Culture and Efficiency; Their Relation to the English Subjects WALTER BARNES, HEAD OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, T Efficiency. II. HREE principles, important and far-reaching in their effect upon the curriculum and methods of teaching, not only of the English subjects, but of all the other subjects, may be based upon the preceding truths. First, the school curriculum as a whole should be made up of those activities, subjects and parts of subjects that contribute to both Culture and Second, the school curriculum should contain nothing else, except, perhaps, certain moral and civic ideas and ideals not comprised in either of our major terms. Third, each subject or part of subject should be closely scrutinized to determine whether its material and methods may be expected to add something to Culture on the one hand or Efficiency on the other. There should be no confusion of purposes or values, the two kinds of education should be kept absolutely separate; if they mingle, let them mingle in the personality of the students, not in the methods of the teachers. These three principles, if applied to the course of study, would work great changes in nearly all the subjects. Our task now is to determine their application to the English branches. Fortunately-in some respects, unfortunately-English divides itself naturally, inevitably, into two distinct groups, the one cultural, the other practical. I say "fortunately," for it allows the English teacher to give her pupils education in both departments of life. I say "unfortunately," for too often the English teacher, not recognizing the dual nature of her task, attempts to make all the work practical or cultural, or selects the wrong parts of it for the one purpose or the other. More of this presently. The second principle, that we exclude everything that does not add some educative increment to the lives of our pupils, would enable us to eliminate from English a considerable amount of material, which clings to the curriculum only because we have false ideas of Culture. From Literature it would cut away a heavy mass of information about authors, dates, literary periods, it would banish much memorization of poetry and all cramming for examination in literature, all that part of our literature material and method which has to do with the acquisition of conventional and traditional and pseudo-cultural knowledge. It would eliminate the intensive study of forms, of vocabulary, the insistence upon knowing the meaning of every word and the significance of every allusion; for nothing in all this adds one cubit to our stature in any of the five essentials of Culture, and assuredly contributes not an iota to our Efficiency. It would strike many of the classics from off our list of literature to be read in school, because in content and spirit they are so remote from the lives of boys and girls that they cannot impress upon them either cultural ideals or practical rules of life. In the language group of English subjects, our principle would permit us to reduce spelling to that limited amount which is needed in the actual writing of life, to reduce grammar and rhetoric to that small fraction which functions in the written and spoken language of communication; since only this contributes to Efficiency, and nothing in these subjects contributes to genuine Culture. We should have left in literature all that has an appreciable effect upon true Culture, we should have left in language all that prepares us for an efficient life. The third principle bears directly upon one of the most important and puzzling questions of English teaching: to what extent should the English subjects be cultural, to what extent practical? This entails a minute examination of the nature of content and methods of the English studies. Let us consider literature first. What is literature? what is there in this subject which we may reasonably expect to make a contribution to Culture or Efficiency? To answer it bluntly, we can get out of literature what the authors of literature put into it, no more, and, of course, not so much as that. What, then, are the purposes of the makers of literature? What material do they work with? What do they strive for? What manner of men are the creators of literature? What manner of product do they offer us? The creator of literature is intent primarily on the discovery and revelation of beauty. The land of books is a land of beauty. If we except some of the most pronounced realists, all literary artists are, first of all, seekers after the beauty of life. They construct their poems, their stories, out of the materials, the stuff of human existence, but they select only that part of existence which is beautiful, using the ugly and sordid and commonplace only to point out its hidden charm or to sharpen the contrast between ugliness and beauty. James Russell Lowell perceives the beauty in a dandelion-beauty that our dull eyes, though they have gazed upon the flower hundreds of times, have not seen, and always thereafter we also can perceive the beauty. Shakespeare may show the ugly degradation in the character of Macbeth and may put before us the nastiness of the witches, but he traffics in this ugliness only that he may the more clearly reveal the beauty of the fundamental laws of conduct. Fielding may insist upon our knowing Blifil, mean, narrow, spiteful, selfish, hypocritical, but only that we may discern more vividly the honest worth and sincerity and simple human charm of Tom Jones. Beauty of content, beauty of expression, this is the artist's guiding aim; beauty of scene and circumstance, beauty of manners, of motives, of thoughts, of conduct, beauty of truth, sensuous beauty, ethical beauty. The creator of literature is remarkable, in the second place, for his wide emotional range and his high emotional intensity. Are not artists notoriously high-strung, palpitating with enthusiasms, sensitive to emotional stimuli? Do they not veer continually to the shifting gusts of passion? William Cowper lies awake the night through laughing at the thought of John Gilpin and his ride; Keats almost faints with ecstasy as he broods over the loveliness of a flower; Wordsworth remembers for a lifetime the emotion kindled in his heart by the sight of the little Scotch girl; Dickens weeps bitterly as he foresees the death of Little Nell. Your true artist is an Eolian harp, which sounds to the lightest touch of life's breeze. A literary artist without keen sensibilities, quivering nerves, instantaneous and violent reaction to the emotional situations in life is unthinkable. And yet, no matter how strong his passion, he must guide and control it, else he cannot produce art; he must not only ride, he must guide his Pegasus. Another quality that characterizes the creator of literature is his never-ceasing interest and curiosity concering existence. Most of us accept life without reflection, we take it for granted, we are passive, inert, lazy, listless. Like horses, we wear blinkers, so that we see only the fragment of road just before us; like falcons we are hooded, so that we can perceive but a tiny segment of earth and sky. But the literary artist looks in all directions, wonders about everything, ponders everything, follows up every stream to its secret springs, snatches the masks off the masqueraders. He is the eternal Adam-a new creature in a newly created world, curious, inquisitive, interrogative; he must give everything a name of his own choosing; nothing is staled by usance, every incident is an adventure, every day a new era. Chaucer travels forty or fifty miles in company with a score or so of other people, some of them commonplace and conventional, some coarse and crude, only a few of them persons that you or I would care about or be interested in, no matter how long we traveled with them. But Chaucer has no peace of mind until he has studied and understood each member of the group, winding through the labyrinth of word, manner and deed till he has penetrated into the secretest and sacredest recesses of personality and temperament. He is curious about them-that is all. He cannot help asking, “What kind of persons are these anyhow? What is below the surface?" Robert Browning opens casually a book containing the record of a murder trial, sensational, tawdry, sordid, such a record as you and I often glance at in the newspaper. But he is curious about it. Who is guilty: the man, the woman, the lover? What is the truth here? And out of it he evolves the "Ring and the Book," in which he reveals the truth from every angle, as each person involved in the story saw it. All literature bears witness to the wide, deep interest that the makers of literature take in human life, in all the facts of existence. And they have not only interest in the scenes and situations in life, they have sympathetic fellowship with the characters that "strut and fret their hour upon the stage." None but Maupaussant and a few of his followers remain aloof from the personages they have translated from the world to the pages of their books. A Shakespeare feels kinship with a Lear and a Lear's folly, for a Falstaff, for a Hamlet, for a Shylock, for a Rosalind, a Beatrice, a Juliet. He pictures them forth, divergent and heterogeneous, without prejudice or personal bias, with sympathetic appreciation, because each is a member of the human family to which he himself belongs, because each one is Shakespeare, Shakespeare is each A Whitman enfolds every class of humanity within his brotherly arms; an O. Henry or a Miss Ferber are near of kin to laborers, clerks, shop-girls, show-girls. The very beasts of the field and forest are adopted as members of the clan of Burns, Thoreau, and Uncle Remus. In this warm, all-ambracing, allcomprehending sympathy, literary artists are unique among men ; they and children are the only true democrats. one. Finally, literary people are so constituted, so endowed that they can read intuitively the riddles of life, can lighten The heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world. By virtue of the divine radiance within them, they cast an illumination into the darkest mysteries of life and death. The universe. is confused, formless, chaotic; good and evil, joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness, divinity and bestiality, lie mixed, it would seem, inextricably, without apparent plan or order. What is life for? What is our relation to our fellows and to God? Why |