Part 2
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."
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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: