What is the author's thought-habit as shown in the poem?
What is the place of this poem in the development of verse?
I am perhaps a little uncharitable to these queries
because I am, I confess, entirely unable to answer them myself; but I am also sure that no child in the stage of mental development belonging to the secondary schools would have any clear and reasonable idea even of what they mean. The example is an extreme one, but it has more parallels than would seem possible.
The formulation of views on æsthetics, whether in regard to workmanship or to motive, is utterly beyond the range of any mental condition the teacher in secondary schools has a right to assume or to expect. All that can happen is that the student who is asked to answer æsthetic conundrums will reproduce, in form more or less distorted according to the parrot-like fidelity of his memory, views he has heard without understanding them. Any teacher of common sense knows this, and any teacher of independent mind will refuse to be bullied by manuals or by entrance-examination papers into inflicting tasks of this sort upon his pupils.
In any branch many students either go on blunderingly or fail altogether through sheer ignorance of how to study. In the case of literature perhaps more fail through this cause than through all others combined. A robust, honest, and not unintelligent lad, who is fairly well disposed toward school work, but whose real interests are in outdoor life and active sport, who is intellectually interested only in the obviously practical side of knowledge, is set down to "study" a play of Shakespeare's. He is disposed to do it well, if not
from any vital interest in the matter, at least from a general habit of being faithful in his work and a healthful instinct to do a thing thoroughly if he undertakes it at all. He is at the outset puzzled to know what is expected of him. In arithmetic or algebra he has had definite tasks, and success has been in direct proportion to the diligence with which he has followed a course definitely marked out. Now he casts about for a rule of procedure. He can understand that he is expected to learn the meaning of unusual or obsolete words, that he is to make himself acquainted with the story so that he may be able to answer any of the conundrums which adorn ingeniously the puzzle department of examination papers. These things he does, but he is too sensible not to know that if this is all there is to the study of literature the game is not worth the candle. He cannot help feeling that the time thus employed might be put to a better use; he is probably bored; and as he is sure to know that he is bored, he is likely to conceive a contempt for literature which is none the less deep and none the less permanent for not being put into words. He very likely comes to believe, with the inevitable tendency of youth to make its own feelings the criteria by which to judge all the world, that everybody is really bored by literature, if only, for some inscrutable reason, people did not feel it necessary to shroud the matter in so much humbug. Talk about the beauty of Shakespeare, about the greatness of his poetry, the
wonders of literary art, come to affect him as cant pure and simple. He puts this to himself plainly or not according to his temperament; but the feeling is in his mind, showing at every turn to one wise enough to discern. Now and then a boy is born with the taste and appreciation of poetry, and of course even in these days, when a literary atmosphere in the home is unhappily so rare, an occasional student appears from time to time who has been taught to care for poetry where every child should learn to love it, in the nursery. On the whole, however, the average school-boy really cares little or nothing for literature, and in his secret heart is entirely convinced that nobody else cares either.
Not knowing how to "study" literature, then, and feeling that in literature is nothing to study which is of consequence, the pupil is in no position to make even a reasonable beginning. He cannot even approach literature in any proper attitude unless he can be made to care for it; unless he can be so interested that he ceases to feel the profession of admiration for the Shakespeare he is asked to work upon to be necessarily cant and affectation. Perhaps the hardest part of the task set before the teacher is to bring the pupil into a frame of mind where he can properly study poetry and to give him some insight into what such study may and should mean.
How this is to be accomplished I cannot pretend fully to say. In speaking of what I may call