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

Life is full to the brim with emotions. Not war only nor political rallies nor the excited throngs at sports are vibrant with emotion, but there is not a single act of life which has not some emotion, quiet or intense, as its source, its companion and its effect. Man ought to be ruled by cold reason, but he responds to feelings and succumbs to feelings.

Today more than ever in the history of the world is emotionalism rampant. Civilization has made mankind a crowd. We touch elbows with the world. The Egyptian hermit has now “the privacy of a goldfish in a glass bowl.” An individual by himself may indeed deliberate and philosophize, but a crowd feels and acts. As soon as it stops cheering, it begins to disintegrate into thinking individuals, who creep silently back to the hermitage of home. The war, with its drives of all kinds, the elections, the athletic contests, have made us familiar with the nature of a crowd. The mob is a high-pressure crowd, and the feelings which burn in the crowd explode violently in a mob. Civilization has brought mankind into the closeness of a crowd, but not yet to the explosive confusion of a mob.

War taught us too the great value of morale. What is morale? What is that light in the sky, that solid ground under foot, that winged buoyancy of the heart? Morale might be described as organized emotion. A crowd is fickle because it feels instead of reasons. Morale is the counter-force to fickleness. Emotions are awakened, are focused on a given point, are stabilized, and the result is morale. Courage hardens to pluck, duty flames into devotion and bravery is transfigured into heroism.

Life therefore is flooded with emotion, all the way from every action of the individual up to the responsive crowd, yielding to panic, exploding into violence or steadied by morale. What then is education doing for the emotions? Whether education be considered a development of the individual capacities, or an adjustment of man to the community, education should not neglect the emotions. The controlling tendencies, however, of the modern school would seem to ignore or belittle emotions. Modern schools pride themselves on being practical and scientific. They have become more immersed in matter than in man. They are materialistic in the wide sense, or naturalistic, but they are less and less humanistic. Three great fields lie before the spirit of man, the field of truth, the field of beauty and the field of good. No traveler can reach beauty and good except through truth, but education seems to think its work is done if it travels the regions of truth and ignores the regions of beauty and good.

All education formerly could be divided into two stages, the earlier of preparation, the later of application. The individual was taught to speak and write and was equipped with the general information necessary to all. He who was able to speak and write was able to express himself, and self-expression, which argued that man’s powers were working normally, was the satisfactory goal in the first stage of education. After the development of the individual came his application to the study of his life-work in professional schools and universities.

In the former of these two stages, as self-expression was the end, language was the chief and almost exclusive means. Sciences were relegated to the university and informational subjects were left strictly subordinated, and the whole course was predominately humanistic. Modern education has profoundly changed this simple arrangement. The university method of education and electivism and specialization have been advanced to college, to high school and to grade school. Many natural sciences have been systematized and brought into early classes. The university chemistry and physics of fifty years ago are now in the grades. Besides professional courses, pre-medical, pre-law, pre-divinity, pre-engineering, pre-journalism, and in general pre-professional studies are in our schools or at the doors. The trades are not behind the professions. The million trades which concern themselves with the production of raw material or with the manufacture of raw material into finished products or with the distribution of finished products, all these are knocking at the door or looking in the window of our school. Nor is that all. As the professions want pre-professional and the trades pre-trade courses, so the state demands pre-citizen courses in civic and hygienics and military tactics, and the home exacts pre-family courses in eugenics and many domestic sciences. Do not close your curriculum list yet. The profession, the trade, the home, the state are not all, and to leave out religion, which calls for pre-religious courses in private schools, we have the whole field of sport and play in pre-dancing, pre-ball-playing, and at last pre-movies. To make the conquest of the practical complete, it is seriously advocated by a special committee of the N. E. A. that this bewildering multiplicity of sciences, professions, trades, civic, domestic and amusement courses should be begun at the junior high school or seventh grade.

There is the contrast. Life is emotional. The early schools that used to be devoted chiefly to writing and speaking, are now crowded with a multiplicity of fact subjects, and even language and literature, the most humanistic and emotional subjects of our courses, are taught theoretically by university and scientific methods. In the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, which did not differ essentially from other systems, four years of the lower schools were given to correct expression of the truth, one year to the element of interest, or beauty, in expression, and one whole year to the element of force, or good, in expression. These two latter classes were called humanities and rhetoric and correspond to the present freshman and sophomore classes in Jesuit colleges.

The reason why a whole year was given to the elements of interest and force in self-expression is found in the twofold nature of emotions. One set of emotions arises from the apprehension of good or avoidance of evil. Another set arises from the perception of the novel, humorous and beautiful. These latter comprehend the emotions of surprise, wonder, delight, awe, in general, the esthetic emotions. The other emotions, called appetitive, include love and hate, with desire and fear, joy and sadness, pity and anger and many others.

Fortunately for the teacher the teaching of emotions is somewhat simplified by the fact that both kinds of emotions respond, not to abstract truth but to truth in the concrete and concrete truth takes on beauty or good and awakens emotions through the imaginations of teacher and student. Teachers who themselves imagine will awaken emotions and educate emotions by exercising them. Teachers who imagine will make pupils imagine by making them translate all truth from the abstract to the concrete. The perpetual question on the lips of the teacher, “For instance?” will embody truth in the concrete, exercise students in imagination and make truth emotional and abiding.

Interesting and enthusiastic teachers are always training emotions. Emotion is not imparted by instruction; it is kindled by contact. Teachers who have their subjects transferred from dead books to their warm, living imaginations, will be interesting, will be moving. They will excite surprise and wonder by novelty and beauty of presentation. They will make their classes expand with love or shrink in horror at the pictures of good or evil.

After imagination and actual feeling on the part of both student and teacher, the next best means of educating emotions is the stimulating of action, especially in the way of original self-expression through the written and spoken word. One of the happy tendencies of our modern education is the restoring of oral expression to its former high place.

These means just mentioned will be helpful in any subject of the curriculum, but the principal instrument in the schools for training the emotions will be literature. Literature is the embodiment of human emotions, in story, in essay, poem, and speech. The schools must hold on to the teaching of literature. They must make a stand against the imperialism of facts and so-called practical subjects. The schools must never forget that it is at least just as practical to have a heart in life as to have a head. A modern French scholar has said: “Humanities and letters are man himself, to remove them from education, it would be necessary to commence by taking man from man.”

Instruction in trades is a knack, not an education of man. A savage can learn to run an automobile, and there are many today running automobiles, but a savage does not enjoy literature or produce literature. Science has its center outside of man, it is impersonal and unemotional. Literature is human, is personal, it appeals to the heart which must not be starved while the head is stuffed.

But even when the teachers of literature have the works of man in their hands, they must not rob them of all emotions by making their teaching of them historical only, or analytical only or theoretical only, lowering Macbeth to a footnote in Scottish history or to an argument for the theory of the romantic movement or to a dissertation on the psychology of temptation. Literature must be taught as literature, not as history, not as ethics. Literature should be taught as an art, not as a science. The teacher should keep self-expression in view. The teacher will consider the work of literature as the expression of a man. Before the class the masterpiece of literature will grow and crystallize into unity. The students will watch its creation; they will reflect the light from the eyes of an enthusiastic teacher; they will grasp the truth vividly and emotionally; they will be thrilled with the truth that has taken shape in their teacher’s imagination, that has been dramatized before them in suggestive detail, that will teach the students themselves how to think, how to imagine, how to find for the embodied truth a local habitation and a name, how to express themselves in words which fascinate and inflame.

So will the emotions by their exercise be developed and by their expression be controlled. The world of the classroom is a little world and its tiny emotions are as dew-drops to a deluge, but for the young hearts in school the world of the classroom is a gigantic world and its slight emotions are adequate to teach beginners. For a dew drop may be a deluge for a violet and its very food and life.

XIII KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM

This is not the time to drop Latin or Greek openly or under the subterfuge of optional electives. Colleges everywhere are crowded. Buildings are too small for the students; classes are too large for the professors. Now is the time to impose stricter conditions rather than to open wider the doors to colleges, and now is the proper time to restore the classical languages, and especially Greek, if not to favor, because knowledge maketh a bloody entrance, and its weapons are resented, at least to respectable toleration, by teaching them in the right way. Do not empty the baby with the bath, but do draw off the stagnant waters and let the bright showers sparkle and sing and refresh. Don’t throw out Greek, but do teach Greek as literature, as the art of self-expression, as a practical and permanent possession of the student through appreciation and through composition in his own language.

Greek authors used to be put in the students’ hands with a Latin paraphrase. In Jesuit schools the explanation of the author included a translation which might be dictated to the class. This was done because in Latin, and especially in Greek, which was not the language to be used in life, the proper and real work began after the interpretation was known. That proper work was artistic appreciation and artistic reproduction in one’s own language, formerly Latin and now various languages. Rather than cast out Greek, furnish the students with Loeb or Jebb or Murray or Lang, shorten grammatical drill, and then center attention on the appreciation and the reproduction of the finest literary art of all ages, exacting compositions written and spoken in the student’s own language. This is not a revolutionary proposal, the system now prevalent is revolutionary; but it is a proposal to relegate to the university the specialism and scientific handling of literature, and an earnest plea to retain or restore to the classics, especially Greek, their age-old method, proper to the general training of academy and of college and profitable to every student if the art of speaking and writing is of lifelong utility.

The teaching of literature has a handicap which is not found in the teaching of other arts. A painter must know some practical facts about preparing and applying paints, but he need not know the whole chemistry of pigments or the physics of colors. The sculptor must choose the right kind of marble, but he does not take a course in geology. In all arts except literature the contact with the artist’s work is almost immediate. But in literature a language must be mastered, and in mastering that language a thousand sciences have obtruded themselves between the student and the masterpiece. Gustav Foch of Leipsic published some years ago a catalog of dissertations printed in Germany during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The catalog, which was by no means complete, containing only the items he was prepared to furnish, listed 27,000 titles. This formidable number concerned itself entirely with the Greek and Roman writers and embodied special studies on the history, the evolution, the text, the erudition of classical literature. Practically nothing of this immense flood of special dissertations touched on the art of literature.

Now, if all this tremendous erudition were left to the university, where it properly belongs, not much harm would be done; but unhappily the study of literature as a science has almost completely excluded its study as an art. The small school of Dissen, Rehdantz and Blass, who represented in Germany the artistic appreciation of Greek literature, was submerged by the immensely greater number of scientific investigators. The classical poets, with the exception of Homer, fared better than the prose authors; but all literature, instead of being a help to the art of composition, was subordinated to establishing a theory or to exemplifying a generalization.

France resisted almost entirely this scientific obsession of literature. England held out long. In both of these nations composition in the classical languages was a fixed feature of the schools. Victorian literature is steeped in the classics, especially of Greece; the golden age of England’s eloquence, the age of Chatham, Fox and Burke, preceded the scientific era of classicism and was the product of artistic appreciation and of composition.

What of America? The earlier schools followed French and English traditions and taught the classics with literary appreciation and with fruitful results for the literature of America. Then later America sent its professors to Germany; specialism and the departmental system separated literature entirely from the classics; composition ceased except as a means of learning grammar, thus establishing a complete reversal of the original practice, where grammar was a means to composition.

It would be untrue to say that all the erudition, discovered and systematized by numerous sciences and centering upon the classics, was useless or unprofitable. Even the immense library which the Wolfian theory of Homeric origins brought into existence has not been entirely in vain. Germany of the nineteenth century was the Alexandria of the modern world, and as Alexandrian criticism was the forerunner of the best in Latin literature, perhaps the immense activity of scientific investigators may have an artistic outcome. A selection of what is good and true, and a clear, concise presentation of well-established facts, such as Père Laurand gives in his excellent series, Manuels des Etudes Grecques et Latines (Picard, Paris), will help the study of the classics. Erudition should take now its proper place of subordination. The classics should resume the functions which history, evolution, origins and other scientific approaches have taken away; the classics should once more be studied primarily as works of art. The medium and materials do not dominate other arts; they should not dominate literature. Self-expression is the goal of all art; it should be the goal of literature.

Have the teachers of the classics lost faith? Is artistic appreciation an idle thing or is it a thing of beauty, a joy forever? The experimental sciences are always changing in facts and theories. The chemistry of a century ago is absurd; the chemistry of twenty-five years ago is antiquated; the chemistry of today will be old tomorrow. As Remsen long ago saw and insisted on, what is valuable in the teaching of chemistry are the processes, not the theories, which will likely change tomorrow. Chemistry, as a science, is a bit of classified information always modified by research. Art and artistic appreciation is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Give a man appreciation of literature; let him taste the beauty of Homer and of Sophocles and of Demosthenes, and you have given him, not a catalog of facts which must always be rectified, not a theory which must change with the facts, but a precious treasure in the mind which will always remain. In teaching chemistry the processes are more important than the temporary information; in the teaching of literature the processes are at least equally valuable, and besides last through life in abiding taste and in perfected self-expression.

Formerly reproduction was the aim of the teacher of the classics. “Reproduction is the soul of the explanation or prelection,” is the way early Jesuit pedagogy put it, and every student of philosophy knows what the soul or formal cause contributes to the effect. How many in explaining classical literature today guide themselves throughout by the principle that their students are to reproduce artistically the masterpiece which they explain? No doubt professors insist upon the formation of clear ideas and further demand explicit judgments in the way of propositions. Most too require that the links of reasoning be sharply and definitely stated. Interpretation, in a word, is well done. The intellectual element of the masterpiece is handled satisfactorily. But what of the artistic form? Does the literature take shape in the student’s imagination? Is the picture realized in the teacher’s imagination and then by suggestion, through the sparkling eye and sympathetic voice and interpreting gesture, by vivid, though not histrionic, dramatization, is the author’s message staged in the student’s imagination? Scientific analysis, especially where a text becomes a tag to some learned generalization, often prevents imaginative realization and thus precludes artistic appreciation of literature.

The teaching of the classics has been and is now justified by the general training they impart, but it is chiefly when taught as literature that they impart that general training. If the classics are subordinated to the university lecturer’s specialty, then the classics are imparting little general training and have hardly more right in the classroom, except for indirect results which may accrue from contact with art, than have special courses in conchology or entomology. Let the teacher look upon the classics as art to be reproduced after being appreciated, and a general training will be the outcome. Composition should be made the aim of literature.

Idioms of languages, and their vocabulary and their structure differ, but thought and imagination may be the same. Set all the languages of the world before a moving-picture, and each language will tell the common story on the screen to its children in its own way of speaking. So the student of any language may learn from Homer how to select details and group them into artistic wholes, how to carry on the narrative through significant and choice events, how to dwell on the important and touch lightly on the insignificant, how to relieve a story and intensify a part of it by appropriate comparisons. As the student learns how to tell a story, so too may he master the art of describing a scene, of creating a character, of making a speech. He will be taught the way to focus an idea and give it discriminating expression by the right word, the way to embody good or evil in concrete and picturesque words and the way to be proficient in all the elements and processes of composition. The Greek Homer made the Latin Æneid, the Greek Theocritus made the Latin Eclogue and, if Stedman is right, also the Tennysonian Idyll. The literary art of Greek and Latin has given and will give artistic form to the student’s vernacular.

The classics will give a general training if they are made to do so. Literature will not impart a general training automatically. Art is a habit arising from a repetition of acts. The art of thinking is mastered by thinking, and the art of imagining by imagining, and that thinking and imagining will be done well if done under the guidance of masters. Has the literary art of Greece, which created Latin literature and directly and indirectly shaped the literature of all civilization, done its full work? Who can believe it? Every generation since Homer has been influenced by the art of Homer in translation and imitation, and no generations more so than those of Cowper and Morris and Lang in England and of Bryant and Palmer in America. The time may come when literary taste and literary art will be as well studied and demonstrated in modern languages as in those of Latin and Greek; the time may come when modern classics may be as well adapted for education as the classics of Greek and Rome which have been in the classroom for century upon century, but that time does not appear to be tomorrow or the day after. If the art of self-expression is the best test of education, if the art of self-expression is the most practical thing in life and the most permanent treasure that can be gained in school, then Greek literature, the finest masterpiece of self-expression, should remain, and Greek literature should be taught, as for centuries it was taught, with interpretation and translation furnished to the student, leaving the time of training to be devoted not to special sciences proper to the university, but to the general training in appreciation and expression, proper to academy and college.

XIV THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD

This title is not an advertisement for a patent medicine; it is the brief statement of an important historical fact. “Every schoolboy knows” that the revival of learning in Italy came from the vitalizing touch of Greek. Out of that renaissance, which the Jesuits took over and embodied in their system of teaching, grew modern scholarship in England through Linacre, Lilly, Colet and More, the forerunners of the Elizabethans. It was the beginning of modern scholarship in Germany, through Erasmus, the friend of these Englishmen, and through Melanchthon, whose name, like that of Erasmus, marks the power of Greek: out of that renaissance sprang the rejuvenated civilization of our day. Every schoolboy knows that Greek brought the modern world to life, but is it as well known or remembered that Greek has always been vivifying everything it touched?

The civilization of Rome in every part felt the influence of Greece. Rome conquered the world by force of arms, but itself was humanized and then humanized the world through Greece. Every modern language today feels the force of Isocrates and Demosthenes through Cicero, and of Alcæus and Sappho through Horace, and of Greek tragedy through Seneca and of Homer through Virgil. When later the barbarians of the north severed Rome from Greece and the Roman Empire and its civilization lay dead, who brought the world to life again? “When the accurate knowledge of Latin was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in Ireland.”[2] It was the Irish monks who freshened into flame the blackening embers of European civilization and began its restoration. The revival was brought about through the schools of Bobbio and St. Gall, mostly indeed as the scattered books of their libraries show, by means of Latin literature but always with the help of Greek, as the same libraries testify. That was an earlier renaissance in Italy and Switzerland. And who was the leading figure in the revival in Spain about the same time? It was the Greek scholars, Isidore of Seville and, a little earlier, Hosius of Cordova, and, a little later, John of Gerona. Then France began to grope out of barbarism under the leadership of Charlemagne, resuming close relations with Greece and importing the Irish monks, Clement and Dungal, and the English monk, Alcuin. But it was under Charlemagne’s successor, Charles the Bald, that this new renaissance took on a fresh energy which did not spend itself before the decline of scholasticism. John Scotus, John the Irishman, who styled himself in his translation of Dionysius from the Greek by the title of Erin-born, for a quarter of a century kept France intellectually alive, and did it chiefly by his Greek. John, the Erin-born, was the forerunner of scholastic philosophy, which caught the vital force of Greek through another channel also. When Spain was conquered by barbarians and lost its civilization, where did its Arabian conquerors go for the seeds of the new life? The Arabs went to Greece, gave Aristotle in translation to Europe, and ushered in the golden age of medieval philosophy. Rightly does Traini (1345), on an altar-piece in Pisa, picture St. Thomas Aquinas receiving the light of knowledge from Christ through the Greek New Testament and from Aristotle on his right and from Plato on his left. As Aquinas combined patristic and scholastic theology, he merged in his works the twofold Greek influences of Plato and Aristotle, who were the human aids in each of these theologies.

Pass over several centuries to the time when the Italian renaissance had grown senile and when scholarship left Spain, Italy and, to a large extent, France, and found its home in the north. These nations lost touch with Greek and their scholarship died down, while life moved northward in the wake of Greek. When F. A. Wolf went to Halle about the beginning of the nineteenth century, he represented the reaction against the realism of that day, and “his conflict with the school of useful knowledge brought into clear relief his ideal of a culture founded on Greek traditions.”[3] Time has shown that Wolf’s theories of Homeric authorship are all wrong, but the stimulus he gave to scholarship lasted all through the nineteenth century, and to no other single influence more than to Wolf may Germany ascribe its undoubted supremacy in classical learning during the last century. His inspiration came from the Greek, and in his vitalizing of Germany he was associated with others who had felt the same inspiration and were already beginning the influence that still in a measure persists: Heyne in the classics, Lessing in criticism and Winckelmann in art.

England’s partial reawakening under Queen Anne saw Bentley, the Greek scholar, and his contemporary, Pope, translator of the Iliad and Odyssey, and let scholars say what they will about Pope’s translation, they cannot impugn the fine criticism of his introductions or the lasting influence for good of his versions. Passing over the prime of English eloquence, whose living roots, as Goodrich has shown, are in Greek literature, we come to the fresh memories of our own time and to the Victorian era. Again it is Greek which vitalizes every branch of literature, philosophy and art with new and unexpected truth and life. Without Greek the Victorian revival would not have come about. In poetry recall Keats, who awoke to life through the reflected glory of Homer; recall Cowper, translator of Homer, and Byron, who died for Greece, and Moore, who translated Anacreon, and Landor and Arnold and Tennyson and Browning, all of whom took substance and form and fire from Greek sources. In essay-writing you have Brougham, eloquent advocate of Greek oratory; De Quincey, who could, as his tutor said, at the age of thirteen harangue a Greek crowd; Macaulay, who, even in manhood, weeps over his Homer on the streets of London. In art there are Ruskin and Morris and Pater, who are saturated with Greek thought. Think of statesmanship and you will recall Lord Derby and Gladstone, political rivals, at one in their love of Homer; think of criticism, and Lang, Saintsbury, Blackie, Butcher and Jebb will say that through Greek they have dominated modern criticism; think of history, and the names of Rawlinson and Grote and Hallam, Grecians, will come forward in your mind. History! Why, you will remember that all ancient history has recently been rewritten with the spade, and it was Schliemann under the spell of Homer who turned the first sod.

Go over the great names in literature and art, in philosophy, theology and scripture, in the sciences of history, mathematics, law, government, and you will find Greek giving life and vigor. Even in the newer sciences founded on observation and experience, which have come into being within a century, whenever an observer gets beyond the elementary stage of research and classification, he will resort to Greece for principles and intellectual categories just as he borrows the language of Greece with which to name his discoveries. History shows that every people and every system of education and every house of learning, when it gives up Greek, is headed towards inferiority and decay, but when it turns with fresh endeavor toward Greek it reaches forth to life and to light. Nor is all this surprising or strained. Our civilization was born and grew for centuries in Greece. Our Christianity was early translated into the language of Greece and for centuries spoke and thought chiefly in that tongue. So then in our minds and souls our youth will ever have been Greek, and from Greek must ever come, as it has come in the past, the new blood that will flush with dynamic energy the anemic arteries of cosmos, the world, and of the microcosm, man.

XV TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM

The story of Phidias and his pupil, Alcamenes has often been told. They competed for a prize in sculpture. The statue of Alcamenes was about to be chosen because of its exquisite finish when Phidias objected to any decision until the statues should be put in the high position they were designed to occupy. At once, the opinions of the judges were reversed, for the apparently rough lines of Phidias’s creation stood out in sublime majesty, while the polish of Alcamenes’s was lost when the statues were raised aloft. The story illustrates a splendid rule of art which has often been forgotten in the study of Homer. The epics of Homer were not made for the test-tube and the microscope. They were not made even for readers; they were composed for listeners. Put them on their proper pedestals and the minutiæ revealed by the grammarian’s microscope will be lost in the grand sweep of the story. You would as soon halt Shakespeare’s Macbeth because of the anachronisms, or condemn Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” because of modern masonry in the walls or carpentry in the table, as apply the philological and archeological tests of the higher critics to Homer.

Apply the tests of art to Homer and judge him by those. Take the matter of the contradictions which critics have talked so much about. In many cases, especially where mythology was concerned, the material the poet had to handle bristled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Long ago Aristotle laid down the sensible rule for drama, and it is equally true for epic poetry, that the poet is not responsible for the improbabilities in his materials. The sculptor may have flaws in his block of marble; the painter may have defects in his lead or oil, or pigments; and the epic poet found contradictions in the fairy stories of mankind which he wove into the story he sang. That one consideration will sweep away instantly heaps of higher criticism.

Again, the artist is more taken up with the end than he is with the means. In the fervor of his composition he wreaks himself upon expression, he burns to embody his ideal and, engrossed in that, he is likely to be less observant of the material of his art. The achieving of the effect is more to him than mathematical accuracy in the use of the instruments by which he achieves the effect. He makes his hero win his battle; he may unhappily forget some of the tactics or even the geography of the battlefield. His object is not to teach the art of warfare or furnish the topography of the country, but to tell an interesting story in an interesting way. The Iliad has a wall that vexes many critics. It was built in the tenth year of the war, which was no time to build a wall, and was put up simply because Achilles left the field. Besides, according to these critics the wall appears and disappears strangely. So the conclusion is: Homer did not build the wall, but some other poet came along and projected his masonry into the epic. In answer it has been shown that the wall behaves very well, but, whether it does or not, it matters little. The poet is not a surveyor or a street commissioner. He wished to make his story interesting, to make the character of Achilles prominent, to bring some agreeable variety into what might prove a monotonous catalog of similar battles. Those are reasons enough for a poet to build a Chinese wall or reduce it to dust when he does not want it, or conveniently overlook it in the heat of an imaginary charge.

A story-teller is more concerned to please his hearers than to guard against inconsistencies which they would never detect as listeners, and which even close readers did not detect for about thirty centuries. A work of art is not to be judged as a mass of machinery is, nor is a poem to be scrutinized with dictionary and grammar as you would a schoolboy’s exercise. This is the statue of Phidias over again. A stage scene will differ somewhat from a miniature, and an epic takes liberties with walls and rivers and even mountains and oceans, liberties which would not be tolerated in a quatrain. These principles are as obvious as daylight, but apostles of the obvious are needed in abundance in the harvest fields of higher criticism.

What is needed for Homer is a study of his art in a broad but not shallow way, comprehensive and fundamental like Aristotle’s brief discussion. For the wonderfully analytical mind of Aristotle Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were models of unity, because he looked upon them as works of art, not scrap-heaps of philology and archeology. Put the poems of Homer on the pedestals for which he made them, for listeners who had to be entertained and clamored for variety. “It is a trait of Homer,” says a writer, “constantly to shift the scene. The motive may be weak, but the eye of the poet was not on the motive, but on the scene; so he not only shifts the scene but varies the description of the events.” The poet’s eye, it might be added, is also like the orator’s, fixed steadily on his audience, and the audience must be relieved even if masonry or geography suffer.

The paramount principles of variety and growth of interest which govern every good story hold sway in Homer. Take a staple action of the Iliad, the battles. Homer’s audience wanted fighting, yet jaded listeners and the artistic poet knew there must be in the fighting variety and growth of interest. Even in the matter of killing men, which seems to us unimportant but which would not be to an audience of fighters, Homer has shown a wonderful variety. A German professor has diagnosed the Homeric surgery with all the thoroughness of his class. The conclusions may be found in Seymour’s Life in the Homeric Age. The number and variety of the wounds, the weapons used, the percentages of fatalities, are all given in full detail. “Hardly could the poet have covered more completely the possibilities of wounds for the human body if he had proceeded systematically and mechanically.” Some will have it that Homer was a surgeon and an army doctor. Certainly the history of anatomy has its first chapter in the Iliad.

But to pass over the variety displayed in the wounds and other smaller points, consider the actual fighting. For the maneuvers we may refer to two interesting chapters in Lang’s World of Homer, where the variety and consistency of Homeric warfare are well described and defended against the dissectionists. The point, however, we are working toward is the variety shown in even the external circumstances of the warfare. A closer study than we can afford to give would reveal more variety, but we may mention the plain, the wall, the river, the night as in the tenth book, the mist. These are the various circumstances which the poet introduces into his battles, relieving the monotony and sustaining the interest. There is no falling off. The different heroes, too, succeed one another; the victory alternates from one side to the other; the battle on earth has its echo among the gods. The interest rises. Patroclos enters the fight, and then his fallen body becomes the center of the struggle, as the wall and the ships had been before. Something, too, is left for Achilles. Ferocious as may have been the fighting before, it becomes a veritable shambles when Achilles enters the fray. Never were such frightful wounds, never such rivers of blood as may be witnessed in Book XX “when the black earth ran blood,” “when beneath the great-hearted Achilles his whole-hooved horses trampled corpses and shields together; and with blood all the axle-tree below was sprinkled and the rims that ran around the car, for blood-drops from the horses’ hooves splashed them and blood-drops from the tires of the wheels. But the son of Peleus pressed on to win his glory, flecking with gore his irresistible hands.”

Then follows the battle in the river, and finally the battle of the gods themselves, and after the necessary relief and lull and reawakening of interest comes the last battle of all and the climax of the poem in the conflict of Achilles and Hector.

A study of the art of Homer along its great lines will give us the true principles upon which to judge him. Such a study will put him in the right perspective. The statue of Phidias will mount on high where its artist wished to have it enshrined. The Iliad and Odyssey were meant to cross the bronze threshold of some great palace, “where there was a gleam as it were of sun or moon through the high roofed hall of a great-hearted King. Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round then was a frieze of blue and within were seats arrayed against the wall this way and that.” Then “after the men had put from them the desire of meat and drink,” they called upon the minstrel. “For minstrels from all men on earth get their meed of honor and worship; inasmuch as the muse teacheth them the paths of song and loveth the tribe of minstrels.” “And the minstrel being stirred by the god began and showed forth his minstrelsy and took up the tale where it tells how the Argives sailed away.” That was the setting of the Homeric Epic, and thus speaks one whose “heart had melted at the song and whose tears wet his cheeks beneath his eyelids.” “Verily it is a good thing to list to a minstrel, like to the gods in voice. Nay, as for me, I say there is no more gracious or perfect delight than when a whole people makes merry, and the men sit orderly at feasts in the halls and listen to the singer and the tables by them are laden with bread and flesh, and pours it into cups. This fashion seems to me the fairest thing in the world.”

There is the place that Homer chose for his matchless poems, and there they should be judged. The hearts that melt with song are not searching for digammas or Æolic forms. They want the story, the long voyages and the strange adventures, the swaying lines of battle and the prowess of heroes. They look for and recognize the different characters which must be as varied and as clearly marked as in the life around them. They must not be surfeited with too much of anything. Voyages and battles must vary and grow in intensity and be crossed with pictures of nature, brief but thrilling and immensely relieving,—the lion, the wheat field, the tossing ocean and the steady downfall of an unending snow storm. With these and the plot entangling and disentangling, the listeners to Homeric song and story will not look for that polished smoothness and frigid exactness, the absence of which vexes the minds of modern Germany. Phidias’ statue occupies its proper pedestal, and the true judges award to Phidias his well-deserved prize.

XVI THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE

Their elders are too busy these days devising tests for the children. Is it not time for the children to retort on their testers? “Having pried and prodded into us to see if we measure up to you, dear elders, let us now see,” the children may well say, “whether you measure up to us.” A great philosopher wished to make man the measure of everything. We have a truer, a divine philosophy, a philosophy all the more persuasive, and that philosophy makes the child the measure and test of man’s worth and the arbiter of his eternal destiny. “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God, as a child, shall not enter it.” The millstone mooring the scandalizer in the ooze of ocean’s darkest depths and the angels who see the face of their little one’s Father, these are the extreme sanctions which guarantee the accuracy of the child-test for the measurement of man.

The child-test has often been applied to man’s morals. Onan and Sanger, Sparta and China, Calvin’s unchristian infant damnation and the Christless infant sanctification of Pelagius, Malthus with his “Decrease and subtract” and Moses with his “Increase and multiply,” all, from individuals to nations, are ample evidence that the child is set for the ruin and resurrection of many in Israel. The child-test is surely potent in rating the world’s moral morons and moral geniuses.

Can the child-test be applied to man’s art and literature? Recall the words of Job, “Who shut up the sea with doors, when I made a cloud the garment thereof and wrapt it in a mist in swaddling bands?” That view of the sea in the swaddling bands of infancy is a proof of an imagination looking at the universe with the eyes of the Creator. The child-test is a measure of the sublimity of Hebrew literature. The revelation of Genesis gave the literature of the Bible an outlook never reached by other literatures. As the promise of the Messiah kept a hallowing guard over the cradles of Israel, so the vision of the Creator blotted out from the concepts of the Hebrew imagination the crude and monstrous nativities which make all pagan mythologies hybrid and miscegenetic.

Homer has fewer than others have of these nightmares, but it is not in them nor in the tinsel sublimity of his divine machinery that Homer has touched a wider circle of readers than any of his epic brethren. Rather it is in his unaffected and transparent portrayal of the human nature we all understand that Homer has set the heart of the world throbbing faster. Not the celibate Virgil, nor the Puritanic Milton, dissolver of matrimony, nor yet Dante, idealizer of the maiden Beatrice, gave us childhood and motherhood as Homer has done. Homer is no sentimentalist, but he has wider sympathies with mother and child than any author on the rolls of literature. The mother cow, lowing over its first-born; the mother dog, growling in defense of its litter; the mother lion, all its brow wrinkled with the greatest frown ever sketched; the mother bird, starving and dying for its young, yes, even the mother wasp, solicitous for its menaced brood (note that, S. P. C. A.!) these are evidences of Homer’s tenderness. Achilles likens his friend Patroclus to a little maid fondly catching at her mother’s dress and getting in her way with persistent tearful pleading till the mother takes her up. In the Iliad, Helen’s sorrow for her abandoned Hermione is a pleasing element in her repentance. Odysseus proudly styles himself the father of Telemachus; the mother of Odysseus dies for longing of him, and his father, Laertes, in the most exquisite of the many recognition scenes of the Odyssey, passes from view in that story, while his long-absent son tells him of the fruit trees, “which,” says Odysseus, “thou once gavest me for mine own, and I was begging of thee this and that, being but a child and following thee through the garden.” We have natural sketches of the babyhood of his two heroes, Achilles and Odysseus.

Yet, more than all these pictures, stands out in the world’s imagination Hector’s boy, whose future fate Andromache, after Hector’s death, details with a mother’s despairing vividness, whose childish terror at his father’s helmet, while Andromache smiles through her tears, has brought home to unnumbered thousands the grim specter of war. That scene has etched itself so deeply into the heart of mankind that it has almost ruined Homer’s poem, alienating universal sympathy from Achilles to Hector.

After Homer, the child motif in literature is less in evidence. Drama, of its nature, has little place for the child except to put a keener poignancy in tragedy. So Sophocles used the children of Œdipus. So in his time did Shakespeare with the princes of Richard III, with Marcellus in Coriolanus, with Macduff’s sprightly lad, and with others. Theocritus has a child to furnish an aside for the gossipy Syracusan dames. Anacreon introduces the counterfeit of childhood in the Cupids, whose sophisticated conventionality checked invention in Elizabethan lyrics as it did in art from Pompeii to Rubens and later. Cupids are symbols, children of the brain, not of the heart, and figure in song and painting as signs. They have a message for the mind; they do not touch the feelings, while on the other hand, they free the artist from seeking in life the expressive significance that Homer gave the child.

Literature had to wait long for the naturalness of Homer to reappear. Virgil has a little of it in Ascanius, another Cupid, and it is significant that Virgil’s one outstanding natural touch is found in the famous Messianic eclogue: Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem. As for other Latins, whether it be bachelorship or the erotic preoccupation of the lyricists, or the supreme power of the father in Roman customs and law, Latin literature does not mirror for us prominently the child and mother nor reflect their natural attractiveness as found in Homer. Well, even Greece seems to have lost the art, and a new inspiration was needed. That inspiration came with the Divine Child of Bethlehem.

XVII THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE

The influence of the Christ-Child on painting was tremendous and lasting. A history of Christian art could be written around the Madonna, and the subject has attracted the notice of many writers, indexed in art libraries. Alice Meynell has treated the subject attractively and with her studious insight in the Children of the Old Masters. In the Catacombs, Christian art felt and portrayed the Divine Child and His Mother. Byzantine ornamentation and mosaics gave the Child a rigid majesty which veiled His winsomeness, but the master painters came closer to childhood and brought Madonnas from the walls of crypts and of cathedrals to the devotional shrine and the chapel, making the Child less architectural and more natural.

In literature the Christ-Child had equal influence until Puritanism tried to remove Christmas from the calendar. Drama originated in the liturgy of Easter and of Christmas, and although Holy Week was more elaborate and in substance more dramatic, Christmas to Twelfth Night, offering more incentive to play and song and more holidays, exercised a larger influence on the stage. In lyric poetry at the beginning of the sixth century we have already the familiar, intimate and loving contact with the Christ-Child, which finds its latest expression in Thompson and Tabb. St. Ita, the Irish saint (480-570), is of their faith and tenderness in the song of “Isucan,” “Little Jesus,” given in Sigerson’s Bards of the Gael and Gall:

The bambino shines through medieval song in Adam of St. Victor and in other writers of hymns. The Catholic writers of the Renaissance celebrate the same theme in the revived meters of classicism. Sarbievius, the Jesuit lyricist of Poland, is full of the Christ-Child, and in his well-known lines “To the Violet” he calls upon that “dawn of spring” to crown his “Little Lad” with its flowers in place of the gold and gems and purple which weighted the Infant. Sarbievius was doing what the painters did, discarding the Byzantine ornament and convention.

Test Puritanism with the child and it fails; test it with the Christ-Child, and you will get the ponderous “Hymn to the Nativity” of Milton, an imperialistic ode which must have gladdened Cromwell. No familiarity there, no mirthfulness, no Jesukin with violets for crown jewels, not even Byzantine immobility. Milton does not even doff the helmet of war, as Hector did; no, he sees

A Prince of Peace indeed with a mailed fist! Merry medieval England would not recognize Jesukin in Miltonic panoply. Fortunately for art it had attained excellence before the Puritanic blight fell upon the world, but for literature in the English language we must wait until the nineteenth century to see the child come to its own. Wordsworth attempted a revival of Plato’s philosophy and found immortality, if not familiarity, in childhood when he wrote his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth took a more fruitful lesson from the Greeks when he went back to nature in other poems to study childhood. Even before him, Blake, painter and poet, influenced no doubt by the traditions of painting, began to see the heart in childhood. The interminable moralizing stories of Ann and Jane Taylor and of Elizabeth Turner, which date from this time, are heavy with grown up condescension. E. V. Lucas would have done better to republish in his Book of Verses for Children the graceful and humorous lessons of the Greek fables than perpetuate Taylor and Turner.

After Wordsworth we see the child motif gradually taking a larger place in the literature of England and America. Despite Francis Thompson’s vigorous effort in his famous essay, he has not succeeded in making Shelley pass the child-test. Shelley had no faith, no humility, no humor, no real tenderness, and even granting him the dreaming power of childhood, which in Thompson’s essay is largely a reflection of Thompson, Shelley had not the heard of a child to enter into the Kingdom. Walter Scott’s friendship for Marjorie Fleming shows that the great poet and novelist had the necessary qualifications, but no performance comes now to mind except a lullaby and the glorification of merry England at Christmas. Swinburne glimpses gleams of a baby’s pink toes and lists to low laughter of mouths of gold. The child is picturesque for him. Moore, Byron, Browning, for different reasons, fail in the child-test. Tennyson touched the surface, although in the “Princess” he came close to the mystery. Patmore, uxorious and paternal, came closer and even touched the depths of the child in “Toys.” Longfellow and Whittier were of the same school.

It was Stevenson, in a Child’s Garden of Verses who brought back into poetry, as Lewis Carroll did in prose and verse, the natural child that Homer saw about him, and that painting discerned in the Babe of Bethlehem. Humor, imagination, sympathy, these were the factors which discovered the heart of childhood for our modern world. Barry and Belloc in England, Eugene Field and Riley in America, Earls and “Tom” Daly and many others have furthered the discoveries. There is no hope for the child in the “New Poetry” which takes itself too seriously. Who would hold up the world if the “new poets” started in to mind the baby?

One more element was needed, and sorely needed, to enter fully into the mystery of the child. That element is faith. Evolution looked on the child as an epitome of its theory; pedagogy plotted out, weighed and measured the child and drew up formidable statistics; eugenics faced the child as though it were a dire microbe, source of poverty, ignorance, bootlegging, war, pestilence and famines. The modern child had and still has before it a dismal prospect. It is the camping ground of the specialist, the experimental laboratory of the theorist, and the peculiarly delectable victim of physical and moral vivisectionists. Faith must save the child, faith in the Babe of Bethlehem. Tabb and Thompson had that faith. They are the counterpart in literature of a St. Anthony or a St. Stanislaus in life and art. They play with the Child Jesus. Isucan has come into His own again. Tabb sings in “Out of Bounds”:

And Francis Thompson with medieval intimacy asks in “Ex Ore Infantium”:

“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven,” said Thompson. He will surely be at home there, and Tabb and many another will be with him.

The first seven chapters of this work were given in substance as lectures at the Champlain Assembly, Cliff Haven, N. Y.

Chapter XII, Educating the Emotions, is a summary of an address given to the Public School Teachers of Rhode Island.

Other chapters have appeared in America, Catholic World, Educational Review of Washington, School Interests, Classical Weekly, Magnificat and are reproduced through the courtesy of the editors.