Art principles in literature

by Francis P. Donnelly

Life is full to the brim with emotions. Not war only nor political rallies nor the excited throngs at sports are vibrant with emotion, but there is not a single act of life which has not some emotion, quiet or intense, as its source, its companion and its effect. Man ought to be ruled by cold reason, but he responds to feelings and succumbs to feelings.

Today more than ever in the history of the world is emotionalism rampant. Civilization has made mankind a crowd. We touch elbows with the world. The Egyptian hermit has now “the privacy of a goldfish in a glass bowl.” An individual by himself may indeed deliberate and philosophize, but a crowd feels and acts. As soon as it stops cheering, it begins to disintegrate into thinking individuals, who creep silently back to the hermitage of home. The war, with its drives of all kinds, the elections, the athletic contests, have made us familiar with the nature of a crowd. The mob is a high-pressure crowd, and the feelings which burn in the crowd explode violently in a mob. Civilization has brought mankind into the closeness of a crowd, but not yet to the explosive confusion of a mob.

War taught us too the great value of morale. What is morale? What is that light in the sky, that solid ground under foot, that winged buoyancy of the heart? Morale might be described as organized emotion. A crowd is fickle because it feels instead of reasons. Morale is the counter-force to fickleness. Emotions are awakened, are focused on a given point, are stabilized, and the result is morale. Courage hardens to pluck, duty flames into devotion and bravery is transfigured into heroism.

Life therefore is flooded with emotion, all the way from every action of the individual up to the responsive crowd, yielding to panic, exploding into violence or steadied by morale. What then is education doing for the emotions? Whether education be considered a development of the individual capacities, or an adjustment of man to the community, education should not neglect the emotions. The controlling tendencies, however, of the modern school would seem to ignore or belittle emotions. Modern schools pride themselves on being practical and scientific. They have become more immersed in matter than in man. They are materialistic in the wide sense, or naturalistic, but they are less and less humanistic. Three great fields lie before the spirit of man, the field of truth, the field of beauty and the field of good. No traveler can reach beauty and good except through truth, but education seems to think its work is done if it travels the regions of truth and ignores the regions of beauty and good.

All education formerly could be divided into two stages, the earlier of preparation, the later of application. The individual was taught to speak and write and was equipped with the general information necessary to all. He who was able to speak and write was able to express himself, and self-expression, which argued that man’s powers were working normally, was the satisfactory goal in the first stage of education. After the development of the individual came his application to the study of his life-work in professional schools and universities.

In the former of these two stages, as self-expression was the end, language was the chief and almost exclusive means. Sciences were relegated to the university and informational subjects were left strictly subordinated, and the whole course was predominately humanistic. Modern education has profoundly changed this simple arrangement. The university method of education and electivism and specialization have been advanced to college, to high school and to grade school. Many natural sciences have been systematized and brought into early classes. The university chemistry and physics of fifty years ago are now in the grades. Besides professional courses, pre-medical, pre-law, pre-divinity, pre-engineering, pre-journalism, and in general pre-professional studies are in our schools or at the doors. The trades are not behind the professions. The million trades which concern themselves with the production of raw material or with the manufacture of raw material into finished products or with the distribution of finished products, all these are knocking at the door or looking in the window of our school. Nor is that all. As the professions want pre-professional and the trades pre-trade courses, so the state demands pre-citizen courses in civic and hygienics and military tactics, and the home exacts pre-family courses in eugenics and many domestic sciences. Do not close your curriculum list yet. The profession, the trade, the home, the state are not all, and to leave out religion, which calls for pre-religious courses in private schools, we have the whole field of sport and play in pre-dancing, pre-ball-playing, and at last pre-movies. To make the conquest of the practical complete, it is seriously advocated by a special committee of the N. E. A. that this bewildering multiplicity of sciences, professions, trades, civic, domestic and amusement courses should be begun at the junior high school or seventh grade.

There is the contrast. Life is emotional. The early schools that used to be devoted chiefly to writing and speaking, are now crowded with a multiplicity of fact subjects, and even language and literature, the most humanistic and emotional subjects of our courses, are taught theoretically by university and scientific methods. In the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, which did not differ essentially from other systems, four years of the lower schools were given to correct expression of the truth, one year to the element of interest, or beauty, in expression, and one whole year to the element of force, or good, in expression. These two latter classes were called humanities and rhetoric and correspond to the present freshman and sophomore classes in Jesuit colleges.

The reason why a whole year was given to the elements of interest and force in self-expression is found in the twofold nature of emotions. One set of emotions arises from the apprehension of good or avoidance of evil. Another set arises from the perception of the novel, humorous and beautiful. These latter comprehend the emotions of surprise, wonder, delight, awe, in general, the esthetic emotions. The other emotions, called appetitive, include love and hate, with desire and fear, joy and sadness, pity and anger and many others.

Fortunately for the teacher the teaching of emotions is somewhat simplified by the fact that both kinds of emotions respond, not to abstract truth but to truth in the concrete and concrete truth takes on beauty or good and awakens emotions through the imaginations of teacher and student. Teachers who themselves imagine will awaken emotions and educate emotions by exercising them. Teachers who imagine will make pupils imagine by making them translate all truth from the abstract to the concrete. The perpetual question on the lips of the teacher, “For instance?” will embody truth in the concrete, exercise students in imagination and make truth emotional and abiding.

Interesting and enthusiastic teachers are always training emotions. Emotion is not imparted by instruction; it is kindled by contact. Teachers who have their subjects transferred from dead books to their warm, living imaginations, will be interesting, will be moving. They will excite surprise and wonder by novelty and beauty of presentation. They will make their classes expand with love or shrink in horror at the pictures of good or evil.