After imagination and actual feeling on the part of both student and teacher, the next best means of educating emotions is the stimulating of action, especially in the way of original self-expression through the written and spoken word. One of the happy tendencies of our modern education is the restoring of oral expression to its former high place.
These means just mentioned will be helpful in any subject of the curriculum, but the principal instrument in the schools for training the emotions will be literature. Literature is the embodiment of human emotions, in story, in essay, poem, and speech. The schools must hold on to the teaching of literature. They must make a stand against the imperialism of facts and so-called practical subjects. The schools must never forget that it is at least just as practical to have a heart in life as to have a head. A modern French scholar has said: “Humanities and letters are man himself, to remove them from education, it would be necessary to commence by taking man from man.”
Instruction in trades is a knack, not an education of man. A savage can learn to run an automobile, and there are many today running automobiles, but a savage does not enjoy literature or produce literature. Science has its center outside of man, it is impersonal and unemotional. Literature is human, is personal, it appeals to the heart which must not be starved while the head is stuffed.
But even when the teachers of literature have the works of man in their hands, they must not rob them of all emotions by making their teaching of them historical only, or analytical only or theoretical only, lowering Macbeth to a footnote in Scottish history or to an argument for the theory of the romantic movement or to a dissertation on the psychology of temptation. Literature must be taught as literature, not as history, not as ethics. Literature should be taught as an art, not as a science. The teacher should keep self-expression in view. The teacher will consider the work of literature as the expression of a man. Before the class the masterpiece of literature will grow and crystallize into unity. The students will watch its creation; they will reflect the light from the eyes of an enthusiastic teacher; they will grasp the truth vividly and emotionally; they will be thrilled with the truth that has taken shape in their teacher’s imagination, that has been dramatized before them in suggestive detail, that will teach the students themselves how to think, how to imagine, how to find for the embodied truth a local habitation and a name, how to express themselves in words which fascinate and inflame.
So will the emotions by their exercise be developed and by their expression be controlled. The world of the classroom is a little world and its tiny emotions are as dew-drops to a deluge, but for the young hearts in school the world of the classroom is a gigantic world and its slight emotions are adequate to teach beginners. For a dew drop may be a deluge for a violet and its very food and life.
XIII
KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM
This is not the time to drop Latin or Greek openly or under the subterfuge of optional electives. Colleges everywhere are crowded. Buildings are too small for the students; classes are too large for the professors. Now is the time to impose stricter conditions rather than to open wider the doors to colleges, and now is the proper time to restore the classical languages, and especially Greek, if not to favor, because knowledge maketh a bloody entrance, and its weapons are resented, at least to respectable toleration, by teaching them in the right way. Do not empty the baby with the bath, but do draw off the stagnant waters and let the bright showers sparkle and sing and refresh. Don’t throw out Greek, but do teach Greek as literature, as the art of self-expression, as a practical and permanent possession of the student through appreciation and through composition in his own language.
Greek authors used to be put in the students’ hands with a Latin paraphrase. In Jesuit schools the explanation of the author included a translation which might be dictated to the class. This was done because in Latin, and especially in Greek, which was not the language to be used in life, the proper and real work began after the interpretation was known. That proper work was artistic appreciation and artistic reproduction in one’s own language, formerly Latin and now various languages. Rather than cast out Greek, furnish the students with Loeb or Jebb or Murray or Lang, shorten grammatical drill, and then center attention on the appreciation and the reproduction of the finest literary art of all ages, exacting compositions written and spoken in the student’s own language. This is not a revolutionary proposal, the system now prevalent is revolutionary; but it is a proposal to relegate to the university the specialism and scientific handling of literature, and an earnest plea to retain or restore to the classics, especially Greek, their age-old method, proper to the general training of academy and of college and profitable to every student if the art of speaking and writing is of lifelong utility.
The teaching of literature has a handicap which is not found in the teaching of other arts. A painter must know some practical facts about preparing and applying paints, but he need not know the whole chemistry of pigments or the physics of colors. The sculptor must choose the right kind of marble, but he does not take a course in geology. In all arts except literature the contact with the artist’s work is almost immediate. But in literature a language must be mastered, and in mastering that language a thousand sciences have obtruded themselves between the student and the masterpiece. Gustav Foch of Leipsic published some years ago a catalog of dissertations printed in Germany during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The catalog, which was by no means complete, containing only the items he was prepared to furnish, listed 27,000 titles. This formidable number concerned itself entirely with the Greek and Roman writers and embodied special studies on the history, the evolution, the text, the erudition of classical literature. Practically nothing of this immense flood of special dissertations touched on the art of literature.
Now, if all this tremendous erudition were left to the university, where it properly belongs, not much harm would be done; but unhappily the study of literature as a science has almost completely excluded its study as an art. The small school of Dissen, Rehdantz and Blass, who represented in Germany the artistic appreciation of Greek literature, was submerged by the immensely greater number of scientific investigators. The classical poets, with the exception of Homer, fared better than the prose authors; but all literature, instead of being a help to the art of composition, was subordinated to establishing a theory or to exemplifying a generalization.