The thing of first importance to be prescribed is learning classical poetry by heart until its music has taken a hold on the learner. Introduce the boy to the varied field of lyric poetry and you have put before him one of the rarest and most abiding pleasures of life. Here his troubled heart may always find consolation. Nothing will bring him to a sense of his own personality with such a deft touch as a perfect lyric coming to him through his own voice. The next thing to look to is a right that is a fixed right of childhood and one that it is positively vicious to suppress, the right to the land of fairy life. A free range here will be meat and drink to any boy. Much sordidness and much selfishness in old age come to the man or woman who has not a cultivated imagination. Logic and cold facts are of precious little value in the fireside life of a family. The best things of that life are not reasoned out; but they are felt out and wondered out. Again, the great field of mythology that is so fundamentally linked to that of literature, and that is a capital mark of culture, should be open to the boy that he may roam about and wonder at its mysteries. Then he may as certainly come to own an "Age of Fable" as he must own a "Golden Treasury." And what a pair are these!
From these three fields the step will be to a knowledge and classification of books and their authors, what books to own, and how to take care of them. And to this working grasp of poetry and stories may be added a little of what is possible in history, biography, and personal essay. In this age of cheap and spurious book-making the reader must know standard editions without abridged and garbled texts. Even editors of hymn books do not hesitate to mutilate great hymns to suit their particular notions. This freedom may be a form of that exaggerated idea of personal privilege that was the gift of democracy in the past century. A good knowledge of fables and proverbial wisdom will certainly temper that notion. Such are some of the things that might be prescribed by the teacher and learned by the student. The field as thus given is limited, but the friends therein are dear friends. Nor are they to be exchanged for the new friends that may come through the advertising appeal, founded on the unsubstantial instinct for constant variety.
If enough idea of authority can ever be driven into the head of the American boy to put him into the attitude of a willing learner, good things may be looked for in habits of reading—provided the teacher be equal to the responsible task that is laid upon him. The habits of reading that measure the use of spare time, and in that way the character of the individual, will work for a more sane and less showy home life and through that for a community given to other than obtrusive and frivolous social life. What bundle of habits will serve its slave better than will this bundle? Or where is keener and more subdued pleasure to be found? Though books are a bloodless substitute for life, as Stevenson has well pointed out, we need some substitute in our hours of ease, and a good book does passing well for such a substitute; and this is especially true if the book be our favourite from the wonderful Waverley series and with it we can square about to the fire, snuff the candle, and let the rest of the world go spin.
CHAPTER III
THE LEARNING OF LYRIC POETRY
"These verses be worthy to keep a room in every man's memory: they be choicely good."
—From "The Complete Angler."
The teacher who is a workman skilled in his craft looks upon a few educational practices as being of intrinsic merit—through and through in an age of veneer and cheap imitation. Of these practices the one most fruitful under cultivation, when done with care and in moderation, is that of learning good poetry by heart. The sense of having truly learned a thing by heart, of having completely mastered it, is a most pleasant sense to have. And when the thing learned is one of the many perfect lyrics from the field of English poetry, a far-sighted judge who has lived and considered what is of most value to the individual is led to say: That is well and good. In some mysterious way this possession of a few choice poems makes for a rarer personality and gives that touch which can come only through a perfect work of art. By sheer force of intellect a man may become a cold, designing man of action and set plans on foot for the time being; but the power that is back of all great movements for civilization and culture is one that is grounded in feeling and constructive imagination. The proverbial songs of a nation are a greater force than are its laws. In one of his most entertaining essays, De Quincey points out that, when the intellect sets itself up in opposition to the feelings, one should always trust to the feelings. Normal instincts are worth more than syllogisms. The man who has attuned himself to the moods and impulses of lyric poetry is a safe man in action. Yet he is more than this; he has in him that which is the groundwork of fireside pleasures and of the joys of companionship. In other words, he is a man of cultivated imagination, and he can play in many moods.