Part 5
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:
My pupils, I find, can work longer and harder on "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," with constantly increasing interest, than on any other masterpieces suited to school use. Just because these dramas are so stimulating, the pupils have the patience to struggle with the difficulties of the text. In general they feel only a languid interest in word-puzzles such as delight the student of language; for instance, the expression, "He doesn't know a hawk from a handsaw," might fail to arouse their curiosity. But when Hamlet says: "I am but mad north-north west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw," they are on the alert; they really care to know what he means and why he has used this peculiar expression. Thus word-study which might be mere drudgery is rendered interesting by the human element in the play—the element which, in my opinion, should always be kept well in the foreground.
A large number of teachers, many of them, very likely, of experience greater than mine, will agree with this view. I am not able to do so because I believe we should know the language before we try to read; but I at least hold that the first principle in any successful teaching is that a teacher shall follow the method which he finds best adapted to his own temperament. For the instructor who is convinced that the habit of taking up difficulties of language as they are met in actual reading, to take them up then is perhaps the only effective way of doing things. It seems to me, however, a little like sacrificing the literature to a desire to make teaching the vocabulary easier. It is very likely a simpler way of arousing interest in difficulties of language; but in teaching literature the elucidation of obscure words and phrases is of interest or value simply for the sake of the effect of the text, and I hold that to this effect, and to this effect as a whole, everything else should be subordinate. Each teacher must decide for himself what is the proper method, but I insist that no author ever wrote sincerely without assuming that his vocabulary was familiar to his audience beforehand. Certainly I am not able to feel that it is wise to interrupt any first reading with anything save perhaps the briefest possible explanations, comments that are so short as not to break the flow of the work as a whole.
The first reading of a narrative of any sort, it may surely be said, is chiefly a matter of making the reader, and especially the childish reader, acquainted with the story. Since little real study can be accomplished while interest is concentrated on the plot, it may be wise for the teacher to have a first reading without any more attention to the difficulties of vocabulary than is absolutely needed to make the story intelligible, and then to have the difficulties learned before a second and more intelligent going over of the work as a whole. Each teacher must decide a point of this sort according to individual judgment and the character of the class.
In all the lower grades of school work whatever literature is given to the children should be in diction and in phrasing so simple that very little of this sort of preliminary work need be done. So long as what is selected has real literary excellence it can hardly be too simple. We constantly forget, it seems to me, how simple is the world of children. Dr. John Brown, dear and wise soul, has justly said:
Children are long in seeing, or at least in looking at what is above them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, its "red sodgers" and lady-birds, and all its queer things; _their world is about three feet high_, and they are more often stooping than gazing up.
It does not follow that children are to be fed on that sort of water-gruel which is so often vended as "juvenile literature." They should be given the best, the work of real writers; but of this the simplest should be chosen, and in dealing with it the children should not be bothered with thoughts and ideas which are over their heads. They live, it must be remembered, in a "world about three feet high," mentally as well as physically.
In preliminary work the first object is to remove whatever obstacles might hinder ease and smoothness of progress in reading. Beside having all obscure terms understood, it is well to call attention to some of the most striking and beautiful passages in the book or poem which is to be read. They should be taken up as detached quotations, and the pupils made to discover or to see how and why each is good. The pleasure of coming upon them when the text is read helps in itself; it diminishes the strain upon the mind of the student in the effort of comprehension, and it doubles the effect of the portions chosen. My idea is that many fine passages may be treated almost as a part of the vocabulary of the text; their meaning and force may be made so evident and so attractive that when the complete play or poem is taken up a knowledge of these bits helps greatly in securing a strong effect of the work as a whole.
We teachers too often ignore, it is to be feared, the strain it is to the young to understand and to feel at the same time. We fail to recognize, indeed, how difficult it is for them—or for any one—to _feel_ while the attention is taxed to take in the meaning of a thing; so that in literary study we are likely to demand the impossible, the responsiveness of the emotions while all the force of the child's mind is concentrated upon the effort to comprehend. Whatever may be done legitimately to lessen this stress is most desirable. The preparation of the vocabulary, the elucidation of obscure passages obviously aids in this; but so does the pointing out of beauties. Instead of being bothered in the midst of the effort to take in a poem or a play as a whole and being harassed by the need of mastering details of diction or phrasing, the student has a pleasant sense of self-confidence in coming upon obscure matters already conquered; and in the same way receives both pleasure and a feeling of mastery in recognizing beauties already familiar.
The preliminary work, besides this study of any difficulties of vocabulary, should include whatever is needful in making clear any difference between the point of view of the work studied and that of the child's ordinary life.
In "The Merchant of Venice," for instance, it is necessary to make clear the fact that the play was written for an audience to which usury was an intolerable crime and a Jew a creature to be thoroughly detested. The Jew-baiting of recent years in Europe helps to make this intelligible. The point must be made, because otherwise Antonio appears like a cad and Jessica inexcusable. The story is easily brought home to the school-boy, moreover, by its close relation to the simplest emotions.