An instinct for what will nourish the ordinary man or woman as keen as your perception of what will be relished by the fastidious reader. Don’t insist that people must live on what you, or any one else, declare to be good for them. It is not for nothing that they “don’t know anything about literature, but know what they like.”
A confidence in the greater wisdom of the greatest number. Tarkington got it right. The public wants the best it is capable of understanding; its understanding may not be the highest understanding, but “the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.” Neither does the writer who never concedes anything. The public’s standard can’t always be wrong; the private standards can’t always be right.
Arnold Bennett says, quite rightly, that the classics are made and kept alive by “the passionate few.” But the business of high school teachers of English is not with the passionate few—who will look after themselves—but with the unimpassioned many. You can lead the student to Mr. Pope’s Pierian spring, but you cannot make him drink. Unless you can show him, in the Missourian sense, it’s all off. If you can’t tell what it is a girl likes in Grace S. Richmond how are you going to show her what she’ll like in Dickens? Unless you know what it is that “they” get out of these books they do read you won’t be able to bait the hook with the things you want them to read. Don’t you think you’ve got a lot to learn yourself? And mightn’t you do worse than sit down yourself and read attentively, at whatever personal cost, some of the best sellers?
It all goes back to the size of the teacher’s share of our common humanity. A person who can’t read a detective story for the sake of the thrills has no business teaching high school English. A person who is a literary snob is unfit to teach high school English. A person who can’t sense (better yet, share) the common feeling about a popular writer and comprehend the basis of it and sympathize a little with it and express it more or less articulately in everyday speech is not qualified to teach high school English.
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A word about writing “compositions” in high school English classes. Make ’em write stories instead. If they want to tackle thumbnail sketches or abstracter writing—little essays—why, let ’em. Abstractions in thought and writing are like the ocean—it’s fatally easy to get beyond your depth, and every one else’s. Read what Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch says about this in his Studies in Literature. Once in a while a theologian urges us to “get back to the Bible.” Well, there is one sense, at least, in which the world would do well to get back to the Bible, or to the Old Testament, at any rate. As Gardiner points out in his The Bible as English Literature, it was the fortune or misfortune of ancient Hebrew that it had no abstractions. Everything was stated in terms of the five senses. There was no such word as “virtue”; you said “sweet smellingness” or “pleasant tastingness” or something like that. And everybody knew what you meant. Whereas “virtue” means anything from personal chastity to a general meritoriousness that nobody can define. The Greeks introduced abstract thinking and expression and some Germans blighted the world by their abuse.
What should enter into the training of high school teachers of English? Only humbleness, sanity, catholicity of viewpoint, humor, a continual willingness to learn, a continuous faith in the people—and undying enthusiasm. Only these—and the love of books.
LITERARY EDITORS
BY ONE OF THEM