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THE HIGHER STUDY OP ENGLISH 
 
THE HIGHER STUDY OF 
 ENGLISH 
 
 BY 
 
 ALBERT S. COOK 
 
 Professor of the English Language and Literature in Yale University 
 
 BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1906 
 
LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
 Two Copies Received 
 
 OCT 18 1906 
 
 CLASS A XXc^No, 
 
 co/yb. 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1906 BY ALBERT S. COOK 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October igob 
 
^ 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The reader who takes up this little book should 
 be warned that he must not expect a syste- 
 matic treatise. These four papers are of a strictly 
 occasional nature, since even the second was writ- 
 ten in response to an invitation from the editor 
 of the Atlantic Monthly, and the subject of the 
 fourth was suggested in the letter which requested 
 me to deliver the address. Hence they are not 
 mutually exclusive — indeed, the critical reader 
 will discover that in some instances they overlap 
 — though perhaps they may fairly be said to be 
 mutually supplementary. Slight changes have 
 been made in the text of the first and second 
 papers, and the foot-notes to these are new. Of 
 the Vassar address a portion is omitted at the 
 beginning. In other respects the papers are re- 
 produced essentially without change. 
 
 Albert S. Cook. 
 Greensboro, Vermont, 
 August 11, 1906. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Province of English Philology . . 1 
 II. The Teaching of English 35 
 
 III. The Relation of Words to Literature . 71 
 
 IV. Aims in the Graduate Study of English 99 
 Index 143 
 
I 
 
 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
THE PROVINCE OP ENGLISH 
 PHILOLOGY 1 
 
 Perhaps no reproach is oftener addressed to 
 those who call themselves philologists than that 
 they are unconcerned with that beauty which 
 has furnished a distinctive epithet for the word 
 4 literature ' in the phrase belles-lettres, that they 
 lack imagination and insight, and that they are 
 quite unfitted to impart to others a sense of the 
 spiritual values which inhere in the productions 
 that form the subject-matter of their studies. 
 An eloquent writer, who is himself a capable 
 investigator, has recently presented this view in 
 an essay which deserves the attention of every 
 teacher of literature, and especially of every 
 teacher of English literature. 
 
 I make no apology for quoting a rather long 
 extract from the essay in question, since the ar- 
 raignment puts into definite form what a good 
 many people have been feeling and intimating, 
 and the philologist is bound to meet the attack, 
 either by mending his ways, or by showing that 
 
 1 Address as President of the Modern Language Association 
 of America, at its Annual Meeting held at the University of 
 Pennsylvania, December, 1897. 
 
4 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 the critic, with the best intentions in the world, 
 has not fully comprehended the purposes of 
 philology, or has perhaps taken a part for the 
 whole. Here, then, is the passage : 1 
 
 And so very whimsical things sometimes happen, 
 because of this scientific and positivist spirit of the 
 age, when the study of the literature of any language 
 is made part of the curriculum of our colleges. The 
 more delicate and subtle purposes of the study are put 
 quite out of countenance, and literature is commanded 
 to assume the phrases and the methods of science. 
 ... It is obvious that you cannot have universal 
 education without restricting your teaching to such 
 things as can be universally understood. It is plain 
 that you cannot impart * university methods ' to thou- 
 sands, or create ' investigators ' by the score, unless 
 you confine your university education to matters 
 which dull men can investigate, your laboratory train- 
 ing to tasks which mere plodding diligence and sub-, 
 missive patience can compass. Yet, if you do so limit 
 and constrain what you teach, you thrust taste and 
 insight and delicacy of perception out of the schools, 
 exalt the obvious and the merely useful aboVe the 
 things which are only imaginatively or spiritually con- 
 ceived, make education an affair of tasting and hand- 
 ling and smelling. . . . 
 
 You have nowadays, it is believed, only to heed the 
 suggestions of pedagogics in order to know how to 
 
 1 Woodrow Wilson, Mere Literature, and Other Essays, 1896, 
 pp. 2-5. 
 
SOME OBJECTIONS TO PHILOLOGY 6 
 
 impart Burke or Browning, Dryden or Swift. There 
 are certain practical difficulties, indeed ; but there are 
 ways of overcoming them. You must have strength 
 if you would handle with real mastery the firm fibre 
 of these men ; you must have a heart, moreover, to 
 feel their warmth, an eye to see what they see, an 
 imagination to keep them company, a pulse to expe- 
 rience their delights. But if you have none of these 
 things, you may make shift to do without them. You 
 may count the words they use, instead, note the 
 changes of phrase they make in successive revisions, 
 put their rhythm into a scale of feet, run their allu- 
 sions — particularly their female allusions — to cover, 
 detect them in their previous reading. Or, if none of 
 these things please you, or you find the big authors 
 difficult or dull, you may drag to light all the minor 
 writers of their time, who are easy to understand. 1 
 
 1 Compare with this the beginning of his preface to The Eng- 
 lish Works of George Herbert (1905), where Professor Palmer, of 
 Harvard University, says : ' There are few to whom this book 
 will seem worth while. It embodies long labor, spent on a 
 minor poet, and will probably never be read entire by any one. 
 But that is a reason for its existence. Lavishness is in its aim. 
 The book is a box of spikenard, poured in unappeasable love 
 over one who has attended my life. . . . There are public 
 reasons too. The tendencies of an age appear more distinctly 
 in its writers of inferior rank than in those of commanding 
 genius. These latter tell of past and future as well as of the 
 years in which they live. They are for all time. But on the 
 sensitive, responsive souls, of less creative power, current ideals 
 record themselves with clearness. Whoever, then, values liter- 
 ary history will be glad to seek out the gentle and incomplete 
 poet. ... A small writer so studied becomes large.' 
 
6 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 By setting an example in such methods you render 
 great services in certain directions. You make the 
 higher degrees of our universities available for the 
 large number of respectable men who can count, and 
 measure, and search diligently ; and that may prove 
 no small matter. You divert attention from thought, 
 which is not always easy to get at, and fix atten- 
 tion upon language, as upon a curious mechanism, 
 which can be perceived with the bodily eye, and 
 which is worthy to be studied for its own sake, quite 
 apart from anything it may mean. You encourage 
 the examination of forms, grammatical and metrical, 
 which can be quite accurately determined and quite 
 exhaustively catalogued. You bring all the visible 
 phenomena of writing to light and into ordered sys- 
 tem. You go further, and show how to make careful 
 literal identification of stories somewhere told ill and 
 without art with the same stories told over again by 
 the masters, well and. with the transfiguring effect of 
 genius. You thus broaden the area of science; for 
 you rescue the concrete phenomena of the expres- 
 sion of thought — the necessary syllabification which 
 accompanies it, the inevitable juxtaposition of words, 
 the constant use of particles, the habitual display of 
 roots, the inveterate repetition of names, the recurrent 
 employment of meanings heard or read — from their 
 confusion with the otherwise unclassifiable manifesta- 
 tions of what had hitherto been accepted, without 
 critical examination, under the lump term 'litera- 
 ture,' simply for the pleasure and spiritual edification 
 to be got from it. 
 
THESE OBJECTIONS NOT NEW 7 
 
 This is a stern indictment to bring against 
 the philologist — the ■ mere philologist,' as our 
 author might say — and if it contains the whole 
 truth, and nothing but the truth ; if things are 
 quite as bad as here represented, and the fault is 
 the fault of certain innovators, who usurp the 
 domain of better men with their science falsely 
 so-called ; then it behooves us to be on our guard, 
 lest we also be entangled in the net they have 
 woven for their own feet, and so become involved 
 with them in a common destruction. 
 
 Let us first see, however, whether some of 
 these matters are susceptible of being differently 
 stated. And first, is it quite certain that the 
 evils complained of are due to the scientific and 
 positivist spirit of this age, and to the effort 
 after universal education ? It is more than two 
 thousand years since Herodicus described the 
 followers of the critic Aristarchus as ' buzzing 
 in corners, busy with monosyllables.' It is more 
 than eighteen hundred years since Seneca thus 
 declaimed ' against what he understood by the 
 philological study of literature : 
 
 A grammarian occupies himself with the care of 
 speech, or, if he takes a wider view of his art, pos- 
 sibly with history. The most that he can do is to 
 extend its limits so as to include poetry. Which of 
 
 1 Epist. 88, somewhat freely translated (Camelot Series) by 
 Walter Clode, following Thomas Lodge. 
 
8 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY ' 
 
 these openeth a way to virtue ? Doth the unfolding 
 of syllables, the niceties of speech, the memory of 
 fables, or the law and syntax of verses? Which of 
 these taketh away fear, casteth out covetousness, 
 bridleth lust? . . . Let us grant unto them that 
 Homer was a philosopher ; in that case he must have 
 learnt wisdom before he wrote poetry ; wherefore let 
 us learn those things which made Homer a wise man. 
 . . . What supposest thou that it profiteth to inquire 
 into the ages of Patroclus and Achilles? Seekest 
 thou rather Ulysses' errors than seest how thou canst 
 prevent thine own? There is no time for hearing 
 whether Ulysses was shipwrecked between Italy and 
 Sicily, or passed the boundaries of the known world. 
 . . . Tempests of the mind do daily toss us, and vice 
 driveth us into all the evils which Ulysses suffered. 
 Beauty there is to beguile the eyes, and she cometh 
 not in the guise of a foe : hence come cruel monsters, 
 which delight in men's blood ; hence come deceitful 
 allurements of the ears; hence shipwrecks, and so 
 many varieties of evil. Teach me this thing — how I 
 may love my country, my wife, and my father ; how 
 even suffering shipwreck, I may steer my ship into 
 so virtuous a haven. 
 
 Here, then, is a strong argument against lit- 
 erary scholarship. Observe at once its admira- 
 ble cogency and its comprehensive sweep. The 
 goal of all education should be to render men 
 wise and virtuous ; therefore wisdom and virtue 
 should be taught directly, to the exclusion of all 
 
SENECA'S VIEWS 9 
 
 other matters. How obvious and how convincing ! 
 The objection to literary scholarship has the 
 same force as applied to other studies. This is 
 apparent from the very title of Seneca's essay, 
 That the Liberal Arts are not to be classed 
 among Good Things, and contribute Nothing to 
 Virtue. But let us hear his own application of 
 the principle — enounced earlier by Diogenes the 
 Cynic — to the study of music and geometry : 
 
 Let us pass to geometry and music ; nothing shalt 
 thou find in them which forbiddeth fear, or forbid- 
 deth covetousness, of which whosoever is ignorant, in 
 vain knoweth other things. . . . Thou teachest me 
 how there cometh a harmony from sharp and bass 
 sounds, and how a chord may be composed of disso- 
 nant strings. Do thou make rather that my mind may 
 be in harmony with itself, and that my counsels be 
 not out of time. . . . Thou knowest what a straight 
 line is ; what profiteth it thee, if thou art ignorant of 
 what is crooked in life ? 
 
 But there is another argument against all 
 learning, or rather against all learning except 
 philosophy. Learning is a positive incumbrance. 
 The mind is limited in its capacity. There 
 is only a given amount of space in the mind 
 to include everything. All the room occupied 
 by learning is so much subtracted from that 
 which might have harbored virtue. Hear once 
 more the incomparable Seneca : ' Of whatsoever 
 
10 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 part of divine and human affairs thou takest 
 hold, thou shalt be wearied with the huge abun- 
 dance of things to be sought out and to be 
 learned. . . . Virtue will not lodge itself in so 
 narrow a room ; a great matter desireth a large 
 space ; let all else be driven out, let the whole 
 breast be empty for it.' 
 
 With Seneca, the conclusion of the whole mat- 
 ter is extremely simple. Philosophy is the science 
 which teaches wisdom and virtue. Therefore 
 neglect everything else, and study philosophy. 
 In his own words : 
 
 Philosophy . . . raiseth the whole structure, 
 foundations and all. Mathematics, so to speak, is 
 a superficial art ; it buildeth upon another's founda- 
 tions, it receiveth its principles from others, by the 
 benefit of which it cometh to further conclusions. If, 
 by its own exertions, it could come to truth, if it 
 could comprehend the nature of the whole world, 
 I should be more grateful to it. The mind is made 
 perfect by one thing — namely, by the unchangeable 
 knowledge of good and bad things, for which alone 
 philosophy is competent. But none other art inquireth 
 about good and bad things. 
 
 But, unfortunately, the trail of the serpent is 
 over philosophy, even. Seneca cannot help ad- 
 mitting that his very philosophers are not quite 
 what they should be. 4 I speak,' says he, 'of 
 liberal studies ; how much of what is useless do 
 
WISDOM WITHOUT LEARNING? 11 
 
 philosophers possess, how much of what is un- 
 practical ! They also have descended to the dis- 
 tinction of syllables, and to the proprieties of 
 conjunctions and prepositions, and to envy gram- 
 marians, to envy geometricians. . . . Thus it 
 is come to pass that, with all their diligence, they 
 know rather to speak than to live.' 
 
 Now I would not be understood as institut- 
 ing a parallel in all respects between the able 
 and brilliant writer first quoted, with certain of 
 whose positions I find myself in agreement, and 
 the moralist who thus ruthlessly, like another 
 Caliph Omar, would sweep away all learning 
 from the face of the earth. Yet I cannot help 
 seeing in the essay of the former an implication 
 that taste and insight and delicacy of perception 
 shall be imparted directly by the schools, in a 
 manner not dissimilar, it may be apprehended, 
 to that in which the Senecan wisdom and virtue 
 were to be taught. Perhaps this is possible; I 
 would that it were. Is there one who listens to 
 me who would not gladly devote his whole ener- 
 gies to the direct communication of taste and in- 
 sight and delicacy of perception, and still more 
 of wisdom and virtue, were that possible without 
 the adventitious aid of learning? If we could 
 train the mind to exact and severe thinking, to 
 endure the toil involved in continuous attention 
 to the same subject, without invoking the pro- 
 
12 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 cesses of mathematical science, or any equivalent 
 discipline, to come to our assistance, how the col- 
 lege curriculum might speedily be relieved of one 
 of its heaviest burdens ! But we have already seen 
 that even Seneca's philosophers were not quite 
 equal to his demands ; they also ' descended to 
 the distinction of syllables, and to the proprieties 
 of conjunctions and prepositions.' These philoso- 
 phers must have felt, at least, after Seneca's 
 rebuke, how far they were derogating from the 
 inwardness of their mission. Yet, if they lived 
 a quarter of a century longer, they were surely 
 not a little comforted by the utterances of Quin- 
 tilian, who in one place says : * 
 
 Was Cicero the less of an orator because he was 
 most attentive to the study of grammar, and because, 
 as appears from his letters, he was a rigid exactor, on 
 all occasions, of correct language from his son ? Did 
 the writings of Julius Csesar On Analogy diminish 
 the vigor of his intellect ? Or was Messala less ele- 
 gant as a writer because he devoted whole books, not 
 merely to single words, but even to single letters? 
 These studies are injurious, not to those who pass 
 through them, but to those who dwell immoderately 
 on them. 
 
 But are modern times barren of such instances 
 as Quintilian has noted ? Milton, great poet that 
 he was, did not disdain to write an Accidence 
 1 Inst. 1. 7. 34, 35. 
 
DANTE ON THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE 13 
 
 commenced Grammar, and I have never heard 
 that his poetry was the worse for it. Milton's 
 exemplar, the first poet of Italy, a man eminent 
 for taste and insight and delicacy of perception, 
 as well as for wisdom and virtue, wrote a book 
 On the Vernacular Language, which he began 
 on this wise : 
 
 Since we do not find that any one before us has 
 treated of the science of the ve macular language, while 
 in fact we see that this tongue is highly necessary for 
 all, inasmuch as not only men, but even women and 
 children, strive, in so far as nature allows them, to 
 acquire it ; and since it is our wish to enlighten to 
 some little extent the discernment of those who walk 
 through the streets like blind men, generally fancying 
 that those things which are really in front of them 
 are behind them ; we will endeavor, the Word aiding 
 us from heaven, to be of service to the vernacular 
 speech ; not only drawing the water of our own wit 
 for such a drink, but mixing with it the best of what 
 we have taken or compiled from others. 
 
 In this work, he whom the difficulties of lan- 
 guage had never prevented from saying just 
 what he desired to say, went on to write chapters 
 whose titles are such as these : ' On the Dialect 
 of Romagna, and Some of the Dialects beyond 
 the Po, especially the Venetian ; ' ' Of the Struc- 
 ture of the Lines, and their Variation by means 
 of Syllables ; ' ' Of what Lines Stanzas are made, 
 
14 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 and of the Number of Syllables in the Lines ; ' 
 1 Of the Relation of the Rimes, and in what 
 order they are to be placed in the Stanza ; ' 
 8 Of the Number of Lines and Syllables in the 
 Stanza.' Does it not look as though Dante had, 
 in the words of our critic, come perilously near 
 to rescuing from their confusion with literature 
 'the concrete phenomena of the expression of 
 thought — the necessary syllabification which 
 accompanies it, the inevitable juxtaposition of 
 words ' ? 
 
 Passing over such men as Ben Jonson, who 
 wrote an English grammar, and made an exten- 
 sive collection of the grammars of various lan- 
 guages, but at the same time set the fashions in 
 English literature for several decades, let us 
 dwell for a moment on the authors cited above 
 as deserving better treatment than they are likely 
 to receive at the hands of the modern expositor. 
 Is it possible that the attitude of Burke and 
 Browning, of Dryden and Swift, toward philo- 
 logical investigation, is in any respect similar to 
 that of Dante and of Milton ? I turn to Burke's 
 essay On the Sublime and Beautiful, and find 
 such headings as these: 'Color considered as 
 productive of the Sublime ; ' ' Smell and Taste ; 
 Bitters and Stenches ; ' ' The Effect of Words ; ' 
 ' How Words influence the Passions.' Moreover, 
 I find in this work such passages as the follow- 
 
DRYDEN AS A PHILOLOGIST 15 
 
 ing : ' ' It is hard to repeat certain sets of words, 
 though owned by themselves unoperative, with- 
 out being in some degree affected, especially if 
 a warm and affecting tone of voice accompanies 
 them ; as suppose, — 
 
 Wise, valiant, generous, good, and great. 
 
 These words, by having no application, ought to 
 be unoperative ; but when words commonly sa- 
 cred to great occasions are used, we are affected 
 by them even without the occasions.' 
 
 I turn to Browning, and, reading The Gram- 
 marian's Funeral, cannot doubt that he was in 
 sympathy with the character he has so vividly 
 and feelingly delineated. 
 
 I turn to Dryden, and find him writing in this 
 vein : 2 * Thus it appears necessary that a man 
 should be a nice critic in his mother tongue be- 
 fore he attempts to translate a foreign language. 
 Neither is it sufficient that he be able to judge 
 of words and style, but he must be a master of 
 them too; he must perfectly understand his 
 author's tongue, and absolutely command his 
 own.' Again he says : 4 All the versification and 
 little variety of Claudian is included within the 
 compass of four or five lines, and then he begins 
 again in the same tenor ; perpetually closing his 
 sense at the end of a verse, and that verse com- 
 
 1 Part 5, sect. 3. 2 Essay on Translation, 
 
16 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 monly what they call golden, or two substantives 
 and two adjectives, with a verb betwixt them to 
 keep the peace.' Does not this look like the pre- 
 figurement of a modern inquiry into end-stopped 
 and run-on lines ? 
 
 I turn to Swift, and am reminded by the re- 
 vival of the proposition to establish an English 
 Academy that he wrote a Proposal for cor- 
 recting, improving, and ascertaining the Eng- 
 lish Tongue, involving the creation of a society 
 similar to the French Academy for that pur- 
 pose. 
 
 Even the author who instances Burke and 
 Browning, Dryden and Swift, as writers who 
 should be interpreted in a larger and freer man- 
 ner, is willing, in a noble oration, to affirm: 
 'What you cannot find a substitute for is the 
 classics as literature ; and there can be no first- 
 hand contact with that literature if you will not 
 master the grammar and the syntax which con- 
 vey its subtle power.' From this it would appear 
 that it is proper to master the grammar and syn- 
 tax of the ancient classics ; which he who will 
 may harmonize with the objections which were 
 quoted at the beginning of these remarks. 
 
 Recalling those objections, we have seen that 
 they were in some measure anticipated centuries 
 ago ; that Seneca would have had all ancillary 
 study of literature replaced by the direct inculca- 
 
WHY DOES LEARNING SURVIVE? 17 
 
 tion of the essential qualities or virtues that lit- 
 erature embodies ; that his criticism held equally 
 true of all liberal studies except philosophy, and 
 that even philosophy was not exempt from his 
 censure ; but that, on the other hand, some of 
 the noblest statesmen, orators, and poets have 
 busied themselves with the very inquiries which 
 we have heard so unsparingly condemned ; and 
 that we are thus presented with the singular 
 anomaly that that is forbidden to the humble 
 expounder of classic authors which was practised 
 and recommended by the classical authors them- 
 selves ; and that is forbidden to the student of 
 our own literature which is reckoned, by the 
 same authority, as highly laudable in a student 
 of the masterpieces of antiquity. 
 
 There must, one would infer, be something 
 inherently attractive and valuable about learn- 
 ing which enables it to survive such attacks as 
 those of Seneca ; there must be something inher- 
 ently attractive and valuable about the learning 
 which occupies itself with literature, to make it 
 the concern of so many magnanimous spirits, 
 and to extort vindications from the antagonists 
 who come out armed to destroy it. Perhaps the 
 explanation is to be sought in Aristotle's famous 
 sentence, 'All men by nature desire to know.' 
 Perhaps the justification has been furnished 
 by Seneca himself, who elsewhere asks why we 
 
18 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 instruct our children in liberal studies, and 
 answers, 'Not because they can give virtue, but 
 because they prepare the mind to the receiving 
 of it.' Possibly, then, virtue may sometimes be 
 best suggested by indirection ; perhaps, too, the 
 same is true of taste and insight ; it may be that 
 they come not with observation, or at least not 
 exclusively with observation ; it may be that they 
 who devotedly study any aspect of great works 
 receive of their spirit, even as one may approach 
 the one spirit of Nature through the different 
 channels of astronomy, chemistry, and zoology. 
 A lover of literature and of all forms of beauty, 
 too early lost to his University and the world — 
 I refer to the late Professor McLaughlin — in an 
 essay in which he pleaded for the recognition of 
 the spiritual element in literature, was yet fain 
 to admit : * ' The first steps toward the desired 
 results must be prosaic ; people must train them- 
 selves, or be trained, to see what is on the sur- 
 face, to grow conscious of metrical differences, 
 for instance ; not to remain quite blind to the 
 real meaning beneath a figurative turn ; even to 
 come to recognize that there is a figurative turn.' 
 If we could take this view to heart, perhaps 
 the difficulties which perplex so many earnest 
 seekers after truth, as they consider the subject, 
 would vanish away, or at any rate become less 
 
 1 Literary Criticism for Students, pp. viii, ix. 
 
ATTAINMENT IS A GRADUAL PROCESS 19 
 
 formidable. According to this mode of looking 
 at the matter, taste and insight and delicacy of 
 perception are by no means common in an era of 
 universal education, nor indeed in any era what- 
 ever ; the person who possesses them in only a 
 rudimentary degree is as likely to be repelled as 
 attracted by a sudden revelation of their austere 
 charms ; in this, as in everything else, the natu- 
 ral progress is by easy stages from the phenome- 
 nal to the noumenal, from the things of sense 
 to the things of the spirit ; and accordingly the 
 science which undertakes to deal with the forms 
 in which the human spirit has, in various epochs, 
 manifested itself, especially through the medium 
 of literature, must be prepared to take account 
 of the phenomenal no less than the noumenal, and 
 accompany the seeker along the whole scale of 
 ascent from the one to the other. 
 
 But is there any such science ? There is ; its 
 name is Philology ; and in no other sense than 
 as designating this science should the term 
 4 philology ' be used, unless with some qualifying 
 term which limits its meaning in a specific and 
 unmistakable manner. * 
 
 The function of the philologist, then, is the "n 
 endeavor to relive the life of the past ; to enter 
 by the imagination into the spiritual experiences 
 of all the historic protagonists of civilization in 
 a given period and area of culture ; to think the 
 
20 THE PROVINCE OF ENGILSH PHILOLOGY 
 
 thoughts, to feel the emotions, to partake the 
 aspirations, recorded in literature; to become 
 one with humanity in the struggles of a given 
 riation or race to perceive and attain the ideal 
 of existence; and then to judge rightly these 
 various disclosures of the human spirit, and to 
 reveal to the world their true significance and 
 relative importance. 
 
 In compassing this end, the philologist will 
 have much to do ; much that is not only labori- 
 ous, but that even, in itself considered, might 
 justly be regarded as distasteful, or even re- 
 pellent. He must examine and compare the 
 records of the human spirit bequeathed us by 
 the past, and, before doing this, must often 
 exhume them perhaps, in a mutilated condition, 
 from the libraries and monasteries where they 
 may have been moldering for ages ; he must piece 
 them together, where they have been separated 
 and dispersed ; interpret them ; correct their 
 manifest errors, so far as this may safely be done 
 in the light of fuller information; determine 
 their meaning and their worth ; and then deliver 
 them to the world, freed, as far as may be, from 
 the injuries inflicted by time and evil chance, 
 with their sense duly ascertained, their message 
 clearly set forth, and their contribution to the 
 sum of human attainment justly and sympathet- 
 ically estimated. 
 
WHAT IS THE PHILOLOGIST? 21 
 
 This is the work that has been done, and is 
 still in process of doing, for the Sacred Scrip- 
 tures ; for Homer, Sophocles, and Pindar among 
 the Greeks ; for Virgil, Lucretius, Tacitus, and 
 Juvenal among the Romans; for the Italian 
 Dante and Ariosto; for the French Chansons 
 de Geste, no less than for Ronsard, Moliere, and 
 Rousseau; for the Nibelungenlied and Goethe 
 among the Germans; for Cynewulf, Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, and Milton among the English; 
 and for a multitude of others of whom these 
 may stand as types. 
 
 The ideal philologist is at once antiquary, 
 palaeographer, grammarian, lexicologist, ex- 
 pounder, critic, historian of literature, and, 
 above all, lover of humanity. He should have 
 the accuracy of the scientist, the thirst for dis- 
 covery of the Arctic explorer, the judgment of 
 the man of affairs, the sensibility of the musician, 
 the taste of the connoisseur, and the soul of the 
 poet. He must shrink from no labor, and despise 
 no detail, by means of which he may be enabled 
 to reach his goal more surely, and laden with 
 richer results. Before traversing unknown seas, 
 he must appropriate every discovery made by his 
 predecessors on similar quests, and avail him- 
 self of every improvement upon their methods 
 wljich his imagination can suggest, and his 
 judgment approve. He will be instant in season 
 
22 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 and out of season. Whatsoever his hand finds 
 to do he will do with his might. He will choose 
 the task which humanity most needs to have 
 performed, and at the same time that in which 
 his own powers and special equipment can be 
 most fully utilized ; and, when possible, he will 
 give the preference to such labors as shall 
 afford play and outreach to his nobler faculties, 
 rather than to such as may dwarf and impov- 
 erish them. 
 
 According to the exigencies which circum- 
 stances create, or his own intuition perceives, he 
 will edit dictionaries, like Johnson or Mur- 
 ray; make lexicons to individual authors, like 
 Schmidt ; compile concordances, like Bartlett or 
 Ellis ; investigate metre, like Sievers or Schip- 
 per ; edit authors, as Skeat has edited Chaucer, 
 Child the English and Scottish Ballads, and 
 Furness Shakespeare ; discourse on the laws of 
 literature, like Sidney, or Ben Jonson, or Lewes, 
 or Walter Pater ; write -literary biography, like 
 Brandl or Dowden ; or outline the features and 
 progress of a national literature, like Ten Brink, 
 or Stopford Brooke, or Taine. 
 
 The ideal philologist must, therefore, have 
 gained him * the gains of various men, ransacked 
 the ages, spoiled the climes.' Yet withal he must 
 be content, if fortune, or his sense of a potential 
 universe hidden in his apparently insignificant 
 
PHILOLOGISTS SOMETIMES WRITE WELL 23 
 
 task, will have it so, merely to settle hoWs busi- 
 ness, properly base oun, or give us the doctrine 
 of the enclitic de — sure that posterity, while it 
 may ungratefully forget him, will at least have 
 cause to bless his name, as that of one without 
 whose strenuous and self-sacrificing exertions 
 the poets, the orators, the historians, and the 
 philosophers would have less completely yielded 
 up their meaning, or communicated their inspira- 
 tion, to an expectant and needy world. 
 
 That the philologist, as such, is not necessarily 
 a creative literary artist, is no impugnment of 
 his mission or its importance. Neither is he 
 who expounds the law, or the doctrines of Chris- 
 tianity, necessarily a creative literary artist. Yet 
 he may be ; Erskine was, and Webster ; and so 
 were Robert South and Cardinal Newman in 
 their sermons. To be learned is not necessarily 
 to be dull, for Burke was learned, and Chaucer, 
 and Cicero, and Homer. Petrarch was not dull ; 
 and all the philology of modern times goes back 
 to Petrarch. 
 
 If we seek for philologists who may fairly be 
 ranked among reputable authors, the brothers 
 Grimm wrote fairy stories quite as charmingly 
 as Perrault; Hallam says of Politian that his 
 poem displayed more harmony, spirit, and ima- 
 gination than any that had been written since 
 the death of Petrarch ; and the same writer calls 
 
24 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 the History and Annals of Grotius a monument 
 of vigorous and impressive language. Professor 
 Lounsbury says of Tyrwhitt, ' His literary taste 
 can be described as almost unerring.' The style 
 of Erasmus has been called clear, lively, expres- 
 sive rather than regular, sparkling with sallies 
 and verve, Sainte-Beuve, who by his profes- 
 sion of critic comes well within the definition of 
 the philologist, is of course one of the literary 
 glories of France. Croiset, the author of La 
 Poesie de Pindare, is an author whom one finds 
 it difficult to lay down when his book has once 
 been taken in hand. Sellar's accounts of the 
 Roman poets can be read with the utmost plea- 
 sure by any one at all interested in the subject. 
 The charm of Max Muller's writing is well 
 known. One might go on to enumerate Jebb, 
 and Gildersleeve, and Jowett, and Mahaffy — 
 but why extend a list which any one can con- 
 tinue for himself? Enough has been said to 
 show that the pursuit of philology is not incom- 
 patible with literary power and grace — as why 
 indeed should it be ? 
 
 But it has been observed that dull men crowd 
 into the profession, men who can only count and 
 catalogue, or who, to employ the language of 
 Chapman in The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, 1 
 are 
 
 1 Act 2, scene 1. 
 
WHY SOME PHILOLOGISTS ARE DULL 25 
 
 Of taste so much depraved, that they had rather 
 Delight, and satisfy themselves to drink 
 Of the stream troubled, wandering ne'er so far 
 From the clear fount, than of the fount itself. 
 
 Alas, it is but too true ! Heaven-sent geniuses 
 are rare, and there is not room for all the dull 
 men in the other professions. Moreover, great 
 poets are sometimes averse to spending their 
 lives in the professor's chair, when they can 
 write Idylls of the King and Men and Women. 
 Also, there is no recipe by which to convert dull 
 men into heaven-sent geniuses, and the prepon- 
 derance of the former class everywhere is an evil 
 not sufficiently to be deplored. Then, too, some 
 of us must do the intellectual hewing of wood 
 and drawing of water for the rest, and how 
 should this be were no dull men to interest them- 
 selves in literature ? Finally, we can always fall 
 back upon the reasons assigned by Longinus — 
 if it was indeed he who wrote the immortal 
 Treatise on the Sublime — Longinus, a man 
 whom Plotinus allowed to be a philologist, but 
 in no sense a philosopher. Thus he moralizes: 
 'It is a matter of wonder that in the present 
 age, which produces many highly skilled in the 
 arts of popular persuasion, many of keen and 
 active powers, many especially rich in every 
 pleasing gift of language, the growth of highly 
 exalted and wide-reaching genius has, with a few 
 
26 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 rare exceptions, almost entirely ceased. ... It 
 is so easy, and so characteristic of human nature, 
 always to find fault with the present. Consider, 
 now, whether the corruption of genius is to be 
 attributed, not to a world-wide peace, but rather 
 to the war within us which knows no limit, which 
 engages all our desires, yes, and still further to 
 the bad passions which lay siege to us to-day, 
 and make utter havoc and spoil of our lives. 
 Are we not enslaved, nay, are not our careers 
 completely shipwrecked, by love of gain, that 
 fever which rages unappeased in us all, and love 
 of pleasure ? — one the most debasing, the other 
 the most ignoble, of the mind's diseases.' If 
 there are no better men forthcoming as expound- 
 ers of English literature, may it not be that the 
 requisite talents are attracted to more lucrative 
 pursuits rather than that the fault is with the 
 tendency of education to become universal ? 
 
 It is singular, however, that men whom no one 
 would think of calling dull practise on occasion 
 the arts that we have heard condemned. Thus 
 Professor Dowden, in his very newest book, his 
 volume of selections from Wordsworth, 1 so far 
 from thinking it a sin, in dealing with the 
 poets, to ' note the changes of phrase they make 
 in successive revisions,' expressly says, 'From 
 no other English poet can lessons in the poetic 
 1 Poems by William Wordsworth, p. lxxxv. 
 
PHILOLOGY NOT MERELY LINGUISTICS 27 
 
 craft so full, so detailed, and so instructive be 
 obtained as those to be had by one who follows 
 Wordsworth through the successive editions, and 
 puts to himself the repeated question, "For 
 what reason was this change, for what reason 
 was that, introduced ? " ' Gaston Paris, too, who 
 is said to be unsurpassed as a lecturer on the 
 felicities of style, is best known to the world 
 by researches which quite surely fall under the 
 condemnation already cited. 
 
 Philology is frequently considered to be iden- 
 tical with linguistics. This is an error which 
 cannot be sufficiently deprecated. It results in 
 the estrangement of the study of language from 
 that of literature, with which, in the interests of 
 both, it should be most intimately associated. 
 *The study of language is apt to seem arid and 
 repellent to those who do not perceive how essen- 
 tial it is to the comprehension of literature. The 
 conception of linguistics as a totally independent 
 branch of learning, and the bestowal upon it of 
 the appellation which properly designates the 
 whole study of the history of culture, especially 
 through the medium of literature, is fraught 
 with incalculable injury to the pursuit of both 
 divisions of the subject. Professor Saintsbury 
 deplores this separation in a recent work. He 
 says too truly: 1 'With some honorable excep- 
 
 1 History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 460. 
 
28 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 tions, we find critics of literature too often di- 
 vided into linguists who seem neither to think 
 nor to be capable of thinking of the meaning or 
 the melody, of the individual and technical mas- 
 tery, of an author, a book, or a passage, and into 
 loose aesthetic rhetoricians who will sometimes 
 discourse on iEschylus without knowing a sec- 
 ond aorist from an Attic perfect, and pronounce 
 eulogies or depreciations on Virgil without hav- 
 ing the faintest idea whether there is or is not 
 any authority for quamvis with one mood rather 
 than another.' He adds : ' It is not wonderful, 
 though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, 
 that the stricter scholars should be more or less 
 scornfully relinquishing the province of literary 
 criticism altogether, while the looser aesthetics 
 consider themselves entitled to neglect scholar- 
 ship in any proper sense with a similarly scorn- 
 ful indifference.' 
 
 I hope we shall all concur with Professor 
 Saintsbury in this opinion. Such mutual dis- 
 trust, not to say dislike, is in the highest degree 
 unhealthy. Why should not all thoughtful stu- 
 dents of English call themselves philologists, 
 and thus recognize that they are all virtually 
 aiming at the same thing, notwithstanding that 
 they approach the subject from different points 
 of view, and in practice emphasize different 
 aspects of their common theme ? 
 
PROPOSED DEFINITION NOT NEW 29 
 
 It may perhaps be objected that this would be 
 equivalent to attributing an arbitrary and novel 
 signification to the word philology. In this pre- 
 sence, I need only advert to the fact that in Ger- 
 many the meaning I advocate is recognized as 
 the only tenable one by all the recent authori- 
 ties. More than a hundred years ago, Wolf, 
 acting in part under the inspiration of Goethe, 
 outlined the conception which in more recent 
 times has been developed by Boeckh, and from 
 him has been adopted by all the chief authors 
 or editors of systematic treatises dealing with 
 the philology of the various nations or races. 
 While they differ more or less with respect to 
 the expediency of including certain subdivisions 
 of this department of knowledge in their survey, 
 on the essential point such scholars as Paul, 
 Grober, Korting, and Elze, all agree. No one 
 who has not reflected long and deeply upon the 
 conception elaborated by Boeckh can realize 
 how fruitful it proves, and how fully it satisfies 
 the demand for a philosophy of our work which 
 shall recognize at once the part played in its 
 advancement by the intuitions of genius and 
 by the humbler labors of the compiler and sys- 
 tematizer. 
 
 Many people are misled by forming a wrong no- 
 tion of the etymology of the term we have been 
 discussing. ■ Does not Aoyos mean " word " ? ' 
 
30 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 say they ; ' how then can philology signify any- 
 thing else than a study of words ? ' — whereupon 
 they complacently identify philology with ety- 
 mology. But the initial mistake is a serious one. 
 If one traces the use of faXoXoyU and <faX6Xoyos 
 in classical Greek and Latin, he will find some- 
 thing quite different. The philologist was ori- 
 ginally one who loved the tales of history or 
 old romance, and then one who was fond of all 
 sorts of learning which naturally grew out of 
 this love for dwelling on the records of the past. 
 Thus a philologist was distinctively literary in 
 his tastes ; not always philosophical, but always 
 prevailingly literary. Since literature employed 
 speech as its medium, he of course became an 
 investigator of speech, but — and this is a most 
 important consideration -£his interest in lan- 
 guage grew out of his interest in literature, and 
 his dominant concern with language was in its 
 capacity as the organ of literary communication^ 
 Boeckh has pointed out that a compound which 
 would have expressed to the ancients what 
 we often mean by linguistic study would have 
 had to be formed with yXwa-a-a — like our ' glos- 
 sonomy ' — and not with Aoyos. It is the use of 
 the expression 'comparative philology' in the 
 sense of 'glossonomy' or 'glossology' which 
 has wrought the mischief. If one regards Xoyos 
 as standing for the typical revelation of itself by 
 
THE PHILOLOGIST A LOVER 
 
 31 
 
 the human soul, and also for the faculty chiefly 
 instrumental in effecting this revelation — for 
 oratio and ratio, as the Romans said — the term 
 philology assumes its rightful dignity and 
 breadth, and designates one of the noblest em- 
 ployments to which a human being can dedicate 
 himself. He who cherishes this ideal will not 
 thereby become an ideal philologist, but he will 
 be less likely to strive as one that beateth the 
 air ; he will perceive that his ultimate concern 
 is with the human soul, and all his collecting, 
 and comparing, and criticizing, will subserve 
 the one end of enabling the voices of the past, 
 and especially the thrilling and compelling voices, 
 to sound more audibly and tunefully in the ear 
 of his own and future generations. 
 
 We must never forget that the philologist is 
 a lover. As Pythagoras was not willing to be 
 called a wise man, but only a lover of wisdom, 
 and thus coined the word philosophy, so the 
 philologist may well be content to call himself a 
 lover too — a lover of the thrilling and compelling 
 voices of the past. He becomes a philologist, if 
 he is worthy of the name, because they have 
 thrilled and compelled him ; and he would fain 
 devise means, however circuitous in appearance, 
 by which to insure that they shall thrill and 
 compel others. His sensibility is the measure of 
 his devotion ; and his devotion, while it may not 
 
32 THE PROVINCE OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY 
 
 be the measure of his success, is certainly its 
 indispensable condition. 
 
 If then, philology, truly considered, enlists 
 the head in the service of the heart; if it de- 
 mands not only high and manifold discipline, 
 but rich natural endowment ; if its object is the 
 revelation to the present of the spiritual attain- 
 ments of the past ; if it aims to win free access 
 for the thoughts of the mightiest thinkers, and 
 the dreams of the most visionary of poets ; if it 
 seeks to train the imagination to re-create the 
 form and pressure of a vanished time, in order 
 to stimulate our own age to equal or surpass its 
 predecessors in whatever best illustrates and 
 enobles humanity; if there are not wanting 
 numerous examples of poets who have been phi- 
 lologists, and philologists who have been essen- 
 tially poets ; and, finally, if philology is the only 
 term which thus fully comprehends these various 
 aspects of a common subject, and we have the 
 most authoritative precedents for employing it 
 in that signification ; shall we willingly allow the 
 word to be depreciated, and the largeness and 
 unity of the corresponding conception imperiled, 
 by consenting to employ it for the designation 
 of a single branch of the comprehensive whole, 
 and that the branch which, to the popular appre- 
 hension, least exhibits the real import and aim 
 of the science ? If not, and we are willing to be 
 
AGREEMENT DESIRABLE 33 
 
 known as philologists in the truer and larger 
 sense, can we not do something to make this 
 sense the prevalent one, by consistently adhering 
 to it in our practice, and, so far as possible, in- 
 ducing others to accept and adopt it ? By thus 
 doing, we shall not only be recognizing a truth 
 which is indisputable, but also be promoting that 
 harmony of opinions and sentiments without 
 which the most strenuous individual efforts are 
 certain to prove in some degree nugatory. 
 
n 
 
 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 1 
 
 English literature sprang at the outset from 
 the impulse felt by an untutored Yorkshire 
 peasant, in the seventh century of our era, to 
 express in the vernacular his sense of the power 
 and goodness of God, as manifested in the work 
 of creation. His disposition and ability thus to 
 employ his native speech were immediately util- 
 ized by the abbess and philanthropic scholars 
 of a neighboring monastery in the rendering of 
 Scriptural narrative and homiletic reflections 
 into Northumbrian alliterative verse, having in 
 view the moral improvement of the common 
 people, to whom Latin was an unknown tongue. 
 Throughout the Old English period — say to 
 the Norman Conquest — this effort to popularize 
 the treasures of Christian learning, which other- 
 wise must have remained the exclusive property 
 of the scholarly few, is accountable for the chief 
 part of the literature produced. The clergy were 
 ordered to repeat the Creed and the Lord's 
 Prayer in English ; homilies were composed in 
 it ; Bede's church history, Pope Gregory's Pas- 
 1 Atlantic Monthly, May, 1901. 
 
38 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 toral Care, and Boethius' Consolation of Phi- 
 losophy were translated by Alfred, or under his 
 supervision ; the lives of saints and Biblical 
 personages were written in prose or paraphrased 
 in verse ; the poor, in all ways, had the gospel 
 preached to them. On the other hand, the tribal 
 kings compiled codes of customary law, embody- 
 ing the legal practices which prevailed among 
 an unsophisticated folk, and comprehending the 
 few and simple relations which the members of 
 a tribe or province sustained to one another. 
 Add the first annalistic jottings of historical 
 occurrences, and the poems dealing with the 
 exploits of popular heroes, and you have all, 
 and more than all, that can fairly be termed 
 oelles-lettres down to near the period of the 
 Norman Conquest. It was a literature of the 
 people and for the people, and at least to some 
 extent, as in the case of Csedmon, by the people. 
 
 Centuries passed, and the institutions which 
 had once represented enlightenment and ad- 
 vancement were now either become corrupt, 
 or seemed likely to oppose further progress. 
 Reform was inevitable, and reform at length 
 arrived. • 
 
 What we call the Eeformation was an upris- 
 ing of the people against the privileged classes 
 — against the degenerate monastic orders and 
 the rule of Rome, but also, as the sequel showed, 
 
 
 
 
 
 4 
 
 
 C-V*>5 
 
 ■me-r^o 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 pror 
 
 %*' 
 
 ' 
 
 3w 
 
 ppr«-&* 
 
 
 
THE REVIVAL OF OLD ENGLISH 39 
 
 against absolute monarchy and feudal oppression. 
 Rome professed to be exercising only her imme- 
 morial rights ; monarchy and feudalism insisted 
 that they were the very institutions by which 
 England had always been governed. Appeal 
 was made against both to English antiquity, to 
 the literature of the pre-Norman period ; and 
 thus it happened that in the wreck of the monas- 
 tic houses, when the Reformers were reforming 
 so much out of existence, it was precisely the Old 
 English manuscripts which stood the best chance 
 of preservation, and which — though many were 
 doubtless lost — were collected and treasured up 
 by Leland, Archbishop Parker, Joscelin, and 
 their assistants. Lambarde published the Old 
 English laws, Parker the life of Alfred writ- 
 ten by Asser, Parker and Foxe the Old English 
 translation of the Gospels, Parker and Joscelin 
 iElfric's Paschal Homily and other writings 
 bearing on the question of transubstantiation, 
 and Hakluyt the voyage of Ohthere in a trans- 
 lation from the account by King Alfred — all 
 before the year 1600. English scholarship — by 
 which I here mean scholarship having reference 
 to the English language and literature — had 
 thus made a definite beginning between the birth 
 of Shakespeare and the death of Elizabeth. As 
 Old English literature was of and for the people, 
 so English scholarship originated in obedience 
 
40 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 to the democratic instinct, and was the creation 
 of a popular want. It was evoked to overthrow 
 sacerdotalism and to undermine prescriptive rule 
 of every sort, and it is not surprising that its 
 influence has been in the main, though not with- 
 out marked exceptions, to this effect. 
 
 Being thus democratic in origin, it is but 
 natural that the systematic study and teaching 
 of English have had to contend with the indif- 
 ference or opposition of the Roman Church, the 
 aristocracy, and the supporters of the ancient 
 classics. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that a 
 great body of mediaeval English literature is 
 monastic or ecclesiastical in character, we do 
 not find that many distinguished Roman Cath- 
 olic scholars have been engaged in editing or 
 expounding it. 1 In like manner, the teaching of 
 English prevails much more widely in America 
 than in England, the contrast being no doubt in 
 some measure due to the aristocratic traditions 
 which cling to the ancient seats of learning in 
 that country. And, with exceptions here and 
 there, the representatives of the classics have 
 ignored, depreciated, or opposed the progress 
 and extension of English study. The reason is 
 plain: these classes of persons have been the 
 representatives of prescription and authority, 
 
 1 An interesting exception in this country was Brother 
 Azarias (Patrick F. Mullany, 1847-] 
 
THE SENSATIONAL PHILOSOPHY 41 
 
 and have therefore felt in the advance of English 
 the approaching triumph of a natural foe. 
 
 On the other hand, the allies of English have 
 been democracy and individualism, the spirit 
 of nationality, the methods of physical science, 
 and the sensational and utilitarian philosophy, 
 to which may be added the growing influence of 
 woman, and, in part as the cause of this influence, 
 the pervasive and vitalizing effect of essential 
 Christianity. 
 
 To illustrate these points briefly. Locke, the 
 founder of modern sensational philosophy, thus 
 writes in his Thoughts concerning Education 
 (1693) : * Since 't is English that an English 
 gentleman will have constant use of, that is the 
 language he should chiefly cultivate, and wherein 
 most care should be taken to polish and perfect 
 his 'style. . . . Whatever foreign language a 
 young man meddles with — and the more he 
 knows, the better — that which he should criti- 
 cally study, and labor to get a facility, clearness, 
 and elegancy to express himself in, should be 
 his own.' 
 
 Franklin learned his English from the Spec- 
 tatorj and he was the founder and most per- 
 sistent supporter, in the face of much discour- 
 agement, of an English high school in the city 
 of Philadelphia. For this school he elaborated 
 a plan of English teaching which can still be 
 
42 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 pondered with profit by students of pedagogy. 
 Jefferson, who espoused the cause of the people 
 against the spirit of caste, established a chair 
 of Anglo-Saxon in 1825 at his newly founded 
 University of Virginia. 
 
 The names of these three men — Locke, Frank- 
 lin, and Jefferson — who, in the three successive 
 centuries following the rediscovery of the ancient 
 tongue, zealously advocated the study of English, 
 are deeply significant. They were apostles of a 
 sensational philosophy, of physical science in its 
 application to homely uses, of toleration, of the 
 rights and needs of the common man. They 
 represented prose, common sense, materialism, 
 so that it is by the exquisite irony of overruling 
 circumstance that they have aided in bringing 
 poetry, religion, and philosophical idealisms 
 home to the smug and benighted Philistine. For 
 our schools teach Ruskin rather than Locke, 
 Shakespeare rather than Poor Richard's Alma- 
 nac, Burke rather than Jefferson ; they speak, 
 like Balaam, far other words than as they were 
 commanded at the first. 
 
 This ennoblement and etherealization of the 
 subject of English teaching, and to some extent 
 of its method, is primarily due to two causes — 
 the influence of Christianity, and the consequent 
 influence of woman. To begin with the larger 
 of these two factors : the belief in the value of 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 43 
 
 the individual is the basis of democracy, and 
 this belief came into the world with Christianity. 
 It was the Puritans who overthrew the despot- 
 ism of the Stuarts, and it was their success 
 that emboldened and informed the prophets of 
 the French Revolution. Rousseau promulgated 
 the gospel of individualism in a form adapted 
 to his age and country, yet not more truly nor 
 effectively than did Wesley in England; and 
 Rousseau himself, however unwittingly or un- 
 willingly, was but the mouthpiece of the Chris- 
 tian consciousness which for centuries had been 
 protesting against the vassalage of man to any 
 power lower than the divine. The return to 
 nature, the return to poetry, was a return to the 
 indefeasible instincts and needs of the individual 
 human soul. The social contract was supposed 
 to rest upon free consent, like the association of 
 individuals in the primitive Christian church. 
 
 The lyric cry of Romanticism was an echo of 
 the chants that resounded from the church and 
 cloister of the Middle Ages. Like them, it was 
 a passionate outpouring of the heart — in joy, in 
 grief, in aspiration ; and, like them, it uttered 
 itself in freer and more spontaneous forms than 
 those inherited from classical antiquity. At that 
 cry the doors of an almost forgotten sepulchre 
 opened, and there stumbled forth into the light 
 a figure wrapped in cerements, at whose appear- 
 
44 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 ance some stood aghast, while others exulted 
 with the pulse of a new life. As the grave-clothes 
 have been slowly unwrapped, we have beheld a 
 visage marred more than any man, and its form 
 more than the sons of men ; but we have also 
 seen a radiance streaming from the resuscitated 
 members, and have felt a mysterious potency 
 animating our own ; for we have assisted at the 
 resurrection of the buried Christianity of the 
 Middle Ages, with its likeness to the Crucified, 
 with its yearnings over the poor and them that 
 have no helper, with its eager pressing on to 
 the realization of the kingdom of God. Thus it 
 has come to pass that the great literature of the 
 nineteenth century is either Christian or humani- 
 tarian; and if humanitarian, then necessarily 
 Christian, though it may be unconsciously or 
 in its own despite. And what is true of the liter- 
 ature is true also, in its degree, of the ideals of 
 our English teaching. 
 
 In this revolution woman has been at once 
 a gainer and an actor. Whatever releases and 
 strengthens the individual soul clothes her with 
 might. Christianity, and the religion out of 
 which Christianity sprang, first gave woman- 
 hood, as distinguished from single notable wo- 
 men, its potential dignity, influence, and fullest 
 charm. What wonder that she has been instinc- 
 tively repelled from those of the ancient classics, 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE AND WOMAN 45 
 
 and of their modern imitations, in which she 
 has seen herself degraded and vilified? What 
 wonder that she has been drawn toward a litera- 
 ture of sympathy and palpitant emotion — a 
 literature which places the virgin and the mother 
 upon the throne of earth and heaven, while it 
 makes of woman a ministrant in the abode of 
 poverty and at the couch of feebleness and pain ? 
 And so it results that much of the teaching of 
 English is done by women, and it is they who 
 strive forward, quite as eagerly as the men, to 
 gain the advanced instruction in English of our 
 higher institutions. 
 
 The deeper causes of the increasing study of 
 English are thus seen to lie in the onward sweep 
 of certain irresistible forces which are not yet 
 spent, and which are likely to continue in opera- 
 tion for an indefinite period. The initial impulse 
 came from that Protestantism which had been 
 nourished in the lap of the Middle Ages ; then 
 utilitarianism spoke its word, and advocated a 
 study which came home to the business and 
 bosoms of all men ; the spirit of nationality glo- 
 rified the vernacular speech ; the spirit of indi- 
 viduality emancipated men from bondage to 
 pseudo-classicism; science inculcated fearless- 
 ness in exploration, and a recognition of value 
 only where, and in so far as, value really existed ; 
 a reviving Christianity insisted on deference to 
 
46 , THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 its own literary as well as ethical precepts ; and 
 at length woman had begun to assume the full 
 royalty to which her claim had so long lain in 
 abeyance, and to exercise it in behalf of those 
 species and aspects of literature to which her 
 nature inclines. 
 
 We may now turn to consider the specific pro- 
 gress effected in the last decade or so, though a 
 fixed limit of time will not be easy to observe. 
 
 In the course of rather more than a genera- 
 tion in America, democracy has outgrown its in- 
 stitutions of higher learning. Not in the sense 
 that it has appropriated and utilized all that its 
 colleges and academies had to offer, and that, 
 having transcended all this learning and culture, 
 it has mildly requested more. No, it is rather 
 in the material sense that it has outgrown them : 
 it has filled to repletion the dormitories, class- 
 rooms, and laboratories, in at least one instance 
 reciting in large tents pitched upon college 
 grounds. The teeth of dragons had been scat- 
 tered over a favorable soil, and immediately 
 there sprang up impetuous hosts, rushing upon 
 the domains of culture like the hordes of Attila 
 upon the plains of fertile Italy. They were 
 armed, so none could resist them; and they 
 were rude, so that what they clamored for was 
 less the garnered wisdom precious to the ripe 
 scholar than such enginery of science as would 
 
SMATTERINGS OF CULTURE 47 
 
 empower them to extort riches from the soil and 
 the mine, or assist them in levying tribute upon 
 the labor of others, together with such smatter- 
 ing of letters as would enable them to communi- 
 cate with precision and brevity their wishes and 
 commands, or would embellish the rare social 
 hour with some suggestions of artistic refine- 
 ment. Training in the older sense they cared 
 not for. Those who devoted themselves to phy- 
 sical science endured so much of intellectual dis- 
 cipline as they considered indispensable for the 
 attainment of their ends, but were impatient of 
 more. Those who were less serious or less spe- 
 cific in their application were willing to practise 
 the easier forms of writing, but in the pursuit 
 of literature insisted upon being entertained, 
 and then in being provided with abundance 
 of the small coin of information and opinion, 
 which they might utter in conversation or dis- 
 pense in speech-making. If they were to have 
 culture, it was culture made easy that they de- 
 sired ; and, on the whole, they preferred to have 
 it rather than otherwise. But to what purpose 
 were they to turn their backs upon Greek and 
 Latin, if they were to be required to pursue exact 
 methods, and make solid acquisitions, in their 
 native tongue ? 
 
 Here was the opportunity, the problem, and 
 the pitfall of English. There were all the stu- 
 
48 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 dents that the most grasping partisan of the 
 subject could ask for. How should they be em- 
 ployed? How should they be satisfied? And 
 how, if possible, should they be educated ? The 
 first two of these questions were more readily 
 answered than the third. 
 
 The problem first beset the colleges, and espe- 
 cially the larger of them. It was they that were 
 the first to be overcrowded, because of their 
 prestige. The academies and high schools had 
 enough to do with the preparation of their stu- 
 dents in the stock subjects required for admis- 
 sion to college, in giving a little special attention 
 to those who were to attend scientific schools, 
 and in providing commercial courses ; their turn 
 was to come later. In the colleges there con- 
 tinued to be, as before, those who had inherited 
 scholarly traditions, and who had come from re- 
 fined homes — men who could be depended upon 
 to profit by the best facilities provided for them. 
 But side by side with these there were not only 
 the children of poverty and obscurity — such 
 there had always been, and from this class had 
 arisen some of the most eminent of Americans 
 — but a numerous body of students from fam- 
 ilies wealthy without inherited ideals, or promi- 
 nent without distinction. These persons were 
 ready to allege their riches as a warrior might 
 allege his. weapons ; it was a reason for doing 
 
EXPEDIENTS ADOPTED 49 
 
 nothing contrary to their inclination, and espe- 
 cially for nonchalant perseverance in the crudi- 
 ties of Philistinism. 
 
 Two possibilities presented themselves as 
 contributory to the solution of the overwhelm- 
 ing problem. Training implied small classes ; so 
 training was not to be thought of. What, then, 
 could be done with students in large masses ? 
 They could have frequent practice in writing 
 about subjects with which they were presumably 
 already conversant; and they could listen to 
 lectures on English literature. In the one way, 
 they could, if not form a style, at least learn to 
 avoid the most vulgar errors ; in the other, they 
 could acquire a tincture of information concern- 
 ing authors and their works, and learn to speak 
 with decision about books which they perhaps 
 had never read, and on which they had certainly 
 never reflected. 
 
 In the smaller colleges matters were not so 
 bad, at least as respects the size of the classes. 
 There was therefore an opportunity to do good 
 teaching, and in many instances good teaching 
 was done. But two forces militated against ex- 
 cellence. The one was the influence of the larger 
 colleges, exerted through their graduates and 
 through public discussion ; and this, as we have 
 seen, was unavoidably in the direction of super- 
 ficiality. The other was the uncertainty respect- 
 
50 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 ing the best methods of instruction, due in part 
 to the recent enrolment of English among the 
 favored topics of the curriculum, in part to the 
 variety of related subjects which might be com- 
 prehended under the term, and in part to the 
 peculiar nature of English itself. To some it was 
 clear that, since English was a language like 
 Latin or Greek, with words and syntax, it could 
 be taught like Latin or Greek, largely through 
 etymological and grammatical exercitations or 
 notes, with some assistance from the explana- 
 tion of historical allusions and the citation of 
 parallel passages. To others it was equally clear 
 that, since English was our native tongue, it 
 stood in no need of learned commeutary, and 
 that nothing was necessary but to read it — read 
 it rapidly, extensively, and with interest. Some, 
 who had studied in Germany, were for carrying 
 every word back to what they called Anglo- 
 Saxon ; others had not so much as heard whether 
 there were any Anglo-Saxon, but at all events 
 were positive that it had no connection with 
 modern English. Some loved poetry and aesthet- 
 ics, and would none of Dryasdust ' philology ; ' 
 others believed in applying the scientific method 
 to literature, and eschewing impressionism and 
 the musical glasses. All of us, I suppose, have 
 done the best we knew how; it has not been 
 our fault if we have insisted upon our personal 
 
VIEWS CONCERNING RHETORIC 51 
 
 predilections, or taken up with other people's 
 fads; the truth of it is that while Greek and 
 Latin were taught according to a system and a 
 method, good or bad, we had none upon which 
 we were agreed, and, from the very nature of 
 the case, could have none. 
 
 Among the rhetorical teachers it was nearly or 
 quite as bad as among the professors of literature. 
 There were those who depended upon negative 
 precepts — ' Don't ' writ large over many things 
 reprehensible according to literary convention 
 or the individual preceptor; those whose main 
 reliance was upon constant practice in writing, 
 with a minimum of precept ; those who followed 
 the rhetoric of the eighteenth century, rewritten 
 to date at the behest of enterprising publishers ; 
 and those who believed that students would never 
 mend till the English they spoke and wrote was 
 regarded as the common concern of all depart- 
 ments of instruction, and not relegated to one 
 or a very few instructors, who in this way were 
 made the scapegoats or whipping-boys not only 
 for the sins of the whole student body, but also 
 for the negligence of their other teachers. Here, 
 again, we may not censure, and must certainly 
 find much to admire. But if personal initiative 
 is pardonable — nay, even praiseworthy — in 
 those who have to sustain the first onset of an 
 unexpected attack, and if we marvel at the pluck 
 
52 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 with which one clubs his weapon and another 
 flings a stone, it is not therefore to be doubted 
 that the manual of arms is, on the whole, an ex- 
 cellent book and worthy to be studied, nor that 
 conduct and harmony of action are what an army 
 chiefly needs. 
 
 While the colleges were thus struggling with 
 their difficulties, how was it faring with the 
 schools ? In the lower schools training had been 
 largely abandoned. ' Heading without tears ' 
 was the watchword. The pupil must at all hazards 
 be kept ' interested ' ; that is to say, amused and 
 distracted. ' Language-lessons ' took the place 
 of grammar, and the ' word-method ' of spelling. 
 Spelling and grammar, therefore, became as obso- 
 lete as the mediaeval trivium and quadrivium, 
 and were reckoned among the lost arts. Instead 
 of a few things well learned, there were many 
 things badly taught. Now to know many things 
 badly has from of old been regarded as a poor 
 equipment for facing the stern * Stand and 
 deliver ! ' of life. 
 
 It was thus the high school and the academy 
 that were to be caught between the upper and 
 the nether millstone. For the colleges, finding 
 an illiteracy confirmed by the habits of half a 
 generation too deeply rooted to be eradicated 
 within a reasonable time, at least with the means 
 at their disposal, began to consider whether this 
 
ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS 53 
 
 inveteracy were not, on the whole, a thing to be 
 deplored ; and eventually opined that it was. 
 They then began to frame entrance requirements 
 in English, designed to remove the more igno- 
 minious phases of this illiteracy before college 
 years, either through some acquaintance with 
 English literature, or through practice in writing, 
 or both. The requirements were of varying de- 
 grees of severity ; but that mattered little, since 
 they were seldom enforced, and never with the 
 rigor which a decent regard to the opinions of 
 enlightened humanity would have exacted. When 
 the high schools were remonstrated with for the 
 ignorance and slovenliness which they permitted, 
 they alleged the prescriptive requirements of the 
 colleges on the one hand, and on the other the 
 inexorable demands of a public which expected 
 them to teach bookkeeping, physics, chemistry, 
 physiology, botany, geology, civics, political 
 economy, manual training, domestic economy — 
 all the * preparation for actual life.' How, then, 
 could they take up English in addition ? * Eng- 
 lish, forsooth ! — but yet if our pupils are minded 
 to read certain books at home, and report the fact 
 at school, we will see what can be done. Still, it 
 is a crying injustice that we should be expected 
 to retrieve all the deficiencies remaining through 
 the negligence or incapacity of the lower schools.' 
 The pressure thus exerted by the colleges 
 
54 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 upon the preparatory schools has in many in- 
 stances been transmitted by them to the gram- 
 mar schools, with the result that the worst evils 
 are in course of being remedied ; and certain 
 high schools have courses in English extending 
 over four years, and with four or five exercises 
 a week, conducted by enthusiastic, winning, 
 and competent teachers. Unfortunately, there 
 is a premature movement on the part of a few 
 high schools to emancipate themselves from all 
 dependence upon college requirements — or, as 
 their representatives would say, an unreasonable 
 obstinacy on the part of the colleges in holding 
 to their requirements — a movement which, 
 unless carefully watched, will go far to nullify 
 the progress which has been made, since it is 
 only through the harmonious cooperation of all 
 parts of our educational system that the indis- 
 pensable results can be attained. 
 
 Though there is still much to be desired, there 
 is considerable ground for encouragement. A few 
 of the gains of recent years may be briefly enu- 
 merated. 
 
 Through the agency of various bodies, chief 
 of which is perhaps the Conference on Uniform 
 Entrance Requirements in English, the chasm 
 which yawned between the colleges and the pre- 
 paratory schools is in process of being bridged 
 over. This Conference, composed of representa- 
 
HARMONIZING AGENCIES 55 
 
 tives from all sections of the country east of the 
 Rocky Mountains — California has its own ex- 
 cellent system of local cooperation — and from 
 colleges and preparatory schools alike, has set 
 up a standard not merely of college require- 
 ments, but also of high school attainment, which 
 is fairly satisfactory to the whole country; 
 thus measurably harmonizing the views of both 
 classes of institutions, as well as of the East, 
 the West, and the South. But in this effort it 
 has not stood alone. The National Educational 
 Association and its committee of ten ; the Associ- 
 ation of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the 
 Middle States and Maryland ; the Commission 
 of Colleges in New England ; the New England 
 Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools ; 
 the North Central Association of Teachers of 
 English ; the Association of Colleges and Pre- 
 paratory Schools of the Southern States ; the 
 Regents of the State of New York; and the 
 Schoolmasters' Association of New York City — 
 these, and other similar bodies, besides numer- 
 ous individuals whose names it would be invid-' 
 ious to mention, have contributed to the same 
 end. 
 
 With a better understanding of what the 
 secondary schools are expected to accomplish, 
 there has come more pride in the work ; a spirit 
 of emulation among the more aspiring of the 
 
56 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 schools ; a growing sense of professionalism 
 among the teachers of English ; and a demand 
 for special instruction, suited to the needs of 
 such teachers, on the part of the larger colleges 
 and universities. In many cases, as already ob- 
 served, excellent courses of instruction have been 
 formulated within the individual school, or by 
 bodies like the Connecticut Association of Clas- 
 sical and High School Teachers ; and in some 
 schools such programs are in successful opera- 
 tion. Then, too, rival publishing houses, finding 
 that it would be remunerative to focus their 
 attention upon the books set for the entrance 
 examinations, have competed with one another 
 in the issue of well-edited and attractive texts. 
 The interest in school-directed home reading is 
 sure to follow ; canny publishers will reap a har- 
 vest, and the public will be immensely benefited. 
 With all allowance for deficiencies and blun- 
 ders, then, we may fairly say that these results 
 have been accomplished. The pride and interest 
 of Americans in England's literature and that 
 of our own country; the craving for culture in 
 a form which promises so much return for so 
 little expenditure of effort ; the admiration for 
 our speech, because it is our own, because of 
 its wide diffusion and sway, and because of the 
 great works by which it has been illustrated ; and 
 the need and desire to employ the language as a 
 
SLOW EMERGENCE FROM CHAOS 57 
 
 means of communication, of persuasion, and of 
 artistic achievement — these, seconded by the 
 whole democratic and scientific trend of the cen- 
 tury, by the interest of other races in their own 
 vernaculars, and by the necessity of unifying our 
 heterogeneous population on the basis of a com- 
 mon speech and common sentiments, have not 
 only multiplied magazines and newspapers, and 
 cheapened books, but have introduced courses in 
 English into schools and colleges of every grade, 
 and taxed the energies and resources of every 
 teacher of the subject. Beginning sporadically, 
 and at first proceeding unevenly, the movement, 
 as it has gathered volume, has tended to absorb 
 the currents of individual opinion, and to render 
 them all unconsciously tributary to a distant 
 and perhaps as yet dimly perceived end. From 
 the chaos and welter of divergent opinion, cer- 
 tain conclusions have at least so far emerged 
 that we can now fairly say what the country 
 in general seeks as a requisite in English for 
 admission to college. This requirement is help- 
 ing to fix and direct the courses in English of 
 the secondary schools ; and these, in turn, cannot 
 fail to exercise a profound influence upon the 
 ideals and efforts of the grammar and primary 
 schools. In some degree, this establishment of 
 a common standard of entrance proficiency in 
 English tends to unify the college work, in so 
 
58 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 far as it eliminates certain tasks from the college 
 curriculum which have hitherto found a place 
 there because it was necessary that they should 
 be done somewhere. Further progress in the or- 
 ganization of college teaching is to be expected 
 through reflection upon the failures due to mis- 
 directed endeavor ; through the natural efforts 
 of rival institutions to equal or transcend one 
 another's successes ; through the lessons taught 
 by scientific pedagogy; and especially, it may 
 be, from graduate study of the subject, leading 
 to wider views and more philosophical generali- 
 zations. 
 
 It being assumed that important changes in 
 the conception of English teaching are now in 
 progress, and that we may confidently look for 
 a more general agreement with respect to the 
 precise nature of its purposes and processes, we 
 may ask ourselves whether current practice and 
 discussions will enable us to forecast what the 
 next steps will be, and how far they will leave 
 us short of a reasonable goal. In attempting 
 to find an answer, we must bear in mind that 
 if there are definable currents, there are also 
 counter-currents ; and that what is true of one 
 institution or one section of the country is not 
 necessarily true, at the same moment, somewhere 
 else. Were there not this confusion, and even 
 apparent contrariety of effort, it would be far 
 
POSSIBILITIES YET UNREALIZED 59 
 
 easier to outline the situation ; but this condition 
 would imply that the gain had been achieved, 
 and that henceforth we were to be content. Now 
 it is the sense of unrealized possibilities, and of 
 the field that they offer to hope and young am- 
 bition, for which the teacher of English is most 
 profoundly grateful, and which at times inspires 
 him with the sentiments of a Columbus or a 
 Magellan, if not of a Cortez or an Alexander. 
 
 If we look at the situation largely, this, I think, 
 may fairly be said at the moment : that the 
 emphasis is upon quantity rather than quality, 
 upon phenomena rather than principles, upon 
 practice rather than theory, or upon the science 
 rather than the philosophy of the subject. In 
 this respect English does not stand absolutely 
 alone, but the tendency is here more accentuated 
 because English is such a late comer into the 
 sisterhood of disciplines, and has yet so much to 
 learn. Colleges pride themselves on the number 
 of their English courses, their extent and their 
 variety ; we have had the daily theme, perhaps 
 with the addition of the weekly, the bi-weekly, 
 or the monthly essay ; grammar has been exten- 
 sively repudiated ; and the ' old rhetoric,' which 
 I take to be a statement of principles with the 
 necessary illustrations, has been supplanted by 
 a newer rhetoric, which tends, at least in one 
 of its phases, to become a collection of illustra- 
 
60 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 tive excerpts from literature, with a minimum 
 of elucidative theory. 
 
 In some quarters, the spirit of science, cautious 
 and inductive, is supplanting an older cocksure 
 dogmatism. The processes of the investigator's 
 laboratory are attempted in the class-room. The 
 student is brought face to face with facts, and 
 encouraged to draw his own inferences. He then 
 becomes conscious of a world of phenomena 
 which he cannot hope to master in a limited 
 time, but which is infinitely attractive by reason 
 of its complexity and vitality. Who would not 
 hesitate to criticize a mode of teaching which 
 is the scholar's mode of learning? The method 
 of science, from the days of Bacon onward, has 
 given man an ever increasing power over nature ; 
 why should it not be applicable to language and 
 literature, and if adopted in the study, why 
 should it not be practicable in the school ? It 
 is ; it must be. And yet we hesitate to stop with 
 a simple assent. Science is content with advances 
 which may be slow as the unspeeding precession 
 of the equinoxes, if only they be sure ; while 
 to the individual student, whether life be short 
 or not, pupilage needs must be. Moreover, lit- 
 erature belongs to the sphere of the emotions 
 and the will, at least as much as to that of the 
 pure intellect. And again, the novice may be in 
 a position to draw proximate inferences, while 
 
THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY 61 
 
 incapable of forming by himself those ultimate 
 conceptions which are regulative of the whole na- 
 ture, and which are as readily attained through 
 the medium of literature as through any branch y 
 of secular study. Besides, it is a fact that the 
 student hungers for the voice of authority ; he 
 can repose only in certitude — a certitude which 
 he finds it impracticable to attain by his own ef- 
 forts, yet without which he cannot act with the 
 freedom and power which the possession of truth 
 alone confers. In other words, the necessary 
 complement of science is philosophy. Philosophy 
 recognizes only a few great constitutive princi- 
 ples, which it attains by including many phe- 
 nomena under one law, and many subordinate 
 laws under one more comprehensive. With a 
 philosophy of literature one may approximately 
 comprehend its great manifestations; with the 
 science alone one has the pleasure of always 
 learning, but the disadvantage of never being 
 able to come to the knowledge of the truth. 
 
 The still easier way — to pursue only infinite 
 and uncoordinated, or at best loosely coordinated 
 detail — is to sacrifice strength, grasp, direction, 
 to the charm of waywardness, the delight of 
 endless straying. Yet it must be confessed that 
 to many minds the delight of endless straying 
 is unconquerable. They love variety and easy 
 appreciation ; they care not for a perception of 
 
62 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 unity and law which must be bought with ardu- 
 ous labor. The appeal of literature to them is, 
 1 Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.' And are 
 they to be blamed for yielding to the seductive 
 proffer ? 
 
 These considerations lead us to what is perhaps 
 the fundamental problem in the teaching of Eng- 
 lish literature — how to combine discipline with 
 delight. Given a certain temperament in the 
 speaker, and it is easy to interest or amuse classes 
 or audiences with English literature. It is not 
 so easy for persons of the like temperament, or 
 of any temperament whatever, to train others, or 
 themselves, by means of English literature. A 
 certain training is always secured in the acqui- 
 sition of a foreign or ancient language. This, 
 it is sometimes said, must be missed by the 
 student of his own : his memory and judgment 
 are not exercised in the same way, and he is 
 not called upon.to make the effort necessary for 
 comprehending alien modes of thought. Must 
 English literature, then, leave people where it 
 finds them, save for the pleasure it affords, the 
 fund of information it yields, and a certain 
 vague and unconscious effect in the refinement 
 of taste ? There are always those who will reply : 
 ' What more could you ask ? Is not this enough ? ' 
 There are never lacking those who say : l English 
 literature cannot be taught. The art of writing 
 
HOW THE GREEKS STUDIED HOMER 63 
 
 cannot be taught. English literature can be 
 read, and grammar can be taught. All subjects 
 whatever can be talked about, facts can be mem- 
 orized, examinations can be held, but literature 
 and the art of writing cannot be taught.' 
 
 Perhaps the dispute is one about words. Sup- 
 pose we change the terms, and ask, not whether 
 literature can be taught, but whether people can 
 be taught by means of literature. Antiquity evi- 
 dently thought so. Let us hear the testimony of 
 Professor Jebb: 1 'The study of the poets in 
 schools is described in Plato's Protagoras, . . . 
 The purpose was not only to form the boy's liter- 
 ary taste, or to give him the traditional lore ; it 
 was especially a moral purpose, having regard 
 to the precepts in the poets, and to the praises 
 of great men of old — " in order that the boy 
 may emulate their examples, and may strive to 
 become such as tbey." From this point of view, 
 Homer was regarded as the best and greatest 
 of educators. In Xenophon's Symposium one of 
 the guests says : " My father, anxious that I 
 should become a good man, made me learn all 
 the poems of Homer ; and now I could say the 
 whole Iliad and Odyssey by heart." . . . Espe- 
 cially, as Isocrates says, Homer was looked upon 
 as the embodiment of national Hellenic senti- 
 ment. No one else was so well fitted to keep the 
 
 1 Homer, p. 81. 
 
64 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 edge of Hellenic feeling keen and bright against 
 the barbarian.' 
 
 This is instructive in more than one way. Note 
 (1) that it is poetry that is studied; (2) that the 
 study is intimate and prolonged ; (3) that it does 
 not range over a boundless field ; (4) that it has 
 a direct and practical bearing upon life ; (5) that 
 it is a study of character and sentiments, not 
 primarily of words and technique. And not other- 
 wise is Horace's conception of the usefulness of 
 Homer in the Second Epistle of the First Book, 
 or Plutarch's in his treatise on How a Young 
 Man should study Literature. 1 
 
 Turning from antiquity to modern times, we 
 may ask ourselves what Milton — one of the 
 wisest men who have ever written on the training 
 of youth — thought about education as sought 
 through the recorded speech of the past. Remem- 
 ber that he wrote a Latin grammar, and made 
 extensive collections for a Latin dictionary, and 
 then listen to his assertion in the treatise On 
 Education : ' Though a linguist should pride him- 
 self to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the 
 world into, yet if he have not studied the solid 
 things in them, as well as the words and lexi- 
 cons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a 
 learned man as any yeoman or tradesman com- 
 
 1 See, for example, Padelf ord's translation ( Yale Studies in 
 English XV), pp. 61 ff. 
 
MILTON'S THEORY OF TEACHING 65 
 
 petently wise in his mother dialect only.' On 
 the premature practice of composition he has 
 to observe : ■ And that which casts our profi- 
 ciency therein so much behind ' — he is speaking 
 of Latin and Greek, but he would have held 
 the same respecting English — 4 is our time lost, 
 . . . partly in a preposterous exaction, forcing 
 the empty wits of children to compose themes, 
 verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest 
 judgment, and the final work of a head filled by 
 long reading and observing with elegant maxims 
 and copious invention. These are not matters to 
 be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of 
 the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit.' 
 
 Leaving the criticism of existing practices, 
 Milton next proceeds to develop his own plan. 
 He resumes : ' For their studies, first they should 
 begin with the chief and necessary rules of some 
 good grammar ; . . . and while this is doing, their 
 speech is to be fashioned to a distinct and clear 
 pronunciation, as near as may be to the Italian, 
 especially in the vowels.' When it comes to their 
 reading, he is of opinion that ' the main skill and 
 groundwork will be to temper them such lec- 
 tures and explanations, upon every opportunity, 
 as may lead and draw them in willing obedience, 
 inflamed with the study of learning and the ad- 
 miration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of 
 living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear 
 
66 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 to God and famous to all ages.' After much time 
 spent upon the useful arts and the best authors, 
 he would introduce his pupils to logic and the 
 theory of poetry. ' This,' he says, ' would make 
 them soon perceive . . . what religious, what 
 glorious and magnificent use might be made of 
 poetry, both in divine and human things.' And 
 here comes the conclusion of the whole matter, 
 so far as the practice of writing is concerned : 
 1 From hence, and not till now, will be the right 
 season of forming them to be able writers and 
 composers in every excellent matter, when they 
 shall be thus fraught with an universal insight 
 into things.' 
 
 Such was not only Milton's theory, but such 
 had already been his practice. As is well known, 
 he spent five years at Horton, after leaving the 
 university, in the perusal of the classics. And 
 what was the effect of this reading upon Milton 
 as man and as poet ? I will take the answer from 
 a contemporary Miltonic scholar : x ' To Milton 
 an extension of his reading was an extension of 
 his own life, with all its experience, sympathies, 
 and understanding, into the life and times of 
 which he read. ... It is a commonplace that 
 travel enlarges a man's nature. For the high and 
 sensitive mind books do the same, and in the case 
 
 1 Osgood, The Classical Mythology of Milton's English Poems, 
 p. xliii, 
 
HOW AUTHORS LEARN LITERATURE 67 
 
 of Milton the quality of wide range in his poetic 
 utterance was a direct consequence of the range 
 of his own mind, which his reading had done 
 much to extend.' In another place the same 
 writer says : ! ' In attempting to explain Milton's 
 power over his material, one word suggests itself. 
 ... It is his clearness of vision. With the de- 
 tailed scrutiny of the Renaissance added to the ex- 
 alted faith of the Middle Ages and the clearness 
 and intellectuality of true classicism, he looked 
 upon the world with a more perfect comprehen- 
 sion of its meaning and of the right purpose in 
 life. Throughout his poems there is passionate 
 but steady contemplation of things which men of 
 his time either failed to see, or saw but faintly 
 and apart from life itself. They are the eternal 
 truths which lie around and above this life, and 
 through which all things act in cooperation, and 
 not in contradiction, as it appears to the worldly 
 man.' 
 
 Here, then, we come back to our theme. 
 Whether or not literature can be taught, at 
 least the lesson of it can be learned. It was 
 learned by Dante, sitting at the feet of Virgil, 
 and Aristotle, and the authors of Scripture ; 
 by Chaucer, sitting at the feet of Ovid, and 
 Petrarch, and Guillaume de Lorris ; by Spen- 
 ser, sitting at the feet of Chaucer and Tasso ; by 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. lxviii. 
 
68 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 Burke, sitting at the feet of Cicero and Milton ; 
 by Tennyson, sitting at the feet of Homer, and 
 Virgil, and Dante, and Keats, and Wordsworth. 
 The great learners always learn meanings and 
 values. Incidentally, they may learn facts and 
 phrases and artifices ; they may learn to imitate ; 
 they may learn to appropriate ; they may even 
 learn to surpass; but the supreme thing they 
 learn is meanings and values — the meanings 
 of life, the relative values of the various pos- 
 sibilities that life offers. These things litera- 
 ture can teach us, if we will learn ; and these 
 things it is important that we, and our children, 
 should know. The great authors must know 
 them ; not alone the authors of permanent lit- 
 erature, but the authors of permanent freedom, 
 permanent empire, permanent civilization. Au- 
 thors, and all artists, are shapers ; and in Amer- 
 ica every one is called upon to be a shaper — to 
 shape his own destiny, the destiny of his country, 
 the destiny, in some sense, of the world. If he 
 does not know the meanings and values of things, 
 what shapes will he produce? And in all our 
 education, what shall teach him these meanings 
 and values, if not literature ? 
 
 It has been pertinently asked : ' Why has all 
 this teaching of English, in the last twenty 
 years, produced so little good literature ? What 
 is there to show for all the effort, for all the hue 
 
WHAT ARE THE FRUITS? 69 
 
 and cry ? Men like Lowell, bred up in the ancient 
 classics, and advocating them to the end, are 
 among the foremost in American letters. Their 
 successors, fed, without labor of their own, on 
 the accumulated stores of England and America 
 — where are they? who are they? what have 
 they produced ? ' Well, perhaps the fault is not 
 alone in the teaching of English. The matter 
 is by no means so simple as that. But certainly 
 the supreme justification for devoting so much 
 space to the subject of English would be found 
 in the production of authors, the production of 
 men, the production of statesmen and patriots, 
 who should equal — no, that would not be suffi- 
 cient ; who should surpass — the authors, the 
 men, the statesmen, and the patriots reared under 
 the tutelage of the ancient classics and the Bible. 
 We have all the advantage, for we have the an- 
 cient classics and the Bible too, in addition to 
 the treasures of our own literature. The English 
 teacher may teach Plato and Dante, Goethe and 
 Moliere, if he so choose, as well as Shakespeare 
 and Browning. Nay, if he is to teach meanings 
 and values, he must teach them, at least by im- 
 plication ; for his own sense of meanings and 
 values will be most imperfect if he do not him- 
 self know the best literature of all the world, 
 and constantly use it as the touchstone by which 
 to try the authors with whom he is dealing. 
 
70 THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH 
 
 Fortunately, there are signs which point that 
 safe and happy way. The validity of rhetori- 
 cal practice and precept is being tested by 
 an examination of the underlying psychology. 
 Here and there classes in poetical theory are 
 endeavoring to ascertain what qualities insure 
 the permanence and enduring charm of litera- 
 ture. Scholarship in English, through the agency 
 of our better graduate schools, is deepening as 
 well as widening, is growing more refined and 
 less mechanical. There is hope that the quanti- 
 tative test will be gradually supplanted by the 
 qualitative — that we shall forget to ask, ' How 
 much ? ' and begin to ask, ' How well ? ' But to 
 attain this result implies something more than 
 harmonious effort from the primary school to 
 the university; it implies that in every grade 
 the attention shall be steadfastly fixed, not upon 
 the demands of the next higher grade, but 
 upon the best things — the things eternally best 
 in their own nature, the things which most surely 
 conduce to the fullness and perfection of indi- 
 vidual and national life. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE RELATION OF WORDS TO 
 LITERATURE 
 
THE RELATION OF WORDS TO 
 LITERATURE 1 
 
 . . . We are told of Cuvier that, from a single 
 bone of a fossil animal, he could, whether or not 
 he had studied its anatomy previously, construct 
 its entire skeleton. Have we not profound respect 
 for the Greek archaeologist who can, from a few 
 broken capitals and ruined bases, reconstruct a 
 beautiful temple ? Do we not admire the sure- 
 ness of knowledge which enables one to eke out 
 the missing parts of an ancient statue ? What 
 skill is frequently displayed by palaeographers 
 in supplying letters, whole words, and sometimes 
 even several words of a mutilated inscription ! 
 In a note to Matthew Arnold's essay on Celtic 
 literature, Lord Strangford shows how, by simi- 
 lar study, the forms of a prehistoric language 
 can be ascertained with certainty. He says : * By 
 true inductive research, based on an accurate 
 comparison of such forms of Celtic speech, oral 
 and recorded, as we now possess, modern phi- 
 lology has, in so far as was possible, succeeded in 
 
 1 From an address delivered at Vassar College, February 
 19, 1906. 
 
74 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 restoring certain forms of the parent speech, 
 and in so doing has achieved not the least strik- 
 ing of its many triumphs ; for these very forms, 
 thus restored, have since been verified past all 
 cavil by their actual discovery in the old Gaulish 
 inscriptions recently come to light.' 
 
 Where the laws of nature have been in opera- 
 tion, as in the case of the bony structure of an 
 animal, and to some extent in the form of a 
 language, such reconstructions, though always 
 admirable, are perhaps not precisely wonderful. 
 Where human choice or will enters, as in the 
 productions of architecture and sculpture, or in 
 lapidary inscriptions, it might be supposed that 
 they would introduce an element of caprice, and 
 therefore of uncertainty ; yet we know how fre- 
 quently, and with how much sureness, the missing 
 parts are divined. This must be, then, because 
 such works of art, too, have a certain organic 
 character, because they cohere almost as do the 
 members of an animal. A squirrel with horns, 
 or a sheep with a trunk like an elephant — who 
 would think of postulating such monstrosities? 
 Now this sense of the monstrous, and hence of 
 the impossible, must grow, and become more and 
 more keen, in every capable person who devotes 
 himself to intensive study in any department. 
 Such a one will not look for the chiaroscuro 
 of Rembrandt in a fresco by Giotto, nor for the 
 
DIVINATION DUE TO HARD WORK 75 
 
 dreamy languors of a modern waltz in a fugue 
 or chorale by Bach. 
 
 In the field of literary investigation, reputa- 
 tions are now and again won, almost over night, 
 by the application of such principles. Some 
 thirty years ago, a student of the Germanic 
 languages, reading over an Old English poem 
 of considerable length, called the Genesis, was 
 struck by the fact that five or six hundred lines, 
 in the heart of the poem, seemed to differ in 
 various respects from the lines which preceded 
 and followed. Pursuing his inquiry further, and 
 comparing the forms of these lines with those 
 of a kindred language, he came to the conclu- 
 sion that this section, which had always been 
 supposed to be original Old English, had been 
 in fact translated from Old Saxon, the conti- 
 nental Germanic tongue referred to above, and 
 was therefore led to believe in the existence of 
 an Old Saxon poem on this subject of Genesis, 
 though he was obliged to confess that he had 
 found no other trace of its existence. Some 
 twenty years after, another scholar, at work in 
 the Vatican Library, which had only recently 
 rendered its treasures more accessible, discovered 
 a fragment of the missing Old Saxon Genesis, 
 of which probably no one had read a line for a 
 thousand years. Yet such had been the faith of 
 competent scholars in Sievers' processes that no 
 
76 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 one was surprised when the missing manuscript 
 swam into sight, any more than astronomers 
 were amazed when the telescope pointed to the 
 quarter of the heavens indicated by Adams and 
 Leverrier, and revealed the planet Neptune, 
 which no human eye till then had ever seen. 
 Professor Sievers might have read histories of 
 Old English literature, and essays on it, for 
 decades; he might have read this poem in a 
 casual way a score of times, just as Adams and 
 Leverrier might have rushed about the sky with 
 their telescopes for unnumbered nights, without 
 anything to reward their diligence ; but by the 
 intensive methods they actually employed, Sie- 
 vers became famous at twenty-five, and Adams 
 immortalized himself at twenty-seven. 
 
 A little reflection will show that intensive 
 study is compatible with extensive, and, in fact, 
 is impossible without it. Adams and Leverrier 
 could not hope to discover Neptune save through 
 an acquaintance with the whole planetary system. 
 If Sievers had known no other language than 
 Old English, it would have been to compara- 
 tively little purpose that he studied the Gene- 
 sis, The person who investigates Milton line by 
 line, and word by word, must know more than 
 a little of the ancient poets, of Spenser and of 
 Shakespeare, if his intensive study is to yield 
 him the richest returns. 
 
AN ILLUSTRATION FROM ARCHAEOLOGY 77 
 
 Nothing will sooner convince one of the neces- 
 sity for wide knowledge of his chosen subject 
 than an attempt to master some small corner of 
 it. Not long ago an archaeologist was studying 
 the representations of the god Pan in sculp- 
 ture and the allied arts. Side by side with the 
 numerous figures of a bearded and goat-footed 
 deity, with prominent horns, he came upon some 
 of quite a different type, in which the god was 
 represented as a beardless youth, with merely 
 incipient horns half-hidden by his clustering 
 hair, and with no other sign of animality about 
 him. How was this to be explained ? Had our 
 intensive student been narrow in his outlook and 
 knowledge, he must have rested in a statement 
 of this discrepancy. Being such as he was, how- 
 ever, he had no difficulty in showing that the 
 youthful type was merely a slight modification 
 of a famous statue by the sculptor Polycletus, 
 called the Doryphoros, or spear-bearer. Provided 
 with inconspicuous horns, and with a sheep-hook 
 instead of a spear, this figure was readily trans- 
 formed into a statue highly acceptable to those 
 worshipers of Pan who demanded more beauty or 
 dignity in the semblance of their deity than fig- 
 ures of the usual type possessed. Whenever a new 
 statue, or fragment of a statue, is discovered in 
 Greece, professional students are at once ready to 
 draw upon all extant knowledge of the subject 
 
78 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 in order to identify the personage depicted, and 
 to assign the marble or bronze to its epoch, its 
 school, or its individual creator. 
 
 Let me now attempt to illustrate the intensive 
 study of literature by an example taken from 
 so well-known a poet as Tennyson. The poem I 
 have selected is already comparatively short, but 
 I shall still further limit myself, and examine 
 only a small portion of it ; and even this I shall 
 not attempt to study as minutely as might be 
 necessary if one were intent on making discov- 
 eries concerning a poem whose relations were 
 otherwise unknown. As I shall need, however, 
 to touch upon what Matthew Arnold has called 
 natural magic, and the peculiar susceptibility to 
 it shown by the Celtic genius, I must first direct 
 your attention to one or two sentences from the 
 essay on Celtic literature in which he deals with 
 that phase of the subject. Speaking of the Celt, 
 he says (p. 82) : ' His sensibility gives him a 
 peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature 
 and the life of nature ; here, too, he seems in a 
 special way attracted by the secret before him, 
 the secret of natural beauty and natural magic, 
 and to be close to it, to half-divine it.' He 
 finds the Celtic quality in Reynolds and Tur- 
 ner as painters (p. 93). * They succeed,' says he, 
 'in magic, in beauty, in grace, in expressing 
 almost the inexpressible. Here is the charm of 
 
TENNYSON'S MERLIN AND THE GLEAM 79 
 
 Keynolds' children and Turner's seas ; the im- 
 pulse to express the inexpressible carries Turner 
 so far that at last it carries him away.' 
 
 Turning to the poem we have selected, Tenny- 
 son's Merlin and The Gleam, we find that it was 
 written in his late maturity, three years before 
 his death, and when he was eighty years old. 
 He had long been familiar with the Celtic le- 
 gends concerning Arthur, and the Idylls of the 
 King are touched with not a little of Celtic im- 
 aginativeness. In Hallam Tennyson's Memoir 
 his father is made to say : ' In the story of Mer- 
 lin and Nimue I have read that Nimue means the 
 Gleam — which signifies in my poem the higher 
 poetic imagination.' With the very title of the 
 poem thus coming from a Celtic source, it would 
 not be surprising if the poem itself were suffused 
 with Celtic magic. If Tennyson were to suffuse 
 it with magic, and especially with Celtic magic, 
 what words would he be likely to make use of to 
 effect his purpose ? Evidently he would not use 
 any chance words that he might happen to re- 
 call, but would make a definite selection of such 
 as would be full of the requisite connotations. 
 
 Now let us see what he has done. The poem 
 contains nine stanzas. Every stanza ends with 
 the words, 4 The Gleam ; ' that is to say, the 
 theme — the higher poetic imagination in its re- 
 lation to the poet — recurs in the manner of a 
 
80 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 refrain. It is a light — a fugitive, a traveling, 
 an advancing light — which the poet is to fol- 
 low throughout his poem, as throughout his life. 
 By this means he will obtain movement — move- 
 ment which he will express by numerous verbs 
 — movement, and occasional rest, and movement 
 again, movement prolonged, as it were, beyond 
 the end of his poem, and even of his life. Move- 
 ment, and a light — a light appearing not only 
 for itself, but also for the illumination which it 
 may shed upon objects exposed to it. The move- 
 ment gives unity to the poem: we follow the 
 gleam in its wanderings until it disappears be- 
 yond the poem's verge, and then the poem ceases. 
 / Now what sort of word is needed to denote 
 this light ? Shall it be ' ray ' — or ' beam ' — or 
 ' glow ' — or ' glint ' — or ' spark ' — or ' flash ' — 
 or ' blaze ' — or ' flame ' — or' sheen ' — or ' splen- 
 dor ' ? We might discuss each of these, and 
 find reasons for rejecting them all. Some of the 
 reasons for selecting ' gleam ' may be discovered 
 in Tennyson's own use of the word as noun and 
 verb. ' Gleam,' with him, may suggest cold light 
 or warm light. Perhaps it is rather cold than 
 warm in The Miller's Daughter (115, 116) : 
 The white chalk-quarry from the hill 
 Gleamed to the flying moon by fits. 
 
 Here we are made to associate the word with 
 alternate appearance and disappearance. 
 
THE CHOICE OF A WORD 81 
 
 We cannot doubt which is meant in the line 
 from The Two Voices (182) : 
 
 Beyond the polar gleam forlorn. 
 In Merlin and Vivien (223) : 
 
 Like sallows in the windy gleams of March. 
 In Loclcsley Hall (4) we have something forbid- 
 ding: 
 
 Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley 
 Hall. 
 
 On the other hand, in addressing Margaret, the 
 
 poet says : 
 
 Lulled echoes of laborious day 
 Come to you, gleams of mellow light 
 Float by you on the verge of night. 
 
 But the quality which we should chiefly expect 
 to find in the poem before us occurs in a much 
 earlier poem, The Two Voices (380) : 
 
 Moreover, something is or seems 
 t That touches me with mystic gleams, 
 
 Like glimpses of forgotten dreams. 
 
 The thought of our poem, as well as this word, 
 Tennyson might have derived from Words- 
 worth's lines on . Peele Castle — the familiar 
 
 lines : 
 
 — And add the gleam, 
 The light that never was on sea or land, 
 The consecration, and the poet's dream. 
 
 As early as the Elizabethan period the word 
 was dowered with mystical associations, or at 
 
82 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 least associations of high poetical beauty, such 
 as Matthew Arnold might call Celtic. The 
 seventeenth century had but just begun when 
 Marston wrote (Antonio and Mellida, Act 3) : 
 
 Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn that flakes 
 With silver tincture the east verge of heaven ? 
 
 Thus we see that Tennyson had already in- 
 vested the word with the necessary atmosphere 
 in the earlier part of his life, that he had possibly 
 taken it over from Wordsworth in just the sense 
 needed here, and that its poetic possibilities had 
 been discovered when Shakespeare was in mid 
 career. Could one ask a more appropriate history 
 in the case of a word which was to dominate 
 such a poem? Perhaps not; but we have not 
 yet exhausted its appropriateness. The English 
 language does not yield up its riches so easily ; 
 we must dig for them, as for hid treasures. 1 
 
 If we revert to the oldest period of English, 
 we shall find, in the first place, that 'gleam' 
 has always been a poetic word. In Old English 
 poetry it is used some five times — once as a 
 
 1 Joubert says : ' Like the fields, languages are enriched 
 by digging ; to make them fruitful, when they are no longer 
 virgin soil, we must dig deep.' And again : ' In literature it 
 is well for the writer to go back to the sources of a language, 
 because he thus opposes antiquity to fashion; and besides, 
 when a man discovers in his native tongue that touch of unfa- 
 miliarity which stimulates and awakens the taste, he speaks it 
 better, and with more pleasure.' 
 
EARLY MEANING OF 'GLEAM' 83 
 
 synonym for the sun, once of the brightness of the 
 sun as it causes vegetation to revive in spring, 
 once of the glorious beauty of the earth, once 
 of a heavenly light appearing in the darkness of 
 night, and once of the radiance of beautiful maid- 
 enhood. 1 Notwithstanding the effulgence which 
 it originally denoted, the word is somewhat re- 
 motely akin to glimmer and glimpse. We now 
 begin to see why it is so marvelously adapted to 
 our poem. When the lexicographer defines the 
 word, he does so in the following terms: 4 In 
 early use, a brilliant light (e. g. of the sun). In 
 mod. use, a subdued or transient appearance of 
 light, emitted or reflected.' The poet, then, has 
 warrant in the history of the word for increas- 
 ing or diminishing the light it designates. In 
 this respect its meaning has not been fixed, 
 any more than in the steadiness of the shining. 
 Tennyson's 
 
 Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley 
 Hall 
 
 1 It is of course not necessary to assume that Tennyson 
 was familiar with the earliest history of the word ; it is suffi- 
 cient to realize that it had come down to him from a remote 
 antiquity invested with poetic associations, some constant, and 
 some gradually acquired, of which he could avail himself on 
 occasion. The picture mellowed hy centuries has richer and 
 deeper tones than the same picture when it left the painter's 
 hand ; hut the later effects repose upon the earlier, and are 
 evolved out of them. 
 
84 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 suggests fitfulness or intermittence. But when, 
 in The Two Voices (212), the poet speaks of those 
 who 
 
 Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, 
 
 the light implied is not necessarily unsteady, nor 
 does it seem to me to be so in Wordsworth's 
 
 — gleam, 
 The light that never was on sea or land. 
 
 Suppose we compare it in these respects with 
 glow, as in Milton's 
 
 — Now glowed the firmament 
 With living sapphires, 
 
 or in Tennyson's reference to the planet Mars 
 {Maud 3. 6. 14) : 
 
 As he glowed like a ruddy shield on the Lion's breast. 
 
 Is glow capable of such range — intensity and 
 fitfulness both considered? Or, not to neglect 
 other words beginning with gl, let us take glance, 
 as in The Brook : 
 
 I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance. 
 
 Is its range any wider? Or that of glitter, 
 or glimpse, or glimmer ? Glitter, like glimmer, 
 belongs to those frequentative formations in 
 -er which, by the very law of their constitution, 
 originally denote or imply unsteadiness. Kingsley 
 has {Misc. 2. 17) : ' As their wings glittered in 
 the light, they looked like flakes of snow.' Ten- 
 
'GLEAM' AND 'GLIMMER 1 85 
 
 nyson thus uses glimmer of a reflection (JEdwin 
 Morris 135) : 
 
 Her taper glimmered in the lake below. 
 
 And it hardly needs saying that glimpse im- 
 plies a similar unsteadiness, or rather fitfulness, 
 as with reference to the ghost of Hamlet's father, 
 who 
 
 Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon. 
 
 And now, if we return to our poem, we shall 
 see how Tennyson can use the kinship of two 
 words, the range of meaning in the one, and the 
 comparative fixity of the other, in stanza 6 : 
 
 For out of the darkness 
 
 Silent and slowly 
 
 The Gleam, that had waned to a wintry glimmer 
 
 On icy fallow 
 
 And faded forest, 
 
 Drew to the valley 
 
 Named of the shadow, 
 
 And slowly brightening 
 
 Out of the glimmer, 
 
 And slowly moving again to a melody 
 
 Yearningly tender, 
 
 Fell on the shadow, 
 
 No longer a shadow, 
 
 But clothed with The Gleam. 
 
 If we reflect that this is the darkest and most 
 horrible of all shadows, the shadow of death, we 
 shall feel the expansiveness, the latent potencies 
 
86 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 of this Gleam, which erstwhile ' had waned to a 
 wintry glimmer,' and shall find ourselves back 
 again with the solar effulgence recognized in Old 
 English, the * splendor in the grass,' the ' glory- 
 in the flower,' that victorious principle of life 
 and beauty which triumphs over ugliness and 
 triumphs over death. 
 
 A while ago I was speaking of the Celtic tone 
 of this poem. I might have spoken of a cer- 
 tain wistfulness and unrest, a dissatisfaction with 
 the actual, an unworldliness, almost an unearth- 
 liness, in it. I might have found in it sugges- 
 tions of that Celtic land of Brittany on which 
 a French lecturer has been so eloquently dis- 
 coursing in this country of late, or of that Celtic 
 land of Lyonnesse by the Cornish sea, where, 
 as the novice informs Guinevere, her father, as 
 he rode, 
 
 — An hour or maybe twain 
 After the sunset, down the coast, he heard 
 Strange music, and he paused, and turning — there, 
 All down the lonely coast of Lyonnesse, 
 Each with a beacon-star upon his head, 
 And with a wild sea-light about his feet, 
 He saw them — headland after headland flame 
 Far on into the rich heart of the west ; 
 And in the light the white mermaiden swam, 
 And strong man-breasted things stood from the sea, 
 And sent a deep sea- voice thro' all the land, 
 To which the little elves of chasm and cleft 
 Made answer, sounding like a distant horn. 
 
WORDS CONVEY ALIEN SENTIMENT 87 
 
 And yet, though I have insisted on the Celti- 
 cism present, and perhaps dominant, in the 
 poem, it will not have escaped your notice that 
 I have been dwelling at considerable length on a 
 word — the word gleam — which is not Celtic 
 at all, but Germanic, a word as Anglo-Saxon as 
 Anglo-Saxon can be. What is to be said under 
 these circumstances ? Am I not convicted of a 
 glaring non sequitur f Yes, unless the non se- 
 quitur be Tennyson's. The truth is, for one thing, 
 that the number of demonstrably Celtic words in 
 English is very small, so that the poet could not 
 convey Celtic feeling by this agency, if he would. 
 And then has not the example of * gleam ' shown 
 us that a word belonging to a race alien and 
 hateful to the Celt, a race which seemed to him 
 uncouth, barbarous, even stupid, may yet serve 
 admirably to convey Celtic sentiment ? 
 
 This principle may be illustrated from the whole 
 poem. In the first stanza, of ten lines and thirty- 
 five words (including repetitions), there are two 
 Latin words, both in the first line, one from Old 
 Norse, die, one from Old Persian, magician, and 
 all the rest pure English, or Anglo-Saxon. The 
 Old Persian word, if it be really such, is one of 
 might and mystery. An ancient writer says : * 
 • Among the Persians they who are wise respect- 
 ing the deity, and are his servants, are called 
 
 1 Porphyry, Be Abstin. 4. 16. 
 
88 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 magi.' There is considerable evidence to show 
 that both name and office of these magi were 
 originally Babylonian. Now what was magic, 
 among what nations was it practised, what was 
 it supposed to accomplish, what rites did it em- 
 ploy ? Was there any truth in it ? How long did 
 it persist ? When did it die out ? These questions 
 may suggest how little we know about the word 
 without deeper study. What should we think 
 about the Magi who came to worship Christ? 
 Where did they come from, and why did they 
 come ? Were their pursuits such as should de- 
 serve our respect? In Tennyson's Corning of 
 Arthur, we may remember in passing, Merlin 
 is called a mage (279-281) : 
 
 And there I saw mage Merlin, whose vast wit 
 And hundred winters are but as the hands 
 Of loyal vassals toiling for their liege. 
 
 Excluding the four words I have specified — 
 O and mariner Latin, die Old Norse, and magi- 
 cian Old Persian or Babylonian through Greek 
 — the others of the first stanza are all Anglo- 
 Saxon, as I have said. Does not this suggest 
 that there are unsuspected possibilities in com- 
 mon words ? We look at the familiar words of 
 the first stanza, such as haven, gray, eyes, wonder, 
 follow, and we say, ■ Oh, yes, we know them.' 
 Yes, but do we know them? If so, why cannot we 
 do with them what Tennyson could ? May it not 
 
ONE WAY TO STUDY WORDS 89 
 
 perhaps be that he saw deeper into them than 
 we do? We are told of Lord Chatham, certainly 
 one of the very greatest of English orators, that, 
 in addition to much practice in translating from 
 Demosthenes, and learning by heart many of the 
 sermons of Barrow, c he went twice through the 
 folio dictionary of Bailey (the best before that 
 of Johnson), examining each word attentively, 
 dwelling on its peculiar import and modes of 
 construction, and thus endeavoring to bring 
 the whole range of our language completely 
 under his control.' ! Why should he not have 
 confined himself, it might be thought, to the 
 uncommon and difficult words? Why examine 
 each word attentively, and dwell not only on its 
 peculiar import, but also on its modes of construc- 
 tion? Cannot a person of literary ambition, 
 desirous to be a commanding orator or laureate 
 poet, do better than that ? Apparently not ; or 
 at least there seems to be an advantage in his 
 doing that, whatever better things he may do. 
 
 ' But,' you say, ' it is not the words, but 
 the way they are put together.' Just so ; Lord 
 Chatham had apparently thought of this, too. 
 Or you say, ' It is not the words, but the music 
 of the verse.' Let us see. The verse of Merlin 
 and The Gleam follows the same pattern as that 
 of the dozen years earlier Battle of Brunanburh, 
 
 1 Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, p. 52. 
 
90 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 which Tennyson is supposed to have constructed 
 on an Old English model. Listen to the first 
 stanza of that poem: — 
 
 Athelstan King, 
 Lord among Earls, 
 Bracelet-bestower and 
 Baron of Barons, 
 He with his brother, 
 Edmund Atheling, 
 Gaining a lifelong 
 Glory in battle, 
 Slew with the sword-edge 
 There by Brunanburh, 
 Brake the shield-wall, 
 Hewed the linden-wood, 
 Hacked the battle-shield, 
 Sons of Edward with hammered brands. 
 
 Does that seem to you the magical and mystical 
 melody of the later poem ? Or does this? 
 
 Slender reason had 
 
 He to be glad of 
 
 The clash of the war-glaive — 
 
 Traitor and trickster 
 
 And spurner of treaties — 
 
 He, nor had Anlaf 
 
 With armies so broken 
 
 A reason for bragging 
 
 That they had the better 
 
 In perils of battle 
 
 On places of slaughter — 
 
 The struggle of standards, 
 
 The rush of the javelins, 
 
THE BRUNANBURH AND THE MERLIN 91 
 
 The crash of the charges, 
 The wielding of weapons — 
 The play that they played with 
 The children of Edward. 
 
 And now a stanza of the Merlin : 
 
 Then to the melody, 
 Over a wilderness 
 Gliding, and glancing at 
 Elf of the woodland, 
 Gnome of the cavern, 
 Griffin and Giant, 
 And dancing of Fairies 
 In desolate hollows, 
 And wraiths of the mountain, 
 And rolling of dragons 
 By warble of water, 
 Or cataract music 
 Of falling torrents, 
 Flitted The Gleam.' 
 
 Compare individual lines from the two poems : 
 
 Brake the shield-wall 
 with 
 
 or 
 
 with 
 
 or 
 
 with 
 
 Elf of the woodland ; 
 Hacked the battle-shield 
 Gnome of the cavern ; 
 The crash of the charges 
 By warble of water. 
 
92 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 Is it not evident that there is a difference, a 
 difference which becomes cumulative and em- 
 phatic in the sweep of a stanza, or the totality 
 of a poem ? And are not these cumulative effects 
 built up out of elements — of individual lines, 
 if you will, but, in the last analysis, out of ele- 
 ments smaller than individual lines, namely, out 
 of individual words ? 
 
 Now here belongs a truth which is frequently 
 overlooked. It is this: One does not truly 
 and completely know a word, as Lord Chatham 
 and Tennyson knew words, save through con- 
 trast and comparison. In a sense, one knows 
 nothing save by contrast and comparison. Cold, 
 they tell us, is absence of heat. It follows that 
 he who does not know heat does not know cold, 
 or at least is not in a position to appreciate 
 degrees of cold. So, if we recur to the Anglo- 
 Saxon words of the first stanza, we may say 
 that he does not know haven, as Lord Chatham 
 and Tennyson knew haven, who does not also 
 know harbor and port. Now in the first three 
 lines of the Merlin let us substitute harbor for 
 haven, making also two other substitutions, and 
 instead of 
 
 O young Mariner, 
 
 You from the haven 
 
 Under the sea-cliff,' 
 
 we shall have : 
 
ATTEMPTED SUBSTITUTIONS 93 
 
 O young Sea-dog, 
 You from the harbor 
 Under the promontory. 
 
 That does n't sound right, does it ? You say that 
 the third line is too long. Well, it has seven 
 syllables, and in the same poem we find 
 
 And streaming and shining on, 
 
 which also has seven syllables. Try this : 
 
 O young Skipper, 
 You from the harbor 
 Under the foreland, 
 
 and compare it with the original : 
 
 O young Mariner, 
 You from the haven 
 Under the sea-cliff. 
 
 As we reflect on the reasons why the one 
 sounds right, as we say, and the other does n't, 
 we shall discover that there are two principal 
 ones, and perhaps only two. The first concerns 
 the sound of the word in itself and in relation 
 to others — the proportion of light and heavy 
 syllables, the number and order of vowels, 
 liquids, dentals, gutturals. Compare in this re- 
 spect 
 
 The crash of the charges 
 with 
 
 By warble of water. 
 
94 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 The other relates to meaning and associations, 
 and associations are sometimes more than half 
 the meaning. Thus the word shipper ought to 
 suggest to us skiff, or ship — words to which it 
 is etymologically akin. It would be ignorance, 
 or mischief, or sheer perversity that would insist 
 upon any connection with the verb skip, or with 
 skipper in any sense derived from the verb skip ; 
 yet if that association should arise of itself, 
 how fatal it would be to our enjoyment of the 
 stanza ! But it does not need this particular 
 association to bar the word ; skipper will not do, 
 and sea-dog will not do, nor will promontory 
 do instead of sea-cliff. But why will not harbor 
 do ? If we look at Tennyson's use of it, we can 
 perhaps determine. In Enoch Arden (115-6) 
 we are told of Enoch that once 
 
 — Clambering on a mast 
 In harbor, by mischance he slipt and fell. 
 
 Later in the poem, the officers and men of the 
 ship which carried him back first made up a 
 purse for him, 
 
 Then moving up the coast they landed him 
 Even in that harbor whence he sailed before. 
 
 And now, in contrast with shipper and harbor, 
 consider mariner and haven. First mariner, 
 associated as it is with our thoughts of The An- 
 
MORE AND LESS KNOWLEDGE 95 
 
 dent Mariner, and with the line of The Lotus- 
 Eaters (173) : 
 O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. 
 
 And then haven, how it brings back — 
 
 And the stately ships go on 
 To their haven under the hill. 
 
 Ask us if we know haven, harbor, mariner, 
 and we confidently, almost scornfully, answer 
 yes, that we cannot remember when we did n't 
 know them; but isn't there a difference, after 
 all, between knowing and knowing, between 
 knowing as merely recognizing and knowing as 
 possessing the inmost secrets of a word — the 
 whole range of its melody, the whole hideous- 
 ness of its cacophony, the whole train of shadowy 
 forms which it evokes, stretching on and on 
 with various degrees of palpability and evanes- 
 cence, some bold and distinct, and others melt- 
 ing, like the faintest curl of a summer cloud, into 
 the viewless air ? But if we are to attain this — 
 this sense not only of the word in itself, but of 
 its contrasting values, and what we may call its 
 combining power, we must have a much more 
 extensive and perfect apparatus than at present. 
 For this purpose we need concordances of many 
 more authors, and lexicons of some — the means 
 of confronting, not merely word with word, but 
 context with context, passage with passage, poem 
 
96 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 with poem. There is before me at this moment 
 talent and industry enough to make priceless 
 additions, in the course of two or three years, 
 to our resources for exploring and evaluating 
 the treasures of our tongue, and for providing 
 teachers of literature with instruments for con- 
 veying to the minds and hearts of their stu- 
 dents the most delicate, the most precious, the 
 most vital products of all civilization. The tasks 
 are comparatively simple ; the most that they 
 demand is industry and a devoted spirit, such 
 industry and devotion as have linked insepara- 
 bly, for all time, the name of Bartlett with the 
 name of Shakespeare, and the name of Ellis 
 with that of Shelley. 
 
 I had hoped to dwell at some length on stanza 
 4 of the Merlin poem — on the wild animals, in 
 Old English ' wild deer,' from which the wilder- 
 ness takes its name ; on the griffins, and giants, 
 and dragons, all of them Greek, yet bowing here 
 to the Celtic enchantment ; on elf, which is Ger- 
 manic ; on fairy — which originally meant not 
 a being, but magic, and then fairy-land and 
 fairy-folk, before it came to mean the individual 
 fairy — and how fairy, or rather fay, comes from 
 the Latin fatum, so that fairies are a kind of 
 Fates ; on gnome, and how Paracelsus, the Para- 
 celsus of Browning's poem, coined the name, 
 
POSSIBILITIES OF VERBAL STUDY 97 
 
 and the Jewish cabalists, long centuries before, 
 perhaps evolved the idea ; on all the downpour 
 and crash of wild and ruining waters in cataract, 
 and how it differs from cascade, and waterfall, 
 and fall ; on all the sweet humanities inherent 
 in music, the art of the Muses, and how Plato 
 calls the study of philosophy the noblest and 
 best of music ; * and then point out how Tenny- 
 son brings together these two magnificent words, 
 cataract and music, in the same line. I might 
 have gone over all the verbs which express the 
 motion of the Gleam — and its rest — asking you 
 to remark their variety, and their specific appro- 
 priateness in each instance; or I might have 
 called attention to the twofold appeal to the 
 senses made by the poem, how light and music 
 conspire, how 
 
 Moving to melody, 
 Floated The Gleam, 
 
 and how, when 
 
 The landskip darkened, 
 The melody deadened. 
 
 I have wished, however, merely to do one thing 
 — to show you by a few examples the relation 
 of words to literature, in order to emphasize the 
 relation of the study of words to the study of 
 literature ; to show you, if I could, that the study 
 1 Phcedo 61 A. 
 
98 RELATION OF WORDS TO LITERATURE 
 
 of words might be so intense and penetrating 
 as to conduce to the perception of literary value 
 and beauty ; in short, to persuade you, if you 
 needed persuasion, that there might be a study 
 of linguistics which should be literary, as there 
 might be a study of literature which should be 
 linguistic. 
 
IV 
 
 AIMS IN THE GRADUATE STUDY OF 
 ENGLISH 
 
AIMS IN THE GRADUATE STUDY 
 OP ENGLISH 1 
 
 Into an age of gold like ours, which is, by rea- 
 son of that fact, an age of iron ; into an age of 
 strenuous endeavor, to what end men know not, 
 and seem not to care ; into an age of intellectual 
 ferment, which precipitates nothing precious and 
 substantial ; into an age which everywhere seeks 
 out origins, and ignores a Primal Cause ; into 
 an age which tosses in fevered unrest, reaching 
 out blindly for a dimly apprehended good, are 
 born, must be born from time to time, those 
 who are to point to the fountains of cool water, 
 to the true riches, to the Source and Aim of 
 man's transitory life upon earth. They must 
 be born, if matter is not permanently to enthrall 
 spirit, the enduring to be even as the ephem- 
 eral ; unless man is to reel back into the beast, 
 and rage and wallow like the dragon of the slime. 
 They must be born, or else, to man at least, 
 
 The pillared firmament is rottenness, 
 And earth's base built on stubble. 
 
 1 Address delivered at Princeton University, January 13, 1906. 
 
 L.0FC. 
 
102 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 How, when born, are they to be discovered, 
 shown their appointed task, and so trained that 
 they shall work effectively towards peace, har- 
 mony, justice, stability, and all the ends of spir- 
 itual being ? This is the master-problem of the 
 State, and the State delegates it, in large mea- 
 sure, to the University, as the University shares 
 it, in turn, with its constituent bodies and with 
 the educational agencies subordinate to it. How 
 shall the true leaders of humanity be selected, 
 and disciplined for their mission? This, I re- 
 peat, is the chief problem^ as its solution is the 
 prime function, of the University, since upon 
 finding its answer the very existence of the 
 State depends ; and it is a problem which by 
 no other agency can be solved so well. 
 
 Such being the case — for I assume that on 
 this point there will be no dissent — there have 
 been, and in that sense are, three classes of spir- 
 itual leaders who stand preeminent above others. 
 They are not alone ; they are powerfully rein- 
 forced by the representatives of other classes; 
 but in the nature of things, and notwithstanding 
 the deficiencies or unworthiness of individual 
 members, they have stood, and deserve to stand, 
 above all the rest. These three classes are: 
 ministers of religion ; poets ; and teachers of 
 the humanities — by humanities meaning the 
 branches of learning which are concerned pri- 
 
THE CLERGYMAN AND THE POET 10# 
 
 marily with the nobler spiritual achievements 
 and possibilities of human nature. 
 
 Of these, the minister of religion, in his two- 
 fold function of prophet and priest — Aaron and 
 Moses in one — ought to be more serviceable 
 to man than either of the others. His office 
 is directly authorized by God; he is supposed 
 to enter it with the fullest conviction and the 
 most ardent zeal; he is inducted into it with 
 the most solemn sanctions ; he consecrates hu- 
 manity at the three chief epochs or crises of 
 its existence — before the cradle, the marriage- 
 altar, and the tomb ; and he is listened to with 
 attention, if not always with reverence, whenever 
 he speaks in his sacred character. 
 
 The poet represents for our purpose the whole 
 confraternity of artists, partly because the range 
 of his expression is wider than that of any other 
 artist — since he can at once suggest sculpture 
 and utter himself in music — and partly because 
 he can search more deeply, and stir more power- 
 fully, the secret places of the soul. Dante rules 
 a more extensive domain than Giotto, or Fra 
 Angelico, or Botticelli, and with a more absolute 
 sway, since he rules them also. Even when we 
 are inclined to object the variety of arts in which 
 Michael Angelo excelled, we must not forget 
 that Dante was his master, too. Now, the poet at 
 his highest is the unaccredited ambassador from 
 
x04 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 heaven to earth. He is God's spy, unavowed, 
 sent to unriddle the moral universe in the inter- 
 est of man, to exhibit its cosmical beauty, to set 
 it to music. With the poet we should class the 
 philosopher of clearest and most piercing vision 
 — such revealers as Plato, who suggest more 
 than they can distinctly express. 
 
 The third class, the expounders of the human- 
 ities, comprises all true teachers of literature, 
 history, and philosophy. They are the ones who 
 build up in the spirit of their pupils, by the 
 systematic processes of academic instruction, 
 the vision of a noble past or of a noble future. 
 The teacher of philosophy, by disclosing what is 
 innate in man as man, points directly to future 
 realizations of his true self. The gaze of the 
 teacher of history or literature is rather retro- 
 spective, in so far as he tries to re-create the great 
 past in the imagination of his hearers. But the 
 philosopher must also rehearse the history of 
 thought, while history and literature are full 
 of inspiration for him who would work in the 
 present. The historian deals primarily with 
 man organized — politically, socially, or eco- 
 nomically — and therefore seems often to be 
 concerned with the shell or husk of things ; yet 
 there is no just reason why he may not view the 
 past as keenly as Shakespeare. The business of 
 the teacher of literature is essentially with the 
 
THE PROVINCES OF LITERATURE 105 
 
 heart of man, yet he may broaden his scope to 
 contemplate ideal commonwealths, or the golden 
 days of Pericles and the Antonines. 
 
 The teachers of literature are conventionally 
 classified into teachers of Greek, of Latin, of 
 Italian, French, German, English, and the like ; 
 yet for our purpose they have one common func- 
 tion, to make man free of his own heritage, to 
 acquaint him with the hill-tops and dingles, the 
 groves and streams, the highways and paths, of 
 his own spiritual estate. What man has achieved, 
 or conceived of himself as achieving, in the realm 
 of spirit, is their common subject. Their prov- 
 inces are not 4 conterminous; they overlap, or are 
 superimposed. No one can comprehend Latin 
 literature who is not versed in its Greek anteced- 
 ents, nor Italian or French literature who knows 
 nothing of Latin writers, nor English literature 
 who knows not something of all these. I am ac- 
 quainted with a teacher of Homer who has Milton 
 always on his tongue in the class-room, and a 
 teacher of Milton who has ransacked the ancient 
 classics for the materials which are woven into 
 the fabric of Paradise Lost and the minor poems. 
 Shorey's edition of Horace will occur to you 
 all as a book replete with apt quotations from 
 English literature, and this is as it should be. 
 How should we like to be taught Goethe by a 
 man whose imagination had never traveled to the 
 
106 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 shores of the Mediterranean? What should we 
 say of the teacher of Moliere who knew nothing 
 of Plautus and Terence, or the teacher of Wyatt 
 and Surrey who knew nothing of Petrarch ? 
 
 So far, then, as literature is concerned, we 
 might appropriately have one great department, 
 with the fullest coordination and interrelation 
 among its several provinces. In it each teacher, 
 nominally assigned to represent a nationality or 
 an epoch, should be encouraged to make himself 
 to some reasonable extent free of all, and, while 
 emphasizing his own special branch of the total 
 subject, should draw illustrations and compari- 
 sons from every quarter. 
 
 But the creators of literature, and the races 
 of which they are the most eminent spokesmen, 
 reveal themselves not alone through drama and 
 lyric, through epic and prose narrative, regarded 
 as wholes. Every fragment of such composi- 
 tions, every minutest element, nay, every indi- 
 vidual word, bears its proportion of the poetry 
 diffused throughout the whole. Language, we 
 are told, is fossil poetry ; and it is so even when 
 detached from its place in masterpieces, and 
 even, to some extent, when it has never found 
 its way into masterpieces at all. For the creative 
 impulse in the heart of man discloses itself not 
 alone in great syntheses, an Odyssey or a King 
 Lear, but also in single phrases, even in single 
 
LINGUISTICS RELATED TO LITERATURE 107 
 
 words, as yet, perhaps, uncombined into any- 
 thing properly to be called literature. Every 
 such word, in each several language, has its own 
 aura of associations, due to its primal meaning 
 and to all the experiences through which it has 
 passed since its birth. Just as grief and joy 
 print their traces on the countenance, and just as 
 the original configuration of the features is deter- 
 mined in large measure by heredity, so words 
 acquire their peculiar character, — bearing, as it 
 were, the stamp of many dies, which have im- 
 pressed themselves in succession, and with vary- 
 ing force, upon the original physiognomy. Does 
 peace or joy mean the same thing to us as pax 
 or gaudium to Julius Caesar ? I trow not. Do 
 gaudy and joyous suggest to us identical notions ? 
 Yet, according to our best information, they 
 spring from the same original. The teacher of 
 Greek or Grerman, then — to confine ourselves 
 for the moment to languages relatively underiva- 
 tive — has, besides his general interest in all 
 literatures related to his own, a more particular 
 interest in these fragments or elements of litera- 
 ture which we call words, or, collectively, lan- 
 guage. Moreover, in the modern tongues at 
 least, and most of all in English, he has to reckon 
 with forms which have been derived from other 
 languages, and with attempts, by means of na- 
 tive terms, to express thoughts which have ori- 
 
108 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 ginated in earlier civilizations, and have been 
 communicated from these older civilizations to 
 the newer. Hence, much as the teacher of 
 French or Italian — and the same thing applies, 
 in a still higher degree, to the teacher of Eng- 
 lish — may need, when dealing with the lin- 
 guistic portion of his task, to specialize within 
 the native language itself, he needs hardly less 
 to extend his survey to include those tongues 
 which have had a direct and powerful influence 
 upon the one he professes. 
 
 Incidentally, the teacher of Latin, or Ger- 
 man, or other foreign tongue, must impart to 
 the student such rudimentary knowledge of the 
 language as shall enable him to read it, or pos- 
 sibly to write or converse in it ; but this func- 
 tion may be regarded as distinctly subordinate 
 to that upon which we have touched above. The 
 drill-master in Latin paradigms, for instance, 
 may be a useful member of society, but if he 
 is merely or chiefly that, he belongs to a dis- 
 tinctly inferior class to that of the teacher of 
 the humanities. Indeed, he must take good 
 care that he do not become, both by precept and 
 example, a propagator of inhumanities, since 
 mere task-work, unilluminated and uncheered 
 by the contemplation of ideal ends, tends rather 
 to deaden, to degrade, and to brutalize than to 
 soften and refine. 
 
ABDICATION OF THE CLERGYMAN 109 
 
 I have said that, in my opinion, there are three 
 classes of men who, beyond any others, raise the 
 human species out of savagery, or prevent it 
 from relapsing into that state. These, I repeat, 
 are the ministers of religion, the poets — a kind 
 of generic term which designates the arts in gen- 
 eral by the chief of all arts — and the teachers 
 of the humanities. Now, viewed at the present 
 juncture, what place — what rank, if you will — 
 is to be held, is likely to be held, in the next 
 generation or so, by the teacher of English in 
 America ? As one looks out over the face of the 
 country, and over many parts of what we call the 
 civilized world, he sees that, speaking generallyij 
 the professional minister of religion has virtually' 
 abdicated his function of authoritative spiritual 
 leadership, largely because he is himself devoid 
 of certitude regarding the things whereof it is 
 his mission to speak. Either he doubts the truth 
 of a divine revelation, or of a divine government 
 of the world, or the genuineness of particular 
 revelations, or the inferences which have been 
 currently drawn from such particular revelations, 
 or the systems which have been constructed from 
 the supposed truths of revelation philosophically 
 considered. Under such circumstances he neces- 
 sarily ceases to be an authoritative spiritual 
 leader, except as he deserves or obtains credence 
 and following in his incidental character as poet, 
 
110 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 or philosopher, or unavowed prophet. He loses 
 all support from divine revelation as contained 
 in a certain closed and canonical body of writ- 
 ings, or Scriptures, and all support from a co- 
 herent body of truths, representing the efforts 
 made by certain master-minds, singly or in com- 
 bination, to codify the truths of revelation in 
 the light of nature and human experience. He 
 stands by himself, and has just as much or as 
 little authority as he can gain in his character 
 of unaccredited seer, or vates ; he tells people 
 what he personally has discovered, or passes on 
 to them what he individually thinks best worthy 
 of report in the writings of other men. In the 
 discharge of this latter function — namely, in 
 the reporting to others of what he discovers in 
 books, with or without indorsement or criticism 
 — he passes into our third class, and becomes 
 little more than a teacher of literature. 
 
 As to the second class, the poets, there seem 
 at present to be virtually none with a message, 
 that is, none who announce with decision and 
 persuasiveness a doctrine, or view of the moral 
 universe, such as has power to stir men's souls 
 and lift them above their customary and com- 
 monplace moods. Neither are there any who are 
 concerned to present with cogency and charm 
 the more compelling doctrines of an earlier time. 
 The versifiers of the present have neither stolen 
 
THE NEW POETRY 111 
 
 fire from heaven themselves, nor are they, with 
 few and trifling exceptions, bearing torches of 
 borrowed fire to kindle flame in the hearts of 
 men. They are, for the most part, persons with 
 a laborious or easy knack of melodious phrase- 
 making, retailers of poetical truisms, recorders 
 of certain aspects of the physical world, search- 
 ers after the eccentric and bizarre, or the like. 
 Who is there that is at once fresh, vigorous, 
 authentic, and inspiring? We do not even have 
 their counterparts in prose, such men as Car- 
 lyle, or Ruskin, or Emerson, or Newman. Not 
 only are the sun and moon gone from the heav- 
 ens, but the great planets are extinguished, 
 Orion has been flung from his lofty watch-tower, 
 Sirius is dead, and both pole-star and Greater 
 Bear have sunk beneath the baths of ocean. 
 
 As an example of meaningless modern verse, 
 with just enough melody and trick of pretty 
 phrase to give it plausibility, take the following, 
 which is drawn from a current magazine : 
 
 At the silken sign of the Poppy, 
 
 At a shop that is never old, 
 Where the twilight silence lingers, 
 
 It is there that dreams are sold. 
 
 There 's the scent of love's lost roses, 
 The soft echo of childhood's laugh ; 
 
 There 's the ring of empty glasses, 
 For the white lips never quaff. 
 
112 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 To the crimson sign of the Poppy 
 
 We shall come when the daylight dies, 
 
 When the curfew music quivers 
 'Neath the gray of evening skies. 
 
 Just beyond the gates of sunset, 
 
 Where the grim toll of death we pay, 
 
 We shall find the shop of dream-wares, 
 Where the poppies hang alway. 
 
 So we long for the dusk of twilight, 
 When with wealth or no earthly gold, 
 
 We shall come where sleep-flowers cluster, 
 To the shops where dreams are sold. 
 
 We see that, according to the new poetic creed, 
 death is something more than an eternal sleep. 
 It is a Celestial dream, fed with unlimited opium 
 (to be consumed, we may suppose, in an imperish- 
 able pipe) — moistened by an imperceptible 
 stimulant, malt or vinous, for this point is left 
 undetermined — and perfumed by love's lost 
 roses. Such verse sounds like a parody on 
 itself, and reminds us of Calverley's caricature 
 of some of the poetry of his own time : 
 
 In moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter, 
 (And heaven it knoweth what that may mean ; 
 Meaning, however, is no great matter) 
 When woods are a-tremble, with rifts a-tween. . . . 
 
 In prose, take the exquisite preciosity of Mark 
 Twain's famous screed, and see how easily it 
 
TEACHERS OF FOREIGN LITERATURES 113 
 
 might deceive the inattentive into the conviction 
 that here was a prose poem of rarest charm : 
 
 It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. 
 The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory fires of 
 autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, 
 a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wing- 
 less wild things that have their home in the tree-tops 
 and would visit together ; the larch and the pome- 
 granate flung their purple and yellow flames in bril- 
 liant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the 
 woodland ; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable de- 
 ciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere : 
 far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon 
 motionless wing ; everywhere brooded stillness, se- 
 renity, and the peace of God. 1 
 
 If now, putting aside contemporary poets and 
 prose writers, we come down to our third class, 
 the teachers of the humanities, and especially 
 to the teachers of the various literatures, we find 
 the condition of things somewhat as follows. 
 Whatever, ideally considered, is the function of 
 the teachers of German, French, Spanish, etc., 
 we find them actually occupied, for the most 
 part, in enabling their pupils merely to read 
 those languages intelligently, so that they have 
 comparatively little time for imbuing them with 
 the virtues of the literatures themselves. In 
 other words, they are discharging a necessary, 
 
 1 Harper's Magazine 104, 264 (January, 1902). 
 
114 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 but subordinate duty, growing out of their great 
 mission as teachers of the respective literatures, 
 but leaving in large measure the mission itself 
 unfulfilled. 
 
 / Among the humanities, Greek has for gener- 
 I ations held an almost undisputed primacy, not 
 
 v without good reason. Now, however, we find its 
 ministers, like those of religion, forced more and 
 more to abdicate, or at least to consent to a 
 retrenchment of their privileges. This is partly 
 their own fault, I fear. They have insisted un- 
 duly upon what other people have regarded as 
 mint, and anise, and cummin, neglecting the 
 weightier matters of the law. They have not 
 brought out of their treasure-houses things new, 
 as well as things old. They have not sufficiently 
 related their stores to the interests or needs of 
 modern life. They have not considered them- 
 selves as hierophants of priceless mysteries so 
 much as masters of a certain abracadabra, tra- 
 ditionally regarded as having a kind of magical 
 potency. 
 
 Here, it would seem, are reasons enough why 
 they have fallen, or are falling, from their high 
 estate. But the cause is not less to be sought 
 in the attitude of the public towards the real 
 treasures of which they have been the appointed 
 custodians. A democracy does not readily toler- 
 ate superiority of any kind. A materialistic age 
 
WHY GREEK IS IN ECLIPSE 115 
 
 does not contemplate with rapturous satisfaction 
 the things of the spirit. The transcendent and 
 the mystical are despised by people who imagine 
 that physical science has unlocked, or is soon to 
 unlock, the last dim and remote chamber of the 
 universe, and flood it with the light of common 
 day. The self-activity of the mind is irksome to 
 those who respond only to sensual excitations," 
 who can be thrilled only by the speed of an 
 automobile, the soarings of an air-ship, or the 
 sinkings of a submarine boat. People whose 
 grandfathers could not read, and whose fathers 
 barely learned to, feel that there is much for 
 them to do before they begin to climb the far- 
 off summits of Hellenic wisdom and beauty ; 
 and indeed they are right. Those who are poor, 
 and are determined to be rich, cannot see how 
 Greek will give them the Midas-touch. Those 
 who are rich, and consider no evil so dire as 
 poverty, have their own realms of gold to travel 
 in, and think those of Keats mean in compari- 
 son. In short, those who are prosaic find Greek 
 too poetic, those, who fancy themselves poetic 
 find Greek too severe, those who like ease find 
 Greek too hard, those who are barbarous find 
 Greek too civilized, and those who are sophis- 
 ticated find Greek too simple. ' The reason 
 why the seven stars are no more than seven is a 
 pretty one,' says the bitter fool to Lear, and the 
 
116 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 reasons why Greek is not at present in favor, 
 if not so pretty, are at least more numerous, 
 and quite as decisive. The more honor to such 
 a University as yours, which, mindful that a 
 great University should not be the sport of 
 every popular gust, still exalts Greek to a place 
 of prominence, and abides in calm prevision of 
 the time when it shall again come to its own. 
 / As to Latin, it seems to have neither the im- 
 mediate and pecuniary utility of French and 
 German, nor the eminence which appertains to 
 VGreek. It is not to the same degree as Greek 
 an instrument of generous nurture and high 
 breeding, nor will it lend itself to the purposes 
 of the market-place so readily as French and 
 German. Yet if Latin is to pass into eclipse, 
 its occultation is likely to be slower, partly be- 
 cause it is more easily learned than Greek, and 
 will therefore serve for those who wish cheaply 
 to acquire an aristocratic tincture, and partly 
 because it has entered so largely into English 
 and other modern tongues. 
 
 This brings us at last to English itself, the 
 goal of all our devious wanderings. Now, while 
 we must recognize, at once and unequivocally, 
 the inferiority of the English teacher to the 
 adequate minister of religion, or to the artist of 
 penetrative imagination, we cannot help seeing 
 that circumstances have devolved upon him a 
 
THE NEW POSITION OF ENGLISH 117 
 
 task the more momentous because these guides 
 and educers of the human spirit are absent from 
 their appointed places, or raise nerveless arms 
 to point aimlessly and convulsively to all the 
 quarters of the heaven — and the earth. So, 
 too, as long as Greek stood in the van, supported 
 in more sober and pedestrian ways by Latin, 
 the teacher of English could feel that his was a 
 humbler place in the rear, that he was a useful 
 auxiliary, but hardly a principal. Of late, how- 
 ever, conditions have changed so rapidly that 
 this theory has ceased to be quite tenable. Greek 
 no longer occupies the centre of the stage, but is 
 retreating, rather unceremoniously hastened at 
 times, towards the tiring-room and the exit. Is 
 the stage to be left empty ? That can hardly be. 
 The most obvious candidate for the vacant place 
 is English, and in fact English has been thrust 
 forward with a rapidity almost alarming, in view 
 of the fact that most of us who represent it have 
 been brought up with a lower conception of our 
 responsibilities, and with a more restricted view 
 of our opportunities, than is indicated by the 
 present exigency. Upon us, it would seem, the 
 ends of the ages have come, and we are reminded 
 of the words of Paul to the Corinthian brethren : 
 
 Neither let us try the Lord, as some of them tried, 
 and perished by the serpents. Neither murmur ye, 
 as some of them murmured, and perished by the de- 
 
118 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 stroyer. Now these things happened unto them by way 
 of example ; and they were written for our admoni- 
 tion, upon whom the ends of the ages are come. 
 
 I well remember the impressive conclusion of 
 an address before English students by a pro- 
 fessor of Greek a couple of years ago, in which 
 he warned them that English was now on its 
 trial, as Greek had been, and that if English 
 failed to answer the high expectations which 
 had been formed of it, it would fall. 
 
 Perhaps it is now time for us to consider what 
 are some of the demands at present made upon 
 the professor of English. They are not all nom- 
 inated in the bond of his election, but sooner or 
 later he is made to smart under the conscious- 
 ness that the public, or his academic colleagues, 
 or his fellow-scholars, have reasonably been look- 
 ing to him to do what he was never prepared 
 for, what he is quite unequal to, and what, until a 
 particular exigency has arisen, he may scarcely 
 have reflected upon as belonging to his province. 
 
 Let me set down briefly, in topical form, some 
 of these requirements, which, according to cir- 
 cumstances likely to occur in any individual 
 experience, he may be called upon to meet. 
 The teacher of English, then, or at least the Uni- 
 versity teacher, must 
 
 1. Speak and write the English language with 
 propriety. His verbs must agree with their sub- 
 
DEMANDS ON THE ENGLISH TEACHER 119 
 
 / jects ; he must pronounce according to acknow- 
 ledged standards, so far as there are such; and 
 he must use words in their accepted senses. 
 
 2. He must be able to make himself heard 
 in addressing a class or an audience. He must 
 enunciate distinctly, and speak with sufficient 
 vigor to convey his full meaning, and, if possi- 
 ble, impress it upon his hearers. It may be said 
 that so much, at least, should be expected of all 
 teachers ; this is true, but the deficiency is more 
 likely to be censured in the case of a teacher of 
 English. 
 
 3. He must be sufficiently informed with re- 
 spect to the history of his own and kindred liter- 
 atures, and sufficiently versed in their master- 
 pieces and critical works. 
 
 4. He must be filled with the spirit of the 
 best literature — not of all literature, not even 
 of all English literature, but of the best. 
 
 5. He must know good style, good composi- 
 tion, and good sense when he sees them, in both 
 poetry and prose, and also bad style, bad com- 
 position, and nonsense. He must know why the 
 good is good, and the bad bad; and he must 
 know varying degrees of goodness and badness, 
 so as to pass rational judgment upon a work 
 submitted to him. 
 
 6. He must be able to read with tolerable 
 facility, and explain to others, the English of 
 
120 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 all periods, from the days of King Alfred to 
 the present. 
 
 7. He must be able to read the languages 
 upon which English is chiefly dependent for 
 vocabulary or literary influence. 
 
 8. He must know the pedagogical theory of 
 his own subject, that is, of English considered 
 comprehensively: its chief divisions and their 
 interrelations, and the disciplines by which re- 
 sults of different kinds can be attained, whether 
 by individuals or classes. Thus, in directing the 
 affairs of a department as its head, he should 
 be able to decide what subjects should be pur- 
 sued under given conditions; what should be 
 made obligatory, and what elective ; in what 
 order they should be disposed, having due regard 
 to the average age and attainment of particular 
 classes ; and how to secure a climactic result. 
 
 9. He must know the scholarly theory of his 
 subject, that is, what is the present condition of 
 scholarship in English, and its chief deficiencies, 
 as compared with the most developed subjects of 
 like general character ; and how to achieve the 
 best scholarly results with the smallest expendi- 
 ture of time and energy. 
 
 10. He must know the relations of English to 
 other subjects of instruction, in order that he may 
 avail himself of the assistance which may be 
 gained from the work in those departments ; in 
 
DEMANDS ON THE ENGLISH TEACHER 121 
 
 order that he may secure for English its proper 
 proportion of time and attention ; and in order 
 that he may not trespass upon other depart- 
 ments, either by transgressing the due limits of 
 his own, or by demanding an undue proportion 
 of the time and energy of his students. 
 
 11. He must be able to win and maintain for 
 himself a place as scholar or independent inves- 
 tigator. Without this he cannot count on the 
 respect of his professional brethren in other in- 
 stitutions, and without their respect he cannot, 
 in general, hope to secure and hold the highest 
 respect of his immediate colleagues in other 
 branches, of his departmental subordinates, of 
 his students, of the discerning public — or even, 
 I may add, of himself. Now, in comparison with 
 his colleagues in other departments, it is doubly 
 and trebly incumbent upon him to possess this 
 respect, because he is succeeding to dignities and 
 responsibilities which, it may easily be assumed, 
 he has not earned, and does not merit. 
 
 12. He should be a gentleman, and, if con- 
 venient, a good fellow, in the better sense of that 
 term. 
 
 Now who is sufficient for these things ? No- 
 body ; we may as well frankly confess it at once. 
 Yet which of these requirements shall we cut 
 out ? Shall we say that the person who profes- 
 sionally represents English scholarship, and the 
 
122 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 beauty and splendor of English literature, is 
 privileged to mispronounce it, to write ungram- 
 matically, and to sign his letters ' Sincerely, 
 John Jones,' as though there were some question 
 of his being John Jones ? May he mumble or 
 drone before a class ? May he be ignorant of 
 Paradise Lost and Bacon's Essays, of the Anti- 
 gone and the Alcestis, of Virgil and Juvenal, of 
 Tasso and Moliere, of Longinus and Aristotle's 
 Poetics f May he, with a limited time in which 
 to perform a task of great moment, of vital con- 
 cern to the very existence of the Republic, teach 
 the trashy and the ephemeral for lack of a sense 
 of values, and thus for all time befuddle the 
 judgment, and degrade the taste, of his pupils ? 
 May he, depending merely upon his own sensi- 
 bility and intuitive perceptions, content himself 
 with reading good literature aloud to them, or 
 telling them to read it, without being able to 
 explain wherein the goodness of good literature 
 consists ? May he already begin to regard Spen- 
 ser and Skelton as Old English, find difficulty 
 with Chaucer, and show that English before the 
 coming of the Normans is quite beyond the pale 
 of his knowledge and his sympathies? May he 
 be unable to read Horace in the original, to 
 avail himself of German investigations, and to 
 learn from the French the secret of scholarship 
 which is not pedantry, and of charm which is 
 
DEMANDS ON THE ENGLISH TEACHER 123 
 
 neither shallow nor pretentious? May he, if a 
 subordinate, be so unversed in the theory of his 
 subject as not to understand how to make the 
 branch he is teaching at the moment contribute, 
 in an effective way, toward a total insight, or, if 
 a leader, how to marshal his forces so as to win 
 the completest possible victory over the forces 
 of Chaos and old Night ? May he, if he under- 
 takes to beat back the limits of our present igno- 
 rance, be so untutored as to spend his energies 
 upon tasks already accomplished, to undertake 
 those that are relatively insignificant, or to be 
 handicapped every moment by ignorance of his 
 tools, or of the proper way of using them ? May 
 he, instead of dovetailing English in with other 
 subjects in such a way as to assist his colleagues 
 while drawing strength and support from them, 
 be at liberty unconsciously to thwart their en- 
 deavors, or else so contract the bounds of his 
 own department as to deprive it of its legitimate 
 efficiency ? May he be a man without standing 
 in the court of his peers, a man of whom Eng- 
 lish teachers in. other Universities have never 
 heard, or whose name they mention only to scoff ? 
 Finally, may he be a boor, a man whose society 
 his fellows shun ? 
 
 These questions answer themselves, and yet is 
 there any representative of English in an Amer- 
 ican University, who, judged fairly by these 
 
124 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 standards, is in all respects fitted to occupy his 
 place ? If we are obliged to reply in the nega- 
 tive, it behooves us to see to it that the next 
 generation is better supplied than our own. 
 Grant that what we have sketched is an ideal, 
 and, as an ideal, impossible of perfect realiza- 
 tion, is it not our duty to strive toward it as 
 resolutely as we may? 
 
 If now we address ourselves to the means 
 that may be employed in training candidates 
 for this high office, we are naturally impelled to 
 consider, first of all, what agencies characteristic 
 of our time may be invoked to further our efforts. 
 We shall find, I think, upon a little reflection, 
 that the present age is distinguished by these 
 five things — by others, perhaps, but certainly, 
 I believe, by these five : 
 
 1. A passion for discovery, and proximate or 
 elementary classification, having primary refer- 
 ence to utility — the love of science. 
 
 2. A disposition to emphasize the notion of 
 becoming, or, as a German would say, das Wer~ 
 den — an interest in evolution. 
 
 3. A readiness to perceive deity as permeative 
 — to accept the doctrine of the divine immanence. 
 
 4. A passion for voluntary association — the 
 club spirit. 
 
 5. A desire for social justice, or the common 
 weal — philanthropy, the love of man as man. 
 
FIVE HELPFUL AGENCIES 125 
 
 You will see that these things — scientific zeal, 
 insistence upon the doctrine of evolution, a will- 
 ingness to entertain the idea of the divine im- 
 manence, the club spirit, and devotion to the 
 cause of humanity — are all Greek, or at least 
 that they were all enounced and illustrated in 
 Greece, and that they are all, therefore, in some 
 sense, phases of neo-paganism, or, if you dis- 
 like that word, neo-classicism, or neo-Hellenism. 
 They by no means comprise all of Hellenism, 
 and perhaps they do not comprise the best of 
 Hellenism, but it is fair enough to call them 
 all Hellenic. 
 
 Now, how may these five agencies be made to 
 assist in the discipline of the spiritual leaders 
 whom we call teachers of English ? When winds 
 blow, we let them turn our wheels ; when streams 
 descend, we float with their current, or transform 
 their energy into electricity. We should be fool- 
 ish if we were not in all ways economical, doing; 
 as little as possible against the grain. How, then^' 
 can we harness these forces, and direct them tdi 
 the end we have in view ? 
 
 Take first science. This can be made an in- 
 strument of training, and a producer of useful 
 results, by means of the elaboration of indexes, 
 glossaries, catalogues, phonological and syntac- 
 tical monographs, and the like. These acquaint 
 the student with facts, the raw material of science, 
 
126 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 and induct him into the processes employed by 
 his acknowledged masters, the methods of selec- 
 tion and arrangement without which science is 
 impossible. As a propaedeutic to original work 
 of this kind, it is useful to have courses for the 
 study of works which embody the spirit and 
 method of science, and which afford opportu- 
 nity for elementary practice on the part of the 
 students themselves. The actual performance 
 of the substantial tasks, and the subsequent pub- 
 lication of the results, should also gratify the 
 social instinct — the instinct to associate oneself, 
 at least in thought, with the life of humanity — 
 and confer the sense of benefiting mankind. Of 
 course the scientific impulse, if sufficiently deep 
 and sustained, ought to eventuate in philosophy ; 
 but it may accomplish much that is serviceable 
 without going so far. Yet, useful as it is, we 
 must be on our guard against overrating it, pre- 
 cisely because it is so emphasized by our times. 
 Next the notion of evolution. That impels one 
 backward into the past, and prophetically into 
 the future. It gives zest to all historical study, 
 even of events and periods which until recently 
 were thought dry and barren. It irrigates desert 
 soil, so to speak, making it bud and blossom as 
 the rose. It is this which has sent people back 
 into Old English, and back of Old English into 
 Gothic, and back of Gothic into Sanskrit and 
 
THE IDEA OF EVOLUTION 127 
 
 the hypothetical Indo-European unity. In phi- 
 lology, it is made to bear fruit in monographs on 
 the evolution of this or that literary form — the 
 evolution of the drama, the epic, the essay, and 
 the like, and in such studies of individuals as 
 Texte's book on Rousseau, or Morel's on James 
 Thomson, for instance, or Legouis's on Words- 
 worth. In France, Brunetiere is the apostle of 
 evolution in this form. It is, however, often 
 posited in monographic investigations where the 
 gaps in the material are sufficient to prevent the 
 tracing of an evolution at all, or where evolu- 
 tion has been interrupted by disturbing forces, 
 or where the human spirit has seemed to defy 
 the principle of determinism. Do the Middle 
 Ages fully account for Dante, or the Renaissance 
 for Shakespeare? Yet, with much caution in 
 its employment, lest it mislead and confuse the 
 novice, rather than clarify and settle his ideas, 
 it may be of real utility. 
 
 The idea of the divine immanence is related 
 to that of evolution, and tends in a still higher 
 degree, perhaps, to harmonize the phenomena 
 of history, and provide a goal for the stumbling 
 feet of science. If there is 
 
 One far-off, divine event, 
 
 To which the whole creation moves, 
 
 then it must be not only because 
 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy, 
 
128 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 and lay about the whole universe in its infancy, 
 but also because of 
 
 — Something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. 
 
 This notion will serve as a living link between 
 much of nineteenth-century poetry, for instance, 
 and the poets and philosophers of Greece ; and 
 such living links, binding organically together 
 the phenomena of various literary periods, can- 
 not be too highly prized. 
 
 What I have called the club spirit may be 
 utilized in the formation of associations for the 
 study in common of various topics, or for the 
 performance of cooperative undertakings like 
 the New English Dictionary, the Dialect Diction- 
 / ary, or the projected Tennyson Concordance * 
 at Baylor University. Associations may take the 
 form of Journal Clubs, for report on current pe- 
 riodicals, or Keport Clubs, for calling attention 
 to current professional publications of all kinds, 
 or English Clubs of a more general nature, for 
 the presentation and discussion of any subject 
 which may properly come before it. Not less im- 
 portant is the promotion of general sociability 
 and good fellowship, the value of which between 
 
 1 Since this was written, a movement for a Concordance 
 Society has been instituted. 
 
DEVOTION TO HUMANITY 129 
 
 be a I 
 
 Q Of 
 
 kindred and aspiring souls may be illustrated 
 from the University life of Tennyson and his 
 intimate friends. 
 
 Devotion to the cause of humanity may 
 strongly impelling force in the production 
 scholarly work, and thus render the student 
 much more keen in the prosecution of the neces- 
 sary propaedeutical studies. A desire not to lose 
 touch with humanity will be the best safeguard 
 against egotistical and repulsive pedantry. More- 
 over, without the passion to serve humanity, the 
 English teacher is likely to be of comparatively 
 little use in the class-room, whereas with it, even 
 if his training be somewhat defective, he may 
 still accomplish something worth while. 
 
 It must be evident, I think, that the student 
 has much to gain from the gratification of these 
 impulses, which are at present so common that 
 they may almost be called natural. But a dis- 
 position difficult to acquire, and indispensable 
 to the attainment of the highest results, remains 
 for us to consider. It is the disposition to dis- 
 cover, before it is too late, what are those 
 principles and disciplines which underlie and 
 condition deeper understanding and adequate 
 elucidation of the texts with which the English 
 teacher has to deal. Here let us recall Bacon's 
 anecdote of Sir Amyas Paulet, who when he saw 
 
,130 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 too much haste made in any matter, was wont to 
 say, i Stay a while, that we may make an end 
 the sooner.' And a particular application of it, 
 which can hardly be too much pondered, is also 
 from Bacon : ■ ' Another error ... is that . . . 
 men have abandoned universality, or prima philo- 
 sophia ; which cannot but cease and stop all pro- 
 gression. For no perfect discovery can be made 
 upon a flat or level ; neither is it possible to dis- 
 cover the more remote and deeper parts of any 
 science, if you stand but upon the level of the 
 same science, and ascend not to a higher sci- 
 ence.' 
 
 Without insisting too much upon Bacon's 
 prima philosophia, we shall be ready, I suppose, 
 to grant that there are disciplines or branches 
 of knowledge which, were it possible to compass 
 them, would be of extreme utility to the profes- 
 sional student of literature. I have heard liter- 
 ary persons plume themselves upon a supposed 
 congenital inability to comprehend mathematics. 
 Again on this point let us hear Bacon, a scholar 
 incapable neither of mathematics nor of liter- 
 ature : 2 ' Men do not sufficiently understand the 
 excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that 
 they do remedy and cure many defects in the 
 wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be 
 too dull, they sharpen it ; if too wandering, they 
 1 Adv. Learn., Bk. 1. 2 Ibid. 2. 8. 2. 
 
AUXILIARY DISCIPLINES 131 
 
 fix it ; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract 
 it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in it- 
 self, but of great use in respect it maketh a 
 quick eye, and a body ready to put itself into all 
 postures, so in the mathematics that use which 
 is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy 
 than that which is principal and intended.' So 
 elsewhere Bacon says, in a familiar passage : ' 
 'If a man's wit be wandering, let him study 
 the mathematics, for in demonstration, if his wit 
 be called away never so little, he must begin 
 again ; if his wit be not able to distinguish or 
 find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for 
 they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to 
 beat over matters, and to call upon one thing to 
 prove and illustrate another, let him study the 
 lawyers' cases ; so every defect of the mind may 
 have a special receipt.' 
 
 In speaking of these disciplinary subjects, 
 I must not be understood to advocate that all 
 of them shall be employed in the case of every 
 candidate for an English professorship, though 
 perhaps the error would not be worse than 
 that which Bacon elsewhere reprehends, when he 
 says : 2 ' In the handling of this science, those 
 which have written seem to me to have done as 
 if a man that professed to teach to write did 
 only exhibit fair copies of alphabets and letters 
 
 1 Of Studies. 2 Adv. Learn. 2. 20. 1. 
 
132 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 joined, without giving any precepts or directions 
 for the carriage of the hand and framing of the 
 letters.' To apply this to our own branch, it is 
 not sufficient to say : * Here is the body of English 
 literature; come and read it, and then go and 
 teach it.' No, various prerequisites are implied, 
 and in a given case they might even be best 
 secured by training in a physical science. Cer- 
 tain it is that the graduate student who in my 
 experience accomplished the most — quantity 
 and quality both considered — in the least time, 
 was one who had been trained in experimental 
 biology. But, whether the propaedeutic ideally 
 required be mathematics, or science, or philoso- 
 phy, at all events, if we detect in the student 
 certain ' stonds or impediments,' as Bacon calls 
 them, we should either suggest that they be re- 
 moved by some extraneous discipline, or else, as 
 far as possible, ourselves devise the means by 
 which they may be ' wrought out,' only bearing 
 in mind the extreme difficulty of removing all 
 sorts of stonds or impediments through the 
 agency of English alone. So far as linguistic 
 discipline is efficacious in these respects — and 
 on other accounts as well — it is desirable, I 
 believe, that there shall be for the graduate 
 student a requirement with respect to the sight- 
 reading of French, German, and Latin of average 
 difficulty, and that the examination in this shall 
 
DISCIPLINE UNDERTAKEN BY ORATORS 133 
 
 be passed at the beginning of his course, or in 
 any case not less than two academic years before 
 he takes his degree. 
 
 Though the province of the English teacher 
 and that of the parliamentary orator are not 
 identical, yet the two have much in common, so 
 that we may, perhaps, profitably remind our- 
 selves of the amount and kind of labor under- 
 gone by some of the great English orators in 
 preparation for their triumphs. Lord Chatham 
 translated repeatedly from the orations of De- 
 mosthenes, learned by heart many of the sermons 
 of Barrow, and went twice through the largest 
 English dictionary then extant, scrutinizing 
 every word in order, with its various meanings 
 and modes of construction. One of his biogra- 
 phers says of him : ' Probably no man of genius 
 since the days of Cicero has ever submitted to 
 an equal amount of drudgery.' * Charles James 
 Fox was so thoroughly grounded in Latin and 
 Greek from boyhood that he read them through- 
 out life much as he read English ; but, we are 
 told, 8 he always felt the want of an early train- 
 ing in scientific investigation, correspondent to 
 that he received in classical literature.' 2 For 
 many years William Pitt devoted himself to 
 'the classics, the mathematics, and the logic of 
 
 1 Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, pp. 52-3. 
 
 2 Ibid., pp. 438-9. 
 
134 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 Arisotle applied to the purposes of debate.' * 
 Perhaps these examples will suffice to show how 
 far these great orators were from preparing them- 
 selves for their careers by the mere reading of 
 English literature. 
 
 But besides the more disciplinary auxiliaries, 
 there are certain branches of knowledge with 
 which the deeper sort of English student needs 
 to be acquainted. How could one, for instance, 
 who knew nothing at first hand about the litera- 
 ture of Old French or Italian — to say nothing 
 of Latin — go profoundly into Chaucer? And 
 again, besides these, there are the methodical 
 inquiries, such as those into the theory of lit- 
 erary study and the theory of English study 
 taken as a whole, which are almost indispensa- 
 ble at the outset. As many as possible of these 
 fundamental courses should be taken, I am in- 
 clined to think, at the beginning, and this for 
 two reasons. If they are really fundamental, 
 there will be constant use and application of 
 them later, so that they can hardly be begun too 
 soon. This is the first reason. The other is that 
 which, if report be true, has actuated many edi- 
 tors in dealing with young men who wished to 
 enter journalism, as well as theatrical managers 
 in their interviews with aspirants to histrionic 
 honors. It is that the person who mistakes a 
 
 1 Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, p. 552. 
 
UNQUALIFIED ASPIRANTS 135 
 
 velleity for a determination may be deterred at 
 the outset from undertaking a career for which 
 he is not fitted. There is no place in our pro- 
 fession for the sybaritic individual who merely 
 wishes lazily to read pleasant books, and the 
 sooner he can be turned to the right about, the 
 better. At the risk of seeming to indulge in 
 paradox, I will hasten to add that he who has not 
 been a passionate reader of good literature from 
 the age of ten, or thereabouts, up to the timd 
 that he begins graduate study, and who does nofl 
 give promise of remaining a passionate reader! 
 of good literature to the end of life, should be 
 gently, but firmly, discouraged from entering 
 our profession. Such a person will certainly not 
 have the enthusiasm which will carry him through 
 the necessary toils, just as the shallow person, of 
 whom I spoke above, will not have the insight to 
 perceive what the necessary toils are. The oft- 
 repeated story of the celebrated Porpora may 
 be in point here, not only as showing the mas- 
 tership requisite on the part of the teacher, but 
 especially the enthusiasm and patience neces- 
 sary on the part of the learner. The latest form 
 in which I have seen the story is as follows: 
 
 It is said that a young man went to Porpora, who 
 was one of the famous teachers at the beginning of 
 the eighteenth century, and asked for tuition. Por- 
 pora replied that he would accept the youth as a pupil 
 
136 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 only on condition that the student would agree to 
 do precisely as the teacher told him. The youth con- 
 sented, and the master wrote some exercises for him 
 on four pages of music-paper. At the end of three 
 years the young man was still studying this sheet. 
 He called his teacher's attention to the fact, and Por- 
 pora said, ' Remember your promise.' At the end 
 of the sixth year the young man went to his teacher 
 in despair. He was still on the same sheet, and he 
 was ready to abandon the struggle and throw himself 
 into the river, when, to his surprise, Porpora said : 
 1 Now, my son, you may go. You are the greatest 
 singer in the world.' The teacher had written on 
 that paper everything that could be done by a human 
 voice, and Caff arelli, afterwards known as the Prince 
 of Song, had mastered all. 
 
 We shall know the right-minded student by 
 his recognizing, when it is presented to him, the 
 truth of Aristotle's precept : x i We must . . . con- 
 sider towards which extreme it is that we our- 
 selves are the most inclined to drift, for no two 
 men have the same natural bent. Our test herein 
 will be the pleasure or the pain which we feel 
 upon each occasion. And we must strive to drag 
 ourselves to exactly the counter course, much 
 as they do who straighten warped timbers.' 2 
 
 1 Nic. Eth. 2. 9. 5. 
 
 2 With this compare Ruskin's manuscript addition to Sesame 
 and Lilies, Lecture HI, § 122 ( Works, ed. Cook and Wedder- 
 burn, 18, 169) : ' Remember that all teaching that is true is 
 
UNQUALIFIED ASPIRANTS 137 
 
 With respect to the desirability of a love for 
 good literature, and a considerable acquaintance 
 with it, on the part of the person who under- 
 takes graduate study, we must remember that 
 in three years only a limited number of course- 1 
 hours can be taken to advantage, considering the I 
 severe demands made by each, and the amount J 
 of collateral reading they should require. I my-/ 
 self have been accustomed to reckon them as' 
 twenty, distributed through the successive years 
 as about eight, eight, and four. This affords a 
 minimum of time for the compassing of every- 
 thing desirable, and therefore makes it indis- 
 pensable to exclude the person who has to ac- 
 quire in his graduate years a love for literature 
 and a respectable acquaintance with it. If he 
 must do this at such a late day, he will have 
 time for nothing else. All the English litera- 
 ture that he openly pursues during this period 
 
 in a measure startling. Of the best and perfeetest knowledge 
 it is said, " Such knowledge is too wonderful for me " [Ps. 
 139. 6] ; but in its own measure all knowledge is wonderful. 
 To learn the vivid radical meaning of a familiar word, to get 
 sight of a new feature or harmony in a natural object, to ap- 
 prehend the bearing of an unknown law — all these things are 
 wonderful ; and of any teacher who is rightly helping you, you 
 ought always to feel, not " how right that is ; I always thought 
 that" — no — but "how strange that is; I never thought of 
 that." But it follows, therefore, that all true teaching must 
 be very slow, for you cannot receive many new thoughts or 
 facts at once.' 
 
138 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 should be in strictly methodical courses, such as 
 will induct him into scholarly and pedagogical 
 processes. 
 
 / It may be objected that I lay too much stress 
 /ipon the disciplinary side of graduate study. 
 But to myself I seem to be in accord with all the 
 chief theorists who have treated of Art in rela- 
 tion to Nature. All agree that the richest soil 
 may produce abundant crops, though perhaps 
 plentifully sprinkled with weeds, with little or no 
 cultivation, just as very likely there have been 
 and are most inspiring teachers of English who 
 have had little of the training outlined above. 
 All agree that moderately rich soil demands 
 more continuous and careful culture. And all 
 agree that a naturally thin and barren soil can 
 be made to produce respectable crops only by 
 the application of the most perfect means which 
 science has at its disposal. I have never seen a 
 soil too well cultivated, and I have never seen a 
 teacher too well trained ; but I have seen soils 
 that produced poor crops in spite of thorough 
 tillage, and I have seen teachers, to whom Heaven 
 has denied temperament and intuition, who could 
 never equal the performances of a Socrates, or a 
 Mark Hopkins, or a James McCosh, if they had 
 been trained by the greatest master of pedagogi- 
 cal science that ever lived. 
 
 And now, as we approach the end of this hur- 
 
THE BOND OF UNITY 139 
 
 ried, though perhaps tedious, survey, we may 
 perhaps ask how the bond of the varied exer- 
 cises which we have recommended may be made 
 to appear, especially as so many of these must 
 be detailed and analytical. How shall the stu- 
 dent be preserved from distraction and bewilder- 
 ment? This is best done, I believe, by making 
 the ground-tone of all the study one of synthesis 
 and unity. A philosophical spirit should, if pos- \ 
 sible, pervade the entire instruction, even when 
 scientific processes are most in evidence. If this 
 is done, and sufficient opportunity is afforded 
 the student to question his teacher concerning 
 the relation of a given part to the ideal whole, 
 he is not likely to fight as one that beateth the 
 air, but every blow will stand a good chance of 
 being delivered home. 
 
 Akin to this mode of procedure on the part 
 of the teacher is another on the part of the stu- 
 dent, and of no less importance. It is that which 
 Bacon proposes, if I may once more quote him: 1 
 4 Wherefore we will conclude with that last point, 
 which is of all other means the most compen- 
 dious and summary, and again the most noble 
 and effectual to the reducing of the mind unto 
 virtue and good estate ; which is, the electing and 
 propounding unto a man's self good and virtuous 
 ends of his life, such as may be in a reasonable 
 
 1 Adv. Learn. 2. 22. 15. 
 
140 THE GRADUATE STUDY OF ENGLISH 
 
 sort within his compass to obtain.' But, since 
 Bacon may seem antiquated, and certainly igno- 
 rant of our peculiar circumstances, give me leave 
 to conclude with certain stanzas from a poem 
 read before the Phi Beta Kappa society of Tufts 
 College, 1 in June of the year just expired : 
 
 Libraries, tomes, we may command 
 Through him who wields the Midas-hand. 
 Who would command the sages may ; 
 But who shall give us the desire 
 To light a torch at wisdom's fire ? 
 
 The dregs of all the nations here 
 May seethe and fuse for many a year 
 In this dull mass of commonness ; 
 Yet by-and-by, to earth's surprise, 
 Another type may crystallize. 
 
 So, mad the rush and fierce the game, 
 Till time shall this rude instinct tame, 
 And men a deeper need discern, 
 And burn to spend themselves to give 
 Diviner joys to all that live. 
 
 A remnant is our hope — elect, 
 Distinct, high-minded, circumspect, 
 With grace and power to lead, and turn 
 Ambition's self to grander goals, 
 Unsought, unknown of meaner souls. 
 
 1 Dwight M. Hodge, No Boom at the Inn, and Other Poems, 
 Boston, 1905. 
 
NO SINGLE GOOD HIS VISION FILLS' 141 
 
 And of that remnant, sane and sound, 
 For ever be the Scholar found ! 
 No single good his vision fills ; 
 Nor his the need all strength to spend 
 Toward one self-seeking, vulgar end. 
 
 How shall this common mass be led, 
 Made wistful after more than bread, 
 Shown the true sense of all its ills ; 
 How shall the larger vision come, 
 If learning's oracles be dumb ? 
 
 'T is ours, O brothers, to begin 
 To bring a new republic in, 
 To make the noblest autocrat; 
 To win new love for art and song ; 
 To show the gentlest may be strong ; 
 
 To make a knighthood of great souls, 
 Whom honor's finer sense controls — 
 No petty priests of small reforms, 
 But men who know the one deep need 
 Of larger life with grander deed ; 
 
 To find new ways to Arcady, 
 Though men deny such land may be ; 
 To all that kindles, all that warms, 
 To all who dream, and all who sing, 
 To give a royal welcoming. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adams, John Couch, 76. 
 
 jElfric, 39. 
 
 Alfred, King, 3S, 39. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon. See Old English. 
 
 Aristotle, 17, 67, 122, 134 ; quoted, 
 
 136. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 73, 78. 
 Azarias, Brother, 40. 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 60, 122 ; quoted, 130 
 ff., 139. 
 
 Barrow, Isaac, 133. 
 
 Bartlett, John, 22, 96. 
 
 Battle of Brunanburh. See Tenny- 
 son. 
 
 Bede, 37. 
 
 Boeckh, his classical conception of 
 philology, 29. 
 
 Boethius, 38. 
 
 Brandl, Alois, 22. 
 
 Brooke, Stopford, 22. 
 
 Browning, Robert, 5, 70; his at- 
 titude toward philology, 15, 25; 
 quoted, 23. 
 
 Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 127. 
 
 Burke, Edmund, 5, 16, 23, 42, 68 ; a 
 student of philology, 14. 
 
 Caedmon, English literature may be 
 
 said to begin with, 37. 
 Caffarelli, Gaetano, 136. 
 Calverley, Charles S., 112. 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 111. 
 ' Cataract ' 71. 
 
 Celtic eloquence, 78, 79, 86, 87. 
 Chapman, George, quoted, 25. 
 Chatham, Lord, his preparation for 
 
 an oratorical career, 89 ff . , 133. 
 Chaucer, 23, 67, 122. 
 Child, Francis J., a philologist, 22. 
 Christianity, relation of, to English 
 
 literature and the teaching of, 
 
 41 ff., 45. 
 Cicero, 23, 33, 68 ; a student of 
 
 philology, 12. 
 Clubs, 128. 
 Club spirit, its relation to the study 
 
 of English, 124 ff. 
 
 Composition, Milton's views con- 
 cerning, 65, 66. 
 Concordances needed, 95, 128. 
 Croiset, Alfred, a philologist, 24. 
 Cuvier, 73. 
 
 Dante, 67, 68, 69, 103 ; a student of 
 philology, 13. 
 
 Delight, how to combine with dis- 
 cipline is a problem, 62. 
 
 Demosthenes, 133. 
 
 Dictionaries, 89, 128, 133. 
 
 Discipline, in the study of English, 
 138 ; how to combine with de- 
 light is a problem, 62. 
 
 Dowden, Edward, a philologist, 22 ; 
 quoted, 26. 
 
 Dryden, John, 5 ; a student of phi- 
 lology, 15. 
 
 ' Elf,' 96. 
 
 Ellis, Frederick S., a philologist, 22, 
 96. 
 
 Elze, Karl, agrees with Boeckh, 29. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph W., 111. 
 
 English, aims in the graduate study 
 of, 101 ff. ; causes for increasing 
 study of, 45 ff . ; college entrance 
 requirements in, 53 ff. ; defects in 
 the teaching of, 59 ff. ; demands 
 upon university teacher of, 118 ff . ; 
 difficulties in the proper teaching 
 of, 46 ff . ; how the university 
 teacher of, may be trained, 124 ff.; 
 in the primary schools, 52 ; in the 
 secondary schools, 52 ; place to be 
 held by the teacher of, 109 ff., 
 116 ff . ; reassuring conditions con- 
 cerning, 70 ; results accomplished 
 in the fostering of, as an academic 
 subject, 56 ff . ; the teaching of, 37 ff . 
 
 English literature, beginnings of, 37. 
 
 English philology, the province of, 
 3ff. 
 
 English scholarship, beginnings of, 
 39 ; democratic, 40. 
 
 Erasmus a philologist, 24. 
 
 Euripides, 122. 
 
144 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Evolution, relation of, to the study 
 of English, 124 ff. 
 
 ' Fairy,' 76. 
 Fox, Charles J., 133. 
 Foxe, John, 39. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 41. 
 Furness, William H., a philologist, 
 22. 
 
 Genesis, Old Saxon, 75. 
 
 Gildersleeve, Basil L., a philologist, 
 24. 
 
 4 Gleam,' 80 ff. 
 
 'Gnome,' 96. 
 
 Goethe, 69. 
 
 Graduate study of English, aims in, 
 101 ff . ; cf . 70. 
 
 Grammar, Milton's view of, 12, 65. 
 
 Greek, at Princeton University, 116 ; 
 Chatham's, Fox's, and Pitt's 
 study of, 133, 134 ; present un- 
 popularity of, 114 ff . 
 
 Greek elements in modern life, 125. 
 
 Greek study of literature, 63, 64. 
 
 Gregory, Pope, 37. 
 
 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 23. 
 
 Grober, Gustav, 29. 
 
 Grotius, Hugo, philologist, 24. 
 
 Guillaume de Lorris, 67. 
 
 Hakluyt, Richard, 39. 
 
 Historians, 104. 
 
 Hodge, Dwight M., quoted, 140. 
 
 Homer, 23, 68, 105, 106 ; in educa- 
 tion, 63. 
 
 Hopkins, Mark, 138. 
 
 Horace, 64, 105. 
 
 Humanitarianism and English liter- 
 ature, 44. 
 
 Humanities, expounders of the, 
 104 ff. 
 
 Immanence of the Deity, its relation 
 to the study of English, 124 ff. 
 
 Individualism, its relation to the 
 study of English, 41, 43, 45. 
 
 Intensive study, 73 ff . 
 
 Italian, 134. 
 
 Jebb, Richard, a philologist, 24 ; 
 
 quoted, 63. 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 42. 
 Johnson, Samuel, a philologist, 22. 
 Jonson, Ben, a student of philology, 
 
 14, 22. 
 Joscelin, John, 39. 
 Joubert, Joseph, quoted, 82 ff . 
 Jowett, Benjamin, a philologist, 24. 
 
 Julius Caesar, a student of philology, 
 
 12. 
 Juvenal, 122. 
 
 Keats, John, 68, 115. 
 Kdrting, Gustav, agrees with 
 Boeckh, 29. 
 
 Lambarde, William, 139. 
 
 Latin, 116, 133 ; teachers of, 108. 
 
 Learners, great, what they learn, 68. 
 
 Legouis, Emile, 127. 
 
 Leland, John, 39. 
 
 Leverrier, Urbain, 76. 
 
 Lewes, George H., 22. 
 
 Lexicons needed, 95. 
 
 Linguistics, one reason for study- 
 ing, 106 ff. ; literary, 30, 98. 
 
 Literature, teachers of, 105 ff . ; to 
 what end and how to be taught, 
 63 ff. ; how learned by Dante, 
 Chaucer, Spenser, Burke, Tenny- 
 son, 67 ff. 
 
 Locke, John, quoted, 41. 
 
 Logic, 66, 134. 
 
 Longinus, 122 ; quoted, 24. 
 
 Lowell, James R., advocates the 
 teaching of the ancient classics, 69. 
 
 McCosh, James, 138. 
 McLaughlin, Edward T., 18. 
 Mahaffy, John P., a philologist, 24. 
 Marston, John, quoted, 82. 
 Mathematics, its relation to the 
 
 study of English, 130 ff., 134. 
 Methodology, 134 ; cf . 120. 
 Milton, John, 68, 76, 105, 122; a 
 
 student of philology, 12 ; on 
 
 the teaching of English, 64 ff . ; 
 
 quoted, 84, 101. 
 Minister of religion, the, 103, 109. 
 Minor writers, 5. 
 Modern languages, teachers of, 108, 
 
 113. 
 Moliere, 69, 122. 
 Morel, Leon A., 127. 
 Miiller, Max, a philologist, 24. 
 Murray, James A. H., a philologist, 
 
 22. 
 ' Music,' 97. 
 
 National life in relation to the 
 teaching of literature, 70, 102, 122. 
 
 Nationality, spirit of, in relation to 
 the study of English, 41, 45. 
 
 Newman, John H., 23, 111. 
 
 Old English, revival of, 39 ; chair 
 of, at University of Virginia, 42 ; 
 
INDEX 
 
 145 
 
 literature, brief survey of, 37 ff . ; 
 
 ability to read, 120, 122. 
 Old French, 134. 
 Oratio, relation to ratio, 31 . 
 Osgood, Charles G., quoted, 66 ff. 
 Ovid, 67. 
 
 Palmer, George H., quoted, 5. 
 Pan, illustration from statues of, 77. 
 Paris, Gaston, a philologist, 27. 
 Parker, Matthew, 39. 
 Pater, Walter, a philologist, 22. 
 Paul the apostle, quoted, 117. 
 Paul, Hermann, agrees with Boeckh, 
 
 29. 
 Petrarch, 67, 106 ; a philologist, 23. 
 Philanthropy, relation to the study 
 
 of English, 125 ff . 
 Philology, the province of English, 
 
 3 ff. ; criticism of, 3 ff . ; not to be 
 
 identified with linguistics, 27 ; 
 
 etymological significance of the 
 
 word, 29 ff . ; true conception of, 
 
 19 ff., 31 ff. 
 Philosophy, 10, 139 ; relation to the 
 
 study of English, 61 ; utilitarian, 
 
 41, 45 ; teachers of, 104. 
 Pitt, William, 133. 
 Plato, 69, 104; quoted, 63, 97. 
 Plautus, 106. 
 Plutarch, 64. 
 Poet, the, 103, 110 ff. 
 Politian, a philologist, 23. 
 Porpora, Nicolo, anecdote of, 135. 
 Pronunciation, Milton's view of, 65. 
 Protestantism, relation of, to the 
 
 study of English, 38 ff., 45. 
 
 Quintilian, quoted, 12. 
 
 Ratio, relation to oratio, 31. 
 
 Reformation, the, 38. 
 
 Rhetoric, recent teaching of, 51, 59, 
 
 70. 
 Romanticism, 43. 
 Rousseau, 43. 
 Ruskin, John, 42, 111 ; quoted, 136. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, Charles A., a philolo- 
 gist, 24. 
 
 Saintsbury, George, quoted, 27. 
 
 Schipper, Joseph, a philologist, 22. 
 
 Schmidt, Alexander, a philologist, 
 22. 
 
 Schoolmen, 131. 
 
 Science, relation of, to the study of 
 English, 6, 41, 42, 46, 60, 124 ff. , 132. 
 
 Sellar, William Y., a philologist, 24. 
 
 Seneca, 16, 17 ; quoted, 7 8. . 
 
 Shakespeare, 42, 69, 76, 104, 106 ; 
 
 quoted, 115. 
 Shorey, Paul, his edition of Horace, 
 
 105. 
 Sidney, Philip, a philologist, 22. 
 Sievers, Edward, 22, 75, 70. 
 Skeat, Walter W., a philologist, 22. 
 Skelton, 122. 
 Socrates, 138. 
 Sophocles, 122. 
 Spenser, Edmund, 67, 76, 122. 
 Spiritual leaders, need of, 101 ; 
 
 three classes of, 102. 
 State, the, and the university, 102, 
 
 122. 
 Strangford, Lord, 73. 
 Swift, Jonathan, 5; a student of 
 
 philology, 15. 
 Synthesis, place of, in the study of 
 
 English, 139. 
 
 Taine, Hippolyte, a philologist, 22. 
 
 Tasso, 67, 122. 
 
 Ten Brink, Bernhardt a philologist, 
 
 22. 
 Tennyson, 25, 68 ; illustrations from, 
 
 78 ff. ; his Merlin and The Gleam, 
 
 79 ff. ; linguistic analysis of its 
 first stanza, 87 ff . ; his Battle of 
 Brunanburh, 89 ff. 
 
 Terence, 106. 
 
 Texte, Joseph, 127. 
 
 Theory of poetry, 134 ; Milton's 
 
 view of, 66. 
 Training through English, 62 ff., 
 
 131 ff. 
 Twain, Mark, quoted, 113. 
 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, a philologist, 24. 
 
 University must train spiritual 
 
 leaders, 102. 
 University of Virginia, chair of 
 
 Anglo-Saxon at, 42. 
 Utilitarianism, 41, 45. 
 
 Virgil, 67, 68, 122. 
 
 Wesley, John, 43. 
 
 'Wilderness,' 96. 
 
 Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 4 ff., 16. 
 
 Wolf, Priedrich A., outlined the con- 
 ception of philology, 29. 
 
 Woman, relation of, to the study of 
 English, 41, 44, 45. 
 
 Words, the relation of, to literature, 
 73 ff . ; study of, 79 ff . 
 
 Wordsworth, 68; quoted, 81. 
 
 Xenophon, quoted, 63. 
 
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