Talks on Teaching Literature

by Arlo Bates

It would be interesting to present to pupils who have finished the study of the college requirements half a dozen brief selections, some prose and some poetry, but all printed in solid paragraphs. The number of students who could accurately and confidently distinguish in every case would be a not unfair test of the extent to which the distinction is understood.

Teachers probably fail to make this matter clear because they not unnaturally assume that of course any intelligent lad in his teens must know the distinction between prose and poetry. Natural as such an assumption may be, however, it is often—indeed, I am tempted to say generally—wrong. The chief business of the modern teacher is after all the instructing of pupils in things which they would naturally be supposed to know already. It is certainly safer never to assume in any grade that a student knows anything whatever until he has given absolute proof. The weakest points in the education of the modern student are certainly those which are continually taken for granted.

One of the most serious obstacles in the way of bringing young people to understand technical excellence and to appreciate literary value is the difficulty of having school-work done with proper deliberation. It is doubtful if any process in education can profitably be hurried; it is certain that nothing of worth can be done in the study of literature which is not conducted in a leisurely manner. The first care of an instructor in this delicate

and difficult branch must be to insure a genial atmosphere: an atmosphere of tranquillity and of serenity. No matter how tall a heap of prescribed books may block the way to the end of the school year, each masterpiece that is dealt with should be treated with deference and an amount of time proportioned not to its number of pages but to the speed with which the class can assimilate its worth and beauty. If worst comes to worst, I would have a teacher say honestly to his pupils: "We have taken up almost all of the term by treating what we have studied as literature instead of huddling through it as a mechanical task. For the sake of examinations we are forced to crowd the other books in. The process is not fair to them or to you; so do not make the mistake of supposing that this is the proper way of treating real books." Children who have been properly trained will understand the situation and will appreciate the justice of the proposition.

In this connection is of interest the remark of an undergraduate who said that he obtained his first impression of style and of the effectiveness of words from translating. "I suppose the truth is," he explained with intelligence, "that in English I never read slowly enough to get anything more than the story or what was said. When I was grubbing things out line by line and word by word I at last got an idea of what my teachers had meant when they talked about the effect of the choice of words." Many of us can look back to the days

when we learned grammar from Latin rather than from English, although we had been over much the same thing in our own tongue. In the foreign language we had to go deliberately and we had to apply the principles we learned. Only when the student is treating literature so slowly and thoroughly that these conditions are reproduced does he come to any comprehension of style or indeed of the real value of literature.

Readers of all ages naturally and normally read anything the first time for the intellectual content: for the story, for the information, for that meaning, in short, which is the appeal to the intellectual comprehension. The great majority are entirely satisfied to go no farther. They do not, indeed, perceive the reason for going farther; and they are too often left in ignorance of the fact that they have entirely missed the qualities which entitle what they have read to be considered literature in the higher sense.

In this they are often encouraged, moreover, by the unhappy practice of making paraphrases. The paraphrasing of masterpieces is to me nothing less than a sacrilege. It degrades the work of art in the mind of the child, and contradicts the fundamental principle that poetry exists solely because it expresses what cannot be adequately said in any other way. A paraphrase bears the same relation to a lyric, for instance, that a drop of soapy water does to the iridescent bubble of which it was once the film. The old cry against the selection of

passages from Milton for exercises in parsing should be repeated with triple force against the use of literature as material for children to translate from the words of the poet into their own feeble phraseology. The parsing was by far the lesser evil. It is often necessary to have an oral explanation of difficult passages; but this should be always expressly presented as simply a means to help the child to get at the real significance of a lyric, a sort of ladder to climb by. Any paraphrasing and explaining should be carefully held to its place as an inadequate and unfortunate necessity. The class should never be allowed to think that any paraphrase really represents a poet, or that it is to be regarded in any light but that of apologetic tolerance.

In this matter of workmanship, as everywhere else in the process of dealing with literature, much depends upon the character of the class. Much must always be left unaccomplished, and much is always wisely left even unattempted. Often the teacher must go farther in individual cases than would naturally have been the case in a given grade because questions will be asked which lead on. It is often necessary, for instance, to explain that the crowding forward of events made unavoidable by stage conditions is not a violation of truth, but a conforming to the truth of art. A lad will object that things could not move forward so rapidly, and it is then wise to show him that dramatic truth does not include faithfulness to time, but may