TALKS ON TEACHING
LITERATURE

TALKS ON TEACHING
LITERATURE

BY
ARLO BATES

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1906

COPYRIGHT 1906 BY ARLO BATES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October 1906

These Talks are founded upon lectures delivered before the Summer School of the University of Illinois in June, 1905. The interest which was shown in the subject and in the views expressed encouraged me to state rather more elaborately and in book form what I felt in regard to a matter which is certainly of great importance, and concerning which so many teachers are in doubt. I wish here to express my obligation to Assistant-Professor Henry G. Pearson, who has very kindly gone over the manuscript, and to whom I am indebted for suggestions of great value.

CONTENTS

TALKS ON TEACHING
LITERATURE

I
THE PROBLEM

Few earnest teachers of literature have escaped those black moments when it seems perfectly evident that the one thing sure in connection with the whole business is that literature cannot be taught. If they are of sensitive conscience they are likely to have wondered at times whether it is honest to go on pretending to give instruction in a branch in which instruction was so obviously impossible. The more they consider, the more evident it is that if a pupil really learns anything in literature,—as distinguished from learning about literature,—he does it himself; and they cannot fail to see that as an art literature necessarily partakes of the nature of all art, the quality of being inexpressible and unexplainable in any language except its own.

The root of whatever difficulty exists in fulfilling the requirements of modern courses of training which have to do with literature is just this fact. Any art, as has been said often and often, exists simply and solely because it embodies and conveys what can be adequately expressed in no

other form. A picture or a melody, a statue or a poem, gives delight and inspiration by qualities which could belong to nothing else. To teach painting or music or literature is at best to talk about these qualities. Words cannot express what the work or art expresses, or the work itself would be superfluous; and the teacher of literature is therefore apparently confronted with the task of endeavoring to impart what language itself cannot say.

So stated the proposition seems self-contradictory and absurd. Indeed it too often happens that in actual practice it is so. Teachers weary their very souls in necessarily fruitless endeavors to achieve the impossible, and fail in their work because they have not clearly apprehended what they could effect and what they should endeavor to effect. In any instruction it is of great importance to recognize natural and inevitable limitations, and nowhere is this more true than in any teaching which has to do with the fine arts. In other branches failure to perceive the natural restrictions of the subject limits the efficiency of the teacher; in the arts it not only utterly vitiates all work, but it gives students a fundamentally wrong conception of the very nature of that with which they are dealing.

In most studies the teacher has to do chiefly with the understanding, or, to put it more exactly, with the intellect of the pupil. In dealing with literature he must reckon constantly with the emotions also. If he cannot arouse the feelings and

the imaginations of his students, he does not succeed in his work. Not only is this difficult in itself, but it calls for an emotional condition in the instructor which is not easily combined with the didactic mood required by teaching; a condition, moreover, which begets a sensitiveness to results much more keen than any disappointment likely to be excited by failure to carry a class triumphantly through a lesson in arithmetic or history. This sensitiveness constantly brings discouragement, and this in turn leads to renewed failure. In work which requires the happiest mood on the part of the teacher and the freest play of the imagination, the consciousness of any lack of success increases the difficulty a hundredfold. The teacher who is able by sheer force of determination to manage the stupidities of a dull algebra class, may fail signally in the attempt to make the same force carry him through an unappreciated exercise in "Macbeth." It is true that no teaching is effective unless the interest as well as the attention of the pupils is enlisted; but whereas in other branches this is a condition, in the case of literature it is a prime essential.

The teaching of literature, moreover, is less than useless if it is not educational as distinguished from examinational. It is greatly to be regretted that necessity compels the holding of examinations at all in a subject of which the worth is to be measured strictly by the extent to which it inspires the imagination and develops the character

of the student. Any system of examinations is likely to be at best a makeshift made inevitable by existing conditions, and it is rendered tolerable only where teachers—often at the expense, under present school methods, of a stress of body and of soul to be appreciated only by those who have taught—are able to mingle a certain amount of education with the grinding drill of routine work. Examination papers hardly touch and can hardly show the results of literary training which are the only excuse for the presence of this branch in the school curriculum. Every faithful worker who is trying to do what is best for the children while fulfilling the requirements of the official powers above him is face to face with the fact that the tabulated returns of intermediates and finals do not in the least represent his best or most laboriously achieved success.

Under these conditions it is not strange that so many teachers are at a loss to know what they are expected to do or what they should attempt to do. If the teachers in the secondary schools of this country were brought together into some Palace of Truth where absolute honesty was forced upon them, it would be interesting and perhaps saddening to find how few could confidently assert that they have clear and logical ideas in regard to the teaching of literature. They would all be able to say that they dealt with certain specified books because such work is a prominent part of the school requirement; and many would, unless restrained by

the truth-compelling power of their environment, add vague phrases about broadening the minds of the children. A pitiful number would be forced to confess that they had no clear conception of what they were to do beyond loading up the memories of the luckless young folk with certain dead information about books to be unloaded at the next examination, and there left forever. Too often "broadening the mind" of the young is simple flattening it out by the dead weight of lifeless and worthless fact.

This uncertainty in regard to what they are to do and how they are to do it is constantly evident in the complaints and inquiries of teachers. "How would you teach 'Macbeth'?" one asked me. "Do you think the sources of the plot should be thoroughly mastered?" Another wrote me that she had always tried to make the moral lesson of "Silas Marner" as clear and strong as possible, but that one of her boys had called her attention to the fact that no question on such a matter had ever appeared in the college entrance examination papers, and that she did not know what to do. A third said frankly that she could never see what there was in literature to teach, so she just took the questions suggested by a text-book and confined her attention to them. If these seem extreme cases, it is chiefly because they are put into words. Certainly the number of instructors who are virtually in the position of the third teacher is by no means small.

Even the editors of "school classics" are sometimes found to be no more enlightened than those they profess to aid, and not infrequently seem more anxious to have the appearance of doing a scholarly piece of work than one fitted for actual use. The devices they recommend for fixing the attention and enlightening the darkness of children in literary study are numerous; but not infrequently they are either ludicrous or pathetic. A striking example is that conspicuously futile method, the use of symbolic diagrams. The attempt to represent the poetry, the pathos, the passion of "The Merchant of Venice" or "Romeo and Juliet" by a diagram like a proposition in geometry seems to me not only the height of absurdity, but not a little profane. I have examined these cryptic combinations of lines, tangents, triangles, and circles, with more bewilderment than comprehension, I confess; generally with irritation; and always with the profound conviction that they could hardly be surpassed as a means of producing confusion worse confounded in the mind of any child whatever. Other schemes are only less wild, and while excellent and helpful text-books are not wanting, not a few show evidence that the writers were as little sure of what they were trying to effect, or of how it were best effected, as the most bewildered teacher who might unadvisedly come to them for enlightenment.

Instruction in literature as it exists to-day in the common schools of this country is almost

always painstaking and conscientious; but it is by no means always intelligent. The teachers who resort to diagrams are sincerely in earnest, and no less faithful are those who at the expense of most exhausting labor are dragging classes through the morass of questions suggested by the least desirable of school editions of college requirements. They dose their pupils with notes as Mrs. Squeers dosed the poor wretches at Dotheboys Hall with brimstone and treacle. The result is much the same in both cases.

"Oh! Nonsense," rejoined Mrs. Squeers. . . . "They have brimstone and treacle, partly because if they hadn't something or other in the way of medicine they'd be always . . . giving a world of trouble, and partly because it spoils their appetites, and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner."

Certainly any child, no matter how great his natural appetite for literature, must find the desire greatly diminished after a dose of text-book notes.

The difficulties of teachers in handling this branch of instruction have been increased by the system under which work must be carried on. The tremendous problem of educating children in masses has yet to be solved, and it is at least doubtful if it can be worked out successfully without a very substantial diminution of the requirements now insisted upon. Certainly it is hardly conceivable that with the curriculum as crowded as it is at present any teacher could do much in the common schools with the teaching of literature.

The pedagogic committees who have fixed the college entrance requirements, moreover, seem to have acted largely along conventional lines. In the third place the spirit of the time is out of sympathy with art, and the variety and insistence of outside calls on the attention and interest of the children make demands so great as to leave the mind dull to finer impressions. To the boy eager over football, the circus, and the automobile race he is to see when school is out, even an inspired teacher may talk in vain about Dr. Primrose, Lady Macbeth, or any other of the immortals. Ears accustomed to the strident measures of the modern street-song are not easily beguiled by the music of Milton, and yet the teacher of to-day is expected to persuade his flock that they should prefer "L'Allegro" to the vulgar but rollicking "rag-time" comic songs of dime-museum and alley. Under circumstances so adverse, it is not to be wondered at that teachers are not only discouraged but often bewildered.

What happens in many cases is sufficiently well shown by this extract from a freshman composition, in which the writer frankly gives an account of his training in English literature in a high school not twenty-five miles from Boston:

Very special attention was paid to the instruction of the classics as to what the examinations require. As closely as possible the faculty determine the scope of the examinations, and the class is drilled in that work especially. Examination papers are procured for

several years back, and are given to the students as regular high school examinations, and as samples of the kind of questions to be expected. The instructors notice especial questions that are often repeated in examination papers, warn the pupils of them, and even go so far as to estimate when the question will be used again. I have heard in the classroom, "This question was given three years ago, and it is about due again. They ask it every three or four years."

Another boy wrote, in the same set of themes, that he had taken the examination in the autumn, and added:

On the June examinations I noticed that there was nothing about Milton, so I studied Milton with heart and soul.

Here we find stated plainly what everybody connected with teaching knows to be common, and indeed what under the present system is almost inevitable. I know of many schools of no inconsiderable standing where in all branches old examination papers, if not used as the text-books, are at least the actual guide to all work done in the last year of fitting for college. This is perhaps only human, and it is easy to understand; but it certainly is not education, and of that fact both students and teachers are entirely well aware. All this I say with no intention of blaming anybody for what is the result of difficult conditions. It is not well, however, to ignore what is perfectly well known, and what is one of the important difficulties of the situation.

The problem, then, which confronts the teacher in the secondary school is twofold. He has to decide in the first place what the teaching of literature can and should legitimately accomplish, and in the second, by what means this may most surely and effectively be done. In a word, although work in this line has been going on multitudinously and confusedly for years, we are yet far from sufficiently definite ideas why and how literature should be taught to children.

II
THE CONDITIONS

The inclusion of literature in the list of common school studies, however the original intent may have been lost sight of, was undoubtedly made in the interest of general culture. It is not certain that those who put it in had definite conceptions of methods or results, but unquestionably their idea was to aid the development of the children's minds by helping them to appreciate and to assimilate thoughts of nobility and of beauty, and by fostering a love for literature which should lead them to go on acquiring these from the masterpieces. How clear and well defined in the minds of educators this idea was it is needless to inquire. It is enough that it was undoubtedly sincere, and that it was founded on a genuine faith in the broadening and elevating influence of art.

The importance of literature as a means of mental development used to be taken for granted. Our fathers and grandfathers had for the classics a reverence which the rising generation looks back to as a phase of antiquated superstition, hardly more reasonable than the worship of sacred wells or a belief in goblins. So much stress is now laid

upon the tangible and the material as the only genuine values, that everything less obvious is discredited. The tendency is to take only direct results into consideration; and influences which serve rather to elevate character than to aid in money-getting are at best looked upon with toleration.

That sense of mankind, however, which depends upon the perception of the few, and which in the long run forms the opinion of society in spite of everything, holds still to the importance of literature in any intelligent scheme of education. The popular disbelief makes enormously difficult the work of the teacher, but the force of the conviction of the wise minority keeps this branch in the schools. The sincere teacher, therefore, naturally tries to analyze effects, and to discern possibilities, in order to discover upon what facts the belief in the educational value of the study of literature properly rests.

The most obvious reasons for the study of literature may be quickly disposed of. It is well for a student to be reasonably familiar with the history of literature, with the names and periods of great writers. This adds to his chances of appearing to advantage in the world, and especially in that portion of society where he can least afford to be at a disadvantage. He is provided with facts about books and authors quite as much to protect him from the ill effects of appearing ignorant as for any direct influence this knowledge will have on his mind. Whatever the tendency of the times to

undervalue in daily life acquaintance with the more refined side of human knowledge, the fact remains that to betray ignorance in these lines may bring real harm to a person's social standing. Every one recognizes that among educated people a lad is better able to make his way if he does not confound the age of Shakespeare with that of Browning, and if he is able to distinguish between Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer. Such information may not be specially vital, but it is worth possessing.

Considerations of this sort, however, are evidently not of weight enough to account for the place of the study in the schools, and still less to excuse the amount of time and attention bestowed upon it. The same line of reasoning would defend the introduction of dancing, because

Those move easiest who have learned to dance.

More important and more far-reaching reasons must be found to satisfy the teacher, and to hearten him for the severe labor of working with class after class in the effort, not always successful, of arousing interest and enthusiasm over the writings which go by the name of English Classics. Some of these I may specify briefly. To deal with them exhaustively would take a book in itself, and would leave no room for the consideration of methods.

A careful and intelligent study of masterpieces of prose or verse, the teacher soon perceives, must

develop greatly the student's sense of the value of words. This is not the highest function of this work, but it is by no means one to be despised. Literary study affords opportunities for training of this sort which are not to be found elsewhere; and a sensitiveness to word-values is with a child the beginning of wisdom.

Children too often acquire and adults follow the habit of accepting words instead of ideas. A genuine appreciation of the worth of language is after all the chief outward sign of the distinction between the wise man and the dullard. One is content to receive speech as sterling coin, and the other perceives that words are but counters. If students could but appreciate the difference between apprehending and comprehending what they are taught, between learning words and assimilating ideas, the intellectual millennium would be at hand. Children need to learn that the sentence is after all only the envelope, only the vehicle for the thought. Everybody agrees to this theoretically, but practically the fact is generally ignored. The child is father to the man in nothing else more surely than in the trait of accepting in perfect good faith empty words as complete and satisfactory in themselves. The habit of being content with phrases once bred into a child can be eradicated by nothing short of severe intellectual surgery.

To say that words are received as sufficient in themselves and not as conveying ideas sounds like a paradox; but there are few of us who may not at

once make a personal application and find an illustration in the common phrases and formulas of our life. Perhaps none of us are free from the fault of sometimes substituting empty phrases for vital rules of conduct. The most simple and the most tremendous facts of human life are often known only as lifeless statements rather than realized as vibrant truths. With children the language of text-book or classroom is so likely to be repeated by rote and remembered mechanically that constant vigilance on the part of the teacher can hardly overcome the evil. Force the boy who on the college entrance examination paper writes fluently that "Milton is the poet of sublimity" to try to define, even to himself, what the statement means, and the result is confusion. He meant nothing. He had the words, but they had never conveyed to him a thought. Language should be the servant of the mind, but never was servant that so constantly and so successfully usurped the place of master.

Children must be taught, and taught not simply by precept but by experience, to realize that the value of the word lies solely in its efficiency as a vehicle of thought. They must learn to appreciate as well as to know mechanically that language is to be estimated by its effect in communicating the idea, and that to be satisfied with words for themselves is obvious folly. For enforcing this fact literature is especially valuable. It is hardly possible in even the most superficial work on a play of

Shakespeare, for instance, for the reader to fail to perceive how the idea burns through the word, how wide is the difference between the mere apprehension of the language and the comprehension of the poet's meaning. In the study of great poetry the impossibility of resting satisfied with anything short of the ideas is so strongly brought out that it cannot be ignored or forgotten; and in this way pupils are impressed with the value of words.

This sensitiveness to the value of words in general is closely coupled with an appreciation of the force of words in particular, of what may be called word-values. The power of appreciating that a word is merely a messenger bringing an idea, is naturally connected with the ability to distinguish with exactness the nature and the value of the thought which the messenger presents. To feel the need of knowing clearly and surely the thought expressed inevitably leads to precision and delicacy in distinguishing the significance and force of language. When once a child appreciates the difference between the accepting of what he reads vaguely or mechanically and the getting from it its full meaning, he is eager to have it all; he finds delight in the intellectual exercise of searching out each hidden suggestion and in the sense of possession which belongs to achieving the thought of the master. It is not to be expected that our pupils shall be able to receive in its full richness the deepest thought of the poets, but they none the less find delight in possessing it to the extent

of their abilities. The point is too obvious to need expansion; but every instructor will recognize its great importance.

Obvious as is this importance of the sense of the value of words and a sensitiveness to word-values, it is not infrequently overlooked. Teachers see the need of a knowledge of the meaning of terms and phrases in a particular selection without stopping to think of the prime value of the principle involved, or indeed that a general principle is involved at all. Still more often they fail to perceive all that logically follows. In exact, vital realization of the full force of language lies the secret of sharing the wisdom of the ages. If students can be trained to penetrate through the word of the printed page to the thought, they are brought into communication with the master-minds of the race. It is not learning to read in the common, primary acceptation of the term that opens for the young the thought of the race; but learning to read in the higher and deeper sense of receiving the word only as a symbol behind and beyond which the thought lies concealed from the ordinary and superficial reader.

Most of all is it the business of the young to learn about life. Whatever does not tend, directly or indirectly, to make the child better acquainted with the world he has come into, with how he must and how he should bear himself under its complex conditions, is of small value as far as education goes. Of rules for conduct he is given plenty as

to matters of morality and of religion. Moral laws and religious precepts are good, and could they accomplish all that is sometimes expected of them, life would quickly be a different matter, and teachers would find themselves living in an earthly paradise. Unhappily these excellent maxims effect in actual life far less than is to be desired. Not infrequently the urchin who has been stuffed with moral admonitions as a doll with sawdust shows in his conduct no regard for them other than a fine zeal in scorning them. Children are seldom much affected by explicit directions in regard to conduct. They must be reached by indirection, and they are moulded less by what they recognize as intentionally wise views of life than by those which they receive unconsciously. The more just these unrecognized ideas of themselves and of the world are, the greater is the chance that they will develop a character well balanced and well adjusted to the conditions of human life.

Children live in a world largely made up of half-perceptions, of misunderstandings, and of dreams; a world pathetically full of guesses. They must depend largely upon appearances, and constantly confound what seems with what really is. They learn but slowly, however, to shape their beliefs or their emotions by conventionality. They do not easily acquire the vice of accepting shams because some authority has endorsed these. All of us are likely to have had queerly uncomfortable moments when we have found ourselves confounded and reproved by

the unflinching honesty of the child; and we have been forced to confess, at least to ourselves, that much of our admiration is mere affectation, many of our professions unadulterated truckling to some authority in which after all we have little real faith. Children are naturally too unsophisticated for self-deception of this sort. They confound substance and shadow, but they do it in good faith and with no affectations. They are therefore at the place where they most need sound and sure help to apprehend and to comprehend those things which their elders call the realities of life.

What human nature and human life are like is learned most quickly and most surely from the best literature. The outward, the evident conditions of society and of humanity may perhaps be best obtained by children from the events of every-day existence; but in all that goes deeper the wisdom of great writers is the surest guide.

On the face of it such a proposition may not seem self-evident, and to not a few teachers it is likely to appear a little absurd. Children, it is evident, learn the realities of life by living. They perceive physical truth by the persuasive force of actual experience: by tumbling down and bumping their precious noses; by unmistakably impressive contact with the fist of a pugnacious school-fellow; by being hungry or uncomfortably stuffed with Thanksgiving turkey; by heat and by cold, by sweets or by sours, by hardness or by softness. Certainly through such means as these the child

gains knowledge and develops mentally; but the process is inevitably slow. Most of all is the growth in the youthful mind of general deductions and the perception of underlying principles extremely gradual. He does not learn quickly enough that certain lines of conduct are likely to lead to unfortunate ends. Even when this is grasped, he has not come to appreciate what human laws underlie the whole matter; nor is he in the least likely to realize them so fully as to shape by them his conduct in the steadily more and more complicated affairs of life.

The small boy learns the wisdom of moderation from the stomach-ache which follows too much plum-pudding or too many green apples—if the pain is often enough repeated. The matter, however, is apt to present itself to his mind as a sort of tacit bargain between himself and Fate: so many green apples, so much stomach-ache; so much self-indulgence and so much pain, and the account is balanced. Life is not so simple as this; and that Fate does not make bargains so direct is learned from experience so gradually as often to be learned too late. To tell this to a child is of very little effect; for even if he believes it with his childish intelligence, he can hardly feel the intimate links which bind all humanity together, and make him subject to the same conditions that rule his elders and instructors.

The phrase "realities of life," moreover, includes not only sensible—that is, material

—facts and conditions, but the more subtle things of inner existence. A hundred persons are able to gather facts, while very few are capable of drawing from them adequate conclusions or of perceiving how one truth bears upon another. A very moderate degree of intelligence is required for analysis as compared to that necessary for synthesis. The power "to put two and two together," as the common phrase has it, grows slowly in the mind of a child. Within a limited range children appreciate that one fact is somehow joined to another; and indeed the education which life gives consists chiefly in expanding this perception. The connection between touching a hot coal and being burned brings home the plain physical relations early. The connection between disobedience and unpleasant consequences will be borne in upon the youthful consciousness according to the sharpness of discipline by which it is enforced; and so on to the end of the chapter. To perceive a relation and to appreciate what that relation is are, however, different matters. The understanding of the nature of breaking rules and suffering in consequence involves a perception of underlying principle, and some comprehension of the real nature of these principles.

The part which literature may play in giving children, and for that matter their elders, a vivid perception of moral laws is shown by the use which has been made of fables and moral tales. The parables of Scripture illustrate the point. Of the

habit of making literature directly a vehicle for moral instruction by the drawing of morals I shall have something to say later; but the extent to which this has been done at least serves here to make clearer what we mean by saying that in this study the child learns general principles and their relation. The small child, for instance, who is told in tender years that ingeniously virtuous fable which relates the heroic doings of little George Washington and his immortal hatchet, gets some idea of a connection between virtue and joy in the abstract. A notion faint, but none the less genuine, remains in his mind that some real connection exists between truth and desirability; and the same sort of thing holds true in cases where the teaching is less directly didactic.

The directly didactic is likely to be most in evidence in the training of children, and so affords convenient illustration of the illuminating effect of literature on young minds. Despite the fact that I disbelieve in reading into any tale or poem a moral which is not expressly put there by the author, and that I hold more strongly yet to the belief that the most marked and most lasting effects of imaginative work are indirect, I am not without a perception of the value at a certain stage of human development of the direct moral of the fable and the improving tale. A small lad of ten within the range of my observation, upon whom had been lavished an abundance, and perhaps even a superabundance, of moral precept, astonished and

disconcerted his mother by remarking with delightful naïveté that he had at school been reading "The Little Merchant," in Miss Edgeworth's "Parents' Assistant," and that from it he had learned how mean and foolish it is to lie. "But, my dear boy," the mother cried in dismay, "I've been telling you that ever since you were born!" "Oh, well," responded the lad, with the unconsciously brutal frankness of his years, "but that never interested me." The obvious moral teaching that had made no impression when offered as a bare precept had been effective to him when presented as an appeal to his feeling.

Through imaginative literature abstract truths are made to have for the child a reality which is given to them by the experiences of daily life only by the slowest of degrees. Children rarely generalize, except in matters of personal feeling and in the regions of general misapprehension. A child easily receives the fact of the moment for a truth of all time: if he is miserable, for instance, he is very apt to feel that he must always be in that doleful condition; but this is in no real sense a generalization. It is more than half self-deception. Any child, however, who has been thrilled by a single line of imaginative poetry has—even if unconsciously—come into direct touch with a wide and humanly universal truth.

Especially and essentially is this to be said of truth which has to do with human feeling, the universal truth of the emotions. The man or the

woman into whom the school-boy or girl is to grow will in shaping life be guided chiefly by the feelings. Whether the ordinary mortal lives well or ill, basely or nobly, dully or vividly, is practically determined by what he feels. However much the convictions have to do in ordering conduct, feeling has more, and conviction itself is with most mortals inseparably bound up with the emotions. The highest office of education is to develop the emotions highly and nobly; and it is no less essential to the intellectual than to the moral well-being of the child that he be bred to feel as deeply and as wholesomely as possible. Every teacher knows that in dealing with children the ultimate appeal is to their feelings. If a crisis arises in school-life it is to the emotions that the matter is inevitably referred, whether the instructor likes this or not, and whether the appeal is made openly or is indirect and tacit. Teaching must deal with the sentiments as well as with the understanding. That no other means of training and properly developing the feelings of youth is so efficient as literature seems to me a proposition too self-evident to need further comment.

Enthusiasm is so closely connected with the cultivation and training of the emotions that it is not easy to draw a line between them. While there is certainly no need to enlarge here upon the worth of enthusiasm in education or in life, or upon literature as a means of arousing it, it is worth while to emphasize the extent to which the mind of

youth may be affected by enthusiasm. The effects are naturally often so indirect or intangible as not to be easily measured, but often, too, they are direct and practical. Some years ago in a country school in eastern Maine was still paramount the old-time Greenleaf's "Arithmetic" which we elders remember with mixed feelings. The law of education in those days, when children were still expected to do things which were mapped out for them and to follow a course of study whether it chanced to please their individual fancy or not, enforced the mastering of everything in the text-book, even to sundry weird processes with queer names such as "Alligation Alternate" and the like. The teacher of this particular school, a plucky morsel of New England womanhood, not much bigger than a chickadee, set herself resolutely to carry through the arithmetic a class of farmer lads, better at the plow than in mathematics. What happened she told me twenty-five years ago, and I am still able to call up the vision of the air half of defiance, half of amusement with which she said: "The boys were in a perfectly hopeless muddle. I had explained and explained, until I wished I could either cry like a woman or be a man and swear! The third day I had an inspiration. In the very middle of the recitation, I told them to shut up their books, and I cleaned every mark of the lesson off of the blackboard. Then without a word of explanation I began to tell them a little about the pamphlet Sir Walter

Raleigh wrote about the 'Revenge;' and then I began to recite Tennyson's ballad—which was new then. I was wrought up to the very top-notch anyway, and I just gave that ballad for all there was in me. They were dazed a minute, and then they pricked up their ears, their eyes began to shine, and I had them. We kindled each other, and by the time I got through the tears were running down my cheeks for simple excitement. When I got to the end, you could just feel the hush. Then I told them to go outdoors and snow-ball for ten minutes, and then to come in and conquer that lesson. They were great, rough farmer boys, you understand; but the moment they were outside, they gave a cheer, just to express things they couldn't have put into words. When they came in they were alive to the ends of their fingers, and we went over that old Alligation with a perfect rush." This sort of thing would not be possible anywhere outside of the old-fashioned country school, but it is a capital illustration of the way in which poetry may stir the enthusiasm.

More valuable still, because at once deeper and most lasting, is the effect of literature in nourishing imagination. The real progress which children make in education—the assimilation of the knowledge which they receive—depends largely upon this power. In many branches of study this is easily evident. What a child actually knows of geography or of history obviously depends upon the extent to which his mind is able to make real

places or events remote in space or in time. The same is true of those studies where the fact is not so evident; and it is hardly too much to say that the advance of any student in higher education is measured by the development of his imagination.

The teacher of literature in the secondary schools, then, is to consider that although his work is primarily done as a part of the school requirement, he need not be without some clear and deliberate intention in regard to the permanent effect upon the education and so upon the character of the pupil. He may treat the getting of his charges through the examinations as a purely secondary matter; a matter, moreover, which is practically sure to be accomplished if the greater and better purposes of the study have been secured. Besides a general knowledge of literary history, the student should gain from his training in the secondary school a vivid sense of the importance and value of words; an appreciation of word-values as shown in actual use by the masters; should increase in knowledge of life, and as it were gain experience vicariously, so as to advance in perception of intellectual and moral values; should be advanced in the control of the feelings; in enthusiasm; and in the development of that noblest of faculties, the imagination.

III
SOME DIFFICULTIES

To deal clearly with the work of teaching, it is first of all essential to deal frankly. In order that suggestions in regard to instruction in literature may be of practical value, we must be entirely honest in admitting and in facing whatever difficulties lie in the way and whatever limitations are imposed by the conditions under which the work is done.

As things are at present arranged, an instructor, it seems not unjust to say, must decide how far he is able to mingle genuine education with the routine work which the system imposes upon him. If he has not the power to settle this question, or if he is lacking in the disposition to propose the question to himself, his labor is inevitably confined chiefly to routine. His students are turned out examination-perfect, it may be, but with minds as fatally cramped and checked as the feet of a Chinese lady. If literature has a high and important function in education, the teacher must consider deeply both what that function is and how he is best to develop it.

The failure on the part of instructors to do this makes much of the work done in the secondary

grades so mechanical as to be of the smallest possible use so far as the expansion of the mind and of the character of children is concerned. For a pupil in the lower grades the first purpose of any and of all school-work should be to teach him to use his mind,—to think. The actual acquirement of facts is of importance really slight as compared to the value of this. If at twelve he knows how to read and to write, is sound on the multiplication-table, is familiar with the outlines of grammar and the broadest divisions of geography, yet is accustomed to think for himself in regard to the facts which he perceives from life or receives from books, he may be regarded as admirably well on in the education which he is to gain from the schools. Indeed, if he have learned to think, he is excellently started even if he have accomplished nothing further than simply to read and to write.

In these years of child-life the study of literature can legitimately have but two objects: it may and should minister to the delight of youth, that so the taste for good books be fostered and as it were inbred; and it should nourish the power of thinking. Whatever is beyond this has no place in the lower grades, and personally I am entirely free to say that much that is now called "the study of literature" is the sort of elaborate work which belongs in the college or nowhere. Few students are qualified to "study"—as the term is commonly interpreted—literature until they are advanced further than the boys and girls admitted to

our high schools; further, indeed, than many who are allowed to enter the universities. The great majority of those who grind laboriously through the college entrance requirements in English are utterly unequal to the work and get from it little of value and a good deal of harm.

What should be done in the lower grades, and usually all that can with profit be attempted in the secondary schools anywhere, is to cultivate in the children a love of literature and some appreciation of it: appreciation intelligent, I mean, but not analytic. I would have the secondary schools do little with the history of authors, less with the criticism of style, and have no more explanation of difficulties of language and of structure than is necessary for the student's enjoyment. In a time when the draughts made by daily life upon the attention of the young are so tremendous, when the pressure of the more immediately practical branches of instruction is so great, to add drudgery in connection with literature seems to me completely futile and doubly wrong. The supreme test of success in whatever work in literature is done in schools of the secondary grades should be, according to my conviction, whether it has given delight, has fostered a love of whatever is best in imaginative writings and in life.

The natural abilities of children differ widely, and perhaps more difference still is made by the home influences in which they pass their earliest years. What should be done in the nursery can

never be fully made up in the school, and what should be breathed in from an atmosphere of cultivation can never be imparted by instruction. It is manifestly impossible to interest all in the artistic side of life to the same extent, just as it is idle to hope to teach all to draw with equal skill. This does not alter the direction of effort. The teacher must recognize and accept natural limitations, but not on that account be satisfied with aiming at less admirable results.

Whatever are the conditions, it is possible to do something to foster a love of what is really good in literature, and to avoid the substitution of formal drill in the history of authors, the study of conundrums concerning the sources of plots, the meaning of obsolete words, and like pedantic pedagogics, for the friendly and vital study of what should be a warm, live topic. If young folk can be made really to care for good books, not only is substantial and lasting good gained, but most that is now attempted is more surely secured. William Blake declares that the truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed. In the same way it may be said that if children can be trained to recognize the characteristics of good literature, they are sure, in nine cases out of ten at least, to care for it.

This is the work which properly belongs to the secondary schools; and it is quite as much as they can be expected to do even up to the close of the high school course. I am personally unable to see

what good is accomplished by taking any body of school-children that ever came under my own observation,—and the question must be judged by personal experience,—and drilling them in such matters as the following. I have taken these notes almost at random from approved school editions of the classics, and they seem to me to be fairly representative.

Some striking resemblances in the incantation scenes in "Macbeth" and Middleton's "Witch" have led to a somewhat generally accepted belief that Thomas Middleton was answerable for the alleged un-Shakespearean portions of "Macbeth."

Shakespeare's indebtedness in "Midsummer's Night's Dream" to "Il Percone" admits of no dispute.

The incident of a Jew whetting his knife like Shylock occurs in a Latin play, "Machiavellus," performed at St. John's College, Cambridge, at Christmas, 1597.

The opening note in a popular edition of "Silas Marner" is a comment upon this passage:

The questionable sound of Silas's loom, so unlike the natural, cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, or the simple rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the Raveloe boys.

The note reads as follows:

The hand-loom, once found in every village and hamlet, was controlled by the action of the feet on the treadles, and worked by the hands. A figure representing the parts may be found in "Johnson's Cyclopædia." The longer article on "Weaving" in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" may also be consulted. The rattle of

the loom was in direct contrast to the "cheerful trotting" of the winnowing-machine—an old-fashioned hand-machine for separating the chaff from the grain by means of wind produced by revolving fans. The flail, still in common use for threshing grain by hand, consists of a wooden staff or handle, hung on a club called a swiple, so as to turn easily.

If the end of the study of fiction is the acquirement of dry facts, this note may pass. I have purposely selected an example which is not worse than the average, and which may perhaps be supposed to have an excuse in the consideration that so many readers may be ignorant of all the contrivances mentioned; but can any person with a sense of humor suppose that a real boy is to get any proper enjoyment out of a story when he is at the outset asked to consult a couple of cyclopædias, and is interrupted in his reading by comments of this sort? The real point of the passage, moreover,—the literary significance,—the fact that the boys of Raveloe heard the winnowing-machine and threshing-flail daily, and so were attracted by the novelty of Marner's weaving, with the use of this by George Eliot to emphasize the weaver's isolation in the neighborhood, is left utterly unnoticed.

Were it worth while, I could give from text-books in general use examples more unsatisfactory than these; but this is a fair sample of the things which are administered to pupils in the name of literary study. The students are not interested in

these details; and I am inclined to believe that most of the teachers who mistakenly feel obliged to drill classes in them could not honestly say that they themselves care a fig for such barren facts. It is no wonder that out of the school course young folk so often get the notion that literature is dull. In a recent entrance paper a boy wrote as follows:

I could never understand why so much time has to be given in school to old books just because they have been known a long time. It would be better if we could have given the time to something useful.

He said what many boys feel, and what not a few of them have thought out frankly to themselves, although perhaps few would express it so squarely. If the study of literature means no more than is represented by work on notes and the history of books and authors, I most fully agree with him.

Some of the books at present included in the college entrance requirement, it must be added, lend themselves too much to unintelligent pedantry. Undoubtedly much thought has been given to the selection, although perhaps less sympathetic consideration of child nature. The result is not in all cases satisfactory. To foster a taste for poetry a teacher may, it is true, do much with "Julius Cæsar," but I have yet to see the class of undergraduates with which I should personally hope to arouse enthusiasm with "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Lycidas," or "Comus." I may be simply confessing my own limitations, but I should

think all of these poems, magnificent in themselves, hardly fitted for the boys and girls who are found in our public schools. I have extracted from more than one teacher a confession of entire inability to take pleasure in the Milton which they assure their pupils is beautiful; and while this is an arraignment of instructors rather than of the works, it is significant of the attitude the honest minds of children are likely to take.

By way of making things worse, scholars are drilled in Macaulay's "Milton."[35:1] The inclusion of this essay, the product of the author's 'prentice hand, is most lamentable. The philistinism of Macaulay is here rampant; and the one thing which students are sure to get from the essay is the conception that poetry is the product of barbarism, to be outgrown and cast aside when civilization is sufficiently advanced. Again and again in entrance examinations and in second-year notebooks, I have found this idea expressed. It is not only the one thing which survives out of the essay, but is often the one conviction in regard to literature which has survived examinations as the result of the study of the entire entrance requirement. In the entrance paper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for last year (1905), I had put a question in regard to the difference

between poetry and prose. From the replies I have taken a few of the many echoes from the study of the "Milton."

Macaulay claims that the uncivilized alone care for poetry.

I agree with Macaulay that prose is the product of civilization, . . . while poetry was the way the ancients expressed themselves.

Poetry is not being written nearly so much now as in the Dark Ages, simply because men are learning to treat subjects in classes.

Macaulay says that the writer of a great poem must have a certain unsoundness of mind, and Carlyle makes the statement that to be a great poet a man must first be as a little child. If these opinions are just, one would think poetry could not be regarded as of a quality equal to prose works.

Poetry came first in the lapse of time, and as people grew more civilized, as their education grew higher, they wrote in prose.

Obviously these extracts hardly do justice to the views of Macaulay, but it is evidently absurd to try to interest pupils in poetry when they are getting from one of the works selected "for careful study" the idea that the poet is a semi-madman practicing one of the habits of a half-civilized race![36:1]

Fortunately much of the reading is better, although in effect the books are sometimes limited by the difficulty of keeping the interest of children

up for the long poem. The inclusion in the list of "Elaine" and "The Lady of the Lake" of course presupposes on the part of the pupil familiarity in the lower grades with lyrics and brief narrative poems; and in many cases this may be sufficient. Most pupils will be sure to care for "The Ancient Mariner," many for "The Princess;" and any wholesome boy, with ordinary intelligence, should be interested in "Ivanhoe" and "Macbeth."

As things stand, however, the teacher is forced to deal largely with books which almost compel formal and pedantic treatment. Burke's "Speech on Conciliation," admirable as it is in its place and way, will hardly give to a young student an insight into literature or a taste for imaginative work. The normal, average lad is likely, it seems to me, to be bored by "Silas Marner," or at least very mildly interested; and I confess frankly my inability to understand how youthful enthusiasm is to be aroused or more than youthful tolerance secured for Irving's "Life of Goldsmith" or Macaulay's "Life of Johnson." Plenty of pupils are docile enough to allow themselves to be led placidly through these works, and indeed to submit to any volume imposed by school regulations; but what the teacher is endeavoring to do is to convince the young readers that books entitled to the name "literature" are really of more worth and interest than the newspaper, the detective story, the sensational novel, or the dime-theatre song. It is perhaps not possible to find among the English

Classics works well adapted to such use,—although I refuse to believe it,—but I do at least feel that the present entrance-requirement list does not lend itself readily, to say the least, to the task of the teacher who aims at developing an intelligent and loving appreciation of literature.

The list of obstacles which beset the way of a teacher of literature might easily be lengthened; but these seem chief. They are discouraging; but they exist. They must be faced and overcome, and nothing is gained by ignoring them. The successful teacher, like the successful general, is he who most clearly examines difficulties, and best succeeds in devising means by which they may be vanquished.

FOOTNOTES:

[35:1] Since this was written this essay has been removed from the list, but the effects of it are still with us, as it was used for all classes entering college before 1906. I leave this comment, however, because of its important bearing on a point which I wish to bring up later.

[36:1] See page [212].

IV
OTHER OBSTACLES

The difficulties set down in the last chapter exist in the conditions under which teachers must work. They should be recognized, to the end that they may be as far as possible overcome. They can be done away with only by the slow and gradual changing of public opinion and the re-forming of pedagogic intelligence. For the present they are to be reckoned with as inevitable limitations.

Another class of obstacles to the ideal result of the teaching of literature exists largely in the application of the modern system or in the method of the individual teacher. These may to a great extent be done away with by a proper understanding of conditions, a just estimate of what may be accomplished, and a wise choice of the means of doing this. Teachers must take things as they find them, but the ultimate result of work depends to a great extent upon how they take them. If they must often accept unfortunate conditions, they may at least reduce to a minimum whatever is uneffective in their own method.

The most serious defects which depend largely upon individual teaching are four. The first is the danger, already alluded to, of teaching children

about literature; the second is that of making too great a demand upon the child; the third is the common habit of endeavoring to reach the enthusiasm of the pupil through the reason, instead of aiming at the reason through the enthusiasm; and the fourth is—to speak boldly—the possible incapacity of the teacher for this particular work.

The first of these is the most widespread. It is so natural to bring forward facts concerning the history of writers and of books, it is indeed so impossible to avoid this entirely; to induce students to repeat glibly what some critic has written about authors and their works is so easy, that this insensibly and almost inevitably tends to make up the bulk of instruction. Every incompetent teacher takes refuge in such formal drill. The history of literature is concrete; it is easily tabulated; and it is naturally accepted by children as being exactly in line with the work which properly belongs to other studies with which they are acquainted. If a child is set to treat literature just as he has treated history or mathematics, the process will appeal to him as logical and easily to be mastered. He will find no incongruity in applying the same method to "Macbeth" and to the list of Presidents or to the multiplication-table; and however well or ill he succeed in memorizing what is given him, he will feel the ease of working in accustomed lines. Names and dates may be learned by rote, old entrance-paper questions are tangible things, and thus examinations come to mean annual offerings of

childish brains. To teach literature requires sympathy and imagination: the history of literature requires only perseverance. Much that in school reports is set down as the study of masterpieces is in reality only a mixture of courses in biography and history, more or less spiced with gossip.

The second danger, that of making too great a demand upon the child, is one which, to some extent, besets all school work to-day, but which seems to be especially great and especially disastrous in the case of the study we are considering. Often the nature of the questions asked shows one form of this demand in a way that is nothing less than preposterous. Children in secondary schools are required to have original ideas in regard to the character of Lady Macbeth; to define the workings of the mind of Shylock; to produce personal opinions in the discussion of the madness of Hamlet. Children whose highest acquirements in English composition do not and cannot reach beyond the plainest expository statement of simple facts and ideas, are coolly requested to discriminate between the style of "Il Penseroso" and that of "L'Allegro," and to show how each is adapted to the purpose of the poet. If they were allowed to write from the point of view of a child, the matter would be bad enough; but no teacher who sets such a task would be satisfied with anything properly belonging to the child-mind. It is probably safe to be tolerably certain that no teacher ever gave out this sort of a question

who could without cribbing from the critics perform satisfactorily the task laid upon the unfortunate children.

I have before me a pamphlet entitled "Suggestions for Teachers of English Classics in the High Schools." It is not a gracious task to find fault with a fellow worker and a fellow writer in the same line in which I am myself offering suggestions, and I therefore simply put it to the common sense of teachers what the effect upon the average high school pupil would be if he were confronted with questions such as are included in the proposed outline for the study of "Evangeline." The author of the pamphlet directs that these points are to be used "after some power of analysis has been developed."

The language.

Relative proportion of English and Latin.

Archaic element, proportion and use.

Weight of the style; presentative and symbolic words.

Emotional element; experimental significance of terms.

Picture-element; prevailing character of figures of speech.

The structure.

Grammatical.

Poetic uses of words; archaisms, poetic forms.

Poetic uses of parts of speech, parse.[42:1]

Poetic constructions and inversions, analyze.

Metrical.

Number and character of metrical "feet."

Accent and quantity, the spondee.

Scan selected lines, compare with classic hexameter.

Compare hexameter with other verse-forms.

Character of rhyme, compare with other poems.

Presence and use of alliteration.

Musical.

Examine for lightness and speed; trochee, dactyl, polysyllables.

Examine for dignity; iambus, monosyllables.

Number of syllables in individual lines.

Character of consonants; stopped, unstopped, voiced.

Character of vowels; back, front, round, harsh.

Correspondence of sound to sense.

It would be interesting, and perhaps somewhat humiliating, for each one of us who are teachers to take a list of the questions we have set for examinations in literature and with perfect honesty tell ourselves how many of them we could ourselves answer with any originality, and how many it is fair to suppose that our students could write about with any ideas except those gathered from teacher or text-book. With the pressure of a doubtful system and of unintelligent custom always upon us, few of us, it is to be feared, would escape without a sore conscience.

When I speak of a school-boy or a school-girl as writing with "originality," I do not mean anything profound. I am not so deluded as to suppose

this originality will take the form of startlingly novel discoveries in regard to the significance of work or the intention of authors. I only mean that what the boy or girl writes shall be written because he or she really thinks it, and that each idea, no matter if it be obvious and crude, shall have some trace of individuality which will indicate that it has passed through the mind of the particular pupil who expresses it. This, I believe, is what should chiefly concern the maker of examination-papers. He should especially aim at giving students an opportunity of showing personal opinions and convictions.

No one who has looked over files of examination-papers is likely to deny that we are most of us likely to be betrayed into asking of our classes absurd things in the line of criticism. It is all very well to remember the scriptural phrase about the high character of some of the utterances of babes and sucklings; but this is hardly sufficient warrant for insisting that our school-children shall babble in philosophy and chatter in criticism. The honest truth is that we are constantly demanding of pupils things that we could for the most part do but very poorly ourselves. The unfortunate youngsters who should be solacing themselves with fairy-tales or with stories of adventure as their taste happens to be, are being dragged through "The Vicar of Wakefield,"—an exquisite book, which I doubt if one person in fifty can read to-day with proper appreciation and delight

until he is at least twenty-five. They are being asked to write themes about Lady Macbeth,—and if they were really frank, and wrote their own real thoughts, if they considered her from the point of view of the children they are, where is the teacher who would not feel obliged to return the theme as a failure? Those instructors who recognized that it was of real worth because genuine would also realize that it would be impossible when tried by the modern standard of examinations.

How far individual teachers go in demanding from children what the youthful mind cannot be fairly expected to give will depend upon the personal equation of the instructor. In too many cases the entrance-examinations set a standard which in the fitting-schools may not safely be ignored, but which is fatal to all original thinking. Perhaps the worst form of this is the wrenching from the student what are supposed to be criticisms upon artistic form or content. A hint of the teaching which is intended to lead up to this has been given in the [topics] suggested in connection with the study of "Evangeline" on page 42. The "outline" from which those are quoted goes on to give the following questions:

Of what literary spirit is "Evangeline" the expression?

What is the author's thought-habit as shown in the poem?

What is the place of this poem in the development of verse?

I am perhaps a little uncharitable to these queries

because I am, I confess, entirely unable to answer them myself; but I am also sure that no child in the stage of mental development belonging to the secondary schools would have any clear and reasonable idea even of what they mean. The example is an extreme one, but it has more parallels than would seem possible.

The formulation of views on æsthetics, whether in regard to workmanship or to motive, is utterly beyond the range of any mental condition the teacher in secondary schools has a right to assume or to expect. All that can happen is that the student who is asked to answer æsthetic conundrums will reproduce, in form more or less distorted according to the parrot-like fidelity of his memory, views he has heard without understanding them. Any teacher of common sense knows this, and any teacher of independent mind will refuse to be bullied by manuals or by entrance-examination papers into inflicting tasks of this sort upon his pupils.

In any branch many students either go on blunderingly or fail altogether through sheer ignorance of how to study. In the case of literature perhaps more fail through this cause than through all others combined. A robust, honest, and not unintelligent lad, who is fairly well disposed toward school work, but whose real interests are in outdoor life and active sport, who is intellectually interested only in the obviously practical side of knowledge, is set down to "study" a play of Shakespeare's. He is disposed to do it well, if not

from any vital interest in the matter, at least from a general habit of being faithful in his work and a healthful instinct to do a thing thoroughly if he undertakes it at all. He is at the outset puzzled to know what is expected of him. In arithmetic or algebra he has had definite tasks, and success has been in direct proportion to the diligence with which he has followed a course definitely marked out. Now he casts about for a rule of procedure. He can understand that he is expected to learn the meaning of unusual or obsolete words, that he is to make himself acquainted with the story so that he may be able to answer any of the conundrums which adorn ingeniously the puzzle department of examination papers. These things he does, but he is too sensible not to know that if this is all there is to the study of literature the game is not worth the candle. He cannot help feeling that the time thus employed might be put to a better use; he is probably bored; and as he is sure to know that he is bored, he is likely to conceive a contempt for literature which is none the less deep and none the less permanent for not being put into words. He very likely comes to believe, with the inevitable tendency of youth to make its own feelings the criteria by which to judge all the world, that everybody is really bored by literature, if only, for some inscrutable reason, people did not feel it necessary to shroud the matter in so much humbug. Talk about the beauty of Shakespeare, about the greatness of his poetry, the

wonders of literary art, come to affect him as cant pure and simple. He puts this to himself plainly or not according to his temperament; but the feeling is in his mind, showing at every turn to one wise enough to discern. Now and then a boy is born with the taste and appreciation of poetry, and of course even in these days, when a literary atmosphere in the home is unhappily so rare, an occasional student appears from time to time who has been taught to care for poetry where every child should learn to love it, in the nursery. On the whole, however, the average school-boy really cares little or nothing for literature, and in his secret heart is entirely convinced that nobody else cares either.

Not knowing how to "study" literature, then, and feeling that in literature is nothing to study which is of consequence, the pupil is in no position to make even a reasonable beginning. He cannot even approach literature in any proper attitude unless he can be made to care for it; unless he can be so interested that he ceases to feel the profession of admiration for the Shakespeare he is asked to work upon to be necessarily cant and affectation. Perhaps the hardest part of the task set before the teacher is to bring the pupil into a frame of mind where he can properly study poetry and to give him some insight into what such study may and should mean.

How this is to be accomplished I cannot pretend fully to say. In speaking of what I may call

"inspirational" training in literature I shall try to answer the question to some extent; and here I may at least point out that the situation is from the first utterly hopeless if the teacher is in the same state of mind as the pupil. If the instructor is able to see no method of studying literature other than mechanical drudgery over form, the looking-up of words, verification of dates, dissection of plot, and so on, it is idle to hope that he will be able to aid the class to anything better than this dry-as-dust plodding. The teacher may at least learn what at its best the "study" is. He may or may not have the power of inciting those under him to enthusiasm, but he may at least show them that something is possible beyond the mechanical treatment of the masterpieces of art.

A writer in the (Chicago) "Dial" states admirably the attitude of great masses of students in saying:

There are many people, young people in particular, who, with the best will in the world, cannot understand why it is that men make such a fuss about literature, and who are honestly puzzled by the praises bestowed upon the great literary artists. They would like to join in sympathetic appreciation of the masters, and they have an abundant store of gratitude and reverence to lavish upon objects that approve themselves as worthy; but just what there is in Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Tennyson to call for such seeming extravagance of eulogy remains a dark mystery. Such people are apt in their moments of revolt to set it all down to a sort

of critical conspiracy, and to consider those who voice the conventional literary estimates as chargeable with an irritating kind of hypocrisy. They cannot see for the life of them why the books of the hour, with their timeliness, their cleverness, their sentimental or sensational interest, should be held of no serious account by the real lovers of literature, while the dull babblers of a bygone age are exalted to the skies by these same devotees of the art of letters. . . . Some young people never recover from the condition of open revolt into which they are thrown by the injudicious methods of our education.

Out of his own experience and appreciation the teacher must be able to show the pupil some method of studying literature which shall in the measure of the student's individual capacity lead to a conception of what literature is and wherein lies its importance. Until this can be done, nothing has been effected which is of any real or lasting value.

The third defect which I have mentioned I have put in a phrase which may at first seem somewhat cryptic. What is meant by the attempt to reach the enthusiasm of the child through the reason may not be at once apparent. Yet the thing is simple. It is not difficult to lead children to think, and to think deeply, of things which have touched their feeling. If once their emotions are aroused, they will go actively forward in every investigation of which their minds are capable, and with whatever degree of appreciation they are equal to. A child cannot, however, be reasoned into any vital admiration. The extent to which an adult is to be touched

emotionally by argument is extremely limited. Few travelers, for instance, are able really to respond when an officious verger or care-taker points out some historic spot, and after glibly relating some event in his professional patter, ends with a look which says almost more plainly than words: "Stand just here, and thrill! Sixpence a thrill, please." Yet this is very much what is expected of children. The teacher takes a famous book, laboriously recounts its merits, its fame, its beauties, and then tacitly commands the children: "Think of that, and thrill! One credit for every thrill." It is true that the verger demands a fee and the teacher promises a reward, but the result is the same. Do the children thrill? Is there a conscientious teacher who has tried this method who has not with bitter disappointment realized that the students have come out of the course with nothing save a few poor facts and disfigured conventional opinions which they reserve for examinations as they might save battered pennies for the contribution-box? They have been personally conducted through a course of literature. They come out of it in much the same condition as return home the personally conducted through foreign art-galleries who say: "Yes, I must have seen the 'Mona Lisa,' if it's in the Louvre. I saw all the pictures there, you know." The chief difference is that children are generally incapable, outside of examination-papers, of pretending an enthusiasm which they do not feel.

One thing which is indisputable is that children know when they are bored. Many adults become so proficient in the art of self-deception as to be able to cheat themselves into thinking they are at the height of enjoyment because they are doing what they consider to be the proper thing; when in simple truth their only pleasure must lie in the gratification of a futile vanity. Of children this is seldom true; or, if it is true, it extends only to the fictions practiced by their own childish world. If they have conventions, these differ from the conventions of their elders, and they do not fool themselves with a show of enjoyment when the reality is wanting. If they are wearied by a book, the fact that it is a masterpiece does not in the least console them. They may be forced by teachers to read or to study it, and to say on examination-papers that it is beautiful; yet they not only know they are not pleased, but to each other they are generally ready to acknowledge it with perfect frankness.

The need of saying this in the present connection is that it is not possible really to convince children they are enjoying the writing of themes about Mrs. Primrose, or about Silas Marner and Effie, or on the character of Lady Macbeth, unless they are vitally interested. I am far from being so modern as to think that pupils should not be asked to do anything which they do not wish to do; but I am radical enough to believe that no other good which may be accomplished by the study of literature in any other way can compensate for making good books

wearisome. The idea that literature is something to be vaguely respected but not to be read for enjoyment is already sufficiently prevalent; and rather than see it more widespread, I would have all the so-called teaching of literature in the secondary schools abolished altogether.

The last point which I mentioned as likely to diminish the value of teaching is that it so often demands of teachers more than can be surely or safely counted on in the way of fitness. This I do not mean to dwell upon, nor is it my purpose to draw up a bill of arraignment against my craft. I wish simply to comment that one essential, a prime essential, in the teaching of literature is the power of imaginative enthusiasm on the part of the teacher. This would be recognized if the subject of instruction were any other of the fine arts. If teachers were required to train school-children in the symphonies of Beethoven or in the pictures of Titian, everybody would realize that some special aptitude on the part of the instructor was requisite. Every normal school or college graduate is set to teach the masterpieces of Shakespeare or of Milton, and the fact that the poetry is as completely a work of art as is symphony or picture, and that what holds true of one as the product of artistic imagination must hold true of the other, is quietly and even unconsciously ignored.

No amount of study will create in a teacher the artistic imagination in its highest sense, although much may be done in the way of developing artistic

perception; but at least self-improvement may go far in the nourishing of the important quality of self-honesty. An instructor must learn to deal fairly with himself. He must be strong enough to acknowledge to himself fearlessly if he is not able to care for some work that is ranked as an artistic masterpiece. He must be willing to say unflinchingly to himself that he cannot do justice to this work or to that, because he is not in sympathy with it, or because he lacks any experience which would give him a key to its mood and meaning.

One thing seems to me to be entirely above dispute in this delicate inquiry: that it is idle to hope to impart to children what we have not learned ourselves; and it follows that the first necessity is to appreciate our shortcomings. I ask only for the same sort of honesty which would by common consent be essential in teaching the more humble branches. A teacher who could not solve quadratic equations would manifestly be an ill instructor in algebra. By the same token it is evident that a teacher who cannot enter into the heart of a poem, who does not understand the mood of a play, who has not a real enthusiasm for literature, is not fitted to help children to a comprehension and an appreciation of these. Neither is the power to rehearse the praises and phrases of critics or commentators a sufficient qualification for teaching. In an examination-paper at the Institute of Technology a boy recently wrote with admirable frankness and directness:

I confess that while I like Shakespeare, I like other poets better, and while my teachers have told me that he was the greatest writer, they never seemed to know why.

The boy unconsciously implies a most important fact, namely, that if a teacher does not know why a poet is great, it is not only difficult to convince the pupil of the reality of his claims, but also is it impossible to disguise from the clever scholars the real ignorance of the instructor. As well try to warm children by a description of a fire as to endeavor to awake in them admiration and pleasure by parrot-phrases, no matter how glibly or effectively repeated. They are aroused only by the contagion of genuine feeling; they are moved only by finding that the teacher is first genuinely moved himself.

It is bad enough when an instructor repeats unemotionally what he has unemotionally acquired about arithmetic or geography. Pupils will receive mechanically whatever is mechanically imparted; and in even the most purely intellectual branches such training can at best only distend the mind of the child without nourishing it. When it comes to a study which is presented as of value precisely because it kindles feeling, the absurdity becomes nothing less than monstrous.

Any child of ordinary intelligence comes sooner or later to perceive, whether he reasons it out or not, that much of the literature presented to him is not in the least worth the bother of study if it is to be taken merely on its face-value. If "The

Vicar of Wakefield" or "Silas Marner" is to be read simply for the plot, either book might be swept out of existence to-morrow and the world be little poorer. A conscientious teacher will at least be honest with himself in determining how much more than the obvious and often slight face-value he is enabling his class to perceive.

An ordinary modern school-boy unconsciously but inevitably measures the values of the books presented to him by the news of the day and the facts of life as he sees it. If he is not made to feel that books represent something more than a statement of outward fact or of fiction, he is too clear-headed not to see that they are of little real worth, and with the pitiless candor of youth he is too honest not to acknowledge this to himself. Young people are apt to credit their elders with enormous power of pretending. The conventionalities of life, those arrangements which adults recognize as necessary to the comfort and even to the continuance of society, are not infrequently regarded by the young as rank hypocrisy. The same is true of any tastes which they cannot share. Again and again I have come upon the feeling among students that the respect for literature professed by their elders was only one of the many shams of which adult life appears to children to be so largely made up.

From the purely intellectual side of the matter, moreover, the youth is right in feeling that there is nothing so remarkable in play or poem as to

justify the enthusiasm which he is told he should feel. If he sees only what I have called the face-value, he would be a dunce if he did not imagine an absurdity in the estimate at which the works of great artists are held. He is precisely in the position of the man who judges the great painting by its realistic fidelity to details, and logically, from his point of view, ranks a well-defined photograph above "The Night Watch" or the Dresden "Madonna." There is more thrill and more emotion for the boy in the poorest newspaper account of a game of football than in the greatest play of Shakespeare's,—unless the lad has really got into the spirit of the poetry.

If nothing is to be taken into account but the intellectual content of literature, the child is therefore perfectly right, and doubly so from his own point of view. Regarded as a mere statement of fact it is to be expected that the average modern boy will find "Macbeth" far less exciting and absorbing than an account of a football match or of President Roosevelt's spectacular hunting. If we expect the lad to believe without contention and without mental reservation that the work of literature is really of more importance and interest than these articles of the newspaper or the magazine, we are forced to depend upon the qualities which distinguish poetry as art. If books are to be used only as glove-stretchers to expand mechanically the minds of the young, it is better to throw aside the works of the masters, and to come down frankly

to able expositions of literal fact, stirring and absorbing.

It must be always borne in mind, moreover, that little permanent result is produced except by what the pupil does for himself. The teacher is there to encourage, to stimulate, to direct; but the real work is done in the brain of the student. This limits what may wisely be attempted in the line of instruction. What the teacher is able to lead the pupil to discover or to think out for himself is within the limit of sound and valuable work. With every class, and—what makes the problem much more difficult—with every boy or girl in the class, the capacity will vary. The signs, moreover, by which we determine how far a child is thinking for himself, instead of more or less consciously mimicking the mind of the master, are all well-nigh intangible, and must be watched for with the nicest discernment. Often the teacher is obliged to help the class or the individual as we help little children playing at guessing-games with "Now you are hot," or "Now you are cold;" but just as the game is a failure if the child has in the end to be told outright the answer to the conundrum, so the instruction is a failure if the student does not make his own discovery of the meaning and worth of poem or play. The moment the instructor finds himself forced to do the thinking for his class in any branch of study, he may be sure that he has overstepped the boundary of real work, or at least that he has been going too rapidly for his pupils

to keep pace with him. This is even likely to be true when he is obliged to do the phrasing, the putting of the thought into word. He cannot profitably go farther at that time. In another way, at another time, he may be able to bring the class over the difficulty; but he is doing them an injury and not a benefit, if he go on to do for them the thinking, or that realizing of thought which belongs to putting thought into word. He is then not educating, but "cramming." It is his duty to encourage, to assist, but never to do himself what to be of value must be the actual work of the learner himself.

All this is evident enough in those branches where results are definite and concrete, like the learning of the multiplication-table or of the facts of geography. It is equally true in subjects where reasoning is essential, like algebra or syntax. Most of all, if not most evidently, is it vitally true in any connection where are involved the feelings and anything of the nature of appreciation of artistic values. We evidently cannot do the children's memorizing for them; but no more can we do for them their reasoning; and least of all is it possible to manufacture for them their likings and their dislikings, their appreciations and their enthusiasms. To tell children what feelings they should have over a given piece of literature produces about the same effect as an adjuration to stop growing so fast or a request that they change the color of their eyes.

In any emotional as in any intellectual experience,

intensity and completeness must ultimately depend upon the capacity and the temperament of the individual concerned. It is useless to hope that a dull, stolid, unimaginative boy will have either the same appreciation or the same enjoyment of art as his fellow of fine organization and sensitive temperament. The personal limitation must be accepted, just as is accepted the impossibility of making some youths proficient in geometry or physics. It may be necessary under our present system—and if so the fact is not to the credit of existing conditions—to present the dull pupil with a set of ideas which he may use in examinations. The proceeding would be not unlike providing the dead with an obolus by way of fare across the Styx; and certainly in no proper sense could be considered education. Difficult as it may be, the pupil must be made to think and to feel for himself, or the work is naught.

Perhaps the tendency to try to do for the student what he should accomplish for himself is the most general and the most serious of all the errors into which teachers are likely to fall. The temptation is so great, however, and the conditions so favorable to this sort of mistake, that it is not possible to mete out to instructors who fall into it an amount of blame at all equal to the gravity of the offense.

FOOTNOTES:

[42:1] I am unable to resist the temptation to call attention to the intimation that the writer perceives some relation between poetry and parsing. It would be interesting if he had developed this.

V
FOUNDATIONS OF WORK.

The foundation of any understanding or appreciation of literature is manifestly the power of reading it intelligently. A truth so obvious might seem to be taken for granted and to need no saying; but any one who has dealt with entrance examination-papers is aware how many students get to the close of their fitting-school life without having acquired the power of reading with anything even approaching intelligence. Primary as it may sound, I cannot help emphasizing as the foundation of all study of literature the training of students in reading, pure and simple.

The practical value of simple reading aloud seems to me to have been too often overlooked by teachers of literature. Teachers read to their pupils, and this is or should be of great importance; but the thing of which I am now speaking is the reading of the students to the teacher and to the class. In the first place a student cannot read aloud without making evident the degree of his intelligent comprehension of what he is reading. He must show how much he understands and how he understands it.

The queer freaks in misinterpretation which come

out in the reading of pupils are often discouraging enough, but they are amusing and enlightening. Any teacher can furnish absurd illustrations, and it is not safe to assume of even apparently simple passages that the child understands them until he has proved it by intelligent reading aloud. The attention which oral reading is at present receiving is one of the encouraging signs of the times, and cannot but do much to forward the work of the teacher of literature.

Of so much importance is it, however, that the first impression of a class be good, that the instructor must be sure either to find a reasonably good reader among the pupils for the first rendering or must give it himself. In plays this is hardly wise or practicable; but here the parts are easily assigned beforehand, and the pride of the students made a help in securing good results. In any work a class should be made to understand that the first thing to do in studying a piece of literature is to learn to read it aloud intelligently and as if it were the personal utterance of the reader.

In dealing with a class it is often a saving of time and an easy method of avoiding the effects of individual shyness to have the pupils read in concert. In dealing with short pieces of verse this is, moreover, a means of getting all the class into the spirit of the piece. The method lacks, of course, in nicety; but it is in many cases practically serviceable.

Above everything the teacher must be sure,

before any attempt is made to do anything further, that the pupil has a clear understanding at least of the language of what he reads. My own experience with boys who come from secondary schools even of good grade has shown me that they not infrequently display an extraordinary incapability of getting from the sentences and phrases of literature the most plain and obvious meaning, especially in the case of verse; while as to unusual expressions they are constantly at sea. On a recent entrance examination-paper I had put, as a test of this very power, the lines from "Macbeth:"

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff.

The play is one which they had studied carefully at school, and they were asked to explain the force in these lines of "oblivious." Here are some of the replies:

"Oblivious," used in this quotation, means that the person speaking was not particular as to the kind of antidote that was chosen.

A remedy that would not expose the lady to public suspicion.

The word "oblivious" implies a soothing cure, which will heal without arousing the senses.

An antidote applied in a forgetful way, or unknown to the person.

"Oblivious" here means some antidote that would put Lady Macbeth to sleep while the doctor removed the cause of the trouble.

"Oblivious antidote" means one that is very pleasing.

The word "oblivious" is beautifully used here.

Macbeth wishes the doctor to administer to Lady Macbeth some antidote which will cure her of her fatal [sic] illness, but which will not at all be any bitter medicine.

"Oblivious" here means relieving.

"Oblivious" means some remedy the doctor had forgotten, but might remember if he thought hard enough.

Of course many of the replies were sensible and sound, but those hardly better than these were discouragingly numerous.

In my own second-year work, in which the students have had all the fitting-school training and the freshman drill besides, I am not infrequently confounded by the inability of students to understand the meaning of words which one uses as a matter of course. The statement that Raleigh secretly married a Lady in Waiting, for instance, reappeared in a note-book in the assertion that Sir Walter ran away with Queen Elizabeth's waiting-maid; and a remark about something which took place at Holland House brought out the unbelievable perversion that the event happened "in a Dutch tavern." Personally I have never discovered how far beyond words of one syllable a lecturer to students may safely go in any assurance that his language will be understood by all the members of his class; but this is one of the things which must be decided if teaching is to be effective.

It must always be remembered that the vocabulary of literature is to some extent different from that employed in the ordinary business of life. The student is confronted with a set of terms which

he seldom or never uses in common speech; he must learn to appreciate fine distinctions in the use of language; he must receive from words a precision and a force of meaning, a richness of suggestion, which is to be appreciated only by special and specific training. It will be instructive for the teacher to take any ordinary high-school class, for instance, and examine how far each member gets a complete and lucid notion of what Burke meant in the opening sentence of the "Speech on Conciliation:"

I hope, Sir, that notwithstanding the austerity of the Chair, your good nature will incline you to some degree of indulgence toward human frailty.

An instructor is apt to assume that the intent of a passage such as this is entirely clear, yet I apprehend that not one high-school pupil in twenty gets the real force of this unaided.

If this example seems in its diction too remote from every-day speech to be a fair example, the teacher may try the experiment with the sentence in "Books" in which Emerson speaks of volumes that are

So medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Every word is of common, habitual use, but most young people would be well-nigh helpless when confronted with them in this passage.

The use in literature of allusion, of figures, of striking and unusual employment of words, must become familiar to the student before he is in a condition to deal with literature easily and with full

intelligence. The process must be almost like that of learning to read in a foreign tongue. For a teacher to ignore this fact is to take the position of a professor in Italian or Spanish who begins the reading of his pupils not with words and simple sentences, but with intricate prose and verse.

It must be remembered, moreover, that if the diction of literature is removed from the daily experience of the pupil, the ideas and the sentiments of literature are yet more widely apart from it. Literature must deal largely with abstract thoughts and ideas, expressed or implied; it is necessarily concerned with sentiments more elevated or more profound than those with which life makes the young familiar. They must be educated to take the point of view of the author, to rise to the mental plane of a great writer as far as they are capable of so doing. Until they can in some measure accomplish this, they are not even capable of reading the literature they are supposed to study.

Fortunately it is with reading literature as it is with reading foreign tongues. Often the context, the general tone, the spirit, will carry us over passages in which there is much that is not clear to our exact knowledge. Children are constantly able to get from a story or a poem much more than would seem possible to their ignorance of the language of literature. They are helped by truth to life even when they are far from realizing what they are receiving; so that it would be manifestly unjust to assume that the measure of a child's profit

in a given case is to be gauged too nicely by his acquaintance with the words, the phrases, the tropes, the suggestions in which the author has conveyed it. The fact remains, however, that in attempting to do anything effective in the way of instruction the teacher has first of all to train his pupil in the language of literature.

The student, having learned to read the work which is to be studied, must approach it through some personal experience. The teacher who is endeavoring to assist him must therefore discover what in the child's range of knowledge may best serve as a point of departure. In all education, no less than in formal argument, a start can be made only from a point of agreement, from something as evident to the student as it is to the instructor. Consciously or unconsciously every teacher acts upon this principle, from the early lessons in addition which begin with the obvious agreement produced by the sight of the blocks or apples or beads which are before the child. In literature, too, the fact is commonly acted upon, if not so universally formulated. If young pupils are having "The Village Blacksmith" read to them, the teacher instinctively starts with the fact that they may have seen a blacksmith at work at his forge. The difficulty is that teachers who naturally do this in simple poems fail to see that the same principle holds good of literature of a higher order, and that the more complex the problem, the greater the need of being sure of this beginning with some actual experience.

With this finding some safe and substantial foundation in the pupil's own experience is connected the necessity of speaking of literature, as of anything else one tries to teach, in the language of the class addressed. Of all that we say to our pupils very little if any of all our careful wisdom really impresses them or remains in their minds except that portion which we have managed to phrase in terms of their language and so to put that it appeals to emotions of their own young lives. They can have no conception of the characters in fiction or poetry except in so far as they are able to consider these shadows as moving in their own world. They should be told to make up their minds about Lady Macbeth, or Robin Hood, or Dr. Primrose as if these were persons of their own community about whom they had learned the facts set forth in the books read. They cannot completely realize this, but they get hold of the fictitious character only so far as they are able to do it. They will at least come to have a conception that people they see in the flesh and those they meet in literature are of the same stuff fundamentally, and should be judged by the same laws. They will receive the benefit, moreover, whether they realize it or not, of being helped by fiction to understand real life, and they will be in the right way of judging books by experience.

The principle of speaking to pupils only in the language of their own experience is of universal application, but it is to be applied with common

sense. Nothing is more unfortunate in teaching than to have pupils feel that they are being talked down to or that too great an effort is being made to bring instruction to their level. A friend once told me of a professor who in the days of the first period of tennis enthusiasm in this country made so great an effort to take all his illustrations from the game that the class regarded the matter a standing joke. Yet if care be exercised it is not difficult to mix with the childish, the familiar, and the commonplace, the dignified, the unusual, and the suggestive. Starting with a daily experience the teacher may go on to states of the same emotion which are far greater and higher than can have come into the actual life of the child, but which are imaginatively intelligible and possible because although they differ in degree they are the same in kind. Nothing is lost of the dignity of a play of Shakespeare's dealing with ambition if the teacher starts with ambition to be at the head of the school, to lead the baseball nine, or to excel in any sport; but from this the child should be led on through whatever instances he may know in history, and in the end made to feel that the ambition of Macbeth is an emotion he has felt, even though it is that emotion carried to its highest terms. So the small and the great are linked together, and the use of the little does not appear undignified because it has been a stepping-stone to the great.

The aim in teaching literature is to make it

a part of the student's intimate and actual life; a warm, human, personal matter, and not a thing taken up formally and laid aside as soon as outside pressure is removed. To this end is the appeal made to the pupil's experience, and to this end is he allowed to make his own estimates, to formulate his own likes and dislikes. Any teacher, it must be remembered, is for the scholar in the position of a special pleader. The student regards it as part of the pedagogic duty to praise whatever is taught, and instinctively distrusts commendation which he feels may be only formal and official. He forms his own opinion independently or from the judgment of his peers,—the conclusions of his classmates. He may repeat glibly for purposes of recitation or of examination the criticisms of the teacher, but he is likely to be little influenced by them unless they are confirmed by the voice of his fellows and his own taste. If young people do not reason this out, they are never uninfluenced by it; and this condition of things must be accepted by the teacher.

It follows that it is practically never wise to praise a book beforehand. The proper position in presenting to the class any work for study is that it is something which the class are to read together with a view of discovering what it is like. Of course the teacher assumes that it has merit or it would not be taken up, but he also assumes that individually the members of the class may or may not care for it. The logical and safe method is to

set the students to see if they can discover why good judges have regarded the work as of merit. The teacher should say in effect: "I do not know whether you will care for this or not; but I hope you will be able to see what there is in it to have made it notable."

When the study of poem or play is practically over, when the pupils have done all that can be reasonably expected of them in the way of independent judgment, the teacher may show as many reasons for praising it as he feels the pupils will understand. He must, however, be honest in letting them like it or not. He must recognize that it is better for a lad honestly to be bored by every masterpiece of literature in existence than to stultify his mind by the reception of merely conventional opinions got by rote.

Much the same thing might be said of the drawing of a moral, except that it is not easy to speak with patience of those often well-meaning but gravely mistaken pedagogues who seem bound to impress upon their scholars that literature is didactic. In so far as a book is deliberately didactic, it is not literature. It may be artistic in spite of its enforcing a deliberate lesson, but never because of this. My own instinct would be, and I am consistent enough to make it pretty generally my practice, to conceal from a class as well as I can any deliberate drawing of morals into which a writer of genius may have fallen. It is like the fault of a friend, and is to be screened from the public as

far as honesty will permit. Certainly it should never be paraded before the young, who will not reason about the matter, but are too wholesome by nature and too near to primitive human conditions not to distrust an offering of intellectual jelly which obviously contains a moral pill.

Morals are as a rule drawn by teachers who feel that they must teach something, and something tangible. They themselves lack the conception of any office of art higher than moralizing, and they deal with literature accordingly. They are unable to appreciate the fact that the most effective influence which can be brought to bear upon the human mind is never the direct teaching of the preacher or the moralizer, but the indirect instruction of events and emotions. Personally I have sufficient modesty, moreover, to make me hesitate to assume that I can judge better than a master artist how far it is well to go in drawing a moral. If the man of genius has chosen not to point to a deliberate lesson, I am far from feeling inclined to take the ground that I know better, and that the sermon should be there. When Shakespeare, or Coleridge, or Browning feels that a vivid transcript of life should be left to work out its own effect, far from me be the presumption to consider the poet wrong, or to try to piece out his magnificent work with trite moralizing.

The tendency to abuse children with morals is as vicious as it is widespread. It is perhaps not unconnected with the idea that instruction and improvement

must alike come through means not in themselves enjoyable. It is the principle upon which an old New England country wife rates the efficacy of a drug by its bitterness. We all find it hard to realize that as far as literature, at least, is concerned, the good it does is to be measured rather by the pleasure it gives. If the children entirely and intelligently delight in it, we need bother about no morals, we need—as far as the question of its value in the training of the child's mind goes—have no concern about examinations. Art is the ministry of joy, and literature is art or it is the most futile and foolish thing ever introduced into the training of the young.

VI
PRELIMINARY WORK

It will not always do to plunge at once into a given piece of literature, for often a certain amount of preliminary work is needed to prepare the mind of the pupil to receive the effect intended by the author. For convenience I should divide the teaching of literature into four stages:

• Preliminary;
• Inspirational;
• Educational;
• Examinational.

The division is of course arbitrary, but it is after all one which comes naturally enough in actual work. One division will not infrequently pass into another, and no one could be so foolish as to suppose literature is to be taught by a cut and dried mechanical process of any sort. The division is convenient, however, at least for purposes of discussion; and no argument should be needed to prove that in many cases the pupil cannot even read intelligently the literature he is supposed to study until he has had some preparatory instruction.

The vocabulary of any particular work must first be taken into account. We do not ask a child

to read a poem until we suppose him to have by every-day use become familiar with the common words it contains. We should remember that the poet in writing has assumed that the reader is equally familiar with any less common words which may be used. It is certainly not to be held that the writer intends that in the middle of a flowing line or at a point where the emotion is at its highest, the reader shall be bothered by ignorance of the meaning of a term; that he shall be obliged to turn to notes to look up definitions, shall be plunged into a puddle of derivations, allied meanings, and parallel passages such as are so often prepared by the ingenious editors of school texts. These things are well enough in their place and way; but no author ever intended his work to be read by any such process, and since literature depends so largely on the production of a mood, such interruptions are nothing less than fatal to the effect.

I remember as a boy sitting at the feet of an elder sister who was reading to me in English from a French text. At the very climax of the tale, when the heroine was being pursued down a wild ravine by a bandit, the reader came to an adjective which she could not translate. With true New England conscientiousness she began to look it up in the dictionary; but I could not bear the delay. I caught the lexicon out of her hands, and without having even seen the French or knowing a syllable of that language, cried out: "Oh, I

know that word! It means 'blood-boltered.' Did he catch her?" She abandoned the search, and in all the horror of the picturesque Shakespearean epithet the bandit dashed on, to be encountered by the hero at the next turn of the romantic ravine. I had at the moment, so far as I can remember, no consideration of the exact truth of my statement. I simply could not bear that the emotion of the crisis should be interrupted by that bothersome search for an exact equivalent. The term 'blood-boltered' fitted the situation admirably, and I thrust it in, so that we might hurry forward on the rushing current of excitement. This, as I understand it, is the fashion in which children should take literature. Few occasions, perhaps, are likely to call for epithets so lurid as that in which Macbeth described the ghost of Banquo, but the spirit of the thing read should so carry the reader forward that he cannot endure interruption.

When work must be done with glossary and notes in order that the text may be easily and properly understood, this should be taken as straightforward preliminary study. It should be made as agreeable as possible, but agreeable for and in itself. When I say agreeable for itself, I mean without especial reference to the text for which preparation is being made. The history of words, the growth and modification of meanings, the peculiarities and relations of speech, may always be made attractive to an intelligent class; and since here and throughout all study of literature students

are to be made to do as much of the actual work as possible, this part is simple.

The amount of time given to such learning of the vocabulary might at first seem to be an objection to the method. In the first place, however, there is an actual economy of time in doing all this at first and at once, thus getting it out of the way, and saving the waste of constant interruptions in going over the text; in the second, it affords a means of making this portion of the work actually interesting in itself and valuable for its relation to the study of language in general; and in the third place it both fixes meanings in mind and allows the reading of the author with some sense of the effect he designed to give by the words he employed.

It is hardly necessary to say that in this matter of taking up the vocabulary beforehand many teachers, perhaps even most teachers, will not agree with me. The other side of the question is very well put in a leaflet by Miss Mary E. Litchfield, published by the New England Association of Teachers in English: