Art principles in literature

by Francis P. Donnelly

System was looked upon in some sense as automatic. Such a widespread delusion, which is not yet fully dissipated, was the logical outcome of the mechanical explanation of the universe. The world had evolved along the lines of inflexible laws. Man was part of the machine, and though the mechanism was complicated in his case, yet it was nothing but mechanism after all. If system could run the universe without the help of personality, it would not be hard for it to run the little universe of man. The same reasoning would hold in a classroom. The teacher might be asked to touch the button, but the system would do the rest.

It would not seem to require much argumentation to show the fallacy of such a theory. Do we not all know that nothing in this world is wholly automatic? Motion is a function of personality. Perpetual motion in systems and organizations, that would dispense with personality, is just as absurd as the same proposal in the physical order. Nothing in this world will run of itself without personal coöperation. Somewhere there must be a living, breathing, responsible individual. We may have to travel a long way to find him, but we shall find him, the man behind the motion. It is so with machines; it is much more so with organizations and systems and laws; it is most of all so in education. Latin or German or physics or anything else without a teacher (cf. catalog of correspondence schools) are phrases that belong to the language of advertisement which has omitted from its ethics the chapter on lying. All success, all interest, all enthusiasm are harvests whose sowing is in a human head or human heart. Even the universe calls for the constantly applied force of omnipotence to keep it from disintegrating into nothingness and the watchfulness of Providence to prevent it from wrecking itself. While writers on education have been tracing the causes of the decrease of interest in the classics have they not been overlooking the necessary factor of personality?

The other depressing effect upon education exercised by the scientific atmosphere was the insistence upon concrete results, leading likewise to the elimination of human interest. Science said to every branch of knowledge, “Collect your data, classify your instances, make your deductions, enunciate your laws.” The literary classics were bade to stand and deliver. They had to have data and deductions and laws. Homer and Virgil, Demosthenes and Cicero became the chosen camping-ground of the specialists. The pupils that finished the Iliad with a taste developed, an imagination warmed, a soul uplifted, might be refused a degree. The pupil who had Homer undergo the surgical operations of specialism, who had him pigeon-holed, who had him weighed and counted, was the honor man of the class. He could write an essay on Homeric Æolisms or Homeric ship-building or Homeric word-building. He knew more about Homeric pottery than Homeric poetry. What if his heart never beat faster as he read; what if he was too busy measuring the length of Homeric swords or analyzing the metal of Homeric armor, to drink in the imaginative delight of battle, with Homeric peers, “far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,” he was scientific, he had some concrete results to show for his schooling, and he was the pet child of the century. Assets of the mind could not be weighed or measured; his doctor’s dissertation in his grip could. It contained just twenty-five thousand words, and weighed one pound and a half, and had a superficial area of about a hundred square yards.

The final outcome of the baneful influence of the scientific atmosphere is the almost complete perversion of the good old word, scholar. No one can lay claim now to the title scholarly, unless he is equipped with a formidable array of facts and figures. He must bristle with the fretful quills of half a hundred sciences. In the study of the classics he is so busy with the words of the text that he has not time for their meaning. When he has settled the conflicting claims of innumerable variant readings and all the arguments for the same, he has no leisure left for the old-fashioned practice of trying to appreciate the accepted reading. Scholarship is now a matter of memory, a something that deals with introductions, footnotes, excursuses and critical apparatuses. Plead guilty to an ignorance of all this, and you may be indulgently permitted to call yourself judicious, appreciative, discerning, capable of enjoying a literary masterpiece, but you could not presume to call yourself scholarly. Justin McCarthy, in an article about his old schoolmaster, alludes to the same fact. “I never knew a scholar,” he declares, “so thorough who was less of a pedant, but I ought to say, perhaps, that the general character of his teaching was not what would be called in our days scholarly.”

This steady elimination of the subjective element of education with the corresponding development of the objective side during the years of the nineteenth century, all tended to the extinction of the individual. Another factor also coöperated in achieving this result. The classes in school and college grew more numerous, and the schoolmaster became in turn a teacher, a professor, a lecturer. With each change he drew further away from his hearers. The greater the audience the weaker the personal note, the less individual the expression. The lecturer on a classical author must stray more from the text than the teacher. He is necessarily more general and hence more impersonal. He feels bound to give facts more than impressions. He is committed to the formulating of theories based on a dissection of the text, and shrinks from setting forth the feelings which a masterpiece excites. The lecturer tends to subordinate the author to his lecture, where the teacher’s more humble lot leads him to efface himself in the presence of the author.

This leads us to set forth the proper attitude of the teacher toward the text, and we could not begin the discussion better than by giving a further description of Justin McCarthy’s old schoolmaster.

“I have,” he wrote, in March, 1899, “the most delightful and tender memories of my dear old schoolmaster in Cork. He was not, indeed, the first schoolmaster I ever had, but he taught me all or put me in the way of learning all that I have ever known, and after this long lapse of time I feel as strongly as ever how much I owe him. His name was John Goulding, and he kept a school in the city of Cork, my birthplace.

“To make us understand what we were reading and enjoy it, to make us wish to read more and understand it better—such was the object of his whole method. There was very little of what is called ‘getting by heart’ in his system, unless when he wished to train memory merely for the sake of training it. When we were studying some Latin author he told us all about the author and the scenes described in the pages before us, and he invited all manner of questions on the subject. He showed us on the maps where the places were which the author was describing, and he illustrated the author’s meaning as if he were an artist illustrating a story.

“I do not know to describe his method of teaching better than by saying that it was literary rather than scholastic. His great desire was that a boy should be able to read Greek and Latin as easily as he read Shakespeare and Addison, and he regarded grammar as a necessary means to that end, but not as the end itself. He always took care that historical and geographical knowledge should work in with and illustrate our literary studies.

“I can only say for myself that whatever love of books I may have had I owe in the main to his teaching and to his influence, and I can say with literal truthfulness that throughout a busy life in public and in private his influence and teaching have always been with me and are with me still.”