\:2)\L'b\ 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS % 
 
 019 744 648 1 
 
(B/631 
 
 } 
 
 TO WHAT End do High schools 
 TEACH English? 
 
 BY 
 / 
 
 SAMUEL THURBER, 
 
 GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL, BOSTON, MASS. 
 
 GEORGE A. BACON. 
 {^Copyright i8g^, by George A. Bacojt.'] 
 
TO WHAT END DO HIGH SCHOOLS TEACH 
 ENGLISH ? 
 
 What is perhaps a rather widely prevalent miscon- 
 ception of the object of the secondary teaching of 
 English, was illustrated, the other day, at a meeting 
 of high school teachers. I had had occasion to say, 
 speaking of certain high school girls, that they seemed 
 to me to have achieved fluency and correctness of 
 expression in satisfactory measure, and could proceed 
 to their next studies without being treated as if their 
 composition were in arrears. This elicited from a col- 
 lege man who was present the sarcastic remark that 
 it might be, "in the next century we were to be 
 inundated by a flood of notable female writers." Thus 
 my excellent college friend naively revealed his ideal 
 of high school achievement in English, and perhaps 
 threw light upon a subject on which he could speak 
 with more authority, — the actual aim of the professorial 
 teaching of English within the college walls. 
 
 Here was an educator in conspicuous position, 
 announcing literary distinction as the ambition that 
 we teachers of English should aim to foster' in our 
 laborious supervision and correction of compositions. 
 Before taking in hand this absurd ideal, and trying to 
 show its utter irrelevancy to the conditions in which 
 we work, I cannot forbear stopping a moment to query, 
 — for this is a high school section, and here we are, all 
 by ourselves, and can speak, as it were, suh rosa, — 
 whether we have not our own problems to solve, and 
 
whether it is not better for us to solve them without 
 too much help. It is a curious manner of speech that 
 allows our schools to be spoken of as fitting schools, 
 having a chief and determining relation to other schools 
 that are to follow. No such presupposition exists in 
 the German or the French educational system ; no 
 familiar nomenclature exists in the German and French 
 languages for translating the terms that express such 
 a presupposition. Study the literature of the [/ymyia- 
 siiim and the lycee^ and you find the men of those schools 
 conferring with each other and with the authorities of 
 the State, theorizing, publishing, urging, agitating, 
 warning, all in their own bailiwick, as free citizens, 
 not as dependents ; considering what the nation needs 
 or desires, what a good psychology permits or demands, 
 what innovations in school practice the advance of sci- 
 ence suggests as feasible, what improvements are called 
 for in hygienic conditions : only you do not hear about 
 college examinations as a goal of endeavor, due con- 
 sideration of which is coming to be neglected. Hence 
 I believe the fascination to us Americans of the study 
 of pedagogy in the foreign systems and literatures. 
 One feels himself there in a clearer atmosphere. Ambi- 
 tions are there less clouded with personal strivings for 
 distinction. One hears nothing of this or that gym- 
 nasium as getting more boys m, or as winning more or 
 less honors. 
 
 It is no more true that we prepare youth for college 
 than it is that the college carries on the youth whom 
 we prepare. The standard of excellence in the school 
 is no more relative to the college than the standard of 
 excellence in the college is relative to the school. 
 Each must find its law in social conditions and in 
 
psychologic truth. It is our concern that we hitch our 
 wagon to a star, just as it is the concern of the college 
 also to hitch its wagon to a star. That is, we must 
 adjust our theory and practice to our conditions, 
 according as these conditions exist as limitations or 
 promptings in our total environment. We have to 
 study the laws of mind and the organization of the sub- 
 jects we teach ; we have to consider, each day, — is this 
 or that the better procedure ; we have to interest our 
 pupils, and, to that end, to choose from the infinite 
 riches of nature, art, and literature, as freely as possi- 
 ble, without bias from external disturbers and marplots ; 
 we have to pay homage to the science and art of teach- 
 ing, in whose domain examinations ah extra are a 
 foreign and unassimilable importation, injected and 
 intruded as an anarchic element into the life that 
 should be permitted to attend to its own business in 
 peace and tranquility. 
 
 But to return from my digression, — what is the 
 proper ideal for us to keep in mind in our teaching of 
 English ? Is it possible that a single high school 
 teacher contemplates literary activity as the end and 
 aim of his labor in this department ? Is the training of 
 notable writers, male or female, a business with which 
 we have any concern ? 
 
 Just as much as the high school teacher of astronomy 
 aims to give the world a flood of astronomers ; or the 
 teacher of history to call into being a multitude of 
 historians ; or the teacher of gymnastics to train a 
 generation of athletes ; or the teacher of drawing to 
 inspire a host of artists ; or the teacher of Latin to 
 produce countless classical philologists ; — so much, 
 I suppose, is it the function of the English teacher to 
 
set up for his goal the capacity or the ambition to win 
 the regard of the world by the production of literary 
 work. Probably no one within the secondary pale 
 would have expressed a conception so belated, so ill- 
 judged, so out of all relation to the primary concepts 
 of pedagogy. Certainly our main concern is to attend 
 to our own business, without taking too much advice. 
 We must not let our ideas become confused as to the 
 object for which we are striving. 
 
 First., — what function have secondary teachers of 
 English in common with the other secondary teachers ? 
 Secondly, — what function have secondary teachers of 
 English peculiar and special to themselves ? 
 
 The high school does not exist to train specialists. 
 It deals with youth at that most interesting and 
 momentous period of life when intellectual enthusi- 
 asms are budding and beginning to bloom ; it deals 
 with minds eminently plastic and docile and trustful; 
 it deals with wills unsubjugated either by low consid- 
 erations of prudence and self-interest or by high altru- 
 istic motives of duty to society and the state ; it deals 
 with young citizens not yet entered into the arena of 
 business competition, not yet knowing, or capable of 
 comprehending, the maxims of the market, not yet 
 seasoned with that unbelief which puts by the ideals 
 of righteousness as being unpractical in this modern 
 age. 
 
 The secondary period of education is very different 
 from the primary period on the one hand, and from the 
 tertiary period on the other. It has its unmistakable 
 characteristics — a right to live its own independent 
 life and to seek its own laws. The hiofh school must 
 be autonomoas if it is to flourish. The youth is neither 
 
infant nor man. He cannot be dealt with without ref- 
 erence to his tastes, as the child must ; nor can he be 
 allowed to circumscribe his education within the limits 
 of his own desires, as the man may. The great pre- 
 suppositions common to all civil life are still the main 
 staple of his study. He does not yet choose his pro- 
 fession, any more than does the child ; yet his intel- 
 lectual yearnings must be noted, respected, and deferred 
 to, as must those of the adult man. The secondary 
 period is a period of transition, and so is full of con- 
 tradiction. Hence perhaps the difficulty of formulating 
 a consistent secondary pedagogy, — a task which, how- 
 ever, we must either perform ourselves, or consent to 
 see performed for us by men not of the guild. 
 
 All secondary teachers must begin by studying the 
 youth himself. Then they must consider the total 
 environment in society and the state for which the 
 youth is to be fitted. From the limitless range of sci- 
 ences and arts, languages and literatures, they must 
 select the most fundamental, on which various super- 
 structures of culture and conviction maybe most solidly 
 built. During the years of secondary education the 
 youth matures ; and the later years of it are very unlike 
 the earlier ones. Hence courses of study must be 
 progressive, so as ever to give the newly developed 
 powers resistance worthy of their prowess, — something 
 to attack and conquer, — in order that the conscious- 
 ness of victory and achievement may be awaked, and 
 so may serve to invigorate all the faculties for new 
 efforts. The pugnacity and the wilfulness of boys and 
 the patience and complaisance of girls must have their 
 due recognition and employment. The too easily aroused 
 base motive of desire to beat each other must be taught 
 
6 
 
 to yield to the high motive of desire to beat things. 
 The problems of science and the tasks of art lead the 
 striving mind only upward. The shrewdness that looks 
 to the beating of an examiner usually squints towards 
 knavery. In this point we secondary teachers have a 
 clear and distinct duty. Our relations involve the 
 ever present danger of overgrowth of personal competi- 
 tion. Personal competition is to the struggle with 
 objective difiticulties very much what drunkenness is to 
 inspiration. 
 
 The child in the primary school is always supervised; 
 if he is given something to do, the teacher looks on 
 while he does it. The young man in college is practi- 
 cally never supervised : he is given something to do, 
 and is then left to himself to do it or to devise ways of 
 not doing it. The youth in the high school is treated 
 perhaps too much like the primarian. The true func- 
 tion of the secondary teacher is to enlist the interest of 
 the pupil so that he shall address himself to his work 
 from an inner motive of his own. A great boy or girl 
 studying at a little desk, in a row with other boys and 
 girls, under the eye of a teacher, is a queer spectacle, 
 if you will view it from the vantage-ground of reason. 
 Our ideas of what constitutes a school are largely con- 
 ventional, inheiited from primitive times and conditions. 
 A master or a mistress keeping order in a flock of 
 youth, and hearing recitations, is about the sum and 
 substance of the prevailing idea of a school. And so 
 tyrannical are in our minds the connotations of the 
 term c/ass, that we ignore the individual, and try to 
 teach groups, as if groups were teachable entities. 
 This idea yields all too slowly to the conception of 
 individual youth pursuing lines of study and investiga- 
 
tion, with the teacher at hand to guide, to stimulate, to 
 praise. 
 
 You see I can hardly tear myself away from the 
 allurements of the general part of my theme, which is 
 only preliminary to the special business on which I 
 came here at your kind invitation. To this I must at 
 once proceed. 
 
 To the teacher of English falls a triple function. 
 He is to introduce his pupils to English literature ; he 
 is to awaken the dormant language sense, the linguistic 
 consciousness, with reference to the mother tongue ; he 
 is to stimulate and direct the ambition for neat and 
 comely expression. These three elements, distinct and 
 separable both in theory and in practice, find their 
 common principle in the obvious fact that they deal 
 with the language and with the thought that is 
 expressed in it, or with the art of expressing in it 
 thought that is new and original. 
 
 I. With regard to English literature^ the secondary 
 education should aim to give a conspectus of the five 
 centuries that begin with the age of Chaucer and 
 Wy cliff e. 
 
 If the teacher knows his subject, he will dispense 
 with text-books of literary history, in which all the 
 members of a class simultaneously learn the same les- 
 sons, and will use the method of researcli^giving many 
 topics for exploration^^ending pupils to many books, ^^^_ 
 and requiring reports in writing or in oral speech. 
 There is here no possible forward marching by platoon 
 front ; the individual must find his own way, not rely- 
 ing on the touch of elbows, but examining with his 
 own eyes the ground he comes to, " and with his own 
 judgment planning his next steps. The thing to 
 
eliminate from the recitation is identity of preparation. 
 Nowhere but in the despotism of school duress, can 
 thirty young people be brought together all prepared 
 to say the same things. Absolutely the exercise must 
 not be allowed to become uninteresting and monoto- 
 nous. Thirty pupils do no more than one, if all do the 
 same things ; but thirty pupils do thirty times as much 
 as one if each does a different thing from any other. 
 The only limitation this procedure finds in practice is 
 the lack of time for listening to what so many have to 
 say. When each has made his own discovery, he will 
 not be apt to acquiesce in the loss of his chance to 
 make his report. Tlie clock is merciless. Each should 
 have his opportunity at once, and so it is better to keep 
 a rein on this exercise, lest it run away with all the 
 English time. V 
 
 The conspectus of five centuries of English literature 
 that may be contemplated as -feasible in the secondary 
 course must be modestly planned. I would consider 
 only four periods, — the Early period, coming down to 
 the middle of the sixteenth century ; the Elizabethan, 
 taking in Milton, (but not Drj^den^ the Eighteenth cen- 
 tury, including Dryden and Butler, and ending with 
 Cowper[/ and the Modern.^ These periods can be 
 characterized with sufficient distinctness for high school 
 pupils to appreciate their differences./^ Pupils will make 
 acquaintance with them through the specimens which 
 they will read in class. It will be the teacher's busi- 
 ness to direct the choice of these specimens, and to 
 bring out by his hints and suggestions the waj's in 
 which they relate themselves to and illustrate the 
 period to which they belong. High school pupils can 
 understand that Coriolanus could not have been pro- 
 
9 
 
 duced in the same century with Cato, Comus under the 
 same influences as Hudibras, Pilgrim's Progress in the 
 same environment as the Sentimental Journey, or either 
 of these simultaneously with Childe Harold. ^;^^ 
 
 I wish here to enter my earnest protest against the 
 assumption that high school youth are not grown up to 
 a perception of the broad and obvious historical rela- 
 tions and characteristic differences of literary periods. 
 This assumption is made by the college requirements, 
 which prescribe unrelated atoms of reading, under the 
 most unnatural and crudely conceived stress and strain 
 of anticipated compositions on themes of remembered 
 matter. V What the youth can discover and understand 
 it is proper to say he has a natural right to be put in 
 the way of meeting. Feeble methods in education 
 always address the memory. An examination gropes 
 for the residuum which a mental process has left in the 
 memory. If the mental process has been conducted 
 under anticipation of an examination, it has labored 
 under an incubus, and has probably been checked mid- 
 way, its spontaneity thwarted, its results spoiled. 
 
 It may be a startling proposition to announce to an 
 audience of educators, — though to teachers I believe 
 it will not be unacceptable, — that young people in 
 school, like mature people out of school, can perform 
 mental operations best when their minds are not filled 
 with anxiety and terror. If you desire to have a piece 
 of work well done, begin by announcing, or have it 
 definitely understood as your habitual procedure, that 
 you are not going to subject the results to an examina- 
 tion No memorable literary work was ever inspired 
 by the offer of a great honorarium, and no good effort 
 is ever prompted in school by the desire for class rank. 
 
10 
 
 Examinations are a recent innovation in education. 
 Paulsen reminds us that Goethe and Schiller and the 
 great German philosophers were never examined. As 
 historical pedagogy is studied, examinations will inevita- 
 bly tend to fade from the professional consciousness, 
 for the simple reason that we shall become accustomed 
 to trace valiant educational effort through centuries 
 that had not yet even invented examinations. 
 
 The pupil's writing, in a course of literature, should 
 be, not in the form of examinations, but in the form 
 of theses, or reports of explorations, drawn up with a 
 prime purpose to make known to a listening auditory 
 what the explorer has done. The existence of this 
 prime purpose is all important. The youth has no 
 business to write until he has something to communi- 
 cate, and a desire to make the communication to a pub- 
 lic of his peers. The English of this thesis or report 
 constitutes a secondary purpose. The thesis should be 
 well written, as a matter of course, just as it should be 
 well pronounced in delivery, and just as the reader 
 should be neatly dressed. 
 
 Even when it has the best imaginable opportunity, 
 the course in literature must select a very small num- 
 ber of authors for reading in the class. Yet many 
 authors can be made the objects of research, the aim 
 being to find passages illustrative of their lives, their 
 relations to their contemporaries, and of the form and 
 content of their works. Here the teacher must know 
 his ground, and start the learner on fruitful lines. It 
 does not follow, however, that the teacher must have 
 everything cut and dried. It is easy to overdo a direc- 
 tion. The question-cues must be mere starters. E. g. ; 
 Do you agree with Jolinson and Macaulay as to the 
 
11 
 
 absurdity of Mrs. Thrale's second marriage ? Why 
 should Bunyan and Milton not have been intimate ? 
 What did Thomas Gray probably think of Samuel 
 Johnson? Compare Goldsmith's life and Gray's. Find 
 portraits illustrating Elizabethan peaked beards and 
 ruffs and eighteenth-century shaven faces and wigs. 
 Show us Fanny Burney, George III., Queen Charlotte, 
 Garrick, Sir Joshua, Dr. Burney, etc., etc. Did Words- 
 worth show appreciation of Burns? Did Milton show 
 appreciation of Shakespeare ? Compare a specimen of 
 Milton's prose with a specimen of Dryden's. Compare 
 Twickenham and Strawberiy Hill with the homes of 
 Wordsworth and Tennyson. Find illustrations of 
 Cowper's playfulness, of his domesticity, of his indigna- 
 tion, of his melancholy, of his piety. Take us to a 
 coffee house of Queen Anne's time. Has our prose 
 grown more or less regular and precise since Addison 
 wrote ? Are Elizabethan poetic forms, or eighteenth- 
 century poetic forms, the more in vogue in the modern 
 period? Was Shakespeare played and read in London 
 in the eighteenth century ? Show us a portrait of Mrs. 
 Siddons, and tell some anecdotes of her. Find pict- 
 ures and descriptions to illustrate Keramos. Read to 
 the class Johnson's parallel between Pope and Dryden, 
 and comment on its form and content. Do the same 
 for the classic lona passage in the Journey to the West- 
 ern Islands. Compare Johnson's ideas of a newspaper, 
 as expressed in the last Rambler, with the modern 
 newspaper ideal. Organize some of your classmates 
 into a company to play scenes from Goldsmith's and 
 Sheridan's comedies. In a similar way present the 
 Masque of Pandora. Was Comus ever put on the pub- 
 lic stage ? What contemporary English writers did 
 
12 
 
 Benjamin Franklin read? On what English writers 
 might Franklin, during his earlier and later residences 
 in London, have called ; and how would he probably 
 have been received by them? What English writers 
 did Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Lowell meet in 
 their visits to England? What famous English writers 
 have visited this country ? Correct Macaulay's estimate 
 of Steele by reference to more impartial authorities. 
 Give a rdsum^ of Masson's Life of Chatterton. Imag- 
 ine an interview between Goldsmith and Chatterton. 
 Set forth the case of the disputed authorship of The 
 Ode to the Cuckoo. What facts of Milton's life could 
 we ascertain from his English poems ? Collect from 
 Milton's poems the passages that illustrate his view of 
 the position and influence of woman. Present the 
 historical associations connected with the site of Bar- 
 clay & Perkins's brewery. Trace the custom of tea- 
 drinking by the allusions to it in English literature. 
 Compare the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as to 
 their ways of viewing Alpine scenery. Look up fore- 
 shadowings of Wordsworth in Gray. Make a collec- 
 tion of Wordsworth's strongest lines. Investigate 
 euphuism, not by reading an article on the subject, but 
 by exploring the writings of Lyly himself. Collect 
 examples of the warm and passionate language in which 
 friendship between men was wont to express itself in 
 the times of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. Present 
 the Macpherson-Ossian business, with illustrations of 
 the Ossianic language. What prose fiction would a 
 person have found to amuse himself with, in 1600, in 
 1650, in 1700, etc. ? Read a chapter of the Bible in 
 the several standard versions and report your observa- 
 tions as to the development of its language. Read a 
 
13 
 
 book of Tudor or Stuart times, and comment on its 
 style and diction. Make a collection of interesting 
 word-forms and phrases from Chaucer. 
 
 These are a few specimens of the endless profusion 
 of topics suitable for secondary exploration. For lower 
 classes topics more easy and obvious, and for the 
 maturest and most energetic pupils, topics much more 
 difficult, may be devised. 
 
 The object of such educational researches is of course 
 attained in the very act and process of searching ; so 
 that a vigorous quest may be said to have succeeded, 
 educationally, even though the object sought be not 
 found ; just as a fishing-expedition has manifold intel- 
 lectual and physical results, even though no fish be 
 caught. One attends lectures with but little profit: 
 whatever one ultimately learns of literature, he achieves, 
 not by listening to the tales of explorers, but by explor- 
 ing. So it may be said, the learner never searches in 
 vain : if he does not find one particular thing, he finds 
 a good many others perhaps more important. 
 
 Yet the wise teacher will remember that to the young 
 searcher success is the main stimulus and reward. 
 Problems of research, therefore, must not be too per- 
 plexing. Such problems should have a distinct and 
 unmistakable issue not too far away. The younger the 
 learner, the smaller the area he should be asked to 
 range over. And of course, if the pupils finally give 
 up their search and acknowledge themselves defeated, 
 the teacher must be ready to show them how they 
 might have succeeded, and what beautiful things they 
 might have found for themselves. 
 
 In all this teaching of English literature the teacher 
 must be the unifying principle, referring all details and 
 
14 
 
 particulars to their just place in the whole, and keep- 
 ing the pupils' attention ever alert for indications of 
 historic time. The teacher being present, intent on 
 this business, there will be no need of further sys- 
 tematizing the work. We are too much afraid of 
 desultoriness. It is a great note of the schoolmasterly- 
 mind to schematize, to skeletonize, to paradigmatize, 
 all the matter of instruction. Hence school-masters' 
 books, the so-called text-books, are notably devoid of 
 interest for the public at large ; and when some one 
 makes a book for schools that is consecutive and reada- 
 ble, as Mr. John Fiske did in his Civil Government^ 
 teachers look upon it askance because the skeleton in 
 it is not immediately visible. Spontaneity is better 
 than any parade of method. The instruction will have 
 system, that is, it will stand together as a whole, pro- 
 vided it issue from one clear insight into the nature of 
 the intended result. The more original the teachings 
 the more vain to ask the teacher for his syllabus. 
 
 Thus while we teach English literature, our aim isY^^ 
 to make the youth acquainted with English literature^ 
 — not merely with a few atoms and fragments of it, 
 but, so far as our opportunity and the capacity of our 
 pupils allow, with the entirety of it as a growth and 
 organism, which visibly changes from century to cen- 
 tury, and in which Chaucer and Tennyson are linked 
 together, not merely as chance additions to a great 
 aggregate, but as fellow members of one race, living 
 far apart in time,/but close together in soul, in speech,, 
 in poetic power. J 
 
 The English teacher must be fully imbued with a 
 r sense of the greatness of the great writers. Above all 
 \ things, he must appreciate Shakespeare, and inculcate 
 
15 
 
 belief in the poet's superiority over all else in litera- 
 ture. Not many persons have explored the literatures 
 of the world so thoroughly as to know, of their own 
 knowledge, that any one writer is absolutely unap- 
 proached ; but the older one grows, and the more one 
 reads, the more one comes to feel that this common 
 convention, this universal agreement of the modern 
 world to acknowledge the supremacy of Shakespeare, 
 is just. Of course, in teaching, this convention becomes 
 one of the leading motives. It should be taught like 
 an article of a creed, with all reverence, to be explained, 
 but not to be subjected to doubt. All writers, in fact, 
 with whom it is worth while to deal in school at all, 
 should be treated with honor. A pupil's impression of 
 Pope, e. (/., should not be suffered to remain such as one 
 gets from reading Macaulay's essay on Addison ; nor 
 should pupils be allowed to imagine a moment that 
 Macaulay's own fame as a writer is to be snuffed out 
 by modern epigram directed against his style or his 
 historical accuracy. 
 
 High school pupils are always deficient in a sense for 
 rhythm, and so fail to appreciate poetic form. Hence 
 an important part of the course in literature has to deal 
 with verse as such, temporarily leaving matter and con- 
 tent in abeyance. The five-foot iambic line is the 
 material of which the great mass of our verse is built. 
 To study the nature of the five-foot iambic is to lay the 
 foundation for appreciation of English poetry in gen- 
 eral. Blank verse, the heroic couplet, the sonnet, are 
 all made of five-foot iambics. Therefore, if our time is 
 too scant to enable us to do much with poetics at large, 
 we absolutely must pay homage to this verse form, and 
 make our pupils chant it, scan it, dwell on it, till they 
 
16 
 
 become skilled in running with its movement and 
 incapable of blundering on the accent. It is solely a 
 matter of training. Poetry is not amorphous philoso- 
 phy or narrative, and must not be read with sole refer- 
 ence to sentence-structure and punctuation marks. I 
 am not afraid of a little sing-song. To read verse as if 
 the form were an indelicate matter, that should be hid- 
 den as much as possible beneath the logical pausing, is 
 not to imitate the rhapsodists. One does not dance for 
 the purpose of getting there, or sing to make known 
 one's opinion. 
 
 II. Coming to the second element of the English 
 teacher's function, — instruction in the language^ — it 
 must be said that it is not possible to teach the mother 
 tongue in any such way as to make the study yield the 
 peculiar mental discipline that comes from drill in the 
 forms of a more highly inflected speech. The study of 
 Latin or German seems to me absolutely essential as a 
 prerequisite to the secondary study of English. French 
 is much better than no foreign language at all, and 
 German is far better than Latin. Of Latin, experience 
 seems to me to show that high school pupils are sure to 
 get too little to serve as an appreciable quantity in the 
 sum of their culture. Of German they get a very sub- 
 stantial knowledge. The near kinship of English and 
 German makes each language fruitfully illustrate the 
 other to the youthful comprehension. For one thing, 
 the presence in the two languages of the same set of 
 fi'oeterito-prcesentia verbs enables the German to throw 
 most valuable light upon the English. 
 
 English is infiectionless now, but was not always so. 
 The subjunctive, e. ^., has almost disappeared. It does 
 not follow, however, that the subjunctive forms being 
 
17 
 
 lost, the verbs that once were in the subjunctive are 
 henceforth in the indicative. We have a plenty of 
 subjunctive locutions still. Milton and Shakespeare 
 had far more than we have. Being often invisible to 
 the eye, the subjunctive in modern English is a more 
 subtle and elusive thing to find than are the hypotheti- 
 cal modes in Greek and Latin. It is an excellent hiofh 
 school exercise to detect these essentially subjunctive 
 relations in modern and in Elizabethan speech. Let 
 the pupil consider, e. //., whethei" / might he admitted in 
 All's Well, IV., V. 94, and Imijiht he admitted in Twelfth 
 Night, I., i., 24, are to be parsed as being in the same 
 mode. I may be wrong, but I believe botli these verbs 
 are still parsed as being in the " potential " mode. The 
 ability to make such distinctions as this is quite within 
 the competency of high school youth ; and it is proper 
 to say that whatever is clearly right, inherently inter- 
 esting, and fully within the reach of youth making only 
 wholesome effort, the youth have a natural right to the 
 opportunity of knowing. 
 
 Some of the results of historical English grammar, 
 then, the English teacher ought to be able to communi- 
 cate to his pupils, and ought to communicate to them, 
 in stimulating ways, leaving them half the journey to 
 make for themselves, and not systematically, but as 
 occasion serves. He shouhl eradicate the superstition 
 of a "potential" mode. He should teach how to d 
 tinguish between racy idiom and ancient blunder. He 
 should know how to strike the right tone of relish and 
 insight in dealing with the uncouth forms of Wycliffe's 
 version, of the Paston Letters, of Sir Thomas Malory ; 
 with the archaisms of Spenser, and with the vulgarisms 
 of Bunyan. He should not forget what of good tem- 
 
 on / 
 
 IS- \ 
 
18 
 
 per and forbearance is due even to the innovators who 
 pronounce had rather and had as lief ignoble forms that 
 should give way to the more parsable would rather and 
 woidd as soon. 
 
 One of the countless pleasant memories that I con- 
 nect with the days of my schoolboyhood is of analyzing 
 sentences according^ to the formulas of the late S. S. 
 Greene. Now, I cannot quite get over the feeling that 
 that analysis was a good thing for us boys. Doubtless 
 it was carried into absurd schoolmasterly refinements, — 
 for its author was notably a schoolmaster first, and a 
 student only at many removes from that, — and was 
 mechanical in its plan, and too little stimulating to 
 curiosity. Yet it was a good thing, or the germ of one. 
 Something we teachers of English should surely do to 
 nurse the sentence seyise^ the great safeguard of the 
 writer of English. The thought can be uttered only 
 in the sentence ; the thought is the sentence. The 
 categories of the sentence-structure are the categories 
 of the thought-process. The child constructs sentences 
 unconsciously; the youth analyzes sentences into their 
 elements ; the adult studies the science of thought. ) 
 The high school graduate should be incapable of writ- 3 
 ing, with the outward forms of sentences, groups of 
 words that are not sentences. The sentence-feeling in 
 trained perfection might almost be adopted as the goal 
 of endeavor in secondary English teaching. Then the 
 habit of viewing the sentence analytically naturally 
 begets the complementary habit of viewing it syntheti- 
 cally ; and the ability to apprehend sentences of unusual 
 length as wholes facilitates the reading of such writers 
 as Milton, Clarendon, Hooker and Ruskin, and renders 
 all reading of archaic matter more fruitful and pleasing. 
 
19 
 
 In practice I would confine the study of sentence analy- 
 sis to the nomenclature that is universally recognized. 
 Such whimsical technicalities as Mr. Greene propounded 
 had better be avoided. 
 
 III. With regard to composition^ the third of the 
 main functions assigned by present usage to the English 
 teacher, there would be much to say did time permit. 
 This subject has of late been made prominent by the 
 complaints of the colleges. Even colleges that strenu- 
 ously refuse to admit on certificate, but insist on exam- 
 ining candidates, find themselves surcharged with poor 
 writers, to teach whom the very elements, tlie primary 
 rudiments of decent writing, they must employ a force 
 of instructors, and so descend from the true college 
 function to do the work legitimately belonging to the 
 schooJ. The great query with regard to these belated 
 youth is, — how did they ever pass the examination in 
 English and get into college. I am sure of this, — that 
 youth will write carefully and neatly, as soon as they 
 are convinced that they must ; and that they will abso- 
 lutely make no effort in this direction beyond the point 
 that they know will suffice. A young man fitting for 
 college is a busy person, and economizes his effort and 
 his time by keen instinct. The coming examination 
 he discounts exactly. Girls you can work up to beau- 
 tiful zeal for nice work. Boys tie no ribbons on their 
 themes, they weep not over censure, they sit not up 
 nights to copy and recopy in their anxiety to please 
 you. The examination is their goal, and whatsoever 
 is more than that cometh of evil. In the very nature 
 of things an examination works two ways : if it draws 
 pupils up to its level, at the same time it prevents them 
 from rising higher. Why do you set an examination, 
 
20 
 
 if you mean to speak contemptuously of it as a stand- 
 ard, and exhort learners to go beyond its requirements ? 
 An examination is a thing to be passed, not at all to be 
 surpassed. Those who have passed the college examina- 
 tion should of course have the college guarantee, and 
 be by the college protected against the flings of a carp- 
 ing world. 
 
 The only thing to do in the matter of compositions 
 is to be exacting. If a pupil can do excellent work in 
 his other studies, but remains a sloven in his English 
 writing, — the case is hardly supposable, — refuse him 
 promotion. Other studies may be merged and mingled 
 together in an average ; but English should be a cate- 
 gory by itself : without good English not even the 
 most brilliant scholarship should suffice. English 
 composition concerns the form in which work is done 
 in all departments ; and it is perfectly just to insist as 
 much upon propriety of form as upon propriety of sub- 
 stance and content. If a pupil writes upon a Sunday- 
 school picnic, will you suffer a profound respect in his 
 mind for the matter of his communication to dwarf all 
 consideration for its appearance ? Pupils usually know 
 a good deal more about how to write than they are 
 willing to reduce to practice. They must have some 
 spur to rouse them to an effort. In prepai'atory schools 
 the college examination tends to thwart the application 
 of any such spur. In other schools the stimulus can be 
 devised easily enough if all the teachers can agree as to 
 its importance. 
 
 I was amused to see in a newspaper the suggestion 
 that pupils sliould be required to write something very 
 frequently. The fact is, in almost any modern school 
 pupils are writing about half the time. The daily 
 
21 
 
 emptyings of the waste-baskets reveal lecture-notes, 
 reading-notes, first drafts, solutions, memorandums, 
 notes of request for sundry permissions and exemp- 
 tions, — in fact, a deal of skimble-skamble stuff of 
 indescribable variety, — almost all of it composition. 
 This, of course, cannot come under the teacher's eye. 
 It is vast in quantity, utterly formless in execution. 
 So constant is it as an element of school life, that the 
 merely occasional composition stands no chance beside 
 it of exerting a determining influence on the aggregate 
 of habit which the pupil is forming. 
 
 Evidently the thing to do in this case is to diminish 
 the amount of this illegitimate scribbling. A girl told 
 me that she wrote one hundred and fifty pages of notes 
 of matter dictated by a teacher in the way of lecture, 
 and that her penmanship had been pretty much wrecked 
 in the process. She had to write under stress and 
 strain. She acquired a certain habitual reckless gait 
 and pace, which now she cannot put aside. She was 
 too young for such an exercise. This taking of notes, 
 I venture to say, is needless in secondary education. 
 Then if a pupil is to read something and report on it, 
 encourage him to trust his memory and deliver himself 
 orally, without notes. Girls will copy out pages of 
 books to read to the class. When the matter is histori- 
 cal or biographical, the copying is not only superfluous, 
 it is pernicious. The high school girl is like Hamlet : 
 when she is moved, her impulse is, " My tables, meet it 
 is I set it down." 
 
 The scribbling cannot, of course, be wholly done 
 away with, but it can be diminished in amount. Then 
 all the teachers should equally be teachers of composi- 
 tion. Certainly, pupils compose for every teacher. If 
 
22 
 
 the teachers are cultivated persons, they surely know 
 enough about good English. Every exercise should be 
 viewed for its English as well as for its exhibition of 
 knowledge or skill. That one teacher should be bur- 
 dened with more than his quota of compositions is 
 wrong. This is no special art, requiring peculiar 
 knowledge. Is there any high school teacher who is 
 not a lady or a gentleman ? Is there any such teacher 
 who would acknowledge himself less competent than 
 the rest to observe and to reprove faults in morals, 
 faults in manners, faults in spoken speech ? 
 
 The written matter that a pupil produces in each 
 department should, so far as is possible, come for cen- 
 sure before the teacher in that department ; for censure 
 both as to form and as to content ; the content to have 
 no recognition or reward unless the form is satisfactory. 
 A teacher should be like a royal personfige, who 
 receives no callers that do not strictly observe the eti- 
 quette of dress prescribed by custom ; and not a com- 
 mon, familiar companion, for whom anything is good 
 enough. 
 
 Then the compositions on topics of a general charac- 
 ter, such as do not come within the province of a 
 special teacher, — and there should, of course, be a 
 good many such compositions, — might properly be 
 divided equally among all the teachers. Or the pupils 
 might be apportioned to the teachers at the beginning 
 of the year. Suppose there should be thirty-five to a 
 teacher. Each teacher would then have his class of 
 thirty-five in composition, and would soon find out how 
 many exercises he could have them write and he get 
 time to supervise with due care and deliberation. If 
 each pupil writes once a week, the teacher will have 
 seven themes a day to read, — an hour's work ; though, 
 
23 
 
 as weekly themes would be short ones, it might well 
 be that he would learn to read them at a little quicker 
 rate. 
 
 Now let me say, — and my experience in this matter 
 is considerable, — that seven themes a day is quite as 
 much as any teacher ought to undertake. I have set- 
 tled down to the basis of an hour for five, and even this 
 average I find is made possible only by the fact that 
 most of the themes require but little attention. Seven 
 per day, when the exercises are short, is enough. 
 Probably some teachers would push them all forward 
 to Saturday and then make a grand crush of them, with 
 groanings and imprecations. But that would be wrong 
 every way. It is essential to give a written theme back 
 to its writer almost instantly. It is a fatal laches tO' 
 let days intervene between the theme and the criticism. 
 Seven themes a day will hurt no one, but rather prove 
 pleasing and useful to many a teacher whose sense of 
 form in language is jaded and needs reviving. 
 
 I am utterly unwilling to say a word in favor of the i 
 plan now most in vogue, of imposing the composition 
 work of scores of pupils upon a single teacher already 
 keeping full class hours like the rest, and, like the rest, 
 having his daily preparations to make. To style one 
 an English teacher is not to confer on one any special 
 ability to resist the hebetating influences of excessive 
 work over themes. The English teacher must protect 
 himself, and naturally will protect himself. If he pro- 
 fesses to be reading a great many themes daily, it will 
 be well to inquire how he reads them, and how impress- 
 ive he makes his comment to the young writers. If 
 the results of English composition teaching are unsat- 
 isfactory, something else must be done than trying to 
 squeeze more theme-reading out of the English teacher 
 
24 
 
 He reads too many themes already. My agreement 
 with President Eliot in his general reformatory tenden- 
 cies comes so near being unqualified, that I regret the 
 necessity of dissenting from liis plan for easing the 
 English teacher. President Eliot's plan might be 
 called a j^hase of the ancient Lancasterian method. 
 The trouble with it would be that the monitors, — who 
 in this case would be attaches of the school, employed 
 at low compensation for the special duty of theme- 
 reading, — would surely sink into a low caste and 
 become helots. The English teacher himself, no mat- 
 ter how scholarly and fine-mannered, would at once 
 become a pariah, Avere his function to be confined to 
 theme reading and marking. Nothing will do but that 
 the themes be read by men and women for whom the 
 youth have the fullest respect and regard. 
 
 I do not see how the teachino' of Enoiish writing^ is 
 to be much improved except by improving the tone of 
 the schools ; and the tone of the schools is to be raised 
 only by enlisting in the work all the teachers. The 
 fitting for examinations is an influence constantl}^ tend- 
 ing to debase tone. Where a corps of teachers is 
 unanimous and resolute, all things are possible. 
 
 The main lines in which reform of composition teach- 
 ing must move are then, 1st, Repression of irresponsi- 
 ble, destructive scribbling ; 2nd, Enlargement and 
 increase of responsible, educative writing. Writing, 
 to have value as a factor in education, must be the 
 expression of a positive mental content that is worth 
 communicating and naturally seeks utterance. It must 
 have its opportunity ; it must not be driven and forced 
 up to high speed. Just what to do to prepare for a 
 college examination in English, I do not know : the 
 thing lies outside the domain of pedagogic science. 
 
X