TWO WAYS OF TEACHING HISTORY
The most discouraging moments of my college days occurred during the lecture hours of history, not because I did not have a natural bent for history, but because the professor made the topic, for me, uninteresting. My mind became a blank almost as soon as I entered the classroom. Lecture days in history covered me with a darkness beyond that which I had ever imagined could emanate from the world of fallen spirits. My powers went into eclipse. There seemed to be a kind of automatic cut-off between my brains and my note-book. My only source of comfort consisted in the fact that my miseries had companionship. In some examinations, I remember, only a small remnant of the class succeeded in satisfying the demands of our scholarly teacher.
I can only remember flashes and hints of a long, solemn, student face, shrouded with whiskers, bending with piercing eye over books which seemed only slightly less dry than a remainder biscuit, droning, in “hark-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound” incantation, words, which to our vagrant attention were just words, belonging to remote centuries, while about me my companions shivered audibly, waiting to be called up. The professor was called a great student of history. He might have been. We gladly admitted this: it was the chief compliment we could pay him. As a teacher and inspirer of boys, however, he was a good example of the way to make history impregnable.
A Popular Professor of Chemistry and his Crowded Lecture-Room
I hold in memory, also, another professor who taught history. He was seldom called a professor. The students called him “Benny.” There was a kind of lingering affection in our voices as we spoke his name. His lecture-room was always crowded. No student ever went to sleep, no student became so frightened that he lost his wits, no student ever took himself too seriously. There was an element of humor and humanness which was constantly kindled by this great, manly teacher and which fired at frequent intervals every student heart. His illustrations were not confined to Horatius on the bridge, Garibaldi promising his soldiers disaster and death, or Luther at Worms. He attached history to modern themes. His historical situations were described not in the terms of tedious systems, but in the personalities of great men. We somehow felt that he himself was greater than anything he said; that he himself was a great man. He found interest in the life of college as well as in the work of college. He talked about the last foot-ball game and the reason why the college was defeated and the lessons that men should draw from their failure. The value of his remarks was enhanced by the fact that most of the men had seen him on the running-track in the gymnasium, or on the front row of the grand stand, cheering patriotically with both voice and arms. I remember how he used to add driving power to our awakening resolves and ambitions. We were quite likely to forget that we were learning history. To-day at alumni dinners the mere mention of the name “Benny” brings an enthusiasm which the most eloquent speech of any other man seems incapable of invoking. Here was a man who also taught history; but the man was more than his book, he was more than his subject: he was the light and the blood of it, and the glory of that theme still brightens the path of every one of those hundreds of students who caught a new and radiant vision of the march of events in the light of a great man’s eyes. It was of such teachers that Emerson must have been thinking when he said, “There is no history, only biography,” and again, “An institution is but the lengthened shadow of a man.”
It is of such men that other college graduates think to-day, even as Matthew Arnold thought of Jowett at Balliol:
For rigorous masters seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,
Shew’d me the high, white star of truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.