Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

complete romances, that leave me, when the book is closed, as one might be on a waste plain at midnight, abandoned by his conductor, and without a lantern. I am tired of accompanying people for hours through disaster and perplexity and misunderstanding, only to see them lost in a thick mist at last. I am weary of going to funerals, which are not my funerals however chatty and amusing the undertaker may be. I confess that I should like to see again the lovely heroine, the sweet woman, capable of a great passion and a great sacrifice; and I do not object if the novelist tries her to the verge of endurance, in agonies of mind and in perils, subjecting her to wasting sicknesses even, if he only brings her out at the end in a blissful compensation of her troubles, and endued with a new and sweeter charm. No doubt it is better for us all, and better art, that in the novel of society the destiny should be decided by character. What an artistic and righteous consummation it is when we meet the shrewd and wicked old Baroness Bernstein at Continental gamingtables, and feel that there was no other logical end for the wordly and fascinating Beatrix of Henry Esmond! It is one of the great privileges of fiction to right the wrongs of life, to do justice to the deserving and the vicious. It is wholesome for us to contemplate the justice, even if we do not often see it in society. is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often succeed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in the pageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of the hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measure of it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulous man amasses wealth, lives in luxury and splendor and dies in the odor of respectability. His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged and defrauded, lives in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury. The novelist cannot

It

reverse the facts without such a shock to our experience as shall destroy for us the artistic value of his fiction, and bring upon his work the deserved reproach of indiscriminately "rewarding the good and punishing the bad." But we have a right to ask that he shall reveal the real heart and character of this passing show of life; for not to do this, to content himself merely with exterior appearances, is for the majority of his readers to efface the lines between virtue and vice. And we ask this not for the sake of the moral les

son, but because not to do it is, to our deep consciousness, inartistic and untrue to our judgment of life as it goes on. Thackeray used to say that all his talent was in his eyes; meaning that he was only an observer and reporter of what he saw, and not a Providence to rectify human affairs. The great artist undervalued his genius. He reported what he saw as Raphael and Murillo reported what they saw. With his touch of genius he assigned to everything its true value, moving us to tenderness, to pity, to scorn, to righteous indignation, to sympathy with humanity. I find in him the highest art, and not that indifference to the great facts and deep currents and destinies of human life, that want of enthusiasm and sympathy, which has got the name of "art for art's sake." Literary fiction is a barren product if it wants sympathy and love for men. "Art for art's sake" is a good defensible phrase, if our definition of art includes the ideal, and not otherwise.

I do not know how it has come about that in so large a proportion of recent fiction it is held to be artistic to look almost altogether upon the shady and the seamy side of life, giving to this view the name of "realism;" to select the disagreeable, the vicious, the unwholesome; to give us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the "shady"— to borrow the language of the society she seeks the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with. the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring us into relations only with the sordid and the common; to force us to sup with unwholesome company on misery and sensuousness, in tales so utterly unpleasant that we are ready to welcome any disaster as a relief; and then the latest and finest touch of modern art to leave the whole weltering mass in a chaos, without conclusion and without possible issue.

And this is called a picture of real life! Heavens! Is it true that in England, where a great proportion of the fiction we describe and loathe is produced; is it true that in our New England society there is nothing but frivolity, sordidness, decay of purity and faith, ignoble ambition and ignoble living? Is there no charm in social life-no self-sacrifice, devotion, courage to stem materialistic conditions, and live above them? Are there no noble women, sensible, beautiful, winning,

with the grace that all the world loves, albeit with the feminine weaknesses that make all the world hope? Is there no manliness left? Are there no homes where the tempter does not live with the tempted in a mush of sentimental affinity? Or is it, in fact, more artistic to ignore all these, and paint only the feeble and the repulsive in our social state? The feeble, the sordid, and the repulsive in our social state nobody denies, nor does anybody deny the exceeding cleverness with which our social disorders are reproduced in fiction by a few masters of their art; but is it not time that it should be considered good art to show something of the clean and bright side?

This is pre-eminently the age of the novel. The development of variety of fiction since the days of Scott and Cooper is prodigious. The prejudice against novel-reading is quite broken down, since fiction has taken all fields for its province; everybody reads novels. Three-quarters of the books taken from the circulating library are stories; they make up half the library of the Sunday-schools. If a writer has anything to say, or thinks he has, he knows that he can most certainly reach the ear of the public by the medium of a story. So we have novels for children; novels religious, scientific, historical, archæological, psychological, pathological, total abstinence; novels of travel of adventure and exploration; novels domestic, and the perpetual spawn of books called novels of society. Not only is everything turned into a story, real or socalled, but there must be a story in everything. The stump-speaker holds his audience by well-worn stories; the preacher wakes up his congregation by a graphic narrative; and the Sunday-school teacher leads his children into all goodness by the entertaining path of romance; we even had a president who governed the country nearly by anecdotes.

The result of this universal demand for fiction is necessarily an enormous supply, and as everybody writes, without reference to gifts, the product is mainly trash, and trash of a deleterious sort; for bad art in literature is bad morals. I am not sure but the so-called domestic, the diluted, the "goody," nambypamby, unrobust stories, which are so largely read by school-girls, young ladies and women, do more harm than the "knowing," audacious, wicked ones, also, it is reported, read by them, and written largely by their own sex. For minds enfeebled and relaxed by stories lacking even intellectual fibre are in a poor condition to meet the perils of life. This is not the place for discussing the stories written for the young and for the Sunday-school. It

seems impossible to check the flow of them, now that so much capital is invested in this industry; but I think that healthy public sentiment is beginning to recognize the truth that the excessive reading of this class of literature by the young is weakening to the mind, besides being a serious hindrance to study and to attention to the literature that has substance.

THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AS A SOURCE OF CULTURE.

The

Two important considerations emphasize the significance of the elementary school as a source of culture. The first is the fact that the elements of literary and artistic culture may be instilled at a very early age. second overwhelmingly important consideration is that for the great majority of students, the elementary school is the only possible scholastic source of culture. According to the last report of the United States Commissioner of Education, of the 15,530,268 persons attending some institution of learning during 1893-'94, all but 623,990 were found in the elementary schools. The fact that more than 95 per cent. of all pupils and students never come under the influence of any scholastic institution other than the elementary school, indicates that the culture function of the elementary school is an exceedingly important quesion.

It is to be maintained, therefore, that the elements of literary and artistic culture may be instilled in childhood. It is a mistake only recently recognized as such by the greater number of elementary school teachers to assume that young persons from 6 to 14 years of age have neither the taste nor the capacity for real literature for those masterpieces of human genius which, because they are the works of the highest creative imagination, have a truly educative educative power. Recent biography in the case of those who have cared to report the earliest sources of their inspiration for literature and art, bears witness to the powerful influence of literature in early childhood. A few illustrations will suffice. The stories of Hans Anderson now form part of the course of literature for the fourth year in schools in a score of prominent cities in our country. Now, John Addington Symonds, in his "Autobiography," records the impression made upon him while a very young child by Anderson's story of "The Ugly Duckling:"

"The story made a deep impression on my mind at this time. I sympathized passionately with the poor bird, swimming round and round the duck puddle.

I cried convulsively

when he flew away to join his beautiful widewinged, white brethren of the windy journeys and the lonely meads. Thousands of children have undoubtedly done the same, for it is a note of childhood in souls destined for expression to feel solitary and debarred from privileges due to them."

This incident may be paralleled by an episode in the present writer's own experience. A child five years old was being entertained by being read to from "Pilgrim's Progress." He' was presently found to be crying. Upon being asked why he cried, he explained that he was so sorry that Christian had lost his roll, the allusion being to the incident in the third stage of the immortal story, where Christian, while sleeping, drops from his bosom the roll which was the assurance of his life and the token of his happy reception at the end of the journey.

Symonds gives another instance of the educative and determining influence of literature during his early years:

"My sisters and I were riding one day upon a rocking-horse which stood on the landing of the attic floor. I was holding on to the tail of the horse. We were screaming out in chorus Scott's lines upon the death of Marmion:

"'With dying hand above his head

He shook the fragment of his blade,
And shouted "Victory."

"Charge, Chester, charge; on Stanley, on,"
Were the last words of Marmion.'

Suddenly I ceased to roar, a resolve had formed itself unbidden in my mind: 'When I grow up I too will be an author.'

Cardinal Manning testifies to the permanent impression made by the books he read when in his tenth year. Before he went to school, in 1816, his mother had given him a New Testament:

"I remember that I devoured the Apocalypse, and I never, all through my life, forgot the lake that burneth with fire and brimThat verse has kept me, like an audible voice, through all my life."

stone.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton, in his "Autobiography," bears testimony to the educational power of Scott's poetry over childhood:

sound books on very young minds is an important factor in education not to be overlooked by either parents or teachers. Freeman, the great historian, as we are told in his recent "Life and Letters," says:

"I remember reading both Roman and English history with intense pleasure before I was 7 years old."

Of "Taylor's History of the Roman Empire," Freeman says:

"Coming to that book with a boy's first real powers of understanding I learned things better worth knowing than anything I could have picked up at Eton or Harrow."

William Goodwin, in speaking of the reading he did when from 12 to 15 years of age, says:

"The books I read with the greatest transport were the early volumes of the English translation of the Ancient History of Rollin. Few bosoms ever beat with greater ardor than mine did while perusing the story of the grand struggle of the Greeks for independence against the assaults of the Persian despot. This scene awakened a passion within my soul which will never cease with life."

This biographical testimony to the educative power of real literature over childhood is especially strong and pedagogically instructive. The indications are that the foundations of one's literary tastes lies further back in childhood than has been imagined. Edward Gibbon, the historian of the "Decline and Fall," says that his twelfth year was noteworthy as the most propitious to the growth of his intellectual stature. Hamerton says that in looking back over his life nothing strikes him more astonishing than the rapid mental growth that must have taken place in the two or three years following the death of his father in his tenth year:

as

"When my father died I was simply a child, tho rather a precocious one; but between two and three years after that event the child had become a boy with a keen taste for literature which if it had been taken advantage of by his teachers, ought to have made his education a more complete success than it ever be

came.

"Of all the influences that had sway over It would seem conclusive that in a large me in those days in [his twelfth year] and for class of minds the years from ten to fourteen, long afterward the influence of Scott was by which in our system include the last half of far the strongest. A boy cannot make a bet- the elementary school course, are the years ter choice. Scott has the immense advantage often characterized by great intellectual awakof being always interesting, and the equally ening. It must not be inferred that this is great advantage over many exciting authors true only of the most gifted class of minds. that he never leaves an unhealthy feeling in The indications are that the general truth is the mind." that the elementary school years are those of The attractiveness and influence of really great susceptibility to literary and esthetic in

fluences, and that a school curriculum which too much emphasizes the formal studies and arts to the exclusion of history, literature, esthetics and natural beauty may be a great wrong to childhood.

The nature of these early culture influences should be studied. At this period of life literature is a revelation of a hitherto unknown world, and is decisive of the future trend of thought. A word, a translucent expression fires the imagination and awakes the inner motions of the soul. Symonds remarks: "Our earliest memories of words, poems, works of art, have a great value in our psychical development."

The

The above presentation sets forth the theoretical side of the elementary school as a source of culture, of acquaintance with the best that has been written. How is this being realized in the elementary schools today? How are these schools working out their culture function? Undoubtedly the kindergarten philosophy is a great influence tending to leaven the whole. The elementary school of the future resting upon the kindergarten will develop along fresher and newer lines. The extensive pedagogic use of classical myths, fables and folk stories, of the poems of Tennyson, Longfellow and Wordsworth, of the stories of Anderson and Grimm, from the first school year onward, have but one meaning that the elementary school, like the high school and the college, is to be after its own inner spirit a school of the humanities. almost universal introduction into the upper, elementary grades of whole pieces of literature and complete works of genius displacing the fragmentary selections of the old-time reader is significant of the triumph of the principle that in no stage of education does the purely formal and disciplinary constitute a complete curriculum. Miss Mary Burt, in her interesting study entitled "Literary Landmarks," gives many instances of the effective educational use in elementary schools of episodes from Dante, Homer and other great names in literature. In fact the signs of the times admit of no doubtful interpretation. The great sin of American pedagogy-the underrating of the capacity of the American child -will be expiated. The great works of creative imagination made familiar influences in the schoolroom, the inspirational power of works of genius recognized and therefore made known to childhood and youth, the adornment of the schoolroom with copies of master works in painting, sculpture and architecture, and the personal ownership by each pupil of a few of the best world-famous books-these shall

be some of the main characteristics of the elementary school of the future.-7. A. Reinhart in New York Independent.

CLASSICS IN THE GRADES.

[From Mary E. Burt's Literary Landmarks.] That children's school-reading is a confusion of great and small, good and bad, important and unimportant, fine and coarse, unrelated and unassorted, is the main point under consideration. If men and women wish to read in a topsy-turvy fashion it is their own business; perhaps no adult can or should tell any other adult what he ought to read; but children at school do not do their own choosing, and it is important that they learn to read in such a way that the materials they gather shall form a something entire. They have the ability "to grow a faculty" for preferring the better book instead of the worse. Many teachers have proved to their own satisfaction that young children prefer great classics to weak reading. I have seen a hundred young people in fifth and sixth grades spontaneously applaud, with no prompting from any teacher, the finest and subtlest thought in analyses of Hawthorne's Great Stone Face and the Christmas Banquet, where I had expected a very funny essay to win all the enthusiasm. And I know that the vulgar printed matter which is thrust by vile publishers upon innocent young people cannot hold its own against the pressure of the great book. The masterpiece will stand against common place reading as soon as the child either feels or recognizes the laws of literary art, and he is often more responsive to those laws than are older people. Where the adult will satisfy his conscience with the assumption that "It's all a matter of one's private opinion whether a book is great or not" (a common saying among people not acquainted with the laws of criticism), the child with more open sense and a greater desire to weigh matters will delight in applying the tests given by Goethe, Lessing, Dante, and other great thinkers who have revealed those laws. Since the laws which underlie good painting are very much like the laws governing the worth or worthlessness of literature, a teacher can very easily draw the child's attention to both sets of laws by means of photographs from good paintings. Here is a picture of a blind girl, sitting in a rocky cavern, holding out a light that others coming into the cave may not stumble. Though blind she is giving light to others. The child will soon discover that the picture is a revelation of the beauty of self-forgetfulness and care for others.

Comparing the picture with Warner's matchless story, A-Hunting of the Deer, the child will find that a story may in the same way reveal the same beautiful sentiment, and by indirect questioning he can arrive at the law that a work of art which reveals a noble passion must be greater than one which reveals a mean sentiment, all other things being equal. Of other studies illustrating the same law, Enoch Arden, Chrismas Carol, The Dog of Flanders, for fifth, sixth, and seventh grades, Browning's Ivan Ivanovitch and Story of Donald, Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal, and Craddock's Floating Down Lost Creek, for seventh and eighth grades, are only a few of the many beautiful studies which teachers may select. The drama of Prometheus from Eschylus, is a magnificent study of self-sacrifice, and our practice teachers at the normal school, after making a study of the poem, succeeded in the eighth grade in getting warm discussions concerning the motives of the characters. The study of Philoctetes in the seventh grade (Plumptre's translation), although pointing an opposite sentiment, leads to similar reasoning. Chaucer's Griselda calls forth various expressions; some children regard the heroine as an example of self-sacrifice, and others a specimen of stupidity. A child will take home the lesson of self-sacrifice, when he has discovered the beauty of it by looking at it from a scientific standpoint, when he will revolt against it if it is preached at him.

The law that a work is greater whose parts are correctly related to each other and to the whole is universally recognized by great critics and easily demonstrated by young people.

Plato recognized it and illustrates it in perhaps an amusing manner. Two is not two, he says, by virtue of its being one plus one, but by reason of its quality of twoness, thus showing that two may be looked at in its totality rather than as separate units. Lessing and Goethe emphasize this law. Dante's Divine Comedy is the best possible illustration of it. No one reading The Inferno or the Purgatorio or Paradiso alone can make any just estimate of the poem, since the whole is a single concept, and a just estimate of it can be made only by taking a bird's-eye view of it as a totality. Something like such a view of it may be obtained by drawing diagrams of each part as does Miss Rossetti in The Shadow of Dante, and studying the plan of it as given by her. Such studies in connection with the most impressive cantos can hardly fail to show the unity of Dante's work. That almost every pupil in an eighth grade division would rather

have gone on with the study of The Divine Comedy than to have dropped it was sufficient proof to me that my experiment in putting the poem before them was a satisfactory one.

Midsummer Night's Dream and Philoctetes (Plumptre's translation) for seventh and eighth grades, Lamb's The Tempest for sixth grade, the Antigone of Sophocles for older people, are all interesting studies and illustrations of this law of structure. Amélie Rives' The Story of Arnon is one of the most beautiful stories from an artistic standpoint that American literature affords. A sixth grade class in Chicago during the last year gave their teacher enthusiastic essays upon it, essays which bore conclusive evidence that the artistic unity of the story had made a great impression upon them, although perhaps they had not formulated any rule.

Of shorter studies whose artistic build may be less pronounced, though none the less beautiful, Matthew Arnold's The Forsaken Merman is to me the most exquisite. This poem

I have read and had read in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, generally with great effect. I was introduced to the poem by a pupil reciting it to me. It ethical is almost equal to its structural beauty. Lowell's The Legend of Brittany for private reading, Swinburne's Ode to Proserpine (the cleanest and most charming of his poems) and Browning's Saul for older people; Schiller's Veiled Statue of Truth, Goethe's Erl King, Bryant's Ode to a Waterfowl, Holme's Chambered Nautilus, Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, Sir Galahad, and Elaine, Bryant's Thanatopsis and Death of the Flowers, Whittier's Skipper Ireson's Ride, Gray's Elegy, Burns' John Barley Corn, Hood's Eugene Aram, Drake's Culprit Fay, Scott's William and Helen and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, Lanier's Marshes of Glynn (equal to anything Wordsworth ever wrote), Mrs. Browning's Lady Geraldine, Browning's Ivan Ivanovitch, Herbert's Ode to Virtue, Sarah Orne Jewett's Caged Bird (Atlantic Monthly, vol. 59), Longfellow's Bell of Atri,-any of these studies for seventh and eighth grades.

Poems can easily be spoiled as artistic works by burying them in collateral reading, and by stopping very frequently to nag the child concerning the definition of some word. Take as an illustration Whittier's Barefoot Boy. "What is a boy? What is a blessing? Where did the strawberries grow? did the strawberries grow? What are pantaloons?" and so on. The child's comfort in reading such a piece for totals instead of details can be as completely spoiled by spurious questioning as was the musician's pleasure in

« НазадПродовжити »