John Goulding would not be considered in our day a remarkable pedagogist and has not bequeathed his name to a system of education; yet he presents many traits of the true teacher, and these details of his life are pertinent to our question.
The true commentator, whose suggestion we see in the Cork schoolmaster, will not be a philologist, but will use philology; he will not be a grammarian, but he will refuse no point of grammar that will help. He will press every science into service, but he will be the slave of none. He will remember that his supreme object in teaching is not to compose a dictionary of antiquities nor to collect extracts for rhetoric or examples for grammar. His object rather is and should be to bring the pupil to the text, to bring the mind of the author to the mind of the reader. Away from dictionary and grammar, away from footnote and appendix, back to the text, should be the teacher’s cry. The text should be the center upon which every source of information should be focused, not the center from which to radiate to the cheerless circumference of specializations. We do not contend for superficiality, for slipshod grammar, for inaccurate erudition. Thoroughness, care, accuracy, must rule in the classroom. We are simply for liberal education, which opposes early specialization in courses and must equally oppose it in the teaching of literature.
The study of the classics should key up the whole intellectual apparatus. It should sharpen the critical faculties, warm the imagination, cultivate the judgment, develop the taste, ennoble the appreciation, exercise, partially at least, the reasoning faculty, and finally endow the student with perfected powers of expression. To subordinate literature to any one of the swarm of sciences that sprang into life last century is to limit its efficiency and degrade it as a means of general culture.
The teacher, however, must not look for an infallible recipe in this matter. He cannot expect to stir up interest in the pupils by any prescribed formula, by a rigid system of handling the text. A scheme of suggestions may be drawn up, topics for discussion or observation may be arranged. Such devices are helpful, but they should not become stereotyped, because they deaden when they are hard and fast. It is a mark of a crystal to settle into straight lines at fixed angles; it is characteristic of organisms to be yielding and pliable in their outlines, while they retain their life. The meaning is the life of the text, the meaning as it was in the author’s mind, with all the associations that it had for him. Let the meaning be the guide, and the explanation will not be dead. Let the teacher use systems and hints and topics and all other devices as helps to arrive at the sense and meaning, not as inflexible molds into which he must always pour his commentary. A chemist may have weighed and labeled all the constituent elements of a living cell, and he may even succeed in mingling them in such a way as to have all these elements in the very places they are in life, but his mixture will not have the principle of life, that wonderful, unanalyzable bond that unites into one organism, permeates and vivifies the separate atoms and molecules. Because his analysis is complete and perfect, it does not follow that his synthesis will be complete and perfect. Neither may a teacher expect to get the synthesis of a vital, interesting commentary from the detailed formula of the literary laboratory. He must have his finger on the pulse; he must have seized the beating, warm heart; he must have grasped the permeating, vivifying soul of his author, if he would make his commentary living, and there is no other way to the heart blood of an author, except by loving, enthusiastic meditation of his full meaning.
I remember the first time in class that Homer ceased to be for me an example factory for grammar or a shop for Grecian antiquities. We had been translating Homer and parsing Homer; we now began to read him. The change was as easy as it was pleasant. The teacher simply went back behind the dictionary and the grammar, behind the cases and the tenses, to the author’s meaning. He made us see the old priest of Apollo walking along the seashore. He made us realize the fact that he was coming to speak for his daughter. Our attention was called to the completeness and appropriateness of his little speech. In a word, we began to move in the poet’s world. We had used the grammar and dictionary to get there, but when we reached our destination, we alighted from the train. We were bound for the land of Homer, not for that of Goodwin or Liddell & Scott, and the sooner we left our dusty, noisy cars, the better for us. Our professor knew the translation and knew the grammar, but he had left them behind him. He was on higher levels, and he threw away his mountain staff and his guide rope. We were with him there, and we entered into his enthusiasm for the broad view before us. Homer had been for us a venerable mausoleum of well-preserved and dignified, but very dead mummies. His enthusiasm let the life and light into that ancient tomb, and the mummies took off their wraps and lived and moved. From that day of resurrection until the present, Homer has lived for me; from that time I have heard the Homeric heart beat and felt the Homeric pulse throb.
Nor need the teacher who follows these methods have fear that he is going wrong, or that he is neglecting the proper education of his pupils. He is achieving, too, concrete results, an achievement that must not be considered the monopoly of science. Science may not supplant literature in the school-room. It would be a sad day for both if ever it did. As regards observation and induction, it has not been our wish to protest against the use of these methods, but rather against the limiting of their scope. To observe grammar only or archeology or philology and neglect the author’s meaning is as ridiculous as to observe the paint and not the picture, to put a microscope to the marble and not notice the statue. We do not want less development, rather we want more. Develop the powers of observation, but do not think that the only powers are the senses. The world of imagination and the world of thought offer wider fields for observation than the world of external sense. The horizon of the mind is not restricted to the sky line that narrows the vision of the eye.
If you train the powers of observation in the laboratory by asking the pupil to see, to touch, to taste, to smell, train them, too, in the classroom, by asking them to listen to the harmony of a sentence, to trace out the development of a thought, to appreciate the wit, the beauty, the sublimity of a passage. There was observation and training of the powers of observation before the test tube was blown or the dynamo was wound. Science has opened up new and wonderful worlds, not one of which would we see closed; but the lands of literature have not ceased for that reason to be inviting, and the soul, wearied with facts and hampered with figures, gladly escapes into the restful regions of higher and ampler realities.
The crossing of the borders of mere expression, the living and moving in the realms of meaning, the appreciative following of an author’s mind in all journeyings, may not develop grammarians or philologists or ethnologists or archeologists. Perhaps it is not the life-work of classical literature to stock the market with such commodities. The student who travels with a master-mind through the land of thought, now captivated with a view just under his eyes, again catching a glimpse of some far-off scene, all the more glorious in promise, because it lacks definiteness of detail, such a one may turn out to be more of a tourist than a local antiquarian and may suffer some inconveniences in consequence. He will be set right by the local antiquarian on names and dates connected with some obscure town, but in turn he will convey to his learned friend some ideas on the relative importance of localities and on the topography of the whole country. The tourist will not be provincial or municipal or suburban. He will not mistake his native hamlet for the world or make it the sole standard of excellence. The tourist will give you a map; the local antiquarian will draw up a surveyor’s chart, with the number of inches to the grade and the number of feet to the surface. Should not the teacher of literature consider it his duty to encourage the tourist, to introduce the student into the world of meaning, and not to keep him with theodolite and the leveling-rod along the borders of expression, counting words, measuring phrases, or drawing up lifeless charts of tabulated facts? When the student has come home from his travels, he may, if he chooses, lay aside his guide book, and, having seen the world, confine his energies to mastering a portion of it. If, however, he should have brought home from his wanderings nothing more than a love of literature and all that means, will his teacher’s life have been in vain? John Goulding of Cork might be considered not entirely useless, if he gave us no more than Justin McCarthy, who thus describes the results of his master’s work:
“I do not venture to say that Mr. Goulding’s method of teaching was directly adapted to create a thoroughly scholastic knowledge of Greek and Latin, and I do not know whether his pupils would have been likely by means of his instruction alone to take honors in any university competition, but I know that it made all of us, who had a taste for such, ready and fluent readers in Greek and Latin and as familiar with most of the Greek and Latin poets as with Shakespeare and Keats. It was in truth literary rather than scholastic instruction.”