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 II. WHAT THE MIDDLE AGES READ

HE history of English literary criticism may be said to begin with Sir Philip Sidney's "Defense of Poesy." A few treatises on rhetoric and prosody preceded it, but it was with this book that there reached England the first important influx from the main current of the Italian and French criticism of the Renaissance. In the preceding centuries men had, of course, expressed opinions about books; but these were random and personal, backed by no theory, part of no system, the casual utterances of men who merely knew what they liked.

THE EVIDENCE AS TO MEDIÆVAL TASTE IN LITERATURE

But the taste of an age can be inferred from other sources than the formal judgments of official critics. The evidence of vogue, when it can be obtained, is more significant, for the obvious reason that a man's spending tells us more than his words of what he values. For the centuries when books circulated in manuscript only, the facts as to popularity are hard to get at, since the numbers of those that have survived are the residuum of a thousand accidents; but the introduction of printing in the latter part of the fifteenth century affords an opportunity of an exceptional kind to learn which of the works then in existence were judged most promising and most worthy of the wider publicity which the new process made possible. It is for this reason that William Caxton, the first of English printers, is really an important figure in the history of literary opinion; for not only did he preface the books he printed with quaint and ingenuous statements of his own reasons for thinking them important, but the mere fact of his choosing them is a valuable evidence of their popularity as estimated by a shrewd man of business.

254


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 .—A stage in the development of certain crustaceans (prawns), in which they closely resemble the adults of a genus (Mysis) belonging to a slightly lower group.

.—Commencing development.

.—Adapted for the purpose of swimming.

.—The earliest stage in the development of many Crustacea, especially belonging to the lower groups. In this stage the animal has a short body, with indistinct indications of a division into segments, and three pairs of fringed limbs. This form of the common fresh-water Cyclops was described as a distinct genus under the name of Nauplius.

.—The arrangement of the veins or nervures in the wings of insects.

.—Imperfectly developed females of certain social insects (such as ants and bees), which perform all the labours of the community. Hence, they are also called workers.

.—A semi-transparent membrane, which can be drawn across the eye in birds and reptiles, either to moderate the effects of a strong light or to sweep particles of dust, &c., from the surface of the eye.

.—The simple eyes or stemmata of insects, usually situated on the crown of the head between the great compound eyes.

.—The gullet.

.—A great series of secondary rocks, so called from the texture of some of its members, which appear to be made up of a mass of small egg-like calcareous bodies.

.—A calcareous plate employed by many Molluscæ to close the aperture of their shell. The opercular valves of cirripedes are those which close the aperture of the shell.

.—The bony cavity for the reception of the eye.

.—An organised being, whether plant or animal.

.—A term applied to those fruits of the Umbelliferæ which have the seed straight.

.—Forms or groups apparently intermediate between and connecting other groups are said to be osculant.

.—Eggs.

or (in plants).—The lower part of the pistil or female organ of the flower, containing the ovules or incipient seeds; by growth after the other organs of the flower have fallen, it usually becomes converted into the fruit.

.—Egg-bearing.

(of plants).—The seeds in the earliest condition.

.—A group of Mammalia, so called from their thick skins, and including the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, &c.

.—The oldest system of fossiliferous rocks.

.—Jointed appendages to some of the organs of the mouth in insects and Crustacea.

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Rh THE PREPONDERANCE OF DIDACTIC LITERATURE

As a matter of fact, this evidence coincides remarkably with the inferences that literary historians have drawn from other data. The fables which pass under the name of "Æsop," to begin with what is probably the most ancient of the works he issued, had been popular for many centuries, and the tangle of the relationships of the endless mediæval collections in various languages is one of the most puzzling problems left for the modern scholar to solve. Their value Caxton seems to take for granted, largely, we may presume, because the didactic purpose which he always looks for first lies upon the surface and did not need to be pointed out. Indeed, more than half of the publications of Caxton, the Prologues and Epilogues of which are printed in The Harvard Classics, are confessedly of that improving kind for which the Middle Ages had so insatiable an appetite. The "Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers" and the "Distichs" of Cato were collections of aphoristic wisdom, the appeal of which is apparent, not merely from the number of copies made, but also from the frequency with which we find them quoted by all kinds of mediæval writers.

THE GOLDEN LEGEND The "Golden Legend" was more specifically pious. It is the best-known collection of those marvelous stories of saints which happily performed the double service of cultivating faith and of providing entertainment by their constant stimulation of the sense of wonder. It is only the former of those services, however, which is explicitly recognized by Caxton. "As gold is most noble above all other metals, in like wise is this legend holden most noble above all other works," he says, and he prays "that it profit to all them that shall read or hear it read, and may increase in them virtue, and expel vice and sin, that by the example of the holy saints amend their living here in this short life."


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 .—An order of plants (see ), The flowers of these plants are called papilionaceous, or butterfly-like, from the fancied resemblance of the expanded superior petals to the wings of a butterfly.

.—An animal or plant living upon or in, and at the expense of, another organism.

.—The production of living organisms from unimpregnated eggs or seeds.

.—Supported upon a stem or stalk. The pedunculated oak has its acorns borne upon a footstool.

or .—The appearance of regularity of structure in the flowers of plants which normally bear irregular flowers.

.—The bony arch to which the hind limbs of vertebrate animals are articulated.

.—The leaves of the corolla, or second circle of organs in a flower. They are usually of delicate texture and brightly coloured.

.—Having flattened, leaf-like twigs or leafstalks instead of true leaves.

.—The colouring material produced generally in the superficial parts of animals. The cells secreting it are called pigment-cells.

.—Bearing leaflets on each side of a central stalk.

.—The female organs of a flower, which occupy a position in the centre of the other floral organs. The pistil is generally divisible into the ovary or germen, the style and the stigma.

or Placental Mammals—See.

.—Quadrupeds which walk upon the whole sole of the foot, like the bears.

.—Readily capable of change.

—The latest portion of the Tertiary epoch.

(in plants).—The minute bud between the seed-leaves of newly-germinated plants.

.—Rocks supposed to have been produced by igneous action in the depths of the earth.

.—The male element in flowering plants; usually a fine dust produced by the anthers, which, by contact with the stigma effects the fecundation of the seeds. This impregnation is brought about by means of tubes (pollen-tubes) which issue from the pollen-grains adhering to the stigma, and penetrate through the tissues until they reach the ovary.

(flowers).—Flowers having many stamens.

.—Plants in which some flowers are unisexual and others hermaphrodite. The unisexual (male and female) flowers, may be on the same or on different plants.

.—Presenting many forms.

.—The common structure formed by the cells of the Polyzoa, such as the well-known seamats.

.—Capable of grasping.

.—Having a superiority of power.

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256 LITERATURE OF ENTERTAINMENT

Of Chaucer's works he prints the immortal "Canterbury Tales"; and in the "Proem" to this book he expatiates in praise of Chaucer's style and substance, both because "he comprehended his matters in short, quick, and high sentences, eschewing prolixity, casting away the chaff of superfluity, and shewing the picked grain of sentence uttered by crafty and sugared eloquence"—a characterization of the first great master of English which few of his later critics have bettered. The whole tone of this "Proem" is of a singularly noble and elevated enthusiasm, and in its evident genuineness and warmth it makes us forget that we are reading one of the earliest of English publishers' advertisements.

THE TROJAN LEGEND AND THE ÆNID

The story of Troy, as everyone is aware, was unknown to the Middle Ages in the Homeric version. Two Latin prose works purporting to be derived from Greek contemporary accounts by Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan formed the basis of the mediæval tradition. These were elaborated into a French metrical romance by Benoît de Sainte Maure in the twelfth century, and from him the Sicilian Guido delle Colonne derived the material for his Latin prose history of Troy. For the later Middle Ages Guido was the main source. It is to this tradition that Boccaccio's romance of "Filostrato" belongs, with Chaucer's expansion and paraphrase of it in his "Troilus." On Guido also depends that French priest Raoul le Feure, whom Caxton translated in Bruges and Ghent, and "finished in Cologne, in the time of the troublous world," when England was torn by the Wars of the Roses, and there was little peace for letters at home. Under these circumstances it is perhaps little wonder that the chief justification he offers for his labor in translation is the hope that the destruction of Troy "may be example to all men during the world how dreadful and jeopardous it is to begin a war, and what harms, losses, and death followeth."

The Troy story he continued in his translation of a French version


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 .—The feathers forming the tip of the wing of a bird, and inserted upon that part which represents the hand of man.

.—Projecting portions of bones, usually for the attachment of muscles, ligaments, &c.

.—A resinous material collected by the Hive-Bees from the opening buds of various trees.

.—Exceedingly variable.

.—The lowest great division of the animal kingdom. These animals are composed of a gelatinous material, and show scarcely any trace of distinct organs. The Infusoria, Foraminifera, and sponges, with some other forms, belong to this division.

(pl. ).—The second stage in the development of an insect, from which it emerges in the perfect (winged) reproductive form. In most insects the pupal stage is passed in perfect repose. The chrysalis is the pupal state of butterflies.

.—The minute root of an embryo plant.

.—One half of the lower jaw in the Mammalia. The portion which rises to articulate with the skull is called the ascending ramus.

.—The extent of country over which a plant or animal is naturally spread. Range in time expresses the distribution of a species or group through the fossiliferous beds of the earth's crust.

.—The delicate inner coat of the eye, formed by nervous filaments spreading from the optic nerve, and serving for the perception of the impressions produced by light.

.—Backward development. When an animal, as it approaches maturity, becomes less perfectly organised than might be expected from its early stages and known relationships, it is said to undergo a retrograde development or metamorphosis.

.—A class of lowly organised animals (Protozoa), having a gelatinous body, the surface of which can be protruded in the form of root-like processes or filaments, which serve for locomotion and the prehension of food. The most important order is that of the Foraminifera.

.—The gnawing Mammalia, such as the rats, rabbits, and squirrels. They are especially characterised by the possession of a single pair of chisel-like cutting teeth in each jaw, between which and the grinding teeth there is a great gap.

.—The Bramble Genus.

.—Very imperfectly developed.

.—The group of quadrupeds which ruminate or chew the cud, such as oxen, sheep, and deer. They have divided hoofs, and are destitute of front teeth in the upper jaw.

.—Belonging to the sacrum, or the bone composed usually of two or more united vertebræ to which the sides of the pelvis in vertebrate animals are attached.

.—The gelatinous material of which the bodies of the lowest animals (Protozoa) are composed.

.—The horny plates with which the feet of birds are generally more or less covered, especially in front.

.—Rocks deposited as sediments from water.

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 .—The transverse rings of which the body of an articulate animal or annelid is composed.

.—The leaves or segments of the calyx, or outermost envelope of an ordinary flower. They are usually green, but sometimes brightly coloured.

.—Teeth like those of a saw.

.—Not supported on a stem or footstalk.

.—A very ancient system of fossiliferous rocks belonging to the earlier part of the Palæozoic series.

.—The setting apart of a particular organ for the performance of a particular function.

.—The central portion of the nervous system in the Vertebrata, which descends from the brain through the arches of the vertebræ, and gives off nearly all the nerves to the various organs of the body.

.—The male organs of flowering plants, standing in a circle within the petals. They usually consist of a filament and an anther, the anther being the essential part in which the pollen, or fecundating dust, is formed.

.—The breast-bone.

.—The apical portion of the pistil in flowering plants.

.—Small leafy organs placed at the base of the footstalks of the leaves in many plants.

.—The middle portion of the perfect pistil, which rises like a column from the ovary and supports the stigma at its summit.

.—Situated beneath the skin.

.—Adapted for sucking.

(in the skull).—The lines of junction of the bones of which the skull is composed.

(pl. ), The jointed feet of articulate animals, such as insects.

.—Fishes of the kind familiar to us in the present day, having the skeleton usually completely ossified and the scales horny.

or .—Delicate fleshy organs of prehension or touch possessed by many of the lower animals.

.—The latest geological epoch, immediately preceding the establishment of the present order of things.

.—The wind-pipe or passage for the admission of air to the lungs.

.—Three-fingered, or composed of three movable parts attached to a common base.

.—A peculiar group of extinct crustaceans, somewhat resembling the woodlice in external form, and, like some of them, capable of rolling themselves up into a ball. Their remains are found only in the Palæozoic rocks, and most abundantly in those of Silurian age.

.—Presenting three distinct forms.

.—An order of plants in which the flowers, which contain five stamens and a pistil with two styles, are supported upon footstalks which spring from the top of the flower stem and spread out like the wires of an umbrella, so as to bring all the flowers in the same head (umbel) nearly to the same level. (Examples, parsley and carrot.)

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Rh of the "Æneid" of Virgil, "that noble poet and great clerk." In this work he tells us he stood in great doubt between those advisers who urged him to use language which could be understood of the common people and those who wanted him to use the most curious terms he could find. He chose a middle path, "forasmuch as this present book is not for a rude uplandish man to labour therein ne read it, but only for a clerk and a noble gentleman that feeleth and understandeth in feats of arms, in love and in noble chivalry."

CAXTON ON MALORY

Finally, we have his Prologue to the great book of "King Arthur" compiled by his contemporary, Sir Thomas Malory. If the Troy story was the favorite classical tale in mediæval times, the romances connected with King Arthur were the most notable and the most widely diffused of more recent imaginative literature. Founded on a minute basis of old British history, the Arthurian legends had passed from the chronicles into romance, finding their most important artistic development in France, but spreading in translation and paraphrase into every country of western Europe. At the close of the Middle Ages, an English knight, Sir Thomas Malory, collected, chiefly from French prose versions, materials for a loosely organized compilation of all the more important adventures, and retold them in a style and spirit that make his book one of the great monuments of English prose. For this book Caxton had the warmest admiration; and, though here, if anywhere, we have a literature of entertainment, in it also Caxton finds a possibility of moral and spiritual improvement. Few of his words are better known than his worthy praise of Malory: "And I, according to my copy, have down set it in print, to the intent that noble men may see and learn the noble acts of chivalry, the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in those days, by which they came to honour, and how they that were vicious were punished and oft put to shame and rebuke; humbly beseeching all noble lords and ladies and all other estates, of what estate or degree they be of, that shall see and read in this said book and work, that they take the good and honest


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 .—Hoofed quadrupeds.

.—Consisting of a single cell.

.—Containing blood-vessels.

.—Like a worm.

 * or .—The highest division of the animal kingdom, so called from the presence in most cases of a backbone composed of numerous joints or vertebræ, which constitutes the centre of the skeleton and at the same time supports and protects the central parts of the nervous system.

.—The circles or spiral lines in which the parts of plants are arranged upon the axis of growth.

.—See.

.—The earliest stage in the development of many of the higher Crustacea, so called from the name of Zoëa applied to these young animals when they were supposed to constitute a peculiar genus.

.—In many of the lower animals (such as the corals, Medusæ, &c.) reproduction takes place in two ways, namely, by means of eggs and by a process of budding with or without separation from the parent of the product of the latter, which is often very different from that of the egg. The individuality of the species is represented by the whole of the form produced between two sexual reproductions; and these forms, which are apparently individual animals, have been called zooids.

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258 acts in their remembrance and to follow the same, wherein they shall find many joyous and pleasant histories and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardyhood, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil and it shall bring you to good fame and renown. And for to pass the time this book shall be pleasant to read in; but for to give faith and believe that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty. But all is written for our doctrine."

This last sentence sums up the chief points in the professional faith of the father of English printing. Edification was assumed by him as by his age as the prime, if not the only, justification for writing and publishing. Yet, in spite of this narrow assumption, Caxton and the authors he did so much to make accessible were clearly sensitive to the element of delight as well as of instruction in literature; and enough has been said of the contents of these Prologues to show how rich they are in indications not only of what the Middle Ages read, but why they read it.

As for Caxton's own motives, if we took him literally, we should suppose that he translated and printed mainly to save himself from the sin of idleness. Yet a more generous impulse is easily read between the lines; and it is no mere self-regarding purpose that finds utterance in the words he penned as he closed wearily his long labor on the "Recuyell of the Histories of Troy": "Thus end I this book, which I have translated after mine Author as nigh as God hath given me cunning, to whom be given the laud and praising. And for as much as in the writing of the same my pen is worn, my hand weary and not steadfast, mine eyne dimmed with overmuch looking on the white paper, and my courage not so prone and ready to labour as it hath been, and that age creepeth on me daily and feebleth all the body, and also because I have promised to divers gentlemen and to my friends to address them as hastily as I might this same book, therefore I have practised and learned at my great charge and dispense to ordain this said book in print, after the manner and form as ye may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end that every man may have them at once."


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 III. THEORIES OF POETRY

MONG the various critical essays presented in The Harvard Classics no group is more interesting than that which deals with the theory of poetry. Our consideration of the literary form or quality of the essay has already shown us that we should not expect from the essayist an exhaustive treatise, but rather a free and spirited and suggestive discussion of certain aspects of his subject. To write adequately upon the general theme of poetry, expounding its nature, its æsthetic and social significance, and its technique, would be an enormously difficult task. But there are few poets who have not uttered at one time or another some of the secrets of this craft, or some phase of their admiration for it. Let us glance at the essays of eight English and American poets, ranging in time from the age of Elizabeth to the Victorian epoch: Sidney, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Poe, Whitman, and Arnold. Four of this group, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe, and Arnold, are acknowledged adepts in general literary criticism; while Sidney and Shelley, Wordsworth and Whitman, have given expression to some of the most eloquent and revealing things that have ever been written about their own art of poetry.

Sidney's "Defense of Poesy," like Shelley's, is a reply to an attack, but neither poet is very angry, nor does either believe that his opponent has done much harm. Shelley's antagonist was a humorously Philistine essay by his friend Peacock. Sidney is answering somewhat indirectly a fellow Puritan, Gosson, whose "School of Abuse" (1579) had attacked the moral shortcomings of ancient poetry and the license of the contemporary stage. Yet Sidney's "pitiful defense of poor poetry," as he playfully terms his essay, is composed in no


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260 narrowly controversial spirit, but rather in a strain of noble enthusiasm. He brings to his task a sufficient learning, a knowledge of the poetics of Plato and Aristotle, and an acquaintance with the humanistic critics of Italy and France. He knows his Homer and Virgil, his Horace and Ovid, but he does not on that account despise the "old song of Percy and Douglas." The nobility of Sidney's tone and his beauty of phrasing are no less notable than the clear ordering of his thought. In one close-packed paragraph after another, he praises the poet as a teacher and creator, compares poetry with history and philosophy, and finds, as Aristotle has done before him, that it is nobler than either. He discusses the various types of poetry, testing their capacities for teaching and moving the reader. Then, after a skillful refutation of the current objections against poetry, he turns, like a true Englishman, to the poetry of his own race, which was just then beginning, though Sidney did not foresee it, its most splendid epoch. He condemns, for instance, as being "neither right tragedies nor right comedies," that type of tragi-comedy which Shakespeare was soon to make illustrious. This opinion is now reckoned, of course, a heresy, as is Sidney's other opinion that verse is not essential to poetry. Yet no one who loves Sidney can quarrel with him over this or that opinion. His essay has proved itself, for more than three centuries, to be what he claimed for the beautiful art which he was celebrating—a permanent source of instruction and delight.

One hundred years after Sidney's untimely death, the prince of English criticism was John Dryden. He made no pretense of actual government: he "follows the Rules afar off." He is full of contradictions, reflecting the changing hues of contemporary taste, compromising between the classic and the romantic, changing his views as often as he likes, always readable and personal, always, in the best sense, "impressionistic," always, as Professor Ker has said of him, "sceptical, tentative, disengaged." His early essay "Of Dramatic Poesy" is full of youthful zest for Shakespeare and romance. Then he turns conformist, aiming "to delight the age in which I live" and to justify its prevalent neo-classic taste; but presently he comes


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Rh back to his "incomparable Shakespeare," praises Longinus, and abandons rhyme. In his next period he turns rationalist, and exalts "good sense" and "propriety." In the last dozen years of his life his enthusiasm for highly imaginative literature returns; he translates Juvenal and Virgil, and modernizes Chaucer; he is "lost in admiration over Virgil," though at heart he "prefers Homer." It is in this final stage of his career as a critic that he writes the charming praise of Chaucer, which is reprinted in The Harvard Classics. It is the perfection of essay writing. "Here is God's plenty," as he exclaims of the elder poet, in whom he finds a soul congenial to his own. Dryden did not, it is true, quite understand Chaucer's verse, else he could never have found it "not harmonious," yet he makes royal amends by admitting that "there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect." In his earlier "Apology for Heroic Poetry" (1677) he salutes "the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' " then three years dead, and calls Milton's masterpiece "one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced."

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

Dryden's best pages of criticism tempt one, in brief, to agree with him in declaring that "Poets themselves are the most proper, though I conclude not the only critics." The critical writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge confirm us in that opinion. Wordsworth is less facile than Dryden, and he does not range so far. Coleridge, by natural endowment one of the greatest of literary critics, is desultory and indolent. But the two men, when focusing their masterly powers upon the defense and interpretation of that mode of Romantic poetry in which their own creative energies were for a time absorbed, produced criticism which has affected the whole subsequent development of English literature. Coleridge's lecture on "Poesy or Art," for instance, is full of those flashes of penetrative insight which reveal the born critic: Art "is the power of humanizing nature"; "passion itself imitates order"; "beauty is the union of the shapely with the vital"; "the subjects chosen for works of art should be such as really are capable of being expressed and conveyed within the limits of


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262 those arts." Wordsworth's "Preface" to his epoch-making early poems should be read in connection with Coleridge's comments in the "Biographia Literaria," and in the light of the well-known fact as to the proposed division of labor between the two young poets in the composition of the "Lyrical Ballads." Coleridge intended to treat supernatural objects as if they really existed. Wordsworth wished to find in natural objects elements of novelty and surprise, that is, the romance of everyday experience. The two methods blended of course, like the colors at the extreme edges of the spectrum. Wordsworth's successive statements of his purpose emphasize now his use of "the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes," as if it were mainly a question of poetic diction; then he stresses the necessity of truth to "the primary laws of our nature," and debates the æsthetic question of "the association of ideas in a state of excitement"; finally, he qualifies his first utterances by pointing out that the diction should be a "selection of language really used by men," and that the incidents and situations treated by the poet should have "a certain colouring of the imagination." Such criticism as this, if accompanied by close study of the verbal alterations which Wordsworth made in the text of his poems as his theories changed, is in the highest degree stimulating and profitable.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The influence of Coleridge is traceable throughout Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" (1821). Shelley rides into the lists with as high a heart as Sidney, to repel the attack, not of the "moralists" but of the utilitarians. He is not conscious, like Sidney, Dryden, and Arnold, of the history of criticism. He has steeped himself, it is true, in Plato, but he writes with the enthusiasm of a new and personal vision. Poetry, to him, is primarily the expression of the imagination: "it redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man"; "it is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds"; "a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth"; poetry "acts in a divine but unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness"; "a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one." Though the


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Rh student of poetical theory can easily claim that such sentences as these are post-Coleridgean, they are really timeless, like the glorious spirit of Shelley itself.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Poe's essay on "The Poetic Principle," written to serve as a lecture during the last year (1849) of his brief life, illustrates his conviction that "the truly imaginative mind is never otherwise than analytic." As applied to Shelley, this dictum is far from true, but it expresses Poe's idealization of his own extraordinary gift for logical analysis. He was a craftsman who was never weary of explaining the trade secrets of his art, and though his criticism is uneven in quality and uninformed by deep and accurate scholarship, he expounded certain critical principles with incomparable clearness.

In "The Poetic Principle," together with some popularization of Coleridge, and some admixture no doubt of that "fudge" which Lowell thought so inextricably compounded with Poe's "genius," there will be found the famous definition of the "Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty." Poetry, according to Poe, excites, by elevating the soul. But as all excitements, by psychological necessity, are transient, it is only short poems that are truly poems at all. Such brief and indeterminate glimpses of the supernal loveliness, "the creation of supernal beauty," is the poet's struggle and despair. If Poe's formulation of the task and method of poetry lacks, as it doubtless does, universal validity, it is nevertheless a key to the understanding of his own exquisitely musical fragments of lyric verse.

WHITMAN ON AMERICA AND POETRY

Walt Whitman, like Poe and Coleridge, is mystic and transcendental in his theory of poetry. Unlike them, he is an arch-rebel in poetic practice. The Preface to "Leaves of Grass" (1855) is not so much a critical essay as a manifesto. It is vociferous, impassioned, inconsecutive. Some paragraphs of it were later turned into verse, so rich was it in emotion. The central theme is the opportunity


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264 which the immediate age in America offers to the poet. The past has had its fit poetical expression, but the new world of democracy and science now demands a different type of bard. The qualifications are obdurately clear: he must love the earth and animals and common people; he must be in his own flesh a poem, at one with the universe of things; his soul must be great and unconstrained. He must perceive that everything is miraculous and divine. The poet is to be the priest of the new age, and of all the coming ages. Whitman does not enter, in the Preface, upon the discussion of the technique of his own unmetrical, rhapsodic verse. Yet this verse, which has challenged the attention of two generations, and which is slowly making its way toward general recognition, is scarcely to be understood without a knowledge of the theory of poetry which underlies it. The Preface states that theory, confusedly, if one tries to parse and weigh it sentence by sentence, but adequately, if one watches simply, as Whitman bids, the "drift" of it.

"I do not contest Mr. Walt Whitman's powers and originality," wrote Matthew Arnold in 1866, but he adds this warning: "No one can afford in literature to trade merely on his own bottom and to take no account of what the other ages and nations have acquired: a great original literature America will never get in this way, and her intellect must inevitably consent to come, in a considerable measure, into the European movement." It is not the least useful service of Arnold's own essay on "The Study of Poetry" that it takes us at once into this European movement. The essay was written as a preface to a collection of English verse—"one great contributory stream to the world river of poetry." Arnold insists throughout, in characteristic fashion, upon the necessity of developing a sense for the best, for the really excellent. He points out the fallacies involved in the purely historical and the purely personal estimates. He uses lines and expressions of the great masters as "touchstones" for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality. He takes Aristotle's remark about the "higher truth" and


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Rh "higher seriousness" of poetry as compared to history, and tests therewith the "classic" matter and manner of English poets.

There are pitfalls, without question, lurking in the path of Arnold's apparently sure-footed and adroit method, but the temper of his performance needs no praise. He brings us steadily and serenely back to "the European movement," to the laws and standards that endure. But he also teaches that life and art are inexhaustible in their resources. "The future of poetry is immense"; that is the first sentence of Arnold's essay; and it will be also the confirmed final truth of any reader who has taken pains to acquaint himself with the utterance of poets about poetry. Walter Bagehot wrote long ago: "The bare idea that poetry is a deep thing, a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human things, is even now to the coarse public mind nearly unknown.... All about and around us a faith in poetry struggles to be extricated, but it is not extricated. Some day, at the touch of the true word, the whole confusion will by magic cease; the broken and shapeless notions will cohere and crystallize into a bright and true theory." We are still waiting, no doubt, for that true and final word, but if it is ever spoken, it is likely to be uttered by one of the poets.


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 IV. ÆSTHETIC CRITICISM IN GERMANY

OETHE admonishes the artist to create in forms of beauty, not to talk about beauty, and it is certain that no man ever became a poet from the study of an "art of poetry." Language is abstract, and art is concrete, the understanding is slow and emotion is swift, the reason may be convinced, but the senses cannot be persuaded. There is no disputing about tastes. Nevertheless, we know that taste can be cultivated, and that understanding not only makes the taste more discriminating but also multiplies the sources of æsthetic pleasure. Artists as well as amateurs and philosophers have ever sought to further such understanding.

The sculptor or the painter, whose primary means of expression are forms and colors, assumes the secondary function of teacher when he places at the disposal of his "school" the results of his studies in technique or theory. The philosophical lover of art delights to speculate on the constituents of beauty, and the critic boldly formulates the laws upon the basis of which he judges and classifies. Poetry, probably the earliest of the fine arts, was first subjected to this æsthetic legislation; but music, dancing, sculpture, and painting were soon brought under the same dominion, and have long been regarded as sisters of one and the same household with poetry.

THE RISE OF ÆSTHETIC CRITICISM

Especially since the revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, practice in the arts has been accomplished by a running commentary of theory. The men of the Renaissance, having before them not merely numerous examples of Greek sculpture and the epics of Homer and Virgil, but also Aristotle's "Poetics" and Horace's "Art of Poetry," and seeing in these products of antiquity


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270 and rationalist, tended to separate the spheres of reason, sense, and morals, and to refer all three to subjective judgment. But Schiller, his disciple, fired as he was by moral enthusiasm, wished to find an objective foundation for a theory of the beautiful that should make æsthetics a mediator between science and ethics, and should give to the beautiful the sanction of a perfecter of the mind, the heart, and the will. Not unlike Lessing, whose "Education of the Human Race" meant a gradual liberation from leading strings and final reliance upon trained natural faculties, Schiller conceived æsthetic education as a process of freeing man from bondage to the senses and leading him through culture to a state of more perfect nature, in which, as of old among the Greeks, truth and goodness shall be garbed in beauty. Civilization has been won through specialization, division of labor; it is a gain for the community, but at the loss of harmonious development of powers in the individual life. The beautiful soul longs to restore the balance. If this be impossible in the world of actuality, it is attainable in the world of appearance. There the mind is free to follow the image of beauty and to endow this image with the wealth of all its knowledge and all its goodness not for any ulterior purpose, but in obedience to a native impulse. And so the poet is the sole modern representative of perfect humanity, with all his powers, intellectual, sensuous, and moral, cooperating toward the realization of an ideal.


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 V. THE COMPOSITION OF A CRITICISM

F THE critical essays not discussed in the previous lectures the most important are those by Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Taine, and Mazzini. As their doctrines are quite obviously related to those expounded in the foregoing pages, it seems desirable to consider here the manner in which their opinions are expressed. The critical essays published in this series are classics, not merely because they contain significant doctrines about literature but also because they are in themselves literary works. They confer pleasure as well as profit. What distinguishes them from the journalistic book review on the one hand, and the pedantic study on the other, is their artistic composition. By what methods are their artistic effects produced?

A DOMINANT IDEA

The title of a work cited by Sainte-Beuve suggests what a literary criticism should not be. It runs as follows: "Michel de Montaigne, a collection of unedited or little-known facts about the author of the Essays, his book and other writings, about his family, his friends, his admirers, his detractors." Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and the other masters never present us with a "collection." They marshal their numerous facts into a system, and dominate them with a thought which, however complex, is coherent. Most of us arise from the perusal of an author with a chaotic throng of impressions. But in the mind of a true literary critic the chaos becomes order. Renan, in his "Poetry of the Celtic Races," "giving a voice to races that are no more," lets us hear not a confusion of tongues but an intelligible unity of national utterance—sad, gentle, and imaginative. Hugo, 271


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272 surveying in his "Preface to Cromwell" the highly intricate romantic movement, sees therein the harmonious union of the grotesque and the sublime. Sainte-Beuve answers his sweeping question, "What is a Classic?" with the succinct definition—a work that reveals in a beautiful and individual manner an eternal truth or emotion. Mazzini characterizes Byron as a subjective individualist, and Goethe as an objective one. Taine, prefacing his "History of English Literature," unlocks the riddle of literary growth with the keys "race, environment, and epoch." The truth of these doctrines does not for the moment concern us. What is important for us is that each of these long essays may be summed up in a single sentence; for in each a powerful mind grasps and expresses a single idea. When a critic has conceived the leading idea of his essay, he is still in danger of obscuring its presentation. The more richly informed he is, the more he is tempted to introduce facts not strictly related to his dominant thought. But the great critical essayists, resisting that temptation, subordinate all details to the general design. Hugo, in sketching the development of the world's literature, selects only those phases which forecast the timeliness of romanticism. Sainte-Beuve and Mazzini, in dealing with the lives of Montaigne and Byron, which offer many opportunities for recounting interesting but irrelevant incidents, mention only those which illustrate their conception of the authors.

METHODICAL ARRANGEMENT

In the arrangement of the materials, the same conscious art is observable. Each of the sections of the essays of Taine and Renan is a firm and necessary foundation for those that succeed it. Not until Renan has described the secluded national existence of the Celts does he draw the resultant national traits of character, which thereupon we are ready to trace intelligently in the various branches of Celtic literature. The method of Taine's essay is even more admirably logical. To understand the growth of literature, he tells us, we must know first "the visible man," next "the invisible man," then the race, environment, and epoch which determined his


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Rh, and finally the way in which those causes distribute their effects. Thus is our progress through unknown fields made easy: we are not asked to leap from point to point, or to retrace our way; our guide takes us step by step along the path of his discovery.

ILLUSTRATIONS

The sustained and methodically expounded idea which is the basis of every great critical essay would, however, like all abstractions, seem dull or unintelligible if it were not constantly and vividly illustrated. The logical must flower in the picturesque. This even the great critics occasionally forget: one or two passages in Mazzini's essay would be more convincing if more fully illustrated by references to Goethe's works; and the only pages of Hugo where our interest flags a little are those in which he describes, without examples, the character of romantic verse. But such lapses are highly exceptional. Taine, the most intellectual and least emotional of these men, makes it a rule to clothe the skeleton of his theory in flesh and blood. To show what he means by "the visible man," he clearly portrays a modern poet, a seventeenth-century dramatist, a Greek citizen, and an Indian Purana. Renan, to exhibit the Celtic love of animals and nature, tells the story of Kilhwch and Olwen; and to explain Celtic Christianity, recounts the legend of St. Brandan. Sainte-Beuve states his definition of classicism in a few lines, and devotes the rest of his essay to applying it to particular authors.

All these masters have the gift of happy quotation. Montaigne's "I commend a gliding, solitary, and silent life," quoted by Sainte-Beuve,and Goethe's "I allow objects to act tranquilly upon me," quoted by Mazzini, clarify and confirm out of the authors' own mouths those impressions which the critics wish to impart. The astonishing effectiveness of the close of Hugo's essay is due to his apt quotations from Aristotle and Boileau, which seem to bring over those great classicists to Hugo's romantic party.

The illustrations are not derived only from literary works. Taine, insisting upon the delicacy with which a literature records changes in national character, likens it to the sensitive instrument of a physicist. The similes of Hugo are exceptionally frequent and elaborate. "To make clear by a metaphor the ideas that we have


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274 ventured to put forth," he writes, "we will compare early lyric poetry to a placid lake which reflects the clouds and stars; the epic is the stream which flows from the lake, and rushes on, reflecting its banks, forests, fields, and cities, until it throws itself into the ocean of the drama. Like the lake, the drama reflects the sky; like the stream, it reflects its banks; but it alone has tempests and measureless depths." His poet "is a tree that may be blown about by all winds and watered by every fall of dew; and bears his works as his fruits, as the fablier of old bore his fables. Why attach one's self to a master, or graft one's self upon a model? It were better to be a bramble or a thistle, fed by the same earth as the cedar and the palm, than the fungus or the lichen of those noble trees." Mazzini begins his comparison of Byron and Goethe by contrasting an Alpine falcon bravely floating in the midst of a storm, with a tranquil stork impassive amid the warring elements; and Renan prepares us for his conception of Celtic literature by giving us at the outset the characteristic tone of the Breton landscape. What the intellect has firmly outlined, fancy and imagination paint in lively colors.

COMPARISON AND CONFLICT OF OPINION

An essay which has by these means achieved clearness may be pleasant to read but still lacking in power. To give force to his ideas about an author or a literature, the masterful critic exhibits the peculiarity of his subject by the use of contrast. The brilliancy of Mazzini's essay proceeds largely from its striking antithesis between Byron and Goethe. Renan enforces his doctrine of the individuality of Celtic literature by emphasizing the differences between the French "Roland" and the Celtic "Peredur," between the gentle Isolde and the "Scandinavian furies, Gudrun and Chrimhilde." Hugo intensifies our conviction of the complex character of modern life by describing the simplicity of the ancients. If a critic does not observe this principle, we may say of his essay: "These ideas are, to be sure, clear and enjoyable; but what do they matter?" The great critics do not leave us calmly indifferent; they are on occasion critics militant. Even the gentle Sainte-Beuve admonishes the "Montaignologues," who, he feels, do not understand the spirit of Montaigne. Taine manifests the novelty and


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412 "Annnal Rent, 2s. per 100 acres, and no licence fee. "No Licence issued for less than 1l. "Full annual rent to be paid on application. "Holders of Land in Fee Simple, of not less than 10 acres, within a Class A Licence, have a right to run gratuitously within such Licence one head of great stock for every 10 acres so held, and so long as said land may be let for Pastoral purposes. "Lands in Class B are situate outside of certain defined Boundaries, and are let on Pastoral Leases of eight years. These Leases are not renewable, but the Lessees thereof have a preferable claim for renewal. "No Lease to contain more than 10,000 acres, but any number of Leases may be granted to the same person. The annual rent for a Lease is 5l., and 10s. per thousand acres for the land contained therein. "Leases are granted without competition. "These Leases contain pre-emptive rights of purchase of any portion of the land (not less than 40 acres) during the first year. "After the first year of a Lease, all unsold land is open to general selection for purchase. "Homesteads may be selected by Lessee during the first year, at the rate of two acres for every acre of run, with a right of purchase of any part thereof within the first three years. "Purchasers of Lands within B Leases have the same right of depasturing cattle as in Class A Licences."

Tillage Leases.

"Lands for Tillage purposes are let on Leases for eight years. No Lease to contain more than 320 acres. Any number of Leases may be granted to the same person. The annual rent is 1s, per acre, payable in advance, but no Lease is granted for a less sum than 5'l., except for the last half of a year."

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Rh importance of his method of criticism by mentioning the imperfections of the eighteenth-century method. Mazzini reproves the enemies and misinterpreters of Byron. Hugo above all shows the stimulating value of pitting one's ideas against those of others. He calls his essay his "sling and stone against the classical Goliaths"; and by making his opponents utter their arguments against him gives to his work the force of dramatic combat. Critical essays that thus add vigor to lucidity arouse and delight our minds. When we recognize how skillfully they fuse logic, imagination, and emotion, we perceive the superficiality of the distinction between so-called criticism and so-called creative literature. Good criticism is indeed creative, and its composition is a high art.


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Rh North and East Districts.

"Lands in these Districts are disposed of on more liberal terms than in any other parts of Western Australia. "The North District is comprised between the sea coast and the meridian of 120° East longitude, and to the North of the River Murchison and of a true East line through Mount Murchison. "The East District is comprised between the meridians of 121° and 129° East longitude, and between the South coast and latitude 30° South. "The Lands are divided into Class A for annual Licence, and Class C for more extended occupation. Class A comprises all land within two miles of the sea coast, and Class C the remainder. The rent of Class A Lands is 5s. per 1000 acres for the first four years, and 10s. per 1000 acres for each of the second four years. "Class C Lands are let on Pastoral Lease for eight years, commencing first of January next after application. "The rents of Class C Leases are at the rate of 5s. per 1000 acres for each of the first four years, and 10s, per 1000 acres for each of the second four years, with a fee of 5l. at the commencement of each Lease, but not after the first year."

Mineral Lands.

"Lands known or supposed to contain minerals are termed 'Mineral Lands,' and are sold as such to the first applicant for the same, in lots of not less than 80 acres each, and at the fixed price of 3l. per acre, payable by a deposit of 1l. per acre at the time of application, and of a similar amount on the same date in each of the two following years."

Licences to Test Mineral Lands.

"Any person desirous of testing the mineral qualities of land previously to purchase, may obtain a Mining Licence for one

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text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Education I.


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Education II.


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Education III.


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414 year, subject to renewal for a second year, at the option of the Governor. The rent chargeable to be at the rate of 2s. per acre for the first year, and 4s. per acre for the second year. "No Licences granted for a less term than one year, or for a smaller sum than 8l. "The holder of any Mining Licence may exchange his Licence for a Mining Lease for any period not exceeding ten years, and at an annual rent of 8s. per acre paid in advance. "For the same period, and on the same terms, Mining Leases shall be granted to any other person on approved application."

NATIVE SCHOOL AT PERTH.

Since the foregoing pages were written the Bishop of Perth has carried out his wish to establish, under his own eye, a school for native children similar to that conducted at Albany by Mrs. Camfield. The pupils have been removed from Albany to Perth and are now, under the superintendence of the Bishop, entrusted to the care of one thoroughly well suited to a post of such responsibility, Miss Sheperd, late mistress of the Girls' School at York. At present the native children are accommodated in temporary quarters; but a building expressly intended for the Native Institute has already been commenced and will shortly be completed, when it is hoped that an earnest and united effort will be made by the colony to carry out the purpose which the Bishop has so much at heart by the establishment of a large and prosperous native home.

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text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Education IV.


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Education V.


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Rh PALM WOOL.

One of the most useful productions of the colony, which has been accidentally omitted from notice in the previous pages, is the fine elastic substance, resembling wool, which is found at the base of the leaves or fronds of the Zamia so common in Swan River (Zamia spiralis?). It is much used for bedding and similar purposes, and might become a valuable article of export, as it may be procured at the price of a few pence per pound from those who collect it.

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N ALL profitable thinking about modern education one central fact is stated or assumed—the fact that education has become a public enterprise. To think of it as a matter mainly of private interest, to discuss it chiefly in terms of personal development, is to ignore the achieved conditions of civilized life and the clear trend of progress. The spread of public schools is but the obvious outward sign of a growing conviction concerning all educational endeavor. That conviction was long ago proclaimed and has now become a guide to action—the conviction that the community has a vital stake in the education of every child. Education is a common concern not merely because there are many children to be educated, but because there can be no significant outcome in the education of any child which is not of importance, not to him only, but also to others, immediately to many, more remotely to all.

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF THE MODERN IDEAL

This has always been true. Modern life, with cities and the inventions which belittle time and space, has only made it more apparent and action upon it more pressing. No one can think with penetration upon the results of education who does not come at last to a fuller vision of the interdependence of men. That men shall live less and less each for himself, more and more each for the common good, is not merely a consequence of increasing numbers on the earth, but an essential condition of human progress, in the individual as well as in society. It is a poor and meager culture which does not end in greater power to serve. To become a man is to become capable of living effectively with others and for all, in 276


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Rh the normal relationships of life—not in subservience to custom, but in devotion to a welfare larger than one's own, a welfare at least not incompatible, in the end, with the welfare of the world. It is not enough to say that the common interest is at stake in the education of every child; the very process of education is properly a training for effective membership in the common life.

Such is the reasoning behind the great outlay of public money on schools, libraries, museums, and other educational agencies. Civilized communities undertake education as a part of their proper business, not as a charity, but as a necessary public function. Schools are tax supported and education is compulsory. The state claims final authority to prescribe standards and to supervise even private educational ventures. It calls on all citizens for their full support in this task of conserving and developing human resources. It considers every taxpayer as much in duty bound to support ultimate social improvement through education as to direct social improvement through public enterprises of any other sort. Personal return cannot be taken into the account; the good to be achieved is primarily a public good, in which the childless also share. And the problems of education are problems of public policy, involving the whole theory of the state, of government, of the social order, and of civic progress.

All educational questions have thus become increasingly complex. The character of modern life makes even well-rounded personal development a matter of much difficulty, for the life of the individual child is in some ways narrower to-day than it was in simpler times. To secure for modern children the full exercise of body, intellect, imagination, sympathy, and will is in itself a task which calls for insight, energy, and cooperation, to say nothing of money. Yet to provide for the formal cultivation of personal capacities, faculties, and powers, is by no means to solve the problem of education, even for a given child. The results may happen to be good, but the problem has not been solved, for it has not been adequately stated.

THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM CONCRETE, NOT ABSTRACT

It happens, in the first place, that "body, intellect, imagination, sympathy, and will" are poor terms to use in the actual direction


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278 of teaching. They name abstractions which have induced more futile educational discussion and more useless educational effort than can ever be reckoned. No child is a collection of general faculties which can be trained for universal use. But even when we have discovered the special capacities with which the individual is actually endowed, and with which we may therefore profitably work, the problem is only in part before us. It is quite as important to consider what our child is to do with his capacities, what stuff he is to exercise them on. It is the content of education that gives it social direction and social importance; from the public standpoint it is the school, the course, the subject that mean most, for these determine the concrete character of the individual's later activities and interests. That ancient educational saw, "I care not what you study, if you study it well," is profoundly misleading—a mischievous piece of common sense which hides the truth in order to emphasize a part of it. No matter what "faculty" a subject "trains," it is the information, the ideas, the ideals, principles, points of view, methods, interests, enthusiasms, purposes, and sympathies it imparts that chiefly determine its educational value. It is the content of a man's education which helps most to fix his place in the community, his vocation, his avocations, and his availability for special service.

RELATIVE NATURE OF "THE FUNDAMENTALS"

Education presents not one problem, therefore, but many. In the earlier years, to be sure, all children need much the same intellectual experience, at least in school. "The fundamentals" are the subjects everybody ought to master. Thus at first there is only the complexity of meeting individual differences among children—the brilliant, the backward, the well nurtured, the neglected. Complexity enough! And even so, each subject presents, besides, its own problem of social interpretation: "What everybody ought to master" in arithmetic or in geography is by no means clear, and new definitions of the aim and scope of each subject are continually needed. Such definitions must be made from the standpoint of public service and the real demands of life, not from the standpoint of complete mastery of the subject. A social view of education demands selection and reorganization of the elements of knowledge. But beyond this is


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Rh the fact that children cannot long be kept in the same educational highway. The need to separate arises at least as early as adolescence, the end of childhood and the gate of youth. Here differences of native endowment, economic condition, and conscious purpose force the first fundamental differentiation of schools, courses, and classes. Even if, in some millennium of social justice, the stern necessity of earning a living in the teens were to be done away, the social necessity for variety of schooling would remain. Society needs many kinds of thinkers and workers, just as there are many kinds of aptitude to be trained. There is no "general course" which can provide an "all-round education," in the sense of providing all that is really needful for anybody who knows what is good for him. To discover the best in education for one child or class of children, though with the public interest well in mind, is to answer but one of the questions the educator must hereafter always ask.

For the public interest goes far beyond the need of supplying to all a uniform minimum of schooling. Democracy means far more in education than the warding off of danger from illiteracy. It is a crude and at bottom a wholly mistaken view of public education which confines it to "the three R's," or to those admitted necessities and such other subjects as the common good may dictate for the common school. The public interest is not met by merely elementary education. It is met only when every prospective citizen may secure without undue sacrifice that extent and kind of education which will make him most efficient in his fundamental social relationships, including his vocation. The state needs knowledge, efficiency, insight, and idealism in industry, commerce, the arts, science, philosophy, religion, and family life as much as in citizenship more narrowly defined. The only logical result of the thoroughly social character of education is public support of every socially profitable kind of schooling, with commensurate public authority.

Democracy in education invites, to be sure, the evils of political control; yet education is one of the few permanent means of counteracting political evil. No one need fear to trust educational authority to a public aroused to the meaning and value of education, and this essential condition of public support depends on the slow growth of public conscience and public intelligence. In any case,


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280 private initiative will long have an honorable part to play in education and the very policy of the state may often best be served by leaving the special and the higher schools in private hands: but there are a few communities in which the extension of public provision and public authority in education is not imperative.

Of that extension what must be the guiding conceptions? Before all else must come the honesty of an attitude at once scientific and ethical. Educators must face the facts, without abatement of their enthusiasm for ideals.

THE AIM OF EDUCATION SOCIALLY CONSIDERED

Teachers and school officers find before them not mere types of humanity, with abstract virtues and vices, general habits, faculties, and powers waiting to be cultivated for "life" as it may be philosophically defined; they have to deal with real and ever-varying human beings, whose impulses, emotions, and purposes reach forward to the actual challenge of the specific duties, interests, and rewards of the real world. To provide, for every normal individual, whatever his endowment, nurture, or experience, an opportunity to prepare himself for a part in the legitimate work of the world, a share in its proper pleasures, and an understanding of the meaning and value of the life he leads—this is the problem to be solved. What are the things men do in which the public interest calls for intelligence and efficiency such as may be got in schools? For the getting of such intelligence and efficiency in the doing of such things, what schools are needed? In these schools what subjects shall be taught and how?

These questions present the problem of education as it must be viewed from the standpoint of the common good—and the questions presented by education viewed from any other standpoint are far less important. No doubt we need, in the crash and strain of modern life, remembrance of the old ideal of personal distinction. Grace is worth too much to lose it beyond retrieving, even for efficiency. But how impoverished now appears that aristocratic ideal which made much of personal charm and little of social worth—for which the education of women could consist chiefly of dancing, French, and hand embroidery! Whatever its faults and dangers, it is a stronger age which approves for women schools of household economy, of


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Rh nursing, or philanthropy, so say nothing of clerical training, medicine, or law. But he interprets the modern ideal too narrowly who would have it take no account of beauty, leisure, or reflection. The work of the world is fundamental, and in itself neither selfish nor undignified; but the world's play—its generous sport, its curious science, its philosophic speculation, its art, and its worship—is a region of enduring values. It is only the separation of work and play that belittles either. A social conception of the ends of education finds reason for folk-dancing and pageants in the public schools, but none for the exploitation of children through premature industrial training. The common good demands education for play no less than education for work, education for the larger efficiency of insight, breadth of view, and reflective intelligence no less than education for the narrower efficiency of habit. Democracy cannot perpetuate slavery through schools.

EDUCATION AND FREEDOM

But the essential conditions of freedom cannot be established through education; only the love of it, the understanding of it, and the power and will to use it for service can be gained from the most liberalizing of curricula. The possibility and the extension of freedom are the work of direct social and political reform. It is futile, meanwhile, to insist that liberal studies shall be all that schools shall offer. It is simple error to insist that a traditional range of studies—the classics, science, mathematics, even history, or English—provide the only possible culture for freedom. Schools must meet the need of the world as frankly and directly as they can, without squeamish prejudice against practical or vocational studies. Shopwork may afford more liberal culture to a given boy than Greek—and the problem of educational values is always thus specific. The only profitable distinction between liberal studies and vocational studies is one which looks out and forward to the life the individual is to lead. A man's calling, if it be of much difficulty, demands vocational training; his life in the family, the community, the state, and the church demands an education which may justly be called liberal; the worthy use of his leisure demands an education which may properly be called cultural. But what is vocational for the artist


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282 will be cultural for others; and a given subject may serve many uses in every normal life. A complete education will prepare for life in all its relationships, either by direct study of the problems they present, or by the study of subjects valuable in one of them or in all.

This conception of the ends to be attained is clear enough; it is the means that fail. And the failure of means is due less to public apathy than to inherent difficulty in finding them. New schools, new courses, new subjects must be created. A new interpretation of old subjects and a new method of teaching them must be worked out. Much of our traditional teaching, especially in high schools, academies, and colleges, goes quite astray; it is fruitless because its uses are not clear or because they are not made clear; and the "intellectual discipline" which is supposed to result from it either does not occur or is not carried over into the conduct of mature life. Mental and moral habits and ideals, such attitudes, tendencies, and principles of conduct as "thoroughness," "order," "concentration," "self-reliance," may be taught by precept and example in the work of any subject; in every case they must be generalized and held consciously in mind, practiced and renewed in vision if they are ever to permeate life. In this general training of the mind and will, the unconscious effect of one subject is little better than that of another of similar complexity and scope. Science is as good as Latin, and mechanical drawing may be better than either. Much depends on the ethical enthusiasm, the insight, the sympathy, and the leadership of the teacher; much on the methods of teaching and class management he employs. More depends on the traditions and the administrative, disciplinary, and social policies of the school. This is to say that these precious moral results of education are chiefly matters of personal contagion, direct inspiration, and experience in the common effort of work and play. They are achieved as much in the home or on the playground as in the school. It is the specific habits of attention, the special methods of observing, comparing, classifying, and reacting on facts, the particular forms of skill, the definite information, the peculiar outlook, the actual incentives which a given subject may possess that make it serviceable in education. In these things subjects differ and lend themselves to different uses. In these


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Rh things history differs from dressmaking, science from agriculture. And in these things the same subject will differ as it is taught for different purposes, to pupils of different ages and different capacities and motives. Literature cannot yield the same fruit in a night school that it yields in a college. Under a conception of education which demands preparation for all the essential activities of life, in schools designed to meet the needs of every age and class, subjects must be evaluated and organized anew.

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

The schools and courses now most needed are partly known, partly to be conceived. Vocational education has come to stay, but its various forms and alliances have yet to be completely determined. The fear that vocational training will materialize and lower education is groundless, even in theory. To train carpenters and printers in schools instead of by apprenticeship is not a threatening educational revolution; doctors, lawyers, and engineers were once trained by personal tuition under practitioners. Vocational training has long existed in the higher professions; its establishment for industry and business is the result of social changes which have undermined apprenticeship; and the fact that this training is now given at public expense shows a new sense of the social importance of labor. In the life of the modern world artisans are no more to be neglected than artists, farmers than philosophers. Vocational education is a mighty step in advance, which offers inspiring opportunities for the extension of general education, as an accompaniment of technical training, to those who might otherwise have secured neither. Ought we not to rejoice at the retention of boys and girls in schools, where they can be under the disinterested influence of teachers, whereas they might have drifted from one shabby and depressing experience to another until they had been able, perhaps, to "pick up a trade," acquiring their views of life and their ethical principles and habits who knows how? The pressing problem of vocational training is not the problem of justification and defense, but of organization and extension.

The kind and number of vocational schools to be established must be settled partly by the economic return for special forms of


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284 efficiency. In the long run the social need for efficiency in a trade or profession determines the legitimate rewards of success in that calling. The fact that people will pay well for medical skill is an indication of social need for it. It cannot be said, of course, that schools should be established to train men for every calling in which they may earn a good living. A school may be established as much to teach men the value of training for knowledge and power in a special form of service as to prepare individuals to profit by rendering that service; for it is only in the end that economic demand justly reflects true social need. Accordingly, the public interest calls upon the educator to define social need and correct social demand, no less than to meet it. To plan a system of schools requires vision of a new and better order, in which the wants of men, and their consequent willingness to pay for the satisfaction of them, are more reasonably founded in the general welfare. Yet in discussing the advisability of training for any occupation, the possibility of earning a living in it cannot be ignored. If agriculture could not be made to pay we should not have agricultural high schools or agricultural colleges. Even a school of philanthropy finds added sanction in the fact that trained social workers are paid for their services. In vocational education, then, there is at least an obvious basis for discussion concerning schools, courses, and curricula. The state must train its workers, and work for which there is fundamental need is work which pays. Vocational education presents problems of the most vexing sort, but its rationale is clear.

THE NEED FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

It is the persistent need for general education that complicates the issue. Economic demand may justify child labor, but educational theory does not. A theory of education which finds no place for vocational education is antiquated and meager; but a theory which considers only the requirements of work is meager and inhuman. No training for special skill in a trade is conceivable in the elementary school: manual training, gardening, sewing, cooking, and agriculture have a place in childhood because children cannot learn by books alone, but need a training of body, hand, and eye, of purpose,


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Rh loyalty, and leadership which these subjects can provide. This need does not disappear with adolescence, but generalized manual training—constructive work on objects without economic value, the making of childish gimcracks, of joints which join nothing, or of seams which sew no garment—ceases early to have even an educational value. The purely educational worth of any form of manual training comes gradually to depend on the economic value of the ends for which the pupil works. Manual training as a part of the general curriculum of a high-school pupil must be practical training in some form of manual skill of actual value in the working world. Even a pupil who intends to go to college may well take one or two courses of handwork in the secondary school, for the broadening of his experience and outlook and the specific training he may thus secure: a course in the elements of many occupations would be better still. But this is not vocational education. True vocational education aims at efficiency in a special field of work—it trains printers, stenographers, dressmakers, carpenters, mechanicians, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, journalists, engineers. It brings into play the purpose to earn a living by what one learns—which President Eliot has called the "life-career motive." It narrows, not unjustifiably, but inevitably. The difficulty is to educate for citizenship, for the duties of parenthood and social living, for leisure, and for the interpretation of life—in spite of the need for early specialization, when that need is present.

That need does not arise altogether from differences in wealth. After adolescence many pupils lack incentive for an education that has no direct reference to a career. But the demand for vocational training is so overlaid and entangled with economic pressure that selection of candidates for vocational schooling on the ground of individual aptitude and free choice is visionary. While our social system permits comparative poverty to constrain the vast majority of young men and women to go to work at the earliest possible age, we must face the necessity of early specialization in training, whatever their capacity or need for further general culture. Education can only emphasize the value of liberal studies and strive to include in every curriculum as many as possible, and in profitable form. It can also resist the tendency to specialize too soon.


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286 ECONOMIC PRESSURE IN EDUCATION

Education has thus to struggle, like government or philanthropy, beneath the burdens imposed by the injustice of our economic order. We must make educational provision for social conditions which ought not to exist—night schools for illiterate foreigners, specialized vocational training for factory workers and shopgirls who ought to have at least the time for a much extended general education in addition to their preparation for work. We must also be content to see the high privilege of general education seized by boys and girls whose easy lives make them careless of its value and inconstant in its pursuit. These conditions schools themselves cannot change. But by public provision and by scholarships the opportunity for prolonged education may be kept open to the able and ambitious. The spirit of teaching and school administration may help to prevent the formation of social caste. By precept and example democratic ideals and the will to serve may be encouraged in those who are in danger of losing them. And no academic bars need be hastily and blindly set up—as in the narrow interpretation of college entrance requirements or in failure to provide a reasonable opportunity for higher education of some desirable sort—against those who seek further training after mistaken choice of a high-school course or the early disadvantages of having to earn a living. In a democracy the educational system must at least guard jealously against the perpetuation of special privilege. Schools must discourage the advance of the unfit, not of the unfortunate.

Obviously there is need for wise guidance of individuals into the kind of schooling which will best fit them for the life they can best lead. Vocational guidance is but part of the larger problem of "the redistribution of human talent" (a phrase recently and aptly coined by Professor Carver) and it is often best to be accomplished as a part of an educational guidance which takes account of the need for liberal culture as well as for vocational training. Transcendent ability is doubtless seldom obscured through lack of counsel or of privilege; educational guidance will not discover many a mute inglorious Milton nor send to schools of pharmacy many a discouraged Keats. It may prevent, however, less disastrous misfittings in a


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Rh thousand cases, and therein is its sufficient sanction. But guidance will be futile if there are no proper paths to tread. The money now provided for schools must be increased many fold, if schools are to become for all men the gates of opportunity and the highways to service. We must remember, to be sure, that there are many educational agencies besides schools; libraries often do far more toward education. But any systematic education is schooling, and if the interests of society are to be adequately met, all valuable forms of educational activity must be organized, supported, and made available to the individuals who seek to use them.

THE LINE OF ADVANCE IN EDUCATION

To increase the size of schools is not enough. Schools and classes are already far too large. System is not enough. More schools and courses, of greater variety; smaller schools and smaller classes, with greater opportunity for personal contact between teachers and taught; more teachers, of higher native capacity and better training—all these are needed. But these things we shall not have until the common conception of schools and teachers has suffered change. We still think of teaching too narrowly or too vaguely—too narrowly if we look upon teachers as purveyors of learning for its own sake, too vaguely if we think of them as taskmasters in a dubious abstract discipline of mind. The task of the teacher must be reconceived; we must think of him and he must become a guide to worthy living, teaching not only his subject but how to use it and what it is for, making clear its incentives and ideals, its methods and its values, and helping his pupils to interpret life more justly because they have seen it in a new light. This is the larger opportunity of every teacher, but especially of the teacher of a traditional subject in a traditional course. The teacher of stenography may more safely confine himself to skill and speed with dots and dashes than the teacher of Latin to exactness in the use of tenses. The first task of any teacher is to teach his subject well, but he cannot leave the social interpretation and application of education wholly to principals, parents, school pamphlets, and chance. If the public is to value the teacher's work more highly, he must make it more valuable.

To become more valuable, teaching must develop both a science


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288 and a philosophy of its own, teachers must study their problems as physicians study theirs and as statesmen theirs. For the problems of teaching are at once problems of efficiency and problems of destiny. The teaching of any subject calls for scientific study of methods and ethical study of ends. How shall we teach it well? depends for its answer in part on the answer to What shall we teach it for? These questions have not yet been answered with finality for any subject. With due change of wording they may be asked of any school or course: How shall we manage it well? and, What shall we manage it for? All questions of educational practice are thus both scientific and philosophical.

(a) IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

In the elementary school we need better methods of drill—greater efficiency in the formation of habits, as for instance in arithmetic. To gain it we must turn to experiments in the psychological laboratory and to exact measurement of arithmetical progress in the school. It is only in the last few years that we have had an adequate knowledge of what arithmetical ability is. We do not yet know with much precision how it develops under different methods of instruction. The teaching of every subject suffers for want of accurate records of results. We lack standards, fundamental tests, and a sufficiently detailed knowledge of the psychology of the subjects we teach. But measurement and experiment apply in the main to memory work and the formation of habits. They will not quickly show us how to relate one subject to another or to the life outside school walls; they cannot yet help us to vitalize our subjects and make them yield opportunity for independence and cooperation on the part of our pupils. They will not soon teach us how to make learning a light to life. In the arithmetic of the elementary school we need a social philosophy to govern our selection of topics to be taught or omitted, to justify varying emphasis on logical conceptions, drill in calculation, or exercise with real problems. So in the teaching of every subject we need new study, both exact and broad.

(b) IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL

In the work of the high school this double duty is even more apparent. We face the immediate necessity of extending the period


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Rh of compulsory school attendance far into the period of secondary education. But we cannot lightly set aside both the need to earn and the impulse to work, and the demand for workers will not readily yield to the idealism of the educator who would ignore it in favor of general culture. Compromise must be the outcome, but also coöperation: we must have many forms of vocational training, and employers of young workers must aid the state to educate them through schemes of part-time schooling. Such schemes are already in operation and commend themselves as both efficient and humane. In this increased provision for schooling the purely technical subjects lend themselves readily to measurement of results and standardization of method; it is the subjects of larger social value, such as civics or English, that must be studied anew, in the light of clearer conceptions of their aims and closer observation of their effects. We have to learn how to use these traditional means of education (and such newer ones as the study of household sanitation or personal hygiene) under new and trying conditions and with new purposes, as the liberal adjuncts of many forms of vocational training.

Yet in the secondary school which aims wholly at general culture (or at preparation for college, which is not supposed to be an obstacle to general culture), the problems of aim and method in the teaching of traditional subjects are more pressing still. How shall a modern language be taught to some real purpose? For what purpose shall it be taught? The actual mastery of the tongue can be achieved very much more effectively than it is now achieved if methods of teaching can be based on fuller knowledge of the psychology of learning and completer tests of classroom work and home study. The fundamental values of the subject can be more clearly conceived and more directly pursued if we can shake ourselves free from the befogging belief in general discipline as the goal of teaching in this or any given subject. Ability to handle the language as an instrument of thought and expression—for the achievement of this aim we need a new analysis of the fundamentals and more accurate standards of progress: appreciation of the foreign civilization represented in its literature—for the achievement of this aim we need new selection of material and more vital reference to life. In this and in many traditional subjects teachers are constantly


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290 at work at this double adjustment, and from them as well as from psychologists and students of education we may look for progress and reform.

For scientific study of method, whether by experiment in the psychological laboratory, by classroom test, or by exact statistical record, can but provide the basis for constructive reorganization of teaching in any subject; discussion of aims by educational leaders can but define in general terms a new interpretation of material; the teachers in the schools must make effective or prove visionary the ideals thus achieved. If they cling to traditional conceptions and tried methods—as many do, especially in private schools—they block progress; and if by personal worth and the power of leadership they win respect and affect deeply the lives of their pupils, the weight of their conservatism is the harder to bear. But the hasty and ill-considered application of scientific generalization or social conception is an equal if a rarer fault. The teacher must master for himself the science and the philosophy of his subject and be critical practitioner as well. He must be open-minded, critical, constructive.

(c) IN THE COLLEGE

This attitude is more general among teachers and principals of elementary schools and among school superintendents than among teachers and masters of secondary schools; among public secondary-school teachers than among private secondary-school teachers; and least general among college teachers. Yet to these latter the call to professional study of the problems of their own work is loudest. They have greatest need to test their results and possibly revise their methods, to reconceive their aims and discover new ways to achieve them. In America the college stands perforce for culture; yet it clears itself with difficulty from the snares of technical specialization in chosen fields of knowledge—a specialization essentially vocational. College professors must be specialists—scholars in the full sense of the term; but college students do not for their part commonly intend or care to specialize in the same sense. To study one field with greater thoroughness than others; to gain from it a disinterested enthusiasm for learning; to approach in one direction the limits of achieved knowledge; to taste the joy of constructive intellectual


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Rh effort; these are essential elements in a college student's curriculum. But this does not call for the methods or ideals of graduate specialization, even in the student's chosen field. The privilege of college study is the opportunity to reach safe ground, in all the more important fields of scholarship, for the exercise of reflective intelligence. With a view to providing this opportunity college teachers may well spare time from research for that close observation of methods and results and that unprejudiced discussion of aims which are needed in the teaching of all subjects everywhere.


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E HONOR Francis Bacon as the prophetic inspirer of modern science. In perusing the long list of the activities of that scientific establishment which is described in the closing pages of "The New Atlantis," we are astonished by again and again recognizing in its imaginary methods and achievements precise anticipations of what is actually being done in modern medicine, meteorology, engineering, aeronautics, etc. Bacon himself, to be sure, modestly protested that he was but "stirring the earth a little about the roots of science." He was indeed no great discoverer of data, and from Harvey to Huxley the scientific specialists have sneered at his rather futile experiments. Even his method, which he sincerely believed a new and rapid way to complete mastery of our environment, is now considered somewhat impractical. Yet the prefaces to his "Instauratio Magna," though no longer accurate guideposts, are revered as monuments in the history of scientific progress. They served an even nobler purpose than to show the scientist just where to go; they sent him forth to seek his way with a new and conquering spirit, the spirit of confidence and of cooperation. The works of Bacon instilled in his successors the faith that by united effort they would presently understand, and thus control, those physical forces which in the past had toyed with the life of man, and exposed him to poverty, disease, and all the accidents of circumstance. In this hope were undertaken the Royal Society and the French "Encyclopédie"—leading enterprises in advancing respectively the discovery and the dissemination of rational knowledge. "We shall owe most," says Diderot in his prospectus to the "Encyclopédie," "to the Chancellor Bacon, who threw out the plan of a universal dictionary of sciences and arts at a time when, so to speak, neither sciences nor arts existed. That extraordinary genius, at a


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Rh time when it was not possible to write a history of what was known, wrote one of what it was necessary to learn." Wherever experimental investigators are to-day discovering new laws of nature, and thus more and more subjecting the physical world to the welfare of man, the spirit of Bacon is fruitfully at work.

BACON NOT PREOCCUPIED WITH SCIENCE

Among writers on education, the very magnitude of Bacon's position in the history of science has tended to overshadow his influence in other respects. Yet he urged the development of science because in his day it was relatively the most neglected and chaotic department of human endeavor, and not because he thought it absolutely and forever the most important. Newman himself does not insist more strongly than Bacon on the truth that science, though great, is not the complete satisfier of human needs. In "The Advancement of Learning," the first part of the "Instauratio Magna," Bacon pleads for the discovery and application to life, not merely of pure scientific truth, but also of clear ideals of mental, moral, and spiritual well-being. Religion and the so-called liberal studies had his eloquent and loyal support. "The New Atlantis" presents us not only with the model of a public institution of scientific research, but also with ideals of social and personal character. His Utopia was not, as some mistakenly declare, a merely industrial civilization, but a Christian commonwealth which exalted the humane feelings, family life, and artistic beauty.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN HIS ESSAYS AND HIS OTHER WORKS

Both in the prefaces to the "Instauratio Magna" and in "The New Atlantis," Bacon is thinking of the world as he believed it should and would become. The assumption that he had a similar purpose in his famous "Essays" unfortunately misleads many modern critics, and tends to obscure the peculiar merits of his most popular work. Yet Bacon himself tells us that in his opinion we already had enough books which enthusiastically described moral ideals, and that what we really needed were accurate observations on the extent to which


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294 those ideals were attainable, and on the methods by which, under the actual conditions of everyday life, they might be put into practice. What he wished to present in the essays was human life, not as it ought to be, but as it is. "Let us know ourselves," he said, "and how it standeth with us."

BACON NOT A CYNIC

The result is a portrait of mankind beneath which may be inscribed his characteristic sentence: "It is good to retain sincerity." So accurate and candid an observer of human life is instinctively disliked by persons of sentimental temperament, and they call Bacon cynical and heartless. Ignoring his realistic intention, they turn, for instance, to the essays on love and on marriage, expecting eloquent praise of what love and marriage may be at the very best; and they are disappointed, perplexed, and sometimes disgusted with what they find. In their haste they exclaim: "What a cold and calculating creature! All he says of the love between husband and wife is 'Nuptial love maketh mankind!'" These accusations, which may substantially be found in one of the best known editions of the "Essays," are as inaccurate as they are typical. Any careful reader, not led astray by the usual misconception of Bacon's purpose, will observe that the kind of love which he discusses in his essay on that subject is "the wanton love which corrupteth and embaseth," the condemnation of which should hardly be considered objectionable. As for family life (which, as I have mentioned, he idealizes in "The New Atlantis"), it is true that he dispatches it briefly in the essay on love; but in the essay on marriage he does not estimate it as cynically as we are led to suppose. He points out, to be sure, that, as a matter of sober fact, marriage may interfere with extraordinary public ambition; but he gives it preference over a selfish single life, he scorns those who consider children mere "bills of charges" instead of "dearest pledges," and he calls matrimony a "discipline of humanity," that is, a school of kindness or a humane education. To study the comparative merits and defects of many conditions of human life, to mark the extent and the limitations of human faculties, and to do so with even handed justice, is his ruling purpose.