Anything that adds to the sum total of human happiness of the right kind must have positive ethical tendencies. No study develops the self on as many sides as the study of the great masters in literature. They not only fashion our ideals, but they also help us to pull aside the curtains of our souls and to look face to face upon the beauty of this world. The Grecian boldly wrote down the equation: The beautiful equals the moral. After we have looked at nature thru the eyes of a great poet we can see more beauty. I shall never forget the first time that the daffodil appeared transfigured. I had often seen it before thru a glass darkly, but when I read Shakespeare's lines,

.. daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty,

the flower was invested with new glory.

We shall find that nature will whisper "rememberable things" in our moral ear, if we rise to the height of Wordsworth's conception of her. To him she seemed to possess a conscious soul, which expressed itself in the primrose, the rippling lake, or the cuckoo's song, with as much intelligence as human lips ever displayed in whispering a secret to the ear of love. With rare genius he has taught us to look beyond the color of the flower, the outline of the hills, the beauty of the clouds, to the spirit which breathes thru them, and to commune with "nature's self, which is the breath of God." Communing thus, he has led us to dis

cover

truths that wake To perish never.

By force of arms our warriors may conquer lands beyond the orient wave and annex them to our own. Wordsworth has given to the English-speaking race a new heritage in nature's beauty. He is one of the long line of English poets who have given noble moral ideals to the race, more valuable than eastern lands with all their promise of gold. It still uplifts us to hear Wordsworth calling:

In our halls is hung

Armory of the invincible knights of old;

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold

Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung

Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

Our closing benediction on the great poets of our race shall also be taken from Wordsworth:

Blessing be with them, and eternal praise,

Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares;
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delights by heavenly lays,

EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES APPLIED TO THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE

MARTIN G. BRUMBAUGH, professoR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, AND COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION FOR PORTO RICO

In the closing years of the last century Rev. Manasseh Cutler journeyed from his home in Boston to the great city of Philadelphia, then as now the city of magnificent history.

In his diary the distinguished divine records that he desired most of all to see, when in the city, its two objects of greatest interest - the Liberty Bell and Benjamin Franklin's "long arm." This long arm was Franklin's invention. The savant of the Revolution had a large library, whose volumes filled the shelves to the ceiling. To reach the volumes near the ceiling Franklin devised a long wooden arm with flexible fingers, by means of which he was able readily to reach any book he wished to consult. What this long arm was to Franklin the ability to use language is to the human race. Language is the long arm of the race.

The child lives in his senses, and they report to him an immediately present and narrow environment. The child is enslaved by its senselife until it possesses the magical mystery of symbols. These make the mind free. Of these language is the most valuable. To use the language symbol is to be emancipated. The far is made near. The past

is made present. All the glory, inspiration, majesty, and might of the race in all times and at all places open, like a bursting bloom, to his inquiring mind. His mental horizon is lifted, and his mental sky is illumined with steadily sparkling systems of truth undreamed of in the day of his sense-limitations. Thus, by symbols, the soul achieves universal freedom. To teach the language symbol in all its flexibility, possibility, potency, and beauty is the first and noblest work of the school. It is not all of an education to master language, but all education is conditioned by this mastery.

We have introduced so many informational studies into our elementary curriculum that the child has not time to acquire the symbols with which to entertain and use these bits of crude information. The result is that the child gazes, gazes, and then gazes, and then forgets — no, not forgets, for he never really gets the message of the thing. He needs the symbols before he can rightly use the data of the senses.

"Things before symbols" must be understood only as a tentative statement of a most elementary need of the mind. Things of sense are of value, of virtue, of necessity to an understanding of the symbol, but it is vastly more true that symbols are the necessary antecedents of an adequate interpretation of things. Knowledge of a formal and systematical sort, knowledge that is usable, results only to the mind that approaches things with a previously acquired symbol-mastery.

But language is not mastered until it is comprehended as a language -as the mighty instrument by which a great people reports itself. This comprehension dignifies and defines linguistic ends. We have never truly taught language to a child until we have taught this language thru the literature of the language.

The end of language lessons, elementary grammar, composition work, parsing, analysis, conjugation, declension, etymology, definition, reading, spelling, writing, and all these under newer mercantile titles, is a re-survey of the whole constructive process from the literary heights of the language. We shall scarcely lessen the effort of the child, nor the folly of the process, by coining new names for old ways of doing the same thing. We all denounce vehemently the old object-lessons- a scheme for foisting tedious and useless categories of words upon a child in the name of object-teaching. We seem oblivious to the fact that much of the same pernicious practice still flourishes like a green bay tree under the soothing appellation "nature study." The fault, dear teachers, is not with our terms, but with our processes, that we are censured for our lack of literary results.

We live in processes. There must be a change of view, a conversion to the gospel of results. Our children do not need endless categories of analytic processes in language to reach literary results. Analytic processes have their value as mental discipline, and as a basis for a sort of a rhetoric and grammar long since relegated to the shelves of antiquarians. The pupil needs early to feel the beauty of his language. This feeling is the best result of his early training.

We have over-intellectualized all our processes. School today ignores the æsthetic, the emotional phase of mind-growth. Biologic research at every advance confirms the principle that high thought is based upon keen emotion - especially thought that moves the will and controls the conduct of life. One's mind may be so thoroly intellectualized that fidelity to thought becomes the only aim of life. Thus action, conduct, ethical ends in life, are wholly ignored, and the life is a parody on its possibilities. This thought-craze has taken on the form of immediate expression after enforced impression. Does anyone seriously entertain the thought that these lightning reproductions are anything more than an unholy scheme to secure a show of industry and to lessen the possible disorder of the school? We have forgotten that the child in reflection is struggling and strengthening, and will finally-not instantly break into expression indicative of sanity, and of value not only in measuring the growth of the child in language, but also his growth to self-mastery and to self-respect.

This quick response, so widely demanded and usually called "busy work," is the fertile friend of superficiality and the deadly enemy of genuinely valuable mental culture. It requires time to grow any product

of value. To create a literary taste, to give lofty literary ideals, to secure stately concern in literary models, is impossible under the rush and crush of present-day "busy work" processes.

Will not the day speedily dawn when we shall all be taught, and when we shall all recognize, the vital distinction between idleness and reflection? In that day we shall trust a child more, and we shall know that the twin-evil of idleness is the hasty, scratchy, chaotic stuff now produced in our schools under the name of "busy work."

The main purpose of the early work in literary training is to arouse in the pupil a sincere love for the best in our literature - not the best judged by standards of mature criticism, but the best measured in elements that arouse in the pupil that rich and deep emotional response so essential to a keen enjoyment of all that is highest in our literary ideals. This love may, in the higher grades, be organized into all forms of truth and into all orders of science. The habit of enjoyment is the fundamental enrichment of the mind for all subsequent effort. We do our best work in literature, not when we compass a given course of prescribed reading in a given time, but when we so direct the pupil's taste in school that his whole after-school career is attended by constant reading of the best literature. The literary habit is to be acquired in school that the life may demand daily concourse with the choicest spirits in the nation's literary life. And this will not come to us so long as we teach by the term, measure progress by the term, and promote by the term. Our graded courses of study need to demand more and more a minimum of required work, a maximum of free activity under the guidance of a sympathetic teacher. If we trusted more to the good sense and skill of teachers, and less to our rigid requirements, we should mark a great advance in all our teaching.

What avails an enriched curriculum if we have impoverished and enslaved teachers? If we really seek enrichment of the pupil, it will be achieved only by a fuller enrichment of the teacher.

That system in teaching is wise no sane mind will deny, but this system may and should be established not in advance and hypothetically, but definitely and adjustably by the teacher. If we trusted teachers with larger discretion we might shock the devotees of grade equality, but we should make possible, and doubtless actual, a mighty revival of free activity and pleasurable progress in our pupils.

It may not be inappropriate to note also that the spirit of a noble teacher infinitely transcends any prescribed method. We shall never reach results by quarreling over this or that specific method of teaching ; most so-called methods are mere devices, born of an enthusiasm that is not of knowledge, and foisted upon teachers to their great distress, and to the utter neglect of the vitally significant fact that devices are born for an emergency, that they perish with the occasion which called them

forth, and that their use thereafter is but the dangling of a skeleton before the eyes of living spirits craving life to enrich life.

Every normally constituted child enjoys much that it has not yet the power adequately to define. The child may know that it enjoys, without knowing why it enjoys, or knowing how to describe its enjoyment. Indeed, it is a test of good teaching to arouse in the child those loftier emotions which baffle all adequate expression. Who wants a miserable paraphrase of a great work of art? Is it not enough that the child shall feel what it 66 can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal"?

Literature ought to make the child uneasy under all inartistic influences. This can be done. The mind must be trained to distinguish between doing a thing and doing it well; between saying a thing and saying it well; between the touch that satisfies and the touch that creates endless longing for a better way, a longing that stirs the soul to supreme effort and endless endeavor; between passive acquiescence and active, conscious, volitional reform, both in thought and in act. For we have taught well only when our pupils, as a result, think clearly, feel keenly, and act nobly. It is the keen feeling that makes noble action. Our literature must, then, touch at every turn the springs of feeling, that there may flow forth a steady stream of worthy acts. We do not want to think our literature- we want to feel it and live its ideals.

The paucity of literary interests is a great menace to our civic and social stability. Is it not at least possible that this lack of literary taste is due to the erroneous view of our schools — namely, that teaching a child to read by some fanciful device is the surest and speediest way to create a literary spirit in the pupil? Reading, at the outset, is a process of language mastery. Its first years are clearly mechanical and contribute only indirectly to a taste for literature. We do not rise from a method in elementary reading to an abiding love for literature. A child may read until he becomes a member of the class of readers; but this by no means insures the child against dissipation in reading. In some other way must the appetite be set for the right things in literature. I take it that this will be done first by reading to the pupil, with few comments, such classic poetry and prose as will arouse a keen emotional concern. This should not be followed by any sort of didactic process whatever. The purpose of such exercise is not to teach reading, but to stimulate a taste for the real works of art in the language. This is often best done by having the pupils sit with closed eyes and image the scenes as they unfold. The closing of the eyes aids in the introspective and reflective phases of interpretation. A poem so interpreted will never be forgotten. The words may later be memorized, and this will be all the more readily and permanently accomplished when the spirit of the selection is emotionally entertained. The child memorizes best the things he enjoys

most.