by those who endeavor to get at its secrets.
Good reading is a vocal manifestation of responsiveness, on the part of the reader, to the hieroglyphic letter.
SUCH early training in reading as I have described, is the best preparation for the more elaborate expression demanded by the higher literature. And we shall not have a true, honest vocal interpretation of literature until we return to this early honest reading. I say 'return,' for, so far as my knowledge goes, there is a plentiful lack of it, at present, in primary schools—a lack somewhat due, no doubt, to the ever-increasing amount and variety of knowledge which students are compelled to acquire in the schools. There is no time left for education. He would be the ideal teacher who could induce a maximum amount of education on the basis of a minimum amount of acquirement. But just the reverse prevails. Acquirement is made the all in all, and education is left to take care of itself. The acquisition of knowledge, too, becomes a mere indulgence with thousands of people, in these days—an indulgence which renders them more and more averse to any of that independent activity of mind upon which education so largely depends.
I am quite surprised at what M. Ernest Legouvé says, in his 'Petit Traité de lecture à haute voix à l'usage des écoles primaires,' of the importance attached, in America, to reading aloud. In the very opening sentence of this work, he says, 'La lecture à haute voix compte, en Amérique, parmi les éléments les plus importants de l'instruction publique; elle est une des bases de l'enseignement primaire.' And elsewhere he calls upon the people of France to imitate the United States of North America, in making the art of reading aloud the very corner-stone of public education! Where could M. Legouvé have got this remarkable opinion of the high estimate, in this country, of reading aloud, as an educational agency? From whatever source he derived it, it is certainly most remote from the truth. What Sir Henry Taylor says of the neglect of the art of reading in England (Correspondence, edited by Professor Dowden, p. 225), is quite applicable to this country. After saying that he regards the reading of Shakespeare to boys and girls, if it be well read and they are apt, 'as carrying with it a deeper cultivation than anything else which can be done to cultivate them,' he adds, 'I often think how strange it is that amongst all the efforts which are made in these times to teach young people everything that is to be known, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, the one thing omitted is teaching them to read. At present, to be sure, it is a very rare thing to find any one who can teach it; but it is an art which might be propagated from the few to the many with great rapidity, if a due appreciation of it were to become current. The rage for lecturing would be a more reasonable rage if that were taught in lectures which can be conveyed only by voice and utterance, and not by books.'
Here, by the way, is indicated what the literary lecture should be. It is a comparatively easy thing to lecture about literary products and to deal out literary knowledge of various kinds, and cheap philosophy in regard to the relations of literature to time and place. A professor of literature might do this respectably well without much knowledge of the literature itself. But what students especially need is to be brought into direct relationship with literature in its essential, absolute character; so that the very highest form of literary lecturing is interpretative reading. Such reading brings home to sufficiently susceptible students what cannot be lectured about—namely, the intellectually indefinite element of a literary product. Much of what is otherwise done for students, in the way of lecturing, they could do quite as well for themselves.
'A book of criticism,' says Hume, 'ought to consist chiefly of quotations.' The same should be said of a literary lecture, with the important addition to the word 'quotations,' 'effectively read.'
To return from this digression, what seemed so strange to Sir Henry Taylor, is not so strange when it is considered that the dealing out of knowledge, in the schools, on the part of the teacher, and the acquiring of it on the part of students, leave no time for education of any kind except the little which is incident upon the imparting and the acquisition of various kinds of knowledge 'from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall.'
Perhaps the greatest danger to which education proper will be more and more exposed, in the future, will be the great increase of knowledge, in every department of thought. This may sound paradoxical; but with the increase of knowledge, the temptation will correspondingly increase to make the acquisition of the greatest possible amount of it, in schools, colleges, and universities, the leading aim. To give the student the fullest command of his faculties, should certainly be the prime object, to which the acquisition of knowledge should be subservient; but this object seems to be more and more lost sight of, while to cram his mind to the utmost, with vague, indefinite, and heterogeneous knowledge, is getting more and more to be, if not the sole, at any rate the chief, consideration. This state of things prevails from our lowest to our highest schools. We hear and read ad nauseam that the word 'education' means 'a drawing out.' This one etymology everybody knows, if he doesn't know any other. Lecturers and writers on education, and school circulars, keep reiterating it. There are certain truths so ding-donged in our ears that they lose all their vitality. One of these certainly is, that the word 'education' means 'a drawing out.' Sometimes a teacher at a school institute, after presenting this etymology, proceeds to present what he considers the best methods of ramming in!
There are schools, and their patrons think them excellent, which out-herod Herod in their slaughter of the Innocents. Sad, indeed, is it that the young are so debarred, as they are, by the tasks imposed upon them, from all sweet and quickening 'impressions before the letter.' 'As in Hood's exquisite parody of George Robins's advertisement,' says George Henry Lewes in his novel, Ranthorpe, 'the pump is enumerated as having "a handle within reach of the smallest child," so do our illustrious educators wish to place the pump of knowledge within reach of the meanest capacity, that infants may forego the mother's milk to drink of its Pierian spring.' The time must come, it is no doubt in the very far future,—there are no indications, at present, of its being in the near future,—when it will be a pedagogical question how to induce a maximum amount of education with a minimum amount of brain-slaughter.