Among modern essayists, Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold stand preëminent, and they are already well established among the mightiest teachers of our age, and it may be, of many to come. Sure it is that teachers could not do better than put themselves within earshot of these resonant voices. Their heart-strings will vibrate and their intellects will be stretched to a full tension, not simply by the music, but by the truth which surges up and bursts into utterance. It is scarcely a figure of speech to say that the lightning flashes across their pages. The stinging rebuke of wrong, the noble ideals of righteousness, place them among the prophets whose tongues have been touched with fire from the altar.
Besides the historical, social, and moral tuition for teachers in literature, there are several other important culture effects in it. The deepest religious incentives are touched, nature in her myriad phases is observed with the eye of the poet and scientist, and the æsthetic side of poetry and rhythmic prose, its charm and graces of style, its music and eloquence, work their influence upon the reader. Literature is a harp of many strings, and happy is that teacher who has learned to detect its tones and overtones, who has listened with pleasure to its varied raptures, and has felt that expansion of soul which it produces.
Literature, in the sense in which we have been using it, has been called the literature of power, the literature of the spirit. That is, it has generative, spiritual life. It is not simple knowledge, it is knowledge energized, charged with potency. It is knowledge into which the poet has breathed the breath of life. The difference between bare knowledge and the literature of power is like the difference between a perfect statue in stone and a living, pulsing, human form.
One of the virtues of literature, therefore, is the mental stimulus, the joy, the awakening, the intensity of thought it spontaneously calls forth. Textbooks are usually a bore, but literature is a natural resource even in hours of weariness. Who would dream of enlivening leisure hours or vacation rest with text-books of grammar, or arithmetic, or history, or science? But the poet soothes with music, solemn or gay, according to our choice. If we go to the woods or lakes to escape our friends, we take one of the masters of song with us. After a day of toil and weariness, we can turn to "Evangeline," or "Lady of the Lake," or the "Vision of Sir Launfal," and soon we are listening to—
"The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,"
or the echo of the hunter's horn,—
"The deep-mouthed bloodhound's heavy bay
Resounded up the rocky way,
And faint, from farther distance borne,
Were heard the clanging hoof and horn."
At a time when we are not fit for the irksome and perfunctory preparation of text-book lessons, we are still capable of receiving abundant entertainment or hearty inspiration from Warner's "How I killed a Bear," or Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," or "Sleepy Hollow." Literature is recreation in its double sense. It gives rest and relief, and it builds up.
Teachers should shake themselves free from the conviction that severe disciplinary studies are the best part of education. They have their well-merited place. But there are higher spiritual fountains from which to draw. Read the lives of Scott, Macaulay, Irving, Hawthorne, and Emerson, and discover that the things we do with the greatest inward spontaneity and pleasure and ease are often the best.
Literature, both in prose and verse, is what the teacher needs, because our best authors are our best teachers in their method of handling their subjects. They know how to find access to the reader's mind by making their ideas attractive, interesting, and beautiful. They seem to know how to sharpen the edge of truth to render it more keen and incisive. They drive truth deeper, so that it remains embedded in the life and thought. Let a poet clothe an idea with strength and wing it with fancy, and it will find its way straight to the heart. First of all, nearly all our classic writers, especially those we use in the grades, handle their subjects from the concrete, graphic, picturesque side. They not only illustrate abundantly from nature and real things in life; they nearly always individualize and personify their ideas. Virtue to a poet is nothing unless it is impersonated. A true poet is never abstract or dry or formal in his treatment of a subject. It is natural for a literary artist, whether in verse or prose, to create pictures, to put all his ideas into life forms and bring them close to the real ones in nature. Homer's idea of wisdom is Minerva, war is Mars, strength is Ajax, skill and prudence are Ulysses, faithfulness is Penelope. Dickens does not talk about schoolmasters in general, but of Squeers. Shakespeare's idea of jealousy is not a definition, not a formula, but Othello. Those books which have enthralled the world, like "Robinson Crusoe," "Pilgrim's Progress," "Gulliver's Travels," "Arabian Nights," "Evangeline," "Ivanhoe," "Merchant of Venice,"—they deal with no form of classified or generalized knowledge; they give us no definitions, they are scenes from real life. They stand among realities, and their roots are down in the soil of things. They are persons hemmed in by the close environment of facts.