The Lost Art of Reading Part 9

Nature uses such men over again, makes them into something more worth while, something terribly or beautifully alive,--and goes on her way.

If this principle--namely, that the reproductive power of culture is the measure of its value--were as fully introduced and recognised in the world of books as it is in the world of commerce and in the natural world, it would revolutionise from top to bottom, and from entrance examination to diploma, the entire course of study, policy, and spirit of most of our educational inst.i.tutions. Allowing for exceptions in every faculty--memorable to all of us who have been college students,--it would require a new corps of teachers.

Entrance examinations for pupils and teachers alike would determine two points. First, what does this person know about things? Second, what is the condition of his organs--what can he do with them? If the privilege of being a pupil in the standard college were conditioned strictly upon the second of these questions--the condition of his organs--as well as upon the first, fifty out of a hundred pupils, as prepared at present, would fall short of admission. If the same test were applied for admission to the faculty, ninety out of a hundred teachers would fall short of admission. Having had a.n.a.lytic, self-destructive, learned habits for a longer time than their pupils, the condition of their organs is more hopeless.

The man who has the greatest joy in a symphony is:

First, the man who composes it.

Second, the conductor.

Third, the performers.

Fourth, those who might be composers of such music themselves.

Fifth, those in the audience who have been performers.

Sixth, those who are going to be.

Seventh, those who are composers of such music for other instruments.

Eighth, those who are composers of music in other arts--literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Ninth, those who are performers of music on other instruments.

Tenth, those who are performers of music in other arts.

Eleventh, those who are creators of music with their own lives.

Twelfth, those who perform and interpret in their own lives the music they hear in other lives.

Thirteenth, those who create anything whatever and who love perfection in it.

Fourteenth, "The Public."

Fifteenth, the Professional Critic--almost inevitably at the fifteenth remove from the heart of things because he is the least creative, unless he is a man of genius, or has pluck and talent enough to work his way through the other fourteen moods and sum them up before he ventures to criticise.

The principles that have been employed in putting life into literature must be employed on drawing life out of it. These principles are the creative principles--principles of joy. All influences in education, family training, and a man's life that tend to overawe, crowd out, and make impossible his own private, personal, daily habit of creative joy are the enemies of books.

II

Private Road: Dangerous

The impotence of the study of literature as practised in the schools and colleges of the present day turns largely on the fact that the principle of creative joy--of knowing through creative joy--is overlooked. The field of vision is the book and not the world. In the average course in literature the field is not even the book. It is still farther from the creative point of view. It is the book about the book.

It is written generally in the laborious unreadable, well-read style--the book about the book. You are as one (when you are in the book about the book) thrust into the shadow of the endless aisles of Other Books--not that they are referred to baldly, or vulgarly, or in the text. It is worse than this (for this could be skipped). But you are surrounded helplessly. Invisible lexicons are on every page. Grammars and rhetorics, piled up in paragraphs and between the lines thrust at you everywhere. Hardly a chapter that does not convey its sense of struggling faithfulness, of infinite forlorn and empty plodding--and all for something a man might have known anyway. "I have toted a thousand books," each chapter seems to say. "This one paragraph [page 1993--you feel it in the paragraph] has had to have forty-seven books carried to it." Not once, except in loopholes in his reading which come now and then, does the face of the man's soul peep forth. One does not expect to meet any one in the book about the book--not one's self, not even the man who writes it, nor the man who writes the book that the book is about. One is confronted with a mob.

Two things are apt to be true of students who study the great masters in courses employing the book about the book. Even if the books about the book are what they ought to be, the pupils of such courses find that (1) studying the master, instead of the things he mastered, they lose all power over the things he mastered; (2) they lose, consequently, not only the power of creating masterpieces out of these things themselves, but the power of enjoying those that have been created by others, of having the daily experiences that make such joy possible. They are out of range of experience. They are barricaded against life. Inasmuch as the creators of literature, without a single exception, have been more interested in life than in books, and have written books to help other people to be more interested in life than in books, this is the gravest possible defect. To be more interested in life than in books is the first essential for creating a book or for understanding one.

The typical course of study now offered in literature carries on its process of paralysis in various ways:

First. It undermines the imagination by giving it paper things instead of real ones to work on.

Second. By seeing that these things are selected instead of letting the imagination select its own things--the essence of having an imagination.

Third. By requiring of the student a rigorous and ceaselessly unimaginative habit. The paralysis of the learned is forced upon him. He finds little escape from the constant reading of books that have all the imagination left out of them.

Fourth. By forcing the imagination to work so hard in its capacity of pack-horse and memory that it has no power left to go anywhere of itself.

Fifth. By overawing individual initiative, undermining personality in the pupil, crowding great cla.s.sics into him instead of attracting little ones out of him. Attracting little cla.s.sics out of a man is a thing that great cla.s.sics are always intended to do--the thing that they always succeed in doing when left to themselves.

Sixth. The teacher of literature so-called, having succeeded in destroying the personality of the pupil, puts himself in front of the personality of the author.

Seventh. A teacher who destroys personality in a pupil is the wrong personality to put in front of an author. If he were the right one, if he had the spirit of the author, his being in front, now and then at least, would be interpretation and inspiration. Not having the spirit of the author, he is intimidated by him, or has all he can do not to be. A cla.s.sic cannot reveal itself to a groveller or to a critic. It is a book that was written standing up and it can only be studied and taught by those who stand up without knowing it. The decorous and beautiful despising of one's self that the study of the cla.s.sics has come to be as conducted under uncla.s.sic teachers, is a fact that speaks for itself.

Eighth. Even if the personality of the teacher of literature is so fortunate as not to be the wrong one, there is not enough of it. There is hardly a course of literature that can be found in a college catalogue at the present time that does not base itself on the dictum that a great book can somehow--by some mysterious process--be taught by a small person. The axiom that necessarily undermines all such courses is obvious enough. A great book cannot be taught except by a teacher who is literally living in a great spirit, the spirit the great book lived in before it became a book,--a teacher who has the great book in him--not over him,--who, if he took time for it, might be capable of writing, in some sense at least, a great book himself. When the teacher is a teacher of this kind, teaches the spirit of what he teaches--that is, teaches the inside,--a cla.s.sic can be taught.

Otherwise the best course in literature that can be devised is the one that gives the masterpieces the most opportunity to teach themselves.

The object of a course in literature is best served in proportion as the course is arranged and all a.s.sociated studies are arranged in such a way as to secure sensitive and contagious conditions for the pupil's mind in the presence of the great masters, such conditions as give the pupil time, freedom, s.p.a.ce, and atmosphere--the things out of which a masterpiece is written and with which alone it can be taught, or can teach itself.

All that comes between a masterpiece and its thus teaching itself, spreads ruin both ways. The masterpiece is part.i.tioned off from the pupil, guarded to be kept aloof from him--outside of him. The pupil is locked up from himself--his possible self.

Not too much stress could possibly be laid upon intimacy with the great books or on the constant habit of living on them. They are the movable Olympus. All who create camp out between the heavens and the earth on them and breathe and live and climb upon them. From their mighty sides they look down on human life. But cla.s.sics can only be taught by cla.s.sics. The creative paralysis of pupils who have drudged most deeply in cla.s.sical training--English or otherwise--is a fact that no observer of college life can overlook. The guilt for this state of affairs must be laid at the door of the cla.s.sics or at the door of the teachers.

Either the cla.s.sics are not worth teaching or they are not being taught properly.

In either case the best way out of the difficulty would seem to be for teachers to let the cla.s.sics teach themselves, to furnish the students with the atmosphere, the conditions, the points of view in life, which will give the cla.s.sics a chance to teach themselves.

This brings us to the important fact that teachers of literature do not wish to create the atmosphere, the conditions, and points of view that give the cla.s.sics a chance to teach themselves. Creating the atmosphere for a cla.s.sic in the life of a student is harder than creating a cla.s.sic. The more obvious and practicable course is to teach the cla.s.sic--teach it one's self, whether there is atmosphere or not.

It is admitted that this is not the ideal way to do with college students who suppose they are studying literature, but it is contended--college students and college electives being what they are--that there is nothing else to do. The situation sums itself up in the att.i.tude of self-defence. "It may be (as no one needs to point out), that the teaching of literature, as at present conducted in college, is a somewhat faithful and dogged farce, but whatever may be the faults of modern college-teaching in literature, it is as good as our pupils deserve." In other words, the teachers are not respecting their pupils.

It may be said to be the const.i.tution and by-laws of the literature cla.s.s (as generally conducted) that the teachers cannot and must not respect their pupils. They cannot afford to. It costs more than most pupils are mentally worth, it is plausibly contended, to furnish students in college with the conditions of life and the conditions in their own minds that will give masterpieces a fair chance at them.

_Ergo_, inasmuch as the average pupil cannot be taught a cla.s.sic he must be choked with it.

The fact that the typical teacher of literature is more or less grudgingly engaged in doing his work and conducting his cla.s.ses under the practical working theory that his pupils are not good enough for him, suggests two important principles.

First. If his pupils are good enough for him, they are good enough to be taught the best there is in him, and they must be taught this best there is in him, as far as it goes, whether all of them are good enough for it or not. There is as much learning in watching others being educated as there is in appearing to be educated one's self.

Second. If his pupils are not good enough for him, the most literary thing he can do with them is to make them good enough. If he is not a sufficiently literary teacher to divine the central ganglion of interest in a pupil, and play upon it and gather delight about it and make it gather delight itself, the next most literary thing he can do is protect both the books and the pupil by keeping them faithfully apart until they are ready for one another.

If the teacher cannot recognise, arouse, and exercise such organs as his pupil has, and carry them out into themselves, and free them in self-activity, the pupil may be unfortunate in not having a better teacher, but he is fortunate in having no better organs to be blundered on.

The drawing out of a pupil's first faint but honest and lasting power of really reading a book, of knowing what it is to be sensitive to a book, does not produce a very literary-looking result, of course, and it is hard to give the result an impressive or learned look in a catalogue, and it is a difficult thing to do without considering each pupil as a special human being by himself,--worthy of some attention on that account,--but it is the one upright, worthy, and beautiful thing a teacher can do. Any easier course he may choose to adopt in an inst.i.tution of learning (even when it is taken helplessly or thoughtlessly as it generally is) is insincere and spectacular, a despising not only of the pupil but of the college public and of one's self.

If it is true that the right study of literature consists in exercising and opening out the human mind instead of making it a place for cold storage, it is not necessary to call attention to the essential pretentiousness and shoddiness of the average college course in literature. At its best--that is, if the pupils do not do the work, the study of literature in college is a sorry spectacle enough--a kind of huge girls' school with a chaperone taking its park walk. At its worst--that is, when the pupils do do the work, it is a sight that would break a Homer's heart. If it were not for a few inspired and inconsistent teachers blessing particular schools and scholars here and there, doing a little guilty, furtive teaching, whether or no, discovering short-cuts, climbing fences, breaking through the fields, and walking on the gra.s.s, the whole modern scheme of elaborate, tireless, endless laboriousness would come to nothing, except the sight of larger piles of paper in the world, perhaps, and rows of dreary, dogged people with degrees lugging them back and forth in it,--one pile of paper to another pile of paper, and a general sense that something is being done.

In the meantime, human life around us, trudging along in its anger, sorrow, or bliss, wonders what this thing is that is being done, and has a vague and troubled respect for it; but it is to be noted that it buys and reads the books (and that it has always bought and read the books) of those who have not done it, and who are not doing it,--those who, standing in the spectacle of the universe, have been sensitive to it, have had a mighty love in it, or a mighty hate, or a true experience, and who have laughed and cried with it through the hearts of their brothers to the ends of the earth.