Chapter IV: Appendix: Greek Speaks for Itself (2)

Does the union of religion and art mean then that the artist must be a moralist? To moralize is not a function of art as such. I enjoy the beauty of a tree without any feeling that it conveys a truth or inculcates a virtue. The artist may transfer the tree to canvas, where I enjoy it as I did in nature without any accessory implication, informing or ethical. Joyce Kilmer may put the tree in a poem and with it add beauty to the truth that, “only God can make a tree.” The psalmist may put a tree in his sacred hymn and with it add beauty to his praise of the life of a good man, who shall be “like a tree planted near the running waters.” Logical truth and moral good are not excluded from art, although the artist by profession is not a teacher. Modern critics are often inconsistent and hypocritical in welcoming every dramatist or poet or novelist who undisguisedly advocates various theories, but will be withering in their scorn for any one who advocates the ten commandments. To moralize, to dogmatize, to theorize is not the function of art, and though these actions are not incompatible with the functions of art, very rarely in the history of art has it been successful when it undertook to teach or to preach. Didactic poetry, satire poetry and propaganda drama, have great difficulty in becoming poetry and remaining poetry.

Religion then is a virtue of the will, resulting in acts of worship; art, a power of the mind, resulting in various artistic creations. Religion may remain wholly spiritual, even in its expression, but, though the mind’s appreciation of beauty may rest on purely spiritual and intellectual objects, such as theories or virtues or God and heaven, art must express itself in sensible objects. Even in literature, the most intellectual of arts, words and pictures of the imagination are essential. Angels might be conceived as having an art whose sole medium was spiritual ideas, not so man, whose mind works through imagination. Aquinas, stressing the intellectual nature of beauty, calls attention to the fact that while men speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds, they will rarely and only figuratively consider the acts of other senses, as taste, touch and scent, beautiful. The actions of these senses are immersed in the material, whereas sight and hearing are closer to the intellectual and spiritual. Man has not yet succeeded in making a fine art whose medium would be tastes and touches and fragrances. The unselfish enjoyment of art cannot be released in objects so material and so near to the appetites. The sensualist is not an artist in yielding to sense enjoyment, although he may wish to give his unhallowed ways an artistic gloss. The one who sees only an apple pie in rosy apples or senses slumbrous ease in soft velvets and in iridescent silks or perceives only the perfume in flower and fruit, is not experiencing esthetic emotions, but rather stirrings of the bodily appetites. If estheticism is not asceticism, neither is it, on the other hand, concupiscence or mere sensualism.

Does the connection between art and religion exclude the presentation of evil in art? Art would be much handicapped if it were restricted entirely to good objects. Art is a manifestation of man’s intellect and must act in accord with the nature of that faculty. If evil is artistically presented, it must be depicted as evil. To present moral evil as a good is a falsification as repugnant to the mind as would be the painting of a blue sunrise, of a green moon or of a black-and-tan sea, and as absurd as the sculpture of a five-legged lion. The enlightened mind rejects such physical monstrosities, and the enlightened mind, despite the lower appetites, rejects moral disorders with equal, if not greater, repugnance.

Again, art requires that the evil, the moral ugliness or physical ugliness, be a necessary and rational part of the presentation. A fact of nature becomes at once the material of science, because science concerns itself with unadorned truth. But for a fact of nature to be material of art, it must be idealized, that is, it must be made an integral part of the art product. The pleasure of art does not arise from deception but from illusion which does not deceive. Painted grapes might deceive birds; but did they deceive men, then the effect would not be that of art but of reality. The evil or ugly can never be pleasant as long as it is present and actual. The transfer of evil to the world of art if it becomes an integral, justified and rationalized part of the illusion, is usually enough to rob evil of its actuality and unpleasantness.

Sometimes in contemporary realism, with every justification of ugliness from the art product, there is depression and not true art pleasure, because we cannot forget the actual world when contemplating the imaginary world of art. Suppose “Macbeth” or “Œdipus” were really historical and were acted in the presence of their contemporaries or of the next generation. Would there be satisfaction and the emotional relief arising from illusion? Hardly. Memories would be too much lacerated with the actual to surrender to the illusion of art and to enjoy its contemplation. Actuality would put back the salt into the tears that else might have been sweetened by transfer of evil to remote and imaginary realms. The Greeks and Shakespeare were right in making their tragedies historical, whereas modern realists are somber with pessimism because they never forsake the actual.

Art and religion are both concerned with life and so they both must touch evil and ugliness, unhappily a large part of life. Religion as a virtue must overcome evil and not permit it to master the will. Art depicts evil in such a way as not to offend the enlightened mind, by approval of evil or by the artistically unjustified introduction of evil or by actual experience of evil. In all these cases the mind would not experience the true and lasting pleasure of art. The taste of fruit passes; the contemplation of painted fruit is a joy forever. Art pleasure is not the playing with toys, as Plato would seem to make it, but the fine occupation of rational minds, which Aristotle made it, an occupation worthy of man because art interprets nature and man to himself, because art exercises man’s rational faculties, because art releases man’s emotions under conditions where the evil of actual life is removed. Macbeth and Œdipus in life were saddening spectacles; the echo of that sadness felt through dramatic representation has high pleasure for the mind.

The cathartic function of art brings it close to the virtuous and the divine. What virtue does really, art does ideally, transforming evil into good. The vicarious sacrifice of Calvary was the catharsis of mankind, an infinite cleansing, compared with which the vicarious feeling of dramatically enacted evil is but as a drop to the ocean. Close to the divine, too, although at the same time infinitely remote, is the creation of art. Wisdom and love inspired God in His creation, but so also did the quest of beauty. Aquinas called the universe God’s sermon, and the universe is a divine picturing and sculpturing and harmonizing. The artist follows far after, rethinking through finite images the ideals which filled the thoughts of the Divine Artist.

In idealizing, in creating, is art akin to the divine, and, lastly, in its disinterestedness is art divine. All appreciation of beauty is divine. Contemplation will be the occupation of eternity, and contemplation is the proper and the congenial attitude of the soul towards beauty. Good inspires love and attracts to union, but when union has been effected in eternity, the enraptured ecstasy of the beautiful will be the soul’s unending activity. Beauty is the supreme excellence of truth, the polish on the granite of fact, the uncloying fascination arrested upon perfection. In eternity infinite good and infinite truth, obscured in time, will stream into the soul unclouded and refulgent, and beauty will grace love and crown wisdom.

The millions of mankind who admire the red of every morning, and the forests breaking green through the silver mists and the birds in awakened song rising from the flowers to the brightening sky, these millions do not begrudge one another such beautiful spectacles, nor are they mutually jealous as they listen to beautiful sounds. That unselfish, that unenvious contemplation of beauty marks off man from animals by an impassable chasm and makes him an image of the self-sufficing Creator, the source of all beauty, the exemplar of all beauty, whom the Blessed forever contemplate and forever enjoy, unenvying and unenviously.

VIII

THE VISCERAL TEST OF BEAUTY

“What is the prime requisite of a critic?” was the question. “His sincerity,” said one; “his sympathy,” said a second; “his philosophy,” said a third, “because everything he says will be ruled by his principles, even his sincerity and sympathy.” The answer of the third speaker is pertinent to a symposium printed in the _New Republic_ on the function of criticism.

It is the common view of the seven writers that criticism is an art and the critics, artists, but no one, except Mr. Francis Hackett, tries to show what the label of artist means. Mr. Dickinson Miller, a professor in a theological seminary, very justly and quite fittingly insists on the social responsibility of the artist, as one who deals with life. Mr. Lovett goes to history and prepares the ground for a discussion of principles by grouping critics in several classes. Mr. Clive takes the humblest and most practical view of the critic, calling him an appraiser, a function which Mr. H. L. Mencken vehemently repudiates and places a chip on his shoulder while belligerently proclaiming himself impressionistic. He makes one deep remark which would seem to put him in the same school of esthetics with Mr. Hackett. Presumably with humorous intent, or perhaps seriously, Mr. Mencken locates the artistic impulse in “hormones and intestinal flora.” Hormones are secretions of the glands (we just looked it up!) and “intestinal flora” may mean ferments. Mr. Mencken is abreast of the times. Graft on a new gland and masticate yeast, these are the new specifics for all the ills that flesh is heir to.

The other contributors to this interesting symposium, though not, with the exception of Mr. Hackett, delving as deep as Mr. Mencken, would appear to be in philosophy individualists and subjectivists. The former editor of the _Athenæum_, Mr. J. Middleton Murry, accepts the dictum of Rémy de Gourmont: “Erect personal impressions into laws,” as the “true motto of a critic.” Mr. Murry is, however, too sensible to accord to individual impressions undue freedom and with some violence to his consistency asserts that personal laws stand or fall by their agreement with common experience and with human nature.

Mr. Morris Cohen puts himself into a fallacious dilemma from which he does not successfully extricate himself. According to Mr. Cohen, all critics are led by personal impressions or by the authority of others. He should know that between the blind feeling of impressionism and the blind faith of authority there is enlightened reason. Mr. Cohen does not take the path of reason, but endeavors to escape the horns of his own dilemma by recourse to pragmatism. He claims, what will be news to historians of philosophy, that Euclid was the first pragmatist, although in the next breath Mr. Cohen states that “mathematicians of the nineteenth century have shown that Euclid’s axioms are mere guesses to be justified by their consequences in the factual realm.” “Factual realm” seems to mean the indefinitely remote future of pragmatism where the gold of truth is separated from meaner elements. Some chosen spirits of the “factual realm” now assure us that the “self-evident principles” of Euclid are “guesses.” Mr. Cohen is equipped to write an inside history of philosophy with some entirely original features. The “factual realm” leads back to skepticism, and Mr. Cohen is still impaled by his dilemma.

Mr. Francis Hackett makes the most serious attempt to get at the philosophy of criticism and of art, and attacks at once the question of the beautiful. It is evidence of his thoroughness that he goes straightway to the great problem of esthetics, “Can an object be at once beautiful and evil?” Mr. Hackett answers promptly in the negative, but then proceeds to confuse the point by going to another and different question, “Can evil or an ugly object be represented in art?” The answer to this question is evident. The elopement of Helen, the patricide and incest of Œdipus, the galleries of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and countless other happenings in the world of art, show that the evil and the ugly have been and may be represented in art. “I can hardly conceive,” says Mr. Hackett, “an artist as subduing a cancerous object to an esthetic design.” But why not? Marriage with one’s mother is more repugnant than a cancer, and yet it was handled successfully by Sophocles, however repulsive some of his imitators have been in their details.

The very transfer to the realm of art robs the ugly object of its actuality and imminence. Surely the ugly and evil have been and may be represented in art, but such objects may not be represented as beautiful and good. That were as false and untrue to nature as a centipede cow in a picture. Perhaps a cancer could not appear in a picture or poem or story except by suggestion. A stark realism would disgust, but a true artist might subdue a cancerous object to artistic design as effectively as Homer subdued in his story the fleas of the dog, Argos, and the dung-heap where he lay.

Beauty in art would lose one of its charms, the splendor of contrast, did not admitted ugliness or evil occur in art. Bad art disgusts and so does badness in art, when badness is approved or when it is projected into art for purposes not artistic. Mr. Hackett’s real trouble is that he has not properly isolated the feeling of art awakened by beauty. He thinks that the esthetic sense is sexual and visceral. If the mouth waters at painted fruit, would Mr. Hackett call art salival? Human beings are composites, and external objects while producing their essential and proper effects may have concomitant effects accidentally brought into being. To admire the beauty of an apple is an esthetic feeling entirely distinct in cause and faculty and in operation from the feeling of sensible satisfaction, anticipated or actual, which comes to the taste-buds, and different again from any visceral qualms that may arise from associated ideas of unhappy experience with other apples.

Mr. Hackett has been led astray by not distinguishing the disinterested emotions of beauty from the selfish emotions of appetite. He calls beauty, “disinterested satisfaction,” and in that word “disinterested” he has a fact about beauty, a fact solving his problems, a fact which has been admitted by every one who has studied the subject, and a fact which is capable of experimental demonstration at any moment. Professor Phelps of Yale once called esthetic emotions a spinal thrill; Mr. Mencken would call them “hormones or intestinal flora”; and Mr. Hackett declares that “the true sources of esthetic satisfaction and dissatisfaction are deep in our emotional and visceral life.” The one essential quality of disinterestedness, found in esthetic satisfaction, shows the absurdity of all such statements. Bodily emotions are all the outcome of appetites, and appetites are never disinterested but always self-seeking by their very nature. They are actuated by good; they tend to an end, an end which they do not and cannot seek disinterestedly. Even the act of the highest disinterested love may be akin to the sense of beauty, but it is not as wholly disinterested because that unselfish love is still seeking good, and good as such does not come within the purview of beauty at all. It is impossible to be disinterested towards good or evil.

Mr. Hackett speaks of beauty being a “sensuous satisfaction.” Here again there is a confusion between beauty of art and other beauty. Art appeals to the senses because art presents its beauty in concrete embodiments. To that extent the satisfaction of beauty arises from sensible objects, but the feeling of beauty transcends mere sensation. “Art is long.” “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The satisfaction of appetite is passing; the satisfaction of beauty abides. Mr. Hackett does well to seek the springs of beauty in personality. Personality is an abiding principle of intellectual beings. The enduring joy of beauty argues to an abiding principle which bears the dynamic charge of that joy. Beauty supposes a soul.

“Beauty is a light that may follow any reality whatever and give us the power to release our emotions happily in the presence of that reality.” So states Mr. Hackett, and he is right, if he gives the correct meaning to “emotions.” Light or luster has been recognized from all time as an objective element of beauty, which has been defined as the light of truth. Mr. Hackett paraphrases a definition which has been incorrectly attributed to Plato. Kleutgen has defined beauty as the perfection of anything resplendently manifested.

Let us hope that Mr. Hackett will remove “visceral” from among the qualities of beauty and preclude critics from adding a fiftieth explanation of Aristotle’s _catharsis_ to the forty-nine varieties already set forth. Wearers of Murphy buttons or those who have lost or may lose sections of the intestinal tract should be assured in an amended edition of Mr. Hackett’s esthetics that their sense of beauty has not been abbreviated or impaired. Sane philosophy is the prime requisite of true criticism.

PART SECOND

ART IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE

IX

LOOKING FORWARD IN LITERATURE

The teacher of literature today is looking backward when he should be looking forward. Greek literature, Latin literature and, to a large extent, English literature are not orientated; they do not face the rising sun. It was not so in the Greek schools of Greek literature. Gorgias and Isocrates taught literature for the morrow, and for practical and immediately practical purposes. In the Roman schools it was so from first to last. Recall Cicero’s studies under Greek rhetoricians and Cicero’s own preachment in the _Archias_ speech. “Shame on those who bury themselves so deep in literature that they harvest nothing for the good of all and bring nothing to light for our eyes to look upon.” Recall Quintilian’s _Institutes of Oratory_, and all the intervening schools of Rome. Rome had no vocational schools for road-building, but Rome did have schools of grammar, poetry, rhetoric and philosophy where it trained leaders with vision and with the power to act. The brains of Rome trained in literature guided barbarian hands to lay down the roads over which Christianity traveled and civilization came down to us.

Literature looked forward in every period of the world’s schooling. Ausonius and Isidore, Alcuin and Petrarch, Boileau and Pope, England and France, and even Germany until about the middle of the nineteenth century and America until a little later, kept the literatures of Greece and Rome orientated to the future by teaching them as arts, by making composition of literature the goal of the teaching of literature.

Science is ever growing old; history is always being rewritten; literature is ever young. We know more about Homer’s history than Longinus knew, but we do not taste the delight of his poetry any better than Longinus tasted it. “Handing on the torch of learning” is a trite phrase, but it is literally verified in the true teaching of literature. Each age adds to the advance of science and information, but art is long. Literature and art do not belong to the past. Literally and without figure of speech they are the past living in the present. They are the flaming torch, kindled in the past, never dimming and never to dim.

Write a history of artists; do not write a history of art. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The information of science changes every moment; the appreciation of art once gained is enduring. The _Encyclopedia Britannica_ has rewritten all its science and history; it reprints its appreciations of Sophocles by Campbell and of Demosthenes by Jebb and even of Johnson by Macaulay. Where the cause is the same, the effect is the same, and so the beauty of Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn awakens still the same appreciation.

Of literature as a subject of investigation in university or graduate work there is here no question. The investigator studies the origin, the development, the history of literature. He looks backward; his purpose is to amass information and to codify a science. That is not or should not be the purpose of the teacher in high school and college. He is educating; he wishes to set in operation and perfect the faculties of the class before him, to impress upon every faculty its own proper art, that is, its habitual and excellent way of acting. The school teacher is concerned with the education of acts; the university lecturer with the education of facts.

Take the _Ratio Studiorum_ of the Jesuits, a system embodying the traditions of education and not differing fundamentally from other systems of its time. The _Ratio Studiorum_ had no history of literature or lectures on the evolution of literature. It did not approach literature as a science but as an art. It took the standard authors of Latin and Greek. Cicero was the staple of every class in Latin because for nearly every kind of Latinity, history and poetry excepted, he was a model. Cicero was analyzed, was appreciated, was imitated, that the student might express himself in writing and speaking as clearly, as interestingly, as forcibly as Cicero, that the student might be master of acts of literature, not of facts about literature. That was and is humanism; that is, making a man a man by equipping all his faculties with the art proper to each. The humanities were so called because they embody man. Science is classified nature; literature is nature brought into touch with man’s personality and transmuted into art, man’s only creation.

You cannot get grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. Every other subject in the curriculum produces its kind; so should literature. Mathematics makes mathematicians, chemistry chemists, and physics physicists. Art should produce artists; literature should result in literature, in artistic expression, but it is made to produce historians, biographers, perhaps critics. The history of literature, the evolution of literature should be put out of high school and college and relegated to the university or handed over to the lectures on history, leaving the valuable time of literature for appreciation and expression.

Today we have literature in one class and composition in another and perhaps rhetoric in another. Departments are the offspring of universities and the instruments of science. The rational school of literary expression correlates author, precept and exercise. Information may be imparted piecemeal and from different sources; it is multitudinous and capable of division. Formation is one and united; it is the faculty or power brought to the perfection of self-expression. Art requires a teacher and unifying of means; science may have a score of lecturers as its truths are found in a score of books. Let the teacher of literature therefore take standard literature, make it understood, feel its personality that students may feel it, note and appreciate its beauty that others may take fire or at least get heat from the enthusiasm kindled within him, and then let the teacher see to it that his class express their own selves as the author expressed himself. Let students do for Lincoln what Shakespeare did for Julius Cæsar. If they cannot do a play, perhaps they can do an act; if they cannot create a character, perhaps they can give one characteristic action; if they cannot write a description or tell a story, perhaps they can supply a noun for Lincoln or visualize his deeds in a verb or paint him in an epithet or coin him in a metaphor. And all this, not for an Elizabethan public, but for the students’ own public here and now, looking forward, not backward.

Desperate efforts have been made to galvanize literary courses by lectures on modern novels, current magazines and daily papers. The lamentable fact is that most recent products are not literature; that if there is in them art, it has not been made available for students, as the art of literary classics has been made available by centuries of criticism, and that, finally, the contents of contemporary writings are so easy of access and so inviting to the reader and yet often so ephemeral, that the artistic form is neglected. There is no contemporary history, neither is there contemporary criticism. Literature, like all art, must pass beyond the prejudices and passions of the day to be known and appreciated as art at all. It is for the enlightened teacher of literature to make the students embody their own experience in the finest art molds of the past, not distracting them by the multiplicity of modern literature, but holding up the ideals, like torches, to light the paths before them and, like expert guides, to direct the trembling steps of beginners to new goals.

Literature is not the study of words. Grammar or philology is the study of words. Science dehumanizes everything; it eliminates the personal equation; it is objective, unimpassioned, impersonal, subordinating everything to laws and principles. Literature is the opposite in every respect. It is embodied humanity. Science contains some of man’s operations; literature enshrines all; not truth alone, but good and beauty as well; not simply the clear idea, the accurate statement, the correct conclusion, the consistent reasoning, but also the myriad visions of the imagination, the subtle analogies, the suggestive creations, haunting beauties and idealized good. So literature actuates every power of man whether that power is a constituent part of man’s soul or is a bodily power whose operation by reaction terminates in man’s soul.

As literature is therefore the whole man, so far as humanity can be put in language, the understanding of literature, its appreciation and most of all its creation will make every power of the student operate, if literature is taught as literature. Such results will not come automatically; they come when the teacher by true appreciation creates again before the student the literary masterpiece and when the student strives to rival the masterpiece in the expression of his own experience and of his own dawning humanity. Literature is looking forward when it is making minds think and imaginations imagine and reasons reason and tastes taste and emotions thrill. Teach literature as an art, which it is; not as a science, which it is not.

X

UNIFYING EDUCATION THROUGH LITERATURE

Unity is most useful, if not essential, to a satisfactory course of studies. In the university this unity is effected by the profession which the student has chosen. His field of concentration in art, literature, law, medicine, science, engineering or divinity dictates to him his subjects, and his own earnest choice, together with prescriptions and examinations, insures unity and thoroughness in concentration courses.

Lecturing is the predominant method of the university because professors of higher branches are few and students are comparatively numerous. Lecturing is the weakest and most ineffective of all means of education, and is only saved from complete failure by the serious purposes of university students and much more by the sanction of repetitions and examinations.

In the colleges, however, with the advent of electivism there was no unifying bond to the studies. University methods of studies and lectures prevailed where there were no university conditions. Thoroughgoing electivists, like Dr. Eliot, admitted that the purpose of the college was a general education or culture, but held that any and every study could give such general training. President Lowell, Dr. Eliot’s successor, began to put order into the chaos of extreme electivism. He saw his coaches on the athletic fields build up expert athletes by a rigidly prescribed course of training, and proclaimed the analogy between body and mind, an analogy which would have been all the more cogent had his philosophy been materialistic like that of Dr. Eliot. The prescribed examination in one department at the end of four years is the latest advance of Harvard toward definiteness and unity.

All colleges in America took up electivism to some extent, and even where studies were still prescribed they adopted in their catalogs the language and methods of electivism. No longer were there classes, but everywhere you had courses and departments. One effect of this system has been to make coördinate and of equal importance many subjects which had formerly been subordinate. Colleges whose major subject, or field of concentration, had been language, with other subjects subordinate, now tended to make every subject a major and every field a field of concentration. The departmental system has helped to impair unity of education by disturbing the hierarchy of studies and by removing all subordination. It does not appear to be feasible to concentrate on everything. In some cases colleges seem about to give up the general-training idea and are tending to make their whole course subservient to a profession, obliging every one to take a pre-medical course because the American Medical Association is mighty and medical schools are very exacting.

Formerly high schools and colleges made language or self-expression the field of concentration, and other subjects, like history, mathematics, sciences, were kept subordinate. College and high school had then one purpose, which unified all their studies, as a profession unified lectures in the university—that purpose was the mastery of the art of expression. The French lycées, the German gymnasia, the English public schools, the Jesuit _Ratio Studiorum_, prepared for the university by making students masters of writing and speaking. The writer and speaker could express himself; his intellectual faculties could work properly, and therefore they had received a general training which prepared them for professional work of a special kind. The field of concentration was shown in the names of the classes. The teachers were teachers, not of Latin, Greek, English, but of grammar, of poetry, of oratory, of clear, interesting, forceful expression.

The departmental system destroys this fine unity or renders it very difficult of attainment. The departmental system has been perhaps the chief reason why the classics have been taught as means towards the acquisition of various sciences rather than as exemplifications of literary art. It is as literature and as models of perfect expression that the classics have hitherto survived; as literature and models of expression they were taught in the days preceding the university system of departments. Cicero was a model of letter-writing, of essay-writing, of speech-making. He was chosen with a view to composition; he was graded with a view to composition.

How can a department teacher preserve the former unity of system, where all literature was studied with one dominating purpose, self-expression? If the grade of the class is rhetoric or oratorical expression, will each department teach its own authors, Greek, Latin and English, following the same rhetorical precepts in the same order, or will each department follow its own terminology and its own order, or will, as has happened everywhere, the teaching of rhetoric be relegated to English or to a separate professor, leaving Cicero and Demosthenes to be taught as grammatical documents or historical documents or as legal documents, not as speeches, not as models of oratorical expression? Will the professor of Latin teach Virgil as epic poetry, and the professor of Greek teach Homer as epic poetry, and the professor of English teach Milton as epic poetry, or will the teaching of poetry be avoided by the Greek and Latin departments entirely? Cicero and Demosthenes survive because they are orators; Homer and Virgil live because they are epic poets, but the departmental system either forgets that fact entirely or has three professors teaching the same thing with confusion in the order and in the rules of art. The departmental system, which is a university device adapted for specialization, makes unity of education extremely difficult, and has taken all the interest out of literature by teaching it as everything else but literature!

Besides, as art is the power of doing, and science is chiefly systematized information, the process of education for doing will be different from the process of acquiring information. Too many cooks may spoil the broth because cooking is an art, but too many sign-posts may not always confuse the traveler. It is far easier to divide information among various agents and impart it piecemeal than to apportion the different faculties used in an art to different individuals who will train them to act together harmoniously. Different teachers may very well teach the geography of different countries, but it would not be feasible to let one teacher have the right hand and another the left in teaching the art of piano-playing.

Omitting the effect of personality, which is paramount in art, as the history of all religious movements shows it also to have been in the formation of character and in virtue, one cannot fail to see that departments cannot well coöperate in giving the formation of art. In fact, practically the art of composition has ceased to be the field of concentration in modern high schools and colleges. All literatures, even English, are taught mostly as sciences. The only wholesome reaction in modern education against the predominance of science or systematized information is found in the present vogue for psychological tests. These are professedly tests of power, not of mere information, and in them the power of self-expression through language is preëminent. All the examinations are conditioned by the necessary medium of language, and by far the greater number of tests are and must always be tests in linguistic expression.

Language is the only practical measure of intelligence, and if such tests win favor, they may result in establishing once more the art of expression as the field of concentration or major subject in high schools and colleges which give a general education. Language, when taught as an art, educates the mind, giving it the powers of expression which are the guaranties of the mind’s adequate education. Professors become teachers of an art, not lecturers in a science. Perfect unity is found where the finest models of self-expression in all languages, especially the classical languages, are directed by one teacher to the mastery of the art of expression in one’s own language.

XI

THE INTERESTING TEACHER OF LITERATURE

The nineteenth century was a century of science. Its atmosphere was surcharged with scientific discoveries and scientific theories, and radiated a scientific influence in every direction. Among other effects of that all-pervading spirit we may mention two that entered the classroom and deeply modified the teaching of literature. Science insisted on concrete results and tended to emphasize mechanical methods, enhancing system at the expense of personality.

System was looked upon in some sense as automatic. Such a widespread delusion, which is not yet fully dissipated, was the logical outcome of the mechanical explanation of the universe. The world had evolved along the lines of inflexible laws. Man was part of the machine, and though the mechanism was complicated in his case, yet it was nothing but mechanism after all. If system could run the universe without the help of personality, it would not be hard for it to run the little universe of man. The same reasoning would hold in a classroom. The teacher might be asked to touch the button, but the system would do the rest.

It would not seem to require much argumentation to show the fallacy of such a theory. Do we not all know that nothing in this world is wholly automatic? Motion is a function of personality. Perpetual motion in systems and organizations, that would dispense with personality, is just as absurd as the same proposal in the physical order. Nothing in this world will run of itself without personal coöperation. Somewhere there must be a living, breathing, responsible individual. We may have to travel a long way to find him, but we shall find him, the man behind the motion. It is so with machines; it is much more so with organizations and systems and laws; it is most of all so in education. Latin or German or physics or anything else without a teacher (cf. catalog of correspondence schools) are phrases that belong to the language of advertisement which has omitted from its ethics the chapter on lying. All success, all interest, all enthusiasm are harvests whose sowing is in a human head or human heart. Even the universe calls for the constantly applied force of omnipotence to keep it from disintegrating into nothingness and the watchfulness of Providence to prevent it from wrecking itself. While writers on education have been tracing the causes of the decrease of interest in the classics have they not been overlooking the necessary factor of personality?

The other depressing effect upon education exercised by the scientific atmosphere was the insistence upon concrete results, leading likewise to the elimination of human interest. Science said to every branch of knowledge, “Collect your data, classify your instances, make your deductions, enunciate your laws.” The literary classics were bade to stand and deliver. They had to have data and deductions and laws. Homer and Virgil, Demosthenes and Cicero became the chosen camping-ground of the specialists. The pupils that finished the _Iliad_ with a taste developed, an imagination warmed, a soul uplifted, might be refused a degree. The pupil who had Homer undergo the surgical operations of specialism, who had him pigeon-holed, who had him weighed and counted, was the honor man of the class. He could write an essay on Homeric Æolisms or Homeric ship-building or Homeric word-building. He knew more about Homeric pottery than Homeric poetry. What if his heart never beat faster as he read; what if he was too busy measuring the length of Homeric swords or analyzing the metal of Homeric armor, to drink in the imaginative delight of battle, with Homeric peers, “far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,” he was scientific, he had some concrete results to show for his schooling, and he was the pet child of the century. Assets of the mind could not be weighed or measured; his doctor’s dissertation in his grip could. It contained just twenty-five thousand words, and weighed one pound and a half, and had a superficial area of about a hundred square yards.

The final outcome of the baneful influence of the scientific atmosphere is the almost complete perversion of the good old word, scholar. No one can lay claim now to the title scholarly, unless he is equipped with a formidable array of facts and figures. He must bristle with the fretful quills of half a hundred sciences. In the study of the classics he is so busy with the words of the text that he has not time for their meaning. When he has settled the conflicting claims of innumerable variant readings and all the arguments for the same, he has no leisure left for the old-fashioned practice of trying to appreciate the accepted reading. Scholarship is now a matter of memory, a something that deals with introductions, footnotes, excursuses and critical apparatuses. Plead guilty to an ignorance of all this, and you may be indulgently permitted to call yourself judicious, appreciative, discerning, capable of enjoying a literary masterpiece, but you could not presume to call yourself scholarly. Justin McCarthy, in an article about his old schoolmaster, alludes to the same fact. “I never knew a scholar,” he declares, “so thorough who was less of a pedant, but I ought to say, perhaps, that the general character of his teaching was not what would be called in our days scholarly.”

This steady elimination of the subjective element of education with the corresponding development of the objective side during the years of the nineteenth century, all tended to the extinction of the individual. Another factor also coöperated in achieving this result. The classes in school and college grew more numerous, and the schoolmaster became in turn a teacher, a professor, a lecturer. With each change he drew further away from his hearers. The greater the audience the weaker the personal note, the less individual the expression. The lecturer on a classical author must stray more from the text than the teacher. He is necessarily more general and hence more impersonal. He feels bound to give facts more than impressions. He is committed to the formulating of theories based on a dissection of the text, and shrinks from setting forth the feelings which a masterpiece excites. The lecturer tends to subordinate the author to his lecture, where the teacher’s more humble lot leads him to efface himself in the presence of the author.

This leads us to set forth the proper attitude of the teacher toward the text, and we could not begin the discussion better than by giving a further description of Justin McCarthy’s old schoolmaster.

“I have,” he wrote, in March, 1899, “the most delightful and
tender memories of my dear old schoolmaster in Cork. He was
not, indeed, the first schoolmaster I ever had, but he taught
me all or put me in the way of learning all that I have ever
known, and after this long lapse of time I feel as strongly as
ever how much I owe him. His name was John Goulding, and he
kept a school in the city of Cork, my birthplace.

“To make us understand what we were reading and enjoy it, to
make us wish to read more and understand it better—such was the
object of his whole method. There was very little of what is
called ‘getting by heart’ in his system, unless when he wished
to train memory merely for the sake of training it. When we
were studying some Latin author he told us all about the author
and the scenes described in the pages before us, and he invited
all manner of questions on the subject. He showed us on the
maps where the places were which the author was describing, and
he illustrated the author’s meaning as if he were an artist
illustrating a story.

“I do not know to describe his method of teaching better than
by saying that it was literary rather than scholastic. His
great desire was that a boy should be able to read Greek and
Latin as easily as he read Shakespeare and Addison, and he
regarded grammar as a necessary means to that end, but not
as the end itself. He always took care that historical and
geographical knowledge should work in with and illustrate our
literary studies.

“I can only say for myself that whatever love of books I
may have had I owe in the main to his teaching and to his
influence, and I can say with literal truthfulness that
throughout a busy life in public and in private his influence
and teaching have always been with me and are with me still.”

John Goulding would not be considered in our day a remarkable pedagogist and has not bequeathed his name to a system of education; yet he presents many traits of the true teacher, and these details of his life are pertinent to our question.

The true commentator, whose suggestion we see in the Cork schoolmaster, will not be a philologist, but will use philology; he will not be a grammarian, but he will refuse no point of grammar that will help. He will press every science into service, but he will be the slave of none. He will remember that his supreme object in teaching is not to compose a dictionary of antiquities nor to collect extracts for rhetoric or examples for grammar. His object rather is and should be to bring the pupil to the text, to bring the mind of the author to the mind of the reader. Away from dictionary and grammar, away from footnote and appendix, back to the text, should be the teacher’s cry. The text should be the center upon which every source of information should be focused, not the center from which to radiate to the cheerless circumference of specializations. We do not contend for superficiality, for slipshod grammar, for inaccurate erudition. Thoroughness, care, accuracy, must rule in the classroom. We are simply for liberal education, which opposes early specialization in courses and must equally oppose it in the teaching of literature.

The study of the classics should key up the whole intellectual apparatus. It should sharpen the critical faculties, warm the imagination, cultivate the judgment, develop the taste, ennoble the appreciation, exercise, partially at least, the reasoning faculty, and finally endow the student with perfected powers of expression. To subordinate literature to any one of the swarm of sciences that sprang into life last century is to limit its efficiency and degrade it as a means of general culture.

The teacher, however, must not look for an infallible recipe in this matter. He cannot expect to stir up interest in the pupils by any prescribed formula, by a rigid system of handling the text. A scheme of suggestions may be drawn up, topics for discussion or observation may be arranged. Such devices are helpful, but they should not become stereotyped, because they deaden when they are hard and fast. It is a mark of a crystal to settle into straight lines at fixed angles; it is characteristic of organisms to be yielding and pliable in their outlines, while they retain their life. The meaning is the life of the text, the meaning as it was in the author’s mind, with all the associations that it had for him. Let the meaning be the guide, and the explanation will not be dead. Let the teacher use systems and hints and topics and all other devices as helps to arrive at the sense and meaning, not as inflexible molds into which he must always pour his commentary. A chemist may have weighed and labeled all the constituent elements of a living cell, and he may even succeed in mingling them in such a way as to have all these elements in the very places they are in life, but his mixture will not have the principle of life, that wonderful, unanalyzable bond that unites into one organism, permeates and vivifies the separate atoms and molecules. Because his analysis is complete and perfect, it does not follow that his synthesis will be complete and perfect. Neither may a teacher expect to get the synthesis of a vital, interesting commentary from the detailed formula of the literary laboratory. He must have his finger on the pulse; he must have seized the beating, warm heart; he must have grasped the permeating, vivifying soul of his author, if he would make his commentary living, and there is no other way to the heart blood of an author, except by loving, enthusiastic meditation of his full meaning.

I remember the first time in class that Homer ceased to be for me an example factory for grammar or a shop for Grecian antiquities. We had been translating Homer and parsing Homer; we now began to read him. The change was as easy as it was pleasant. The teacher simply went back behind the dictionary and the grammar, behind the cases and the tenses, to the author’s meaning. He made us see the old priest of Apollo walking along the seashore. He made us realize the fact that he was coming to speak for his daughter. Our attention was called to the completeness and appropriateness of his little speech. In a word, we began to move in the poet’s world. We had used the grammar and dictionary to get there, but when we reached our destination, we alighted from the train. We were bound for the land of Homer, not for that of Goodwin or Liddell & Scott, and the sooner we left our dusty, noisy cars, the better for us. Our professor knew the translation and knew the grammar, but he had left them behind him. He was on higher levels, and he threw away his mountain staff and his guide rope. We were with him there, and we entered into his enthusiasm for the broad view before us. Homer had been for us a venerable mausoleum of well-preserved and dignified, but very dead mummies. His enthusiasm let the life and light into that ancient tomb, and the mummies took off their wraps and lived and moved. From that day of resurrection until the present, Homer has lived for me; from that time I have heard the Homeric heart beat and felt the Homeric pulse throb.

Nor need the teacher who follows these methods have fear that he is going wrong, or that he is neglecting the proper education of his pupils. He is achieving, too, concrete results, an achievement that must not be considered the monopoly of science. Science may not supplant literature in the school-room. It would be a sad day for both if ever it did. As regards observation and induction, it has not been our wish to protest against the use of these methods, but rather against the limiting of their scope. To observe grammar only or archeology or philology and neglect the author’s meaning is as ridiculous as to observe the paint and not the picture, to put a microscope to the marble and not notice the statue. We do not want less development, rather we want more. Develop the powers of observation, but do not think that the only powers are the senses. The world of imagination and the world of thought offer wider fields for observation than the world of external sense. The horizon of the mind is not restricted to the sky line that narrows the vision of the eye.

If you train the powers of observation in the laboratory by asking the pupil to see, to touch, to taste, to smell, train them, too, in the classroom, by asking them to listen to the harmony of a sentence, to trace out the development of a thought, to appreciate the wit, the beauty, the sublimity of a passage. There was observation and training of the powers of observation before the test tube was blown or the dynamo was wound. Science has opened up new and wonderful worlds, not one of which would we see closed; but the lands of literature have not ceased for that reason to be inviting, and the soul, wearied with facts and hampered with figures, gladly escapes into the restful regions of higher and ampler realities.

The crossing of the borders of mere expression, the living and moving in the realms of meaning, the appreciative following of an author’s mind in all journeyings, may not develop grammarians or philologists or ethnologists or archeologists. Perhaps it is not the life-work of classical literature to stock the market with such commodities. The student who travels with a master-mind through the land of thought, now captivated with a view just under his eyes, again catching a glimpse of some far-off scene, all the more glorious in promise, because it lacks definiteness of detail, such a one may turn out to be more of a tourist than a local antiquarian and may suffer some inconveniences in consequence. He will be set right by the local antiquarian on names and dates connected with some obscure town, but in turn he will convey to his learned friend some ideas on the relative importance of localities and on the topography of the whole country. The tourist will not be provincial or municipal or suburban. He will not mistake his native hamlet for the world or make it the sole standard of excellence. The tourist will give you a map; the local antiquarian will draw up a surveyor’s chart, with the number of inches to the grade and the number of feet to the surface. Should not the teacher of literature consider it his duty to encourage the tourist, to introduce the student into the world of meaning, and not to keep him with theodolite and the leveling-rod along the borders of expression, counting words, measuring phrases, or drawing up lifeless charts of tabulated facts? When the student has come home from his travels, he may, if he chooses, lay aside his guide book, and, having seen the world, confine his energies to mastering a portion of it. If, however, he should have brought home from his wanderings nothing more than a love of literature and all that means, will his teacher’s life have been in vain? John Goulding of Cork might be considered not entirely useless, if he gave us no more than Justin McCarthy, who thus describes the results of his master’s work:

“I do not venture to say that Mr. Goulding’s method of teaching
was directly adapted to create a thoroughly scholastic
knowledge of Greek and Latin, and I do not know whether his
pupils would have been likely by means of his instruction alone
to take honors in any university competition, but I know that
it made all of us, who had a taste for such, ready and fluent
readers in Greek and Latin and as familiar with most of the
Greek and Latin poets as with Shakespeare and Keats. It was in
truth literary rather than scholastic instruction.”

XII

EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS