Talks on Teaching Literature

by Arlo Bates

A similar comparison between history and poetry is on the same grounds easily to be made between

the history lesson and the chronicle plays of Shakespeare. The student who in his nursery days started out with the instinctive question in regard to the fairy-tale: "Is it true?" begins to perceive the difference between literal and essential truth. He perceives that verity in literature is not simple and obvious fidelity to the specific fact or event; he learns to appreciate that the truth of art, like the truth of algebra, lies in its accuracy in representing truth in the abstract: he comes to appreciate the narrowness of the nursery question, which asked only for the literal fact, and he begins to comprehend something of the symbolic.

An excellent illustration for practical use is a poem like "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." Any live, wholesome boy is sure to tingle with the swing and fervor of the verse, the sense of the open air, the excitement, the doubt, the hope, the joyful climax. It is easy to lead the class on to consider how exhilarating such an experience would be, and to go on from this to point out that the poem does not describe a literal, actual occurrence; but that it is a generalized expression of the zest and exhilaration of a superb, all but impossible ride, with the added excitement of being responsible for the freedom or even the lives of the folk of a whole city.

The first feeling of the class on learning that such a ride was not taken is sure to be one of disappointment. It is better to meet this frankly, and to compensate for it by arousing interest in the

embodiment of abstract feeling. One great source of the lack of interest in literature at the present time is that the material, practical character of the age makes it difficult for the general reader to respect anything but the concrete fact. Literature is apt to present itself to the hard-headed young fellow of the public school as a lot of make-believe stuff, and therefore at best a matter of rather frivolous amusement. The surest way of correcting this common attitude of mind is to nourish the appreciation of what fact in art really means; to cultivate a clear perception of how a poem or a tale may be the truest thing in the world, although dealing with imaginary personages and with incidents which never happened.[114:1]

As an illustration of the sense in which literature is a sort of algebra of human feeling somewhat more remote from the ordinary life of a child may be taken another poem of Browning's, "The Lost Leader." My experience is that most youth of the school age start out by being able to make little or nothing of this. By a little talk, however, beginning perhaps as simply as with the way in which a lad feels when a school-fellow he had faith in has failed in a crisis, has for some personal advantage gone over to the other party in a school election, or of how the class would feel if some teacher who had been with the students in some effort to obtain an extension of privilege to which the scholars felt themselves to be honestly entitled had for

his own purposes swung over to the opposite side, the whole thing may be brought home. The boys may be led on to imagine what are the feelings of a youth eager for the cause of freedom and the uplifting of man, when one whom he has looked to as a leader, one in whom he has had absolute faith, deserts the rank for honors or for money. Once the young minds are on the right track it is by no means impossible to bring them to see pretty clearly that in the poem is not the question of a particular man or a particular cause; but that Browning is dealing with a universal expression of the pain that would come to any man, to any one of them, in believing that the leader who had been most trusted and revered had in reality been unworthy, and had betrayed the cause his followers believed he would gladly die to defend.

These two examples from Browning I have taken almost at random, and not because they are unusual in this respect, for this quality is the universal property of all real literature, and indeed is one of the tests by which real literature is to be identified. Any selection which it is worth while to give students at all must have this relation which I have called "algebraic," but of which the true name is imaginative; and it is certainly one of the important parts of anything which in a high sense is properly to be called "teaching" literature to make the scholars realize and appreciate this.

The next step is more difficult because far more subtle; and I confess frankly that it is all but

impossible to propose methods by which formal instruction may deal with it. The aim of literature is largely the attempt to produce a mood. The prime aim of the poet is to induce in the reader a state of feeling which will lead inevitably to the reception of whatever he offers in the same mood in which he offers it. In the simplest cases no instruction is needed, for even with school-boys a ringing metre, to take a simple and obvious example, has somewhat the same effect as the dashing swing of martial music; whoever comes under its influence falls insensibly into the frame of mind in which the ideas of the verse should be received. The thoughts are accepted in the exhilarated spirit in which they were written, and the effects of the metre are as great or greater than the influence of the literal meaning. It is a commonplace to call attention to the part which the melody of poetry or the rhythm of prose plays in the effect, but how to aid pupils to a responsiveness to this language of form is not the least of the problems of the teacher.