A Plea for Life and Color.
Fortunately there is plenty of stirring action to offset the tedium (to boys and girls) of laws and parliaments. Bannockburn, Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt—what an array of names to conjure with! Let us not be parsimonious, fellow teachers, when we reach these vantage grounds of glory! Let us not be ultra-orthodox in our scientific view of history. In the reaction, the very proper reaction from the view of history which made it a mere record of wars and battles there is danger of making it a valley of dry bones. After all, it is the record of life, and the events which have stirred the imagination and aroused the patriotism of millions are not to be too lightly set aside. Let the young imagination “drink delight of battle with its peers”; let it see what was really noble as well as what was base in chivalry. Surely it is worth while that it should catch the life and color of those middle ages—so different, yet after all so human. Froissart has given us this in a form now easily accessible, or failing a complete edition of his “Chronicles,” Cheyney’s “Readings” furnish a taste (pp. 233-249), but hardly enough, for only Crecy is here described. Green, as usual, is vivid in his battle accounts—Bannockburn, pp. 213 and 214; Crecy, Calais, and Poitiers, pp. 225-230; and Agincourt, pp. 267-268. Henry V’s speech in Shakespeare’s play of “Henry V” is too splendid in its rhetoric to be overlooked. Sometimes a laggard in the class loves to declaim, and may be stirred to some interest by such a speech. Here is the chance to make him useful.
And then the story of Joan of Arc, with its unspeakable beauty and pathos, comes as a noble climax, a spiritual contrast, to the series of events the glamour of which is at best of the earth earthy in comparison with the life and death of the Maid. Gardiner’s “Student’s History” contains a very concise account of her life, pp. 310-312. The extracts from contemporary writings, pp. 289-296 of Cheyney’s “Readings” are very interesting and illuminating. Green’s account, pp. 274-279, is vivid, especially the story of her trial and death, p. 279. Reference to the great performance given in the Harvard Stadium last June by Maud Adams would add reality and interest to the study of Joan of Arc. An interesting account of this, with pictures, may be found in “Current Literature” for August, 1909, pp. 196-199.
For a very interesting detailed account of the beginnings of the House of Commons, see the extended quotation from Stubbs’s “Select Charters” in Beard’s “Introduction,” pp. 124-157.
In discussing the “black death” and its effects, it is worth while to point out the revolution wrought by modern medicine and sanitation to which is due the absence of such plagues from modern Europe. The “bubonic plague,” which still devastates India, is much like the “black death,” and the failure of the English to exterminate it in India is due to the superstitious dread and suspicion with which the natives regard all efforts toward inoculation, segregation and disinfection. In the “Readings,” pp. 255-257, is a contemporary account of the plague which not only paints it realistically, but shows its effects on labor.