Literature in College

WE all live, nowadays, in an age of theory, and make of our human existence a much more complicated affair than our ancestors did. Scientific, medical, psychological, economic, social, and artistic theories crowd the journals of the world with their claims and criticisms, while, particularly in this country, of the making of educational t heories there is no end.

Let me say at once, then, that I have no love for educational theories, and have no new one to propound. In educational matters I am t horoughly old-fashioned. I believe teaching — or, rather, arousing the desire to learn — to be purely a matter of personality and practice, and learning to be purely a matter of keenness and concent rat ion. I have never found any theory that can get behind these facts; but I recognize very clearly, nevertheless, the value of the multitude of theories which so greatly amazes a stranger in America.

This value is not, I think, in themselves, but in the general attitude of mind of which they are a symptom. They are part of the really great and genuine interest in the subject of education, and the profound realization of its importance to the community, of which no sensitive person in this country can fail to be conscious.

When we look back upon the developments in educational method of the last few hundred years, we have some reason to claim real progress. The days are past when education meant the mere acquisition of knowledge. We no longer encourage a curriculum like that suggested by Sir Thomas Elyot, in 1530, who remarks: ‘As far as poetry is concerned, Aristophanes, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Silvius, Lucan, and Hesiod will suffice until the scolar pass the age of thirteen years’; who recommends 6 to 11 A.M. and 1 to 6 P.M. as suitable working hours, from the age of five years. We no longer agree with Dr. Johnson when he says: ‘Why, Sir, till you can fix the degree of obstinacy and negligence of the scholars, you cannot fix the degree of severity of the master. Severity must be continued until obstinacy be subdued, and negligence be cured.’ We are past the Sandford and Merton stage of reducing everything taught to a question of moral conduct; and, in theory at any rate, we are past the horrors of the early days of the examination system.

All I mean by this system can be illustrated by the quotation of a joke which appeared many years ago in Punch. The scene shows a poet and an examiner taking a walk in a wood in the springtime. Suddenly the cuckoo calls. The poet quotes: —

concludes the examiner!

But the ideals represented by these systems belong to the past, and our present aims in education are very different. Perhaps one might describe the difference shortly by saying that we aim nowadays rather at producing an attitude of mind than at mere instruction. The schools of a hundred years ago produced an attitude of mind, too, as we can see by this letter from a young lady on leaving school.

Well, my education is at last finished. Indeed it would be strange if, after five years’ hard application, anything were left incomplete. Happily, that is all over now, and I have nothing to do but exercise my various accomplishments. French, Italian, music, drawing, dancing. . . . As to common things, geography, history, poetry, philosophy, thank my stars, I have got through them all, so that I may consider myself not only perfectly accomplished, but also thoroughly well informed.

Education, in fact, was a matter of schooldays, and automatically concluded when school was finished with, and the young lady was ‘finished.’ It was a social asset, just as the vocational training of to-day is a business asset. But the aim of our modern educational idealists is to make education a social asset in a far wider sense. For whatever theories they may hold as to how to teach and what to teach, they are all agreed in the human ideal that they wish to achieve. Put shortly, the aim of modern educators is to train youth in such a way as shall enable each individual in the community to live as complete a life as possible; to be as much alive as possible in every part of his being, body, mind, and spirit; to stimulate and develop every channel of sensation through which impressions reach mankind — bodily senses, mental senses, spiritual senses; and in the first, to increase the feeling for beauty in all man’s physical being; in the second, to stimulate the love of mental adventure and constructive doubt; in the third, to appreciate the variety and wonder of human character, experience, and achievement.

All these go to make up the sum of human life, and we now agree upon the principle that any educational method should aim at making people respond to as much of life as they are, each individually, capable of responding to.

What place, then, does the study of literature hold in this view of education? Literature is an art which is more closely related to life than any other of the arts, so that any ideal which is aiming at fullness of life must be much concerned with it. It is possible, I suppose, to hold the view that, since education is to be the training of experience, and literature is only experience at second-hand, it were better to leave literature on one side, and learn direct from life itself. For, as Stevenson says, ‘books, music, pictures are all very well in their way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.’

So, indeed, they are, and I think there is real danger in the overemphasis of t his side of literature. ‘ Reading maketh a full man,’ says Bacon; but too much reading maketh him too full; and an overread person is just as distressing as an overfed one. We all know that blotting-paper individual who seems always to bear the impress of the last printed matter he has been in contact with, and there is a reality behind the sneers of the practical world at the ‘academic spirit.’ But it is a view which can be held whole-heartedly only by those who are deaf and blind to the world of art.

Literature is interpretation of life, and cannot be appreciated without experience, it is true; yet to the sensitive mind it s experiences are as real and vivid as those of life itself. For the artist makes life more true, more varied, more clear by his comment on its problems and sensations. It is true that the world says everything and shows everything; but since we have eyes that see not and ears that hear not and hearts that do not understand, through literature we can add beauty and reality to our own imperfect impressions. The mind of every individual is peopled with a sleeping company of reminiscences, associations, impressions, attitudes, emotions, and facts which will respond and awaken at the touch of art. Browning has expressed this faculty of t he artist in Fra Lippo Lippi. He speaks of painting, but the interpretative touch belongs more completely to literature.

And the minds of writers are lent more completely than those of other artists, because the experiences they deal with are the most directly related to life as it is lived. Through them we can range over the vast track of human existence, choosing at any moment our company and our occupation. We can follow the pilgrim’s progress or go angling for trout; be present at the fall of man or at the first roast of sucking pig; decline with the Roman Empire or travel with a donkey; hear of holy living and dying or of unholy. We can be in places as different as Erewhon and Wuthering Heights, Athens and Reading Gaol. We can feast with the gods on Olympus or take tea with the ladies of Cranford. We can meet friends as different as Othello and Mr. Collins, Perdita and Mrs. Poyser, Piers Plowman and Mr. Pickwick.

These are the human delights of reading; but beyond this, there is no subject so wide in its appeal to all sides of man’s nature as literature. It touches his physical senses with a wealth of suggestion in beauty of color, of line, of melody, of rhythm, describing with the brush of a painter, working in sound like a musician. On the mental side it shows mankind the splendor of his intellectual scope, ‘how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty ... in apprehension how like a god’; while it contains the whole worlds of fiction and drama as comment and as interpretation of the immense range of human emotion and character. What subject could be wider? Hence the importance of considering thoughtfully how best to keep the study of it wide. For it is obvious to anyone who takes a large view of the subject to-day, that, in spite of a full recognition of its value as an educative force, its full possibilities are cramped and thwarted on many sides by narrowing ideas of its function and its scope.

Some seem to get little from literature save the skillful statement of moral truths. They make it the Polonius of life, something which supplies an inexhaustible mine of useful and helpful maxims, characters, and stories. That maxims and quotations can be an inspiration to the living of life no one will deny. They give mental and moral help, supply courage and quietness, zest and patience, or any other quality of which our frail humanity stands in need. In the old days, the bards were freely employed to maintain heroes in fortitude and enthusiasm. When the heart failed and the spirit drooped, the bard came and urged men to their high destiny by reminding them of their high origins and magnificent traditions. In a very noble sense, the poet was a propagandist: he reminded mankind of the heroic in them. In one sense, this is what all fine literature does; but to narrow it down to its moral content is as bad as to narrow life down to duty.

One is reminded of a wicked little comment by Matthew Arnold on the Puritan founders of American society. ‘Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage, they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakespeare or Vergil . . . accompanying them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakespeare or Vergil would have found them.’ Literature, indeed, is not a kind of messenger-boy running between God and the suburbs.

At the other extreme are those who shrink the subject to a field for research. Here it befits one who is in no sense a scholar to walk warily, for the ground is full of thorns. Yet I think there are many, having the teaching of literature at heart, who agree that the idea of ‘research’ has grown to be something of a fetish. While not perhaps going as far as Samuel Butler, in wanting a Society for the Suppression of Erudite Research and the Decent Burial of the Past, it is almost impossible for the common-sense individual not to be convinced that there is quite as much in the past as in the present of the unimportant and the superfluous, and that these dry bones are none the more living after exhumation than before it. The practisers of this craft of raising ghosts are very apt to rate the importance of their investigation in proportion to the trouble it costs them: hence the frequent lack of proportion in their views. A subject has no inherent literary, or even scholarly, value because it has ‘not been done before’; and how many of the theses which result from the postgraduate work of immature college students are nothing but tombstones set up to a period of misdirected effort. If only it were frankly accepted that the task of minute and patient investigation, though laborious, is quite easy, instead of its being exaggerated into an occupation for the best intelligences, we should, I think, find fewer competitors in the field, or perhaps one might say, the graveyard.

For the study of literature should be a matter of growing, not of grubbing, of the widening of capacities, of education in the fullest meaning of the word. But as we teach it in our universities and colleges, does it mean this? Or do we find, side by side with the admiration of the superfluities of past ages, an admiration of the superfluities of the present? It is, I fear, impossible to deny that we do. We find students who have been through a compulsory course in English at college acclaim the latest sentimental or realist novel, the latest minor poet or the latest emotional drama, as a fine artistic achievement. And this misvaluation of the present is an unmistakable sign that the past has not been really understood or enjoyed, but is honored only on the score of authority. The taste of the majority of educated young people is a vague and ill-formed sense of likes and dislikes in the present, and a somewhat sullen acceptance of est ablished masterpieces as classics — according to the famous definition of that word as books which can safely be praised without having been read. ‘I know what I like’ is considered a sufficient standard, although that knowledge is shared alike by infants, illiterates, and imbeciles.

But if literature is to play the part in education which is claimed for it, and which undoubtedly it can play, it must mean more than this. It cannot be merely a moral tonic, a subject for research, or a reflection of the fashions of the moment in manners and morals. It is all these, but it is also an art; and though this is the side of it most neglected, because most difficult of approach, it is its ultimate importance. Hence by far the most lively problem before the teachers of the subject should be, how to create a standard of appreciation. The question is, how to lay the foundations of the enjoyment of reading so that they may develop into a real critical sense. It is a practical question. All students have, I believe, one year during which English literature is a part of their compulsory course in college. Now, how is the subject to be best presented to them in that time, so that its effect on widening their consciousness may be most potent?

It is usual in England, and I think also in America, to adopt the historical and sociological method: either by a survey in outline of the whole of English literature, or by the more detailed study of a certain period. It is, of course, obvious that anyone who is to make a special study of the subject must do so historically, at last; but that this method is the one by which to profit most in a short general course, is, I think, very questionable. Everyone comes from school with some slight knowledge of the historical background of our literature; but what all lack when they come to college, and what most lack equally when they go from college, is any capacity for artistic appreciation. Ask any college boy or girl whether he or she thinks Far from the Madding Crowd or If Winter Comes the finer book. We may safely say that over fifty per cent will vote with sincerity for the latter; and most of those who honestly prefer Hardy will generally be quite unable to give any reason for the faith that is in them.

The historical method makes the subject unmanageable for a short course. Lists of necessary reading are given to students, but real lack of time, besides natural mental laziness, makes it inevitable that the temptation to use textbooks and summaries should be overpowering. The heart of the subject — the unity of all literary art, past and present. — cannot be stressed, and the student fails inevitably to relate his literary experience of the present with anything that he or she studies as a part of the college curriculum.

It is for this reason that I would put forward the suggestion that a class in Appreciation of Literature is of far more value than one in the History of Literature, during the freshman year in college. Anyone who has in any degree experienced it, whether in making poetry or puddings, an opera or a radio apparatus, knows something of the energy of creation: the thrill, the excitement, the zest, the sense of stimulation and vitality and exhilaration which it brings. It is this sensation, this ‘sudden blood,’ which should be behind appreciation; for criticism is but another kind of creation. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that the artist does to the visible world of form and color, or to the unseen world of passion and thought. His aim is to re-create in his own consciousness the vision of the artist: he stands as interpreter between the inspired and the uninspired; he knows what the writer is trying to do, and how he has done it, what he is striving to express, and how he has expressed it; he can establish and determine the relation of the writer’s art to that general life which is its substance and its subject.

All art is life made more living, more vital, than the average man lives it: hence its power. But this power is conditioned by the kinship and capacity of the minds to which it speaks: hence the supreme importance of developing that kinship and capacity. For it can be developed. Taste, unlike genius, can be acquired; and, since its acquisition enriches personality perhaps more than any other quality, it is worth while to consider the best means of doing it.

There is no need for a course such as I have suggested to become the study of æsthetics. The abstract questions, what Beauty is, and its exact relation to Truth, are unnecessary. Few literary artists are either philosophers or metaphysicians; and no other knowledge is needed to appreciate a work of art than was possessed by the writer to create it. But literature contains certain forces and qualities, certain fusions of thought, emotion, and expression, which produce that harmony of mind, sense, and spirit, which we call artistic pleasure. We believe that our education becomes completer in proportion as our sensitiveness to these impressions increases in depth and variety. Any teacher of literature, who has any right to be teaching it, must experience this enjoyment and must believe himself, or herself, capable of communicating it to others.

Still, I doubt if many really face the question, what literature is, and what are the sources of the impressions it communicates. Yet this is the question on which everything else in the whole study and delight of literature depends. All knowledge of it historically centres in the answer to this question; and yet it is not considered important enough to have a place in college curricula. We teach young people what the great works of literature are, but we do not discuss with them why we consider them great, or by what standard we measure them.

But these questions, besides being the foundations of all judgment, are also those which stimulate most easily that sense ot mental adventure without which all learning is futile. There is no inquiry more fascinating than that which brings us close to an apprehension of the difference between life itself and its expression in terms of art. In the course of such an inquiry, illustration and comment can be drawn from the whole sweep of literary history — past and present, classic and contemporary. At the same time, no lengthy reading-lists need be compiled; for it is a study which calls for the minimum of reading and the maximum of thinking. A class may be confronted with this stanza: —

and then with the Ode to a Grecian Urn, to see what differences they find; or quote them the story of Othello as it might appear in a police-court report, and make them realize what more they find in Shakespeare. I think one may safely say that students find such a method of approach more stimulating than Outlines of Elizabethan Literature, or The Romantic Revival.

These are only suggestions of detail, which I have found stimulating in my own teaching experience; but such a course would include an immense range of subjects of general interest to the alert mind: large questions, such as the relation of literature to the other arts, and to philosophy, to morality, to history, to sociology, to technique; together with discussions of the artistic qualities which mould the various literary forms — poetry, drama, novel, and the rest; every facet, indeed, of the many-sided subject of the relation of life and writing.

By this method, I believe, the full educative value of the study of literature can be developed in a way which is not now taken full advantage of in college schemes of teaching, and which, indeed, is often completely missed in an historical survey. I do not say it is easy. It requires that teachers and students shall coöperate in intensifying their powers. But its very difficulty makes it attractive to educational idealists with a healthy belief in possibilities. We can all commit facts to memory, and the arousing of emotional interest in the subject-matter of literature is not hard; but. an intelligent standard of appreciation aims at something far wider and higher. The mental and emotional discipline behind its achievement has a very real bearing on national as well as individual life.

The cultural value of works of art is now universally admitted, and in this country museums and private collectors vie with each other in possessing as many of them as possible.

But it must not be forgotten that a nation’s artistic wealth consists, not in the number of individual works of art in the land, but in the capacity for appreciation among its men and women. There is only one way to possess works of art, in music, painting, or literature, and that is by understanding them; by living over again the artist’s vision and capturing something of his creative vitality.

Oscar Wilde said that the greatness of the Greeks was the result of their being a nation of art critics. To look back upon the age of Pericles is to watch a race of men who made of their intellectual life an adventure as stirring as any physical existence could be. Experiment, not habit, ruled their artistic attitude: hence a vitality of creation and appreciation which has lasted two thousand years.

It is the Greek spirit of experiment and adventure which we need among both teachers and students in our modern universities, and il is worth while trying to create it. It is alive enough in the physical and business spheres in America of to-day, but all too dormant in the spheres of intellect and understanding. Perhaps no portion of the community has greater opportunity to foster it. than the teachers of literature. Their task is not easy; ‘but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ No nation is fully civilized until she has added Utopia to her dominions.