Special Method in the Reading of Complete English Classics Part 5

We have already noted the great significance of American history stories in fourth and fifth grades. It is from the early pioneer epoch and the colonial history that we derive much of our best educative history. The heroism of these old days has been commemorated in story and poem by our best writers.

As we approach the Revolutionary crisis a new body of choice literary products, aglow with the fire of patriotism and independence, is found stored up for the joy and stimulus of our growing young Americans: "Paul Revere's Ride," "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill," Was.h.i.+ngton's letters, "A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party," "Ode for Was.h.i.+ngton's Birthday," "Lexington" (Holmes), "The Song of Marion's Men," "The Green Mountain Boys," Webster's speeches at Bunker Hill and on Adams and Jefferson, "Old Ticonderoga" (Hawthorne), Burke's speech on the American War, Was.h.i.+ngton's "Farewell to the Army," The Declaration of Independence, "Under the Old Elm," and descriptions of some of the great scenes of the war by our best historians.

It is to be desired that children in the seventh grade may have opportunity in regular history lessons to study in detail a few of the central topics of the Revolutionary epoch. This will put them in touch with the spirit and surroundings of the Americans.

In the reading lessons of the same grade we may well afford to discover and feel what our best patriots and men of letters have said and felt in view of the struggle for freedom. The n.o.blest expressions of sentiment upon great men and their achievements are contagious with the young.

Patriotism can find no better soil in which to strike its deepest roots than the n.o.ble outbursts of our orators and poets and patriotic statesmen. The c.u.mulative effect of these varied but kindred materials is greater than when scattered and disconnected. They mutually support each other, and when they are brought into close dependence upon parallel historical studies, we may well say that the children are drinking from the deep and pure sources of true Americanism.

Parallel to whatever history we attempt to teach in the eighth grade should run a selection of the best literary products that our American authors can furnish, and here again we are rich in resources. The thought and life of our people find their high-water mark in the poet's clarion note and the statesman's impa.s.sioned appeal. No others have perceived the destiny of our young republic as our cherished poets, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Emerson. They have stood upon the mountain tops, looking far and wide through the clear atmosphere, while the great army of the people has been tenting in the valleys below. These wakeful priests and prophets have caught the bright tints of the morning while the people were still asleep, and have witnessed the suffused glory of the sunset clouds when the weary ma.s.ses below had already forgotten the day's toil. One thing at least, and that the greatest, can be done for our children before they finish the common school course. They may rise into this pure atmosphere of poet, patriot, sage, and prophet. They may hear these deathless strains and feel the thrill of these clarion notes. Let their ears be once attuned to the strength and harmony of this music, and it will not cease to echo in their deeper life. The future patriots will be at hand, and the coming years will see them rising to the great duties that inevitably await them. We have a body of n.o.ble, patriotic material which is capable of producing this effect if handled by skilful teachers: the Ordinance of 1787, _The Federalist_, Numbers 1 and 2, Was.h.i.+ngton's "Inaugurals" and the "Farewell Address," Everett's "Oration on Was.h.i.+ngton," "O Mother of Mighty Race" (Bryant); "Our Country's Call" (Bryant); "Abraham Lincoln"

(Bryant); Lincoln's "Inaugurals" and "Gettysburg Speech," "Army Hymn"

and "The Flower of Liberty" (Holmes), Webster's "Second Speech on Foot's Resolution," The Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, "The Fortune of the Republic" (Emerson), etc., "Antiquity of Freedom" (Bryant); "Centennial Hymn" (Whittier); "The Building of the s.h.i.+p" (Longfellow); "The Poor Voter on Election Day" (Whittier).

Why not gather together these sources of power, of unselfish patriotism, of self-sacrifice, of n.o.ble and inspiring impulse? Let this fruit-bringing seed be sown deep in the minds and hearts of the receptive young. What has inspired the best of men to high thinking and living can touch them.

It is not by reading and declaiming a few miscellaneous fragments of patriotic gush, not by waving flags and banners and following processions, that the deeper sentiments of patriotism and humanity are to be touched, but by gathering and concentrating these fuller, richer sources of spiritual power and conscious national destiny. The schoolroom is by far the best place to consolidate these purifying and conserving sentiments. By gathering into a rising series and focussing in the higher grades the various forms, in prose and verse, in which the genius of our country has found its strongest expression; by a.s.sociating these ringing sentiments with the epochs and crises of our history, with the valorous deeds of patriots upon the field and of statesmen in the senate, with the life and longings of home-nurtured poets and sages,--we shall plant seed whose fruitage will not disappoint the lovers of the fatherland.

Mr. Horace E. Scudder, in his two essays on "Literature" and "American Cla.s.sics in the Common School," has portrayed with convincing clearness the spiritual power and high-toned Americanism which breathe from those literary monuments which have been quarried from our own hillsides and chiselled by American hands. We recommend to every teacher the reading in full of these essays, from which we quote at much length:--

"Fifty years ago there were living in America six men of mark, of whom the youngest was then nineteen years of age, the oldest forty-four.

Three of the six are in their graves and three still breathe the kindly air. [Since this was written, in 1888, the last of the six has pa.s.sed away.] One only of the six has held high place in the national councils, and it is not by that distinction that he is known and loved. They have not been in battle; they have had no armies at their command; they have not ama.s.sed great fortunes, nor have great industries waited on their movements. Those pageants of circ.u.mstances which kindle the imagination have been remote from their names. They were born on American soil; they have breathed American air; they were nurtured on American ideas. They are Americans of Americans. They are as truly the issue of our national life as are the common schools in which we glory. During the fifty years in which our common school system has been growing up to maturity these six have lived and sung; and I dare say that the lives and songs of Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell have an imperishable value, regarded as exponents of national life, not for a moment to be outweighed in the balance by the most elaborate system of common schools which the wit of man may devise. The nation may command armies and schools to rise from the soil, but it cannot call into life a poet. Yet when the poet comes and we hear his voice in the upper air, then we know the nation he owns is worthy of the name. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? Even so, pure poetry springs from no rank soil of national life.

"I am not arguing for the critical study of our great authors, in the higher grades of our schools. They are not the best subjects for critical scholars.h.i.+p; criticism demands greater remoteness, greater foreignness of nature. Moreover, critical study is not the surest method of securing the full measure of spiritual light, though it yields abundant gain in the refinement of the intellectual nature and in the quickening of the perceptive faculties. I am arguing for the free, generous use of these authors in the princ.i.p.al years of school life. It is then that their power is most profoundly needed, and will be most strongly felt. We need to put our children in their impressionable years into instant and close connection with the highest manifestation of our national life. Away with the bottle and the tube! Give them a l.u.s.ty draft at the mother's full breast!

"Nor do I fear that such a course will breed a narrow and parochial Americanism. On the contrary, it would destroy a vulgar pride in country, help the young to see humanity from the heights on which the masters of song have dwelt, and open the mind to the more hospitable entertainment of the best literature of every clime and age. I am convinced that there is no surer way to introduce the best English literature into our schools than to give the place of honor to American literature. In the order of nature a youth must be a citizen of his own country before he can become naturalized in the world. We recognize this in our geography and history; we may wisely recognize it also in our reading.

"The place, then, of literature in our common school education is in spiritualizing life, letting light into the mind, inspiring and feeding the higher forces of human nature.

"It is the business of the old to transmit to the young the great traditions of the past of the country, to feed anew the undying flame of patriotism. There is the element of destiny. No nation lives upon its past; it is already dead when it says, 'Let us eat and drink to-day; for to-morrow we die.' But what that destiny is to be may be read in the ideals which the young are forming; and those ideals, again, it is the business of the old to guide. They cannot form them; the young must form them for themselves; but whether these ideals shall be large or petty, honorable or mean, will depend upon the sustenance on which they are fed.

"Now in a democracy, more signally than under any other form of national organization, it is vitally necessary that there should be an unceasing, unimpeded circulation of the spiritual life of the people. The sacrifice of the men and women who have made and preserved America, from the days of Virginia and New England to this hour, has been ascending from the earth in a never-ending cloud; they have fallen again in strains of music, in sculpture, in painting, in memorial hall, in tale, in oration, in poem, in consecration of life; and the spirit which ascended is the same as that which descended. In literature above all is this spirit enshrined. You have but to throw open the shrine, and the spirit comes with its outspread blessings upon millions of waiting souls. Entering them, it reissues in countless shapes, and thus is the life of the nation in its highest form kept ever in motion, and without motion is no life.

"The deposit of nationality is in laws, inst.i.tutions, art, character, and religion; but laws, inst.i.tutions, character, and religion are expressed through art and mainly through the art of letters. It is literature, therefore, that holds in precipitation the genius of the country; and the higher the form of literature, the more consummate the expression of that spirit which does not so much seek a materialization as it shapes itself inevitably in fitting form. Long may we read and ponder the life of Was.h.i.+ngton, yet at last fall back content upon those graphic lines of Lowell in 'Under the Old Elm,' which cause the figure of the great American to outline itself upon the imagination with large and strong portraiture. The spirit of the orations of Webster and Benton, the whole history of the young giant poised in conscious strength before his triumphant struggle, one may catch in a breath in those glowing lines which end 'The Building of the s.h.i.+p.' The deep pa.s.sion of the war for the Union may be overlooked in some formal study of battles and campaigns, but rises pure, strong, and flaming in the immortal 'Gettysburg Speech.'

"Precisely thus the sentiment of patriotism must be kept fresh and living in the hearts of the young through quick and immediate contact with the sources of that sentiment; and the most helpful means are those spiritual deposits of patriotism which we find in n.o.ble poetry and lofty prose, as communicated by men who have lived patriotic lives and been fed with coals from the altar.

"It is from the men and women bred on American soil that the fittest words come for the spiritual enrichment of American youth. I believe heartily in the advantage of enlarging one's horizon by taking in other climes and other ages, but first let us make sure of that great expansive power which lies close at hand. I am sure there never was a time or country where national education, under the guidance of national art and thought, was so possible as in America to-day.

"The body of wholesome, strong American literature is large enough to make it possible to keep boys and girls upon it from the time when they begin to recognize the element of authors.h.i.+p until they leave the school, and it is varied and flexible enough to give employment to the mind in all its stages of development. Moreover, this literature is interesting, and is allied with interesting concerns; half the hard places are overcome by the willing mind, and the boy who stumbles over some jejune lesson in his reading-book will run over a bit of genuine prose from Irving which the schoolbook maker, with his calipers, p.r.o.nounces too hard.

"We have gone quite far enough in the mechanical development of the common school system. What we most need is the breath of life, and reading offers the n.o.blest means for receiving and imparting this breath of life. The spiritual element in education in our common schools will be found to lie in reserve in literature, and, as I believe, most effectively in American literature.

"Think for a moment of that great, silent, resistless power for good which might at this moment be lifting the youth of the country, were the hours for reading in school expended upon the undying, life-giving books! Think of the substantial growth of a generous Americanism, were the boys and girls to be fed from the fresh springs of American literature! It would be no narrow provincialism into which they would emerge. The windows in Longfellow's mind looked to the east, and the children who have entered into possession of his wealth travel far.

Bryant's flight carries one through upper air, over broad champaigns.

The lover of Emerson has learned to get a remote vision. The companion of Th.o.r.eau finds Concord become suddenly the centre of a very wide horizon. Irving has annexed Spain to America. Hawthorne has nationalized the G.o.ds of Greece and given an atmosphere to New England. Whittier has translated the Hebrew Scriptures into the American dialect. Lowell gives the American boy an academy without cutting down a stick of timber in the grove, or disturbing the birds. Holmes supplies that hickory which makes one careless of the crackling of thorns. Franklin makes the America of a past generation a part of the great world before treaties had bound the floating states into formal connection with venerable nations. What is all this but saying that the rich inheritance we have is no local ten-acre lot, but a part of the undivided estate of humanity. Universality, Cosmopolitanism,--these are fine words, but no man ever secured the freedom of the Universe who did not first pay taxes and vote in his own village."--"Literature in School" (Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.).

9. The series of American cla.s.sics is nowise confined to the ideas of local or national patriotism, but above and beyond that deep and powerful sentiment which magnifies the opportunity and manifest destiny of our nation, it grasps at the ideal form and content of those Christian virtues which now and evermore carry healing and comfort to the toiling millions. Our poets, as they have pondered on the past and looked into the future, were not able to be content with less than the best. As the vision of the coming years unrolled itself before them they looked upon it with joy mingled with solicitude. In the mighty conflicts now upon us only those of generous and saintly purpose and of pure hearts can prevail.

"Brief is the time, I know, The warfare scarce begun; Yet all may win the triumphs thou hast won.

Still flows the fount whose waters strengthened thee, The victors' names are yet too few to fill Heaven's mighty roll; the glorious armory That ministered to thee is open still."--BRYANT.

To reveal this Christian armory, the defences of the soul against the a.s.saults of evil, has been the highest inspiration of our poets. What depth and beauty and impersonation of Christian virtues do we find in "Snow-Bound," "Among the Hills," "Evangeline," "The Conqueror's Grave,"

"To a Waterfowl," "The Groves were G.o.d's First Temples," "The Living Temple," "The Sun Day Hymn," "The Chambered Nautilus," "Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Great Stone Face."

The Bible is not generally admissible as a schoolbook, but the spirit of Christianity, clad in the forms of strength and grace, is immanent in the works of our poets. So universal, so human, so fit to the needs and destinies of men, are the truths of the great evangel, that the prophets and seers of our race drift evermore into the sheltering haven they supply. To drink in these potent truths through poetry and song, to see them enshrined in the imagery and fervor of the sacred masterpieces of our literature, is more than culture, more than morality; it is the portal and sanctuary of religious thought, and children may enter it.

10. The higher products of literature contain an energy that quickens spiritual life in morals, in art, and in religion. To many people, whose lives are submerged in commercial pursuits or in the great struggle to develop and utilize the material resources of the world, these spiritual forces seem vague and shadowy, if not mythical. But there are plenty of heroic souls in the realm of letters, such as Emerson, Scudder, Ruskin, Arnold, and Carlyle, who are not disposed to let men settle down in lazy satisfaction with material good, nor to be blinded even by the splendor of modern achievements in engineering, in medicine, and in the application of electricity. We must at least reach a point of view high enough to perceive the relations of these natural riches to the higher nature and destiny of man.

Scudder says, "It is to literature that we must look for the substantial protection of the growing mind against an ign.o.ble, material conception of life, and for the inspiring power which shall lift the nature into its rightful fellows.h.i.+p with whatsoever is n.o.ble, true, lovely, and of good report."

Sh.e.l.ley, in like spirit, says: "The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the acc.u.mulation of the materials of external life exceed the quant.i.ty of the power of a.s.similating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it."

Matthew Arnold, in "Sweetness and Light," while discussing the function of that truer culture and "perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something," remarks:--

"And this function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilization is, to a much greater degree than the civilization of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so. But above all in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform because here that mechanical character, which civilization tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree. Indeed, nearly all the characters of perfection, as culture teaches us to fix them, meet in this country with some powerful tendency which thwarts them and sets them at defiance. The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us."

11. Judged by these higher standards our writers and literary leaders were not simply Americans. They were also Europeans. The Puritan brought his religion with him, the Cavalier acquired his gentlemanly instincts in the old home, not in the untrodden forests of the New World. Much of what we call American is the wine of the Old World poured into the bearskins and buckskins of the West, with a flavor of the freedom of our Western wilds. Though born and bred on American soil and to the last exemplars of the American spirit, our literary leaders have derived their ideas and inspiration from the literature, tradition, and history of the Old World. It will be no small part of our purpose, therefore, to open up to the children of our common schools the best entrance to the history and literature of Europe. Our own writers and poets have done this for us in a variety of instances: Hawthorne's rendering of the Greek myths, Bryant's translation of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," a good half of Irving's "Sketch-Book," Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal,"

"Aladdin," and "Prometheus," Irving's "Alhambra," Longfellow's "Golden Legend," "Sandalphon," Taylor's "Boys of Other Countries." Nearly the whole of our literature, even when dealing ostensibly with American topics, is suffused with the spirit and imagery of the Old World traditions. There is also a large collection of prose versions of European traditions, which, while not cla.s.sic, are still lively renderings of old stories and well suited to the collateral reading of children. Such are "G.o.ds and Heroes," "Tales from English History,"

"Tales from Spenser," "Heroes of Asgard," "Story of the Iliad and Odyssey."

The transition from our own poets who have handled European themes to English writers who have done the same, is easy and natural; Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," Scott's "Tales of a Grandfather," "The Stories of Waverley," the "Christmas Carol," Kingsley's "Greek Heroes" and "Water Babies," Ruskin's "King of the Golden River," "Lady of the Lake,"

"Marmion," "Roger de Coverley Papers," "Merchant of Venice," "Arabian Nights," "Peasant and Prince," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress,"

"Gulliver's Travels," and others have become by inheritance and birthright as much a part of the American child's culture as the more distinctive products of our own writers. No line can be drawn between those writings which are American and those which sprung from the soil of England and Europe. So intimate and vital is the connection between our present and our past, between our children and their cousins across the water.

These American and European literary products lie side by side in the school course, though the predominating spirit through the middle and higher grades up to the eighth should be American. We have noticed that in the earlier grades most of our cla.s.sic reading matter comes from Europe, the nursery rhymes, the folk-lore, fables, and myths, because the childhood of our culture periods was in Europe. But into the fourth grade, and from there on, beginning with the pioneers on sea and land, our American history and literature enters as a powerful agent of culture. It brings us into quick and vital contact, not simply with the outward facts, but with the inmost spirit, of our national life and struggle toward development. This gives the American impulse free and full expansion, and fortunate are we, beyond expression, that pure and lofty poets stand at the threshold to usher the children into this realm, founded deep in the realism of our past history and rising grandly into the idealism of our desires and hopes. As we advance into the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades the literature of Europe begins again to increase in quant.i.ty and influence, and to share equally with American authors the attention of the children.

The Americanism of our poets and prose writers, as previously shown, has also another side to it, which is one sign of the breadth and many-sidedness of literature as a study for the young. North America is a land rich in variety of natural scenery and resource. Nature has decked the New World with a lavish hand, forest and mountain, lake and river, prairie and desert, the summer land of flowers and the home of New England winters. The masterpieces of our poets are full of the scenery, vegetation, sunsets, mountains, and prairies of the Western empire. The flowers, the birds, the wild beasts, the pathless forests, the limitless stretches of plain, have mirrored themselves in the songs of our poets, and have rendered them dearer to us because seen and realized in this idealism. Unconsciously perhaps the feeling of patriotism is largely based upon this knowledge of the rich and varied beauty and bounty of our native land.

"I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills, My heart with rapture thrills, Like that above."

As along the sh.o.r.es of our Northern lakes the clear and quiet waters reflect the green banks, the rolling, forest-crowned hills, the rocky bluffs, the floating clouds, and overarching blue, so in the homespun, cla.s.sic verse and prose of our own writers are imaged the myriad charms of our native land. Bryant especially is the poet of forest and glade, "The Forest Hymn," "The Death of the Flowers," "The Return of the Birds," "A Summer Ramble," "The Fringed Gentian," "The Hunter of the Prairies," "The White-footed Deer," "To a Waterfowl," "Thanatopsis," and many others. Longfellow's "Hiawatha," "Evangeline"; Whittier's "Barefoot Boy," "Songs of Labor," "Among the Hills," and "Snow-Bound"; Hawthorne's "Tales of the White Hills"; Holmes's "Spring"; Lowell's "Indian Summer Reverie," "The Oak," and many more.

The literature selected for these grades has a wide scope. It is instinct with the best Americanism. It draws from Europe at every breath, while enjoying the freedom of the West. Social, political, and home life and virtue are portrayed in great variety of dress. Nature also and natural science reveal the myriad forms of beauty and utility.

CHAPTER IV

CLa.s.s-ROOM METHOD IN READING

1. The Doorway.

There is a strong comfort in the idea that in the preparation of a masterpiece for a reading cla.s.s the teacher may be dealing with a unity of thought in a variety of relations that makes the study a comprehensive culture-product both to herself and to the children. To become a student of "Hiawatha" as a whole, and in its relations to Indian life and tradition, early aboriginal history, and Longfellow's connection with the same, is to throw a deep glance into history and anthropology, and to recognize literature as the permanent form of expressing their spirit. There are a good many side-lights that a teacher needs to get from history and other literature, and from the author's life, in order to see a literary masterpiece in its true setting. It is the part of the poet to make his work intensely real and ideal, the two elements that appeal with trenchant force to children.

The teacher needs not only to see the graphic pictures drawn by the artist, but to gather about these central points of view other collateral, explanatory facts that give a deeper setting to the picture.

Fortunately, such study as this is not burdensome. There is a joyousness and sparkle to it that can relieve many an hour of tedium.

Literature in its best forms is recreation, and brings an infusion of spiritual energy. We should not allow ourselves to confuse it with those more humdrum forms of school employment, like spelling, figuring, reading in the formal sense, grammar, writing, etc. Literature is the spiritual side of school effort, the uplands of thought, where gus.h.i.+ng springs well from the roots and shade of overarching trees. There is jollity and music, beauty and grandeur, the freshness of cool breezes and of mountain scenery, in such profusion as to satisfy the exuberance of youthful spirit, and to infuse new energy into old and tired natures.

If the teacher can only get out of the narrow streets of the town and from between the dead walls of the schoolroom, up among the meadows and groves and brooks, in company with Bryant or Longfellow or Whittier, if she can only take a draught of these spirit-waters before walking into the schoolroom, her thought and conduct will be tempered into a fit instrument of culture.