The reading of prose may be treated in much the same way, bearing in mind the fact that the emotional element is less marked in prose, the appeal being rather to reason than to feeling. Such prose as has become a part of literature is, however, largely imaginative, and we have to teach the children not only to follow closely a train of reasoning and to criticise it, if need be, but also to appreciate the means by which the writer makes his thought vivid to us, what figures he uses, what light he flashes upon his subject. Some of Macaulay’s Essays, Addison’s Essays, Rasselas, and similar works may well be read at this stage for the sake of the training they give in the right use of language, the first element of literary cultivation.
The most advanced stage—the study of the history of literature.The teaching of a period of the history of literature is a matter on which only broad general principles can be laid down. Children of fourteen to sixteen can hardly be expected to realise clearly differences in style or treatment, or to be able to write criticisms on the poets of the period. With them, it will be best to make them acquainted with the lives of the chief writers, as far as may be necessary, and then to let them read as much as they can of their works. We can teach them to love choice expressions, to recognise beauty of thought, to appreciate true imagination. They may not be able to say why they like these things, but they need not like them the less for that. With older pupils, capable of taking in general ideas as to the drift of thought in any particular age, the period to be studied should be set against its historic background, the first lessons being devoted to discussion of the stage of cultivation reached at the time, and the influences which had tended to produce it. For instance, a course on the Elizabethan period would require introductory lessons on the Renaissance as it affected England, on the Reformation in its bearing on education and freedom of thought, on the discovery of America and the spirit of adventure connected with it, and on the social and political conditions of the times. With clear conceptions on these points to start from, it will be easy to follow the art movement in poetry during the period, the growth of the drama, the development of prose writing in its various branches, and the students will be in possession of information which will help them to understand why Spenser, Shakspere, Bacon and our Authorised Version belong to that age and to no other. Then the chief authors should be read as far as possible at first hand, and the very cheap editions which are published of all our classics make it easy for the class to come provided with their own books. It will not be possible to read many of the longer works through with the class, but selection can be made of the choicest passages, and these can be linked together by a short analysis of the rest.
During this stage the sense of style should be carefully cultivated. Differences in style may be shown by comparing examples of the treatment of similar themes by different writers; for instance, in poetry, “Lycidas,” Gray’s “Elegy,” Adonaïs, and Thyrsis, might be studied with this aim, while in prose, selected essays of Bacon, Cowley, Addison and Lamb might be used in the same way. Taste must also be trained, and it should be made as catholic as possible; each author should be enjoyed for his own special excellence, Dryden for his vigour and common-sense, no less than Sir Thomas Browne for his “moth-like flitting” in intellectual twilight.
A suggestion for reading-courses adapted for girls of different ages is subjoined. It is not, and could not be, in any sense complete, but it may serve to help those who have not yet had much experience to estimate the character and scope of the reading that may be expected from children of various ages. Except in the case of the youngest children, the choice of books has been made so as to include prose and poetry of different epochs, and thus make the intellectual outlook wider than it could be if the reading were restricted to the works of one particular age. A girl who had read through the books mentioned in this course, or any drawn up on similar lines, would have a fair all-round acquaintance with the best kind of literature by the time she was eighteen.
| Age. | ||
|---|---|---|
| 10-12. | 1st year. | Macaulay’s “Lays”; “Marmion”; Kingsley’s “Heroes”; Keary’s “Heroes of Asgard”. |
| 2nd year. | “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha”; “Enoch Arden”; “Ancient Mariner”; Lamb’s “Tales from Shakspere”; “Ivanhoe”. | |
| 12-14. | 1st year. | “Midsummer Night’s Dream”; “Lady of the Lake”; “Deserted Village”; “Gulliver’s Travels”; “Kenilworth”. |
| 2nd year. | “Merchant of Venice”; “Childe Harold”; “Morte d’Arthur”; “Vicar of Wakefield”; Essays from the “Spectator”. | |
| 14-16. | 1st year. | “As You Like It”; “Henry V.”; Gray’s “Elegy”; “The Princess”; “Esmond”; some of the “Essays of Elia”. |
| 2nd year. | “Faerie Queene,” book i.; “Julius Cæsar”; Milton’s “Minor Poems”; Macaulay’s Essays on “Clive” andon “Mme. d’Arblay”; Ruskin’s “Sesame and Lilies”. | |
| 16-18. | 1st year. | “Macbeth”; “Paradise Lost,” books i. and ii.; “The Holy Grail”; “Areopagitica”; Burke’s “Speeches on America”. |
| 2nd year. | “Hamlet”; “Essay on Man”; “Selections from Wordsworth”; Bacon’s “Essays”; “Rasselas”; Carlyle, “The Heroas Poet and the Hero as Man of Letters”. | |
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.
By Dorothea Beale.
The third division of Part I. has to do with man as subject, a person, self-conscious, related to other persons and to One All-embracing Personality in whom all live and move and have their being. I am to treat the subject from an intellectual point of view—religion, ethics, philosophy.
Sphere of school instruction.No school, and especially no day-school for girls, is responsible for the whole of the religious education. The school is the link between infancy and mature life, between the home and the world, the secular and the spiritual. The school has to systematise instruction, and bring it to bear on the daily tasks, on the social life, on the developing character; to make the secular and religious life one organic whole.
We have to teach our pupils, so that they may know the truth, feel nobly, and hence act rightly. We have to cultivate the power of thought by instruction, to purify the emotions by the teachings of history and poetry including the Bible and the utterances of heroic and saintly lives, to strengthen the character by the discipline of the mind, heart, will.