Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram

Closely allied with the teaching of history and forming a link as it were with the teaching of English, is a branch of study at present unformulated and unknown, but, I am convinced, of great importance in education as a method of character development. Life has always focused in great personalities, and formal history has recognized the fact while showing little discretion, and sometimes very defective judgment, in the choices it has made. A past period becomes our own in so far as we translate it through its personalities and its art; the original documents matter little, except when they become misleading, as they frequently do, when read through contemporary spectacles. Now the great figures of a time are not only princes and politicians, conquerors and conspirators, they are quite as apt to be the knights and heroes and brave gentlemen who held no conspicuous position in Church or state. I think we need what might be called "The Golden Book of Knighthood"—or a series of text books adapted to elementary and advanced schools—made up of the lives and deeds (whether attested by "original documents," or legendary or even fabulous does not matter) of those in all times, and amongst all peoples, who were the glory of knighthood; the "parfait gentyl Knyghtes" "without fear and without reproach." Such for example, to go no farther back than the Christian Era, as St. George and St. Martin, King Arthur and Launcelot and Galahad, Charles Martel and Roland, St. Louis, Godfrey de Bouillon and Saladin, the Earl of Strafford, Montrose and Claverhouse, the Chevalier Bayard, Don John of Austria, Washington and Robert Lee and George Wyndham. These are but a few names, remembered at random; there are scores besides, and I think that they should be held up to honour and emulation throughout the formative period of youth. After all, they became, during the years when these qualities were exalted, the personification of the ideals of honour and chivalry, of compassion and generosity, of service and self-sacrifice and courtesy, and these, the qualifications of a gentleman and a man or honour, are, with the religion that fostered them, and the practice of that religion, the just objective of education.

Much of all this can even now be taught through a judicious use of the opportunities offered instructors in English, whether this is through the graded "readers" of elementary education, or the more extended courses in colleges and universities. Very frequently these opportunities are ignored, and will be until we achieve something of a new orientation in the matter of teaching English.

Now it may be I hold a vain and untenable view of this subject, but I am willing to confess that I believe the object of teaching English is the unlocking of the treasures of thought, character and emotion preserved in the written records of the tongue, and the arousing of a desire to know and assimilate these treasures on the part of the pupil. I am very sure that English should not be taught as a thing ending in "ology," not as an intricate science with all sorts of laws and rules and exceptions; not as a system whereby the little children of the Ghetto, and the offspring of Pittsburgh millionaires, and the spectacled infant elect of Beacon Hill may all be raised to the point where they can write with acceptable fluency the chiseled phrases of Matthew Arnold, the cadenced Latinity of Sir Thomas Browne, the sonorous measures of Bolingbroke or the distinguished and resonant periods of the King James Bible. Such an aim as this will always result in failure.

The English language is the great storehouse of the rich thought and the burning emotion of the English race, and all this, as it has issued out of character, works towards the development of character, when it is made operative in new generations. There is no other language but Latin that has preserved so great a wealth of invaluable things, and English is taught in order that it all may be more available through that appreciation that comes from familiarity. There is no nobler record in the world: from Chaucer down to the moderns is one splendid sequence of character-revelations through a perfect but varied art, for literature is also a fine art, and one of the greatest of all. Is it not fair to say that the chief duty of the teacher of English is to lead the student to like great literature, to find it and enjoy it for himself, and through it to come to the liking of great ideas?

In the old days there was an historical, or rather archaeological, method that was popular; also an analytical and grammarian method. There was also the philological method which was quite the worst of all and had almost as devastating results as in the case of Latin. It almost seems as though English were being taught for the production of a community of highly specialized teachers. No one would now go back to any of those quaint and archaic ways digged up out of the dim and remote past of the XIXth century. We should all agree, I think, that for general education, specialized technical knowledge is unimportant and scientific intensive methods unjustifiable. For one student who will turn out a teacher there are five hundred that will be just simple voters, wage-earners, readers of the Saturday Evening Post and the New Republic, members of the Fourth Presbyterian Church or the Ethical Society, and respectable heads of families. The School of Pedagogy has its own methods (I am given to understand), but under correction I submit they are not those of general education. Shall I put the whole thing in a phrase and say that the object of teaching English is to get young people to like good things?

You may say this is English Literature, not English. Are the two so very far apart? English as a language is taught to make literature available. "Example is better than precept." Reading good literature for the love of it will bring in the habit of grammatical speaking and writing far more effectively than what is known as "a thorough grounding in the principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws should be deduced from examples. Philology, etymology, syntax are derivatives, not foundations. "Practice makes perfect" is a saying that needs to be followed by the old scholastic defensive "distinguo." Practice in reading, rather than practice in writing, makes good English composition possible. The "daily theme" may be overdone; it is of little use unless thought keeps ahead of the pen.

I would plead then for the teaching of English after a fashion that will reveal great thoughts and stimulate to greater life, through the noble art of English literature and the perfectly illogical but altogether admirable English language. The function of education is to make students feel, think and act, after a fashion that increasingly reveals and utilizes the best that is in them, and increasingly serves the uses of society, and both history and English can be so taught as to help towards the accomplishment of these ends.

There is another factor that may be so used, but I confess I shall speak of it with some hesitation. It is at present, and has been for ages, entirely outside the possibility even of consideration, and in a sense that goes beyond the general ignoring of religion, for while Catholics, who form the great majority of Christians, still hold to religion as a prime element in education, there are none—or only a minority so small as to be negligible—who give a thought to art in this connection. I bring forward the word, and the thing it represents, with diffidence, even apologetically: indeed, it is perhaps better to renounce the word altogether and substitute the term "beauty," for during the nineteenth century art got a bad name, not altogether undeservedly, and the disrepute lingers. So long as beauty is an instinct native to men (and it was this, except for very brief and periodic intervals, until hardly more than a century ago, though latterly in a vanishing form), it is wholesome, stimulating and indispensable, but when it becomes self-conscious, when it finds itself the possession of a few highly differentiated individuals instead of the attribute of man as such, then it tends to degenerate into something abnormal and, in its last estate, both futile and unclean. In its good estate, as for example in Greece, Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and in Oriental countries until the last few decades, beauty was so natural an object of endeavour and a mode of expression, and its universality resulted in so characteristic an environment, it was unnecessary to talk about it very much, or to give any particular thought to the educational value of the arts which were its manifestation through and to man, or how this was to be applied. The things were there, everywhere at hand; the temples and churches, the painting and the sculpture and the works of handicraft; the music and poetry and drama, the ceremonial and costume of daily life, both secular and religious, the very cities in which men congregated and the villages in which they were dispersed. Beauty, in all its concrete forms of art, was highly valued, almost as highly as religion or liberty or bodily health, but then it was a part of normal life and therefore taken for granted.

Now all is changed. For just an hundred years (the process definitely began here in America between 1820 and 1823) we have been eliminating beauty as an attribute of life and living until, during the last two generations, it is true to say that the instinctive impulse of the race as a whole is towards ugliness in those categories of creation and appreciation where formerly it had been towards beauty. Of course the corollary of this was the driving of the unhappy man in whom was born some belated impulse towards the apprehending of beauty and its visible expression in some art, back upon himself, until, conscious of his isolation and confident of his own superiority, he not only made his art a form of purely personal expression (or even of exposure), but held himself to be, and so conducted himself, as a being apart, for whom the laws of the herd were not, and to whom all men should bow.

The separation of art from life is only less disastrous in its results than the separation of religion from life, particularly since with the former went the separation of art (and therefore of beauty) from its immemorial alliance with religion. It was bad for art, it was bad for religion, and it was worst of all for life itself. Beyond a certain point man cannot live in and with and through ugliness, nor can society endure under such conditions, and the fact is that, however it came to pass, modern civilization has functioned through explicit ugliness, and the environment it has made for its votaries and its rebels indifferently, is unique in its palpable hideousness; from the clothes it wears and the motives it extols, to the cities it builds, and the structures therein, and the scheme of life that romps along in its ruthless career within the sordid suburbs that take the place of the once enclosing walls. And the defiant and segregated "artists," mortuary art museums, the exposed statues and hidden pictures, the opera subsidized by "high society," and the "arts and crafts" societies and the "art magazines" and "art schools" and clubs and "city beautiful" committees, only seem to make the contrast more apparent and the desperate nature of the situation more profound.