The number of courses that can be offered in the department will depend in some cases upon the relative size of the faculty and the student body. For in no other subject is it more important, especially in the later years, that the classes or sections should be small enough to allow some intimate personal touch between professor and student. It may be safely said that no college department of English literature is well officered or equipped that does not furnish at least four or five year-long courses of instruction. And certainly no student can maintain for four years such an acquaintance with the best specimens of a great literature without gaining something of that broad intelligence, heightened imagination, and just appreciation of whatever is best in nature and in human life, which combine in what we call culture.
Undergraduate vs. graduate teaching of English literature
Throughout this paper it has been assumed that what has been termed appreciation—that is, the ability to understand and enjoy the best things in literature—is the one central purpose to which all efforts must be subservient, in the teaching of English literature. But it should be remembered, as stated at the outset, that this paper has to do with the college undergraduate only, the candidate for the bachelor's degree. In the university, and to some extent in the graduate courses of the college leading to the master's degree, the subjects and methods of teaching may well be very different. Studies in comparative literature, studies of literary origins, the investigation of perplexed or controverted questions in the life or work of an author, the study and elucidation of the work of an unknown or little-known writer—all these and many other similar matters may very properly be the subjects of specialized graduate study. But they will rarely be found of most profit to undergraduate classes.
Caleb T. Winchester
Wesleyan University
XIX
THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH COMPOSITION[[60]]
Language an index of mental development
"Deeds, not words," is a platitude—a flat statement which reduces the facts of the case to an average, and calls that truth. It is absurd to imply, as does this old truism, that we may never judge a man by his words. Words are often the most convenient indices of education, of cultivation, and of intellectual power. And what is more, a man's speech, a man's writing, when properly interpreted, may sometimes measure the potentialities of the mind more thoroughly, more accurately, than the deeds which environment, opportunity, or luck permit. It is hard enough to take the intellectual measure even of the makers of history by their acts, so rapidly does the apparent value of their accomplishments vary with changing conceptions of what is and what is not worth doing. It is infinitely more difficult to judge in advance of youths just going out into the world by what they do. Their words, which reveal what they are thinking and how they are thinking, give almost the only vision of their minds; and "by their words ye shall know them" becomes not a perversion, but an adaptation of the old text. Would you judge of a boy just graduated entirely by the acts he had performed in college? If you did, you would make some profound and illuminating mistakes.