The Lost Art of Reading Part 11

Half of the battle is already won. The principle of natural selection between pupils and subjects is recognised in the elective system, but we have barely commenced to conceive as yet the principle of natural selection in its more important application--mutual attraction between teacher and pupil--natural selection in its deeper and more powerful and spiritual sense: the kind of natural selection that makes the teacher a worker in wonder, and education the handiwork of G.o.d.

In most of our great inst.i.tutions we do not believe in even the theory of this deeper natural selection: and if we do believe in it, sitting in endowed chairs under the Umbrella of Endowed Ideas, how can we act on that belief? And if we do, who will come out and act with us? If it does not seem best for even the single teacher, doing his teaching unattached and quite by himself, to educate in the open,--to trust his own soul and the souls of his pupils to the nature of things, how much less shall the great inst.i.tution, with its crowds of teachers and its rows of pupils and its Vested Funds be expected to lay itself open--lay its teachers and pupils and its Vested Funds open--to the nature of things? We are suspicious of the nature of things. G.o.d has concealed a lie in them. We do not believe. Therefore we cannot teach.

The conclusion is inevitable. As long as we believe in natural selection between pupil and subject, but do not believe in natural selection between pupil and teacher, no great results in education or in teaching a vital relation to books or to anything else will be possible. As long as natural selection between pupil and teacher is secretly regarded as an irreligious and selfish instinct, with which a teacher must have nothing to do, instead of a divine ordinance, a Heaven-appointed starting-point for doing everything, the average routine teacher in the conventional school and college will continue to be the kind of teacher he is, and will continue to belong to what seems to many, at least, the sentimental and superst.i.tious and pessimistic profession he belongs to now. Why should a teacher allow himself to teach without inspiration in the one profession on the earth where, between the love of G.o.d and the love of the opening faces, inspiration--one would say--could hardly be missed? Certainly, if it was ever intended that artists should be in the world it was intended that teachers should be artists. And why should we be artisans? If we cannot be artists, if we are not allowed to make our work a self-expression, were it not better to get one's living by the labour of one's hands,--by digging in the wonder of the ground? A stone-crusher, as long as one works one's will with it, makes it say something, is nearer to nature than a college. "I would rather do manual labour with my hands than manual labour with my soul," the true artist is saying to-day, and a great many thousand teachers are saying it, and thousands more who would like to teach. The moment that teaching ceases to be a trade and becomes a profession again, these thousands are going to crowd into it. Until the artist-teachers have been attracted to teaching, things can only continue as they are. Young men and women who are capable of teaching will continue to do all that they can not to get into it; and young men and women who are capable of teaching, and who are still trying to teach, will continue to do all that they can to get out of it. When the schools of America have all been obliged, like the city of Brooklyn, to advertise to secure even poor teachers, we shall begin to see where we stand,--stop our machinery a while and look at it.

The only way out is the return to nature, and to faith in the freedom of nature. Not until the teacher of the young has dared to return to nature, has won the emanc.i.p.ation of his own instincts and the emanc.i.p.ation of the instincts of his pupils, can we expect anything better than we have now of either of them. Not until the modern teacher has come to the point where he deliberately works with his instincts, where he looks upon himself as an artist working in the subject that attracts him most, and in the material that is attracted to him most, can we expect to secure in our crowded conditions to-day enough teaching to go around. The one practical and economical way to make our limited supply of pa.s.sion and thought cover the ground is to be spiritual and spontaneous and thorough with what we have. The one practical and economical way to do this is to leave things free, to let the natural forces in men's lives find the places that belong to them, develop the powers that belong to them, until power in every man's life shall be contagious of power. In the meantime, having brought out the true and vital energies of men as far as we go, if we are obliged to be specialists in knowledge we shall be specialists of the larger sort. The powers of each man, being actual and genuine powers, shall play into the powers of other men. Each man that essays to live shall create for us a splendour and beauty and strength he was made to create from the beginning of the world.

To those who sit in the seat of the scornful the somewhat lyrical idea of an examination in joy as a basis of admission to the typical college appeals as a fit subject of laughter. So it is. Having admitted the laugh, the question is,--all human life is questioning the college to-day,--which way shall the laugh point?

If the conditions of the typical college do not allow for the working of the laws of nature, so much the worse for the laws of nature, or so much the worse for the college. In the meantime, it is good to record that there are many signs--thanks to these same laws of nature--that a most powerful reaction is setting in, not only in the colleges themselves, but in all the forces of culture outside and around them. The examination in joy--the test of natural selection--is already employed by all celebrated music masters the world over in the choosing of pupils, and by all capable teachers of painting; and the time is not far off when, so far as courses in literature are concerned (if the teaching of literature is attempted in crowded inst.i.tutions), the examination in joy will be the determining factor with all the best teachers, not only in the conduct of their cla.s.ses, but in the very structure of them.

Structure is the basis of conduct.

VII

The Emanc.i.p.ation of the Teacher

The custom of mowing lawns in cities, of having every gra.s.s-blade in every door-yard like every other gra.s.s-blade, is considered by many persons as an artificial custom--a violation of the law of nature. It is contended that the free-swinging, wind-blown gra.s.ses of the fields are more beautiful and that they give more various and infinite delight in colour and line and movement. If a piece of this same field, however, could be carefully cut out and moved and fitted to a city door-yard--bobolinks and daisies and shadows and all, precisely as they are--it would not be beautiful. Long gra.s.s conforms to a law of nature where nature has room, and short gra.s.s conforms to a law of nature where nature has not room.

When, for whatever reason, of whatever importance, men and women choose to be so close together, that it is not fitting they should have freedom, and when they choose to have so little room to live in that development is not fitting lest it should inconvenience others, the penalty follows. When gra.s.s-blades are crowded between walls and fences, the more they can be made to look alike the more pleasing they are, and when an acre of ground finds itself covered with a thousand people, or a teacher of culture finds himself mobbed with pupils, the law of nature is the same. Whenever crowding of any kind takes place, whether it be in gra.s.s, ideas, or human nature, the most pleasing as well as the most convenient and natural way of producing a beautiful effect is with the Lawn Mower. The dead level is the logic of crowded conditions. The city grades down its hills for the convenience of reducing its sewer problem.

It makes its streets into blocks for the convenience of knowing where every home is, and how far it is, by a glance at a page, and, in order that the human beings in it (one set of innumerable n.o.bodies hurrying to another set of innumerable n.o.bodies) may never be made to turn out perchance for an elm on a sidewalk, it cuts down centuries of trees, and then, out of its modern improvements, its map of life, its woods in rows, its wheels on tracks, and its souls in pigeonholes--out of its huge Checker-board under the days and nights--it lifts its eyes to the smoke in heaven, at last, and thanks G.o.d it is civilised!

The substantial fact in the case would seem to be that every human being born into the world has a right to be treated as a special creation all by himself. Society can only be said to be truly civilised in proportion as it acts on this fact. It is because in the family each being is treated as one out of six or seven, and in the school as one out of six hundred, that the family (with approximately good parents) comes nearer to being a model school than anything we have.

If we deliberately prefer to live in crowds for the larger part of our lives, we must expect our lives to be cut and fitted accordingly. It is an aesthetic as well as a practical law that this should be so. The law of nature where there is room for a man to be a man is not the law of nature where there is not room for him to be a man. If there is no playground for his individual instincts except the street he must give them up. Inasmuch as natural selection in overcrowded conditions means selecting things by taking them away from others, it can be neither beautiful nor useful to practise it.

People who prefer to be educated in ma.s.ses must conform to the law of ma.s.s, which is inertia, and to the law of the herd, which is the Dog. As long as our prevailing idea of the best elective is the one with the largest cla.s.s, and the prevailing idea of culture is the degree from the most crowded college, all natural gifts, whether in teachers or pupils, are under a penalty. If we deliberately place ourselves where everything is done by the gross, as a matter of course and in the nature of things the machine-made man, taught by the machine-made teacher, in a teaching-machine, will continue to be the typical scholar of the modern world; and the gentleman-scholar--the man who made himself, or who gave G.o.d a chance to make him--will continue to be what he is now in most of our large teaching communities--an exception.

Culture which has not the power to win the emanc.i.p.ation of its teachers does not produce emanc.i.p.ated and powerful pupils. The essence of culture is selection, and the essence of selection is natural selection, and teachers who have not been educated with natural selection cannot teach with it. Teachers who have given up being individuals in the main activity of their lives, who are not allowed to be individuals in their teaching, do not train pupils to be individuals. Their pupils, instead of being organic human beings, are manufactured ones. Literary drill in college consists in drilling every man to be himself--in giving him the freedom of himself. Probably it would be admitted by most of us who are college graduates that the teachers who loom up in our lives are those whom we remember as emanc.i.p.ated teachers--men who dared to be individuals in their daily work, and who, every time they touched us, helped us to be individuals.

VIII

The Test of Culture

Looking at our great inst.i.tutions of learning in a general way, one might be inclined to feel that literature cannot be taught in them, because the cla.s.ses are too large. When one considers, however, the average cla.s.s in literature, as it actually is, and the things that are being taught in it, it becomes obvious that the larger such a cla.s.s can be made, and the less the pupil can be made to get out of it, the better.

The best test of a man's knowledge of the Spanish language would be to put him in a balloon and set him down in dark night in the middle of Spain and leave him there with his Spanish words. The best test of a man's knowledge of books is to see what he can do without them on a desert island in the sea. When the s.h.i.+p's library over the blue horizon dwindles at last in its cloud of smoke and he is left without a shred of printed paper by him, the supreme opportunity of education will come to him. He will learn how vital and beautiful, or boastful and empty, his education is. If it is true education, the first step he takes he will find a use for it. The first bird that floats from its tree-top shall be a message from London straight to his soul. If he has truly known them, the spirits of all his books will flock to him. If he has known Shakespeare, the ghost of the great master will rise from beneath its Stratford stone, and walk oceans to be with him. If he knows Homer, Homer is full of Odysseys trooping across the seas. Shall he sit him down on the rocks, lift his voice like a mere librarian, and, like a book-raised, paper-pampered, ink-hungry babe cry to the surf for a Greek dictionary? The rhythm of the beach is Greece to him, and the singing of the great Greek voice is on the tops of waves around the world.

A man's culture is his knowledge become himself. It is in the seeing of his eyes and the hearing of his ears and the use of his hands. Is there not always the altar of the heavens and the earth? Laying down days and nights of joy before it and of beauty and wonder and peace, the scholar is always a scholar, _i. e._, he is always at home. To be cultured is to be so splendidly wrought of body and soul as to get the most joy out of the least and the fewest things. Wherever he happens to be,--whatever he happens to be without,--his culture is his being master. He may be naked before the universe, and it may be a pitiless universe or a gracious one, but he is always master, knowing how to live in it, knowing how to hunger and die in it, or, like Stevenson, smiling out of his poor, worn body to it. He is the unconquerable man. Wherever he is in the world, he cannot be old in the presence of the pageant of Life. From behind the fading of his face lie watches it, child after child, spring after spring as it flies before him; he will not grow old while it still pa.s.ses by. It carries delight across to him to the end. He watches and sings with it to the end, down to the edge of sleep.

A bird's shadow is enough to be happy with, if a man is educated, or the flicker of light on a leaf, and when really a song is being lived in a man, all nature plays its accompaniment. To possess one's own senses, to know how to conduct one's self, is to be the conductor of orchestras in the clouds and in the gra.s.s. The trained man is not dependent on having the thing itself. He borrows the boom of the sea to live with, anywhere, and the gladness of continents.

Literary training consists in the acquiring of a state of mind and body to feel the universe with; in becoming an athlete toward beauty, a giver of great lifts of joy to this poor, straining, stumbling world with its immemorial burden on its back, which, going round and round, for the most part with its eyes shut, between infinities, is the hope and sorrow of all of us for the very reason that its eyes are shut.

IX

Summary

The proper conditions for literary drill in college would seem to sum themselves up in the general idea that literature is the spirit of life.

It can therefore only be taught through the spirit.

_First._ It can only be taught through the spirit by being taught as an art, through its own nature and activity, reproductively--giving the spirit body. Both the subject-matter and the method in true literary drill can only be based on the study of human experience. The intense study of human experience in a college course may be fairly said to involve three things that must be daily made possible to the pupil in college life. Everything that is given him to do, and everything that happens to him in college, should cultivate these three things in the pupil: (1) Personality--an intense first person singular, as a centre for having experience; (2) Imagination--the natural organ in the human soul for realising what an experience is and for combining and condensing it; (3) The habit of having time and room, for re-experiencing an experience at will in the imagination, until the experience becomes so powerful and vivid, so fully realises itself in the mind, that the owner of the mind is an artist with his mind. When he puts the experience of his mind down it becomes more real to other men on paper than their own experiences are to them in their own lives.

It is hardly necessary to point out that whatever our conventional courses in literature may be doing, whether in college or anywhere else, they are not bringing out this creative joy and habit of creative joy in the pupils. Those who are interested in literature-courses--such as we have--for the most part do not believe in trying to bring out the creative joy of each pupil. Those who might believe in trying to do it do not believe it can be done. They do not believe it can be done because they do not realise that in the case of each and every pupil--so far as he goes--it is the only thing worth doing. They fail to see from behind their commentaries and from out of their footnotes, the fact that the one object in studying literature is joy, that the one way of studying and knowing literature is joy, and that the one way to attain joy is to draw out creative joy.

_Second._ And if literature is to be taught as an art it must be taught as a way of life. As long as literature and life continue to be conceived and taught as being separate things, there can be no wide and beautiful hope for either of them. The organs of literature are precisely the same organs and they are trained on precisely the same principles as the organs of life.

Except an education in books can bring to pa.s.s the right condition of these organs, a state of being in the pupil, his knowledge of no matter how long a list of masterpieces is but a catalogue of the names of things for ever left out of his life. It is little wonder, when the drudgery has done its work and the sorry show is over, and the victim of the System is face to face with his empty soul at last, if in his earlier years at least he seems overfond to some of us of receiving medals, honours, and valedictories for what he might have been and of flouris.h.i.+ng a Degree for what he has missed.

There was once a Master of Arts, Who was "nuts" upon cranberry tarts: When he'd eaten his fill He was awfully ill, But he was still a Master of Arts.

The power and habit of studying and enjoying human nature as it lives around us, is not only a more human and alive occupation, but it is a more literary one than becoming another editor of aeschylus or going down to posterity in footnotes as one of the most prominent bores that Shakespeare ever had. If a teacher of literature enjoys being the editor of aeschylus, or if he is happier in appearing on a t.i.tle-page with a poet than he could possibly be in being a poet, it is personally well enough, though it may be a disaster to the rest of us and to aeschylus.

Men who can be said as a cla.s.s to care more about literature than they do about life, who prefer the paper side of things to the real one, are at liberty as private persons to be editors and footnote hunters to the top of their bent; but why should they call it "The Study of Literature," to teach their pupils to be footnote hunters and editors?

and how can they possibly teach anything else? and do they teach anything else? And if good teachers can only teach what they have, what shall we expect of poor ones?

In the meantime the Manufacture of the Cultured Mind is going ruthlessly on, and thousands of young men and women who, left alone with the masters of literature, might be engaged in acc.u.mulating and multiplying inspiration, are engaged in a.n.a.lysing--dividing what inspiration they have; and, in the one natural, creative period of their lives, their time is entirely spent in learning how inspired work was done, or how it might have been done, or how it should have been done; in absorbing everything about it except its spirit--the power that did it--the power that makes being told how to do it uncalled for, the power that asks and answers its "Hows?" for itself. The serene powerlessness of it all, without courage or pa.s.sion or conviction, without self-discovery in it, or self-forgetfulness or beauty in it, or for one moment the great contagion of the great, is one of the saddest sights in this modern day.

In the meantime the most practical thing that can be done with the matter of literary drill in college is to turn the eye of the public on it. Methods will change when ideals change, and ideals will change when the public clearly sees ideals, and when the public encourages colleges that see them. The time is not far off when it will be admitted by all concerned that the true study of masterpieces consists, and always must consist, in communing with the things that masterpieces are about, in the learning and applying of the principles of human nature, in a pa.s.sion for real persons, and in a daily loving of the face of the universe.

This idea may not be considered very practical. It stands for a kind of education in which it is difficult to exhibit in rows actual results. We are not contending for an education that looks practical. We are contending merely for education that will be true and beautiful and natural. It will be practical the way the forces of nature are practical--whether any one notices it or not.

The following announcement can already be seen on the bulletin boards of universities around the world(--if looked for twice).

THEY ARE COMING! O Shades of Learning, THE LOVERS OF JOY, IMPERIOUS WITH JOY, UNCONQUERABLE!

Their Sails are Flocking the East.

The High Seas are Theirs.

They shall command you, overwhelm you. Book-lubbers, paper-plodders, shall be as though they were not. The youth of the earth shall be renewed in the morning, the suns and the stars shall be unlocked, and the evening shall go forth with joy. The mountains shall be freed from the pick and the shovel and the book, and lift themselves to heaven.

Flowers shall again outblossom botanies, and gymnasts of music shall be laid low, and Birds Through An Opera Gla.s.s shall sing. Joy shall come to knowledge, and the strength of Joy upon it. THEY ARE COMING, O Ye Shades of Learning, a thousand thousand strong. Their sails flock the Sea. The smoke and the throb of their engines is the promise of the east. The days of thirteen-thousand-ton, three-horse-power education are numbered.

X

A Note

It is one of the danger signs of the times that the men who have most closely observed our modern life, in its social, industrial, artistic, educational, and religious aspects seem to be gradually coming to the point where they all but take it for granted in considering all social, industrial, and educational and political questions, that the conditions of modern times are such, and are going to be such that imagination and personality might as well be dropped as practical forces--forces that must be reckoned with in the movement of human life. Nearly all the old-time outlooks of the Soul, as they stand in history, have been taken for factory sites, bought up by syndicates, moral and otherwise, and are being used for chimneys. Nothing but smoke and steel and wooden Things come out of them. Poets and brokers are both telling us on every hand that imagination is impossible and personality incredible in modern life.

Imagination and personality are the spirit and the dust out of which all great nations and all great religions are made.

The attempt has been made in the foregoing pages to point out that they are not dead. The Altar smoulders.

In pointing out how imagination and personality can be wrought into one single branch of a man's education--his relation to books--principles may have been suggested which can be concretely applied by all of us, each in our own department, to the education of the whole man.