the emotions of spiritual freedom. The soul is
constantly struggling to free itself from bondage, and every time a
limitation is removed the soul leaps with joy. In this lies much of the
educative power of literature. The all-inclusive pleasure of literature
is the soul’s joy in its hopes and its possibilities of freedom. The
reader, if he really reads, is forced to live for the time being at
least the ideal life pictured in the literature, and thus from day to
day his soul attains to higher levels.
THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL.
Let us now discuss “The Vision of Sir Launfal.” This is a work of
literary art, a gem from a master, beautiful in conception, beautiful
in execution, and beautiful in its inspiration to higher life. The
teacher who secures the proper conception of this poem by the pupil
rings a rising bell in the dormitory of that child’s soul. Methods of
teaching may vary with the personality of the teacher. The best method
of one teacher may or may not be the best method of another. It is
hoped the following suggestions may be helpful to some, and if so, they
were not written in vain.
The following general suggestions may pave the way for a closer study:
1. Study the legend of the “Holy Grail” carefully.
2. In connection with the study of “The Vision of Sir Launfal”
read Tennyson’s “Holy Grail” and “Idylls of the King,”
noting likeness and difference.
3. Have pupils read through the poem carefully until they
catch the movement and the rhythm. It is as great a
mistake to set a class to criticising a poem or picking to
pieces and analyzing the first paragraph of a selection of
literature before they have read it as a whole as it would
be to have them criticise a monument by having them examine
one or two of the blocks of granite at the quarry.
4. Keep closely before the student the standard and tests of
pure literature.
The first step then in the study of “The Vision of Sir Launfal”--and
the same would be true of any selection of literature--is to find the
author’s theme. The second step is to test this theme by the questions:
1. Is it universal?
2. Is it ideal?
3. Is it emotional?
These tests will determine the class of literature to which it belongs.
The theme of literature is its soul or purpose, but this soul must
have a body. The writer of literature does not speak in abstract
terms. He embodies the forms in concrete, visible forms. The ideal
image is presented in the real, the universal in the individual, and
these objective or concrete particulars become types or symbols of the
abstract or universal. Thus Hester in “The Scarlet Letter” and Jean
Valjean in “Les Misérables” are realizations of universal principles
in human nature. The building and the launching of the ship with
Longfellow is typical of national life. He who reads Evangeline and
sees but Evangeline the individual loses most of the poem. Evangeline
is the concrete individual form or embodiment of the abstract and the
universal--woman’s devotion. To see the universal symbolized by the
particular, to see Evangeline no longer as an individual, but as a
type--an ideal to which our souls may aspire--gives life to the study
of literature and makes it a monitor to our own soul.
Language is the medium which carries the theme through the embodiment
to the reader. In other forms of art, as in sculpture and painting,
the embodiment stands alone and the reader must make out of it what
he can. Literature, however, is more plastic. It may represent the
change, the rate of progress or development. Language brings a vivid
image before the mind, and may give the meaning of the image in terms
of life. Literary language must be beautiful. Its interpretation must
yield aesthetic pleasure; not only aesthetic pleasure, but sensuous
pleasure also. It must caress the ear. These pleasing qualities give
rise to euphony, harmony, rhythm, and rhyme in all its pleasing forms.
It includes also alliteration and the balanced sentence. Language has
both a form side and a sense side. It is the incarnation of thought,
and the soul is indispensable to the body. Language also awakens
sensuous pleasure by stimulating the imagination and the judgment. The
connotation of language is often of more importance than the denotation.
Now let us apply these principles more in detail to “The Vision of Sir
Launfal.”
THE THEME.
The theme of the poem is charity. The foundation of charity is our
feeling of kinship. Blood kinship is a strong bond and has been in all
of man’s history. The recognition of spiritual kinship has grown out
of blood kinship. The prejudice of the Greeks against the barbarian
came from the denial of blood kinship, while they failed to recognize
the higher spiritual kinship. For the same reason the Gentile and the
Jew were enemies. Monotheism--one God, one Father of all--lies at the
foundation of all true charity. No wonder the greatest of virtues is
charity. It is
“That thread of the all-sustaining beauty,
Which runs through all and doth all unite.”
The theme of the poem is not apparent at first. The poet, like the
organist, begins “doubtfully and far away.” This stanza is typical of
the universal method of thought. We approach the definite through the
vague and the indefinite. The stanza has no connection with the theme
of the poem. It is simply a prelude, and serves to prepare the mood of
the reader for what follows.
In the second stanza the theme is the unconscious rising to higher life
through the uplifting influences of nature about us--the winds, the
mountains, the woods, and the sea.
The theme of the third stanza is the cost of earthly things contrasted
with God’s gifts. Earth gets its price; it is only heaven can be had
for the asking. The theme of the next stanza is the power of a June day
unto righteousness. The general purpose of this beautiful description
of a June day is to bring the reader to a realization of the uplifting
influences about him. The particular purpose is to furnish the
immediate connection with Sir Launfal, in whom from this time the theme
is to be embodied. Mark the highly idealized upward impulse of a June
day. Even the clod climbs upward to a soul in the grass and flowers.
The theme in Part I., except the last stanza, is selfishness--unconscious
selfishness under the guise of a noble deed. The theme of the preceding
is continued, and shows strongly by contrast the uncharitable element
in Sir Launfal’s character. His own life was so bright his heart could
not be opened to the leper. Sorrow and reverses must touch him and
melt his selfishness. Unlike the bird, there is no song of sympathy in
the heart of Launfal, and like the castle he rebuffed the sunshine and
gloomed apart. Everything up to this point is unified in the one idea
of selfishness. The leper states this definitely. Heaven may be had
for the asking, but we rebuff the gifts of heaven as the castle does
the sunshine. Sir Launfal gives alms only; the gifts of true charity
must come from the heart. The knight rode to do a noble deed, but he
could have found the Holy Grail at his own castle gate had his heart
gone with his gift. He was seeking the husk instead of the grain. The
crusaders sought Christ by going to Jerusalem, and many yet seek Him
in the mere external ceremonies of the church. Notice how the leper
contrasts this false charity with the real:
“But he who gives but a slender mite,
And gives to that which is out of sight,
That thread of the all-sustaining beauty,
Which runs through all and doth all unite,
The hand cannot clasp the whole of his alms,
The heart outstretches its eager palms,
For a god goes with it and makes it store
To the soul that was starving in darkness before.”
Sir Launfal has realized the false charity; he is now to grow into the
true; and that is the problem to be worked out in the life of each
individual. It is the unceasing conflict between egoism and altruism,
between the individual and the universal self. In this conflict there
is a failure to recognize the self where the true self is found.
Failing to see the divinity in things we fail to see ourselves in them.
In the prelude to Part II. we have the inner beauty of life set over
against the external form. It requires the chilling influences of
winter to awaken the soul of Sir Launfal to the realities of life, to
enable him to recognize his kinship to the leper. His act was a small
one; little in the eyes of the world. He gave but a mouldy crust and a
drink of water, but
“The Holy Supper is kept indeed
In whatso we share with another’s need;
Not what we give but what we share,
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three--
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me.”
If the pupils do not realize the theme, if they do not see it as
universal in time and place--as good to-day as in time of knighthood,
and as applicable to one individual as another--they have lost the
best, in fact all, of the good of the poem. If they really read the
poem they must live for the time being decidedly above the ordinary
level of charitable feeling.
THE EMBODIMENT.
The theme is embodied in a person. Sir Launfal is not simply Sir
Launfal the individual, but Sir Launfal the universal. He is the
potential of what you and I may become. We know nothing and care
nothing about the ordinary events of his life. Even the most
matter-of-fact person cares nothing about when or where he was born.
Age and clime do not concern us. We are interested only in his growth
in charity. The embodiment is not Sir Launfal only, but Sir Launfal
with all his accessories, the castle, the leper, summer, winter, etc.
Sir Launfal before the castle gate, confronted by the leper, stands
boldly out in the foreground of the picture in the beginning, and
the scene must be shifted until he stands confronted by the leper
again--from June to December of life--and Sir Launfal, and not the
leper, must change.
The heavenly influences must bring knight and leper together so that
each shall recognize their spiritual kinship, and in the beginning they
are the extremes of human life. The only ideal charity is the kind
which has power to bring together the extremes of life, to show how the
kinship in a person in the most abject and offensive condition of life.
Sir Launfal is a knight, and the sworn duty of a knight is to do good
to others and to protect and defend the weak. Here is the opportunity
to do good to one who needs help, but he fails utterly. He makes no
sacrifice in giving gold; he does not share his life; he gives the gold
in scorn.
Sir Launfal, the proud, selfish knight, can never realize his kinship
to the leper until his selfishness is overcome, until his heart is
changed. He is uncharitable to an ideal degree, and this is still more
idealized when we consider that the June day which inspired Launfal to
the keeping of his vow was a free gift. The poet describes the June
day until the reader feels its power unto higher living. The physical
and the spiritual are blended, and to such a degree is the spiritual
idealized that the reader consciously feels the uplifting impulse. The
class that does not feel this uplifting impulse does not really read
the poem.
The June day is called a perfect day. It is a time when earth is in
tune with higher life. Every clod feels a stir of might, and such an
idealized effect on the clod makes the reader reach and tower to a
higher life. But Sir Launfal’s selfishness makes him out of harmony
with nature all about him. The little bird, deluged with summer, sings
to the world:
“His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings,”
but Sir Launfal’s heart sings only to the wide world, if it sings at
all. He does not respond to the quiet duty before him. Everything
but Sir Launfal is upward striving; selfishness like a lodestone, is
holding him down. At first it seems the poem lacks unity, but a careful
study shows that the preludes have the closest relation to the theme.
The uplifting influences of the free June day makes the selfishness of
Sir Launfal all the greater.
The castle is the embodiment of Launfal and selfishness. It, too,
was besieged by the summer, but “lay like an outpost of winter, dull
and gray.” The drawbridge dropped with a surly clang as the knight
dashed forth, but the sunshine went out of his soul with a thrill as
he beheld the leper. This picture is the embodiment of the emptiness
of the outward forms of charity--the mere almsgiving. The picture of
true charity is quite different. Sir Launfal and the leper meet again
before the same castle wall and again the leper begs an alms. The
chilling influences of life and the reverses of fortune have wrought
a change in Sir Launfal, and he now listens to the “grewsome thing.”
He recognizes in him not only a kinship, but sees in him the image
of Christ--the real Christ--while his life has been spent in seeking
only the shadow of Christ. The external contrast is as great as the
spiritual contrast. Sir Launfal is now an old, bent man. There is no
sign of Knighthood--he is “shelterless, shelterless, shelterless.”
The description of the little brook is, if possible, more delightful
than that of the June day, and is the embodiment of Sir Launfal’s
present life. The reader feels the joy of the fullness of inner
life independent of external circumstances. The warmth and comfort
inside the castle is a striking contrast with the cold outside, and
this expresses the condition of Sir Launfal. The inner life is now
triumphant over the outer. Contrast the picture of Sir Launfal leaving
the castle, and Sir Launfal returning to the castle. In the first the
outward life is triumphant over the inner. The external world is light
with warmth and cheer. In the second it is cold and bleak and gloomy,
while the ruddy glow comes from within. This growth is typical of
the progress of the soul from the pride of youth and inexperience to
the joy of the inner spiritual life of old age. It suggests also the
historical movement from external splendor of chivalrous deeds to inner
Christlike charity; the growth from symbolism to the thing symbolized.
The class should study the embodiment until they feel:
1. That the picture is accurate, vivid and full.
2. That it makes its appeal to the inner life of sympathy and love.
3. That there is perfect harmony between the real as presented in the
picture and the ideal as potential in human nature.
THE LANGUAGE.
The pupils should scan the poem to catch the music of the verse. Notice
the external mechanism, the language and its power to awaken aesthetic
pleasure. Note the freedom and variety of the structure. There is no
monotonous jingle. Rhythm is the primary element in poetic form, and
a return to it. There must be no fixed regularity in the departure
and the return. Notice the flexibility in the rhyme, as “knowing”
“growing,” “ear” “near,” “flowing,” “sky” “by,” “back” “lack,”
“chanticleer” “year,” “crowing.”
The measure is as free and as playful as the rhyme. The iambic is the
characteristic foot, but there is frequently variations by the use of
the anapest. The trochaic foot is used occasionally at the beginning
of the line. Notice the variations running through the poem and the
variations in the length and structure of the stanzas. The more complex
the movement of a poem, provided there is unity in it, the more music
there is in it. Stanzas cut by the same form and pattern are artificial
and mechanical.
The form of poetry, however, cannot be considered separate from the
thought and sentiment expressed. Alliteration, unless it fit the form
to the idea, is mere affectation. When the sentiment rises and falls
or moves with varying rapidity, the form of the stanza must vary. The
class should study the poem to see:
1. If there is any conflict between the form and meaning.
2. If the variation in form comes naturally with the variation of the
sentiment expressed.
Suggestion and allusion are well employed in the selections. The
author utilizes the reader’s knowledge of Wordsworth’s “Intimations
of Immortality,” the Bible story of Moses and Sinai, Druid religion,
and Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” and he does it skillfully. He does
not thrust it at the reader, but assumes the reader’s intelligence,
and the compliment is pleasing. The poems are few where we find the
objects presented so completely and transformed into spiritual types
so perfectly. Even the clod climbs to a soul. Note the suggestiveness,
the connotation, in “reaches” and “towers,” “groping blindly” and
“climbing.” All of them suggestive of the human soul’s ascent to higher
things.
The poem is a unit. It is “universal, ideal, emotional.” There is
complete fusion of form and content, a rounded fullness, completeness
and beauty which makes it a work of fine art. Do not let your
class leave it until they have stored their minds with beautiful
quotations--gems of thought and sentiment, jewels of expression--which
will bless and brighten and uplift them in after years.