Part 11 (1/2)
To the teacher who stands in the presence of thirty or fifty distinct species of incipient men and women, social insight and culture, the ability to appreciate each in his individual traits, his strength or weakness, are a prime essential to good educative work.
Now, there are two avenues through which social culture is attainable,--contact with men and women in the social environment which envelops us all, and literature. Literature is, first of all, a hundred-sided revelation of human conduct as springing from motive.
Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell are revealers of humanity. Still more so are d.i.c.kens and Eliot and Shakespeare and Goethe. To study these authors is not simply to enjoy the graphic power of an artist, but to look into the lives of so many varieties of men and women. They lay bare the heart and its inward promptings. Our appreciation for many forms of life under widely differing conditions is awakened. We come in touch with those typical varieties of men and women whom we shall daily meet if we will but notice. It broadens one's perceptions and sympathies, it reveals the many-sidedness of human life.
It suggests to a teacher that the forty varieties of humanity in her schoolroom are not after one pattern, nor to be manipulated according to a single device.
The social life that surrounds each one of us is small and limited. Our intimate companions.h.i.+ps are few, and we can see deeply into the inner life of but a small portion even of those about us. The deeper life of thought and feeling is largely covered up with conventionalities and externalities. But in the works of the best novelists, dramatists, and poets, we may look abroad into the whole world of time and place, upon an infinite variety of social conditions, and we are permitted to see directly into the inner thought and motive, the very soul of the actors.
Yet fidelity to human nature and real life is claimed to be the peculiar merit of these great writers. By the common consent of critics, Shakespeare is the prince of character delineators. Schlegel says of him:--
”Shakespeare's knowledge of mankind has become proverbial; in this his superiority is so great that he has justly been called the master of the human heart. A readiness to remark the mind's fainter and involuntary utterances, and the power to express with certainty the meaning of these signs, as determined by experience and reflection, const.i.tute 'the observer of men.'”
”After all, a man acts so because he is so. And what each man is, that Shakespeare reveals to us most immediately; he demands and obtains our belief, even for what is singular and deviates from the ordinary course of nature. Never perhaps was there so comprehensive a talent for characterization as Shakespeare. It not only grasps every diversity of rank, age, and s.e.x, down to the lispings of infancy; not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot, speak and act with equal truthfulness; not only does he transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and portray with the greatest accuracy (a few apparent violations of costume excepted) the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in the wars with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of their history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many comedies), the cultivated society of the day, and the rude barbarism of a Norman foretime; his human characters have not only such depth and individuality that they do not admit of being cla.s.sed under common names, and are inexhaustible even in conception,--no, this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits.”
What is true of Shakespeare in a preeminent degree is true to a marked extent of all the great novelists and poets.
The teacher needs to possess great versatility and tact in social situations. A quick insight, social ease, freedom, and self-possession are of the first importance to him. The power of sympathy, of appreciation for others' feelings and difficulties, is wholly dependent upon such social cultivation. Otherwise the teacher will be rude, even uncouth and boorish in manner, producing friction and ill-will where tact and gentleness would bring sympathy and confidence. Many people absorb this refinement of thought and manner from the social circles with which they mingle, and it is, of course, a smiling fortune that has placed a teacher's early life in a happy and cultured atmosphere, where the social sympathies and graces are absorbed almost unconsciously. But even where the earlier conditions have been less favorable, the opportunity for rapid social development and culture is most promising.
The numberless cases in our country in which young people, by the strength of their energetic purpose and desire for improvement, have raised themselves not only to superior knowledge and scholars.h.i.+p, but also to that far greater refinement of social life and manner which we call true culture,--the numberless instances of this sort are a surprising indication of the power of education. Literature has been a potent agent in this direction. It emanc.i.p.ates, it sets free, the spirit of man. It lifts him above what is sordid and material, and gives him those true standards of worth with which to measure all things. It contains within itself the refining elements, the aesthetic and ethical ideals, and, best of all, it portrays human life in all its thought, feeling, and pa.s.sion with such intensity and realistic fidelity that its teaching power is unparalleled.
This potentiality of the better literature to produce such n.o.ble results in the higher range of culture is dependent upon conditions. No one will understand literature who does not study and understand ordinary life as it surrounds him; who does not constantly draw upon his own experience in interpreting the characters portrayed in books. No stupid or un.o.bservant person will be made wise through books, be they never so choice. Even the student who works laboriously at his text-books, but has no eye nor care for the people or doings about him, is getting only the mechanical side of education, and is losing the better part. He who will draw riches out of books must put his intellect and sympathy, his whole enthusiastic better self, into them.
The indwelling virtue of great books is that they demand this intense awakening, this complete absorption of the whole self. The mind of a child and of a man or woman has to stretch itself to the utmost limit to take in the message of a great writer. One feels the old barriers giving way and the mind expanding to the conception of larger things. Speaking of the ancient drama at Athens, Sh.e.l.ley says, ”The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and pa.s.sions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived.”
Those who have received into the inner self the expansive energy of n.o.ble thought and social culture, are the better qualified, from the rich variety of the inner life, to act effectively upon the complex conditions and forces of the outer world. The teacher whose inner life is teeming with these rich sympathies and potent ideals will react with greater prudence and tact upon the kaleidoscopic conditions of a school.
Practical social life and literature are not distinct modes of culture.
They are one, they interact upon each other in scores of ways. Give a teacher social opportunities, give him the best of our literature, let these two work their full influence upon him,--then, if he cannot become a teacher, it is a hopeless case. Let him go to the shop, to the farm, to the legislature; there is no place for him in the schoolroom.
Literature is also a sharp and caustic critic of his own follies or foibles, to one who can reflect. It has a mult.i.tude of surprises by which we are able, as Burns wished,--
”To see oursels as ithers see us.”
Even the schoolmaster finds an occasional apt description of himself in literature which it is often interesting and entertaining for him to ponder. One of the most familiar is that of Goldsmith in ”The Deserted Village”:--
”Beside yon straggling fence that skirts the way With blossomed furze unprofitably gay, There, in his noisy mansion, skill'd to rule, The village master taught his little school.
A man severe he was, and stern to view; I knew him well, and every truant knew: Well had the boding tremblers learn'd to trace The day's disasters in his morning face; Full well they laugh'd, with counterfeited glee, At all his jokes, for many a joke had he; Full well the busy whisper, circling round, Convey'd the dismal tidings when he frown'd.
Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault.
The village all declar'd how much he knew; 'Twas certain he could write, and cipher too; Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage, And even the story ran that he could gauge; In arguing, too, the parson own'd his skill, For even though vanquish'd he could argue still; While words of learned length and thundering sound Amaz'd the gazing rustics ranged around; And still they gaz'd, and still the wonder grew That one small head could carry all he knew.”
A like entertainment and suggestion of what the schoolmaster may be, as seen by others, are furnished by Irving's Ichabod Crane. William Shenstone's description of the schoolmistress and the school near two hundred years ago in his native village, is very diverting. Charles d.i.c.kens's description of schools and schoolmasters is important in the history of England, and, like his portrayals of child life generally, of deep pedagogical worth to teachers.
In his book, ”The Schoolmaster in Literature,” Mr. Skinner has done a real service to the teaching world in bringing together, into a convenient compilation from many sources, the literature bearing directly upon the schoolmaster. Even the comic representations and caricatures are valuable in calling attention to common foibles and mannerisms, to say nothing of the more serious faults of teachers.
It is in literature, also, and in those lives and scenes from history which literary artists have worked up, that the teacher can best develop his own moral ideals and strengthen the groundwork of his own moral character. The stream will not rise above its source, and a teacher's moral influence in a school will not reach above the inspirations from high sources which he himself has felt. Those teachers who have devoted themselves solely to the mastery of the texts they teach, who have read little from our best writers, are drawing upon a slender capital of moral resource. Not even if home influences have laid a sound basis of moral habits are these sufficient reserves for the exigencies of teaching. The moral nature of the teacher needs constant stimulus to upward growing, and the children need examples, ideal ill.u.s.trations, life and blood impersonations of the virtues; and literature is the chief and only safe reservoir from which to draw them.
We have already discussed the moral value of the right books for children. The lessons of the great works are so profound in this respect that they offer a still wider range of study to the teacher. Even the foremost thinkers and philosophers have found therein an inexhaustible source of truth and wisdom.
In the Foreword to his ”Great Books as Life Teachers,” Newell Dwight Hillis says, ”For some reason our generation has closed its text-books on ethics and morals, and opened the great poems, essays, and novels.”
This is a remarkable statement and is the key-note to a silent but sweeping change in education. He adds, ”Doubtless for thoughtful persons this fact argues, not a decline of interest in the fundamental principles of right living, but a desire to study these principles as they are made flesh and embodied in living persons.” Again, ”It seems important to remember that the great novelists are consciously or unconsciously teachers of morals, while the most fascinating essays and poems are essentially books of aspiration and spiritual culture.”
It is suggestive to note that this fundamental text is worked out in his book by chapters on Ruskin's ”Seven Lamps of Architecture,” George Eliot's ”Romola,” Hawthorne's ”Scarlet Letter,” Victor Hugo's ”Les Miserables,” Tennyson's ”Idylls of the King,” and Browning's ”Saul.”
This suggests a fruitful line of studies for every teacher.