Civilization has made mankind a crowd. We touch elbows with the world.
The Egyptian hermit has now “the privacy of a goldfish in a glass bowl.”
An individual by himself may indeed deliberate and philosophize, but
a crowd feels and acts. As soon as it stops cheering, it begins to
disintegrate into thinking individuals, who creep silently back to the
hermitage of home. The war, with its drives of all kinds, the elections,
the athletic contests, have made us familiar with the nature of a crowd.
The mob is a high-pressure crowd, and the feelings which burn in the
crowd explode violently in a mob. Civilization has brought mankind into
the closeness of a crowd, but not yet to the explosive confusion of a mob.
War taught us too the great value of morale. What is morale? What is that
light in the sky, that solid ground under foot, that winged buoyancy of
the heart? Morale might be described as organized emotion. A crowd is
fickle because it feels instead of reasons. Morale is the counter-force
to fickleness. Emotions are awakened, are focused on a given point, are
stabilized, and the result is morale. Courage hardens to pluck, duty
flames into devotion and bravery is transfigured into heroism.
Life therefore is flooded with emotion, all the way from every action of
the individual up to the responsive crowd, yielding to panic, exploding
into violence or steadied by morale. What then is education doing for the
emotions? Whether education be considered a development of the individual
capacities, or an adjustment of man to the community, education should
not neglect the emotions. The controlling tendencies, however, of the
modern school would seem to ignore or belittle emotions. Modern schools
pride themselves on being practical and scientific. They have become
more immersed in matter than in man. They are materialistic in the wide
sense, or naturalistic, but they are less and less humanistic. Three
great fields lie before the spirit of man, the field of truth, the field
of beauty and the field of good. No traveler can reach beauty and good
except through truth, but education seems to think its work is done if it
travels the regions of truth and ignores the regions of beauty and good.
All education formerly could be divided into two stages, the earlier of
preparation, the later of application. The individual was taught to speak
and write and was equipped with the general information necessary to
all. He who was able to speak and write was able to express himself, and
self-expression, which argued that man’s powers were working normally,
was the satisfactory goal in the first stage of education. After the
development of the individual came his application to the study of his
life-work in professional schools and universities.
In the former of these two stages, as self-expression was the end,
language was the chief and almost exclusive means. Sciences were
relegated to the university and informational subjects were left strictly
subordinated, and the whole course was predominately humanistic.
Modern education has profoundly changed this simple arrangement. The
university method of education and electivism and specialization have
been advanced to college, to high school and to grade school. Many
natural sciences have been systematized and brought into early classes.
The university chemistry and physics of fifty years ago are now in the
grades. Besides professional courses, pre-medical, pre-law, pre-divinity,
pre-engineering, pre-journalism, and in general pre-professional
studies are in our schools or at the doors. The trades are not behind
the professions. The million trades which concern themselves with the
production of raw material or with the manufacture of raw material into
finished products or with the distribution of finished products, all
these are knocking at the door or looking in the window of our school.
Nor is that all. As the professions want pre-professional and the trades
pre-trade courses, so the state demands pre-citizen courses in civic and
hygienics and military tactics, and the home exacts pre-family courses in
eugenics and many domestic sciences. Do not close your curriculum list
yet. The profession, the trade, the home, the state are not all, and to
leave out religion, which calls for pre-religious courses in private
schools, we have the whole field of sport and play in pre-dancing,
pre-ball-playing, and at last pre-movies. To make the conquest of the
practical complete, it is seriously advocated by a special committee of
the N. E. A. that this bewildering multiplicity of sciences, professions,
trades, civic, domestic and amusement courses should be begun at the
junior high school or seventh grade.
There is the contrast. Life is emotional. The early schools that used
to be devoted chiefly to writing and speaking, are now crowded with
a multiplicity of fact subjects, and even language and literature,
the most humanistic and emotional subjects of our courses, are taught
theoretically by university and scientific methods. In the Jesuit _Ratio
Studiorum_, which did not differ essentially from other systems, four
years of the lower schools were given to correct expression of the truth,
one year to the element of interest, or beauty, in expression, and one
whole year to the element of force, or good, in expression. These two
latter classes were called humanities and rhetoric and correspond to the
present freshman and sophomore classes in Jesuit colleges.
The reason why a whole year was given to the elements of interest and
force in self-expression is found in the twofold nature of emotions.
One set of emotions arises from the apprehension of good or avoidance
of evil. Another set arises from the perception of the novel, humorous
and beautiful. These latter comprehend the emotions of surprise, wonder,
delight, awe, in general, the esthetic emotions. The other emotions,
called appetitive, include love and hate, with desire and fear, joy and
sadness, pity and anger and many others.
Fortunately for the teacher the teaching of emotions is somewhat
simplified by the fact that both kinds of emotions respond, not to
abstract truth but to truth in the concrete and concrete truth takes on
beauty or good and awakens emotions through the imaginations of teacher
and student. Teachers who themselves imagine will awaken emotions and
educate emotions by exercising them. Teachers who imagine will make
pupils imagine by making them translate all truth from the abstract
to the concrete. The perpetual question on the lips of the teacher,
“For instance?” will embody truth in the concrete, exercise students in
imagination and make truth emotional and abiding.
Interesting and enthusiastic teachers are always training emotions.
Emotion is not imparted by instruction; it is kindled by contact.
Teachers who have their subjects transferred from dead books to their
warm, living imaginations, will be interesting, will be moving. They
will excite surprise and wonder by novelty and beauty of presentation.
They will make their classes expand with love or shrink in horror at the
pictures of good or evil.
After imagination and actual feeling on the part of both student and
teacher, the next best means of educating emotions is the stimulating
of action, especially in the way of original self-expression through
the written and spoken word. One of the happy tendencies of our modern
education is the restoring of oral expression to its former high place.
These means just mentioned will be helpful in any subject of the
curriculum, but the principal instrument in the schools for training
the emotions will be literature. Literature is the embodiment of human
emotions, in story, in essay, poem, and speech. The schools must hold
on to the teaching of literature. They must make a stand against the
imperialism of facts and so-called practical subjects. The schools must
never forget that it is at least just as practical to have a heart in
life as to have a head. A modern French scholar has said: “Humanities
and letters are man himself, to remove them from education, it would be
necessary to commence by taking man from man.”
Instruction in trades is a knack, not an education of man. A savage can
learn to run an automobile, and there are many today running automobiles,
but a savage does not enjoy literature or produce literature. Science has
its center outside of man, it is impersonal and unemotional. Literature
is human, is personal, it appeals to the heart which must not be starved
while the head is stuffed.
But even when the teachers of literature have the works of man in their
hands, they must not rob them of all emotions by making their teaching of
them historical only, or analytical only or theoretical only, lowering
Macbeth to a footnote in Scottish history or to an argument for the
theory of the romantic movement or to a dissertation on the psychology of
temptation. Literature must be taught as literature, not as history, not
as ethics. Literature should be taught as an art, not as a science. The
teacher should keep self-expression in view. The teacher will consider
the work of literature as the expression of a man. Before the class the
masterpiece of literature will grow and crystallize into unity. The
students will watch its creation; they will reflect the light from the
eyes of an enthusiastic teacher; they will grasp the truth vividly and
emotionally; they will be thrilled with the truth that has taken shape
in their teacher’s imagination, that has been dramatized before them in
suggestive detail, that will teach the students themselves how to think,
how to imagine, how to find for the embodied truth a local habitation and
a name, how to express themselves in words which fascinate and inflame.
So will the emotions by their exercise be developed and by their
expression be controlled. The world of the classroom is a little world
and its tiny emotions are as dew-drops to a deluge, but for the young
hearts in school the world of the classroom is a gigantic world and its
slight emotions are adequate to teach beginners. For a dew drop may be a
deluge for a violet and its very food and life.
XIII
KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM
This is not the time to drop Latin or Greek openly or under the
subterfuge of optional electives. Colleges everywhere are crowded.
Buildings are too small for the students; classes are too large for the
professors. Now is the time to impose stricter conditions rather than to
open wider the doors to colleges, and now is the proper time to restore
the classical languages, and especially Greek, if not to favor, because
knowledge maketh a bloody entrance, and its weapons are resented, at
least to respectable toleration, by teaching them in the right way. Do
not empty the baby with the bath, but do draw off the stagnant waters
and let the bright showers sparkle and sing and refresh. Don’t throw out
Greek, but do teach Greek as literature, as the art of self-expression,
as a practical and permanent possession of the student through
appreciation and through composition in his own language.
Greek authors used to be put in the students’ hands with a Latin
paraphrase. In Jesuit schools the explanation of the author included a
translation which might be dictated to the class. This was done because
in Latin, and especially in Greek, which was not the language to be
used in life, the proper and real work began after the interpretation
was known. That proper work was artistic appreciation and artistic
reproduction in one’s own language, formerly Latin and now various
languages. Rather than cast out Greek, furnish the students with Loeb
or Jebb or Murray or Lang, shorten grammatical drill, and then center
attention on the appreciation and the reproduction of the finest
literary art of all ages, exacting compositions written and spoken in
the student’s own language. This is not a revolutionary proposal, the
system now prevalent is revolutionary; but it is a proposal to relegate
to the university the specialism and scientific handling of literature,
and an earnest plea to retain or restore to the classics, especially
Greek, their age-old method, proper to the general training of academy
and of college and profitable to every student if the art of speaking and
writing is of lifelong utility.
The teaching of literature has a handicap which is not found in the
teaching of other arts. A painter must know some practical facts about
preparing and applying paints, but he need not know the whole chemistry
of pigments or the physics of colors. The sculptor must choose the
right kind of marble, but he does not take a course in geology. In all
arts except literature the contact with the artist’s work is almost
immediate. But in literature a language must be mastered, and in
mastering that language a thousand sciences have obtruded themselves
between the student and the masterpiece. Gustav Foch of Leipsic published
some years ago a catalog of dissertations printed in Germany during the
latter part of the nineteenth century. The catalog, which was by no means
complete, containing only the items he was prepared to furnish, listed
27,000 titles. This formidable number concerned itself entirely with the
Greek and Roman writers and embodied special studies on the history, the
evolution, the text, the erudition of classical literature. Practically
nothing of this immense flood of special dissertations touched on the art
of literature.
Now, if all this tremendous erudition were left to the university,
where it properly belongs, not much harm would be done; but unhappily
the study of literature as a science has almost completely excluded its
study as an art. The small school of Dissen, Rehdantz and Blass, who
represented in Germany the artistic appreciation of Greek literature, was
submerged by the immensely greater number of scientific investigators.
The classical poets, with the exception of Homer, fared better than the
prose authors; but all literature, instead of being a help to the art of
composition, was subordinated to establishing a theory or to exemplifying
a generalization.
France resisted almost entirely this scientific obsession of literature.
England held out long. In both of these nations composition in the
classical languages was a fixed feature of the schools. Victorian
literature is steeped in the classics, especially of Greece; the golden
age of England’s eloquence, the age of Chatham, Fox and Burke, preceded
the scientific era of classicism and was the product of artistic
appreciation and of composition.
What of America? The earlier schools followed French and English
traditions and taught the classics with literary appreciation and with
fruitful results for the literature of America. Then later America
sent its professors to Germany; specialism and the departmental system
separated literature entirely from the classics; composition ceased
except as a means of learning grammar, thus establishing a complete
reversal of the original practice, where grammar was a means to
composition.
It would be untrue to say that all the erudition, discovered and
systematized by numerous sciences and centering upon the classics, was
useless or unprofitable. Even the immense library which the Wolfian
theory of Homeric origins brought into existence has not been entirely
in vain. Germany of the nineteenth century was the Alexandria of the
modern world, and as Alexandrian criticism was the forerunner of the
best in Latin literature, perhaps the immense activity of scientific
investigators may have an artistic outcome. A selection of what is
good and true, and a clear, concise presentation of well-established
facts, such as Père Laurand gives in his excellent series, _Manuels des
Etudes Grecques et Latines_ (Picard, Paris), will help the study of the
classics. Erudition should take now its proper place of subordination.
The classics should resume the functions which history, evolution,
origins and other scientific approaches have taken away; the classics
should once more be studied primarily as works of art. The medium
and materials do not dominate other arts; they should not dominate
literature. Self-expression is the goal of all art; it should be the goal
of literature.
Have the teachers of the classics lost faith? Is artistic appreciation an
idle thing or is it a thing of beauty, a joy forever? The experimental
sciences are always changing in facts and theories. The chemistry of
a century ago is absurd; the chemistry of twenty-five years ago is
antiquated; the chemistry of today will be old tomorrow. As Remsen long
ago saw and insisted on, what is valuable in the teaching of chemistry
are the processes, not the theories, which will likely change tomorrow.
Chemistry, as a science, is a bit of classified information always
modified by research. Art and artistic appreciation is a thing of beauty
and a joy forever. Give a man appreciation of literature; let him taste
the beauty of Homer and of Sophocles and of Demosthenes, and you have
given him, not a catalog of facts which must always be rectified, not
a theory which must change with the facts, but a precious treasure in
the mind which will always remain. In teaching chemistry the processes
are more important than the temporary information; in the teaching of
literature the processes are at least equally valuable, and besides last
through life in abiding taste and in perfected self-expression.
Formerly reproduction was the aim of the teacher of the classics.
“Reproduction is the soul of the explanation or prelection,” is the way
early Jesuit pedagogy put it, and every student of philosophy knows
what the soul or formal cause contributes to the effect. How many in
explaining classical literature today guide themselves throughout by
the principle that their students are to reproduce artistically the
masterpiece which they explain? No doubt professors insist upon the
formation of clear ideas and further demand explicit judgments in the
way of propositions. Most too require that the links of reasoning
be sharply and definitely stated. Interpretation, in a word, is
well done. The intellectual element of the masterpiece is handled
satisfactorily. But what of the artistic form? Does the literature take
shape in the student’s imagination? Is the picture realized in the
teacher’s imagination and then by suggestion, through the sparkling
eye and sympathetic voice and interpreting gesture, by vivid, though
not histrionic, dramatization, is the author’s message staged in the
student’s imagination? Scientific analysis, especially where a text
becomes a tag to some learned generalization, often prevents imaginative
realization and thus precludes artistic appreciation of literature.
The teaching of the classics has been and is now justified by the general
training they impart, but it is chiefly when taught as literature that
they impart that general training. If the classics are subordinated to
the university lecturer’s specialty, then the classics are imparting
little general training and have hardly more right in the classroom,
except for indirect results which may accrue from contact with art, than
have special courses in conchology or entomology. Let the teacher look
upon the classics as art to be reproduced after being appreciated, and a
general training will be the outcome. Composition should be made the aim
of literature.
Idioms of languages, and their vocabulary and their structure differ, but
thought and imagination may be the same. Set all the languages of the
world before a moving-picture, and each language will tell the common
story on the screen to its children in its own way of speaking. So the
student of any language may learn from Homer how to select details and
group them into artistic wholes, how to carry on the narrative through
significant and choice events, how to dwell on the important and touch
lightly on the insignificant, how to relieve a story and intensify a part
of it by appropriate comparisons. As the student learns how to tell a
story, so too may he master the art of describing a scene, of creating
a character, of making a speech. He will be taught the way to focus an
idea and give it discriminating expression by the right word, the way to
embody good or evil in concrete and picturesque words and the way to be
proficient in all the elements and processes of composition. The Greek
Homer made the Latin Æneid, the Greek Theocritus made the Latin Eclogue
and, if Stedman is right, also the Tennysonian Idyll. The literary art of
Greek and Latin has given and will give artistic form to the student’s
vernacular.
The classics will give a general training if they are made to do so.
Literature will not impart a general training automatically. Art is
a habit arising from a repetition of acts. The art of thinking is
mastered by thinking, and the art of imagining by imagining, and that
thinking and imagining will be done well if done under the guidance of
masters. Has the literary art of Greece, which created Latin literature
and directly and indirectly shaped the literature of all civilization,
done its full work? Who can believe it? Every generation since Homer
has been influenced by the art of Homer in translation and imitation,
and no generations more so than those of Cowper and Morris and Lang in
England and of Bryant and Palmer in America. The time may come when
literary taste and literary art will be as well studied and demonstrated
in modern languages as in those of Latin and Greek; the time may come
when modern classics may be as well adapted for education as the
classics of Greek and Rome which have been in the classroom for century
upon century, but that time does not appear to be tomorrow or the day
after. If the art of self-expression is the best test of education,
if the art of self-expression is the most practical thing in life and
the most permanent treasure that can be gained in school, then Greek
literature, the finest masterpiece of self-expression, should remain,
and Greek literature should be taught, as for centuries it was taught,
with interpretation and translation furnished to the student, leaving
the time of training to be devoted not to special sciences proper to the
university, but to the general training in appreciation and expression,
proper to academy and college.
XIV
THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD
This title is not an advertisement for a patent medicine; it is the
brief statement of an important historical fact. “Every schoolboy knows”
that the revival of learning in Italy came from the vitalizing touch of
Greek. Out of that renaissance, which the Jesuits took over and embodied
in their system of teaching, grew modern scholarship in England through
Linacre, Lilly, Colet and More, the forerunners of the Elizabethans. It
was the beginning of modern scholarship in Germany, through Erasmus, the
friend of these Englishmen, and through Melanchthon, whose name, like
that of Erasmus, marks the power of Greek: out of that renaissance sprang
the rejuvenated civilization of our day. Every schoolboy knows that Greek
brought the modern world to life, but is it as well known or remembered
that Greek has always been vivifying everything it touched?