Talks on Teaching Literature

by Arlo Bates

The last point which I mentioned as likely to diminish the value of teaching is that it so often demands of teachers more than can be surely or safely counted on in the way of fitness. This I do not mean to dwell upon, nor is it my purpose to draw up a bill of arraignment against my craft. I wish simply to comment that one essential, a prime essential, in the teaching of literature is the power of imaginative enthusiasm on the part of the teacher. This would be recognized if the subject of instruction were any other of the fine arts. If teachers were required to train school-children in the symphonies of Beethoven or in the pictures of Titian, everybody would realize that some special aptitude on the part of the instructor was requisite. Every normal school or college graduate is set to teach the masterpieces of Shakespeare or of Milton, and the fact that the poetry is as completely a work of art as is symphony or picture, and that what holds true of one as the product of artistic imagination must hold true of the other, is quietly and even unconsciously ignored.

No amount of study will create in a teacher the artistic imagination in its highest sense, although much may be done in the way of developing artistic

perception; but at least self-improvement may go far in the nourishing of the important quality of self-honesty. An instructor must learn to deal fairly with himself. He must be strong enough to acknowledge to himself fearlessly if he is not able to care for some work that is ranked as an artistic masterpiece. He must be willing to say unflinchingly to himself that he cannot do justice to this work or to that, because he is not in sympathy with it, or because he lacks any experience which would give him a key to its mood and meaning.

One thing seems to me to be entirely above dispute in this delicate inquiry: that it is idle to hope to impart to children what we have not learned ourselves; and it follows that the first necessity is to appreciate our shortcomings. I ask only for the same sort of honesty which would by common consent be essential in teaching the more humble branches. A teacher who could not solve quadratic equations would manifestly be an ill instructor in algebra. By the same token it is evident that a teacher who cannot enter into the heart of a poem, who does not understand the mood of a play, who has not a real enthusiasm for literature, is not fitted to help children to a comprehension and an appreciation of these. Neither is the power to rehearse the praises and phrases of critics or commentators a sufficient qualification for teaching. In an examination-paper at the Institute of Technology a boy recently wrote with admirable frankness and directness:

I confess that while I like Shakespeare, I like other poets better, and while my teachers have told me that he was the greatest writer, they never seemed to know why.

The boy unconsciously implies a most important fact, namely, that if a teacher does not know why a poet is great, it is not only difficult to convince the pupil of the reality of his claims, but also is it impossible to disguise from the clever scholars the real ignorance of the instructor. As well try to warm children by a description of a fire as to endeavor to awake in them admiration and pleasure by parrot-phrases, no matter how glibly or effectively repeated. They are aroused only by the contagion of genuine feeling; they are moved only by finding that the teacher is first genuinely moved himself.

It is bad enough when an instructor repeats unemotionally what he has unemotionally acquired about arithmetic or geography. Pupils will receive mechanically whatever is mechanically imparted; and in even the most purely intellectual branches such training can at best only distend the mind of the child without nourishing it. When it comes to a study which is presented as of value precisely because it kindles feeling, the absurdity becomes nothing less than monstrous.

Any child of ordinary intelligence comes sooner or later to perceive, whether he reasons it out or not, that much of the literature presented to him is not in the least worth the bother of study if it is to be taken merely on its face-value. If "The

Vicar of Wakefield" or "Silas Marner" is to be read simply for the plot, either book might be swept out of existence to-morrow and the world be little poorer. A conscientious teacher will at least be honest with himself in determining how much more than the obvious and often slight face-value he is enabling his class to perceive.