IXLOOKING 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 theArchiasspeech. “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’sInstitutes 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. TheEncyclopedia Britannicahas 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 thesame, 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 theRatio Studiorumof the Jesuits, a system embodying the traditions of education and not differing fundamentally from other systems of its time. TheRatio Studiorumhad 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, notof 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 andunifying 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 itscreation 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.