Part 7

And what shoulder and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And, when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand formed thy dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile His work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?

"It sounds rather pretty," I commented, as carelessly as possible.

"Yes, I suppose so," he assented colorlessly, looking at me rather suspiciously.

He was a shrewd little mortal, and he had been so often told at school that he should like this and that for which in reality he did not care a button that he was on his guard. I made a casual remark about something entirely unrelated to the subject. It was well that the lad should not feel that he was being instructed. Then in a manner as natural and easy as I could make it I asked:

"Did you ever see a tiger?"

"Oh, yes; I've seen lots of them at the circus. Tom Bently never went to but one circus, but I've been to four."

"What does a tiger look like?" I went on, ignoring the irrelevant.

"He's a fierce-looking thing! Didn't you ever see one?"

"Yes, I've seen them, but I wondered if they looked the same to you as they do to me."

"Why, how do they look to you?"

"I asked you first. It's only fair for you to say first."

"Well," the small boy said, with a fine show of being determined to play fair, "I think they look like great big, big, big cats. Did you think that?"

"That's exactly what I should have said. They really are a sort of cat, you know. Did you ever see a keeper stir them up?"

"Oh, yes, sir; and they snarled like anything, and licked their lips just like this!"

He gave a highly gratifying imitation, and then added vivaciously: "If I were the keeper, I'd keep stirring them up all the time. They did look so mad!"

"And they opened and shut their eyes slowly," I suggested, "as if they'd like to get hold of their keeper."

"Yes; and their eyes were just like green fire."

"'Burning bright,'" I quoted; and then without giving the boy time to suspect that he was being led on, I asked at once: "Did you ever see a cat's eyes in the dark?"

"Oh, I saw our cat once last summer, when we were in the country, under a rosebush after dark, when Dick and I got out of the window after we'd gone to bed. She just scared me; her eyes were just like little green lanterns. Dick said they were like little bicycle lamps."

"If it had been a tiger under a bush in the night,—'in the forests of the night,'—"

"Oh," interrupted the boy with the eagerness of a discoverer, "is that what it means! Did he see a tiger in the night under a bush? A real, truly tiger, all loose? I'd have run away."

"I don't know if he ever saw one," I answered. "I rather think he saw a tiger or a picture of one, or thought of one, and then got to thinking how it must seem to come across one in the woods; when one was travelling, say, in the East where tigers live wild. If you came upon one in the forest in the dark, what do you think would be the first thing that would tell you a tiger was near?"

"I'd hear him."

"Did you ever hear a cat moving about?"

"No," the boy said doubtfully. "Aunt Katie says Spot doesn't make any more noise than a sunbeam. Could a sunbeam make a noise?"

"She meant that Spot didn't make any. You'd never hear a tiger coming, for it's a kind of cat, and moves without sound. You wouldn't know that way."

"I'd see him."

"In the night? You couldn't see him."

"Yes, I could! Yes, I could!" he cried triumphantly. "I'd see his eyes just like green fire."

I had interested the lad and taken him far enough to feel sure he would follow me if I helped him on a little faster. I was ready to use clear suggestion when I felt that he would respond to it as if the thought were his own.

"Well," I said, "don't you see that this is just what the man who wrote the poem meant? He got to thinking how the tiger would look in the night to anybody that came on him in the forest and saw those eyes like green fires shining at him out of the jungle. Don't you suppose you or I would think they were pretty big fires if we saw them, and knew there was a tiger behind them?"

"I guess we should! Wooh! Do you suppose Bruno'd run?"

Bruno was a small and silky water-spaniel, a charming beast in his way, but not especially welcome at this point of the conversation.

"Very likely;" I slid over the subject. "The man knew that he would have a feeling how big and strong that tiger must be: and it gave him a shock to think what a fearful thing the beast would be there in the dark, with all the warm, damp smells of the plants in the air, and the strange noises. It would almost take away his breath to think what a mighty Being it must have taken to make anything so awful as a tiger."

"Yes," the lad said so quietly that I let him think a little. He had snuggled up against my knee and laid hold of my fingers, and I knew some sense of the matter was working in him. After a moment or two I asked him if he could repeat the first verse of the poem as if he were the man who thought of the tiger in the jungle there, with fierce eyes shining out of the dark, and who had so clear an idea of the mighty creature that he couldn't help thinking what a wonderful thing it was that it could be created. The boy fixed his eyes on mine as if he were getting moved and half-consciously desired to be assured that I was utterly serious and sympathetic; and in his clear childish voice he repeated in a way that had really something of a thrill in it:

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

"If a traveller were in the jungle in the dark night," I went on after a word of praise for his recitation, "I suppose he couldn't see much around him, the trees would be so thick. He'd have to look up to the sky to see anything but the tiger's eyes."

"He'd see the stars there," the boy observed, just as I had hoped he would. "I've seen stars through the trees. I was out in the woods long after dark once."

"Were you really? The man must have thought the stars looked like the eyes, as if when the animal was made the Creator went to the sky itself for that fire. Think of a Being that could rise to the very stars and take their light in His hand."

"Ouf!" the small man cried naïvely. "I shouldn't want to take fire in my hand!"

"The writer of the poem was thinking what a wonderful Being He must be that could do it; but that if He could make a creature like the tiger, He would be able to do anything."

The boy reflected a moment, and then, with a frank look, asked: "Did the fire in a tiger's eyes really come out of the stars?"

"I don't think that the poem means that it really did," was my answer. "I think it means that when the poet thought how wonderful a tiger is, with the life and the fierceness shining like a flame in his eyes, and how we cannot tell where that fire came from, and that the stars overhead were scarcely brighter, it seemed as if that was where the green light came from. He was trying to say how wonderful and terrible it was to him,—especially when he thought of coming upon the beast all alone in the forest in the night with nobody near to defend him."

The boy was silent, and thinking hard. He had evidently not yet clearly grasped all the idea.

"But God didn't make a tiger on an anvil and put pieces of stars in for eyes," he objected.

"You told me yesterday that Bruno swims like a duck. He doesn't really, for a duck goes on the top of the water."

"Oh, but I meant that Bruno goes as fast as a duck."

"And you wanted me to know how well he swims, I suppose."

"Why, of course. Bruno can swim twice as fast as Tom Talcott's dog."

"You said that about the duck to make me know what a wonderful swimmer Bruno is, and the man who wrote the poem wanted you when you read it to feel how wonderful the tiger seemed to him; its eyes as if they were of fire brought from the stars, its strength so great that it seemed as if his muscles had been beaten out on an anvil from red-hot steel by some Being mighty enough to do something no man could begin to do. The poem doesn't mean that a tiger was really made in this way; but it does mean that when you think of the strength and fearfulness of the creature, able to carry off a man or even a horse in its jaws, this is the best way to give an idea of how terrible the animal seemed."

The boy accepted this, and so we came to the fifth verse. The range of ideas here is so much beyond the mind of any child that it was necessary to suggest most of them, to go very slowly, and in the end to be content with a childishly inadequate notion of the magnificent conception. I gave frankly a suggestion of the creation of all the animals at the beginning, and of how the angels might have stood around like stars, watching full of interest and of kindness. The boy was easily made to feel as if he had seen the making of the deer and the lamb and the horse, and of how the angels might see in one or another of the animals a help or a friend to man.

"Then suppose," I said, "that the angels should see God make the great tiger, royal and terrible. What would they see?"

"Oh, a great fierce thing," the lad returned. "Do you suppose he'd jump right at the deer and the lambs?"

"He would make the angels think how he could. How different from the other animals he'd be."

"Yes, he'd have big, big, sharp teeth, and he'd lash his tail, and he'd put out his claws. Do you suppose he'd sharpen his claws the way Muff does on the leather chairs?"

"Very likely he would," I said. "At any rate the angels would think how the other animals would be torn to pieces if the tiger got hold of them; and they would think of what would happen to men. Perhaps they would imagine some poor Hindu woman, with her baby on her back going through a path in the jungle, and how the tiger might leap out suddenly and tear them both to pieces. The angels couldn't understand how God could bear to make any animal so cruel, or how He could be willing to have anything so wicked in the world. They would be so sorry for all the suffering that was to come that they would throw down their spears and not be able to keep back the tears."

"But angels wouldn't have spears, would they?"

I went to a shelf of the library in which we were talking and took down a volume in which I found a picture of St. Michael in full armor.

"It is like the fire from the stars," I said. "Of course nobody ever saw an angel to know how he would look, but to show how strong and powerful an angel might be, a good many men that make pictures have painted them like knights."

"But men that had spears wouldn't cry; I shouldn't think angels would."

"Even the strongest men cry sometimes, my boy; only it has to be something tremendous to make them. A thing that would make the angels 'water heaven with their tears' must be something so terrible that you couldn't tell how sad it was."

"Well, anyway, I'd rather be a tiger than a lamb," he proclaimed rather unexpectedly.

"Very likely," I assented, "but I think you'd rather have a lamb come after Baby Lou than a tiger."

"Oh, I wouldn't want a tiger to get Baby Lou!" he cried with a tremor.

"I suppose that is the way the angels might feel at the idea of the tiger's killing anybody," I rejoined.

With a lad somewhat older one would have gone on to develop the thought that to the watching angels the tiger, leaping out fierce and bloodthirsty from the hand of the Creator, would be like the incarnation of evil, and that in their weeping was represented all the sorrowful problem of the existence of evil in the Universe; but this on the present occasion I did not touch upon.

"So the angels," I went on, "couldn't keep back their tears; but what did God do?"

"Why, He smiled!" the boy answered, evidently with astonishment at the thought which now for the first time came home to him. "I shouldn't think He'd have smiled."

"When you were so disappointed the other day because the carriage was broken and you couldn't go over to the lake in it, do you remember that Uncle Jo laughed?"

"Oh, he knew we could go in his automobile."

"He knew."

"Yes, he knew," began the boy, "and so—" He stopped, and looked at me with a sudden soberness. "What did God know?" he asked seriously.

"He must have known that somehow everything was right, don't you think? He knew why He had made the tiger, just as He knew why He had made the lamb, and so He could see that everything would be as it should be in the end."

"But—but—"

The boy was speechless in face of the eternal problem, as so many greater and wiser have been before him. It seemed to me that we had done quite enough for once, so I broke off the talk with a suggestion that we try the boy's favorite game. That was the end of the matter for the time, but in the library of the lad's father the copy of Blake is so befingered at the page on which "The Tiger" is printed that it is evident that the boy, with the soiled fingers of his age, has turned it often. How much he made out of the talk I cannot pretend to say, but at least he came to love the poem.

I said at the start that I do not give the conversation, which is actual, as a sample, but as an illustration. The poem called for more leading on of the pupil than would many, for as Blake is one of the most imaginative of English writers, his conceptions are the more subtle and profound. A class, moreover, cannot be treated always with the same deliberation as that which is natural in the case of a single child; but the essential principle, I believe, is the same everywhere.

IX

EDUCATIONAL

Educational in the broadest sense must anything be which is inspirational; for to interest the child in literature, to make him enter into it as into a charming heritage, is more truly to educate him than would be any pedantic or formal instruction whatever. I have used the term specifically, however, as a convenient word by which to designate that form of instruction which is more deliberately and formally an effort to make clear what literature may be held to teach. To regard any work of art as directly and didactically teaching anything is perhaps to fail in so far to treat it as art; but the point which such a consideration raises is too deep for our present inquiry, and may be disregarded except in the case of unintelligent attempts to make every tale or poem embody and convey a set moral. To endeavor to aid pupils to perceive fully the relation of what they read to themselves and to the society in which they live is part of the legitimate work of the teacher of literature. In a word, while the term is perhaps not the best, I have used the word educational to designate such study as is directed to helping the student to gain from books a wider knowledge of life and human nature.

It is not my idea that in actual practice a formal division is to be made, and still less that what I have called inspirational consideration of literature is ever to be discontinued. In the growth of a child's mind comes naturally a simple and unreflecting pleasure in literature, beginning, as has been said, with unsophisticated delight in the marked rhythms of Mother Goose or in the wholesome joy of the fairy-story. To this is gradually added an equally unreflecting absorption of certain ideas concerning life, which by slow degrees gives place to reflection conscious and deliberate. The delight and the unconscious yielding to the influence of the work of art remain, and to the end they are more effective than any deliberate and conscious ideas can be. Nothing that we teach our pupils about a poem can compare in influence with what they absorb without realizing what they are doing. One of the great dangers of this whole matter is that we shall hurry them from an instinctive to a cultivated attitude toward literature; that we shall replace natural and healthful pleasure by laborious and conscientious study. In dealing with any piece of real literature the wise method, it seems to me, is to take it up first for the absolute, straightforward emotional enjoyment.[110:1] It is of very little use to study any work which the children have not first come to care for. After they see why a piece is worth while from the point of view of pleasure, then study may go further and consider what is the core of the work intellectually and emotionally.

In speaking of treating literature educationally I do not refer to that sort of instruction which so generally and unfortunately takes the place of the true study of masterpieces. The history of a poem or a drama, the biography of authors, and all work of this sort should in any case be kept subordinate and should generally, I believe, come after the student has at least a tolerable idea and a fair appreciation of the writings themselves. What is important and what I mean by the educational treatment of literature is the development of those general truths concerning human nature and human feeling which form the tangible thought of a play or poem. The line of distinction between this and the less tangible ideas which are conveyed by form, by melody, by suggestion,—the ideas, in short, which are the secret of the inspirational effect of a work,—cannot be sharply drawn. Many of the tangible ideas will have been obvious in the reading of which the recognized purpose has been mere delight and inspiration; and on the other hand the two classes of ideas are so closely interwoven that it is not possible, even were it advisable, to separate them entirely. It is possible, however, after the pupil has come to take pleasure in a work,—though it should never be attempted sooner,—to go on to the deliberate study of the intellectual content, and to take up broad and general truths.

One way of preparing a class for the work which is now to be done is to speak to them of literature as a sort of high kind of algebra; to let them see, that is, how the distinction between the great mass of reading-matter and what is fairly to be called literature is not unlike the difference with which they are familiar in mathematics between arithmetic and the higher grade of work which comes after. The newspaper, the text-book, the history, the scientific treatise all deal with the concrete, just as arithmetic has to do with absolute quantities. In the mental development of the pupil the time comes when he is considered sufficiently advanced to go on from the handling of concrete things to the dealing with the abstract. When he is able to understand the relation between the sum paid for one bushel of wheat and the amount needed to purchase fifty, he may be advanced to the lore of general formulæ, and be made to understand how _x_ may represent any price and _y_ any number of bushels. In the same way from reading in a newspaper the story of the assassination of the late King of Servia, the concrete case, he may go on to read "Macbeth," wherein Duncan represents any monarch of given character, and Macbeth not a particular, actual, concrete assassin, but a murderer of a sort, a type, the general or abstract character. The student has gone on from the particular to the general; from the concrete to the abstract; from the arithmetic of human nature to its algebra.

A similar comparison between history and poetry is on the same grounds easily to be made between the history lesson and the chronicle plays of Shakespeare. The student who in his nursery days started out with the instinctive question in regard to the fairy-tale: "Is it true?" begins to perceive the difference between literal and essential truth. He perceives that verity in literature is not simple and obvious fidelity to the specific fact or event; he learns to appreciate that the truth of art, like the truth of algebra, lies in its accuracy in representing truth in the abstract: he comes to appreciate the narrowness of the nursery question, which asked only for the literal fact, and he begins to comprehend something of the symbolic.

An excellent illustration for practical use is a poem like "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." Any live, wholesome boy is sure to tingle with the swing and fervor of the verse, the sense of the open air, the excitement, the doubt, the hope, the joyful climax. It is easy to lead the class on to consider how exhilarating such an experience would be, and to go on from this to point out that the poem does not describe a literal, actual occurrence; but that it is a generalized expression of the zest and exhilaration of a superb, all but impossible ride, with the added excitement of being responsible for the freedom or even the lives of the folk of a whole city.

The first feeling of the class on learning that such a ride was not taken is sure to be one of disappointment. It is better to meet this frankly, and to compensate for it by arousing interest in the embodiment of abstract feeling. One great source of the lack of interest in literature at the present time is that the material, practical character of the age makes it difficult for the general reader to respect anything but the concrete fact. Literature is apt to present itself to the hard-headed young fellow of the public school as a lot of make-believe stuff, and therefore at best a matter of rather frivolous amusement. The surest way of correcting this common attitude of mind is to nourish the appreciation of what fact in art really means; to cultivate a clear perception of how a poem or a tale may be the truest thing in the world, although dealing with imaginary personages and with incidents which never happened.[114:1]

As an illustration of the sense in which literature is a sort of algebra of human feeling somewhat more remote from the ordinary life of a child may be taken another poem of Browning's, "The Lost Leader." My experience is that most youth of the school age start out by being able to make little or nothing of this. By a little talk, however, beginning perhaps as simply as with the way in which a lad feels when a school-fellow he had faith in has failed in a crisis, has for some personal advantage gone over to the other party in a school election, or of how the class would feel if some teacher who had been with the students in some effort to obtain an extension of privilege to which the scholars felt themselves to be honestly entitled had for his own purposes swung over to the opposite side, the whole thing may be brought home. The boys may be led on to imagine what are the feelings of a youth eager for the cause of freedom and the uplifting of man, when one whom he has looked to as a leader, one in whom he has had absolute faith, deserts the rank for honors or for money. Once the young minds are on the right track it is by no means impossible to bring them to see pretty clearly that in the poem is not the question of a particular man or a particular cause; but that Browning is dealing with a universal expression of the pain that would come to any man, to any one of them, in believing that the leader who had been most trusted and revered had in reality been unworthy, and had betrayed the cause his followers believed he would gladly die to defend.