THE WAY TO TEACH ENGLISH LITERATURE

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 265, 1 August 1908, Page 12

THE WAY TO TEACH ENGLISH LITERATURE

Many of us know, from our own cases or those of others, in now many bad ways the study of English literature can bo taught at school. With somo of us Shakespere fell into early discredit through the exclusive <uso of his words as pegs on which to hang disconnected, unstiggestivo notos on odds and ends of fact, philological, archaeological, historical, and geographical. Others havo neyor quite got out of their mouths the mawkish taste left by somo teacher who went to the other extreme and gushed sloppily about the unique pathos of this passage and the ineffable, statuesque, Greek beauty of that._ A third species of the mistaught is exemplified in the young man or woman who has nover roally road anything with enjoyment and absorption, but who can plunge off at a moment's notice' into tho most ambitious generalisations about literary schools and tendencies in literary history, about primary and secondary influences, reactions and coun-tor-reactions, central currents, backwaters, aftermaths, and all tho rest of it. There is a yet worse product of bad teaching— the illiterate expert in literature, tho person who has picked up quite correctly a great mass of communicablo facts, ,and oven of sound judgments, about litorary history and relative literary values, without being so much influenced by,the material he has worked in as to acquire the slightest personal sense of literary _ form or to feel anv shame at formlessness in his own writing; he will express what scum to be intelligent and instructed views in tho inexact and characterless jargon of second-rate "popular scionce." Of course there has always been 1 some firstrate teaching of English literature in seconr dary schools; thero is now a good deal, and there is promise of much more in the clearness with which the best secondary toachors seo what is to be.sought and what shunned. An excollont briof statoment of tho right way and of the chiof- pitfalls by Mr. J. H. Fowler, of Clifton, has just been published by tho vigorous English Association as a sixpenny pamphlet. Most adults who can recollect their own youthful sonsations would porhaps say that what taught them most about English litora-, turo woro a few casual occasions on whichsome, older person road a fine piece of English in their hearing with genuine gusto. Appreciation of artistic form can -perfectly well be transmitted, but it comparatively seldom' is, because tho slightest taint of pedantry, of perfunctoriness, of exaggeration, or of ■ false sentiment in the. transmitting person is generally fatal. Tho beginning and foundation,of all good teaching of literature is perfect integrity of critical judgment and intensity of relish in the teacher. Boys and girls have an extraordinarily shrowd instinct for rejecting anv offer of intellectual comradeship to which the other party does not bring the intellectual sincerity anil enthusiasm which would mako it a fair bargain. Mr. Fowler enumerates very clearly and rightly tho qualities which will distinguish a teaching that rests on this basis. It will certainly not shirk the labour —not a dead weight of labour when tackled by a mind already interested—of exact and scientific study. ' To a pupil who has begun to learn tho real enjoyment of form in literature it will always bo a delight, as Pater said, to penetrate to the severer qualities of fine work, to its architecture, its logical structuro, and also to traco the sources of its ornament, the .diet that its author's mind had fed on, the earlier, fine work from which his imagination had takon liplit. Biit such lessons in literary history will always start from and return to tho direct appreciation of first-rate things—tho lirst-rato things will not be dipped into as mere illustrations of self-centred lessons in literary history for literary history's sake. . And the teaching will kocp equally clear of the mawkish effusiveness whiph usually - marks - the absence of an authentic pleasure in books, and of its equally objectionable opposite, the common kind of pseudo-virilism which is somewhat in fashion and pleads oven' capablo teachers,. as Mr. Fowler says, "to regard tho literary teacher, whose interest lies in the. humanor qualities of his subject, as not morely unpractical but unmanly." Tho perfect teaching of English literature is simply the animated "ana systematic pursuit by teachor and pupil,- with their minds laid well along side one another, of thoso inquiries to which the right enjoyment of masterpieces naturally loads a normally curious intellect; whore tho teaching tends to'produce dilettantism, pedantry,' scntimentafism, materialism, or the fatty degeneration of mind that comes of want of duly hard* mental" exorciso, it will often be fouud that through want of vocation, or some deadening routine, or the importunacy of examinations, or overwork, the salt of lettors had lost its savour to tho teacher before _the teaching began.—"Manchester Guardian."