THE STUDY AND INTERPRETATION OF LITERATURE.

The study of literature has of late years become somewhat sane and rational in its aim and purpose. There was a time, and that not very long ago, when literature was forced to yield up its spirit in the class-room to mere analysis or a talk about grammar, philology, rhetoric and sundry other irrelevant subjects.

To-day, however, in the best schools and colleges, this vicious method, which has for years worked destruction to true literary culture, has pretty well died out; nor is a through ticket by flying express down the centuries from Chaucer to Tennyson any longer regarded as satisfactory evidence that the privileged passenger knows much of the glory which nestles on the way.

How any person can hope to become a literary scholar in the highest and best sense of the word without assimilating the INFORMING life of literature has always seemed to us a problem in dire need of solution. We can well understand how one may possess himself of the literature of knowledge without such assimilation, but how he can become possessed of the literature of power without responding to the inner life of an art product, is to us a question incomprehensible.

Nor has the old spirit, we fear, been fully and wholly exorcised, as yet, from the class and lecture room. There are still to be found those who believe that the analytical exegesis of literature should be the main purpose of the teacher—that to elucidate the intellectual thought which articulates a poem, precipitating it from a concrete creation into a barren abstraction—this and this alone should be the aim and end of all literary study in the school or lecture room.

The fault with such persons is, that they do not fully understand and appreciate the true meaning and import of literature, mistaking its lesser coefficient for its chief and primary one. No definition of literature can be at all adequate which does not take into consideration the spiritual element as a factor. The late Brother Azarias, whose study of literature was most profound, clear and sympathetic, gives us a definition in the very opening chapter of his charming little volume, “A Philosophy of Literature,” which is entirely satisfactory. He regards literature as the verbal expression of man’s affections, as acted upon in his relations with the material world, society and his Creator. Literature may therefore be defined as the expression in letters of the spiritual co-operating with the intellectual man, the former being the dominant co-efficient.

Knowing, then, that the spiritual element constitutes the INFORMING life of a poem, how can teachers fritter their time away with brilliant analytics which do little or nothing for true literary culture? Better, far better, that the students under their charge be turned loose in some library—there to browse at will, free to follow their literary tastes and inclinations.

We have long considered that examinations for certificates and degrees are for the most part a detriment to literary studies—that they dull the finer faculties of appreciation and magnify the importance of mere acquisition. Assuredly, when a young man finds that in order to reach his diploma or degree he must be able to discuss the Elizabethan English as found in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “As You Like It,” or trace the gerundial infinitive through Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” he will pay little heed to either the spirit of Shakespeare or Chaucer as embodied in their works.

In our great eagerness to fill our heads with facts, without any co-ordination, we lose sight amid the stress and strain of our educational work of the ONE GREAT FACT: That if we would be wisely educated, we must seek it on the basis of a maximum of education with a minimum of acquirement. It is impossible to play fast and loose with the spirit of literature and not suffer for our insincerity. Literature is a jealous mistress and will brook no rival. Those who woo her must come with clean hearts and minds, setting aside all thought of mercenary returns, for, as Mrs. Browning says:

“We get no good

In being ungenerous, even to a book,

And calculating profits—so much help

By so much reading. It is rather when

We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge

Soul-forward, headlong into a book’s profound

Impassion’d for its beauty and salt of truth—

’Tis then we get the right good from a book.”

Another fault which characterizes the literary studies of to-day is, that we grasp at too much, and not a little that we fain would compass is, as far as literary training and culture are concerned, entirely unimportant. A few great literary personages—epochal men—who have handed the intellectual torch down the centuries—these are worthy of a devoted study. We think it is Ruskin who says that he who knows the history of Rome, Venice, Florence, Paris and London has a full knowledge of medieval and modern civilization. Twenty authors are not many, still they largely cover the great masterpieces of poetic thought, both ancient and modern. Homer, Virgil and Dante, Calderon, Molière and Goethe, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson—these contain much of the best poetic thought in all ages, and yet we have but named little more than half of the twenty. There is a flood of ephemeral literature—chiefly novels—day by day deluging the land, which fashion and frivolity set up for literary study. How much harm these novels do, lashing with their waves the moral shores of life. God alone knows. To-day, in the minds of many, the novel has supplanted the Bible, and the ethics of George Eliot take precedence of the Sermon on the Mount. It is doubtful if either Cardinal Newman or John Ruskin ever read a line of Tolstoi, Ibsen or Kipling, and yet both hold respectable places in literature.

Passing now from the subject of literature in itself to a consideration of its interpretation, we desire to touch upon a subject of vital import: The Vocal Interpretation of Literature. The spiritual element in a poem is indefinite and cannot be formulated in terms of x and y. No examination on paper, be it ever so thorough, can satisfactorily reach it. The only full response to this spiritual element, this essential life of a poem, that can be secured by the teacher is through a vocal rendering of it. But before he is capable of doing so he must first have sympathetically assimilated the INFORMING life of the poem. This is why no person need hope to become a great reader without a deep and sympathetic study of literature, nor a great interpreter of literature—which means a great teacher of literature—without the vocal capabilities requisite for voicing the indefinite or spiritual element which constitutes the soul of an art product. A true literary scholar is one who grows soulward. It is not enough that he store his mind with intellectual facts, he should grow vitalized at every point of his soul in his literary studies.

“Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell.”

Knowledge is of the intellect, wisdom and reverence of the soul. We should aim, in our study of literature, to pierce through the show of things—to reach the vital, quickening, spiritual element, by breaking through the baffling and perverting mesh of words which hide and blind it. How true are the lines of the late Poet Laureate:

“I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the thoughts I feel,

For words, like nature, half reveal

And half conceal the soul within.”

Herein, then, comes the office of the voice in literary interpretation—to aid in laying bare the soul within. When the same time is given in preparing the voice for the high office of literary interpretation that is now devoted to it in preparation for the operatic and concert stage, then we may look for the best and highest results in literary study. Then, indeed, will the throbbing pulse of poetry be felt in the class and lecture room, and the divine infection of inspiration will do its benign work, cheating the lazy and indifferent student of his hours and days.

Many make the mistake of believing that they may become capable vocal interpreters of literature in a month or a year, whereas the great work should cover a lifetime. Professor Corson, of Cornell University, who is acknowledged to be the ablest vocal interpreter of literature in America, once told the writer that he had made it a custom to read aloud for an hour each day for more than twenty-five years. Those who have been privileged to hear Professor Corson interpret vocally the great masterpieces of poetic literature, as found in Shakespeare, Tennyson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Milton and Browning, can better understand and appreciate the true value of vocal culture as a factor in the great work of literary interpretation.

If we could combine the voice work of our best schools of elocution and oratory with the fullest and most comprehensive courses in literature found in our best universities, we might soon hope for the very summit of literary culture and training. The worst of our elocution schools are a positive injury to vocal training as a worthy factor in the interpretation of literature, inasmuch as they induce both superficiality and artificiality, their chief ambition being to graduate pretty girls with pretty gowns who can recite some catch-penny piece of current literature, before an assemblage of admiring friends, according to the numbers or lines upon an elocutionary chart or fashion plate. When these graduates leave their schools after a six months’ course, all equipped and prepared to voice the depths of Shakespeare, the heights of Milton, or the zigzag involutions of Browning, they never fail, also, as a rule, to carry with them the brand or trade-mark of their respective manufactories.

In the best of our elocution schools, such as are found in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, where saner and more thorough methods are pursued and a certain measure of literary scholarship finds a habitation and a name, respectable attention is given to some of the chief masterpieces of literature, and a graduate knows something more than the scrappy selections found in a few recitation books.

Still the aim of all these schools is to turn out readers and teachers of reading, and this very aim precludes a deep, serious and comprehensive study of literature.

In many of our leading colleges and universities there is a professor of oratory, who trains young men for declamation and intercollegiate contests in oratory and debate, but here again the aim determines the character and limitations of the work done. The most suitable department for voice training in a college or university is that of English literature, for it is as needful in the dramas of Shakespeare as in the orations of Webster and Burke; as requisite in the lyrics of Moore, Burns and Longfellow as in the glorious epics of Homer, Dante and Milton; as potent in the sonnets of Cowper and Wordsworth as in the tender elegies of a Shelley, an Arnold or a Tennyson.

But what about the vocal interpretation of literature in our primary and intermediate schools—in our academies preparatory to college and university work? It is here where the great work of vocal culture should begin—and begin in earnest, too. But it should never be pursued as an accomplishment or means of frivolous display. The aim should be, in every class, the adequate voicing of literary thought. Teachers will find in the voice an invaluable aid in the work of interpreting, particularly lyrics.

The lyric being subjective, and its very lifeblood being feeling, a sympathetic vocal interpretation of it will give a better insight into its poetic moment or inspirational thought, around which centres the whole structure, than hours of sentence chopping and phrase stitching. For the purpose of illustrating this fact let us take Tennyson’s exquisite lyric, “Break, Break, Break,” which embodies or crystallizes a mood. Here is the delightful little gem:

“Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

“O well for the fisherman’s boy

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor-lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay.

“And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

“Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.”

It will be remembered that this lyric, as well as another poem, “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” though not contained in the linked elegy of “In Memoriam,” are practically a part of it, and are co-radical as to their subject of inspiration—the sorrow borne by Tennyson for young Hallam. Here are the lines of the second poem:

“All along the valley, stream that flashest white,

Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,

All along the valley, where thy waters flow,

I walked with one I loved two and thirty years ago.

All along the valley, while I walk’d to-day,

The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away;

For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed,

Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead.

And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,

The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.”

It is easy to find the poetic moment in the first lyric, as it may be seen and FELT at once that the whole poem-thought centres around the inspirational lines:

“But O for the touch of a vanished hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still.”

We have seen an examination paper strewn with questions upon this lyric, among them being one asking for the reason why the first line, “Break, break, break,” is shorter in the number of its feet than the others which follow. As well ask for the reason of the permanency of parental or filial affection. The question is entirely gratuitous to one who has assimilated the poem in its essential life and can voice it properly. To those who have not responded, or, worse, cannot respond, to the INFORMING life of the lyric, a technical answer is of as much value as are many of the treatises that assume to deal with the subject of versification. But enough. Let the reader be assured of one thing: That the vocal interpretation of literature is in every way a subject worthy of his attention, and that he is the best interpreter of literature whose every faculty is fully developed—not the least of which is the voice—and who brings to his work a full and vitally spiritualized life.

Now as to the best method of taking up the study of literature—and we refer particularly to that department of it known as poetry—in our primary and secondary schools and colleges, why, we should say that the less method put into the work the better. For indeed there is no best method in the study and interpretation of literature. A poem being a work of art, the approach to it must be along the same lines as is the approach to every work of art.

As a matter of fact, no two interpreters of literature—we use the word interpreter here rather than that of teacher, since the study of literature is entirely subjective—will ever approach a poem along exactly the same lines. Why? Because the poem makes to each a different appeal. Nothing is truer than the statement that you get out of a poem what you bring to it. But the teacher of literature should ever remember that the primary purpose in the study of poetry is not discipline and instruction but exaltation and inspiration.

Dr. Hamilton Mabie, the well-known American critic and author, writing upon the study of poetry, says: “So much has been said of late years about methods of literary study that we are in danger of missing the ends of that study; in the multiplication of mechanical devices of all kinds and in the elaboration of systems the joy which ought to flow from a true work of art escapes us, and we are disciplined and instructed where we ought to be exalted and inspired. There are other studies which train the mind and impart information; the study of poetry ought to do more; it ought to liberate the imagination and enrich the spirit of the student.”

Dr. Corson, now Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Cornell University, N.Y., to whom reference has already been made, whose sympathetic interpretation of poetry will remain a gift and memory to every student who has ever had the rare privilege of sharing in his instruction and enjoying the fine infection of his inspiring lectures, has this to say with respect to the study of poetry: “In studying a poem with a class of students, the purpose being literary culture (that is, spiritual culture), the aim of the teacher should be to hold the minds of the class up as near as possible, which at best may not be very near, to the height of the poet’s thought and feeling. He should carefully avoid loosening, so to speak, more than there is need the close texture of the language; for it is all-important that the student should be encouraged to think and feel as far as he is able in the idealized language of the higher poetry.”

Nor should it be forgotten that much of our best poetry is expressed under the form of a symbol. Take, for instance, Longfellow’s little simple lyric, “Excelsior.” Think you that the full meaning of that poem lies upon the surface? Instead of representing the failure of a youth climbing the Alpine peaks of life, does the poem not rather represent the triumph of a soul over all earthly difficulties, freed from every worldly allurement? Is not the voice we hear at the close “from the sky serene and far” but the voice of triumphant immortality?

If the student would indeed know what poetry really means, and what is its function, and what the office of a poet, he should read Tennyson’s “The Poet’s Mind” and “The Lady of Shalott,” the Fifth Book of Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh,” and her “Musical Instrument,” and Browning’s poem, “Popularity.” In nearly all these poems the meaning is expressed in symbol.

Another thing to remember in the interpretation of poetry is that its value is constant; nor has it one message or meaning for the boy and another for the man. But in order that this may be realized it would be well to take up first for interpretation in the classes the poets whose work is chiefly confined to the lyric, the idyl and the ballad, and leave for mature years—the years of philosophic thought—the study of poets of the more complex and philosophic school.

THE DEGRADATION OF

SCHOLARSHIP