THE STUDY AND INTERPRETATION OF LITERATURE.
The study of literature has of late years become somewhat sane and rational in its aim and purpose. There was a time, and that not very long ago, when literature was forced to yield up its spirit in the class-room to mere analysis or a talk about grammar, philology, rhetoric and sundry other irrelevant subjects.
To-day, however, in the best schools and colleges, this vicious method, which has for years worked destruction to true literary culture, has pretty well died out; nor is a through ticket by flying express down the centuries from Chaucer to Tennyson any longer regarded as satisfactory evidence that the privileged passenger knows much of the glory which nestles on the way.
How any person can hope to become a literary scholar in the highest and best sense of the word without assimilating the INFORMING life of literature has always seemed to us a problem in dire need of solution. We can well understand how one may possess himself of the literature of knowledge without such assimilation, but how he can become possessed of the literature of power without responding to the inner life of an art product, is to us a question incomprehensible.
Nor has the old spirit, we fear, been fully and wholly exorcised, as yet, from the class and lecture room. There are still to be found those who believe that the analytical exegesis of literature should be the main purpose of the teacher—that to elucidate the intellectual thought which articulates a poem, precipitating it from a concrete creation into a barren abstraction—this and this alone should be the aim and end of all literary study in the school or lecture room.
The fault with such persons is, that they do not fully understand and appreciate the true meaning and import of literature, mistaking its lesser coefficient for its chief and primary one. No definition of literature can be at all adequate which does not take into consideration the spiritual element as a factor. The late Brother Azarias, whose study of literature was most profound, clear and sympathetic, gives us a definition in the very opening chapter of his charming little volume, “A Philosophy of Literature,” which is entirely satisfactory. He regards literature as the verbal expression of man’s affections, as acted upon in his relations with the material world, society and his Creator. Literature may therefore be defined as the expression in letters of the spiritual co-operating with the intellectual man, the former being the dominant co-efficient.
Knowing, then, that the spiritual element constitutes the INFORMING life of a poem, how can teachers fritter their time away with brilliant analytics which do little or nothing for true literary culture? Better, far better, that the students under their charge be turned loose in some library—there to browse at will, free to follow their literary tastes and inclinations.
We have long considered that examinations for certificates and degrees are for the most part a detriment to literary studies—that they dull the finer faculties of appreciation and magnify the importance of mere acquisition. Assuredly, when a young man finds that in order to reach his diploma or degree he must be able to discuss the Elizabethan English as found in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “As You Like It,” or trace the gerundial infinitive through Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” he will pay little heed to either the spirit of Shakespeare or Chaucer as embodied in their works.
In our great eagerness to fill our heads with facts, without any co-ordination, we lose sight amid the stress and strain of our educational work of the ONE GREAT FACT: That if we would be wisely educated, we must seek it on the basis of a maximum of education with a minimum of acquirement. It is impossible to play fast and loose with the spirit of literature and not suffer for our insincerity. Literature is a jealous mistress and will brook no rival. Those who woo her must come with clean hearts and minds, setting aside all thought of mercenary returns, for, as Mrs. Browning says: