Art principles in literature
Date: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Literature; Aesthetics

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Title: Art principles in literature

Author: Francis P. Donnelly

Release date: February 1, 2021 [eBook #64443]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE ***

ART PRINCIPLES
IN LITERATURE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
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TORONTO

ART PRINCIPLES
IN LITERATURE

By FRANCIS P. DONNELLY, S.J.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK MCMXXV

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
SET UP AND PRINTED. PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1923.
REPRINTED APRIL, 1925.

REPRINTED JULY, 1928.

WYNKOOP HALLENBECK CRAWFORD COMPANY, NEW YORK, U. S. A.

INTRODUCTION

In the Art of Interesting (Kenedy, 1920) the writer began a discussion of the principles of art and of their application to writing and speaking. In this work the discussion is carried further and is not restricted to the one feature of arousing and fixing attention, especially in oratory, which was the chief topic of the Art of Interesting. The following chapters represent the reactions of the writer to literature both as composed today and as taught in our schools. Any active mind, bewildered by the ceaseless experimenting in literature and education, and not satisfied with a passive acceptance of even excellent critics, is necessarily forced back upon first principles. Such a mind will not yield to the despair of skepticism, that there are no first principles, nor to the despair of agnosticism, that there may be such principles but we cannot know them, nor yet to the despair of pragmatism, that we must wait and see whether the human race ages from now will give us assurance that there really are principles of art because the last man has seen that these principles have been found to work up to the moment prior to which he joined Tutankhamen.

Art, just as morals and pure science, differs entirely from the natural sciences, which are generalizations based upon acquired information and must change as long as the information upon which they are based can be modified and enlarged. But where, as in art or pure science, principles are based on final truths, the principles have also a finality and can only be rejected if their basis can be changed or modified. Aristotle’s principles have something of that finality. Aristotle had for his study a body of literature that has for centuries met with the approval of the best taste in every age and of every critic. Aristotle’s biology or physics are not final, but his ethics, his logic, his esthetics are in measurable distance of finality except where some additions have been made to the materials upon which he based his analysis. In religion, because of revelation, in music because of discoveries in instrumentation, and perhaps in other arts, time has added to the original store, but in literature there are few additions to the fields which lay before Aristotle, and subsequent ages have not developed any keener analytical powers than those of Aristotle.

It is Aristotle’s principles that in the main have dominated the writer’s reactions to modern art and literature. When Greek literature held an honored place in our schools, there was less need of insisting on obvious truths of art. The intense modernism now predominating everywhere has driven classical literature and classical methods from school and life. History is modernized too or fails to supply the vital contact with the ever-living past which earlier schools experienced in the poets, historians, orators and philosophers of Greece and Rome. So-called cultural subjects in modern education are chiefly informational. Culture is a word which calls for definition, but on its intellectual side at least, culture for the largest number of persons in the world can be gauged most satisfactorily by their appreciation of literature and by their capacity to produce literature. The study of literature as an art is the chief topic of this book, and Aristotle’s great principles need all the more stressing now that his philosophy of art and the supreme literature on which he based his conclusions are passing away from present-day consciousness.

The chapters that follow are popular rather than scientific in presentation. Readers who seek a fuller and wider view may be interested in such a work as Benedetto Croce’s Æsthetic, from the Italian by Douglas Ainslie. Its historical summary, especially for modern times, is valuable and good. For the Greeks and earlier periods, Butcher’s Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts is easily best. Professor Rhys Roberts’ editions of the works of Dionysius, Longinus and Demetrius are excellent for the traditions of classical rhetoric, a tradition weak in America.

In theory Croce is an extreme intellectualist in the principles of art. He locates all of esthetics in pure intuition, which is “lyrical,” that is, emotional, because it represents “the states of the soul,” “passionality, feeling, personality.” For Croce “natural beauty is simply a stimulus to esthetic reproduction, which presupposes previous production.” He is therefore an idealist in his conception of beauty. Even monuments of art seem to be only “stimulants to esthetic reproduction” and are not beautiful in themselves. In another place, however, Croce seems to be a realist. “Art is governed entirely by imagination; its only riches are images. Art does not classify objects nor pronounce them real or imaginary nor qualify them nor define them. Art feels and represents them. In as far as it apprehends ‘the real’ immediately before it is modified and made clear by the concept, it must be called pure intuition.”

Quite to the other extreme in theory goes The Psychology of Beauty by Ethel D. Puffer. This author has much about sensations and their physiology and but little about ideas. For Croce the last stage is in the idea; for Puffer it would seem to be in the work of art. “The low-lying wide expanse of some of the old Dutch landscapists give us repose, not because they remind us of the peaceful happiness of the land but because we cannot melt ourselves into all those horizontal lines without the restful feeling which accompanies such relaxation.” This passage might almost class the writer with the Einfühlung school,—the school which gives Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy” a number of advocates. Pathetic fallacy was a complete misnomer when applied by Ruskin to the well-known tropes of metaphor and personification. Kingsley was not insane enough to imagine that a wave was actually cruel and actually crawled. He likened the wave that drowned to a wild animal. But the school of Lipps in Germany desires you to moan with the wind and smile with the rose and lie flat with painted horizontal lines.

Perhaps Puffer’s formula of stimulation with repose and Croce’s formula of intuition with lyricism can be reconciled with Aquinas’ definition of the beautiful, quæ visa placent. A study of Maurice De Wulf’s excellent little volume L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté gives us briefly and clearly the neo-scholastic solution of the esthetic problem. The book is a good example of the reasonable discussion which has won for scholastic philosophy the universal designation as the philosophy of common sense. Longhaye’s Théorie des Belles Lettres, which is scholastic philosophy applied to literature, is another clear and sane presentation of the principles of the art.

The reader who desires to supplement the popular exposition of this book with a systematic treatise on the esthetic and its application to literature is recommended to De Wulf and to Longhaye. English is rich in criticism but is deficient in works treating of the philosophy of beauty in literature.

CONTENTS

| PAGE
INTRODUCTION

Connection with author’s Art of Interesting—Need of principles of an art amidst violent experimentation in art and education—Aristotle’s principles valid except where the basis of his deductions has been modified—With Greek literature leaving our schools, Greek taste is needed against excessive modernism—Recent art discussions— Croce’s Æsthetic; Puffer’s Psychology of Beauty; De Wulf’s L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté

v

ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE

PART FIRST
ART IN THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

I
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL

1. Individualism and Responsibility | 1

Talking to oneself in art—Chaos in religion, morals and art from unchecked individualism—Altruism a better principle—Responsibility inevitable—Responsibility a help, no hindrance to the artist—Greek drama; Italian Madonnas; Horace.

II
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL

2. Vagaries of Individualism | 8

Modern literature and art and a sense of humor—Fiction, biographical and pathological—New poetry shallow—Riot of emotionalism—Novel of satire, European continental type originating in low comedy—Novel of Scott, epic in origin—Nature, experience, wisdom, the remedies of individualism.

III
ART AND HUMAN NATURE

1. The Universal Element | 14

Art movements begin in nature—Art is social—Permanence of literature due to universal appeal—The camera and the canvas—Personality and individuality—Shock of nerves not the mental thrill of art.

IV
ART AND HUMAN NATURE

2. Realism and Reality | 20

Real cake of soap on a painted wave—Art a distinct world from reality—Motivation, not through logical discussion but through probable incident—Painting in the cake of soap—Realism depressing because of cynic moralizing—Evil in Shakespeare and Homer, relieved by pathos and humor, not depressing.

V
ART AND THE DIVINE

1. Religious Origin of Art | 26

Rich tombs of the past testify to belief in immortality—Cro-Magnon cave pictures probably religious—Earliest art of all nations due to religion—Dancing, song, music, sculpture, architecture, drama, epic—Gothic cathedral of religious middle-ages, synthesis of all arts.

VI
ART AND THE DIVINE

2. The Kinship of Art and Religion | 31

Hebraism, Puritanism, Islamism, reacting against art and the result—Explanation of the origin of art—Taine’s environment theory—Spencer’s play theory—Theory of fear and magic spells—Adequate explanation found in man’s intellectual nature—Art like religion intellectual—Art and religion idealistic—Personal and emotional—Art and religion social in appeal—Sublimity of art and the revelation of Genesis—Harmonious equation between soul and the truth of reality, between soul and the good of morality, same as equation between soul and beauty, all founded on the fact that both soul and triple reality are images of God.

VII
ART AND THE DIVINE

3. Art in Its Relation to Virtue | 39

The theomorphism of man in the threefold tendency of science, morality and art—Religion, a virtue; art, a function of perceptions—Ruskin’s school of the religion of beauty—Moralizing not a function of art—Estheticism neither asceticism nor sensualism—Evil in art to be represented as evil—Evil to be a rationalized element—Contemporary evil excites feelings of reality—Art and religion ennobling—Art and religion purifying—Creation and disinterestedness most divine elements in art.

VIII
THE VISCERAL TEST OF BEAUTY

The critic’s equipment—Defective philosophy of some modern critics, Mencken, Murry, Cohen—Ugly in art and its subdual—Esthetic feeling not concupiscence—Disinterestedness of beauty excludes sensuality of appetites—Visceral reactions not from beauty

48

PART SECOND
ART IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE

IX
LOOKING FORWARD IN LITERATURE

Literature taught for use in Greece, Rome, and elsewhere—Science and history always changing; literature lasting—Object of literature in university—True humanism, equipping man’s faculties with art—Every school subject teaches its like—Correlations of literature and creation—Contemporary literature not suitable—Scientific study partly; artistic study is wholly satisfying

57

X
UNIFYING EDUCATION THROUGH LITERATURE

Necessity of unity—In university through profession—No unity in college electivism—Unity impaired by departments and by specializing—Unity in France, Germany and England—Departmental system destroying the art appeal of literature—Science through knowing; art through doing—Recent mental tests accentuate expression and language—General education through art of literature

64

XI
THE INTERESTING TEACHER OF LITERATURE

Spread of science—System and eliminating of personality—Dissertations for the doctorate—Scholarly means encyclopedic—The impersonal lecturer—Justin McCarthy’s teacher and his methods—Not scientific specialization, but exercise of mental powers—Formulas and personality—Another interesting teacher—Literature educates equally with science—The ideal

70

XII
EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS

Life full of emotions—Emotions intense in our crowded civilization—Morale, organized emotion—Emotions neglected in education—Education of facts dominating schools—Twofold nature of emotions—Emotions from concrete imagining—Kindled by contact—Literature embodiment of emotions—Emotions developed by self-expression and controlled by exercise

83

XIII
KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM

Classics to be kept but taught differently—Former help of translation—Literature overwhelmed by erudition—Germany, France, England, America—True use of erudition—Natural sciences change; art endures—Reproduction, the soul of literary teaching—Method of training—Modern literatures not yet able to supplant ancient literatures

91

XIV
THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD

Literary renaissances associated with Greek literature—Revivals through Irish monks—Spain, France, Scholasticism—Germany with Wolf, Winckelmann, Lessing—England under Queen Anne and Queen Victoria—Youth of civilization in Greece

100

XV
TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM

Story of Phidias’ statue and Homer—Homer tested by art—Flaws in material—Absorption in immediate effects—Told story different from story read—Outline of a study on a broad scale—Variety, alternation, growth in Homeric battling—Homeric palace, the place of Homer’s recital

106

XVI
THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE

Child-test in religion and morals, in the Bible—Homer’s mother and child—Hector and Andromache—Child in later literature rare—Latin writers—Conventionality instead of Homeric naturalness

114

XVII
THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE

Christ-Child in art—Christmas and the drama—In Ireland—Medieval and Renaissance writers—Milton’s war-like child—Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Longfellow—Return of naturalness in Stevenson, Carroll and others—Faith and its effects in Thompson and Tabb

119

APPENDIX
GREEK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF

Mosaic of etymology—Ecclesiastical sphere—Diet, posies and programs—Geography, zoology, politics—Pharmacies and surgery—Schools and composition—Apology and epitaph

129

NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT

Ownership not of the essence of beauty as of good—Perception sufficient for the enjoyment of the beautiful—No new faculty required—Pleasure is normal life consciously localized—Esthetic Enjoyment in the simple apprehension, not in judgment or inference as such—Fact not of the essence of esthetic enjoyment, which is had in fiction too—Causa Exemplaris—Imagination, source of originality—Aristotle’s principles: creation, motivation, unity, universality

134

A FORWARD-LOOKING LESSON IN LITERATURE | 159

ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE

PART FIRST
ART IN THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

I
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL

1. INDIVIDUALISM AND RESPONSIBILITY

A group was standing before a futurist or cubist picture. The group did not know what the picture was all about, but one spoke up in defense of the bewildering work: “Well, after all, art is a language, and why shouldn’t a man be permitted to speak his own language?” A bystander, not daring to address strangers, made answer under his breath: “If art is a language, this artist is talking to himself.” Maudlin, incoherent remarks, disjointed utterances, and in general talking to one’s self, all that, does not pass for high art among men, but for something quite different. To talk to one’s self is the extreme of individualism in conversation; to ignore the world addressed through artistic composition is the triumph of individualism in art.

The abrupt break with all tradition in every art, and the untrammeled expression of the individual, have worked out to the inevitable and bizarre conclusions which a like rebellion has brought about in religion and morals. Every man his own dogmatist; every man his own moralist; that is the individualism which has divided mankind into multitudinous sects and has made millions of moral, unmoral and immoral moralists eager for legislation of infinite variety without any fixed principles to enforce the observance of even one law. Conscience, the executive impulse of all legislation, used to be the voice of God, but individualism has made it anything from a survival of the fittest or an economic standard, through countless varieties all the way to a Freudian complex.

Individualism has run amuck in art from classicism to cubism. It is a barren day which does not produce a new system of religion or morals, and only the occurrence of earthquake, war, fire or some other tremendous upheaval keeps our journals from recording some new theory of art, some Tomism, Dickism or Harryism. Art for art’s sake has been given an individualistic interpretation and has produced the same rich crop, as the individualistic cry, every man his own dogmatist and moralist, has produced—a rich crop of weeds.

If ever an individual could pursue his blissful way oblivious of the existence of a surrounding universe, surely he may not do so now when the universe impinges upon him every moment through ticker, telephone, wireless and unlimited “extras.” There is, however, no such thing as unrestricted individualism. Of God alone can be predicated existence for its own sake. Everybody his own dogmatist means ultimately everybody his own god. Art for art’s sake, interpreted in an individualistic sense, would not only destroy art but would destroy the world. Art for art’s sake should read art for everybody’s sake and for the sake of God, and such a reading will be infinitely better for art’s sake.

It was an Irish colleen, accepting matrimony as a complete submergence of individuality, who replied to a friend dwelling on the dangers of a long ocean trip to be taken by the new bride and groom: “And why should I be afraid, sure ’tis his loss if anything happen to me now!” She was the counterpart of the Irish lad who sang under similar circumstances, “I’m not myself at all.” There you have the complete altruism resulting from the perfect union of matrimony. There is the antithesis of individualism, and such matrimonial communism is far better for every one than any cry of “wife for wife’s sake” or “husband for husband’s sake.”

It is quite evident that no artist can exempt himself from responsibility as though his art were a deity. If a picture or statue or poem would be an incentive to murder or suicide, the artist must stay his hand. He may not manufacture bombs for soul destruction, no matter how artistic the container, even if someone else is to supply the detonator. A lie in beautiful language is a more ugly lie. Recent pretended upholders of the Volstead law have printed an emphatic warning on compounds of their manufacture: “Do not add such an ingredient or this compound will violate the law.” May an artist naïvely dissociate himself from responsibility by stating: “Do not add human nature to my art-product or you will violate the law”? Were the artist a real creator, he would have to forecast results and be dominated by a purpose. Nor may the artist, like God, permit evil, because no artist has omnipotence and infinite wisdom and justice and mercy, governing the permission of evil and guaranteeing good as the final result. May a man who owns a wild tiger of surpassing beauty, trusting in the right of property, parade down a crowded thoroughfare with his jungle pet tethered to a thread?

But why all these truisms? Because individualism in art aims in principle and production not only to free art from restrictions but even to exempt the artist from responsibility. The artist may not talk to himself unless he can find a South Sea island where there is neither man nor God. Nor is it a deadening of his artistic impulse for the artist to be ruled by high purposes, but rather it is a stimulus and an inspiration. Eschylus and Sophocles have a sublimer beauty than Euripides because the earlier dramatists recognized more fully and kept better in view the religious purposes of Athenian drama. Euripides, wishing to cater more to theatric effects, succeeded in being more emotional and in achieving a realistic but transient interest, the hectic flush that marks decay and death in twilight and autumn and sinister disease. Is the marked revival of Euripides within recent years a sign of decadence?

The Madonnas of Italian art received from the painter a solemn beauty not only because they depict Divine maternity, but even too because they were to grace a religious shrine and to constitute part of a religious service. That may be one reason why the Madonnas of Italy are far superior to the prettiness and sentimentality of more recent Madonnas which are painted for private homes and for ephemeral interest.

The purpose of the artist is one thing and the purpose of art is another thing. The purpose of a watch is to keep time whatever purpose the watch-maker may have. It is likely, however, that if he makes the watch for his mother, he will produce better results than if he worked for his usual wage or than if he functioned as part of a machine, having no clearly defined ulterior purpose. So an artist will be inspired in painting, in sculpture, in music, in all arts, to elicit better his full powers and to achieve finer results when he toils for a cathedral than when he works for a cabaret. Noble responsibility conscientiously recognized and fulfilled is no check, but rather a spur to the artist.

“Art for art’s sake” may, however, be taken to mean, “Embody beauty wherever found, or realize to the full your ideal,” and such a meaning is excellent and fruitful unless excessive individualism insists upon expressing its own perverted ideas of beauty and its own eccentric ideals. When Horace said, “Let justice be done though the heavens come crashing down,” a line that might be rendered, “Justice for justice’s sake,” he was far from advocating the explosion of a bomb by some Roman anarchist whose idea of justice was to bring all to a dead level of ruin. The progressive improvement in the realization of art-ideals may be very well illustrated from the career of Horace. Horace gradually worked himself free from the conventionality and baseness of his epodes and earlier satires, experienced the cleansing process of true humor in later satires, took fire at the moral degeneracy of Rome in the initial odes of the third and last book of his first edited lyrics. There the sæva indignatio of Horace brought him within distant sight of sublimity. His progress in philosophy weighted the wings of his song but dowered him with the crystal and clean wisdom of his epistles, of which it has been said one need not blot out a single line. Had Horace retained the youthful vehemence of the republican amid the enervating peace of the new empire, he might have followed Dante and Milton from lyric beauty to epic sublimity, or might have risen with Shakespeare and Molière from song to comedy or even to tragedy, but his hedonistic sleekness and his excessive self-consciousness kept his ripened philosophy in brief letters, when a more vigorous mentality with the help of philosophy might have converted his ennobled power of satire into comedy or transformed the lyric portraits of his early days into tragedy or epic story.

II
ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL

2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM

Modern art has not followed Horace very far. It has broken with conventionality as Horace did with the clichés of Alexandria, but it has not yet entered upon the path of right philosophy. The Spoon River Anthology, a typical specimen from the individualistic school of what might be called localists or village gossips, is in the epode-stage of Horace, the stage of personalities, lubricity and garlic gruesomeness. Hopes might be entertained that Spoon River and Main Street and other individualistic photographs would progressively improve with Horace except for one sad deficiency: Horace had humor and laughed at others, and even at himself; modern individualists are so heavily armored with the seriousness of their own views, that they don’t even smile. To imagine the New Art laughing is impossible; if the New Art had humor and laughed, it would cease to be New Art and would join the larger brotherhood of art uncapitalized. Had the new artists a sense of humor, it would probably be their death sentence. In the course of time they might catch sight of their own art products, whether of painting or of poetry.

Is it not an indication of individualism that so many recent novels are biographies, that the stage is not holding up the mirror to life but applying the scalpel to an ulcer? The biography or personal views of Scott and Shakespeare cannot be discovered in their works. The modern pamphleteer distributes his paradoxes among various mouthpieces whose only difference is in name, and this is called a play, when it is in reality propaganda. There are probably now no less than 100,000 college graduates turning college escapades and flirtations into chapters, which their authors consider typical of life because the incidents were individually experienced. And, as the long stories of the day are biographies or problems and as the drama is a diagnosis of diseases, in the same way many of the short stories are pathological, but all are tending to be individualistic. The artist makes his own subjective experience the full measure of his artistic expression and seems to imagine that his own peculiarities are good art because he sincerely expresses what he feels. Individual nature is not human nature.

Aristotle has described poetry as the universal in the concrete. The “new poets” give the individual in the concrete. Homer, Shakespeare, the true poets, plumb to the depths of the human heart; they voice ripened experience and enshrine mellow wisdom, and so appeal to all men of all times. Much of the new poetry ostentatiously disdains tradition and rejects the wisdom of the ages in discarding its dress. You may see the rouge on the cheek and the freckle on the nose, but as far as life and experience and heart are concerned, most of the new poetry is pitiably young and callous. Meticulous recording of disconnected and unrelated novelties is no adequate substitute for the warmth and depth of life crystallized by the ardent gaze of the true poet out of his experience. New poetry is contemporaneous with the invention and use of the Kodak and has all the responsibility and profundity of that instrument.

Individualism has come to such a pass in modern art that everything in it is resolving itself into pure emotionalism, and that an emotionalism which does not belong to art at all. Degenerates are the products of civilization; they are decayed exotics. “The higher the organism, the more noisome the decay,” a science professor used to say when paying his respects to diseased metaphysics. As only a believer can blaspheme luridly, so when an artist goes wrong, he goes wrong hideously. A pistol in the hands of a marksman gone mad is more destructive than in the hands of a savage. Colors, sounds, shapes, fair words and gorgeous imaginings are instruments of degradation and death if they are a finer veneer over what is false. Individual vagaries and whims, no matter how unusual, will not have the permanence of art because they are based on no principles, but devised simply to startle. Degrade the appeal of beauty to a spinal thrill and your artist will pander to concupiscence.

It is noteworthy that Homer’s worst lapse in story-telling takes place among the luxurious Phæacians, ancient prototypes of degeneracy. Homer may have felt justified artistically because he was depicting the non-Grecian world through whose monsters and marvels Odysseus was passing and making the first collection of sailors’ yarns. But Homer shocked even the pagan world and set an unhappy precedent. Lucian and Ovid, Petronius and Apuleius and the Byzantine eroticists made what was incidental in Homer their chief concern and practice. They perverted fiction into calculated suggestiveness.

That depraved and sensual theory of story-telling was, however, more Aristophanic than Homeric, despite the single unfortunate precedent in the Odyssey. The tradition of Greek and Latin comedy was carried on by the medieval troubadours and by the story-tellers who catered to the decadent nobility of Italy and France. They retorted on their clerical censors and stimulated jaded appetites, substituting in shameless intrigues priests and nuns for the pagan gods. It was and is the glory of Scott that he broke away from these evil traditions which made the novel a hateful thing to our forefathers. Scott deserted the continental school of novelists and their English imitators, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, the last of all Byron. Scott gave up the satirical purposes which handed on in fiction the vulgar devices of low comedy. He went to history, to chivalry, to healthy men and women and created romances, not pathological studies. English, Irish and American fiction for a whole century yielded to the healthy and bracing impulse of Scott, but the younger novelists in vogue today in England, Ireland and America have gone back to the continental type, individual, pathological biographical problems, forsaking Scott’s revival through balladry of the best Homeric manner, where men “drank delight of battle with their peers far on the ringing plains of Troy.”

The individualist must emancipate himself by the contemplation of nature. Pathological specimens, freakish oddities, all the surface impressions of the local colorists are not nature any more than a face contorted with a toothache is a man’s likeness. Such exceptional exhibitions cannot form the enduring basis of art. Personal experience must be widened by length of time, by merging into the stream of wisdom, flowing freighted from the past, or must, in exceptional cases, be won quickly by that intense and probing comprehension of genius, which seems almost Divine intuition. Excessive individualism, like the latest fashion, will be quaint and incongruous on the morrow. Homer lives eternal because through strange names and strange language and strange costumes we see our own sun and fields and ocean and sky and put our fingers on a pulse which registers the beat of a heart throbbing as ours.

III
ART AND HUMAN NATURE

1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT

A serious defect in most modern art movements is that they start from art; they are modifications of previous art movements. True art movements start from human nature. When perfection in any art is standardized, when tradition and conventionality prevail, and the artist has originality enough to chafe at the restraints of classicism but not originality enough to reveal finer ideals through classic expression, his temptation is to rebel at conventionalities and to deem himself original because he is unconventional. He wishes to be different from other artists and seeks for the difference by discarding the traditional medium rather than by improving his own personal message. He prefers to be different and even original by cutting his ginger-bread into the shape of automobiles and air-planes instead of going back to mother’s classic make and blending his ingredients into a new creation, a creation which will make fresh appeal even in former animal shapes or in the traditional ginger-bread cart-wheels.

Art is a social institution. If not by the people, art is of the people, and certainly for the people. When Greek literary art grew conventional in its different forms, the artists went back to the people for another medium to be transfigured by art. Ruskin has called architecture a “glorified roof.” The sonata is a glorified folk melody; epic is glorified folk lore; and Greek drama is a glorified folk song, as Elizabethan drama is a glorified folk chronicle. Both dramas have their roots in the religious services of the people. Homer told us about the public he had, but the nineteenth century would not trust his word until Schliemann dug up the great halls where Demodokos and his fellows told the people their own folk stories in a glorified, artistic form. Greek lyric and Greek pastoral were as public as Greek oratory, Greek choruses, temples and statuary. It was left for Roman conquerors to begin the segregation of art into the cold storage of the modern millionaire and of the modern museum.

The permanence of Greek art is based upon that public appeal. Art is long because it embodies nature, and most of all human nature. Homer has appealed to man, woman and child for thousands of years. His human nature is our human nature despite external differences of every kind. Homer himself was aware of the appeal of nature in art. On the shield of Achilles, he marveled at the field which grew black behind the plowing, a marvel of Homer’s close study of nature as well as an expression of his ideal for art. Nature is a language all can understand and human nature is a language all must and do understand. When lament was made over the body of Patroklos, the elegy of Briseis stirred all, “and thereon the women wailed, in semblance for Patroklos, but each for her own woe.” Similar is the appeal of art where in semblance of something else, each sees what belongs to self. Aristotle in seeking to explain the characteristic pleasure of art ascribes it to mimesis or re-presentation in another medium. Such staging, he says, not only robs the terrifying of its terrors but enables all to understand and reason to the nature of each art product. Such understanding and reasoning mean surely something more than the mere recognition of photographic accuracy and likeness. If we may press the meaning of the Greek word used for reason, the process of art enjoyment is similar to the syllogistic process which involves an appeal to a general statement. The process is one which recognizes the general in a particular case, as the grief of Briseis found an echoing grief in every heart.

Whether Aristotle and this interpretation of him is correct or not, it is evident that art must generalize. Art must select, both by choice of the artist and by the limitations of his medium. Art does not photograph, because it has no sensitive plate for its medium. The photographer’s art largely precedes the camera and consists in selecting that pose and that expression, out of many, which is yours. The camera is nature, controlled by mechanism, and is not art. If the photographer or painter or sculptor photographed you in some passing spasm, we should not learn and reason that it was you. The spasm was realism and fact, but it was peculiar and individual; it was not you whom we have known and generalized from experience. In such a case, Aristotle says shrewdly, we might get artistic pleasure from the workmanship or colors, that is, from the medium and the mechanics of art, but we should have no artistic pleasure from the soul and substance of the art product because the product found no prototype in our experience, because we could not define it or generalize it. Art selects. It cannot give everything, and if it would be true, it must give what all may understand; it must give what is generally true, and what is generally true of all men is human nature.

Selective idealism has usually the advantage of being intelligible, but it labors under the disadvantage of becoming merely intelligible. It gives the truth, but through familiarity the beauty or artistic appeal of the truth has been dulled and tarnished, or, like the dandelion, until a Lowell gives it a new luster, its very commonness leaves us unmoved. We enjoy human nature in Homer because he was the creator of sleeping winds and of rosy-fingered dawns and of the mother’s smile alight through tears. A modern who would transfer these same touches to his own composition would leave us cold. He too must create; he must be personal, but he must not be individual. Personality is the knowing and loving principle, and looks to the many with its thoughts and wishes. Individuality is the principle of separation and isolation and is looking inward, not outward. When the artist, therefore, creates and gives his own winds or dawn or mother love, he should speak to us in his own concrete embodiments of nature, and of human nature, using a language man understands. If selective idealism tends to become merely intelligible and unappealing, individualism tends to become unintelligible and to mystify.

The poet, the novelist, the painter have more depth than silver nitrate on a photographic plate. Artists do not simply mirror nature; they do not catch at the odd or freakish. That is photography, not creation. Horace did not give us a moving picture of a falling tree, but he saw the humor and human interest of that “sorry log.” Burns did not give us an anatomical study of the typhus-carrier on a lady’s bonnet in a kirk, making it crawl upon ourselves and sending us after the kerosene can and bath tub, but Burns soared away, from that sight with Horatian humor and Horatian human nature, into the immortal lines, “O wad some power the giftie gie us.” The artist who confounds the generalized mental attractiveness found in true art with the shock of nerves or the tickling of concupiscence or with misguided realism, will not produce things of beauty. He gets a thrill, but it is not the permanent, undying thrill of art, not the thing of beauty, which is a joy forever.

IV
ART AND HUMAN NATURE

2. REALISM AND REALITY

At an exhibition in New York City there was displayed a picture of an ocean wave upon the crest of which the artist had nailed a real bar of soap. The first idea of the spectator was to consider this peculiar product an advertisement, but it seems to have been intended as a serious, if perverted, attempt at art. If the artist was not slyly proposing the caricature of excessive realism, the cake of soap will serve well as a parable for those artists who do not distinguish between realism and reality.

The ultra-realist forgets that art is a creation, the making of another world. The artist cannot really create what he puts into his new world of sight or hearing or imagination, of color, of sound, of words. If he could actually make something new, not based on nature or on human nature, he would do so on the penalty of being unintelligible. Neither should he go to the other extreme and not leave the world of reality at all. He may not eat his cake and have it. If what he takes from actuality is not merged fully into his art form, he tries to give us fact and fiction, history and art, in the same product, and he nails a piece of soap on a painted wave.

Aristotle insists above all on probability in art, or motivation, as it is now commonly called. A probable or well-motived impossibility, he says, is more artistic and pleasing than an improbable, that is, an unmotived fact. For a like reason he demands that fiction be more philosophical than history. We accept a chronicle of facts without necessarily being aware of their causal connections. In the realms of art the connection must be established. This principle, so fruitful for art, is not to be understood as justifying or approving that school of subjective novelists which is parsimonious in happenings but diffuse in reasoning and gives us a maximum of discussion with a minimum of incident. Aristotle is thinking more of the people who witness the drama. The spectators want the motivation and plausibility of action rather than that of logic. The soliloquy has gone from the stage; the printed soliloquy should be curtailed in the novel. A true understanding of motivation will send all artists back to nature and to human nature for those incidents which are the springs of action and do not require lengthy logic to labor at their explanation. Homer is completely lacking in logical refining. Incident leads to feeling and talk, which gives rise to further incident. Action, feeling and character, Aristotle’s trinity of art subjects, are mingled and detailed, and the story moves on in a way plausible and pleasing to Homeric audiences. When Homer runs short of motivation, he does not resort to logic; he refers the causality to the gods, as modern writers refer all insoluble problems to evolution, which puts hardly more restrictions upon imagination than Homeric mythology.

The artist must transfer his product wholly to the world of art. Sculptured horses must not neigh, nor painted flowers give perfume, but neighing and scents may be suggested even in stone, and in lines by art happenings, which all may read running if the artist will use the language of human nature. He should paint his cake of soap in, not nail it on. If the exigencies of the story demand it, costumes of the night or costumes of bathing may be in place, but it is nailing on a cake of soap, it is outraging probabilities, to force a story into a setting or to adopt a style of dress or of undress simply for the sake of producing a shock. That is the shock of reality, not of art and beauty. Should the dramatist have an excellent quartet and stop the play in order to give a song, he is nailing on a piece of soap, which may be magnificent soap, but it is not art.

Why is the so-called realism depressing? Why is the Russian novelist left for the connoisseur but is caviar to the general? Is it the presence or absence of evil? Hardly that. Homer’s stories are full of evil and of death; Sophocles’ King Œdipus and the Prometheus of Eschylus are surcharged with evil, but they do not depress. Euripides, on the other hand, and Lucian have more alleged realism and are depressing, even when they cause a smile. The realist is cynical, and cynics do not soar off into the world of art, but keep tethering themselves to the real world. They do not lose themselves in their story because they are always thinking of keeping some one’s nose against their grindstone. Why should the optimistic moralizing of Polyanna be resented by critics any more than the cynic moralizing of Shaw or of Main Street? The cheerful idiot and the purblind dyspeptic are depressing in real life, especially when they are moralizing, but in and out of art we can laugh at the idiot, while we squirm at the assumed superiority of the cynic. The moralizing is a cake of soap.

Shakespeare is not depressing and Homer is not depressing. They do not blink the facts of life, and beyond the humor and humanity which saves them and their audience, they lose themselves in their story. The evil they depict is true evil, so recognized, in their art-world. It is, besides, evil called for by their story, not lugged in for a moral or to exemplify a theory of art. They know that drab is not the only color in life. They know that bright things are as real as black things, but they are not illustrating a theory but giving us a story. We pass with them into a fictitious world, and the things which depress the denizens of that world do not depress us if we are not brought back to reality by stumbling on a cake of real soap, not integrated with the story.

The sight of his dog Argos made the heart of Odysseus sink. Even for those who think ugliness the only reality, Argos was covered with realities and squatted on reality. He depressed his master but he does not depress us. He lies upon Main Street and has a Polyanna wag to his tail. His optimism and his pessimism are, however, not tacked on. “And lo, a hound raised up his head and pricked his ears, Argos, the hound of Odysseus.... Despised he lay (his master being afar) in the deep dung of mules and swine.... There lay the dog Argos, full of vermin. Yet even now when he was aware of Odysseus standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he had not the strength to draw. But Odysseus looked aside and wiped a tear.” Argos is the ideal dog of a far away master; “who has lost his dominion,” as Eumæus, the shepherd of Odysseus, says. Argos registers the fate of his master. We feel, but we do not feel depressed. It is human; it is all inevitable; it is real as life but perfectly idealized by perfect transfer to the realm of art. Eumæus gives us the morality of it, the truth of it, but he is far from moralizing, either pessimistically or optimistically. Argos is the dog Schneider that Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle could not find to recognize him; he is the picture in brief of his master’s fate. Eumæus is as free from all obtrusive soap as Argos himself. The dog’s fate is ascribed to the careless women who “are no more inclined to honest service when their masters have lost dominion, for Zeus takes away the half of a man’s virtue when the day of slavery comes upon him.”

V
ART AND THE DIVINE

1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART

The recent discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen has aroused the interest of the world. The perseverance of the explorer, the variety, artistic excellence and intrinsic value of the discovery gave the news a place in the press and signalized the latest triumph of the spade, which Schliemann converted into the best of historians. Dig in your back-yard, and you can read its past in the layers before your eyes. Make a cross-section of the country, and successive deposits will tell you its story. Lay bare the strata of the earth, and the buried fossils, the minerals, the gas, the oil, reveal the history of the world. Grave-digging is the most productive occupation to which science, art and even commerce can now be vocationally guided.

What was it that enriched the Egyptian tomb and other tombs of the past in which man was buried? It was religion, and specifically it was belief in the immortality of the soul. The latest opened tomb repeats the truth that was manifest in the pyramids of Egypt, which were temples as well as tombs. The beehive tombs of Mycenæ from which Schliemann actually shoveled gold ornaments of various kinds were also temples as well as tombs. The altar-stones in Catholic churches with their tiny loculi for the relic of a saint keep still the memory of the days when persecuted Christians found the Catacombs of the dead places of worship as well as of escape from the persecutor.

The caves of Cro-Magnon and Aurignac and other ancient deposits in France and Spain have disclosed the earliest evidence of man’s art. The man was no mean artist, and the coloring and skillful drawing have astonished every one. Why dark caverns, inaccessible to light, should have been so decorated has puzzled observers. Reinach calls the pictures early “magic,” painting of animals to capture them. But there are paintings of men as well as of bisons and reindeer. Professor Osborne is quoted as saying that it seems to be art for art’s sake, namely, that the sheer pleasure of the drawing is its reason. An admission, it would seem, that the professor has no real explanation to offer. Sir Bertram Windle has recently asserted the religious origin of these pictures. They would seem to be the earliest appearance of stained-glass windows. The caves were temples, and the explanation is confirmed by a comparison with the beehive tombs of Mycenæ and with the Egyptian tombs. The altar, the sacrifice, the victims, the food, clothing and other accompaniments of life, are all evidences of religious feelings and a belief in a continued existence. The absence of the bodies in these caves may easily be accounted for. Fleeting time with prowling animals has destroyed them while it left the pictures on the wall. Art is even longer than Longfellow imagined.

If the earliest art so far found is religious in origin, these so called Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian artists exemplify again what is a commonplace in the history of art. It would be easy to add to the following statements found under “Art” in Hasting’s Dictionary of Religion: “The religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that is known of it.” “There is hardly any doubt that the high level of Assyrian and Babylonian art is due to the deep religious feeling of the two nations.” “The history of art in Greece is throughout its course intimately connected with religion.” The fact is beyond all denying. Religion and art are united, in music and song, from the dances of savages to the Hebrew psalms and the stateliest liturgies; in painting, from the early caveman to the modern man; in sculpture, from the crudest icons dug up at Troy to the idol statues of Greece and Rome, in the lions and bulls of buried Mycenæ and Crete, of Assyria and Egypt, in the tiny seal rings, in the ornaments and statuary of our modern churches; in oratory, from the prayers of the priest in the Iliad, to the fulminations of the prophet and the eloquence of the pulpit; even in civic oratory we find Demosthenes and Cicero in their sublimest heights touching upon religious motives; in the poetry of incantation, of oracle, of revelation, in liturgy and drama; in the little tale of the fable and in the mighty story of the epic, for the full sweep of which Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton must stage their events upon the background of a Divine Providence; in architecture, from the tombs and temples of the eastern world, to the temples of the Aztecs and to the Gothic cathedral.

Aquinas gave in his Summa a synthesis of all science; Dante gave in his Divina Comedia a synthesis of man’s life and destiny; the Gothic cathedral of the same age gave a synthesis of all the arts in one structure, exemplifying in fullness and excellence the mutual interaction of art and religion in the middle ages, where manifestly religion held sway as never before or since. The Morgan “Collection” in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York exhibits the dusty wreckage of that wonderful union of religion and art. No poet’s imagination is needed to rebuild those fragments into that marvelous structure, under whose myriad statuary of serious saints and grotesque gargoyles, you pass through carved portals into the spacious aisles over which arches leap aspiringly. The painter fascinates you with the story of many colors in the windows. The weaver hangs other pictures on the rich tapestry curtaining the walls. The wood-carver is everywhere evoking beauty with cunning fingers. Music and song in the dramatic and antiphonal liturgy, the sublime eloquence of the pulpit in turn charm and rest the ears.

The minutest detail is as artistic as the rich magnificence. The missal on the altar will be a “Book of Kells,” a reflection on illuminated parchment of the religious and monastic life which produced it, by its patience, learning, devotion, silent application, and scrupulous exactness; “examined with a microscope for hours,” says an authority, “without detecting a false line or irregular interlacement.” Near the missal of the Gothic cathedral would be found a jeweled chalice, like that of Ardagh, with three hundred and fifty-four distinct pieces, classic and rich in all kinds of ornament. Baldwin Brown was surely right in declaring: “It is probable that nothing more artistically beautiful has ever been seen than the Gothic cathedral,” and the Gothic cathedral is the crowning glory of a deeply religious age.

VI
ART AND THE DIVINE

2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION

The history of art from its lowest manifestations to its highest gives evidence of its union and intimacy with religion. The fact is admitted, and might easily be confirmed by the very way in which religious movements violently reacted against art. Hebraism knew the power of art over its followers, and Hebraic antagonism to sculpture and painting served to give religious impulse freer outlet in Hebrew poetry and oratory and other literature. The Bible is the supreme illustration of the influence of religion upon literary art. Islamism opposed art, but gradually succumbed to its influence at least in architecture. That Islam has not yielded more to art is an evidence of arrested civilization, as well as of baser and more sensual religious feelings. Puritanism, the intensest form of Protestantism, opposed art in all its manifestations, but Puritanism either diverted art energy to poetry and literature or provoked excesses by its attempt to check the natural impulses of art, and Puritanism finally yielded to art. It is clear then that religious opposition to art serves but to show more strikingly the union of religion and art. The religion that opposes art must direct the art impulse into other channels or the religion degenerates. By their nature religion and art are congenial.

What now is the explanation of this close and continuous union of art and religion, found everywhere and in all ages? Taine and his school, led astray by some details in the artist’s subject matter, have tried to explain art by environment; but environment is an explanation absurd in itself, and cannon be adequate for an ubiquitous fact which transcends all environment. The theorists who ascribe the origin of art to play and the deploying of superfluous energies liken, with Herbert Spencer, the art impulse to the acts of a kitten playing with a ball. Play may be partly an excess of energy, but not all energy is artistic, and animal play is the stirring of appetite, bearing but a slight, superficial resemblance to man’s early strivings for artistic expression. How many games are imitative and made more attractive by art! From the very first, mind enters into early and even child art, and at the last the devotion of the artists to their ideals in the higher manifestations of art, a devotion quite unlike play, shows that the art impulse is essentially different from the instinctive impulse of the kitten, which pounces on a rat as it pounced on a ball of wool.[1]

Another school, striving to explain the connection between art and religion, takes a directly opposite view to the play theory. Fear and magic are, according to these authors, the controlling factors. The difficulty in this theory is the utterly selfish element in the fear and magic impulse, whereas the art impulse is disinterested and unselfish. Besides, religious belief precedes the fear and magic propitiation of offended powers. The voodoo and the hoodoo mark degradations of religious impulses. Impulses in harmony with man’s nature may go down as well as up, and even should we suppose that the unselfish impulse of art, which finally becomes the evidence and glory of man’s highest civilization, could be traced back to the sordid details of selfish superstition, why should such an ugly duckling evolve into a fair swan? Devolution and degradation are easier than evolution. Why did the art impulse take the narrow, upward path and shun the broad way down to perdition?

The perfection of the oak must have been in the potency of the acorn. The oak could not come from a peanut, nor can all the powers of sun, rain and soil or any other factor of the environment evolve the fruit of the peanut vine into the majesty of the oak. We can explain by an extrinsic cause the stunting of an oak or the rotting of an oak, but we cannot account for the existence of the oak—except by an acorn. We may find perhaps a thwarted or corrupted art tendency in superstitious fear and its products, but that element of fear could not write a poem or compose a sonata or rear a Gothic cathedral. The perfection reached by the art product must have been in the potency of the first artistic impulse in germ.

Religion and art were then united potentially in the original art impulse just as the strength and lofty beauty of the oak were latent in the acorn. The art impulse is natural to man; it is intellectual. It requires brains to be artistic, as it requires brains to laugh, and no animal has done either or will ever do either. The bird in building its nest displays an intelligence not its own; its nest building is inherited just as its song is. Jean Fabre’s observations have shown conclusively the wonders of instinct, coupled with the stupidity of the creature possessing the instinct. But the earliest scrawl or daub of the child displays the mind working on matter and the deliberate shaping of means to an end. All intellectual testers from Simon-Binet to the latest have found the making or interpreting of pictures a measure of intellectual power. They are right. Art is rationalized pigments or sounds or words with their images or some other rationalized material. Dr. James Harvey Robinson in Mind in the Making says that we are wrong in rationalizing the past to make up our minds, and how does he show it? By rationalizing another past for us. The truth is we must rationalize the past, and Dr. Robinson should induce us, not to stop rationalizing, but to rationalize correctly and should give us something better than universal skepticism with which to rationalize. The art tendency is one with the religious tendency in being rational and intellectual.

Art and religion strive for high ideals; they are disinterested and unselfish. LaFarge says to Saint Gaudens: “That work is not worthy of you,” and Saint Gaudens picks up a hammer and smashes the sculpture. That is an instance paralleling the heroic following of religious ideals with like sacrifices. Was it fear of bogies or love of their dead which filled so many tombs with precious articles? Believing in immortality, Egyptians and Myceneans gave to the dead what was most precious, and what was most precious was the finest art in the costliest material. Love keeps graves green: fear erects a crematory.

Art and religion are personal and emotional. Each has its own proper expression. Of religion the expression is worship and of art it is concrete embodiment of the ideal, and in both cases the expression is intimately personal and permeated with feeling. Art is more sensible and so more emotional because its expression must be presented to the senses or at least to the imagination. Religion whose primary expression is an act of the will, need not of its nature be attended with emotion or external display but it usually is, and feeling and expression commonly help to the fuller expression of religion. The rapture of art and the ecstasy of religion, though differing in much, have also much in common.

In their social appeal art and religion are akin. The artist and the saint have their hours of solitary contemplation. St. Peter at Pentecost, describing the religious ecstasy of the inspired apostles, cried out: “These are not drunk as you suppose,” and, continuing, he quoted the prophet Joel: “Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.” In the forming of their visions and dreams saint and artist are alike, though the substance of their visions differ. They are alike also in their impulse to give their visions expression and to influence men with them. Religion is apostolic and art is social, and that is why in history they have gone forth so often hand in hand to subdue the world. Whole nations had to conspire to erect the Egyptian pyramids, the tower of Babel, the temples of Israel, of Rome, of Greece and of the Orient, and the Gothic cathedrals. Only a union of art and religion could produce such stupendous results. Patriotism and the state have at times come near to these great effects, when patriotism or love of country assumed the nature of religion. To produce these national monuments a lasting cause as well as a cause of wide appeal was necessary. Here again art and religion are akin. Art is long, and religion is immortal.

Art reaches its highest and most perfect expression in the sublime. Here religion does not walk hand in hand with art, but bears art on high and gives to art some of its own divinity by endowing the artistic expression with sublimity. The literature of the Bible attained to heights which writers of other nations could not dream of nor ambition. Genesis sets poets and all artists upon a lofty eminence. By the revelation of creation, the imagination and the vision of the artist became coterminous almost with that of the Creator. Newton’s theory of gravitation which shepherded the starry hosts of the universe into one obedient flock, gives us a realization of the effect of Genesis upon the world’s imagination. The creation motif in literature emancipating man’s imagination, enlarging the boundaries of vision, and dowering the artist with sublimity, deserves a treatise by itself and a history worthy of its greatness.

Art and religion are united in fact, so history teaches; art and religion are akin, so the study of their attributes reveals. What then is the only and full explanation of that fact and of that harmony? Philosophers hold that the only and the full explanation of the harmony subsisting between the mind and reality, which is called truth, is found in the fact that both mind and reality are reproductions in creation of God’s truthful knowledge of Himself. Ethicists hold that the only and full explanation of the harmony subsisting between the will and law, which is called moral good, is found in the fact that both will and law are reproductions in the finite of God’s love of Himself. So philosophers must hold that the full and only explanation of the harmony subsisting between the soul and art, which is called the expression of the beautiful, is found in the fact that like the innate tendency to truth and good, the tendency to beauty is a reproduction of God’s contemplation of Himself. Creation, as has often been declared, is a manifestation of the art of God, a mimetic presentation in finite matter and spirit of the infinite ideal. All advance in truth and virtue is an approach to divine truth and goodness, and all true progress in art is an approach to divine beauty. “Filled with enthusiasm,” says De Wulf in L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté, “before the greatness of the artist’s power, Dante Alighieri compares it to that of Omnipotence:

“‘Your art like the grand-child of God’

(Inferno, XI, 103).

“Art is the grand-child of God because it is the offspring of man’s creative power as man himself has come from the hands of God.”

VII
ART AND THE DIVINE

3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE

The fact that religion and art are connected is abundantly established by history. The naturalness of that connection is made clear by the many traits art and religion possess in common. As philosophers have argued to the existence of God from the fact that the universal belief in His existence can be accounted for satisfactorily on no other supposition; as philosophers also argue to the immortality of the soul from man’s universal and inevitable tendency to unending existence, so in like manner, it may be argued that since always and everywhere the art impulse is connected in its origin and growth with religion, that impulse too, like belief in God and desire of immortality and conscience for law and tendency to truth, is a projection of the divine upon humanity, not the anthropomorphism of God but the theomorphism of man. The structure of our eye, made to respond to light, justifies us in concluding there is light. The nature of the soul, which can respond to infinite beauty, justifies us in concluding there is infinite beauty. He who said, “Let there be light,” said also, “Let us make man after our own image and likeness.”

An explanation of the nature of these two human acts of art and religion will disclose more analogies while revealing essential differences. Religion is a virtue of the will, a habit developed by the free act of man, a virtue which culminates in worship of God as the supreme being. The impulse of art has not been analyzed as fully and as satisfactorily as the virtue of religion, but from Aristotle’s analysis in the Poetics, through the Neo-Platonists and the Scholastics down to Kant and his followers, there is common agreement that the tendency to beauty does not belong to the inclination towards good, actuating appetite and will, but that the enjoyment of beauty is a function of the perceptions, the imagination, and the mind. The admitted disinterestedness of the art impulse is the paramount and irresistible evidence that it differs essentially from the self-seeking tendency of will and appetite which cannot be indifferent to good, since good is the very cause and condition of the appetite’s existence. The enjoyment of a painted fruit is akin to the enjoyment of verified theory or of a triumphant conclusion, and not like the satisfaction felt in the ownership of the painting of fruit or in the actual craving or eating of the fruit.

It is evident, therefore, why a man may be artistic without being religious. There is no more difficulty in understanding why an artist is not a saint than in knowing that conscience is one thing and acting up to it another thing. Improvement in art does not always mean improvement in morals or in religion, any more than to know is to will. Nor, on the other hand, will the evil of an artist or of his work be evidence against the divinity of art. The divine origin of conscience and the natural law is evident in the vice of the sinner as in the virtues of the saint. The essential difference between art and religion shows also that the school in which the prophet is Ruskin, the school which finds a religion in the beauty of world or of art, is incorrect in its teaching. Love and fear are the mainsprings of action, the incentives to virtue. Beauty may grace the attraction of good; it cannot take the place of good in virtue and religion. Estheticism is not asceticism. Francis of Assisi was a poet and a saint, Francesca da Rimini enjoyed poetry, might have been a poet, but was not always a saint, and many a Francisco and Francesca may be found neither artistic nor religious, as many are talented without being virtuous and virtuous without being talented.

Despite the sad lack of harmony between the beauty of their art and the virtue of their lives, artists have nevertheless always been revered. The honor of their art has won them in their lapses a gentleness of treatment not accorded to less favored mortals. They are fallen angels if they fall.

Does the union of religion and art mean then that the artist must be a moralist? To moralize is not a function of art as such. I enjoy the beauty of a tree without any feeling that it conveys a truth or inculcates a virtue. The artist may transfer the tree to canvas, where I enjoy it as I did in nature without any accessory implication, informing or ethical. Joyce Kilmer may put the tree in a poem and with it add beauty to the truth that, “only God can make a tree.” The psalmist may put a tree in his sacred hymn and with it add beauty to his praise of the life of a good man, who shall be “like a tree planted near the running waters.” Logical truth and moral good are not excluded from art, although the artist by profession is not a teacher. Modern critics are often inconsistent and hypocritical in welcoming every dramatist or poet or novelist who undisguisedly advocates various theories, but will be withering in their scorn for any one who advocates the ten commandments. To moralize, to dogmatize, to theorize is not the function of art, and though these actions are not incompatible with the functions of art, very rarely in the history of art has it been successful when it undertook to teach or to preach. Didactic poetry, satire poetry and propaganda drama, have great difficulty in becoming poetry and remaining poetry.

Religion then is a virtue of the will, resulting in acts of worship; art, a power of the mind, resulting in various artistic creations. Religion may remain wholly spiritual, even in its expression, but, though the mind’s appreciation of beauty may rest on purely spiritual and intellectual objects, such as theories or virtues or God and heaven, art must express itself in sensible objects. Even in literature, the most intellectual of arts, words and pictures of the imagination are essential. Angels might be conceived as having an art whose sole medium was spiritual ideas, not so man, whose mind works through imagination. Aquinas, stressing the intellectual nature of beauty, calls attention to the fact that while men speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds, they will rarely and only figuratively consider the acts of other senses, as taste, touch and scent, beautiful. The actions of these senses are immersed in the material, whereas sight and hearing are closer to the intellectual and spiritual. Man has not yet succeeded in making a fine art whose medium would be tastes and touches and fragrances. The unselfish enjoyment of art cannot be released in objects so material and so near to the appetites. The sensualist is not an artist in yielding to sense enjoyment, although he may wish to give his unhallowed ways an artistic gloss. The one who sees only an apple pie in rosy apples or senses slumbrous ease in soft velvets and in iridescent silks or perceives only the perfume in flower and fruit, is not experiencing esthetic emotions, but rather stirrings of the bodily appetites. If estheticism is not asceticism, neither is it, on the other hand, concupiscence or mere sensualism.

Does the connection between art and religion exclude the presentation of evil in art? Art would be much handicapped if it were restricted entirely to good objects. Art is a manifestation of man’s intellect and must act in accord with the nature of that faculty. If evil is artistically presented, it must be depicted as evil. To present moral evil as a good is a falsification as repugnant to the mind as would be the painting of a blue sunrise, of a green moon or of a black-and-tan sea, and as absurd as the sculpture of a five-legged lion. The enlightened mind rejects such physical monstrosities, and the enlightened mind, despite the lower appetites, rejects moral disorders with equal, if not greater, repugnance.

Again, art requires that the evil, the moral ugliness or physical ugliness, be a necessary and rational part of the presentation. A fact of nature becomes at once the material of science, because science concerns itself with unadorned truth. But for a fact of nature to be material of art, it must be idealized, that is, it must be made an integral part of the art product. The pleasure of art does not arise from deception but from illusion which does not deceive. Painted grapes might deceive birds; but did they deceive men, then the effect would not be that of art but of reality. The evil or ugly can never be pleasant as long as it is present and actual. The transfer of evil to the world of art if it becomes an integral, justified and rationalized part of the illusion, is usually enough to rob evil of its actuality and unpleasantness.

Sometimes in contemporary realism, with every justification of ugliness from the art product, there is depression and not true art pleasure, because we cannot forget the actual world when contemplating the imaginary world of art. Suppose “Macbeth” or “Œdipus” were really historical and were acted in the presence of their contemporaries or of the next generation. Would there be satisfaction and the emotional relief arising from illusion? Hardly. Memories would be too much lacerated with the actual to surrender to the illusion of art and to enjoy its contemplation. Actuality would put back the salt into the tears that else might have been sweetened by transfer of evil to remote and imaginary realms. The Greeks and Shakespeare were right in making their tragedies historical, whereas modern realists are somber with pessimism because they never forsake the actual.

Art and religion are both concerned with life and so they both must touch evil and ugliness, unhappily a large part of life. Religion as a virtue must overcome evil and not permit it to master the will. Art depicts evil in such a way as not to offend the enlightened mind, by approval of evil or by the artistically unjustified introduction of evil or by actual experience of evil. In all these cases the mind would not experience the true and lasting pleasure of art. The taste of fruit passes; the contemplation of painted fruit is a joy forever. Art pleasure is not the playing with toys, as Plato would seem to make it, but the fine occupation of rational minds, which Aristotle made it, an occupation worthy of man because art interprets nature and man to himself, because art exercises man’s rational faculties, because art releases man’s emotions under conditions where the evil of actual life is removed. Macbeth and Œdipus in life were saddening spectacles; the echo of that sadness felt through dramatic representation has high pleasure for the mind.

The cathartic function of art brings it close to the virtuous and the divine. What virtue does really, art does ideally, transforming evil into good. The vicarious sacrifice of Calvary was the catharsis of mankind, an infinite cleansing, compared with which the vicarious feeling of dramatically enacted evil is but as a drop to the ocean. Close to the divine, too, although at the same time infinitely remote, is the creation of art. Wisdom and love inspired God in His creation, but so also did the quest of beauty. Aquinas called the universe God’s sermon, and the universe is a divine picturing and sculpturing and harmonizing. The artist follows far after, rethinking through finite images the ideals which filled the thoughts of the Divine Artist.

In idealizing, in creating, is art akin to the divine, and, lastly, in its disinterestedness is art divine. All appreciation of beauty is divine. Contemplation will be the occupation of eternity, and contemplation is the proper and the congenial attitude of the soul towards beauty. Good inspires love and attracts to union, but when union has been effected in eternity, the enraptured ecstasy of the beautiful will be the soul’s unending activity. Beauty is the supreme excellence of truth, the polish on the granite of fact, the uncloying fascination arrested upon perfection. In eternity infinite good and infinite truth, obscured in time, will stream into the soul unclouded and refulgent, and beauty will grace love and crown wisdom.

The millions of mankind who admire the red of every morning, and the forests breaking green through the silver mists and the birds in awakened song rising from the flowers to the brightening sky, these millions do not begrudge one another such beautiful spectacles, nor are they mutually jealous as they listen to beautiful sounds. That unselfish, that unenvious contemplation of beauty marks off man from animals by an impassable chasm and makes him an image of the self-sufficing Creator, the source of all beauty, the exemplar of all beauty, whom the Blessed forever contemplate and forever enjoy, unenvying and unenviously.

VIII
THE VISCERAL TEST OF BEAUTY

“What is the prime requisite of a critic?” was the question. “His sincerity,” said one; “his sympathy,” said a second; “his philosophy,” said a third, “because everything he says will be ruled by his principles, even his sincerity and sympathy.” The answer of the third speaker is pertinent to a symposium printed in the New Republic on the function of criticism.

It is the common view of the seven writers that criticism is an art and the critics, artists, but no one, except Mr. Francis Hackett, tries to show what the label of artist means. Mr. Dickinson Miller, a professor in a theological seminary, very justly and quite fittingly insists on the social responsibility of the artist, as one who deals with life. Mr. Lovett goes to history and prepares the ground for a discussion of principles by grouping critics in several classes. Mr. Clive takes the humblest and most practical view of the critic, calling him an appraiser, a function which Mr. H. L. Mencken vehemently repudiates and places a chip on his shoulder while belligerently proclaiming himself impressionistic. He makes one deep remark which would seem to put him in the same school of esthetics with Mr. Hackett. Presumably with humorous intent, or perhaps seriously, Mr. Mencken locates the artistic impulse in “hormones and intestinal flora.” Hormones are secretions of the glands (we just looked it up!) and “intestinal flora” may mean ferments. Mr. Mencken is abreast of the times. Graft on a new gland and masticate yeast, these are the new specifics for all the ills that flesh is heir to.

The other contributors to this interesting symposium, though not, with the exception of Mr. Hackett, delving as deep as Mr. Mencken, would appear to be in philosophy individualists and subjectivists. The former editor of the Athenæum, Mr. J. Middleton Murry, accepts the dictum of Rémy de Gourmont: “Erect personal impressions into laws,” as the “true motto of a critic.” Mr. Murry is, however, too sensible to accord to individual impressions undue freedom and with some violence to his consistency asserts that personal laws stand or fall by their agreement with common experience and with human nature.

Mr. Morris Cohen puts himself into a fallacious dilemma from which he does not successfully extricate himself. According to Mr. Cohen, all critics are led by personal impressions or by the authority of others. He should know that between the blind feeling of impressionism and the blind faith of authority there is enlightened reason. Mr. Cohen does not take the path of reason, but endeavors to escape the horns of his own dilemma by recourse to pragmatism. He claims, what will be news to historians of philosophy, that Euclid was the first pragmatist, although in the next breath Mr. Cohen states that “mathematicians of the nineteenth century have shown that Euclid’s axioms are mere guesses to be justified by their consequences in the factual realm.” “Factual realm” seems to mean the indefinitely remote future of pragmatism where the gold of truth is separated from meaner elements. Some chosen spirits of the “factual realm” now assure us that the “self-evident principles” of Euclid are “guesses.” Mr. Cohen is equipped to write an inside history of philosophy with some entirely original features. The “factual realm” leads back to skepticism, and Mr. Cohen is still impaled by his dilemma.

Mr. Francis Hackett makes the most serious attempt to get at the philosophy of criticism and of art, and attacks at once the question of the beautiful. It is evidence of his thoroughness that he goes straightway to the great problem of esthetics, “Can an object be at once beautiful and evil?” Mr. Hackett answers promptly in the negative, but then proceeds to confuse the point by going to another and different question, “Can evil or an ugly object be represented in art?” The answer to this question is evident. The elopement of Helen, the patricide and incest of Œdipus, the galleries of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and countless other happenings in the world of art, show that the evil and the ugly have been and may be represented in art. “I can hardly conceive,” says Mr. Hackett, “an artist as subduing a cancerous object to an esthetic design.” But why not? Marriage with one’s mother is more repugnant than a cancer, and yet it was handled successfully by Sophocles, however repulsive some of his imitators have been in their details.

The very transfer to the realm of art robs the ugly object of its actuality and imminence. Surely the ugly and evil have been and may be represented in art, but such objects may not be represented as beautiful and good. That were as false and untrue to nature as a centipede cow in a picture. Perhaps a cancer could not appear in a picture or poem or story except by suggestion. A stark realism would disgust, but a true artist might subdue a cancerous object to artistic design as effectively as Homer subdued in his story the fleas of the dog, Argos, and the dung-heap where he lay.

Beauty in art would lose one of its charms, the splendor of contrast, did not admitted ugliness or evil occur in art. Bad art disgusts and so does badness in art, when badness is approved or when it is projected into art for purposes not artistic. Mr. Hackett’s real trouble is that he has not properly isolated the feeling of art awakened by beauty. He thinks that the esthetic sense is sexual and visceral. If the mouth waters at painted fruit, would Mr. Hackett call art salival? Human beings are composites, and external objects while producing their essential and proper effects may have concomitant effects accidentally brought into being. To admire the beauty of an apple is an esthetic feeling entirely distinct in cause and faculty and in operation from the feeling of sensible satisfaction, anticipated or actual, which comes to the taste-buds, and different again from any visceral qualms that may arise from associated ideas of unhappy experience with other apples.

Mr. Hackett has been led astray by not distinguishing the disinterested emotions of beauty from the selfish emotions of appetite. He calls beauty, “disinterested satisfaction,” and in that word “disinterested” he has a fact about beauty, a fact solving his problems, a fact which has been admitted by every one who has studied the subject, and a fact which is capable of experimental demonstration at any moment. Professor Phelps of Yale once called esthetic emotions a spinal thrill; Mr. Mencken would call them “hormones or intestinal flora”; and Mr. Hackett declares that “the true sources of esthetic satisfaction and dissatisfaction are deep in our emotional and visceral life.” The one essential quality of disinterestedness, found in esthetic satisfaction, shows the absurdity of all such statements. Bodily emotions are all the outcome of appetites, and appetites are never disinterested but always self-seeking by their very nature. They are actuated by good; they tend to an end, an end which they do not and cannot seek disinterestedly. Even the act of the highest disinterested love may be akin to the sense of beauty, but it is not as wholly disinterested because that unselfish love is still seeking good, and good as such does not come within the purview of beauty at all. It is impossible to be disinterested towards good or evil.

Mr. Hackett speaks of beauty being a “sensuous satisfaction.” Here again there is a confusion between beauty of art and other beauty. Art appeals to the senses because art presents its beauty in concrete embodiments. To that extent the satisfaction of beauty arises from sensible objects, but the feeling of beauty transcends mere sensation. “Art is long.” “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The satisfaction of appetite is passing; the satisfaction of beauty abides. Mr. Hackett does well to seek the springs of beauty in personality. Personality is an abiding principle of intellectual beings. The enduring joy of beauty argues to an abiding principle which bears the dynamic charge of that joy. Beauty supposes a soul.

“Beauty is a light that may follow any reality whatever and give us the power to release our emotions happily in the presence of that reality.” So states Mr. Hackett, and he is right, if he gives the correct meaning to “emotions.” Light or luster has been recognized from all time as an objective element of beauty, which has been defined as the light of truth. Mr. Hackett paraphrases a definition which has been incorrectly attributed to Plato. Kleutgen has defined beauty as the perfection of anything resplendently manifested.

Let us hope that Mr. Hackett will remove “visceral” from among the qualities of beauty and preclude critics from adding a fiftieth explanation of Aristotle’s catharsis to the forty-nine varieties already set forth. Wearers of Murphy buttons or those who have lost or may lose sections of the intestinal tract should be assured in an amended edition of Mr. Hackett’s esthetics that their sense of beauty has not been abbreviated or impaired. Sane philosophy is the prime requisite of true criticism.

PART SECOND
ART IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE

IX
LOOKING FORWARD IN LITERATURE

The teacher of literature today is looking backward when he should be looking forward. Greek literature, Latin literature and, to a large extent, English literature are not orientated; they do not face the rising sun. It was not so in the Greek schools of Greek literature. Gorgias and Isocrates taught literature for the morrow, and for practical and immediately practical purposes. In the Roman schools it was so from first to last. Recall Cicero’s studies under Greek rhetoricians and Cicero’s own preachment in the Archias speech. “Shame on those who bury themselves so deep in literature that they harvest nothing for the good of all and bring nothing to light for our eyes to look upon.” Recall Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, and all the intervening schools of Rome. Rome had no vocational schools for road-building, but Rome did have schools of grammar, poetry, rhetoric and philosophy where it trained leaders with vision and with the power to act. The brains of Rome trained in literature guided barbarian hands to lay down the roads over which Christianity traveled and civilization came down to us.

Literature looked forward in every period of the world’s schooling. Ausonius and Isidore, Alcuin and Petrarch, Boileau and Pope, England and France, and even Germany until about the middle of the nineteenth century and America until a little later, kept the literatures of Greece and Rome orientated to the future by teaching them as arts, by making composition of literature the goal of the teaching of literature.

Science is ever growing old; history is always being rewritten; literature is ever young. We know more about Homer’s history than Longinus knew, but we do not taste the delight of his poetry any better than Longinus tasted it. “Handing on the torch of learning” is a trite phrase, but it is literally verified in the true teaching of literature. Each age adds to the advance of science and information, but art is long. Literature and art do not belong to the past. Literally and without figure of speech they are the past living in the present. They are the flaming torch, kindled in the past, never dimming and never to dim.

Write a history of artists; do not write a history of art. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The information of science changes every moment; the appreciation of art once gained is enduring. The Encyclopedia Britannica has rewritten all its science and history; it reprints its appreciations of Sophocles by Campbell and of Demosthenes by Jebb and even of Johnson by Macaulay. Where the cause is the same, the effect is the same, and so the beauty of Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn awakens still the same appreciation.

Of literature as a subject of investigation in university or graduate work there is here no question. The investigator studies the origin, the development, the history of literature. He looks backward; his purpose is to amass information and to codify a science. That is not or should not be the purpose of the teacher in high school and college. He is educating; he wishes to set in operation and perfect the faculties of the class before him, to impress upon every faculty its own proper art, that is, its habitual and excellent way of acting. The school teacher is concerned with the education of acts; the university lecturer with the education of facts.

Take the Ratio Studiorum of the Jesuits, a system embodying the traditions of education and not differing fundamentally from other systems of its time. The Ratio Studiorum had no history of literature or lectures on the evolution of literature. It did not approach literature as a science but as an art. It took the standard authors of Latin and Greek. Cicero was the staple of every class in Latin because for nearly every kind of Latinity, history and poetry excepted, he was a model. Cicero was analyzed, was appreciated, was imitated, that the student might express himself in writing and speaking as clearly, as interestingly, as forcibly as Cicero, that the student might be master of acts of literature, not of facts about literature. That was and is humanism; that is, making a man a man by equipping all his faculties with the art proper to each. The humanities were so called because they embody man. Science is classified nature; literature is nature brought into touch with man’s personality and transmuted into art, man’s only creation.

You cannot get grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. Every other subject in the curriculum produces its kind; so should literature. Mathematics makes mathematicians, chemistry chemists, and physics physicists. Art should produce artists; literature should result in literature, in artistic expression, but it is made to produce historians, biographers, perhaps critics. The history of literature, the evolution of literature should be put out of high school and college and relegated to the university or handed over to the lectures on history, leaving the valuable time of literature for appreciation and expression.

Today we have literature in one class and composition in another and perhaps rhetoric in another. Departments are the offspring of universities and the instruments of science. The rational school of literary expression correlates author, precept and exercise. Information may be imparted piecemeal and from different sources; it is multitudinous and capable of division. Formation is one and united; it is the faculty or power brought to the perfection of self-expression. Art requires a teacher and unifying of means; science may have a score of lecturers as its truths are found in a score of books. Let the teacher of literature therefore take standard literature, make it understood, feel its personality that students may feel it, note and appreciate its beauty that others may take fire or at least get heat from the enthusiasm kindled within him, and then let the teacher see to it that his class express their own selves as the author expressed himself. Let students do for Lincoln what Shakespeare did for Julius Cæsar. If they cannot do a play, perhaps they can do an act; if they cannot create a character, perhaps they can give one characteristic action; if they cannot write a description or tell a story, perhaps they can supply a noun for Lincoln or visualize his deeds in a verb or paint him in an epithet or coin him in a metaphor. And all this, not for an Elizabethan public, but for the students’ own public here and now, looking forward, not backward.

Desperate efforts have been made to galvanize literary courses by lectures on modern novels, current magazines and daily papers. The lamentable fact is that most recent products are not literature; that if there is in them art, it has not been made available for students, as the art of literary classics has been made available by centuries of criticism, and that, finally, the contents of contemporary writings are so easy of access and so inviting to the reader and yet often so ephemeral, that the artistic form is neglected. There is no contemporary history, neither is there contemporary criticism. Literature, like all art, must pass beyond the prejudices and passions of the day to be known and appreciated as art at all. It is for the enlightened teacher of literature to make the students embody their own experience in the finest art molds of the past, not distracting them by the multiplicity of modern literature, but holding up the ideals, like torches, to light the paths before them and, like expert guides, to direct the trembling steps of beginners to new goals.

Literature is not the study of words. Grammar or philology is the study of words. Science dehumanizes everything; it eliminates the personal equation; it is objective, unimpassioned, impersonal, subordinating everything to laws and principles. Literature is the opposite in every respect. It is embodied humanity. Science contains some of man’s operations; literature enshrines all; not truth alone, but good and beauty as well; not simply the clear idea, the accurate statement, the correct conclusion, the consistent reasoning, but also the myriad visions of the imagination, the subtle analogies, the suggestive creations, haunting beauties and idealized good. So literature actuates every power of man whether that power is a constituent part of man’s soul or is a bodily power whose operation by reaction terminates in man’s soul.

As literature is therefore the whole man, so far as humanity can be put in language, the understanding of literature, its appreciation and most of all its creation will make every power of the student operate, if literature is taught as literature. Such results will not come automatically; they come when the teacher by true appreciation creates again before the student the literary masterpiece and when the student strives to rival the masterpiece in the expression of his own experience and of his own dawning humanity. Literature is looking forward when it is making minds think and imaginations imagine and reasons reason and tastes taste and emotions thrill. Teach literature as an art, which it is; not as a science, which it is not.

X
UNIFYING EDUCATION THROUGH LITERATURE

Unity is most useful, if not essential, to a satisfactory course of studies. In the university this unity is effected by the profession which the student has chosen. His field of concentration in art, literature, law, medicine, science, engineering or divinity dictates to him his subjects, and his own earnest choice, together with prescriptions and examinations, insures unity and thoroughness in concentration courses.

Lecturing is the predominant method of the university because professors of higher branches are few and students are comparatively numerous. Lecturing is the weakest and most ineffective of all means of education, and is only saved from complete failure by the serious purposes of university students and much more by the sanction of repetitions and examinations.

In the colleges, however, with the advent of electivism there was no unifying bond to the studies. University methods of studies and lectures prevailed where there were no university conditions. Thoroughgoing electivists, like Dr. Eliot, admitted that the purpose of the college was a general education or culture, but held that any and every study could give such general training. President Lowell, Dr. Eliot’s successor, began to put order into the chaos of extreme electivism. He saw his coaches on the athletic fields build up expert athletes by a rigidly prescribed course of training, and proclaimed the analogy between body and mind, an analogy which would have been all the more cogent had his philosophy been materialistic like that of Dr. Eliot. The prescribed examination in one department at the end of four years is the latest advance of Harvard toward definiteness and unity.

All colleges in America took up electivism to some extent, and even where studies were still prescribed they adopted in their catalogs the language and methods of electivism. No longer were there classes, but everywhere you had courses and departments. One effect of this system has been to make coördinate and of equal importance many subjects which had formerly been subordinate. Colleges whose major subject, or field of concentration, had been language, with other subjects subordinate, now tended to make every subject a major and every field a field of concentration. The departmental system has helped to impair unity of education by disturbing the hierarchy of studies and by removing all subordination. It does not appear to be feasible to concentrate on everything. In some cases colleges seem about to give up the general-training idea and are tending to make their whole course subservient to a profession, obliging every one to take a pre-medical course because the American Medical Association is mighty and medical schools are very exacting.

Formerly high schools and colleges made language or self-expression the field of concentration, and other subjects, like history, mathematics, sciences, were kept subordinate. College and high school had then one purpose, which unified all their studies, as a profession unified lectures in the university—that purpose was the mastery of the art of expression. The French lycées, the German gymnasia, the English public schools, the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, prepared for the university by making students masters of writing and speaking. The writer and speaker could express himself; his intellectual faculties could work properly, and therefore they had received a general training which prepared them for professional work of a special kind. The field of concentration was shown in the names of the classes. The teachers were teachers, not of Latin, Greek, English, but of grammar, of poetry, of oratory, of clear, interesting, forceful expression.

The departmental system destroys this fine unity or renders it very difficult of attainment. The departmental system has been perhaps the chief reason why the classics have been taught as means towards the acquisition of various sciences rather than as exemplifications of literary art. It is as literature and as models of perfect expression that the classics have hitherto survived; as literature and models of expression they were taught in the days preceding the university system of departments. Cicero was a model of letter-writing, of essay-writing, of speech-making. He was chosen with a view to composition; he was graded with a view to composition.

How can a department teacher preserve the former unity of system, where all literature was studied with one dominating purpose, self-expression? If the grade of the class is rhetoric or oratorical expression, will each department teach its own authors, Greek, Latin and English, following the same rhetorical precepts in the same order, or will each department follow its own terminology and its own order, or will, as has happened everywhere, the teaching of rhetoric be relegated to English or to a separate professor, leaving Cicero and Demosthenes to be taught as grammatical documents or historical documents or as legal documents, not as speeches, not as models of oratorical expression? Will the professor of Latin teach Virgil as epic poetry, and the professor of Greek teach Homer as epic poetry, and the professor of English teach Milton as epic poetry, or will the teaching of poetry be avoided by the Greek and Latin departments entirely? Cicero and Demosthenes survive because they are orators; Homer and Virgil live because they are epic poets, but the departmental system either forgets that fact entirely or has three professors teaching the same thing with confusion in the order and in the rules of art. The departmental system, which is a university device adapted for specialization, makes unity of education extremely difficult, and has taken all the interest out of literature by teaching it as everything else but literature!

Besides, as art is the power of doing, and science is chiefly systematized information, the process of education for doing will be different from the process of acquiring information. Too many cooks may spoil the broth because cooking is an art, but too many sign-posts may not always confuse the traveler. It is far easier to divide information among various agents and impart it piecemeal than to apportion the different faculties used in an art to different individuals who will train them to act together harmoniously. Different teachers may very well teach the geography of different countries, but it would not be feasible to let one teacher have the right hand and another the left in teaching the art of piano-playing.

Omitting the effect of personality, which is paramount in art, as the history of all religious movements shows it also to have been in the formation of character and in virtue, one cannot fail to see that departments cannot well coöperate in giving the formation of art. In fact, practically the art of composition has ceased to be the field of concentration in modern high schools and colleges. All literatures, even English, are taught mostly as sciences. The only wholesome reaction in modern education against the predominance of science or systematized information is found in the present vogue for psychological tests. These are professedly tests of power, not of mere information, and in them the power of self-expression through language is preëminent. All the examinations are conditioned by the necessary medium of language, and by far the greater number of tests are and must always be tests in linguistic expression.

Language is the only practical measure of intelligence, and if such tests win favor, they may result in establishing once more the art of expression as the field of concentration or major subject in high schools and colleges which give a general education. Language, when taught as an art, educates the mind, giving it the powers of expression which are the guaranties of the mind’s adequate education. Professors become teachers of an art, not lecturers in a science. Perfect unity is found where the finest models of self-expression in all languages, especially the classical languages, are directed by one teacher to the mastery of the art of expression in one’s own language.

XI
THE INTERESTING TEACHER OF LITERATURE

The nineteenth century was a century of science. Its atmosphere was surcharged with scientific discoveries and scientific theories, and radiated a scientific influence in every direction. Among other effects of that all-pervading spirit we may mention two that entered the classroom and deeply modified the teaching of literature. Science insisted on concrete results and tended to emphasize mechanical methods, enhancing system at the expense of personality.

System was looked upon in some sense as automatic. Such a widespread delusion, which is not yet fully dissipated, was the logical outcome of the mechanical explanation of the universe. The world had evolved along the lines of inflexible laws. Man was part of the machine, and though the mechanism was complicated in his case, yet it was nothing but mechanism after all. If system could run the universe without the help of personality, it would not be hard for it to run the little universe of man. The same reasoning would hold in a classroom. The teacher might be asked to touch the button, but the system would do the rest.

It would not seem to require much argumentation to show the fallacy of such a theory. Do we not all know that nothing in this world is wholly automatic? Motion is a function of personality. Perpetual motion in systems and organizations, that would dispense with personality, is just as absurd as the same proposal in the physical order. Nothing in this world will run of itself without personal coöperation. Somewhere there must be a living, breathing, responsible individual. We may have to travel a long way to find him, but we shall find him, the man behind the motion. It is so with machines; it is much more so with organizations and systems and laws; it is most of all so in education. Latin or German or physics or anything else without a teacher (cf. catalog of correspondence schools) are phrases that belong to the language of advertisement which has omitted from its ethics the chapter on lying. All success, all interest, all enthusiasm are harvests whose sowing is in a human head or human heart. Even the universe calls for the constantly applied force of omnipotence to keep it from disintegrating into nothingness and the watchfulness of Providence to prevent it from wrecking itself. While writers on education have been tracing the causes of the decrease of interest in the classics have they not been overlooking the necessary factor of personality?

The other depressing effect upon education exercised by the scientific atmosphere was the insistence upon concrete results, leading likewise to the elimination of human interest. Science said to every branch of knowledge, “Collect your data, classify your instances, make your deductions, enunciate your laws.” The literary classics were bade to stand and deliver. They had to have data and deductions and laws. Homer and Virgil, Demosthenes and Cicero became the chosen camping-ground of the specialists. The pupils that finished the Iliad with a taste developed, an imagination warmed, a soul uplifted, might be refused a degree. The pupil who had Homer undergo the surgical operations of specialism, who had him pigeon-holed, who had him weighed and counted, was the honor man of the class. He could write an essay on Homeric Æolisms or Homeric ship-building or Homeric word-building. He knew more about Homeric pottery than Homeric poetry. What if his heart never beat faster as he read; what if he was too busy measuring the length of Homeric swords or analyzing the metal of Homeric armor, to drink in the imaginative delight of battle, with Homeric peers, “far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,” he was scientific, he had some concrete results to show for his schooling, and he was the pet child of the century. Assets of the mind could not be weighed or measured; his doctor’s dissertation in his grip could. It contained just twenty-five thousand words, and weighed one pound and a half, and had a superficial area of about a hundred square yards.

The final outcome of the baneful influence of the scientific atmosphere is the almost complete perversion of the good old word, scholar. No one can lay claim now to the title scholarly, unless he is equipped with a formidable array of facts and figures. He must bristle with the fretful quills of half a hundred sciences. In the study of the classics he is so busy with the words of the text that he has not time for their meaning. When he has settled the conflicting claims of innumerable variant readings and all the arguments for the same, he has no leisure left for the old-fashioned practice of trying to appreciate the accepted reading. Scholarship is now a matter of memory, a something that deals with introductions, footnotes, excursuses and critical apparatuses. Plead guilty to an ignorance of all this, and you may be indulgently permitted to call yourself judicious, appreciative, discerning, capable of enjoying a literary masterpiece, but you could not presume to call yourself scholarly. Justin McCarthy, in an article about his old schoolmaster, alludes to the same fact. “I never knew a scholar,” he declares, “so thorough who was less of a pedant, but I ought to say, perhaps, that the general character of his teaching was not what would be called in our days scholarly.”

This steady elimination of the subjective element of education with the corresponding development of the objective side during the years of the nineteenth century, all tended to the extinction of the individual. Another factor also coöperated in achieving this result. The classes in school and college grew more numerous, and the schoolmaster became in turn a teacher, a professor, a lecturer. With each change he drew further away from his hearers. The greater the audience the weaker the personal note, the less individual the expression. The lecturer on a classical author must stray more from the text than the teacher. He is necessarily more general and hence more impersonal. He feels bound to give facts more than impressions. He is committed to the formulating of theories based on a dissection of the text, and shrinks from setting forth the feelings which a masterpiece excites. The lecturer tends to subordinate the author to his lecture, where the teacher’s more humble lot leads him to efface himself in the presence of the author.

This leads us to set forth the proper attitude of the teacher toward the text, and we could not begin the discussion better than by giving a further description of Justin McCarthy’s old schoolmaster.

“I have,” he wrote, in March, 1899, “the most delightful and tender memories of my dear old schoolmaster in Cork. He was not, indeed, the first schoolmaster I ever had, but he taught me all or put me in the way of learning all that I have ever known, and after this long lapse of time I feel as strongly as ever how much I owe him. His name was John Goulding, and he kept a school in the city of Cork, my birthplace.

“To make us understand what we were reading and enjoy it, to make us wish to read more and understand it better—such was the object of his whole method. There was very little of what is called ‘getting by heart’ in his system, unless when he wished to train memory merely for the sake of training it. When we were studying some Latin author he told us all about the author and the scenes described in the pages before us, and he invited all manner of questions on the subject. He showed us on the maps where the places were which the author was describing, and he illustrated the author’s meaning as if he were an artist illustrating a story.

“I do not know to describe his method of teaching better than by saying that it was literary rather than scholastic. His great desire was that a boy should be able to read Greek and Latin as easily as he read Shakespeare and Addison, and he regarded grammar as a necessary means to that end, but not as the end itself. He always took care that historical and geographical knowledge should work in with and illustrate our literary studies.

“I can only say for myself that whatever love of books I may have had I owe in the main to his teaching and to his influence, and I can say with literal truthfulness that throughout a busy life in public and in private his influence and teaching have always been with me and are with me still.”

John Goulding would not be considered in our day a remarkable pedagogist and has not bequeathed his name to a system of education; yet he presents many traits of the true teacher, and these details of his life are pertinent to our question.

The true commentator, whose suggestion we see in the Cork schoolmaster, will not be a philologist, but will use philology; he will not be a grammarian, but he will refuse no point of grammar that will help. He will press every science into service, but he will be the slave of none. He will remember that his supreme object in teaching is not to compose a dictionary of antiquities nor to collect extracts for rhetoric or examples for grammar. His object rather is and should be to bring the pupil to the text, to bring the mind of the author to the mind of the reader. Away from dictionary and grammar, away from footnote and appendix, back to the text, should be the teacher’s cry. The text should be the center upon which every source of information should be focused, not the center from which to radiate to the cheerless circumference of specializations. We do not contend for superficiality, for slipshod grammar, for inaccurate erudition. Thoroughness, care, accuracy, must rule in the classroom. We are simply for liberal education, which opposes early specialization in courses and must equally oppose it in the teaching of literature.

The study of the classics should key up the whole intellectual apparatus. It should sharpen the critical faculties, warm the imagination, cultivate the judgment, develop the taste, ennoble the appreciation, exercise, partially at least, the reasoning faculty, and finally endow the student with perfected powers of expression. To subordinate literature to any one of the swarm of sciences that sprang into life last century is to limit its efficiency and degrade it as a means of general culture.

The teacher, however, must not look for an infallible recipe in this matter. He cannot expect to stir up interest in the pupils by any prescribed formula, by a rigid system of handling the text. A scheme of suggestions may be drawn up, topics for discussion or observation may be arranged. Such devices are helpful, but they should not become stereotyped, because they deaden when they are hard and fast. It is a mark of a crystal to settle into straight lines at fixed angles; it is characteristic of organisms to be yielding and pliable in their outlines, while they retain their life. The meaning is the life of the text, the meaning as it was in the author’s mind, with all the associations that it had for him. Let the meaning be the guide, and the explanation will not be dead. Let the teacher use systems and hints and topics and all other devices as helps to arrive at the sense and meaning, not as inflexible molds into which he must always pour his commentary. A chemist may have weighed and labeled all the constituent elements of a living cell, and he may even succeed in mingling them in such a way as to have all these elements in the very places they are in life, but his mixture will not have the principle of life, that wonderful, unanalyzable bond that unites into one organism, permeates and vivifies the separate atoms and molecules. Because his analysis is complete and perfect, it does not follow that his synthesis will be complete and perfect. Neither may a teacher expect to get the synthesis of a vital, interesting commentary from the detailed formula of the literary laboratory. He must have his finger on the pulse; he must have seized the beating, warm heart; he must have grasped the permeating, vivifying soul of his author, if he would make his commentary living, and there is no other way to the heart blood of an author, except by loving, enthusiastic meditation of his full meaning.

I remember the first time in class that Homer ceased to be for me an example factory for grammar or a shop for Grecian antiquities. We had been translating Homer and parsing Homer; we now began to read him. The change was as easy as it was pleasant. The teacher simply went back behind the dictionary and the grammar, behind the cases and the tenses, to the author’s meaning. He made us see the old priest of Apollo walking along the seashore. He made us realize the fact that he was coming to speak for his daughter. Our attention was called to the completeness and appropriateness of his little speech. In a word, we began to move in the poet’s world. We had used the grammar and dictionary to get there, but when we reached our destination, we alighted from the train. We were bound for the land of Homer, not for that of Goodwin or Liddell & Scott, and the sooner we left our dusty, noisy cars, the better for us. Our professor knew the translation and knew the grammar, but he had left them behind him. He was on higher levels, and he threw away his mountain staff and his guide rope. We were with him there, and we entered into his enthusiasm for the broad view before us. Homer had been for us a venerable mausoleum of well-preserved and dignified, but very dead mummies. His enthusiasm let the life and light into that ancient tomb, and the mummies took off their wraps and lived and moved. From that day of resurrection until the present, Homer has lived for me; from that time I have heard the Homeric heart beat and felt the Homeric pulse throb.

Nor need the teacher who follows these methods have fear that he is going wrong, or that he is neglecting the proper education of his pupils. He is achieving, too, concrete results, an achievement that must not be considered the monopoly of science. Science may not supplant literature in the school-room. It would be a sad day for both if ever it did. As regards observation and induction, it has not been our wish to protest against the use of these methods, but rather against the limiting of their scope. To observe grammar only or archeology or philology and neglect the author’s meaning is as ridiculous as to observe the paint and not the picture, to put a microscope to the marble and not notice the statue. We do not want less development, rather we want more. Develop the powers of observation, but do not think that the only powers are the senses. The world of imagination and the world of thought offer wider fields for observation than the world of external sense. The horizon of the mind is not restricted to the sky line that narrows the vision of the eye.

If you train the powers of observation in the laboratory by asking the pupil to see, to touch, to taste, to smell, train them, too, in the classroom, by asking them to listen to the harmony of a sentence, to trace out the development of a thought, to appreciate the wit, the beauty, the sublimity of a passage. There was observation and training of the powers of observation before the test tube was blown or the dynamo was wound. Science has opened up new and wonderful worlds, not one of which would we see closed; but the lands of literature have not ceased for that reason to be inviting, and the soul, wearied with facts and hampered with figures, gladly escapes into the restful regions of higher and ampler realities.

The crossing of the borders of mere expression, the living and moving in the realms of meaning, the appreciative following of an author’s mind in all journeyings, may not develop grammarians or philologists or ethnologists or archeologists. Perhaps it is not the life-work of classical literature to stock the market with such commodities. The student who travels with a master-mind through the land of thought, now captivated with a view just under his eyes, again catching a glimpse of some far-off scene, all the more glorious in promise, because it lacks definiteness of detail, such a one may turn out to be more of a tourist than a local antiquarian and may suffer some inconveniences in consequence. He will be set right by the local antiquarian on names and dates connected with some obscure town, but in turn he will convey to his learned friend some ideas on the relative importance of localities and on the topography of the whole country. The tourist will not be provincial or municipal or suburban. He will not mistake his native hamlet for the world or make it the sole standard of excellence. The tourist will give you a map; the local antiquarian will draw up a surveyor’s chart, with the number of inches to the grade and the number of feet to the surface. Should not the teacher of literature consider it his duty to encourage the tourist, to introduce the student into the world of meaning, and not to keep him with theodolite and the leveling-rod along the borders of expression, counting words, measuring phrases, or drawing up lifeless charts of tabulated facts? When the student has come home from his travels, he may, if he chooses, lay aside his guide book, and, having seen the world, confine his energies to mastering a portion of it. If, however, he should have brought home from his wanderings nothing more than a love of literature and all that means, will his teacher’s life have been in vain? John Goulding of Cork might be considered not entirely useless, if he gave us no more than Justin McCarthy, who thus describes the results of his master’s work:

“I do not venture to say that Mr. Goulding’s method of teaching was directly adapted to create a thoroughly scholastic knowledge of Greek and Latin, and I do not know whether his pupils would have been likely by means of his instruction alone to take honors in any university competition, but I know that it made all of us, who had a taste for such, ready and fluent readers in Greek and Latin and as familiar with most of the Greek and Latin poets as with Shakespeare and Keats. It was in truth literary rather than scholastic instruction.”

XII
EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS

Life is full to the brim with emotions. Not war only nor political rallies nor the excited throngs at sports are vibrant with emotion, but there is not a single act of life which has not some emotion, quiet or intense, as its source, its companion and its effect. Man ought to be ruled by cold reason, but he responds to feelings and succumbs to feelings.

Today more than ever in the history of the world is emotionalism rampant. Civilization has made mankind a crowd. We touch elbows with the world. The Egyptian hermit has now “the privacy of a goldfish in a glass bowl.” An individual by himself may indeed deliberate and philosophize, but a crowd feels and acts. As soon as it stops cheering, it begins to disintegrate into thinking individuals, who creep silently back to the hermitage of home. The war, with its drives of all kinds, the elections, the athletic contests, have made us familiar with the nature of a crowd. The mob is a high-pressure crowd, and the feelings which burn in the crowd explode violently in a mob. Civilization has brought mankind into the closeness of a crowd, but not yet to the explosive confusion of a mob.

War taught us too the great value of morale. What is morale? What is that light in the sky, that solid ground under foot, that winged buoyancy of the heart? Morale might be described as organized emotion. A crowd is fickle because it feels instead of reasons. Morale is the counter-force to fickleness. Emotions are awakened, are focused on a given point, are stabilized, and the result is morale. Courage hardens to pluck, duty flames into devotion and bravery is transfigured into heroism.

Life therefore is flooded with emotion, all the way from every action of the individual up to the responsive crowd, yielding to panic, exploding into violence or steadied by morale. What then is education doing for the emotions? Whether education be considered a development of the individual capacities, or an adjustment of man to the community, education should not neglect the emotions. The controlling tendencies, however, of the modern school would seem to ignore or belittle emotions. Modern schools pride themselves on being practical and scientific. They have become more immersed in matter than in man. They are materialistic in the wide sense, or naturalistic, but they are less and less humanistic. Three great fields lie before the spirit of man, the field of truth, the field of beauty and the field of good. No traveler can reach beauty and good except through truth, but education seems to think its work is done if it travels the regions of truth and ignores the regions of beauty and good.

All education formerly could be divided into two stages, the earlier of preparation, the later of application. The individual was taught to speak and write and was equipped with the general information necessary to all. He who was able to speak and write was able to express himself, and self-expression, which argued that man’s powers were working normally, was the satisfactory goal in the first stage of education. After the development of the individual came his application to the study of his life-work in professional schools and universities.

In the former of these two stages, as self-expression was the end, language was the chief and almost exclusive means. Sciences were relegated to the university and informational subjects were left strictly subordinated, and the whole course was predominately humanistic. Modern education has profoundly changed this simple arrangement. The university method of education and electivism and specialization have been advanced to college, to high school and to grade school. Many natural sciences have been systematized and brought into early classes. The university chemistry and physics of fifty years ago are now in the grades. Besides professional courses, pre-medical, pre-law, pre-divinity, pre-engineering, pre-journalism, and in general pre-professional studies are in our schools or at the doors. The trades are not behind the professions. The million trades which concern themselves with the production of raw material or with the manufacture of raw material into finished products or with the distribution of finished products, all these are knocking at the door or looking in the window of our school. Nor is that all. As the professions want pre-professional and the trades pre-trade courses, so the state demands pre-citizen courses in civic and hygienics and military tactics, and the home exacts pre-family courses in eugenics and many domestic sciences. Do not close your curriculum list yet. The profession, the trade, the home, the state are not all, and to leave out religion, which calls for pre-religious courses in private schools, we have the whole field of sport and play in pre-dancing, pre-ball-playing, and at last pre-movies. To make the conquest of the practical complete, it is seriously advocated by a special committee of the N. E. A. that this bewildering multiplicity of sciences, professions, trades, civic, domestic and amusement courses should be begun at the junior high school or seventh grade.

There is the contrast. Life is emotional. The early schools that used to be devoted chiefly to writing and speaking, are now crowded with a multiplicity of fact subjects, and even language and literature, the most humanistic and emotional subjects of our courses, are taught theoretically by university and scientific methods. In the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, which did not differ essentially from other systems, four years of the lower schools were given to correct expression of the truth, one year to the element of interest, or beauty, in expression, and one whole year to the element of force, or good, in expression. These two latter classes were called humanities and rhetoric and correspond to the present freshman and sophomore classes in Jesuit colleges.

The reason why a whole year was given to the elements of interest and force in self-expression is found in the twofold nature of emotions. One set of emotions arises from the apprehension of good or avoidance of evil. Another set arises from the perception of the novel, humorous and beautiful. These latter comprehend the emotions of surprise, wonder, delight, awe, in general, the esthetic emotions. The other emotions, called appetitive, include love and hate, with desire and fear, joy and sadness, pity and anger and many others.

Fortunately for the teacher the teaching of emotions is somewhat simplified by the fact that both kinds of emotions respond, not to abstract truth but to truth in the concrete and concrete truth takes on beauty or good and awakens emotions through the imaginations of teacher and student. Teachers who themselves imagine will awaken emotions and educate emotions by exercising them. Teachers who imagine will make pupils imagine by making them translate all truth from the abstract to the concrete. The perpetual question on the lips of the teacher, “For instance?” will embody truth in the concrete, exercise students in imagination and make truth emotional and abiding.

Interesting and enthusiastic teachers are always training emotions. Emotion is not imparted by instruction; it is kindled by contact. Teachers who have their subjects transferred from dead books to their warm, living imaginations, will be interesting, will be moving. They will excite surprise and wonder by novelty and beauty of presentation. They will make their classes expand with love or shrink in horror at the pictures of good or evil.

After imagination and actual feeling on the part of both student and teacher, the next best means of educating emotions is the stimulating of action, especially in the way of original self-expression through the written and spoken word. One of the happy tendencies of our modern education is the restoring of oral expression to its former high place.

These means just mentioned will be helpful in any subject of the curriculum, but the principal instrument in the schools for training the emotions will be literature. Literature is the embodiment of human emotions, in story, in essay, poem, and speech. The schools must hold on to the teaching of literature. They must make a stand against the imperialism of facts and so-called practical subjects. The schools must never forget that it is at least just as practical to have a heart in life as to have a head. A modern French scholar has said: “Humanities and letters are man himself, to remove them from education, it would be necessary to commence by taking man from man.”

Instruction in trades is a knack, not an education of man. A savage can learn to run an automobile, and there are many today running automobiles, but a savage does not enjoy literature or produce literature. Science has its center outside of man, it is impersonal and unemotional. Literature is human, is personal, it appeals to the heart which must not be starved while the head is stuffed.

But even when the teachers of literature have the works of man in their hands, they must not rob them of all emotions by making their teaching of them historical only, or analytical only or theoretical only, lowering Macbeth to a footnote in Scottish history or to an argument for the theory of the romantic movement or to a dissertation on the psychology of temptation. Literature must be taught as literature, not as history, not as ethics. Literature should be taught as an art, not as a science. The teacher should keep self-expression in view. The teacher will consider the work of literature as the expression of a man. Before the class the masterpiece of literature will grow and crystallize into unity. The students will watch its creation; they will reflect the light from the eyes of an enthusiastic teacher; they will grasp the truth vividly and emotionally; they will be thrilled with the truth that has taken shape in their teacher’s imagination, that has been dramatized before them in suggestive detail, that will teach the students themselves how to think, how to imagine, how to find for the embodied truth a local habitation and a name, how to express themselves in words which fascinate and inflame.

So will the emotions by their exercise be developed and by their expression be controlled. The world of the classroom is a little world and its tiny emotions are as dew-drops to a deluge, but for the young hearts in school the world of the classroom is a gigantic world and its slight emotions are adequate to teach beginners. For a dew drop may be a deluge for a violet and its very food and life.

XIII
KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM

This is not the time to drop Latin or Greek openly or under the subterfuge of optional electives. Colleges everywhere are crowded. Buildings are too small for the students; classes are too large for the professors. Now is the time to impose stricter conditions rather than to open wider the doors to colleges, and now is the proper time to restore the classical languages, and especially Greek, if not to favor, because knowledge maketh a bloody entrance, and its weapons are resented, at least to respectable toleration, by teaching them in the right way. Do not empty the baby with the bath, but do draw off the stagnant waters and let the bright showers sparkle and sing and refresh. Don’t throw out Greek, but do teach Greek as literature, as the art of self-expression, as a practical and permanent possession of the student through appreciation and through composition in his own language.

Greek authors used to be put in the students’ hands with a Latin paraphrase. In Jesuit schools the explanation of the author included a translation which might be dictated to the class. This was done because in Latin, and especially in Greek, which was not the language to be used in life, the proper and real work began after the interpretation was known. That proper work was artistic appreciation and artistic reproduction in one’s own language, formerly Latin and now various languages. Rather than cast out Greek, furnish the students with Loeb or Jebb or Murray or Lang, shorten grammatical drill, and then center attention on the appreciation and the reproduction of the finest literary art of all ages, exacting compositions written and spoken in the student’s own language. This is not a revolutionary proposal, the system now prevalent is revolutionary; but it is a proposal to relegate to the university the specialism and scientific handling of literature, and an earnest plea to retain or restore to the classics, especially Greek, their age-old method, proper to the general training of academy and of college and profitable to every student if the art of speaking and writing is of lifelong utility.

The teaching of literature has a handicap which is not found in the teaching of other arts. A painter must know some practical facts about preparing and applying paints, but he need not know the whole chemistry of pigments or the physics of colors. The sculptor must choose the right kind of marble, but he does not take a course in geology. In all arts except literature the contact with the artist’s work is almost immediate. But in literature a language must be mastered, and in mastering that language a thousand sciences have obtruded themselves between the student and the masterpiece. Gustav Foch of Leipsic published some years ago a catalog of dissertations printed in Germany during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The catalog, which was by no means complete, containing only the items he was prepared to furnish, listed 27,000 titles. This formidable number concerned itself entirely with the Greek and Roman writers and embodied special studies on the history, the evolution, the text, the erudition of classical literature. Practically nothing of this immense flood of special dissertations touched on the art of literature.

Now, if all this tremendous erudition were left to the university, where it properly belongs, not much harm would be done; but unhappily the study of literature as a science has almost completely excluded its study as an art. The small school of Dissen, Rehdantz and Blass, who represented in Germany the artistic appreciation of Greek literature, was submerged by the immensely greater number of scientific investigators. The classical poets, with the exception of Homer, fared better than the prose authors; but all literature, instead of being a help to the art of composition, was subordinated to establishing a theory or to exemplifying a generalization.

France resisted almost entirely this scientific obsession of literature. England held out long. In both of these nations composition in the classical languages was a fixed feature of the schools. Victorian literature is steeped in the classics, especially of Greece; the golden age of England’s eloquence, the age of Chatham, Fox and Burke, preceded the scientific era of classicism and was the product of artistic appreciation and of composition.

What of America? The earlier schools followed French and English traditions and taught the classics with literary appreciation and with fruitful results for the literature of America. Then later America sent its professors to Germany; specialism and the departmental system separated literature entirely from the classics; composition ceased except as a means of learning grammar, thus establishing a complete reversal of the original practice, where grammar was a means to composition.

It would be untrue to say that all the erudition, discovered and systematized by numerous sciences and centering upon the classics, was useless or unprofitable. Even the immense library which the Wolfian theory of Homeric origins brought into existence has not been entirely in vain. Germany of the nineteenth century was the Alexandria of the modern world, and as Alexandrian criticism was the forerunner of the best in Latin literature, perhaps the immense activity of scientific investigators may have an artistic outcome. A selection of what is good and true, and a clear, concise presentation of well-established facts, such as Père Laurand gives in his excellent series, Manuels des Etudes Grecques et Latines (Picard, Paris), will help the study of the classics. Erudition should take now its proper place of subordination. The classics should resume the functions which history, evolution, origins and other scientific approaches have taken away; the classics should once more be studied primarily as works of art. The medium and materials do not dominate other arts; they should not dominate literature. Self-expression is the goal of all art; it should be the goal of literature.

Have the teachers of the classics lost faith? Is artistic appreciation an idle thing or is it a thing of beauty, a joy forever? The experimental sciences are always changing in facts and theories. The chemistry of a century ago is absurd; the chemistry of twenty-five years ago is antiquated; the chemistry of today will be old tomorrow. As Remsen long ago saw and insisted on, what is valuable in the teaching of chemistry are the processes, not the theories, which will likely change tomorrow. Chemistry, as a science, is a bit of classified information always modified by research. Art and artistic appreciation is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Give a man appreciation of literature; let him taste the beauty of Homer and of Sophocles and of Demosthenes, and you have given him, not a catalog of facts which must always be rectified, not a theory which must change with the facts, but a precious treasure in the mind which will always remain. In teaching chemistry the processes are more important than the temporary information; in the teaching of literature the processes are at least equally valuable, and besides last through life in abiding taste and in perfected self-expression.

Formerly reproduction was the aim of the teacher of the classics. “Reproduction is the soul of the explanation or prelection,” is the way early Jesuit pedagogy put it, and every student of philosophy knows what the soul or formal cause contributes to the effect. How many in explaining classical literature today guide themselves throughout by the principle that their students are to reproduce artistically the masterpiece which they explain? No doubt professors insist upon the formation of clear ideas and further demand explicit judgments in the way of propositions. Most too require that the links of reasoning be sharply and definitely stated. Interpretation, in a word, is well done. The intellectual element of the masterpiece is handled satisfactorily. But what of the artistic form? Does the literature take shape in the student’s imagination? Is the picture realized in the teacher’s imagination and then by suggestion, through the sparkling eye and sympathetic voice and interpreting gesture, by vivid, though not histrionic, dramatization, is the author’s message staged in the student’s imagination? Scientific analysis, especially where a text becomes a tag to some learned generalization, often prevents imaginative realization and thus precludes artistic appreciation of literature.

The teaching of the classics has been and is now justified by the general training they impart, but it is chiefly when taught as literature that they impart that general training. If the classics are subordinated to the university lecturer’s specialty, then the classics are imparting little general training and have hardly more right in the classroom, except for indirect results which may accrue from contact with art, than have special courses in conchology or entomology. Let the teacher look upon the classics as art to be reproduced after being appreciated, and a general training will be the outcome. Composition should be made the aim of literature.

Idioms of languages, and their vocabulary and their structure differ, but thought and imagination may be the same. Set all the languages of the world before a moving-picture, and each language will tell the common story on the screen to its children in its own way of speaking. So the student of any language may learn from Homer how to select details and group them into artistic wholes, how to carry on the narrative through significant and choice events, how to dwell on the important and touch lightly on the insignificant, how to relieve a story and intensify a part of it by appropriate comparisons. As the student learns how to tell a story, so too may he master the art of describing a scene, of creating a character, of making a speech. He will be taught the way to focus an idea and give it discriminating expression by the right word, the way to embody good or evil in concrete and picturesque words and the way to be proficient in all the elements and processes of composition. The Greek Homer made the Latin Æneid, the Greek Theocritus made the Latin Eclogue and, if Stedman is right, also the Tennysonian Idyll. The literary art of Greek and Latin has given and will give artistic form to the student’s vernacular.

The classics will give a general training if they are made to do so. Literature will not impart a general training automatically. Art is a habit arising from a repetition of acts. The art of thinking is mastered by thinking, and the art of imagining by imagining, and that thinking and imagining will be done well if done under the guidance of masters. Has the literary art of Greece, which created Latin literature and directly and indirectly shaped the literature of all civilization, done its full work? Who can believe it? Every generation since Homer has been influenced by the art of Homer in translation and imitation, and no generations more so than those of Cowper and Morris and Lang in England and of Bryant and Palmer in America. The time may come when literary taste and literary art will be as well studied and demonstrated in modern languages as in those of Latin and Greek; the time may come when modern classics may be as well adapted for education as the classics of Greek and Rome which have been in the classroom for century upon century, but that time does not appear to be tomorrow or the day after. If the art of self-expression is the best test of education, if the art of self-expression is the most practical thing in life and the most permanent treasure that can be gained in school, then Greek literature, the finest masterpiece of self-expression, should remain, and Greek literature should be taught, as for centuries it was taught, with interpretation and translation furnished to the student, leaving the time of training to be devoted not to special sciences proper to the university, but to the general training in appreciation and expression, proper to academy and college.

XIV
THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD

This title is not an advertisement for a patent medicine; it is the brief statement of an important historical fact. “Every schoolboy knows” that the revival of learning in Italy came from the vitalizing touch of Greek. Out of that renaissance, which the Jesuits took over and embodied in their system of teaching, grew modern scholarship in England through Linacre, Lilly, Colet and More, the forerunners of the Elizabethans. It was the beginning of modern scholarship in Germany, through Erasmus, the friend of these Englishmen, and through Melanchthon, whose name, like that of Erasmus, marks the power of Greek: out of that renaissance sprang the rejuvenated civilization of our day. Every schoolboy knows that Greek brought the modern world to life, but is it as well known or remembered that Greek has always been vivifying everything it touched?

The civilization of Rome in every part felt the influence of Greece. Rome conquered the world by force of arms, but itself was humanized and then humanized the world through Greece. Every modern language today feels the force of Isocrates and Demosthenes through Cicero, and of Alcæus and Sappho through Horace, and of Greek tragedy through Seneca and of Homer through Virgil. When later the barbarians of the north severed Rome from Greece and the Roman Empire and its civilization lay dead, who brought the world to life again? “When the accurate knowledge of Latin was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in Ireland.”[2] It was the Irish monks who freshened into flame the blackening embers of European civilization and began its restoration. The revival was brought about through the schools of Bobbio and St. Gall, mostly indeed as the scattered books of their libraries show, by means of Latin literature but always with the help of Greek, as the same libraries testify. That was an earlier renaissance in Italy and Switzerland. And who was the leading figure in the revival in Spain about the same time? It was the Greek scholars, Isidore of Seville and, a little earlier, Hosius of Cordova, and, a little later, John of Gerona. Then France began to grope out of barbarism under the leadership of Charlemagne, resuming close relations with Greece and importing the Irish monks, Clement and Dungal, and the English monk, Alcuin. But it was under Charlemagne’s successor, Charles the Bald, that this new renaissance took on a fresh energy which did not spend itself before the decline of scholasticism. John Scotus, John the Irishman, who styled himself in his translation of Dionysius from the Greek by the title of Erin-born, for a quarter of a century kept France intellectually alive, and did it chiefly by his Greek. John, the Erin-born, was the forerunner of scholastic philosophy, which caught the vital force of Greek through another channel also. When Spain was conquered by barbarians and lost its civilization, where did its Arabian conquerors go for the seeds of the new life? The Arabs went to Greece, gave Aristotle in translation to Europe, and ushered in the golden age of medieval philosophy. Rightly does Traini (1345), on an altar-piece in Pisa, picture St. Thomas Aquinas receiving the light of knowledge from Christ through the Greek New Testament and from Aristotle on his right and from Plato on his left. As Aquinas combined patristic and scholastic theology, he merged in his works the twofold Greek influences of Plato and Aristotle, who were the human aids in each of these theologies.

Pass over several centuries to the time when the Italian renaissance had grown senile and when scholarship left Spain, Italy and, to a large extent, France, and found its home in the north. These nations lost touch with Greek and their scholarship died down, while life moved northward in the wake of Greek. When F. A. Wolf went to Halle about the beginning of the nineteenth century, he represented the reaction against the realism of that day, and “his conflict with the school of useful knowledge brought into clear relief his ideal of a culture founded on Greek traditions.”[3] Time has shown that Wolf’s theories of Homeric authorship are all wrong, but the stimulus he gave to scholarship lasted all through the nineteenth century, and to no other single influence more than to Wolf may Germany ascribe its undoubted supremacy in classical learning during the last century. His inspiration came from the Greek, and in his vitalizing of Germany he was associated with others who had felt the same inspiration and were already beginning the influence that still in a measure persists: Heyne in the classics, Lessing in criticism and Winckelmann in art.

England’s partial reawakening under Queen Anne saw Bentley, the Greek scholar, and his contemporary, Pope, translator of the Iliad and Odyssey, and let scholars say what they will about Pope’s translation, they cannot impugn the fine criticism of his introductions or the lasting influence for good of his versions. Passing over the prime of English eloquence, whose living roots, as Goodrich has shown, are in Greek literature, we come to the fresh memories of our own time and to the Victorian era. Again it is Greek which vitalizes every branch of literature, philosophy and art with new and unexpected truth and life. Without Greek the Victorian revival would not have come about. In poetry recall Keats, who awoke to life through the reflected glory of Homer; recall Cowper, translator of Homer, and Byron, who died for Greece, and Moore, who translated Anacreon, and Landor and Arnold and Tennyson and Browning, all of whom took substance and form and fire from Greek sources. In essay-writing you have Brougham, eloquent advocate of Greek oratory; De Quincey, who could, as his tutor said, at the age of thirteen harangue a Greek crowd; Macaulay, who, even in manhood, weeps over his Homer on the streets of London. In art there are Ruskin and Morris and Pater, who are saturated with Greek thought. Think of statesmanship and you will recall Lord Derby and Gladstone, political rivals, at one in their love of Homer; think of criticism, and Lang, Saintsbury, Blackie, Butcher and Jebb will say that through Greek they have dominated modern criticism; think of history, and the names of Rawlinson and Grote and Hallam, Grecians, will come forward in your mind. History! Why, you will remember that all ancient history has recently been rewritten with the spade, and it was Schliemann under the spell of Homer who turned the first sod.

Go over the great names in literature and art, in philosophy, theology and scripture, in the sciences of history, mathematics, law, government, and you will find Greek giving life and vigor. Even in the newer sciences founded on observation and experience, which have come into being within a century, whenever an observer gets beyond the elementary stage of research and classification, he will resort to Greece for principles and intellectual categories just as he borrows the language of Greece with which to name his discoveries. History shows that every people and every system of education and every house of learning, when it gives up Greek, is headed towards inferiority and decay, but when it turns with fresh endeavor toward Greek it reaches forth to life and to light. Nor is all this surprising or strained. Our civilization was born and grew for centuries in Greece. Our Christianity was early translated into the language of Greece and for centuries spoke and thought chiefly in that tongue. So then in our minds and souls our youth will ever have been Greek, and from Greek must ever come, as it has come in the past, the new blood that will flush with dynamic energy the anemic arteries of cosmos, the world, and of the microcosm, man.

XV
TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM

The story of Phidias and his pupil, Alcamenes has often been told. They competed for a prize in sculpture. The statue of Alcamenes was about to be chosen because of its exquisite finish when Phidias objected to any decision until the statues should be put in the high position they were designed to occupy. At once, the opinions of the judges were reversed, for the apparently rough lines of Phidias’s creation stood out in sublime majesty, while the polish of Alcamenes’s was lost when the statues were raised aloft. The story illustrates a splendid rule of art which has often been forgotten in the study of Homer. The epics of Homer were not made for the test-tube and the microscope. They were not made even for readers; they were composed for listeners. Put them on their proper pedestals and the minutiæ revealed by the grammarian’s microscope will be lost in the grand sweep of the story. You would as soon halt Shakespeare’s Macbeth because of the anachronisms, or condemn Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” because of modern masonry in the walls or carpentry in the table, as apply the philological and archeological tests of the higher critics to Homer.

Apply the tests of art to Homer and judge him by those. Take the matter of the contradictions which critics have talked so much about. In many cases, especially where mythology was concerned, the material the poet had to handle bristled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Long ago Aristotle laid down the sensible rule for drama, and it is equally true for epic poetry, that the poet is not responsible for the improbabilities in his materials. The sculptor may have flaws in his block of marble; the painter may have defects in his lead or oil, or pigments; and the epic poet found contradictions in the fairy stories of mankind which he wove into the story he sang. That one consideration will sweep away instantly heaps of higher criticism.

Again, the artist is more taken up with the end than he is with the means. In the fervor of his composition he wreaks himself upon expression, he burns to embody his ideal and, engrossed in that, he is likely to be less observant of the material of his art. The achieving of the effect is more to him than mathematical accuracy in the use of the instruments by which he achieves the effect. He makes his hero win his battle; he may unhappily forget some of the tactics or even the geography of the battlefield. His object is not to teach the art of warfare or furnish the topography of the country, but to tell an interesting story in an interesting way. The Iliad has a wall that vexes many critics. It was built in the tenth year of the war, which was no time to build a wall, and was put up simply because Achilles left the field. Besides, according to these critics the wall appears and disappears strangely. So the conclusion is: Homer did not build the wall, but some other poet came along and projected his masonry into the epic. In answer it has been shown that the wall behaves very well, but, whether it does or not, it matters little. The poet is not a surveyor or a street commissioner. He wished to make his story interesting, to make the character of Achilles prominent, to bring some agreeable variety into what might prove a monotonous catalog of similar battles. Those are reasons enough for a poet to build a Chinese wall or reduce it to dust when he does not want it, or conveniently overlook it in the heat of an imaginary charge.

A story-teller is more concerned to please his hearers than to guard against inconsistencies which they would never detect as listeners, and which even close readers did not detect for about thirty centuries. A work of art is not to be judged as a mass of machinery is, nor is a poem to be scrutinized with dictionary and grammar as you would a schoolboy’s exercise. This is the statue of Phidias over again. A stage scene will differ somewhat from a miniature, and an epic takes liberties with walls and rivers and even mountains and oceans, liberties which would not be tolerated in a quatrain. These principles are as obvious as daylight, but apostles of the obvious are needed in abundance in the harvest fields of higher criticism.

What is needed for Homer is a study of his art in a broad but not shallow way, comprehensive and fundamental like Aristotle’s brief discussion. For the wonderfully analytical mind of Aristotle Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were models of unity, because he looked upon them as works of art, not scrap-heaps of philology and archeology. Put the poems of Homer on the pedestals for which he made them, for listeners who had to be entertained and clamored for variety. “It is a trait of Homer,” says a writer, “constantly to shift the scene. The motive may be weak, but the eye of the poet was not on the motive, but on the scene; so he not only shifts the scene but varies the description of the events.” The poet’s eye, it might be added, is also like the orator’s, fixed steadily on his audience, and the audience must be relieved even if masonry or geography suffer.

The paramount principles of variety and growth of interest which govern every good story hold sway in Homer. Take a staple action of the Iliad, the battles. Homer’s audience wanted fighting, yet jaded listeners and the artistic poet knew there must be in the fighting variety and growth of interest. Even in the matter of killing men, which seems to us unimportant but which would not be to an audience of fighters, Homer has shown a wonderful variety. A German professor has diagnosed the Homeric surgery with all the thoroughness of his class. The conclusions may be found in Seymour’s Life in the Homeric Age. The number and variety of the wounds, the weapons used, the percentages of fatalities, are all given in full detail. “Hardly could the poet have covered more completely the possibilities of wounds for the human body if he had proceeded systematically and mechanically.” Some will have it that Homer was a surgeon and an army doctor. Certainly the history of anatomy has its first chapter in the Iliad.

But to pass over the variety displayed in the wounds and other smaller points, consider the actual fighting. For the maneuvers we may refer to two interesting chapters in Lang’s World of Homer, where the variety and consistency of Homeric warfare are well described and defended against the dissectionists. The point, however, we are working toward is the variety shown in even the external circumstances of the warfare. A closer study than we can afford to give would reveal more variety, but we may mention the plain, the wall, the river, the night as in the tenth book, the mist. These are the various circumstances which the poet introduces into his battles, relieving the monotony and sustaining the interest. There is no falling off. The different heroes, too, succeed one another; the victory alternates from one side to the other; the battle on earth has its echo among the gods. The interest rises. Patroclos enters the fight, and then his fallen body becomes the center of the struggle, as the wall and the ships had been before. Something, too, is left for Achilles. Ferocious as may have been the fighting before, it becomes a veritable shambles when Achilles enters the fray. Never were such frightful wounds, never such rivers of blood as may be witnessed in Book XX “when the black earth ran blood,” “when beneath the great-hearted Achilles his whole-hooved horses trampled corpses and shields together; and with blood all the axle-tree below was sprinkled and the rims that ran around the car, for blood-drops from the horses’ hooves splashed them and blood-drops from the tires of the wheels. But the son of Peleus pressed on to win his glory, flecking with gore his irresistible hands.”

Then follows the battle in the river, and finally the battle of the gods themselves, and after the necessary relief and lull and reawakening of interest comes the last battle of all and the climax of the poem in the conflict of Achilles and Hector.

A study of the art of Homer along its great lines will give us the true principles upon which to judge him. Such a study will put him in the right perspective. The statue of Phidias will mount on high where its artist wished to have it enshrined. The Iliad and Odyssey were meant to cross the bronze threshold of some great palace, “where there was a gleam as it were of sun or moon through the high roofed hall of a great-hearted King. Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round then was a frieze of blue and within were seats arrayed against the wall this way and that.” Then “after the men had put from them the desire of meat and drink,” they called upon the minstrel. “For minstrels from all men on earth get their meed of honor and worship; inasmuch as the muse teacheth them the paths of song and loveth the tribe of minstrels.” “And the minstrel being stirred by the god began and showed forth his minstrelsy and took up the tale where it tells how the Argives sailed away.” That was the setting of the Homeric Epic, and thus speaks one whose “heart had melted at the song and whose tears wet his cheeks beneath his eyelids.” “Verily it is a good thing to list to a minstrel, like to the gods in voice. Nay, as for me, I say there is no more gracious or perfect delight than when a whole people makes merry, and the men sit orderly at feasts in the halls and listen to the singer and the tables by them are laden with bread and flesh, and pours it into cups. This fashion seems to me the fairest thing in the world.”

There is the place that Homer chose for his matchless poems, and there they should be judged. The hearts that melt with song are not searching for digammas or Æolic forms. They want the story, the long voyages and the strange adventures, the swaying lines of battle and the prowess of heroes. They look for and recognize the different characters which must be as varied and as clearly marked as in the life around them. They must not be surfeited with too much of anything. Voyages and battles must vary and grow in intensity and be crossed with pictures of nature, brief but thrilling and immensely relieving,—the lion, the wheat field, the tossing ocean and the steady downfall of an unending snow storm. With these and the plot entangling and disentangling, the listeners to Homeric song and story will not look for that polished smoothness and frigid exactness, the absence of which vexes the minds of modern Germany. Phidias’ statue occupies its proper pedestal, and the true judges award to Phidias his well-deserved prize.

XVI
THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE

Their elders are too busy these days devising tests for the children. Is it not time for the children to retort on their testers? “Having pried and prodded into us to see if we measure up to you, dear elders, let us now see,” the children may well say, “whether you measure up to us.” A great philosopher wished to make man the measure of everything. We have a truer, a divine philosophy, a philosophy all the more persuasive, and that philosophy makes the child the measure and test of man’s worth and the arbiter of his eternal destiny. “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God, as a child, shall not enter it.” The millstone mooring the scandalizer in the ooze of ocean’s darkest depths and the angels who see the face of their little one’s Father, these are the extreme sanctions which guarantee the accuracy of the child-test for the measurement of man.

The child-test has often been applied to man’s morals. Onan and Sanger, Sparta and China, Calvin’s unchristian infant damnation and the Christless infant sanctification of Pelagius, Malthus with his “Decrease and subtract” and Moses with his “Increase and multiply,” all, from individuals to nations, are ample evidence that the child is set for the ruin and resurrection of many in Israel. The child-test is surely potent in rating the world’s moral morons and moral geniuses.

Can the child-test be applied to man’s art and literature? Recall the words of Job, “Who shut up the sea with doors, when I made a cloud the garment thereof and wrapt it in a mist in swaddling bands?” That view of the sea in the swaddling bands of infancy is a proof of an imagination looking at the universe with the eyes of the Creator. The child-test is a measure of the sublimity of Hebrew literature. The revelation of Genesis gave the literature of the Bible an outlook never reached by other literatures. As the promise of the Messiah kept a hallowing guard over the cradles of Israel, so the vision of the Creator blotted out from the concepts of the Hebrew imagination the crude and monstrous nativities which make all pagan mythologies hybrid and miscegenetic.

Homer has fewer than others have of these nightmares, but it is not in them nor in the tinsel sublimity of his divine machinery that Homer has touched a wider circle of readers than any of his epic brethren. Rather it is in his unaffected and transparent portrayal of the human nature we all understand that Homer has set the heart of the world throbbing faster. Not the celibate Virgil, nor the Puritanic Milton, dissolver of matrimony, nor yet Dante, idealizer of the maiden Beatrice, gave us childhood and motherhood as Homer has done. Homer is no sentimentalist, but he has wider sympathies with mother and child than any author on the rolls of literature. The mother cow, lowing over its first-born; the mother dog, growling in defense of its litter; the mother lion, all its brow wrinkled with the greatest frown ever sketched; the mother bird, starving and dying for its young, yes, even the mother wasp, solicitous for its menaced brood (note that, S. P. C. A.!) these are evidences of Homer’s tenderness. Achilles likens his friend Patroclus to a little maid fondly catching at her mother’s dress and getting in her way with persistent tearful pleading till the mother takes her up. In the Iliad, Helen’s sorrow for her abandoned Hermione is a pleasing element in her repentance. Odysseus proudly styles himself the father of Telemachus; the mother of Odysseus dies for longing of him, and his father, Laertes, in the most exquisite of the many recognition scenes of the Odyssey, passes from view in that story, while his long-absent son tells him of the fruit trees, “which,” says Odysseus, “thou once gavest me for mine own, and I was begging of thee this and that, being but a child and following thee through the garden.” We have natural sketches of the babyhood of his two heroes, Achilles and Odysseus.

Yet, more than all these pictures, stands out in the world’s imagination Hector’s boy, whose future fate Andromache, after Hector’s death, details with a mother’s despairing vividness, whose childish terror at his father’s helmet, while Andromache smiles through her tears, has brought home to unnumbered thousands the grim specter of war. That scene has etched itself so deeply into the heart of mankind that it has almost ruined Homer’s poem, alienating universal sympathy from Achilles to Hector.

After Homer, the child motif in literature is less in evidence. Drama, of its nature, has little place for the child except to put a keener poignancy in tragedy. So Sophocles used the children of Œdipus. So in his time did Shakespeare with the princes of Richard III, with Marcellus in Coriolanus, with Macduff’s sprightly lad, and with others. Theocritus has a child to furnish an aside for the gossipy Syracusan dames. Anacreon introduces the counterfeit of childhood in the Cupids, whose sophisticated conventionality checked invention in Elizabethan lyrics as it did in art from Pompeii to Rubens and later. Cupids are symbols, children of the brain, not of the heart, and figure in song and painting as signs. They have a message for the mind; they do not touch the feelings, while on the other hand, they free the artist from seeking in life the expressive significance that Homer gave the child.

Literature had to wait long for the naturalness of Homer to reappear. Virgil has a little of it in Ascanius, another Cupid, and it is significant that Virgil’s one outstanding natural touch is found in the famous Messianic eclogue: Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem. As for other Latins, whether it be bachelorship or the erotic preoccupation of the lyricists, or the supreme power of the father in Roman customs and law, Latin literature does not mirror for us prominently the child and mother nor reflect their natural attractiveness as found in Homer. Well, even Greece seems to have lost the art, and a new inspiration was needed. That inspiration came with the Divine Child of Bethlehem.

XVII
THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE

The influence of the Christ-Child on painting was tremendous and lasting. A history of Christian art could be written around the Madonna, and the subject has attracted the notice of many writers, indexed in art libraries. Alice Meynell has treated the subject attractively and with her studious insight in the Children of the Old Masters. In the Catacombs, Christian art felt and portrayed the Divine Child and His Mother. Byzantine ornamentation and mosaics gave the Child a rigid majesty which veiled His winsomeness, but the master painters came closer to childhood and brought Madonnas from the walls of crypts and of cathedrals to the devotional shrine and the chapel, making the Child less architectural and more natural.

In literature the Christ-Child had equal influence until Puritanism tried to remove Christmas from the calendar. Drama originated in the liturgy of Easter and of Christmas, and although Holy Week was more elaborate and in substance more dramatic, Christmas to Twelfth Night, offering more incentive to play and song and more holidays, exercised a larger influence on the stage. In lyric poetry at the beginning of the sixth century we have already the familiar, intimate and loving contact with the Christ-Child, which finds its latest expression in Thompson and Tabb. St. Ita, the Irish saint (480-570), is of their faith and tenderness in the song of “Isucan,” “Little Jesus,” given in Sigerson’s Bards of the Gael and Gall:

Jesukin
Lives my little cell within
...
Jesu of the skies who art
Next my heart thro’ every night.

The bambino shines through medieval song in Adam of St. Victor and in other writers of hymns. The Catholic writers of the Renaissance celebrate the same theme in the revived meters of classicism. Sarbievius, the Jesuit lyricist of Poland, is full of the Christ-Child, and in his well-known lines “To the Violet” he calls upon that “dawn of spring” to crown his “Little Lad” with its flowers in place of the gold and gems and purple which weighted the Infant. Sarbievius was doing what the painters did, discarding the Byzantine ornament and convention.

Test Puritanism with the child and it fails; test it with the Christ-Child, and you will get the ponderous “Hymn to the Nativity” of Milton, an imperialistic ode which must have gladdened Cromwell. No familiarity there, no mirthfulness, no Jesukin with violets for crown jewels, not even Byzantine immobility. Milton does not even doff the helmet of war, as Hector did; no, he sees

from Juda’s land

The dreaded Infant’s hand;

The rays of Bethlehem blind his [Osiris’] dusky eyes.

... Our Babe to show His Godhead true

Can in His swaddling clothes control the damnèd crew.

A Prince of Peace indeed with a mailed fist! Merry medieval England would not recognize Jesukin in Miltonic panoply. Fortunately for art it had attained excellence before the Puritanic blight fell upon the world, but for literature in the English language we must wait until the nineteenth century to see the child come to its own. Wordsworth attempted a revival of Plato’s philosophy and found immortality, if not familiarity, in childhood when he wrote his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth took a more fruitful lesson from the Greeks when he went back to nature in other poems to study childhood. Even before him, Blake, painter and poet, influenced no doubt by the traditions of painting, began to see the heart in childhood. The interminable moralizing stories of Ann and Jane Taylor and of Elizabeth Turner, which date from this time, are heavy with grown up condescension. E. V. Lucas would have done better to republish in his Book of Verses for Children the graceful and humorous lessons of the Greek fables than perpetuate Taylor and Turner.

After Wordsworth we see the child motif gradually taking a larger place in the literature of England and America. Despite Francis Thompson’s vigorous effort in his famous essay, he has not succeeded in making Shelley pass the child-test. Shelley had no faith, no humility, no humor, no real tenderness, and even granting him the dreaming power of childhood, which in Thompson’s essay is largely a reflection of Thompson, Shelley had not the heard of a child to enter into the Kingdom. Walter Scott’s friendship for Marjorie Fleming shows that the great poet and novelist had the necessary qualifications, but no performance comes now to mind except a lullaby and the glorification of merry England at Christmas. Swinburne glimpses gleams of a baby’s pink toes and lists to low laughter of mouths of gold. The child is picturesque for him. Moore, Byron, Browning, for different reasons, fail in the child-test. Tennyson touched the surface, although in the “Princess” he came close to the mystery. Patmore, uxorious and paternal, came closer and even touched the depths of the child in “Toys.” Longfellow and Whittier were of the same school.

It was Stevenson, in a Child’s Garden of Verses who brought back into poetry, as Lewis Carroll did in prose and verse, the natural child that Homer saw about him, and that painting discerned in the Babe of Bethlehem. Humor, imagination, sympathy, these were the factors which discovered the heart of childhood for our modern world. Barry and Belloc in England, Eugene Field and Riley in America, Earls and “Tom” Daly and many others have furthered the discoveries. There is no hope for the child in the “New Poetry” which takes itself too seriously. Who would hold up the world if the “new poets” started in to mind the baby?

One more element was needed, and sorely needed, to enter fully into the mystery of the child. That element is faith. Evolution looked on the child as an epitome of its theory; pedagogy plotted out, weighed and measured the child and drew up formidable statistics; eugenics faced the child as though it were a dire microbe, source of poverty, ignorance, bootlegging, war, pestilence and famines. The modern child had and still has before it a dismal prospect. It is the camping ground of the specialist, the experimental laboratory of the theorist, and the peculiarly delectable victim of physical and moral vivisectionists. Faith must save the child, faith in the Babe of Bethlehem. Tabb and Thompson had that faith. They are the counterpart in literature of a St. Anthony or a St. Stanislaus in life and art. They play with the Child Jesus. Isucan has come into His own again. Tabb sings in “Out of Bounds”:

O comrades, let us one and all

Join in to get Him back his ball!

And Francis Thompson with medieval intimacy asks in “Ex Ore Infantium”:

And did Thy Mother at the night

Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?

And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,

Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said?

“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven,” said Thompson. He will surely be at home there, and Tabb and many another will be with him.

The first seven chapters of this work were given in substance as lectures at the Champlain Assembly, Cliff Haven, N. Y.

Chapter XII, Educating the Emotions, is a summary of an address given to the Public School Teachers of Rhode Island.

Other chapters have appeared in America, Catholic World, Educational Review of Washington, School Interests, Classical Weekly, Magnificat and are reproduced through the courtesy of the editors.

APPENDIX

GREEK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
AN ETYMOLOGICAL PHANTASY[4]

During a period of lethargy I was petrified at a phantom, bounding from my lexicon, with this cataract of phrases: “Are you Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Catholic, or Christian? Without me, you are anonymous. Do you stigmatize heresy and schism, hypocrisy and blasphemy. Do you blame schemers against the Mosaic decalog? Do you impose anathemas in apostates, idolaters and atheists or exorcise the devil and his demons with their diabolical pomps? Are you zealous for proselytes, and to baptize neophytes after catechism, and to canonize orthodox martyrs with halos and emblems, scandalizing frenzied iconoclasts? Then all that is done through me.

The ecclesiastical sphere is practically mine. I am the architect of churches, cathedrals and basilicas, from the asphalt base in the crypts of the catacomb, up to the apse and the chimes in the dome. I am architect of monasteries for monks and anchorites, and of asylums for orphans and lepers and maniacs. Mine is the Hierarchy, from the Pope on his dais with his tiara, to the mitered Bishop in his diocese, and to the parish priest in his presbytery. Deacons and acolytes, clergy and laity, Papal encyclicals, diocesan synods, parochial homilies, and all dogmatic theology, with its mysteries and myriad topics, are mine. The Bible is mine from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy of the Pentateuch, to the Paralipomenon and the Psalms, to patriarchs and prophets, to the Evangelists of Christ, to the Epistles and Apocalypse of His Apostles. Epiphany, Pentecost, the Parasceve are mine The tunes of the hymns, the quiring of anthems, the Gregorian tones of the litanies and antiphons are melodious through me and I composed the canon of liturgy with its symbols.

Go to your home with me. Bushels of anthracite for the chimney, and a diet of fancied nectar! Chairs and plates and dishes; oysters; butter and treacle; perch or trout or sardines in olive oil; the aroma of capon or partridge or pheasant; celery and asparagus and peppers; cherries and dates and currants, citrons and melons, prunes and quinces and plums; pumpkins marmalade and pastry; chestnuts and pippins; masses of purple hyacinths, with lily and crocus, with geraniums and heliotropes, with narcissus and peony, with asters and orchids and posies of roses. What zest! Isn’t that a panorama of paradise to tantalize you? Be not economical or dyspeptic. Masticate beneath your mustache. Let choruses echo in the parlor with music of organ and guitar, or let there be anecdotes on the piazza around a bottle of cheering tonic.

I telephone or telegraph for my “auto,” and my machine goes to my theater or hippodrome. There is on my program the symphony orchestra with harmonious melodies; or on my program are scenes melancholy with tragedy, or hilarious with pantomime and melodrama, with comic monolog or dramatic dialog, with cyclists, gymnasts and acrobats. After the drama or kinematic photography, with match and lamp you go to attic canopies, and to the climes of Morpheus. For all these you are to reimburse me with the treasuries of the purse.

Go with me to the ocean, opposing the stratagems and tactics of barbarous pirates, to meander by gulf and isthmus and archipelago, nomads through all climates, charting geography with my nautical atlases, from the Arctic to the Antarctic through the tropic zone, from Polynesia to its antipodes. Then for my astronomy! What a panorama through my telescope in the crystal atmosphere! Above the horizon in the empyrean are my planets and comets and meteors and galaxies of asteroids.

Without me where is your “zoo” with its panthers and leopards with dolphin and crocodile and hippopotamus, with lynxes and hyenas, with ostrich and pelican, with buffalo and dromedary, with ichneumons and scorpions, with the gigantic elephant and its proboscis and the pygmy squirrel! Oh, what of my chimerical and utopian “zoo,” with the phenix and dragon and griffins and chameleons and gorgons and gnomes and basilisks and sphinxes and hybrids!

But I am not archaic; the scope of my dynamic energy is practical and not eccentric. Mine are politics, the diadems of monarchs, the scepters of tyrants, barbarous anarchy and despotic autocracy, the panics of demagogue and the parliaments of autonomy and democracy. Chemistry and chemical analysis, physics with phenomena of electricity, acoustics, and optics, mechanics, botany, geology, entomology, and all the “ologies” with their technical glossaries; they are mine.

So are all the apothecaries and pharmacies with glycerine and licorice and creosote and the antidotes for quinsy; for catarrh, dropsy, neuralgia, and for every “-itis” and “-osis”; emetics for the stomach; the cathartics, calomel and castor-oil; doses of paregoric for colic; plasters for imposthumes; arsenic for spasms of epilepsy, and tonics for anemic arteries; a peptonoic diet for dysentery; oxygen against bronchial phlegm; bromides for asthma; iodine for pleurisy and parasites; narcotics to calm hysteria; antipyrin for agonizing rheumatism; antitoxins for diphtheria and for the deleterious microbes of cholera or typhoid, and bottles of panaceas.

Anatomy is mine and the surgeon, diagnosing symptoms, charting septic organs on the diagrams, trepanning the cranium, cauterizing for hemorrhage, is mine; so are his sponges and syringes and silk and his styptics, and his prophylactic hygiene, and his anæsthetics, chloroform and ether, and his antiseptics against bacteria and gangrene, and his autopsy and his skeletons.

The school is mine with its desks, its programs and schedule and the scholars, from their alphabet to their diploma, their arithmetic and geometry, their gymnasiums and athletics, and the school diamond and amphitheater. Pause before you ostracize me from my schools.

Would you be an essayist, sketching graphic stories or typical characters; an historian, cataloging the treasures of archives, and chronicling epochs of catastrophe and calm; or a philosopher, systematizing theories of Stoics, Hedonists, Peripatetics and Scholastics; or a poet, composing idylls and madrigals, lyrics and odes with strophes and the epics with episodes, you are mine. Without me you have not talents or ideas or paper or ink. Mine are your grammar and syntax, your syllables, your paragraphs with their commas and colons and parentheses, your lexicons and encyclopedias and card-catalogs, your topics and themes for ecstatic rhapsodies or for austere logic, your fantastic paradoxes and your idiotic theories. ’Tis I who phrase for you your axioms, caustic criticisms, laconic epigrams, all your irony and sardonic sarcasm. If your technique is idiomatic, your methods puzzling or crystal, your tropes are metaphors graphic, your fancies hectic or anæmic, you are mine. I am your enthusiastic stenographer, jotting down and synopsizing your ideas and typing them to be stereotyped in your authentic tomes, whether anonymous or under a pseudonym.

I apologize for my tautologies, for this monotonous labyrinth, for the phalanx of technicalities and for the etymological mosaic which strangles your larynx with “ics” and “isms.” Whether it is all abysmal bathos, or the climax and acme of the practical, I am to blame for it.

But pause before you ostracize me from my schools; pause ere the nemesis of chaos and disaster is yours; but if you are to be characterized as adamant and without sympathy, let the poets echo a threnody about my coffin; let there be a chorus of pæans under the cypress and cedar, the larch and osier, the myrtle and amaranth, about my cenotaph; let there be in my cemetery a mausoleum with a monolith, and on it my epitaph:

The Lexicons of Europe Are the Trophies of Greece.

NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT

Esthetic pleasure or the enjoyment of the beautiful is generally admitted to be disinterested. Possession and ownership do not enter into the esthetic act. The ownership of Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is not an object of indifference or of disinterested attention. Thieves scheme for the ownership, thousands covet it, guards protect it. But the enjoyment of “Mona Lisa” is not selfish and exclusive in its nature. Esthetic enjoyment makes abstraction of possession and of selfish good. It follows therefore that esthetic enjoyment is a function of man’s knowledge, not of man’s desires and appetites. The only condition upon which the appetites, whether bodily or spiritual, can operate is that they be energized by personal good. Volition may be free, but it cannot be disinterested. You may enjoy another’s picture; you cannot eat his dinner, nor can you be indifferent to what you know to be for your good.

Some have asserted that esthetic enjoyment belongs to a special power apart from both knowledge and appetite. There is however no need of such power. Certainly beauty must be known to be enjoyed, but is not the knowledge itself adequate to produce the characteristic effect of beauty? Is not Aquinas right in saying, “Pulchrum dicitur id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet” (that is called beautiful which simply by its perception pleases)? Good, being an end, cannot delight solely by being perceived; good must be attained. But for beauty, is not its very perception an enjoyment? The solution of this question will be found in the nature of enjoyment.

Emotions and feelings, pleasure and pain are easy to understand and for that reason difficult to express in satisfactory formulas. By its very nature every faculty of man operating normally has an accompanying pleasure, while if operating abnormally it has pain. The faculty itself is therefore the subject of the feeling just as life is inherent in the organism. Indeed feeling is consciously localized life. The feeling of the toe is felt by the toe; the joy of seeing is felt by the eye. No distinct power is required to carry the feeling. So it is with esthetic emotions. The mind itself feels the delight of beauty. Esthetic enjoyment is a function of perception.

Does esthetic enjoyment belong to the senses and to the imagination? Here again there is difference of opinion. It is probable, however, that sensible perception has no accompanying esthetic pleasure. St. Augustine appealed to experience and declared that esthetic enjoyment of the beauty, say, of the sun, was possible, even when the sight suffered pain. A better reason may be found in the behavior of animals which, though clothed in beauty, give us no certain evidence of esthetic appreciation and enjoyment.

Esthetic enjoyment therefore belongs to intellectual cognition. Now the intellect has many operations. Which one of these carries the esthetic pleasure or esthetic pain, which one is charged with the vital thrill that creates and appreciates the world of art? The mind reasons, the mind judges, the mind apprehends. Esthetic enjoyment belongs to the last. Judgments and inferences may be objects of esthetic enjoyment; to reason, to judge may precede or follow or may be even necessary conditions, but the esthetic act is most probably one of simple apprehension. There would seem to be general agreement that contemplation is the characteristic attitude of the mind in the presence of beauty. Aquinas excludes distinctly the idea of end from beauty. Beauty is a form which we contemplate. Croce calls the esthetic perception intuition. Theodore Watts-Dunton seems to be describing the same act when he calls poetry “the renascence of wonder.” The efforts of reasoning and of judging appear to be alien to the mental attitude in the presence of beauty.

The simple apprehension is concerned with what is termed ontological truth, whereas reasoning and judging result in logical truth. Now, just as esthetic enjoyment abstracts from possession or good, so does it abstract from the affirmations belonging to the logical truth of judgment and of rational inference. There is esthetic enjoyment of fiction as well as of fact. Aristotle long ago saw that although the substance of art must be the persons, actions and feelings of man, the pleasure found in the work of art does not arise from its correspondence with reality. The correspondence with reality gives the satisfaction of logical truth, of scientific truth, of historical fact. The truth which is the object of esthetic pleasure in art is the truth of consistency, of realization of ideal, the truth of reasonable congruity, of plot in a wide sense of the term. This vision, this dream of the artist, scholastic philosophers call causa exemplaris or ideal. If we are right in our understanding of Croce, his intuition is nothing else but the simple apprehension of the ideal. Esthetic enjoyment comes also, as is clear, from the simple apprehension of beauty in natural realities where there is no fiction of art.

To localize the esthetic enjoyment in this way does not determine the constituent elements of beauty, but clear definitions help to exclude many false notions of beauty. The ideal of the artist is embodied in his imagination before it is expressed in its proper medium. The art of man always must have a medium which can be perceived by the senses. That is why a vigorous imagination, which stores up and dispenses to its owner quickly and abundantly of its riches, is so useful to the artist. Through his imagination the artist is original and personal. The pure thought of science is abstract and alike in all minds; the artistic vision formed from individual experience will be different in every one. Therefore no two artists expressing themselves in the concrete can be alike as no two scenes of nature are alike in beauty.

Aristotle put the pleasure of art in perception. Art for him is a mimesis, which does not mean an imitation, in the sense of mirroring or copying. That was Plato’s notion, which Aristotle combated. Art is, in Aristotle, a power analogous to nature, working like nature in another and limited world, of sound, of color, of human thoughts. Art is fiction, a dramatizing, a staging of life, to be judged, not by correspondence with fact, but by its own plausible and convincing rationalization. No one has done more for art than Aristotle in his insistence upon the necessity of cause and effect, of a motivation, sufficient at least for the artist’s public. Intrinsic unity, the fruit of perfect motivation, was another necessary requisite in Aristotle’s analysis of art. It is only when the varied elements of the artist’s imaginative experience have fused themselves into a unity by having a well-motivated beginning, middle and end that the mind feels the beauty of its vision.

Universality in art is another fruitful idea of Aristotle. While confined to his sensible medium, the artist must link up the separate elements of his vision more closely than in the realm of fact. He will by that very reason be general and universal because his motivation must approve itself to all. A moving picture of the death of Cæsar as it really occurred would be valuable history. It would, however, be individual. Shakespeare’s death of Cæsar has a beginning, middle and end, and the spectators see in it the working out of a plot in which every word and act has been carefully planned and fitted into the design. The individuating notes are left out, and the death of a Cæsar has universal appeal.

Artistic creation, motivation, unity, universality, these are great principles of art formulated by Aristotle and not likely ever to be superseded. The cognitive idea of beauty and those principles of Aristotle have been followed in the chapters of this book.

For further discussion of the nature of esthetic pleasure, see author’s “Art of Interesting,” Chap. V, Interest from Emotions; Chap. XVII, Is Esthetic Emotion a Spinal Thrill?

A FORWARD-LOOKING LESSON IN LITERATURE
(To exemplify Chapter IX)

THE METHOD

THE dry bones in the cold print of this lesson are to be galvanized into life by a teacher in constant touch with the class and enlisting the coöperation by questions, by having the passage read aloud, by writing on the board, by interchanges of ideas, by lively disputes between individuals. No mere lecture with passive listeners, no mere study period with a passive overseer, but real teaching, which is a fine conversation, directed upon select subjects and carried to a destined end under expert guidance.

All of the technical terms, apprehension, judgment, inference and the rest are to be omitted. The intelligent use of such terms belongs to college, although the operations and objects which the terms designate belong to all grades. Through simple, untechnical questions the whole truth may be understood by each, and every student may be made to go through operations which are of daily occurrence and which the student must make habitual by repeated exercise to insure a mastery of the art of expression. The teacher is an expert mental director, and, setting before the class a good passage of literature, he will make them think again and put in order again and express again what the author has done; he will make them conceive, arrange and express thoughts of their own with the excellence which teacher and class have noted and appreciated in the passage. The teacher of literature will be no lecturer in history or in philosophy or in mathematics, but will be like the teacher of music or like the physical trainer, who makes his class go through exercises which he himself has exemplified and which the class immediately practice to acquire bodily skill then and for the future.

A passage of poetry is designedly taken in this lesson to show how poetry can be made to contribute to the art of expression. Literature for some is history, for others philosophy. These center attention on the facts or ideas. Literature for others is a dreamy, mysterious thing, which you must look at with awe, speak about with esoteric rhapsody and carefully lock up again in a glass case. A forward looking lesson in literature must know what the passage means, but is usually not concerned with the origin and past history of the author’s meaning. The forward-looking lesson will not pretend to solve all the mysteries of art and beauty but will take out of the clouds and put clearly before the class some point in the art of expression, a point which will be practical and of everyday use. Such a lesson will be as decidedly vocational as hammering a nail or rigging up a radio set or rushing around a gymnasium.

The purpose ever before the literature teacher’s mind is appreciation, leading to mental action and through repeated action to the art of expression.

THE LESSON

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

I. ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT

1. Understanding.—The meaning of each word, the meaning of each line, the meaning of the whole stanza. This should not be a mere passive understanding. Students should be made to reëxpress the ideas, not only by paraphrase in other words but especially by imaginative realization. “For instance,” “Just like what?” are two phrases to be often on the teacher’s lips. “Have you a heard a curfew?” “Have you heard a knell tolling?” “Did you ever see in picture or in reality a lowing herd winding o’er the lea?” A thought illustrated by the thinker’s imagination is realized fully, is felt as well as grasped, and will persist.

2. Judgment.—What is the logical subject and logical predicate of each line and of the whole stanza? That is, what is the author’s chief topic and what does he say about it? This need not always be the grammatical subject of the passage. The art of expression is not only apprehending by vivid understanding, but it is also judging by predication, by affirming or denying something of the subject. There is not a class of any grade which cannot profitably exercise itself in clear and concise judgements. The successive judgements briefly put are: The bell tells the end of day: the cows return to the barn: the ploughman comes home: I am left alone in the darkness.

3. Reasoning.—As as single sentence may be analyzed into a definite subject and a definite predicate for a judgment, so two or more sentences may be compared to grasp the relation between them. Poetry does not go through a process of reasoning. It states thoughts and presents pictures, permitting the mind to infer. The three pictures in the opening lines have a common trait which the mind detects: all three pictures are signs of nightfall. The mind draws an inference which is inductive in nature, and the whole stanza may be briefly stated: The coming of night leaves me alone in darkness.

These stages in analyzing the thought are elaborated here. In practice they may be expedited. Before being read, the judgment and inference may be presented as problems for solution: What does the writer say in each line? What one idea is found in the first three lines? What will be the title, the head-line, the summary of each line and of the whole stanza?[5]

II. ANALYSIS OF FORM

Form includes not only the words and sentences, their choice and their arrangement, but also the texture and color of the thoughts and their modification ending in their perfect expression, as contrasted with the bare and limited statements already determined. In the study of literature, words are not merely materials for philologizing, or merely sentences, free opportunities for grammatical anatomizing with all the bones properly numbered and labeled. Such analyses look chiefly backward and are not productive of writers. Language anatomy has its great utility, but literature, or the art of expression, must look to the flesh and blood of the thoughts, to the personality, to the imagination, to the concrete embodiment of the writer’s art. The student will take up, therefore, the thought already analyzed and note and appreciate how his author has clothed the ideas, the judgments, the reasoning. He will reënact the creative process the author went through, and so here, with a view to expression, he will strive to rival the excellence of Gray, but will do so with his own thoughts.

Grading.—At this stage the teacher may point out incidentally many excellences in the art of expression, but will drill and have practice on the particular excellence in expression, proper to his class. The textbook ordinarily determines the grade, but if there is no textbook or prescribed program, the teacher will determine his own order of matter.

Right Word.—Let us suppose the teacher is teaching the art of using the right word (Model English, 3), the word which states the thing exactly in kind. He may center attention on the line:

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea.

The class will be drilled in the author’s choice of the right word by considering other possible but less exact combinations, e.g.: A number of noisy cows went reluctantly along. After this drill, the class will appreciate what the right word is and be ready for the expression of their own ideas in right words. They are not to paraphrase Gray’s meaning. That has already been done, but they are to provide subject-matter of their own and express it with a like excellence. Did they continue to speak of cows, they could not better Gray, but if they speak of bees or bloodhounds or cavalry or autumn leaves or rioters or anything else that has come under their experience in life or in reading, they might approach the exactness of Gray in giving the right word for the sound, for the collection, for the action, for the manner and for the place.

Bees: the buzzing swarm of bees circled thickly about the hive.

Bloodhounds: the baying pack of hounds followed the trail eagerly.

Cavalry: the clattering squadron of cavalry galloped swiftly along the road.

Autumn: the heaps of rustling leaves were swept into every corner by autumn winds.

Rioters: the yelling mob of rioters rushed wildly towards the jail.

Imagination.—Suppose the teacher is giving a lesson in imagination (“Model English,” Chap. X). If one of the General Methods, say Reflecting (No. 69), is to be taught, then the class must vividly picture in their imaginations Gray’s stanza. With the help of books on the desk and with a gesture or two the scene and all its characters may be dramatized. All this suggestively rather than with exact mimicry, unless there is in question a passage that may be reproduced by the class in a miniature pageant or play. To test whether the class is actually imagining, have them quickly number, one after another, the things they see and hear directly by the words and indirectly suggested by the words. Or test in another way. Let each draw an outline of the frame of a picture and show how they would illustrate any line or the whole stanza, putting numbers on the blank space to locate the details and explaining to the side what the numbers stand for.

Suppose a particular method, significant part for the whole (No. 73) be the matter of the lesson, then the whole which is expressed by Gray is “evening,” or “parting day,” pictured by three significant details—curfew, cows and ploughman. Have the class take an opposite situation—not evening in a graveyard in preparation for gloomy thoughts, but morning on the farm looking to a busy, joyous day. Or again, what significant details will suggest the hush of evening in a city or on the sea; noon in a factory, closing of school in the afternoon, coming of winter in December, dawning of spring in April, etc. Interest may be accentuated if one student gives the details and others imagine what is the whole suggested. For example: The cock crows a greeting to the rising sun; the team of horses is hitched to the mowing machine, and soon the clicking knives lay low the waving grass (farm); the crank is whirled about with a swift revolution and jerking stop; the low purr of a hidden engine steals upon the ear and a cloud of dust swallows up the rattling car (a Ford); a sprig of shamrock graces the lapel of the coat; green ribbons flaunt gayly above ruddy cheeks, and down the street steps a band jigging Garryowen (St. Patrick’s Day). In the same way elements of force or interest, metrical charm or poetic thought and many other points could be taught from this stanza, according to the grade of the class before the teacher. Whatever the passage taken, once the grade has been settled, the artistic drill should be carried through the stages of grasping the thought definitely, of appreciating it with discrimination, of repeating the process of creation, of dramatizing the complete product, and finally of self-expression on the part of the student, striving to rival the author in the excellence he has studied.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Cf. De Wulf: L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté, p. 40.

[2] Sandys: History of Classical Scholarship, I, 438.

[3] Sandys, III, 54.

[4] This “mosaic of etymology” which I offer is not, I think, simply an ingenious tour de force. It has a significance and a practical value. It may illustrate the composite nature of the English language; it may amuse a curious reader; it may enliven a Greek class with the touch of actuality; it may disclose dim vistas into the distant past through the medium of everyday language, exemplifying history through common things. All the words of this phantasy are of Greek origin, except the article, the pronouns, the prepositions and conjunctions, and a few other small words: “so, as, then, home, let, go, do, all” and parts of the verb “to be.” Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary (Student’s edition) is the authority. The exclusively technical words of modern sciences which are almost wholly Greek have not, for the most part, been mentioned. It is needless to remark that the prescriptions of the phantom’s pharmacy are not authoritative.

This jeu d’esprit has attracted so much attention as to be reprinted by the American Classical Association and to be noticed by several metropolitan editors. That attention is the motive for giving the article permanent position in a book with which a novel plea for Greek has a certain, though remote, connection.

[5] For analysis of thought, see Model English, bk. II, chap. X, by F. P. Donnelly, S. J. Allyn and Bacon: Boston, New York and Chicago.

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Table of Contents

- ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE

- PART FIRST ART IN THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

- I ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL

- 1. INDIVIDUALISM AND RESPONSIBILITY

- II ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL

- 2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM

- III ART AND HUMAN NATURE

- 1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT

- IV ART AND HUMAN NATURE

- 2. REALISM AND REALITY

- V ART AND THE DIVINE

- 1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART

- VI ART AND THE DIVINE

- 2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION

- VII ART AND THE DIVINE

- 3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE

- VIII THE VISCERAL TEST OF BEAUTY

- PART SECOND ART IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE

- IX LOOKING FORWARD IN LITERATURE
- X UNIFYING EDUCATION THROUGH LITERATURE
- XI THE INTERESTING TEACHER OF LITERATURE
- XII EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS
- XIII KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM
- XIV THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD
- XV TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM
- XVI THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE
- XVII THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE

- APPENDIX

- GREEK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF AN ETYMOLOGICAL PHANTASY[4]

- NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT

- A FORWARD-LOOKING LESSON IN LITERATURE (To exemplify Chapter IX)

- THE METHOD
- I. ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT
- II. ANALYSIS OF FORM

- FOOTNOTES

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE