Part 13
These opinions should as much as possible be put into speech before being written. The subject should be talked out, however, in a manner so sincere and straightforward as to make conventionality impossible. Students must be held rigorously to honest and simple expression of real beliefs and feelings. In every class, and perhaps especially among girls, are likely to be some who will surely repeat conventional phrases. Children pick up set phrases with surprising ease, and will offer them whenever they have reason to believe such counterfeit will be received instead of real coin. These shams are easily recognized, and they should be mercilessly dealt with, almost anything except sarcasm, that weapon which is forbidden to the teacher, being legitimate against such cant. The student who repeats a set phrase is usually effectually disposed of by a request to explain, to make clear, and to prove; so that the habit of meaningless repetition cannot grow unless the teacher is insensitive to it. The genuine ideas of the pupils may be developed and put into word in the class, and afterwards the writing out will involve getting them into order and logical sequence.
It may be objected that by this process each scholar will borrow ideas from what he hears said in the class. This is in reality no serious drawback to the method. If the individuals are trained to think for themselves, each will judge the views which are presented in class, and will make them his own by shaping and modifying them. In any case the danger of a student's getting too many ideas is not large, and those he gets from his peers, his classmates, are much more likely to appeal to him and to remain in his mind than any which he culls from books. The notions will sometimes be crude, but they will be so corrected and discussed in recitation that they cannot be essentially false.
Any criticism which is received from pupils, whether spoken or written, must first of all be intelligent. Sound common sense is the only safe basis for any comment, and the higher the grade of a work of literature imaginatively the more easy is it to treat it in a common-sense spirit. Pupils should be made to feel not only that they have a right to any opinion of their own on what they read, but that they are expected to have one; and that this opinion may be of any nature whatever, so long as they can justify it by sound reasons. Still farther than this, they should be allowed freely to cherish tastes for which they cannot give formal justification—provided they can show a reasonable appreciation of the real qualities of the work they like or dislike. In the higher regions of imaginative work the power of analysis of the most able critic may fail; and it is manifestly idle to expect from school-children exhaustive criticism of high things which yet they may feel deeply.
Since it is of so much importance that all comment and criticism shall be sincere, care must be taken to keep work within limits which make sincerity possible. Students must not be required to perform tasks which are in the nature of things impossible. To push beyond dealing with comparatively simple matters in a frank and direct manner, is inevitably to encourage the use of conventional phrases and to replace sincerity with cant.
A nice question connects itself with the determination of how much it is proper and wise to require of children: it is how much farther it is well to call upon them to criticise literature than we should ask them to comment on life. We need to know what we are doing, and though an examination of the character and motives of a criminal in a book is not the same thing as would be this sort of criticism applied to a flesh and blood neighbor, the two processes are the same in essence. The better the teacher succeeds in arousing the imagination of the pupil, moreover, the more closely the two approach. We should be sure that we are doing well in requiring of the young, who would not and should not be encouraged to dwell on actual crime and suffering, that they produce original opinions upon these things as represented in fiction.
It is of course to be allowed that no teaching can make fictions vital and real in exactly the same way as is that which is known actually to have happened. An imaginative child vitalizes the story which touches him, but does not bring it home to himself as he would occurrences within the circle of his own experience. It may be urged that by encouraging him to analyze sin in the comparatively remote world of fancy we give him a chance to perceive its moral hatefulness without that distrust of his fellows which might come if he were forced to learn the lesson from the harsher happenings of life; and that in books the knowledge of character and circumstance is so much fuller than it is likely to be in experience that he is able to see more clearly. The fact remains, however, that we should hardly expect or desire a lucid and reasonable estimate of the late King and Queen of Servia from the school-children who are being made to write laborious reams on the motives and the character of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth; that we should be shocked at finding boys and girls considering in real life occurrences like the seduction of Olivia Primrose, or suspicions like those Gareth entertained of Lynette. We certainly cannot afford to be prurient, or to confine the young to goody-goody books. They may generally be safely trusted, it seems to me, to read any tale or poem of first-class merit, although its subject were as painful as that of "Œdipus." They will receive it as they receive facts of life told by a wholesome-minded person, often with very little real perception of the darkest and most sinister side. It will be as it was with young Copperfield when he read Fielding's masterpiece and took delight in the hero, "a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature." When it comes to the discussion of motives, of character, of black events in fiction, the case is different. The child is forced to take a new attitude; to accumulate the opinions of his elders, to view life from their more sophisticated point of view; and inevitably to receive a fresh, and not always a desirable insight into evil. I am not inclined to dogmatize on this point, and touch upon it chiefly for the sake of suggesting that teachers may do well to keep it a little in mind. Each case, it seems to me, must be decided upon its own merit, and I at least have no arbitrary rules to lay down. Of one thing, however, I am sure, and that is that whatever is taken up at all should be treated with absolute and fearless frankness.
All criticism of diction, style, or whatever belongs to literary workmanship necessarily comes late. In the secondary schools I believe very little can profitably be done in this line at all. Of this I shall speak later in connection with the study of workmanship, but here I may say that I suppose most teachers to recognize the obvious absurdity of such questions about metres and metrical effects as are given on page 43. That they should be gravely proposed in a book of advice is indication that somebody believes in them; but any class of students with which I have ever had to deal would be reduced to mechanical repetition of cant conventionality by the bare sight of such interrogations.
One thing which is of importance is the need of encouraging pupils to judge of any work as a whole. It is so much easier to deal with details than with a complete work that constantly students leave schools where the training is in many respects excellent, and have gained no ability to go beyond the examination of particulars. The far more important power of estimating a book or a play from its total effect has not been cultivated. No teacher should forget that the ability to deal fairly with a whole is of as much more value than any facility in minute criticism as that whole is greater than any of its parts.
This does not mean that a student can well summarize everything he reads or that he may wisely attempt it. It does imply that at least his attention shall have been directed over and over to the great fact that the study of details is not the study of a masterpiece; that he shall have been required to judge a book or a play, so far as he is able, as a whole work and with reference to its entire effect. In talking with undergraduates even about short works, pieces no longer than a single essay of Steele or a simple lyric, I constantly find that they are apt to have no conception whatever that they could or should do anything but pick out minute details. I ask what it amounts to as a whole, how it justifies itself, or what is its value as a complete poem or essay, and they seem utterly unable to see what I am driving at. The painful attempt to find out what I wish them to say so entirely occupies their minds as to render them incapable of using whatever power of judgment they may possess. Not long ago one boy said to me: "I didn't know it made any difference what the poem was about if you could pick out things in it." "What do you suppose it was written for?" I asked. A look of painful bewilderment came into his face, and he answered that he supposed some folks liked to write that way. I inquired whether he would test a bridge—he was an engineering student—by picking out bits without seeing how the parts held together and how strong it was as a whole, and he returned with puzzled frankness: "But a bridge has a use." "Very good," was what I assured him, "and so does a poem. Can't you appreciate that mankind has not been keeping poems from generation to generation without finding out if they really are useless? Any work of literature that is really good must be of value as a whole, and you have not got hold of it until you are able to see what it is for as a single thing, a complete unit." The fact is so evident that it seems almost absurd to mention it in a book intended for teachers, but scores of boys come yearly from the fitting-schools who prove how often the fact is ignored,—ignored, very likely, because it is taken for granted, but no less ignored with seriously ill effects.
In general, criticism in the secondary schools should have to do only with the good points of work. Unless a pupil himself shows that he perceives shortcomings in what is read, it is on the whole the place of the instructor to keep the attention of the class fixed on merits, while defects are ignored. This is not to be interpreted as meaning that any weakness should ever be allowed to pass for a merit; or as indicating that it is ever wise to shirk a difficulty. Any intelligent pupil, for instance, should see for himself that the metaphors are sadly and inexcusably mixed in the passage:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.
It is necessary to meet this knowledge frankly, and to show him how it is that Shakespeare can be so great in spite of faults like this. It is the inclination of childhood to feel that a man must be perfect to be great, but even at the cost of encountering the difficulty of such a faith the truth must be told. In general, however, it is as well not to go out of the way to enforce the doctrine of human fallibility, and the youthful mind is best nourished by being fed on what is good, rather than by being taught to perceive what is bad.
When a pupil is asked to put into words the reason why a piece is written, he should be required to answer by a complete sentence, a properly phrased assertion. He is not unlikely to begin by giving a single term, an incomplete and tentative phrase, or at best a fragmentary statement. For the sake of the clearness of his own idea and of the habit of accurate thinking, he should be encouraged and expected to make the idea clear and the statement finished. Student-criticism, as I have said perhaps often enough already, cannot in the nature of things be either profound or exhaustive, but it should be intelligent and well defined as far as it goes.
XV
LITERARY WORKMANSHIP
The appreciation of literary workmanship dawns very slowly on the child's mind. In the secondary schools not much can be accomplished in the way of making students feel the niceties of literary art; but something should be done to enforce the nature and the worth of technique. Much that touches the undergraduate's feelings he cannot analyze, and should never in any work of the secondary schools be asked to criticise. He should, however, if he is to be systematically trained in the study of masterpieces, have knowledge enough of the qualities which distinguish them from lesser work to perceive on what their claims to superiority are founded. Children so naturally and so generally feel that distinctions which do not appeal to them are arbitrary, and it is of so much importance to guard against any feeling of this sort in the case of literature, that it is worth while to be at some pains to make distinctions perceptible, even if they may not always be made entirely clear.
One of the tests of rank in civilization is appreciation of workmanship. The savage knows nothing of mechanics beyond the power of a lever in prying up a rock, the action of a bowstring, or crude facts of this sort. A machine to him is not only incomprehensible, but supernatural: a locomotive is a fire-devil, and a loom or a printing-press, should he see one, a useful spirit. At the other end of the scale of appreciation of mechanical appliances is the inventor who devises or the trained engineer who understands the most complicated engines of modern ingenuity. Somewhere between stands any one of us,—the ordinary pupil presumably far above the savage, but far below the expert. In the appreciation of the art of the painter, at the bottom of the scale is the bushman who can look at the clever painting of a man and not know what it represents, and at the top the great painters of the world and those who can best enter into the spirit of their productions. In this scale again each of us stands somewhere; the average school-boy is unhappily likely to be so far down as to take delight in the colored illustrations of the Sunday newspapers and to be utterly indifferent to a Titian or a Rembrandt. In comprehension of the value and effect of language, the same principle obtains. The scale extends from the savage tribes with a vocabulary of but a few hundred words for the entire speech of the race and no power of making combinations beyond the simplest, to the cultivated nations with perhaps a couple of hundred thousand words and the art of producing the highest forms of prose and of poetry. The scale is a long one, and its development has taken uncounted ages; but somewhere in the line each individual has his place. The degree of the civilization of a race is unerringly determined by its command of the written word; the mental rank of the individual is no less certainly fixed by his power of using and of comprehending human speech.
This general truth is easily brought home to young people by reminding them how they began their knowledge of language with the acquirement of single words and went on to appreciate how much more may be expressed by word-combinations. After the infantile "give" came in turn "p'ease give" and "please give me a drink." From such stages each of them has gone on learning. They have constantly increased their vocabulary, their knowledge of the value of words, of word-arrangement, and of sentence-construction. Gradually by practical experience they have gained some appreciation of all those points which make up the sum of instruction in classes in composition. They now need to be shown that literary appreciation is the extension of this knowledge along the same lines; that it is the means of advancing toward a higher place in that scale which extends from the ignorant savage to the sages. They may in this way be brought to a conception of literary technique as a matter connected with the process of perception which they have been carrying on from childhood.
How value in all workmanship is to be judged by the effects produced is admirably illustrated by machinery, but it is hardly less evident in the case of language. The simpler forms of sentence come to be used by the child in place of single disconnected words because with sentences he can do more in the way of communicating his ideas and obtaining what he desires. To illustrate more complicated forms of language we have only to remind the child how carefully he orders his speech when he is endeavoring to coax a favor from an unwilling friend or a reluctant parent. The child feels himself clever just in proportion as he is able so to frame his plea that it secures his end. He may be reminded that he selects most carefully the terms which suggest such things and ideas as favor his wish and avoids any that might hint at possible objections. Out of these homely, universal experiences of childhood it is possible to build up in the mind of the pupil a very fair notion of the nature and the use of literary workmanship; a notion, moreover, which is at once sound in principle and entirely adequate as a working basis.
Teaching consists principally in helping pupils to extend ideas which they have received from daily life. In this matter of literary workmanship, for instance, it means showing them that they have, without being especially conscious of the fact, a responsiveness to well-turned forms of speech and to skilful use of words. They may perhaps be made to appreciate this with especial vividness by having their attention called to the pleasure they take in clever or apt sayings from their fellows or from joking speeches. This form of illustration must, it is true, be used with discretion. It is always difficult to lead the mind of a child from the concrete to the general. Not a few children—and children, too, of considerable intelligence—are not unlikely, if jesting remarks are instanced, to conclude that good literary workmanship means something amusing. With due care, however, a class may be led to see how the same quality of apt presentation in word which pleases them in the sayings of schoolmates is what, carried farther, is the foundation of literary technique.
Concrete examples of thoughts so well expressed that they have come to be almost part of common speech are abundant. The crisp, dry phrases of Pope lend themselves admirably as illustration, they are so neat, so compact, and, it may be added, so free from delicate sentiment which might be blurred in the handling.
Order is heaven's first law. An honest man's the noblest work of God.
The class can supply examples in most cases, and be pleased with itself for being able to do so. The finer instances from greater writers may be led up to, the epigrams of Emerson, the imaginative phrases of Shakespeare; and so on to longer examples, with illustrations from the rolling paragraphs of Macaulay, the panoplied prose of De Quincey, and after that from lyrics and passages in blank verse. Thus much may be done in the way of instruction in technique fairly early in high-school work. With it or after it at a proper interval should follow instruction in regard at least to the mechanical differences between prose and poetry and what they mean. I have mentioned earlier[212:1] the impression students often bring from the reading of Macaulay's "Milton." The remarks there quoted are selected from answers to a question of an entrance paper in regard to the difference in form and in quality between prose and poetry. Others from the same examination show yet more strikingly the general haziness of conception in the minds of the candidates:
In prose words are thrown together in a way to make good sense and to form good English. Poetry is the grouping of words into a metric [_sic_] system.
Poetry is often written in rhyme, while prose is expressed in sentences.
Poetry is the name given to writing that is written in verse form. One does not as a rule get the meaning of things when they are written in verse form.
Prose may be verse when dealt with by such an author as Shakespeare or Milton, but prose usually consists of words arranged in sentences and paragraphs without any special order.
Poetry is used as a pastime, and as such is all right.
Between good blank verse and prose there is not much difference except in the form of wording in which it is put upon the page.
For me, the difference between prose and poetry is this: Prose does not rhyme and poetry does. Under such a definition, all literature not poetry must be prose. Therefore Shakespeare's works are prose.
The illustrations might be much extended, but these will show the confusion which existed in the minds of boys who had been painfully drilled in the college entrance requirements. I have not selected the examples for their absurdity, although in a melancholy way they are droll enough; but I have meant them to illustrate the confusion which existed in the minds of a large number of the candidates at that particular examination of what makes the vital difference between prose and poetry. It is not my contention that teachers in the secondary schools are to go into minute details in regard to poetic form; but I do believe that it is idle to talk about the rank of a writer as a poet or of the beauty of Shakespeare's verse to students who do not know the difference between verse and prose.
I may be allowed to remark in passing that to my mind the influence of the theories of Macaulay's "Milton" alluded to above illustrates the difference in effect of that which appeals to the personal experience and feelings of boys and that which they are forced to receive without such inward interpretation. The boys who were trained in the "Milton" were trained also in Carlyle's "Burns." The Carlyle, with its eloquent appreciation of the office of the poet, the seer to whom has been given "a gift of vision," had apparently left no trace upon their minds. They had, however, been forced, too often unwilling, over numerous pages of what they were assured was poetry of the highest quality, yet which to them was unintelligible and wearisome. When Macaulay declared that poetry was a relic of barbarism they seized upon the theory eagerly because it justified their own feelings, because it coincided with their own impressions; and thenceforth they doubtless held complacently to their faith in the obsolete uselessness of verse, fortified by so high an authority.