The Novel and the Common School

by Charles Dudley Warner

The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the silk-weavers of Lyons, they are made for the central establishment on individual looms at home; but if demand for the sort of goods furnished at present continues, there is no reason why they should not be produced, even more cheaply than they are now, in great factories, where there can be division of labor and economy of talent. The shoal of English novels conscientiously reviewed every seventh day in the London weeklies would preserve their present character and gain in firmness of texture if they were made by machinery. One has only to mark what sort of novels reach the largest sale and are most called for in the circulating libraries, to gauge pretty accurately the public taste, and to measure the influence of this taste upon modern production. With the exception of the novel now and then which touches some religious problem or some socialistic speculation or uneasiness, or is a special freak of sensationalism, the novels which suit the greatest number of readers are those which move in a plane of absolute mediocrity, and have the slightest claim to be considered works of art. They represent the chromo stage of development.

They must be cheap. The almost universal habit of reading is a mark of this age—nowhere else so conspicuous as in America; and considering the training of this comparatively new reading public, it is natural that it should insist upon cheapness of material, and that it should require quality less than quantity. It is a note of our general intellectual development that cheapness in literature is almost as much insisted on by the rich as by the poor. The taste for a good book has not kept pace with the taste for a good dinner, and multitudes who have commendable judgment about the table would think it a piece of extravagance to pay as much for a book as for a dinner, and would be ashamed to smoke a cigar that cost less than a novel. Indeed, we seem to be as yet far away from the appreciation of the truth that what we put into the mind is as important to our well-being as what we put into the stomach.

No doubt there are more people capable of appreciating a good book, and there are more good books read, in this age, than in any previous, though the ratio of good judges to the number who read is less; but we are considering the vast mass of the reading public and its tastes. I say its tastes, and probably this is not unfair, although this traveling, restless, reading public meekly takes, as in the case of the reading selected in the newspapers, what is most persistently thrust upon its attention by the great news agencies, which find it most profitable to deal in that which is cheap and ephemeral. The houses which publish books of merit are at a disadvantage with the distributing agencies.

Criticism which condemns the common-school system as a nurse of superficiality, mediocrity, and conceit does not need serious attention, any more than does the criticism that the universal opportunity of individual welfare offered by a republic fails to make a perfect government. But this is not saying that the common school does all that it can do, and that its results answer to the theories about it. It must be partly due to the want of proper training in the public schools that there are so few readers of discrimination, and that the general taste, judged by the sort of books now read, is so mediocre. Most of the public schools teach reading, or have taught it, so poorly that the scholars who come from them cannot read easily; hence they must have spice, and blood, and vice to stimulate them, just as a man who has lost taste peppers his food. We need not agree with those who say that there is no merit whatever in the mere ability to read; nor, on the other hand, can we join those who say that the art of reading will pretty surely encourage a taste for the nobler kind of reading, and that the habit of reading trash will by-and-by lead the reader to better things. As a matter of experience, the reader of the namby-pamby does not acquire an appetite for anything more virile, and the reader of the sensational requires constantly more highly flavored viands. Nor is it reasonable to expect good taste to be recovered by an indulgence in bad taste.

What, then, does the common school usually do for literary taste? Generally there is no thought about it. It is not in the minds of the majority of teachers, even if they possess it themselves. The business is to teach the pupils to read; how they shall use the art of reading is little considered. If we examine the reading-books from the lowest grade to the highest, we shall find that their object is to teach words, not literature. The lower-grade books are commonly inane (I will not say childish, for that is a libel on the open minds of children) beyond description. There is an impression that advanced readers have improved much in quality within a few years, and doubtless some of them do contain specimens of better literature than their predecessors. But they are on the old plan, which must be radically modified or entirely cast aside, and doubtless will be when the new method is comprehended, and teachers are well enough furnished to cut loose from the machine. We may say that to learn how to read, and not what to read, is confessedly the object of these books; but even this object is not attained. There is an endeavor to teach how to call the words of a reading-book, but not to teach how to read; for reading involves, certainly for the older scholars, the combination of known words to form new ideas. This is lacking. The taste for good literature is not developed; the habit of continuous pursuit of a subject, with comprehension of its relations, is not acquired; and no conception is gained of the entirety of literature or its importance to human life. Consequently, there is no power of judgment or faculty of discrimination.

Now, this radical defect can be easily remedied if the school authorities only clearly apprehend one truth, and that is that the minds of children of tender age can be as readily interested and permanently interested in good literature as in the dreary feebleness of the juvenile reader. The mind of the ordinary child should not be judged by the mind that produces stuff of this sort: "Little Jimmy had a little white pig." "Did the little pig know Jimmy?" "Yes, the little pig knew Jimmy, and would come when he called." "How did little Jimmy know his pig from the other little pigs?" "By the twist in his tail." ("Children," asks the teacher, "what is the meaning of 'twist'?") "Jimmy liked to stride the little pig's back." "Would the little pig let him?" "Yes, when he was absorbed eating his dinner." ("Children, what is the meaning of 'absorbed'?") And so on.

This intellectual exercise is, perhaps, read to children who have not got far enough in "word-building" to read themselves about little Jimmy and his absorbed pig. It may be continued, together with word-learning, until the children are able to say (is it reading?) the entire volume of this precious stuff. To what end? The children are only languidly interested; their minds are not awakened; the imagination is not appealed to; they have learned nothing, except probably some new words, which are learned as signs. Often children have only one book even of this sort, at which they are kept until they learn it through by heart, and they have been heard to "read" it with the book bottom side up or shut! All these books cultivate inattention and intellectual vacancy. They are—the best of them—only reading exercises; and reading is not perceived to have any sort of value. The child is not taught to think, and not a step is taken in informing him of his relation to the world about him. His education is not begun.

Now it happens that children go on with this sort of reading and the ordinary text-books through the grades of the district school into the high school, and come to the ages of seventeen and eighteen without the least conception of literature, or of art, or of the continuity of the relations of history; are ignorant of the great names which illuminate the ages; have never heard of Socrates, or of Phidias, or of Titian; do not know whether Franklin was an Englishman or an American; would be puzzled to say whether it was Ben Franklin or Ben Jonson who invented lightning—think it was Ben Somebody; cannot tell whether they lived before or after Christ, and indeed never have thought that anything happened before the time of Christ; do not know who was on the throne of Spain when Columbus discovered America—and so on. These are not imagined instances. The children referred to are in good circumstances and have had fairly intelligent associations, but their education has been intrusted to the schools. They know nothing except their text-books, and they know these simply for the purpose of examination. Such pupils come to the age of eighteen with not only no taste for the best reading, for the reading of books, but without the ability to be interested even in fiction of the first class, because it is full of allusions that convey nothing to their minds. The stories they read, if they read at all—the novels, so called, that they have been brought up on—are the diluted and feeble fictions that flood the country, and that scarcely rise above the intellectual level of Jimmy and the absorbed pig.

It has been demonstrated by experiment that it is as easy to begin with good literature as with the sort of reading described. It makes little difference where the beginning is made. Any good book, any real book, is an open door into the wide field of literature; that is to say, of history—that is to say, of interest in the entire human race. Read to children of tender years, the same day, the story of Jimmy and a Greek myth, or an episode from the "Odyssey," or any genuine bit of human nature and life; and ask the children next day which they wish to hear again. Almost all of them will call for the repetition of the real thing, the verity of which they recognize, and which has appealed to their imaginations. But this is not all. If the subject is a Greek myth, they speedily come to comprehend its meaning, and by the aid of the teacher to trace its development elsewhere, to understand its historic significance, to have the mind filled with images of beauty, and wonder. Is it the Homeric story of Nausicaa? What a picture! How speedily Greek history opens to the mind! How readily the children acquire knowledge of the great historic names, and see how their deeds and their thoughts are related to our deeds and our thoughts! It is as easy to know about Socrates as about Franklin and General Grant. Having the mind open to other times and to the significance of great men in history, how much more clearly they comprehend Franklin and Grant and Lincoln! Nor is this all. The young mind is open to noble thoughts, to high conceptions; it follows by association easily along the historic and literary line; and not only do great names and fine pieces of literature become familiar, but the meaning of the continual life in the world begins to be apprehended. This is not at all a fancy sketch. The writer has seen the whole assembly of pupils in a school of six hundred, of all the eight grades, intelligently interested in a talk which contained classical and literary allusions that would have been incomprehensible to an ordinary school brought up on the ordinary readers and text-books.

But the reading need not be confined to the classics nor to the master-pieces of literature. Natural history—generally the most fascinating of subjects—can be taught; interest in flowers and trees and birds and the habits of animals can be awakened by reading the essays of literary men on these topics as they never can be by the dry text-books. The point I wish to make is that real literature for the young, literature which is almost absolutely neglected in the public schools, except in a scrappy way as a reading exercise, is the best open door to the development of the mind and to knowledge of all sorts. The unfolding of a Greek myth leads directly to art, to love of beauty, to knowledge of history, to an understanding of ourselves. But whatever the beginning is, whether a classic myth, a Homeric epic, a play of Sophocles, the story of the life and death of Socrates, a mediaeval legend, or any genuine piece of literature from the time of Virgil down to our own, it may not so much matter (except that it is better to begin with the ancients in order to gain a proper perspective) whatever the beginning is, it should be the best literature. The best is not too good for the youngest child. Simplicity, which commonly characterizes greatness, is of course essential. But never was a greater mistake made than in thinking that a youthful mind needs watering with the slops ordinarily fed to it. Even children in the kindergarten are eager for Whittier's "Barefoot Boy" and Longfellow's "Hiawatha." It requires, I repeat, little more pains to create a good taste in reading than a bad taste.