v\.S.V.S 1 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF OREGON BULLETIN 
 
 New Series SEPTEMBER, 1910 Vol. VIII, No. 1 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF TEACHING 
 RHETORIC IN THE 
 HIGH SCHOOL 
 
 EDWARD A. THURBER 
 
 Professor of Rhetoric, University of Oregon 
 

 
 t 
 
THE PROBLEM OF TEACHING 
 RHETORIC IN THE 
 HIGH SCHOOL 
 
 EDWARD A. THURBER 
 
 Professor of Rhetoric, University of Oregon 
 
THE PROBLEM OF TEACHING RHETORIC IN THE 
 HIGH SCHOOL.* 
 
 I. 
 
 The sensations which a body of students experiences on first 
 taking up the study of Rhetoric might, I presume, be tabulated, 
 if one were industrious enough or expert enough to make the 
 attempt. I do not recall an investigation of this character ever 
 having been made. The chief difficulty, I imagine, in the way of 
 such a tabulation would be, not in a failure to get some expression 
 from the students — they would be fairly ready with that — but in 
 a failure to get an expression that would differentiate Rhetoric 
 from any other subject they might be taking, say, History or 
 Mathematics or Geography. The expression, then, would probably 
 follow closely the students’ tastes — their likes and dislikes. Some 
 might not be happy without Rhetoric ; others might spurn it 
 vehemently, as Macaulay spurned cold boiled veal. Some might 
 enter upon its study with gladness, because their parents — alas! 
 too few — had impressed upon their minds its importance; others, 
 for various reasons — I need not enumerate them — might take up 
 the work with scowls and sinister looks. These latter would form 
 an especially communicative group for tabulation. Still others, 
 to paraphrase Job, might take Rhetoric upon their shoulders and 
 bind it as a crown to them. This is the emotional group. They 
 have walked through country lanes, and, in the manner of their 
 elders, have known cattle and men. To them Rhetoric is the great 
 opportunity. 
 
 Of course, all would demand that the subject be made interest- 
 ing, or, possibly, exciting, and the teacher would doubtless do her 
 best to respond to this call. If she were strong and robust, she 
 might wax fat on the excitement; if frail, she might succumb to 
 nervous prostration. Yet her dying breath might be an exaltation 
 
 *In this discussion I am employing the words Rhetoric and English 
 Composition synonymously. 
 
4 
 
 that, anyway, in stirring up excitement, she had made the good 
 fight. Still, the majority of teachers — I have no statistics at hand 
 — probably neither wax fat nor sink to a premature grave. Most 
 of them are conscientious; many are fervid; some are interesting; 
 and no doubt by these various classes is imparted a modicum — 
 we teachers of Rhetoric have learned to be unassuming — a modicum, 
 I say, of valuable instruction. I wish to say a word or two on 
 the problems involved in presenting this much discussed subject 
 to high school students. 
 
 1. To begin with, Rhetoric is an art. That point, of hoary 
 antiquity, must be insisted upon and thoroughly established with- 
 out end. It has very important bearings in a discussion of the 
 subject. Of course Grammar is not an art, nor are the principles 
 underlying Rhetoric, nor the methods of teaching it in themselves 
 art; no more may the study of an exquisite lyric poem be called 
 art. The study of History or the study of Literature has, as its 
 aim, knowledge, appreciation, or, to use a scholastic word, content. 
 The study of Rhetoric has, as its principal aim, expression. Any 
 subject with such an aim must be art, for art may be defined for 
 our purposes as expression or form giving. Music and painting 
 and dancing and — shall we say? — football are studies of expression, 
 sister arts to Rhetoric. Their object is to get, out of knowledge, 
 form. 
 
 If, then, as teachers, we bear constantly in mind, as most of 
 us do bear it in mind, that Rhetoric is an art, that its ultimate 
 aim is expression in words, we shall be greatly aided in presenting 
 the subject to students. The matter of presentation, however, I 
 hope to dwell upon more in detail later; we may for the present 
 hold it in solution and direct our inquiry toward certain superficial 
 implications which the definition of Rhetoric as an art involves. I 
 say superficial , because I do not intend to discuss any primary dis- 
 tinctions between Rhetoric and its sister arts — painting, music, 
 sculpture, or even football. I wish merely to lay emphasis on the 
 universality of Rhetoric. 
 
 2. In the first place, Rhetoric is the only art that a civilized 
 man, or, perhaps, a savage, for that matter, cannot possibly 
 escape. The Rhetoric of a savage, to be sure, has distinct limita- 
 tions. He studies war; that's science. He puts his knowledge 
 into expression, hurls a spear, kills an enemy; that's art. He 
 cries, “uph”; that's Rhetoric. But the Rhetoric of a savage is 
 
5 
 
 quite too primitive to aid us in its general discussion. We must 
 confine ourselves to the Rhetoric of barbarians — I mean schoolboys 
 — and of civilized persons — other schoolboys, and girls. 
 
 Does it not stand to reason that Rhetoric, unlike any other art, 
 is absolutely unescapable? Comparatively few of us nowadays 
 ever engage in the art of war, even in its most diluted form, 
 athletics. Dancing most of us escape or not, as we wish. For- 
 tunately drawing and singing hold a much more significant place 
 in our high school curricula than they used to hold. But, even 
 granting that drawing and singing may in the near future be 
 required studies of everybody, their vogue may not be compared 
 with the universality of Rhetoric. They are taken as studies 
 among other studies; after a time the student may drop them. 
 He can never by any possibility drop Rhetoric. The art of express- 
 ing himself adequately in words hounds him from the first moment 
 he begins to articulate until he dies. It permeates all other studies, 
 nearly all vocations and avocations. He is compelled to translate 
 his life, his experiences, into words. The lines of Emerson may 
 be turned to express the spirit of Rhetoric: 
 
 “They know not well the subtle ways 
 I keep, and pass and turn again. 
 
 They reckon ill who leave me out; 
 
 When me they fly, I am the wings.” 
 
 To be sure, a time comes when the student may drop Rhetoric 
 as a special study, but escape it, he cannot. Unless he has gained 
 some fundamental knowledge of it, he will find that it has the 
 whip on him. No amount of bucking will dislodge such a rider. 
 
 And, of course, this unique place of Rhetoric among studies 
 is recognized everywhere. There are very few colleges of any 
 standing in our country that do not require in their course some 
 amount of Rhetoric. The study of it was given an added impetus 
 a quarter of a century or so ago, when Charles Francis Adams 
 made his attack on Harvard. “You turn out men,” he said, in 
 substance, “who seem to have a brave knowledge of their subject. 
 But I do not find that they can communicate efficiently their 
 knowledge. They seem to be lacking in articulation.” Whereupon 
 Harvard began to introduce extended courses in Rhetoric. And 
 now nearly all of our colleges have met the pressing demand for 
 this study by specialized courses. 
 
6 
 
 3. But there is another characteristic of Rhetoric, a character- 
 istic, to be sure, which it shares with all the other higher arts, 
 but which is often lost sight of or ill interpreted; Rhetoric is 
 highly artificial. This does not mean that there are not what 
 are called “natural” methods of teaching Rhetoric; but the thing 
 itself is artificial. Talk, of course, is not so artificial as written 
 prose — and our discussion of Rhetoric will confine itself largely 
 to the written form — nor is prose so artificial as verse. But all 
 of these forms bear the marks among the great nations and among 
 cultivated people in those nations of years and years of slow and 
 patient development. Language is a very conservative thing. It 
 demands that certain thoughts be expressed in certain ways; it 
 looks askance at new words and new phrases, and it can only 
 be made to adopt innovations by a constant pleading. It puts 
 things to a majority vote; minorities it abhors. Thus, in a most 
 natural and deliberate way, it remains artificial. The school boy 
 has to obey the sanction of good usage. There are best ways of 
 expressing a sentence as well as of shaping a vase. Both the 
 vase and the sentence spring from processes of rigid training. 
 Rhetoric, then, unescapable and universal, is, like all arts, as the 
 very name art implies, artificial. 
 
 The common saying, “Write as you talk,” is, as we all know, 
 a mere pleasantry. Even a casual scrutiny will reveal in a moment 
 the difference between what is acceptable in • speech and what is 
 acceptable in writing. Between the two there lies a wide gulf. 
 Talk goes on very loosely, without much care of constructions; 
 inflections, or a wave of the hand, serve for emphasis. Writing, 
 on the other hand, can be conducted in no such easy going spirit. 
 The writer must take especial pains with his coherence, and must 
 so place words that the reader will of necessity emphasize the 
 words intended for emphasis. The best writing, then, merely gives 
 the illusion of the best talk. The writer has done laboriously and 
 artificially what the talker accomplished with far less care. There 
 is no need of the pains in talking that there is in writing. The 
 result is effected in other ways. The saying, “Write as you talk,” 
 means simply, “Do the best you can to make the reading of what 
 you have written seem as unlaborious as listening to fluent speech; 
 create the illusion.” 
 
 Or suppose we shift the point of view from the reader to the 
 writer. We have pretty good evidence that Pascal was a con- 
 
7 
 
 spicuously luminous talker. The records of his conversations show 
 the same incisiveness that characterizes his writings. Yet when 
 he came to write his Provincial Letters — we are informed that he 
 copied one of them over eighteen times before he deemed it worthy 
 to appear before the public. And we learn further that before 
 starting any of these letters, he was accustomed to get down on 
 his knees in prayer. Shakespeare, another notable talker in his 
 day, is said to have written the Merry Wives of Windsor, under 
 command of the queen, in an almost incredibly short period of time, 
 and, presumably, without the aid of prayer. This play, as we 
 know, is not in pentameters, but in prose. The talk of the charac- 
 ters is credited as being “natural” to a degree and wonderfully 
 portrayed. But is it actually talk? To be sure, it is to be spoken 
 while PascaPs words are to be read. Yet I imagine that, if we 
 should examine carefully what these people in the drama say, we 
 should be driven to conclude that only a set of glorified geniuses 
 could talk like that. What they say creates the illusion of talk, 
 but the art that has put words into their mouths could only come 
 from a great and skillful master. The novice, indeed, writes 
 prose more as Milton often wrote it, in repugnance or in anger. 
 He has had little practice and he refuses to pray. And it almost 
 seems as if it would be easier for him to write in blank verse 
 than to give the illusion of speech. He is merely finding out that 
 what he is putting on paper doesn’t somehow look so glib as what 
 he rattled off in talk. His medium has stiffened; it is more 
 artificial. 
 
 4. Enough has been said, perhaps, on the general nature of 
 Rhetoric to hazard an attempt to present it in a different light. 
 And if I speak most often of the high school graduate as he pre- 
 sents himself to college as a freshman, I do not intend to imply 
 that all high school boys aspire to college. It is only as he comes 
 to college that I have been able to study him. Yet whether he 
 purposes to enter college or not, I do not see that in the one case 
 or in the other his training should follow an essentially different 
 plan. Efficiency in expression is the desideratum. The tools of 
 a boy who goes into blacksmithy should be as sharp on graduation 
 from high school as the tools of a boy who aims to pursue scholar- 
 ship. How may this efficiency in articulation best be acquired? 
 
 Let us settle one thing at the outset. I intimated in the early 
 part of this paper that, if pupils were requested to express for 
 
8 
 
 purposes of tabulation their experiences or impressions on first 
 taking up the subject of Rhetoric, many of them, perhaps most 
 of them, would express themselves in the way of their preferences 
 or antipathies. And this would be very natural. Expression of 
 opinion, or, better, expression of prejudice, is the long suit of most 
 of us, but especially is it the long suit of the average schoolboy. 
 He likes, say, History, and dislikes Algebra; he adores Longfellow, 
 and repudiates Milton; he doesn’t mind Snowbound, but he pro- 
 tests vigorously against the Ode to Duty. Accordingly, he may 
 be willing to study Geography all night, but he doesn’t give the 
 snap of his fingers for Rhetoric. Now, naturally, when the prob- 
 lem of teaching has to do with authors or poems, the teacher may 
 decide to approach the pupil along the line of least resistance, to 
 lead him gently from the worthy authors or poems he takes to 
 to those he holds in suspicion. An adroit teacher will probably 
 pursue such a course. But when the pupil is confronted with a 
 new subject and a change of teachers, the problem becomes at 
 once more serious and complex. For if the pupil happens to dis- 
 like, say, mathematics in any form whatsoever, the teacher is 
 hardly bound to take up much time in persuading him that he 
 should like it, that it’s good for him, or in endeavoring to feel 
 her way from his least to his greatest abhorrence. The subject- 
 matter of mathematics may not admit of such ready treatment; 
 it hardly pays to sugarcoat wormwood. The teacher will probably 
 cut the Gordian knot by presenting the student’s aversion as well 
 as she knows how. She hopes for the best, and leaves the outcome 
 to the arbitrament of the sluggish gods. 
 
 Has the teacher any other recourse if the students’ pet aversion 
 happens to be Rhetoric? Evidently not. She naturally will do 
 her best to stimulate them, always hoping that they may become 
 interested in some part of the subject, and that the interest in 
 this part may lead them to place greater value on the rest. But 
 with all her zeal and the pleasure she gets from many of her 
 students, there will remain some hopeless cases. 
 
 The teacher of Rhetoric, however, has one compensation, and 
 that an important one. She is not teaching a subject among 
 subjects: she is teaching an art; and this happens to be the only 
 art that a student presents for college entrance. It is different 
 from all the other subjects a pupil takes — except drawing and 
 singing — not in name merely, but in kind. It permeates all the 
 
9 
 
 subjects of content; it underlies them; it serves them. Thus the 
 teacher of Rhetoric will become conscious of a peculiar value 
 attached to her subject, of its singular importance. And this 
 consciousness will be to her immensely satisfying. This universal 
 service of Rhetoric becomes at once its exaltation, just as the 
 exaltation of a man, the measure of his worth to a community, 
 consists in his service. 
 
 And this is what I meant a moment ago when I said that we 
 must settle one thing at the outset. The distinction of Rhetoric 
 from other subjects is that it differs from them in kind. Not 
 only is it the most universal subject, not only does it possess a 
 marked artificiality; its very nature makes its place among sub- 
 jects unique. 
 
 Thus, if the teacher of Rhetoric does not see fit to spend much 
 time in impressing upon indifferent students the importance of 
 her subject, she at least can count upon or ought to count upon 
 the co-operation of the other teachers. Perhaps, even, her point 
 of view may come to be accepted by the school superintendent. 
 There is a large field here for missionary effort. But say that 
 her yeast began to work, that the whole lump became leavened, 
 and that it swelled so rapidly that all the teachers, all the pro- 
 fessors, rose in a body and cried, “Nay, this Rhetoric is important. 
 We will teach it ourselves. No one shall escape us who does 
 not articulate himself as we will in our own subject.” What, then, 
 would become of the particular department of Rhetoric? Well, 
 this would be a predicament. Yet, somehow, I imagine that the 
 danger from this quarter is not imminent. College professors in 
 particular would think seven times before they added to their 
 burdens that of Rhetoric. It would be rather expensive for one 
 thing; it would require a large force of instruction; the regents 
 might demur. And we should all have passed to another world 
 before they came to a definite conclusion. It is said, to be sure, 
 that in Princeton, with the tutorial system in vogue there, each 
 preceptor attends to the expression of his particular diminutive 
 group of students. I have no data as to the success of this experi- 
 ment. I only know that it is expensive. But in the high schools, 
 this danger, as I call it for the moment, opens up afresh the whole 
 discussion of how Rhetoric should be taught there. Suppose, then, 
 we consider briefly what such a revolution implies. 
 
10 
 
 II. 
 
 For want of an extended vocabulary, I shall call this method 
 of presenting Rhetoric the ideal method. And it seems to me 
 that the ideal method would operate somewhat as follows: 
 
 In our high schools, as we know, the teaching of Rhetoric 
 usually falls to the teacher of English Literature. When we speak 
 of English, we are accustomed to include, tacitly, Rhetoric. The 
 teachers of these two subjects are in reality one — a sort of dual 
 unity. This is a time-honored practice of ours, in many respects 
 very natural, and in some respects odd. To be sure, to whom 
 would the discipline in expression more naturally fall than to the 
 teacher of English? Has not her subject trained her to set great 
 store by the way of putting things? But we need not discuss 
 why this point of view of considering the teacher of English 
 and the teacher of Rhetoric as one and the same person is natural. 
 We are at present rather more interested in its result, in the 
 curious condition that it has brought about, in its having made 
 of Rhetoric, for instance, a study of content, a study among other 
 studies, as is English Literature. 
 
 The University of Oregon requires that, for admission, the 
 student shall present six or seven subjects and a few others, these 
 latter being grouped under “electives.” These requirements are 
 not essentially different in character from the requirements de- 
 manded by other state universities, nor are they essentially fewer 
 or greater in number. Some seventy odd high schools in the state 
 have met this demand, and their pupils are consequently admitted 
 to the university without examination. In these requirements no 
 direct reference is made to Rhetoric ; a reference, however, is doubt- 
 less implied under the term English; and, furthermore, a reference 
 is more than implied in that every student upon entering the 
 university from the high schools is required either to pass a test 
 examination in expression or to take a course in Rhetoric in his 
 freshman year. 
 
 This is all as it should be, or somewhat as it should be. The 
 system has been diligently thought out; it is flexible, changes are 
 made from time to time; it could take a prize, a paper prize to be 
 sure, at any unsuborned interstate fair. I have, however, one 
 slight criticism to offer, a criticism, indeed, that implicates the 
 university rather than the high schools. Why should the uni- 
 
11 
 
 versity require a course in Rhetoric when the students have been 
 practicing the art of Rhetoric for the greater part of their innocent 
 lives? And this is the way they presumably have been drilled in 
 expression in the high schools. 
 
 The teacher of Mathematics cries out to her pupil, “Oh, you 
 have the answer well enough, James, but your delivery was very 
 ungrammatical; try it again.” And James once more launches 
 forth in his recitation, this time in better form; until, at last, 
 he not only gives a correct answer, but, what is tolerably important, 
 he has framed it in adequate expression. And when the teacher 
 of Rhetoric hears of James’ progress in mathematics, she smiles, 
 for everything is fish for her net. 
 
 When she learns of James’ training in his Foreign Language 
 class, her smile becomes more obtrusive. What an insistent way 
 that teacher has of exacting idiomatic English; how patient she 
 
 is, how illuminating! The indirectness of method is especially 
 appealing. For James is reviewing, almost without his knowing 
 
 it, his grammar; he is adding to his stock of specific words; and 
 his insight into sentence structure is deepening tremendously. And 
 then, when it comes to the tests, the teacher goes over his paper 
 with him and points out, and makes him write over again, his 
 faulty expressions. In his next paper in the English class, James’ 
 punctuation, to be sure, may still be a bit shaky, but he has 
 acquired a really remarkable felicity in turning sentences. The 
 obtrusive smile of the teacher of Rhetoric broadens to a grin. 
 All is grist that comes to her mill. 
 
 And when James enters upon the study of History, what shall 
 we say? The thought of it gives us pause; it is sobering, so 
 sobering, indeed, that we might as well drop James and his 
 teacher’s grin. The teacher of History, in fact, usurps boldly 
 the very field of Rhetoric. Not only does she correct the students’ 
 oral expression, not only does she see to it that every paper the 
 students present is correctly punctuated and construed before she 
 passes upon it, but she examines the plan of presentation. She 
 insists that the presentation shall be organized; one topic shall 
 be discussed at a time; there shall be no useless digressions, no 
 confusion of thought, no slopping over; but the whole shall march 
 forward evenly to a climax. The teacher herself is a master of 
 Rhetoric. She knows, for instance, that punctuation is structural, 
 that it whispers in undertones, revealing the very secrets of 
 
12 
 
 thoughts. She knows not only that a sentence is bad, but how 
 to go about to make it correct. Her reasons are based not merely 
 on taste but on principles and a knowledge of the history of the 
 language. So far-reaching, in fact, is her criticism that she and 
 the teacher of Rhetoric come to an amicable compromise. The 
 latter sloughs off her duality, the astral part of her, and becomes, 
 what she has always wanted to be, a teacher of English. She 
 rises, to be sure, to a fuller realization than ever before of the 
 infinite opportunities for the study of Rhetoric in her own subject, 
 greater perhaps than anywhere else. Not only does she insist, 
 like the teacher of History, on accurate definitions and clear con- 
 ceptions, on organized presentation, but she delights particularly 
 in what she calls style, in niceties of expression, and in invoking, 
 if she may, the students’ originality and imagination. And what 
 a relief; she may now discard her text-books! 
 
 I shall assume that I need not dwell further on what I have 
 called the ideal way of teaching the art of Rhetoric in the high 
 schools, on the possibilities that lie latent there. I have merely 
 to apologize for the lack of discernment and logic of the Uni- 
 versity of Oregon in requiring a test examination or a course in 
 Rhetoric from a body of students that has fathomed the mysteries 
 of the subject for many years. Still, the test and requirement 
 should not be taken too seriously; they are merely vouchers of 
 deposit. An adequately trained student need fear nothing. If 
 he passes the simple test, he has merely vindicated both himself 
 and his instruction. The department of Rhetoric at the university 
 is sorry to lose him, but it releases him from dabbling further into 
 a subject he already knows. He is free to range at will among 
 his predilections. 
 
 There is, to be sure, a bothersome fly in the ointment. Prospec- 
 tive students rarely pass the test. Well, perhaps it has been too 
 technical; it has placed too great emphasis on the students’ mem- 
 ory, and memory is too fierce a monster to handle without armor. 
 We are going to change all that in Oregon; we are going to make 
 the test easier, just a casual review of grammar — punctuation, 
 sentence structure, and the like (these the students know from 
 the grades up) — and then a question or two to bring out the 
 students’ ability to develop a theme drawn from the years of their 
 experience. All the tests I have seen do precisely this; but we 
 
13 
 
 are going to make ours easier; and if the marking has heretofore 
 been too severe, we'll mark only the mistakes and the incoherences. 
 
 Yet we must, I judge, be a little more explicit and come to a 
 definite understanding. For we are facing, as they say in the 
 greater world — we are facing, not a theory, but a condition. The 
 students present themselves for admission to the university at a 
 fairly mature age, more mature, in fact, from what is at present 
 required of them, than seems actually necessary ; they come decently 
 and conventionally clothed; they display no visible signs of mental 
 aberration. They scribble on their test with perfect aplomb. 
 Occasionally, to be sure, there steals over a face a twinge of agony, 
 but nothing that would indicate the need of a physician. They 
 have, on the whole, taken examinations before. The papers are 
 received with deference, and the thing is over. 
 
 Whence does madness come, the disease that gnaws at the 
 brain all unawares? The patient “falls into a sadness, then into 
 a fast, thence to a watch, then into a weakness, thence to a light- 
 ness, and by this declension into a madness wherein now he raves 
 and all we mourn for." The papers that have been handed in 
 reveal a brain&torm as acute as Hamlet's. No bacchanalian orgy 
 could show a wider range of improprieties. And yet the madness 
 must be partly feigned. The students, as they pass from the 
 room, commit no unseemly barbarities. They are hailed by their 
 comrades in perfect confidence and fellowship. And their future 
 actions, though not always above suspicion, perhaps, are in no 
 way distinguishable from the actions of their brethren. But why 
 should they feign madness? 
 
 That question brings me back again to the problem that I have 
 been endeavoring to discuss. And now we shall have to say good- 
 bye to our beautiful theory, and deal at close quarters with the 
 condition. Let me begin by quoting a paper delivered to me by 
 a high school teacher. 
 
 “Every Wednesday evening I sit down to a pile of some twenty- 
 five papers and a growing sense of despair. The papers are the 
 weekly compositions of my class in English. As I read them, I 
 wonder how any one can spend nine years in school and yet arrive 
 at no working knowledge of the principles of English grammar 
 and their application. Grammar seems to have become an obsolete 
 study. Spelling, also, has been abolished from the public school 
 
14 
 
 curricula, and care in orthography is beneath the notice of our 
 twentieth century students. The majority of my class seem lack- 
 ing in a proper imagination, or, worse still, have not the power 
 to transmit to paper the thoughts which they have. I find un- 
 limited need of patience and red ink, but my criticisms are use- 
 less. The next papers will be little better than these. My pupils 
 show no disposition to profit by past mistakes.” 
 
 This scripture reading offers me the theme of my further 
 discourse. From it I shall choose my text, and, as I have already 
 violated custom by imbedding the text in the middle of the sermon, 
 I shall presume still further to violate it by not adhering to a 
 strict division of topics. The situation revealed in the sentences 
 quoted is manifestly real. Plenty of teachers are undergoing a 
 similar experience. How shall the teacher in Rhetoric meet her 
 problem? Apparently she is held responsible — and here we must 
 not forget that, there are many and an increasing number of 
 exceptions — she is held responsible for the students' use of English. 
 The burden that all should bear has been shifted to her shoulders. 
 But, perhaps, for this situation, the other teachers are not wholly 
 to blame. I grant that they are not, wholly. The disease has a 
 first cause, which I may touch upon later. Meanwhile the teacher 
 of Rhetoric can relieve the situation by assuming a few pretty 
 definite tasks. Some of these tasks will be largely disciplinary, 
 that, for instance, of clearing the students' mind of all vague 
 notions of punctuation. 
 
 1. In the first place, punctuation is nothing if not structural. 
 There exist, to be sure, other varieties, such as rhetorical punctua- 
 tion and, what may be termed, idiomatic punctuation. By this 
 latter class I mean punctuation that is not readily self-revealed. 
 Who can tell for instance, structurally, how “Resolved, That we 
 burn our books on Rhetoric” should be punctuated. This kind of 
 punctuation, if learned at all, will have to be memorized. It 
 admits, however, of diversity in usage and constant simplification; 
 it is becoming all the time more reasonable. Together with rhetori- 
 cal punctuation, that is, punctuation employed most frequently in 
 imaginative writing for subtle effects — together with this rhetorical 
 class, it constitutes hardly a hundredth part of all punctuation, a 
 fairly inappreciable amount. The rest is purely structural ; it 
 is based, like grammar, on reason. In fact, it is grammar, nothing 
 else. 
 
15 
 
 But this should have been learned in the grades. Of course it 
 should, and it should be learned in the high schools too, and it 
 will have to be learned over again in the university. I could 
 flunk, if I chose, a fairly advanced class in reasonable structural 
 punctuation. Grammar, we remember, has some of the qualities 
 of porous plaster — it is perennially adhesive. We cannot tear it 
 away from us in a lifetime. And yet, as my scripture lesson 
 affirms, it seems to have become an obsolete study. 
 
 A student tells me that a teacher informed her that people 
 were punctuating much less than they used to. I shouldn’t be at 
 all surprised. Still, if punctuation is decadent, one would like 
 to know among what class of people it is decadent, and under 
 what conditions. 
 
 “Oh, my dear young friend!” replied Mr. Stiggins (only he 
 didn’t reply quite this), “my dear young friend, all punctuations 
 are vanities.” 
 
 “Too true; too true indeed,” said Mrs. Weller, murmuring a 
 groan and shaking her head assentingly. 
 
 “Veil,” said Sam, “I des-say they may be, Sir; but vich is 
 your partickler wanity. Vich wanity do you like the flavor on 
 best, Sir?” 
 
 If punctuations are vain, one would like to know which par- 
 ticular ones are the vainest. Is it semicolons or is it commas? 
 As any good piece of writing is fairly riddled with both, an 
 aggressive statement on this subject would be of more than pass- 
 ing value. 
 
 2. One important difference between the present method of 
 teaching Rhetoric and the method employed some decades ago 
 lies in the amount of writing called for. Formerly the pupils 
 were required to present a half dozen or so long papers a year. 
 These were very frequently on “literary” topics; the work was 
 exacted by the teacher of English; the complete oversight of the 
 work was, as it is today, in that teacher’s hands. From what we 
 can gather, great weight was placed on these performances; they 
 were overhauled with a good deal of care. 
 
 Nowadays, however, courses in daily theme writing have all 
 but forced their way into high school curricula. And here, when 
 this practice is co-existent with the longer papers, there appears 
 to be great gain. Not only is the student led to apply the whole- 
 
16 
 
 some maxim Nullus dies sine lined, but he is forced to write from 
 a wider experience; he must search his life more diligently for 
 topics; they will perforce be other than literary. And he will 
 also come to see how interesting an apparently narrow topic may 
 be made; his work will become less thin, his paragraphs fuller 
 and more compact. He will perchance be better equipped to enter 
 vocations where frequent written expression is demanded. 
 
 There is, however, in the practice of frequent writing, a distinct 
 danger, particularly to students — and these will form at present, 
 probably, a majority of the average high school class — who are 
 incompetent. In other words, with frequent writing there should 
 be established a system of frequent consultations. Not that every 
 scrap a student submits need be gone over with him personally. 
 Sometimes two or three representative papers taken up and dis- 
 cussed in class will answer every purpose. But when one is be- 
 hind a runaway horse, one does not usually essay to check his 
 flight by giving him the rein. Bad style is self -propagating, like 
 panic. The papers of a student whose thoughts are confused and 
 whose style is therefore confounded, or the papers of a student 
 whose style is confounded without his thought being utterly con- 
 fused — and many such students exist — should never drift uncere- 
 moniously into the waste paper basket. And yet I have heard 
 this very thing advocated, not perhaps in just this way; still it 
 is often advocated most solemnly and amid voiced approval. And 
 some of my most awkward swordsmen have parried my criticism 
 by coolly retorting that they had written three themes a week 
 the year before. It doesn't take much of an expert to diagnose 
 a case like that. Those three themes a week had simply run wild; 
 the teacher had not had the time or had not taken the time to 
 subdue them. A teacher is therefore obliged, in spite of herself, 
 to gauge the amount of written work required of her students 
 by the amount of time she has at her command to spend in con- 
 sultation with them. I do not maintain, of course, that the ideal 
 writer is one who comes to the dinner table rubbing his hands 
 and exclaiming, “Today I have achieved a sentence." Even Rhetoric 
 has its moderations, and a sluggish pondering is not one of them. 
 Frequent writing is in general valuable practice. But unless the 
 student is carefully watched, his seeming gain in facility of 
 expression may be more than offset by vicious habits — a general 
 clumsiness in structure and great redundancy. 
 
17 
 
 3. By insisting endlessly, then, on correct grammar, and by 
 stimulating to the limit of thoroughness in correction the practice 
 of frequent writing, remembering all the time that words stand 
 for ideas, the teacher of English is performing her duty by her 
 students in Rhetoric; she is putting them in a way to express 
 themselves correctly and fluently in her own and in other classes. 
 This is undoubtedly the general aim of every teacher in Rhetoric, 
 and these particular methods of realizing her ambitions have been 
 in her mind all along. They need not be dwelt upon more explicitly. 
 But she is also searching for more tangible ways of co-ordinating 
 her work with that of the students' entire range of studies. 
 Since she has been shoved into the firing line, she wants to know 
 precisely what is expected of her. How shall she give to her 
 task greater reality? My answer to this question is, simply by 
 lifting the pupils' other work into her own class. And this will 
 in no way bring a change into her methods; on the other hand 
 it may serve to stimulate the students' appreciation of her discipline. 
 A student whose first interests lie, say, in Mathematics or in 
 Zoology or in Civil Government should be encouraged to express 
 over again in significant form the thoughts and discussions that 
 have engaged his mind in these respective classes. He is thus 
 killing two birds with one stone; by the very process of salient 
 utterance he is not only cleansing his brain, but he is applying 
 the result of this cleansing in a very patent way to his whole 
 high school course. And such an accomplishment is naturally 
 expected from his study of Rhetoric. 
 
 This procedure, to be sure, of taking over the material of the 
 other studies into the class of Rhetoric is not clear of objections, 
 which may as well be fairly stated. What, for instance, if the 
 student has interests that burden his mind much more seriously 
 than any of his studies. A burning topic with him may be the 
 prospects of the football eleven, or the care of bees, or the town 
 water supply. Zoology may have no glory compared with these. 
 In such a case, but one course is open to the teacher of Rhetoric. 
 The students' choice must have the right of way. The chances are 
 that he will discuss much more to the purpose a subject of his 
 own selection than one thrust upon him. To be sure, a clever 
 teacher often hits upon a topic that awakens a pupil's dormant 
 interest, that seems to arouse his mind from slumbers. Yet, as 
 time goes on, it is only to the more backward pupils or for class 
 2 
 
18 
 
 exercises that topics need be assigned. It is, indeed, part of the 
 student’s business to find his own subjects, to discover what his 
 experiences really are. But, again, if he writes frequently, he 
 is likely in time to run dry; the domain of his hobbies may become 
 deforested. It is at this moment that the teacher appears with 
 her suggestions of a closer co-ordination of studies. In any case, 
 however, among her growing pupils, the teacher is rather more 
 solicitous about their expression, the intensity of their interest, 
 their plan of presentation, than about their erudition. An ade- 
 quate statement of a student’s conclusions on the book he has just 
 finished, or on a character in that book, is quite as important to 
 her as a statement on the behavior of protoplasms. In either case 
 the processes of discussion remain the same; both topics have 
 equal significance. 
 
 At this point I wish to leave for a moment the discussion of 
 Rhetoric as related specifically to high schools in order that later, 
 perhaps, I may take it up again more positively. Suppose, then, 
 we enter upon a wider discussion by quarreling with my final 
 assertion in the preceding paragraph. Are two topics, both of 
 them worthy and expressive of the students’ interest, of equal 
 significance to the teacher of Rhetoric? Here I am afraid we 
 are on debatable ground. In university circles, surely, such a 
 statement would provoke dissent. A teacher has recently phrased 
 his objection to this theory as follows:* 
 
 “The main function of the vernacular is the communication of 
 truth; in a given case the importance of the function is measured 
 by the importance of the truth to be conveyed. Since the posses- 
 sion of truth may not be taken for granted in the student, the 
 teaching of expression must never be made a primary aim of 
 any course. When we shift the emphasis and regard expression 
 as a means instead of an end, the question becomes, not Can we 
 teach the art of composition? but Can we teach by means of 
 composition? that is, can we impart true insight by this means? 
 When the emphasis is thus shifted, it becomes evident that English 
 composition cannot safely be used as an instrument of education 
 except in testing the students’ insight into a definite and connected 
 
 ♦Professor Lane Cooper, in a paper on the Teaching of Written Com- 
 position. read before the Modern Language Association, at Ithaca, Decem- 
 ber, 1909. 
 
19 
 
 subject, where the teacher has first hand knowledge, and the student 
 is acquiring it.” 
 
 These sentences are based on the general assertion that “the 
 welfare of the state and the happiness of the individual are essen- 
 tially promoted by the attainment of insight rather than by 
 expression.” 
 
 I do not propose at the moment to engage in serious quarrel 
 with either the thesis or the conclusions of this utterance. They 
 run quite too parallel with views I have already put forward 
 to admit of disclaimer. They simply criticise, in part, in a 
 different way the common notion about Rhetoric, that it exists 
 as other studies, to be taken up exclusively at certain hours and 
 under special teachers. The theory, of course, is not new. In 
 colleges a grumbling against this prevailing conception of Rhetoric 
 has often been heard of late, especially from the faculty of 
 Engineering. “You teach our students,” they say, “how to dabble 
 in description, how to plot stories; you seem quite enthusiastic 
 over Mr. A.'s paper on the art of clam-digging. How is that 
 going to benefit Mr. A. in presenting the advantages of his new 
 motor engine?” And in some colleges, there have been estab- 
 lished, under special teachers, classes in “Engineers' English.” 
 
 One might ask, to be sure, Why special teachers? Why do not 
 you, each one of you, teach Engineers' English? Or, if you haven't 
 time, have you seen to it carefully that these teachers of Engineers' 
 English are themselves engineers? If you have not, can it be 
 that you are still thinking of Rhetoric as a very extraordinary 
 thing and not essentially pervasive? Still, I do not propose to 
 rail at the scoffings of the Engineers. Their criticisms may come 
 from a wrong conception of what the department of Rhetoric is 
 actually about; yet their criticisms are wholesome. We want 
 them to be louder; we want to see the smoke rise from this whole 
 battlefield of Rhetoric. How many teachers of composition can 
 fairly criticise a paper on the steam pump? Does not the vocabulary 
 of the engineers tread ways that are dark? In vain the teacher 
 thunders, “Pretend I don't know what you are talking about; 
 treat me as if I were ignorant; be interesting.” “To be sure,” 
 the student replies, “but this is to go before a body of experts; 
 they are quite mature; they vote.” “But I am not responsible for 
 your facts,” the teacher cries, “here are your authorities; you 
 have stated them as I told you to.” “And the expression?” “Oh, 
 
20 
 
 the expression goes well enough, I guess — here, by the way, is an 
 is for an are; you want to be careful about things like that. But 
 all this lingo is foreign to me; let’s look over your plan of pre- 
 sentation.” And the student goes away, wondering if, after all, 
 the teacher is in a position to pronounce upon the plan. 
 
 But now, to complete the circle of our digression, to what extent 
 does the condition above mentioned obtain in the high schools? 
 Or, more specifically, is the teacher of English, upon whose shoul- 
 ders the burden of teaching Rhetoric has fallen — is she in a 
 position to allow her pupils to range at will among subjects of 
 which she has no first hand knowledge. Such a subject might be 
 Zoology, or it might be apiculture, football, water-supply; or per- 
 haps she has never read the book that the pupil proposes to write 
 upon. Evidently, to do her work properly, the springs of her 
 wisdom must be eternally gushing. Not only is she expected to 
 give her pupils the finishing touch in the use of their mother 
 tongue, but she is herself expected to read all things, study all 
 things, know all things. Figuratively, she is up a blind alley, 
 infested with prowlers, and her egress is precarious. 
 
 Well, perhaps it’s not quite so bad as that. To begin with, 
 only one of the subjects just mentioned demands of the teacher 
 what might technically be called first-hand knowledge. For the 
 others, a general knowledge and an open mind will do for the 
 nonce. One is hardly obliged to have kept bees or to have studied 
 deeply the problem of water supply to be in a position to judge 
 whether or not a high school student’s paper on apiculture or 
 on the town water is well done; football is in the very air one 
 breathes. I have found, as one naturally would find, that I am 
 at an evident disadvantage in not having read the book that a 
 student is writing about. Still I realize well enough that it is 
 impossible to include the reading of all such books in my day’s 
 work; and it would be absurd to narrow the students’ reading 
 to my own limited range. A like embarrassment would come to 
 teachers in other subjects than English. Moreover, in most sub- 
 jects, the knowledge of the teacher of Rhetoric is doubtless much 
 larger than the pupils’. Her career at college has given her a 
 wider outlook. 
 
 Still, there are likely to remain a few subjects, subjects of a 
 special vocabulary, of which the teachers’ apprehension is less than 
 limited. I hinted a moment ago at a supposititious essay on the be- 
 
21 
 
 haviours of protoplasms. Now my own knowledge of these “viscid 
 cells” is as vain as their habits are said to be peculiar. If I were 
 convinced that a student really knew whereof he was writing, I 
 might not bestir myself greatly to find quarrel in his lack of clear- 
 ness to me. 
 
 But let us not be satisfied to rest quite here. How many pupils 
 are likely to risk the presentation of a subject of this character? 
 And, say one did, are not the chances pretty even that it is not 
 his subject but his brain that is protoplasmic? Or, putting it 
 another way, would he possess a sufficiently extended vocabulary 
 or command of sentence structure to admit of his making himself 
 clear anyway? He might; yet in the great majority of cases, I fear 
 that he would have bitten off more than he could chew. Fresh- 
 men occasionally write excellent themes on water wheels and motor 
 engines, and these excellent themes are, more likely than not, per- 
 fectly intelligible, even to the teacher of Rhetoric. And if they 
 are not intelligible, the trouble is fairly certain to rest in the fact 
 that the students are simply lacking in an elementary assimila- 
 tion of their material, even in the very thought that might guide 
 their expression. Shall the teacher of English give them both 
 words and an understanding? No one else does, and the classes 
 in Rhetoric are large. Huxley wrote on a piece of chalk and Tyn- 
 dall on glacier ice that he may run who readeth it. I wonder if 
 the demand of the teacher that abstruse subjects be made inter- 
 esting does not, after all, give the immature student his clue. 
 If a student does not present a subject interestingly, if he does not 
 write to produce an effect upon other minds, he either does not 
 know his subject or he has not learned what expression means. 
 In the first case, he better be told to keep his subject in abeyance; 
 in the second case — well, he will be told many things. It is well, 
 of course, for a high school student to speak the truth, but unless 
 he can add to what he may think is clearness the element of inter- 
 est, he has not made his truth actual. And I have a stout sus- 
 picion that the same rule will hold true of the present college 
 freshmen. Really advanced students, those whose subjects are in- 
 teresting because they are clear, whose style is rigorously concise 
 because their material is thoroughly assimilated, are addressing 
 a much narrower circle; they should long ago have been able to 
 earn their release from a special Rhetoric requirement. 
 
22 
 
 4. Thus far, in assuming that instruction in the unescapable 
 art of Rhetoric has been relegated, almost universally in our high 
 schools, to the teacher of English, I have endeavored to indicate 
 cursorily how she may take up her task with a mind both to the 
 accumulated ignorance which her pupils bring to her from the 
 grades, and to their present experiences. If they conceive of 
 grammar as a dead and dismal science, made up largely of rules, 
 she will embrace her opportunity to make it vital and reasonable. 
 For now the pupils are in a way to apply their grammar con- 
 cretely; they are about to understand how essential its seeming 
 artificialities really are. In her hands, grammar will become a 
 far more advanced study than it had the air of being heretofore; 
 a thorough knowledge of it on her part will spare her much beat- 
 ing about the bush. Then, in calling for as frequent writing as 
 her time warrants, she will stimulate her pupils to open their 
 minds to the diversity of their experiences; they will perforce draw 
 upon their other studies to help them out. And she will give them 
 every encouragement to unlock the gates of their erudition. Under 
 the conviction, however, that she is intelligent and alive, she will 
 insist that a presentation of these subjects be both intelligible and 
 interesting; she will take a firm stand there. And, as she is also 
 half persuaded that style and thought are inseparable, she will 
 be further importunate that exactness and finish in expression are 
 not devices for ornament, but an essential part of the thought to be 
 conveyed. 
 
 Possibly, as time goes on, her work may become less catholic 
 and more intensive. The grades may give her better equipped 
 pupils, and her fellow teachers may spring to a realization that 
 perhaps Rhetoric is their business too. Signs are multiplying. 
 In a number of High Schools and Normal Schools there has been 
 introduced a more extended scheme of teaching Rhetoric. There 
 the work has been assigned to a special teacher whose office it is 
 to examine the written product not only in the Literature class 
 but in all the classes. Special appointments at designated periods 
 are made with the pupils; there the work, whatever it may be, is 
 gone over and criticised. If a paper on an examination, say, in 
 Geography, has been poorly executed, the pupil is brought to ac- 
 count; the mark is withheld until the paper is rewritten and ap- 
 pears again in adequate form. 
 
23 
 
 The aim of such a scheme is apparent. Under the connivance 
 of the teachers, the pupils are likely to come to a fuller apprecia- 
 tion of what the study of Rhetoric means. The teachers assigned 
 to the special work have naturally had an appropriate training in 
 composition. But herein lies, I should say, a weakness of this 
 method, not from the point of view of the pupils, but of the teach- 
 ers. Would not the shifting of the burden still go on, and might 
 not the teachers themselves still be inclined to regard Rhetoric as 
 something extraneous to their work? If such a scheme were 
 adopted — and it has much in its favor — I suggest that the teacher 
 of English, at least, be let alone. She, above all others, perhaps, 
 should always consider Rhetoric as part and parcel of her sub- 
 ject. Her opportunities are too abundant to be slighted. The 
 special teacher, then, might give her time to the other classes, 
 until the hour arrives when every teacher is in a position to as- 
 sume the responsibility of caring for her pupils’ written work. As 
 an approach to this end, the special teacher — some one apt and 
 trained and interested in composition — might be selected from a 
 department other than English. In a following year, the choice 
 might fall on a teacher from still another department; every 
 teacher, in fact, might live in the expectation of being appointed 
 to this special work. If the teachers proved inefficient, why then 
 the matter might go before the schoolboard. And there — worthy 
 consequence — might ensue a discussion of increased taxation, a 
 fairer apportionment of time, and larger salaries ; and the mil- 
 lenium might be drawing near when no special teachers of Rhetoric 
 would be required. Meanwhile the Holy City is so far on the 
 horizon that it looks as if the special teacher might be of great 
 cheer to the teacher of English in her arduous journey, until they 
 meet other seraphic groups; then the special teacher might spirit 
 herself away, or blend. 
 
 5. Heretofore I have been discussing, or at least have implied 
 in my discussion, the expository theme. And this I have done 
 mainly for the reason that it is in her pupils’ expository work 
 that the teacher of Rhetoric is brought face to face with the de- 
 mand made upon her by the other teachers. They want to see tiie 
 results of her training in their classes, and if they do not note an 
 improvement in the pupils she sends to them, they will naturally 
 bring to question the usefulness of her methods. That they should 
 share in her work has not yet appealed to them as especially 
 
24 
 
 practicable. To make her labor effective, then, in the other 
 classes, is one of her most vexing problems. And the problem is 
 further complicated by thd fact that expository writing is the most 
 difficult kind of writing to make interesting and vital. It demands 
 primarily clear thinking, and clear thinking, if it come to a per- 
 son at all, comes late. “Nothing is harder to write than a primer” 
 says Lafcadio Hearn in a recently published letter. “Simplicity 
 combined with force is required; and that combination requires 
 immense power.” To be sure, high school pupils are not called 
 upon to write primers; yet in expository work they are neverthe- 
 less expected to address themselves to the primer writing state of 
 mind. What immense effort, then, is demanded of immature pupils 
 to give adequate explanations! Their power of reporting their 
 sensations is far more native to them than their power of organ- 
 izing their thoughts; their real world is sensuous, not intellectual. 
 To get them to express ideas and not wholly impressions brings 
 their teacher to all manner of shifts. And yet school is the place 
 where they are supposed to gain ideas; this phase of their writing 
 may not be ignored. The difficulty here involved and its solution 
 form, indeed, the very core of pedagogy. And thus it is that I do 
 not think the teacher of Rhetoric need be over solicitous about 
 pressing too far what I have called the co-ordination of her work 
 with her pupils’ other studies. If she can give them the method 
 of exposition in developing a subject like How to Handle a Boat, 
 in which their interests are far other than intellectual, she might 
 well leave drier subjects alone. Full answers to definite questions 
 such as an examination calls for would furnish them ample op- 
 porunity to be both dry and clear. Larger expository work might 
 well come toward the end of their high school course. As for 
 argument, a specialized form of expository writing, — this has nowa- 
 days the stimulus of debate; outside of this stimulus, however, 
 the difficulties of getting much of value from immature students 
 are of the same nature as the difficulties involved in exposition 
 proper. Expository writing seems best evoked through a question 
 and then another question — a linked series; topics might be sug- 
 gested, perhaps, in the interrogatory form. Indeed this is the 
 very way in which Socrates, that supreme expositor, stimulated 
 thoughts in the Athenian youth. 
 
 6. Socrates, his friends and judges, and the young men of 
 Athens enacted their drama, as we know, in a little corner of a vast 
 
25 
 
 wilderness of a continent long before the dawn of what we are 
 pleased to call modern civilization. The definitions those Greeks ar- 
 rived at do not edify us greatly today. Many things they argued 
 about we take for granted, and much that they guessed at we still 
 recognize as only guesses. Our view is loftily scientific. But 
 what Socrates did and said we still read about, when we have time, 
 and we still are interested. We are not blind to the fact that he 
 possessed an unusual personality; we are incurably enamored of 
 a hero. Then, too, the accounts of Socrates and his friends give us 
 satisfying glimpses of an elder period, and they also usher us into 
 the presence of a remarkably idealistic philosophy. Yet neither 
 the love of a hero, nor of history, nor of philosophy offers an ade- 
 quate explanation why, for instance, a class of youngsters will 
 listen with bated breath to the words of Plato or Xenophon on the 
 daily exigencies of an old Greek sophist. Other chords of interest 
 must have been touched, none other, we imagine, than that the 
 words and acts of Socrates happen to be reported in a most 
 singular way — emotionally. These two contemporaries of Socrates 
 evidently knew how to write; they were creating literature; the 
 youngsters are hanging on the words of great descriptive artists. 
 
 What description is, let us not attempt to define too closely. We 
 should only be traversing over again ground that myriads of 
 text books have already covered. I wish merely to draw atten- 
 tion for a brief space to a certain application of what I shall name 
 the descriptive principle. 
 
 For one thing descriptive writing is not ornamental. To stu- 
 dents, no such thing need be suggested as an adorned, a “flowery” 
 style. To quote Hearn again, “A pictorial style is only justifiable 
 in the treatment of rare, exotic subjects” and the treatment of 
 such subjects a high school student, I take it, is constrained to 
 avoid. He will, if the spirit moves him, find abundant oppor- 
 tunity for that kind of writing when all schools are behind him. 
 For his immediate purposes the descriptive or emotional element 
 in what he writes may be defined as that quality which gives his 
 expressions vitality. 
 
 There are many curious notions about concerning description 
 — much lookings out of car windows and gazings from the tops 
 of hills. All this is well. There can be no offense in looking and 
 
26 
 
 gazing provided one actually sees something. Wordsworth looked 
 at 
 
 “A host, of golden daffodils 
 Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
 
 Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” 
 
 and Ruskin gazed at a cathedral until he saw “the crests of the 
 arches break into marble foam, and toss themselves far into the 
 blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray.” 
 
 But what shall we say of a paper on a scientific subject, a 
 sermon or an oration packed full of similes and illustrations, of 
 “pretty” language, which hang on the theme like so much alien 
 moss, every adornment weakening the effect striven for? I have 
 listened to such papers, such sermons, such orations frequently, 
 and have been led to wonder if the writers, the preachers, the 
 orators, had not been leaning without avail out of a car window, 
 had not been adoring indiscriminately, perchance, two moons, one 
 real and the other a painful hallucination. And yet, these dis- 
 courses, to have carried with them, in the best sense of these words, 
 a popular audience should have been shot through with an emo- 
 tional, a descriptive element. The authors had awkwardly and 
 deliberately appropriated for decoration what might have been 
 made inherent in the theme itself. Their failure, outwardly at 
 least, was due to a lack in applying the descriptive principle. 
 
 To illustrate specifically what I mean, suppose I quote a para- 
 graph from a recent review of George Macaulay Trevelyan’s his- 
 tory of “Garibaldi and the Thousand.”* 
 
 “Another point to be remarked upon, because it is 
 representative, is his accurate study of topography. He 
 traces the course of the Thousand from Marsala to 
 Palermo with the minuteness of a map-maker; indeed, 
 he has been over the route himself, and having an eye 
 for the picturesque, he relieves what might otherwise 
 be a painstaking description of a military march by 
 charming bits of local color. Yet in spite of this gift, 
 he never indulges in fine writing for its own sake. The 
 throbbing passages come quite naturally and are not 
 pressed.” 
 
 Here the reviewer has defined for me indirectly what I mean 
 by the descriptive principle. A living historian has worked upon 
 
 ♦New York Nation, February 17, 1910. 
 
27 
 
 what appears to be at first thought an uncompromisingly dry sub- 
 ject — topography. And yet he has thrown himself upon this ex- 
 pository study so emotionally that it contains throbbing passages, 
 and again these passages bear no trace of “fine writing” but come 
 quite naturally, quite inherently, and are not pressed. 
 
 Let us approach this subject from still another point of view. 
 I find, for instance, that pupils in the grades are supposed to read, 
 besides the poets and story tellers, certain writers of exposition 
 and argument, — Emerson, Webster, Carlyle, Macaulay, Lincoln, 
 Burke. The list is not a long one; other names readily suggest 
 themselves, even among American authors. Occasionally, but not 
 often, great men of action join such a company; occasionally too 
 philosophers. Other historians besides Macaulay and Carlyle 
 could easily take a place there; moreover, the list is quite barren 
 of theologians and popularizers of science. But whoever the men 
 are that go to make up such a group, the principle of selection 
 remains the same. Great men they are, .of course, but in so far 
 as they appear in such a list, they are there because they are 
 masters of expression; they put their thoughts in appealing ways; 
 they create an emotional interest. 
 
 By way of illustration, I quote, not quite at random, a few 
 lines from an article on science. 
 
 “The undulating downs and rounded coombs, covered 
 with sweet grassed turf, of our inland chalk country, 
 have a peacefully domestic and mutton suggesting pretti- 
 ness, but can hardly be called either grand or beautiful. 
 
 But on our southern coasts, the wall sided cliffs, many 
 hundred feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles stand- 
 ing out in the sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve 
 as perches for the wary cormorant, confer a wonderful 
 beauty and grandeur upon the chalk headlands. And in 
 the East, chalk has its share in the formation of some of 
 the most venerable mountain ranges such as the Lebanon.” 
 
 These sentences are taken from the early part of an address 
 to working men. The descriptive element approaches rather closely 
 perhaps to what might be called description proper, yet I am of 
 the opinion that if these sentences were put back again into the 
 body of the address they would not strike one as in the least ex- 
 traneous; and the theme is expository. Huxley has, with no ap- 
 parent thought of decoration, so identified himself emotionally 
 
28 
 
 with his subject that he has evoked among his listeners a respon- 
 sive interest. In other passages the same effect might be traced 
 to the employment of vivid words, figures of speech; throughout, 
 the expositor is denying himself the dry parlance of one who is 
 merely drawing conclusions from a given body of facts, has 
 stepped boldly among the writers to be studied for style. Tyn- 
 dall writes a chapter on the Energy of Nature, exact and logical 
 in thought and structure, yet permeated with an almost poetical 
 fervor of imagination. It ilustrates admirably, as some one has 
 said, how strong feeling raises pure exposition to the level of 
 literature. 
 
 This emotional element I have called the descriptive principle. 
 In so far as this principle is teachable, it has much to do with 
 strong active verbs; choice, colored adjectives; simplicity, vigor, 
 rhythm, — all the paraphernalia, in fact, which a teacher of 
 Rhetoric brings constantly into her class-room drill. It is this 
 descriptive quality that makes Plato forever interesting, and 
 which, together with thfeir nice arrangement of thought, makes 
 Lincoln and Burke worthy of detailed study. For, when all is 
 said, it is in the field of descriptive, emotional writing that the 
 teacher of Rhetoric obtains her most useful, her most lasting- 
 results; in this field she gets at her pupils* essentially intimate 
 experiences; here they usually first come to realize who they are; 
 here they usually first attain a semblance of style. 
 
 The emotional element, then, is inherent in the best expres- 
 sion; it is what makes the thing presented live. The pupil scarcely 
 discovers what is in him until he learns to yield his thought in 
 concise, pictorial images. When his emotional life is once tapped, 
 his vocabulary becomes rich and varied; his vision presses upon 
 his thinking. By rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he stimulates 
 the cells of his brain. 
 
 So, perhaps, when it's dark, he may come to realize that to him 
 night need not always “reign supreme,” nor when it's quiet, need 
 nature always hold “full sway.” He disdains to borrow the finery 
 of “yonder huge oak overhanging the streamlet.” His teacher 
 will demand of him if he actually saw “the little stream jump 
 and laugh with renewed activity,” or “mother nature gently spread 
 her pure white robe over her many children.” And the class will 
 question whether his eyes were rubbed advisedly when he tells 
 
29 
 
 them that “the sun which looked like a large ball of fire was taking 
 his last look at old mother earth before he made his bow to the 
 evening which already could be seen approaching over the eastern 
 hills.” 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. I do not set down these extracts 
 from students’ themes as examples of heinous crimes. Young folks 
 are naturally imitative; they delight in the borrowed dress of their 
 elders, and, besides, their fancy flies easily to grotesque personifi- 
 cation. There is much of the Mede and Persian left in youth. 
 And when they have had their descriptive revelry, when, like 
 
 “Charlotte, having seen his body 
 Borne before her on a shutter ” 
 
 like well conducted persons, they will still go on cutting bread 
 and butter; their lives will settle down to normal values. Yet 
 Charlotte’s vein (another Charlotte) does not require the en- 
 couragement it too often receives from her teachers of Rhetoric. 
 She should be told that personification is a pretty ticklish instru- 
 ment, and that when she stretches it out to a lengthened phrase 
 instead of half hiding it in a glowing verb, she is actually untrue 
 to things as they are and to herself. She is an Elizabethan or a 
 King Solomon instead of a contemporaneous, twentieth century 
 girl; she has stolen a glance from an antique window. 
 
 When, therefore, Charlotte’s exotic enthusiasm has been sup- 
 pressed, she is in a fair way to be born again. Then she will un- 
 derstand, perhaps, the fine condensed reality, the exactness, in 
 the style of the authors she is reading. Her attention to this may 
 result in a pretty thorough self examination, and until a turn of 
 phrase or a figure becomes her own personal property, she will 
 not pluck it and bear it off with her, but will let it stay where it 
 belongs. 
 
 With these few words I shall bring to a close the discussion 
 of description. I have only to add that students have frequently 
 told me that it was through the application of the descriptive 
 principle they first came to realize the bearing of their course in 
 Rhetoric on the rest of their college work. 
 
 7. Perhaps it may not be out of place here to say a general 
 word or two on the use of text books in Rhetoric; to answer the 
 question, if I may, why, with a body of literature at her elbow 
 
30 
 
 and with the principles of composition in her mind, the teacher 
 of English need have recourse to a special text book in Rhetoric 
 at all. Here, at first blush, would appear to be an idle reduplica- 
 tion. And I imagine that a great many well equipped teachers 
 would find their most profitable method to be in leading their 
 pupils to investigate inductively what the art of writing is by an 
 analysis of the required authors and by a careful criticism of the 
 pupils’ application of the principles discovered in these authors. 
 This method of teaching Rhetoric, indeed, is likely to come more 
 and more into use, as the teachers acquire a finer efficiency. 
 
 A strong case, however, might be made on the other side, — 
 on the employment of special text books. To begin with, in re- 
 cent years the text books in Rhetoric have reached a high degree 
 of excellence. It might even be contended that in no other study 
 have the principles of pedagogy been more thoroughly mastered. 
 The appreciation of literature itself, on its formal side, has always 
 been deeply implicated in the methods revealed in the best text 
 books on the art of writing. And in teaching composition, the 
 artistic approach is generally the most practicable and unequivocal. 
 It is part of the business of text books to isolate or throw into 
 relief model paragraphs and salient passages, passages, too — 
 the very best of them — often not found in the authors the pupil 
 is reading. They are frequently selected as having a very present 
 appeal to every day interests. Thus the pupils’ attention is likely 
 to be more concentrated; they come to apprehend visually that 
 good writing is not confined to those masters who are enrolled 
 in their course, but that the field is world-wide and that in con- 
 temporary literature the same principles are observed constantly 
 that are evoked under the shadow of great names. The teacher 
 of English, too, might find it irksome forever to interpret and to 
 analyze rhetorically the same authors. Text books in Rhetoric 
 place before the pupils the one method as distinct from the other, 
 and this distinction, to young minds, may be important. 
 
 In either case, whether the teacher of composition proposes to 
 use text books in her classes or not, she cannot afford not to have 
 her private shelf crowded with them. She is thus repeatedly com- 
 ing in touch with new and helpful suggestions. What she has 
 dimly conceived may burst into revelation from a text book. The 
 hints from others induce her to read widely; they amplify her 
 notes, and occasionally, too, bring her into stimulating relations 
 
31 
 
 with distant colleagues. Though in every text book she will find 
 much that is not to her immediate service, she is likely, on the 
 other hand, to discover something that puts in a more definite 
 way than she has hitherto thought out what has been on her mind. 
 Every teacher, then, if she values her work, will keep pretty 
 close to the new publications. In schools where composition occu- 
 pies a full quota of hours apart from the other studies, a text 
 book, at least in the lower classes, is advisable. In the upper 
 classes much of the work might be done through a series of reading 
 texts. But whatever books she employs, it is best, I should say, 
 to avoid the compendiums. She should be her own compendium of 
 rules, and her own storehouse of grammatical mistakes, drawn 
 from the efforts of her classes. 
 
 And this general rule she might bind to her. If she finds that 
 she is on the point of using the same unrevised textbook for three 
 successive years — I refer, of course, to the ordinary working 
 textbook — she better take a summer off by the seashore or among 
 the mountains to think it over. Possibly her brain has become 
 atrophied and she needs a long rest. For relaxation she might 
 try letter writing, not to the school board, even if they have driven 
 her into her rut, but to her intimates, — long, ardent epistles to 
 pick up neglected friendship. In the French schools, where they 
 do so many things well, letter writing forms an important part of 
 courses in composition. Thus, next to fishing and tramping and 
 a novel or two, her letters might have a distinct bearing on her 
 further usefulness as a teacher. 
 
 III.* 
 
 But I have no intention of diverting what I have to say into 
 a parade of more or less “helpful suggestions.” Hints as to 
 methods we have always with us. The problem confronting the 
 high schools suggests a discussion quite different from that. The 
 present situation, indeed, cries to heaven. “Freshman English,” 
 a teacher writes to me, “will resolve itself into a grammar, sen- 
 tence, paragraph, spelling and punctuation drill, perhaps all that 
 we should demand, though less than I formerly aimed at.” And 
 another teacher declares in print: “College English is bad, in- 
 
 *A major part of the following 1 pages, together with some introductory 
 matter, was read before an Education Conference held in Eugene, Ore- 
 gon, June 24, 1910. 
 
32 
 
 credibly, intolerably bad.” These are not isolated voices; the land 
 rings with them. My own lamentation would be so piteous that 
 I gladly run under cover of a quotation. It is putting it mildly 
 to say that, in this country, to the average youth of eighteen, the 
 ability to write intelligently his mother tongue or at least the pre- 
 vailing tongue of his precinct is about as rare an accomplishment 
 as were formerly supposed to be a rich man’s chances of entering 
 the upper Kingdom. And this youth of eighteen has completed 
 his high school course and is possibly dreaming of four years at a 
 university, years during which his exercise in English will become 
 nothing short of clamorous. If, then, his written word is so bad, 
 we might well ask, why is it so? Is it improving? What is the 
 remedy? 
 
 To none of these questions do I bring a golden answer. A dis- 
 cussion of the first two, indeed, as engaging as it appears, would 
 not, I imagine, be in itself of much profit unless it constantly im- 
 plied an answer to the third, the remedy. A little excursion, to 
 be sure, in muckraking might be enjoyable, yet it calls for a rather 
 highly cultivated talent in psychological analysis and dialectics. 
 To be certain of my points, I should want to read more attentively 
 than I have been in the habit of reading the latest numbers of our 
 ten cent magazines. 
 
 An easy answer to the question why the use of English is 
 so bad might be that the teaching of composition is ill done, — 
 the teachers are poorly equipped, they are not facing the real 
 issue, their methods are wrong. Now, as I said before, let us 
 not for the moment be too eager to plunge into a discussion of 
 methods. A teacher’s methods are to be judged by her accom- 
 plishment, not always either by her immediate accomplishment. 
 Nor is any teacher, be she ever so efficient, likely to make new dis- 
 coveries of methods. Any methods she may adopt will perforce 
 be as old as teaching itself. The danger here is that an inex- 
 perienced teacher, one who has not yet realized where her strength 
 lies, may be led to copy an older teacher’s attitudes without her 
 discipline. She will have a ready ear for short cuts and royal 
 roads, and her enthusiasm may miss the point. For behind every 
 method, new or old, must lie not only a thorough familiarity with 
 the minutest details of her subject but also a faculty of arousing 
 all kinds of students to do useful work. The problem is in reality 
 
33 
 
 profoundly psychological; it strikes too close to the personality 
 of the teacher to admit of demonstrable solution. 
 
 But if the teacher of composition is manifestly incompetent, 
 how did she get her place and how does she happen to retain it? 
 Were any influences brought to bear in her favor other than the 
 recommendations of those who were specifically qualified to judge? 
 And here we are embarassed by the circumstance that rival insti- 
 tutions are engaged in a momentous warfare for their own off- 
 spring. I am told even that in some states it is difficult for a 
 teacher from another state, no matter how assured her efficiency 
 may be, to find a position. The motive here is doubtless not en- 
 tirely vicious. The state in question may be honestly convinced 
 that its teachers are adequately trained and that it is perilous 
 to have to do with outsiders. The principle, however, is likely 
 to do immense harm, especially as good teachers are so uncommonly 
 rare. It might easily happen that out of a large number of pros- 
 pective teachers turned out in a year but a very limited per cent, 
 of them would be worthy of serious recommendation. Besides, 
 such a system thwarts the very democracy that should underlie 
 education. Its logical fallacy becomes evident when legislators pro- 
 pose, as some of them have proposed, that teachers in state uni- 
 versities be appointed from the various counties in the state. Close 
 corporation and inbreeding in the choice of teachers are anom- 
 alous. These evils, however, are hardly likely to grow; the mo- 
 tives behind them are becoming more and more discredited. 
 
 In case poor teachers have been highly recommended by author- 
 ities that ought to know, the schools are evidently not to blame. 
 They have been trapped and must in some way gnaw themselves 
 free. But, on the other hand, what inducements are they offer- 
 ing for good teachers? Does it ever happen that, between two 
 teachers, the contract as in bridge building goes to the lowest 
 bidder? If so, and the lowest bidder is a poor teacher, the trap 
 has been set maliciously for the pupils and the community. Or say 
 this is the situation. A teacher is desired, say, in Latin, with 
 composition on the side. Is composition ever given to a teacher 
 who professes no special interest in it? Now Rhetoric, in the 
 happy phrase of Professor Baldwin, should be regarded as sub- 
 sidiary to the whole curriculum, as the organon — to borrow Bacon’s 
 word for logic — of any course of study. In the old days, the days 
 of our fancy, before the period of confusion, it would have been per- 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 fectly safe to entrust the teaching of composition to the pedagogue 
 in Latin. But some recent conceptions of the mark of an educa- 
 tion show signs of change. And it is today quite possible that the 
 teacher in Latin will carry with him two sets of English vocabu- 
 laries, one solecistical, with which he buries the dead, and the 
 other rigid grammatical, with which he entombs the living. Nor 
 do teachers in other subjects than the languages escape the re- 
 sults of these confusions that destroy. Consequently the pupils’ 
 conception of what expression means becomes exceedingly vague 
 and narrow. 
 
 Again, in schools where there are special teachers of English, — 
 the term English including English Literature and Rhetoric — a 
 student informs me this condition prevails. Teachers in certain 
 branches get such and such a salary, but the salaries of the teach- 
 ers of English are considerably lower. This strikes me as rather 
 interesting, especially as good teachers in English are as rare 
 as good teachers in any other subject. It is bootless to point out 
 that there are more applicants in the field. This is due partly to 
 the fact, I fear, that English is considered easier to master than 
 other subjects and partly also to the fact that a good many make 
 it what they call a secondary subject, their main interest lying 
 elsewhere. In college the most superficial minds often run to the 
 English department because, forsooth, the word has an indigenous 
 and undisciplinary clang. Schools should not be hoodwinked by this 
 disorder. The best of such teachers are in a position to command 
 as high salaries as teachers in any other subject. So rare, indeed, 
 are inspiring teachers in composition that the principle of desig- 
 nating for them lower salaries than are apportioned to teachers 
 in other branches is doubtless accountable in some measure for the 
 present degrading situation. 
 
 1. An inquiry into the existing status in the use of English 
 as compared with that of former times would involve a more 
 extended examination than I am prepared to give. Perhaps, 
 however, a mere glance at what an education in New England 
 implied in the early years of the nineteenth century may be of 
 some service. Emerson, as we know, was somewhat backward in 
 his studies. His father mourns that at three years of age, “Ralph 
 does not read very well yet.” At eighteen he graduated with 
 fifty-eight other boys of like age from a high school called, at 
 the time, Harvard College. Emerson stood about midway in his 
 
35 
 
 class. He read the class poem, but only after several others had 
 positively declined the honor. He took prizes, second prizes, in 
 essay contests. His letters at this time are boyish, interesting, 
 and remarkably well expressed. Many of the lads kept journals 
 — they were encouraged to — in which they wrote down as they 
 might the thoughts and experiences that came to them. The 
 teachers of this high school have left no monographs by which 
 we may measure their erudition. Emerson studied composition 
 under a certain Channing, but he appears to have held in greater 
 reverence his teacher of Greek, Edward Everett, who was a notable 
 orator and preacher. We are entirely safe in assuming that all 
 these teachers had a fair apprehension of their mother tongue, 
 and that slovenliness in the use of the vernacular among their pu- 
 pils would not have been tolerated. Why should a boy pursue 
 knowledge up to the age of eighteen if he couldn’t express him- 
 self? Emerson, we see, whose writings even at this age show 
 unusual felicity, held no marked place among his fifty-eight class- 
 mates. 
 
 Perhaps these lads were a picked crowd. Why, yes, of course 
 they were. A good number of them were southerners, sons of 
 planters, among whom elegance in speech was a social distinction. 
 Harvard College could count on home training. Education had not 
 yet become a mechanism; “useful” studies, vocational studies, did 
 not clamor for a place in the high school curriculum; immigration 
 was not yet disconcerting. Nor had the necessity for technical 
 training arisen; instead of watching France and Germany, Har- 
 vard College could rest serenely in the spirit of the ancient schools 
 of Greece and Rome. We must admit frankly that the problems 
 confronting this New England school of the early nineteenth 
 century were much simpler, much easier of solution than ours. 
 But, after all, may not a cursory contemplation of this old high 
 school, with its definiteness of aim, bring us to a moment’s pause? 
 Might it not help us in a point of view — so seriously lacking in 
 our modern complexity? Let me ask again — Is a person actually 
 educated even for a vocation who, with a presumable equipment 
 of knowledge, cannot pick up a pencil and explain himself in decent 
 phrase? You remember the words of my scripture reading: “I 
 wonder how anyone can spend nine years in school and yet arrive 
 at no working knowledge of the principles of English grammar 
 and their application.” There is at least one phase in the teaching 
 
36 
 
 of these New England boys that, in the way of comparison, offers 
 us moderns meager consolation. 
 
 Nor if we should compare ourselves with our predecessors ten 
 years ago do I judge we would gain much comfort. Here we are 
 dealing with more relative standards. Now when one starts at 
 zero and goes to one, the progress has been very great indeed. If 
 my mathmatics serves me, the advance may not be very well 
 measured; it is infinite. Of course the jump from one to two is 
 measurable. If a child, for example, said “goo” yesterday and 
 spells “cat” today, the progress in articulation is beyond words 
 to express. But if the child spells “cat” today and “dog’ tomor- 
 row, we are not nearly so stunned. So when a high school puts 
 English composition into its curriculum, our hopes spring high. 
 But when it appears that after a decade the pupils of that high 
 school have merely arrived at the point of spelling “dog” incor- 
 rectly, we stop to think. “Spelling,” my text runs, “has been 
 abolished from the public school curricula and care in orthography 
 is beneath the notice of our twentieth century students.” This is the 
 condition in which many young people are entering college today. 
 They are from accredited schools and hence their product is un- 
 challenged. One would think that they were at an age to escape, 
 if they wished, special training in Rhetoric; and yet the college 
 finds that it has to begin with them all over again. Their expres- 
 sion is so faulty that one sometimes wonders if they are in a con- 
 dition to take up liberal studies. If reading has not taught them, 
 at least, to observe, will lectures set them thinking? Apparently, 
 some of them. And I am inclined to assume that a fairly shrewd 
 intelligence may express itself in abominable speech and in shame- 
 less writing. 
 
 2. For this situation the teachers of composition everywhere, 
 in college and high schools alike, are naturally bound to appro- 
 priate a share of the odium. We are all of us in the same boat. 
 People look to us for a solution of the problem and we have none 
 to offer. There is, of course, much of caustic analysis and baffling 
 criticism, curiously enough from those, at times, who have never 
 conducted classes in composition. And what sufficing answer can 
 be made to charges based on the meagre accomplishment of courses 
 in this subject. How easily, too, may such courses fall into useless 
 ways, become a cut and dried thing, unadapted and unwatched, 
 a sort of fetish of plausibilities. But on the whole the critics 
 
37 
 
 of English are very kind. No subject has such a host of friends; 
 and they gather about the invalid not to mourn but to cure. Sup- 
 pose we parley with them a moment to see, like good physicians, 
 if we may not give a fair record of the disease before we suggest 
 a remedy. 
 
 What can teachers of Rhetoric count upon? Surely not home 
 training. Sometime, perhaps; in the past the home may have 
 counted for much. But in this strenuous and efficient day, this 
 day of terrible majorities, the home may be a very happy place, 
 but good English is not at ease there.* On the contrary, as a writer 
 I quoted a moment ago says, “Bad English is bred in the bone of 
 the average American boy.” He hears it everywhere — on the 
 street corners, in the school yard, and at home. Here, perhaps, is 
 the first cause that I hinted at some time ago. I am speaking, 
 of course, of the average home, the sort of place that now and again 
 breeds geniuses. An Abraham Lincoln will walk nine miles a day 
 to school, until he is brought back from his wandering and set to 
 useful work. He will later go off twelve miles to buy a grammar. 
 Such a boy, or a Franklin, who in his youth transcribed and re- 
 transcribed passages from the Spectator, we needn’t bother much 
 about. They disconcert both home and school, and the less we apply 
 theory to them the better. Nor is it well to lay very violent hands 
 on the boy who sets up a printing press, nor even on the boy, I 
 might say, who spouts in roaring phrase • great vanities. They 
 will come to their own, if the school is given a chance. Nor need 
 we feel greatly alarmed over the boy who neglects much, but who 
 reads widely and thinks and feels. The school welcomes such boys 
 and has news for them. Boys of literary initiative, in spite of 
 the influence of home and playground, do not come within the 
 range of the present problem. 
 
 It is the youth of the compact terrible majority that is trouble- 
 some, the average boy from the average home. He stands dis- 
 consolate, unreceptive, quite abashed that the worm of Rhetoric 
 should be thrust down him. Grammar has to be fed to him in 
 diluted form, with a long spoon. Its taste is to him as gruel. And 
 his stomach has so long ceased its proper functioning that this 
 new stuff becomes leaden. He didn’t crave it; therefore he spews 
 most of it out again. At college, the instructors in Rhetoric have 
 long given up any pretence of expecting that a majority of their 
 
38 
 
 students will come to them with a fair working knowledge of 
 grammar, spelling and punctuation. 
 
 But if the teacher of composition gains little support from 
 the average home environment, may she not be liberally assisted 
 by her colleagues? It’s a beautiful theory. I have already de- 
 veloped it at some length. “In a sound education,” as someone 
 has recently said, “all courses would make for workmanlike ex- 
 pression. ” It would be a pity to press this quotation too far. I fail 
 to see why it does not contain a fundamental truth, why every 
 course in school, if education were sound, should not make for 
 workmanlike expression. Perhaps it does; pupils may actually 
 learn in their other courses that expression deals with truths, that 
 the more interested they become the better they are likely to 
 state their thoughts; they may learn other things, even about com- 
 position. As I say, it’s a beautiful theory. But, like the theory 
 of bringing up the child by example alone, it somehow doesn’t seem 
 to work. I have looked over a good many papers in other courses, 
 and have found a large share of them, with fairly high grades 
 too, in expression simply impossible. The papers, however, have 
 been accepted, and there’s an end of it. The theory has gone to 
 smash; the students have not improved in their expression; they 
 are at liberty to perpetrate further horrors. 
 
 Now if all courses are to make toward workmanlike expression, 
 it is apparently the duty of all teachers to see to it that crude ex- 
 pression does not escape their censure. No paper should receive 
 credit unless it is presented in the language which the student is 
 supposed to be writing. And this, of course, is an ideal which, 
 under present conditions, is impossible of attainment, for several 
 very good reasons. To begin with, if every teacher made it a mat- 
 ter of conscience to correct all the poor English that came her way, 
 she would soon find that a good share of her time would be taken up 
 in teaching English composition. And that was not in her contract. 
 Teachers must perforce carry about with them certain elementary 
 assumptions, one of them being, that, if they are hired to teach 
 one subject, it isn’t very good ethics to be teaching another. To 
 be sure, it isn’t the most distressing ethics in the world for every- 
 body to devote some time to the art of composition, this organon 
 of the course. The ancient Greeks had the start of us there. 
 They gave to the study of Rhetoric a place in their curriculum 
 which even its most ardent advocates would not presume to demand 
 
39 
 
 for it now. Yet with their conception of its importance among 
 liberal studies I do not see how we can find great quarrel. Fact 
 or truth is one thing and the expression of it is another, or, bet- 
 ter said, the one remains helpless without the other; and the 
 student and his work are not taken seriously if he is not led early 
 to realize the importance of his expression. As Professor Dewey 
 has recently said in another connection, “To nurture inspiring aim 
 and executive means into harmony with each other is at once the 
 difficulty and reward of the teacher.” Yet as in this progressive 
 age the average student knows precious little about composition, 
 the burden on the teachers would become absolutely too grievous. It 
 would hardly be thought advisable for all teachers to devote their 
 energies to the same subject. 
 
 And it would be inadvisable for another reason. Many teachers 
 today know so little about composition that what they might say 
 to their pupils would not be of signal value. If such a statement 
 appears rather heightened, I hasten to add that it does not include 
 all the teachers of subjects other than composition. As we all 
 know, those who expect to teach comprise, when all is said, the 
 most industrious and the most scholarly group in a college class. 
 A fair number of them do excellent work in all their studies, 
 in their composition as well as in their special field. Some, of 
 course, do not. I have had under me a good many prospective 
 teachers who, though they receive the highest praise in, say, 
 History or Mathematics, are both poor and listless in composition. 
 Their zeal for work seems to have been exhausted in their favorite 
 studies. It is needless to say that, when they come to teach, their 
 neglect will continue. Their pupils will express themselves un- 
 heeded in diverse tongues. As time goes on, we should expect an 
 improvement here. At the present moment, however, the problem, 
 in the nev/er states at least, is in its worst phase. Many teachers, 
 like the pupils under them, appear to consider good English as a 
 sort of special study, to be learned in separate classes. They 
 therefore bring little aid to the teacher of composition. 
 
 3. I am aware that I have been speaking of special classes 
 in composition as if, ideally, I did not believe in them. And yet 
 this is not my view. For, even if every teacher in the school were 
 adept in the use of English and in teaching it, I believe that 
 special classes in composition would nevertheless be necessary. 
 To be sure, if conditions were ideal, I think that the amount of 
 
40 
 
 time given over to these special classes could be greatly curtailed. 
 The contention, “When we regard expression as a means instead 
 of an end, the question becomes not, Can we teach the art of 
 composition? but Can we teach by means of composition?” may be 
 fairly valid, yet it may rest also on the assumption that the con- 
 ditions in our schools are ideal, that every teacher will insist on 
 adequate expression. When this condition prevails, it may be that 
 Rhetoric need no longer be a required study in our colleges. 
 But the present outlook for such a blessed state is anything but 
 bright. In our secondary schools I am convinced that such a time 
 will never come. Indeed, I doubt if anyone but a fanatic would 
 seriously contemplate taking composition as a special study out 
 of our high schools. Some years ago it was contended, and very 
 plausibly too, that a high school course should be elective. Very 
 few would venture such a contention now; the facts are against 
 it. And today the facts are overwhelmingly against making 
 Rhetoric an elective study, even in our colleges. As Cardinal 
 Newman believed that health is a good in itself and hence useful 
 and that intellectual culture is its own end, so do I believe per- 
 sonally that expression is its own end. I am not speaking, of 
 course, of the relative importance between style and matter. 
 Leslie Stephen has said somewhere, “When people ask whether 
 ‘form’ or ‘content,’ style or matter, be the most important, it is 
 like asking whether order or progress should be the aim of a 
 statesman, or whether strength or activity be most needed for an 
 athlete. Both are essential and neither excellence will supersede 
 necessity for the other. If you have nothing to say, there is no 
 manner of saying it well; and if not well said, your something 
 is as good as nothing.” So when Newman states again, “I think 
 I have never written for writing’s sake,” I suppose, if taken very 
 literally, his words express a truism. For the moment, however, 
 I think of him and Macaulay writing their paragraphs over and 
 over again, simply, perhaps, to get the ring of the parallel struc- 
 ture; of Franklin with his Spectator; of Stevenson forever imitat- 
 ing; of Maupassant casting seven years’ work into the rubbish 
 heap; of Hawthorne with his still longer apprenticeship; of the 
 poets forever polishing their lines. If masters in the art are so 
 put to it, what shall we say of beginners, even college students, 
 whose purpose in writing is often embryonic to a degree. Right 
 and fitting expression, like physical exercise or like piano playing, 
 
41 
 
 can surely be thought of as an end in itself without undue worry 
 of a weighty content. A carpenter may aspire some day to build 
 a house, but he does not of necessity build houses in order to learn 
 how to handle his plane. Good writing, I take it, is as laborious 
 and artificial as carpentry; only the practiced hand can make it 
 appear easy and natural. Style, like beauty, “is its own excuse 
 for being.” 
 
 Some teachers — and among them teachers of composition, too 
 — have been suggesting that perhaps a solution of our trouble- 
 some problem would be for the teachers of Rhetoric to take over 
 the written w^ork of the other classes, to see if the pupils, in 
 giving that a lustre, might not be accomplishing the ends of expres- 
 sion. This would include the rewriting of examination papers. 
 The theory has its attractions, and is presented most persuasively. 
 I have already commented upon this plan, and have suggested 
 that as a makeshift, in lieu of nothing better, it might be worth 
 trying. When one considers what a poor body of writers the 
 average school turns out, one realizes that the heralding of such 
 a plan was inevitable. A makeshift, however, it certainly is for 
 two obvious reasons. In the first place I doubt if the amount 
 of writing required in the other courses would be at all adequate 
 to drill the pupils in expression, and in the second place I am 
 convinced that the nature of this sort of work is not such as 
 would stir the pupils’ initiative, the aim of a course in composition. 
 In this connection, let me quote at some length the words of an 
 Englishman, Phillip J. Hartog, in his excellent book, “The Writing 
 of English.”* 
 
 “The influence of examinations on writing and on thought 
 training is, in the main, an evil one, and in two ways. In the 
 first place, they tend to paralyze the powers of exposition. The 
 mental attitude enforced on the examinee is the slightly ridiculous 
 attitude, for a writer, of a person obliged to give information to 
 some one who already possesses it. In everyday life you are silent 
 in the presence of a person better acquainted with a subject than 
 yourself. It is only in the examination room that you tell the 
 better informed person, your examiner, what he already knows, 
 and what he is often intensely bored to be told again. If you 
 are a wise person and clever examinee, you allude, you hint, you 
 
 ♦The Clarendon Press, 1908. 
 
42 
 
 suggest, you convey your knowledge in the briefest possible form, 
 that is, in a form totally unintelligible to the previously uninitiated. 
 Is it any wonder that, with this topsy-turvy training brought to 
 perfection, so many brilliant examinees are incapable in everyday 
 life of explaining themselves to everyday people, who, unlike 
 examiners, are not already acquainted with what they have to 
 say? Is it any wonder that the business clerk cannot write a 
 business letter; that the military officer cannot give clear instruc- 
 tions to his juniors? Have they not been carefully trained by 
 the examination system in the art of unintelligibility? This is 
 one evil — a terrible evil from the point of view of efficiency — which 
 is largely due to the effect of examinations, uncounteracted by 
 other training. The intelligent person untrained by examinations 
 expresses himself better than the person trained by examinations.” 
 
 The writer, you will have noticed, is evidently speaking of the 
 English Civil Service examinations. His criticism, however, is 
 so well guarded that I think it may well apply to all examinations, 
 or to recitations, for that matter, uncounteracted, as he says, by 
 other training. In a following paragraph he approaches the 
 subject from another side. 
 
 “But there is an evil still more serious, if less grotesque, for 
 which, if it is not wholly responsible the examination system is, 
 I believe, largely responsible. We have seen that the training 
 in the mother tongue should have as its object not only the cultiva- 
 tion of the powers of exposition, but, above all, the development 
 of intellectual initiative. The examination, the all-powerful influence 
 which forces the work of each student into a mould that shall 
 please another person, his examiner, rather than himself, tends, 
 and must tend, to destroy intellectual initiative.” 
 
 Thus, although it is but fair to demand that answers to 
 examination questions be expressed, at least, grammatically, I do 
 not think that in revising or rewriting these answers the pupils 
 will have learned very much about composition. The conception 
 that composition should rest in correct statement is not an exalted 
 one. The case against taking over other written work into the 
 composition class is also strong, though, among mature students, 
 not quite so absolute. To begin with, there is not enough of it 
 to be of definite service, nor would an increase in the number 
 of papers required in the other courses help much. I believe that 
 even in courses in Literature, where a great variety of subjects 
 
43 
 
 for papers might easily be suggested, class recitations and discus- 
 sions, the freedom of good talk, would be more satisfying to both 
 teacher and pupils than the scribbling of frequent papers. And 
 in the other courses this would hold with still greater force. Nor, 
 again, when papers are required in these other courses, is there 
 in them much scope for the pupils' initiative and originality. 
 Mature students can, of course, write essays on poems, on writers, 
 or even on problems of science, with originality. The reader gets 
 the personal reaction. But among the most trying papers in a 
 freshman class are so-called expositions on these very subjects, 
 a sort of aftermath of the high school work. They are simply 
 dull rehashes of what other people think, tests of knowledge — 
 useful, no doubt, in their places, but they are not compositions. 
 A composition is the orderly expression of an experience which 
 has so seized upon the pupiVs life that he throws it out as some- 
 thing new. It is through this kind of writing that expression is 
 taught. Nearly all pupils are undergoing these new experiences; 
 in them there is often a large element of emotion. The teacher 
 of composition is not content until she has tapped this source of 
 originality. This may come from the pupil's other studies — his 
 erudition; it is quite as likely not to. In many cases it is essen- 
 tially a matter of feeling, and hence is expressed in description 
 or narration. But no matter; the teacher pounces upon it, and 
 when she has captured it, she asks for more of that kind of thing, 
 for she realizes that in this way only, in this initiating effort, will 
 the pupil be able to tell what he actually thinks and feels. It is 
 a regulating, an educative process; it establishes self-reliance 
 and furthers those mutual relations of intimacy between teacher 
 and pupils which give to the school room its proper atmosphere. 
 
 Now if the teacher of Mathematics or the teacher of History 
 is desirous of obtaining these peculiar rewards and is conscious 
 that she is adequately trained for these peculiar tasks, let her 
 by all means take a class in composition. Or let the teacher of 
 Latin take one, or, naturally, the teacher of Literature. In many 
 schools all these combinations or compromises will have to be 
 made. Yet, under existing conditions, in a state singularly threat- 
 ened as Oregon is at this moment with false utilitarian conceptions 
 of education, I hope that before long all our high schools will be 
 able to establish separate departments of Rhetoric. That such a 
 separate department exists in the State University, no matter how 
 
44 
 
 it came about, I consider fortunate. There need be no worry about 
 the future; adjustments can easily be effected. Meanwhile the 
 study of this subject everywhere will take on a wider significance. 
 No less insistence will be placed upon form but a great deal more 
 insistence upon matter. There will have always to be much reading- 
 in connection with courses in composition, reading that is to stim- 
 ulate the students to express themselves originally. No course 
 should be more useful, and less permeated with a narrow utilita- 
 rianism. 
 
 If a teacher, then, is to carry out these ideas effectively, it is 
 evident that she will have to undergo a rather special training, 
 or, at least, her mind will have to be open to the wide possibilities 
 of her subject. Furthermore, whatever she teaches besides com- 
 position, one subject she must of necessity teach — Grammar. At 
 present Grammar holds a most anomolous place in our curricula. 
 It is often considered as finished when the grades are over, and 
 then comes composition. Of course actually no such thing takes 
 place. You can never finish Grammar, and you can hardly begin 
 composition too early. Grammar is simply a part of the general 
 subject, Rhetoric. They must begin together and end together; 
 separate years for them are unthinkable. In many of the schools 
 of Canada, not to speak of foreign countries, Grammar goes straight 
 through the high school course. If it is taught with composition, 
 the ways of teaching it become much more wholesome; grammar 
 taught through writing and the study of authors reveals both 
 intricacies and flexibilities that are often lost sight of in the dry, 
 formal presentation of an ordinary text-book. Grammar, to be 
 sure, has its formalities and its artificialities; it has in our language 
 a remarkable historical background, a constant clashing between 
 rules and the violation of rules, a sifting down to that slowly, 
 ever-changing master rule of all, Good Usage. If the teacher 
 of Rhetoric takes it upon her to loosen from his moorings the 
 average pupil, I believe that, with the possible exception of a class 
 in Literature, she will have time, in the larger high schools, for 
 little outside of her own subject. 
 
 4. The question of English, as you are aware, is under wide 
 discussion. During the winter months all the journals of education 
 and all the other journals are likely to be devastated by an epi- 
 demic of letters, counter-irritants against that mortal plague, poor 
 English. The daily papers catch the microbe and take on the 
 
45 
 
 frenzy. Learned societies express themselves without end. It 
 looks as if something might happen. I have been greatly interested 
 by the way the subject was approached at the last meeting of 
 the Central Division of the Modern Language Association. Here 
 it was agreed, a foregone agreement, that in our secondary schools 
 the results obtained from the pupils in their written work were 
 not at all commensurate with the time allotted to the study of 
 composition. Very wisely they have decided not to suggest remedies 
 until they have discovered the symptoms of the disease. Conse- 
 quently they have sent to our universities and to many of our high 
 schools a questionnaire calling for a statement of the various 
 teachers of the work that is being done to instruct the young idea 
 how to write. Such circulars have been distributed from this 
 University to ten high schools in the State. I hope there has been 
 no delay in forwarding answers, for it seems to me that much 
 good may come from this significant action of the central committee. 
 
 And this has led me to wonder, not so much of the amount of 
 time given to the teaching of composition in our high schools as 
 of the way the time is apportioned. The teaching of composition 
 is accomplished in three ways — by recitations, by consultations, 
 and by the reading of papers. In a well-conducted course there 
 must be an employment of all three methods — reading papers of 
 course; that is as unavoidable as the holding of recitations, and 
 in a class of twenty-five or so pupils the amount of time given to 
 paper-reading will easily double the time given to recitations. I 
 can speak but generally of these proportions, for the number of 
 recitations a week varies greatly in the different schools, and the 
 calculation is subject to the constant variable of the size of the 
 class. In college, the amount of time given to paper-reading in 
 a class of from twenty-five to thirty, reciting three hours a week, 
 more than doubles the time taken up in recitations. We have then 
 the spectacle of a high school teacher conducting classes all the 
 morning and spending the rest of the day in reading papers. I 
 can hardly conceive of such a thing being done, and yet I imagine 
 that teachers of English are given ample opportunity to devote 
 morning and afternoon and evening to their work, if they want to. 
 Above all things they should cultivate a spirit of meekness. But 
 if they do this, how are they to get in their periods for consultation? 
 Now there should be just as much time given to consultations as 
 to recitations. It is quite as important ; it is, in fact, the laboratory 
 
46 
 
 part of the course. Composition is a laboratory study just as 
 much as Physics is. It consists of class work, laboratory work, 
 and the correction of papers; or, if you wish to keep up the parallel 
 with the other arts, it must have its hours of theory, its hours of 
 personal supervision, and the hours during which the teacher 
 examines the student’s product. If anyone wishes to figure out 
 how all this can be crammed into a day and the teacher be given 
 a moment of leisure or even time to work up her courses in Rhetoric 
 or Literature, I gladly yield the floor. It’s too much for me. In 
 colleges, relief is often got through student readers, an unsatisfac- 
 tory but unavoidable expedient. These readers, naturally, do not 
 release the teacher from reading too, for whoever reads a paper 
 holds the consultation upon it, and if a teacher shirked all reading, 
 he would soon find himself doing the least important part of the 
 work — the conducting of classes. The theme reader, as you know, 
 is an entirely different person from a looker-over of papers. You 
 can comb your hair while looking over a paper on history; you’re 
 after facts. A theme reader is after a composition. And, after 
 all, it’s a sad day when a college has to resort to these readers, 
 for then it begins to steal over one’s consciousness that large num- 
 bers create machinery, and it isn’t a pleasant thing to have to own 
 up that education, too, is a machine. 
 
 But, to return to the high school. Need I say much? Isn’t 
 it apparent that the teaching of composition there is something 
 of a farce? Has not the teacher been given a task impossible of 
 accomplishment? She is supposed to conduct as many classes as 
 the teacher of Latin or the teacher of History. Some of these 
 classes she may throw practically into consultation periods; that 
 will be her lookout. But when does she read her papers? I suspect 
 that the whole question will have to be thought out over again 
 and some equitable reorganization arrived at. Remember we are 
 not in the position of the French schools where all courses are 
 supposed to make toward workmanlike expression. 
 
 Such a reorganization as I have hinted at, such a reconception 
 of the problem of teaching composition is not going to come about 
 in a summer. That heavy, slow-moving entity, the dear public, 
 has got somehow to be reached and cajoled. He is the ultimate 
 nigger in the woodpile. And he has an unhappy way of appearing 
 often in the guise of the taxpayer — he holds the purse — and 
 occasionally too, I hazard the guess that as such a one he takes 
 
47 
 
 his seat on the school board. I do not mean to be rash. Now the 
 public, in the soul of him, has the best of intentions. In the 
 abstract, he approves of good English. But how to acquire such 
 an etherial accomplishment as the writing thereof, his soul does 
 not readily yield him the answer. He will have to be told, just 
 as children have to be told how to pluck rainbows. In the long 
 run, he succumbs to the wiles of the booster. Educators, the world 
 over, have always been the most goodly company of agents of 
 this description. 
 
 Meanwhile, as the Adventists say, there will be a period of 
 waiting, and the fabled game of the stork and the frogs will be 
 played over again — the stork, the public; the frogs, the teachers 
 of composition. That the teachers see from year to year an 
 improvement in their pupils goes without question. Home influenc 
 counts for something, the work of the other teachers, the own 
 initiative of the pupils. The teachers of composition also witness 
 hordes of their pupils escape them, with the most meagre, the 
 dimmest ideas about their own language. Many of these latter 
 enter the halls of the University. For this condition there are 
 many reasons, one among them being that the teachers have not 
 been given a fair chance. King Stork holds sway, and what is 
 glorious sport for him is mighty poor fun for the frogs. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Let me recapitulate very briefly. You and I, I hope, have come 
 to an understanding, in the first place, that Rhetoric is an art 
 and hence differs from all the other studies, except singing and 
 drawing, in a high school course, not in name merely but in kind. 
 We have noticed how universal it is, how it underlies all liberating 
 studies, how it becomes the organon of a course. We have also 
 noticed how artificial it is — what a wide distinction exists between 
 good writing and good talk. And then we have taken up together 
 some details in the presentation of the subject, insisting that 
 punctuation is structural, that the study of Grammar and the 
 study of composition should go together, and that, with our crude 
 body of students, frequent writing is apt to lose its essential value 
 unless it can be guided by frequent consultations. We have dis- 
 cussed also what I have called the descriptive principle, and I 
 have endeavored to show how this emotional element permeates 
 all kinds of writing, enriching the vocabulary and giving to expres- 
 
48 
 
 sion vitality. I have attempted furthermore to point out that the 
 burden of teaching composition seems at present to have fallen 
 almost entirely upon the teacher of English, and yet in suggesting 
 a more equitable distribution of this burden I have insisted that 
 a composition is not the bare expression of a truth, but an organized 
 thing revealing an intellectual or emotional discovery. This is the 
 high ground on which the subject stands. We have reasoned 
 together over the difficulties which beset the teacher, the home 
 and other environment and over the fact that, be she ever so com- 
 petent, more is demanded of her than she can well perform. 
 
 Perhaps one thing more ought to be said. What does it all 
 amount to anyway, this pother about composition? It’s useful, 
 no doubt, in its place, but is it necessary? Cannot a man get along 
 very well without it? Our answer to this question can only come 
 from an appeal to experience. In the solid past, it has been found, 
 indeed, that men thrive and grow fat without a proper medium 
 of articulation. It has also been rather generally assumed that 
 education, if one can get it, is a pretty good thing. The best 
 minds have been so bold as to maintain that in the pursuit of an 
 education only a part of the time should be given over to the 
 rigid vocational studies; quite as large a share, particularly in 
 youth, should be reserved for more general studies, often called 
 liberal. The life of man should be not only warlike, but abundant. 
 There have been conceded to exist certain marks or stigmata of 
 an educated man, one of the most universally accepted being his 
 ability to express ideas, not in wild and whirling words, but in 
 a domesticated idiom that will not put to flight other men of 
 education. From the abundance of his life should his pen write 
 properly. What the future will say about all this is hidden. There 
 may be many things there undreamt of in our philosophy. It 
 seems to me safest just now, however, to guide our present action 
 by the accumulated experience of the past.