The study class : a guide for the student of English literature

Preface

HIS book has grown out of a series of privately printed " Outlines/' some of which have been in use for over five years. These have been issued from time to time in recognition of two notable, though nearly new, features of modern life : First, the great zeal and impetus for study among women throughout the country, expressing itself chiefly through the organization of study clubs ; and, second, the vast amount of such zeal going to waste through misdirected efforts and the lack of efficient leadership. Educational resources offered no provision for these groups of women of mature years and busy lives, whose schooldays were long past, and whose only incitement was from within. The subjects and methods fitted to the high school or university did not fit vi

PREFACE.

the woman's club, since generally its members were those who snatched from commonplace and continuous cares only an occasional hour for study. Chatauqua and the societies for the encouragement of home study were scarcely more helpful ; for while indeed offering many suggestions for courses of reading and text-book lessons, they took almost no account of the deeper needs of the new movement. The common impluse that drew these women together was not so much a wish to acquire facts, as a seeking for knowledge that should in some way issue in life, in character, in the power to think and to express the thought. This, then, was the problem : to provide something that should stir dormant faculties into life, that should awaken the mental powers and furnish a clew to the relative values of things past and present in literature and in life, for the use of persons whom one had never seen, and with whom one must communicate from a distance. This, briefly stated, was the underlying purpose from which, by a process of evolution unnecessary to describe, has grown a circle of classes by correspondence, too large to be conducted longer by means of separate letters and privately printed pamphlets.

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Nearly all of the study-schemes included in the present volume have been used by one or another of these correspondence classes ; each scheme is divided into thirty outline topics, to accord with the average number of club meetings in a year. Thus the one hundred and fifty topics provide for a five years 7 course, but the order in which the subjects occur may be varied at the option of the student ; their present arrangement is not intended to prescribe any "true order of studies '" applicable to all cases, but represents an order that has been found least difficult for beginners and most likely to tempt to further study. Each of the schemes is complete in itself; all, however, belong to the same field, — namely. English Literature.

If some justification seems to be needed for adding one more to the already long list of works dealing with this theme, it may be found in the fact that these " Outlines " concern themselves with literature itself rather than with the history of literature. In general, their questions can only be answered by direct study of the author in hand, being of a kind not to be settled by the cyclopaedia or the school manual. They aim to look somewhat closely at a few great works rather than to marshal a long list of names and viii

PREFACE.

titles ; to fix the attention on the writings themselves rather than on what has been said about these writings ; to stimulate individual study and to develop the critical faculty by personal examination of an author's text rather than to collect gossip about the man himself or to rest content with judgments at second hand, however distinguished the authority. In carrying out this plan the classification has been based on affinity in kind rather than on sequence of time. The relative merits of a given work are only to be determined by reference to those of like nature with itself. Within these separate departments, however, the chronological method has been followed, comparative studies being also introduced for the sake of emphasizing the different characteristics of a given class of writings at different epochs.

The studies are arranged under five general divisions with subjects as follows : Shakespeare, The English Drama, English Poetry, Robert Browning, The English Essay. Within these will be found nearly every writer of note in English literature from the days of Elizabeth to our own, with the exception of the writers of prose fiction; the addition of The English Novel may be expected at a future time.

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Although correspondence must of necessity be inferior to personal conference, by just so much as letters fall below conversation as a means of inspiration, yet that it may result in developing an always delightful, often stimulating, and sometimes truly scholarly and original interchange of thought is a fact which has been amply proved by these five years of experience. In order as far as possible to reproduce the conditions of such correspondence, a few letters treating of the subjects on which the author's advice has been most often sought are prefixed to the study-schemes \ and each group of " Outlines " is preceded by a chapter bearing on the special matter in hand.

The present volume stands for a belief that what has proved useful to the few may be welcomed by a larger public ; may even be acceptable in the class-room of those institutions for the higher education where it begins to be recognized that although means for the study of the history of literature are ample, the helps to the study of literature itself are yet few and inadequate.

Contents

Page

I. Concerning Choice of Subject ... 13 II. Concerning Method in Study . 19

III. The Interpretation of Literature . 25

II. Concerning Method In Study

O beginners in study, there are two words which need often to be reiterated, — simplicity and thoroughness. The programme should be simple in scope, but thorough within that scope. Take some one subject, — it matters not so much what one, provided it be selected with reference to the time you propose to spend, and to your mental capacity ; learn that thoroughly, and you will have gained just so much of equipment for all studies whatsoever. Those were wise words spoken by Professor Sonnenschein to the students of Mason College, Birmingham : —

" There is something in the consecration of all the faculties to a limited field that braces the mind and gives it intellectual grip. . . .

" Let me compare the mind to a house with many windows. For a vital comprehension of

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truth, I would prefer to look through one window thoroughly cleaned, than through all of them half-purified from the obscuring medium of error and prejudice. To the young student, especially, I would say, 6 Clean one of your windows ; be not content until there is one branch of your subject — if it be only the branch of a branch — which you understand as thoroughly as you are capable of understanding it, until your sense of truth is satisfied and you have intellectual conviction.' Be assured that in learning this one thing, you will have added an eye to your mind, an instrument to your thought, and partially have learned many things. . . . Doubtless it would be a grand thing to have a knowledge of all the great objects of human contemplation ; but we must recognize the limitations of our nature, and renounce the impossible.

"On the other hand, we may console ourselves with the reflection that one subject deeply studied involves the examination of others. No man can thoroughly probe a difficult question of law without coming upon problems of morals, politics, and religion ; no one can carry his researches into language far, without solving, on the way, many a question of logic and even metaphysics. In this way one science leads ever to another ; and the specialist is not so

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incomplete as he is sometimes supposed to be. His knowledge stretches itself out in many directions, like the branches of a tree, which spring from a single trunk and are centred in it. Still, no man can be a master of all sciences/*

That this is exactly the reverse of the methods common among clubs, no one will deny who is familiar with the situation. As a rule, the main object seems to be to cover the largest possible field. If the subject be history, the programme will include several centuries and many nations ; if literature, then a dozen or twenty authors will be set down, — all for one winter. Recently, in a club where it was proposed to enter upon a study of Browning by giving one year's work to it, it was objected, " What ! give a whole year to one poet ? Why not have one essay on Browning, one on Wordsworth, one on Tennyson, and so on ? " When we consider the amount of reading, of concentration, of brooding thought, requisite to the preparation of any essay in the least degree individual, or one which shall be anything more than a neat patchwork from the encyclopaedia and Poole's Index, it is apparent what were the ideals of that club. I hold in my hand the programme of another club whose oldest member has not yet reached twenty years, and where " Browning " does thus actually appear

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as one among other literary subjects, — the others being " Gladstone/' " Hans Sachs," etc.

Now, not only is this a waste of time, but it unfits for any real brain- work. The mind is "tattooed all over with masses of fact," but there is no real growth. People fancy they are studying when in fact they are weakening and frittering away the mental fibre ; they are fostering the charlatan's pride of boasted knowledge instead of the scholar's grace of humility.

I know the other side of the question. I do not forget the German scholar who died regretting that he had undertaken to master the Greek language instead of concentrating on the dative case ; nor Holmes's scarabseist, who devoted himself to beetles, and counted the general entomologist as necessarily a humbug. But women's clubs are too far away from such tendencies to need any warning of this danger.

Suppose then this one single line of interest to be adopted ; suppose, for example, Shakespeare is the topic. The genuine way, the scholar's way, would be to begin with a careful study of the text of some one play, proceeding to others only when this is somewhat understood. But is this the club way? By no means ; this is not half high-sounding enough. Let us have for a beginning three essays ; let us call them (I refer to the printed programme of one

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of our clubs) "Classic Drama/' "Romantic Drama," " Shakespeare's Place in Literature." In the name of all that is honest, what can a company who have never read a Greek drama, who are beginners only in Shakespeare, do with such subjects as these? Compare with such pretension the confession of Mr. Frank Marshall that he had been studying " Hamlet " for fourteen years, and then found out how little he knew about it; or Professor Hudson's modest disclaimer : " I have been studying Hamlet more than forty years, — studying him with such small powers of thought as I had. ... I have learned by experience that one seems to understand him better after a little study than after a great deal ; and that the less one sees into him, the more apt one is to think he sees through him, — in which respect he is indeed like Nature herself."

It is gratifying to note a tendency toward simplicity in the programmes of some of the older clubs, but it would be encouraging to see a more rapid progress in this better way. For example, a programme constructed in the spirit of Ruskin when he says, " Teach or preach or labor as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man's capacity and another's. . . . This mental supremacy is incommunicable, . . . and nearly the best tiling that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment

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but the discovery, of this ; learning to know gold when we see it from iron-glance, and diamonds from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds out of our own charcoal."

A word concerning the number of persons who can join in a class profitably. The average club is too large. For genuine study fifteen is a very large number: ten or even less is better. To all new clubs I would say, Limit yourselves to a small membership ; to the old clubs, who cannot do this. Form study-groups, bringing the results if you like into the larger body, but do not attempt to " carry " it all.

III. The Interpretation Of Litera- Ture

ONSIDERABLE uncertainty exists in some minds concerning the true, meaning of the study of literature. Therefore, let us distinguish between right and wrong conceptions of what constitutes its intrinsic value, between right and wrong methods of approach to it as a liberal study.

At the outset, let us rid ourselves of a considerable body of traditions, inherited from schooldays. English literature, as we then studied it, meant a barren catalogue of names, works, and dates; its masterpieces, if studied at all, were considered only as so much material for exercises in grammar, syntax and etymology ; groups of writers were told off according to their " general characteristics," and marked with labels which, being readily committed to memory, were as readily forgotten long ago. The conception

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of literature as the expression of art or genius, as being charged with a message which it was ours to master and assimilate, had not then found its way into the schools, nor has it yet come to general recognition there, though it is to be found in some instances under the leadership of an occasional enlightened and independent teacher.

Thus it happens that our first duty in approaching literature is to discard the old notions ; regarding it neither as a collection of facts for the memory, nor merely as material for the study of words and phrases, but rising to the higher conception of literature as an expression of the truths of life and the world, as seen by the master minds of each generation. To grasp these truths will tax the highest arts of interpretation, — not merely the art of verbal analysis, nor yet alone the art of analysis of form and style, but also the still higher art of analysis of sentiment, ethic, and thought.

Every work of art, be it picture or statue, or melody or writing, has in it some central principle of life ; just as every man whose life is life in any true sense of the word, and not a mere affair of chance, of impulse, of moods or accidents, has in him some central principle of life which animates and controls his words and acts. I know that I am taking issue with a very popular doctrine. The doctrine of art for art's sake alone — that is, for the production of a "fine piece of work, no matter whether in carving a cherry-stone or in painting a madonna — has been preached long enough to corrupt the taste and even the morals of the whole reading community. The writer, it is now insisted, must be concerned with no other end than to portray his subject accurately and vividly, no matter whether the subject be eagle or reptile, saint or brute. To realize where these shallow theories are leading, we have only to look at a large part of current fiction. Whole pages and infinite pains are given to evolving the last psychological depths of the intimations given in the way some weakling ties his cravat, or some frivolous maid gathers her shawl about her shoulders. It is excellent art, but it is art so wretchedly misapplied that it can hardly be called literature.

No, art is not for its own sake, it is for man's sake ; and it ought further to be for the brightest and best, and not for the most trivial in man. No man can write a book that amounts to anything, without a purpose. Indeed, a man of genius is always a man of desperate intensity of purpose. When Shakespeare portrayed Macbeth, he meant blasted ambition and murder ; when Shylock, — avarice overreaching itself; when Iago, — cold-blooded infamy. He did not say

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so to himself, but he looked to it that the reader should.

If you will grant me, then, this central, informing thought in every work, I urge that we must not be satisfied unless we master it. There may and probably will be ornaments and illustrations, just as the tree-trunk puts forth branches and leaves ; and your analysis will include these also, ■ — but recognized as secondary, and in their proper relations to the main thought.

This would seem to be a point so self-evident as to render emphasis superfluous ; but experience shows that nothing is harder than to get students in the way of analyzing what they read. A club that had been studying " Daniel Deronda " for many weeks were asked to bring in as a final exercise the motive of the work, as it lay in the mind of each member. The result was that some brought essays, others citations of favorite passages, others synopses of certain chapters, but not one true analysis of the motive or content of the work was produced. To make a synopsis is a different and much simpler matter than this of analysis. Almost any one, with a little attention, can give a fair resume of the various points made by an author, following their original order \ but it may happen that a great thinker, either from deficiency of literary art, or from other cause, does not work up his theme in any orderly progression, so that the enumeration of its points as they occur would yield no analytic description of its contents. Many of Emerson's essays illustrate this fact, owing to his method of composition, — his custom of putting all his stray thoughts into a common drawer, from which he drew forth on occasion whatever seemed to bear relation to the subject in hand. Thus, at first glance, much of Emerson appears to be mere disjecta membra, which yet, on closer inspection, is seep to have a unity, and unity of a very high kind./ When people say that a writer is unintelligible, it often means that they do not wish to be at the pains to understand him. Now, it is idle to presume to read a book saturated with deep thinking without doing a little thinking ourselves, even if every great thinker (as is not always the case) had the gift of clear expression. The common outcry against Browning's obscurity is not without some foundation ; yet a large part of the difficulties come from the fact that, as he says, he does not write his verses as a substitute for an afterdinner nap or cigar. He cannot be read in a wholly passive state of mind ; to get to the interior of his meaning requires intellectual exertion. An eminent philosophical writer has said that when he first began to read Kant's " Critique," he found it took an hour or two to get

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over a few lines ; but when he once got through Kant he could read a dozen inferior books in a day. He had acquired a mental strength jus: a? surely, and by the same law. as one acquires physical strength in the gymnasium. The thing of value is. not that one has leaped or turned some single bar. but that hereafter all other bars are more easily turned or leaped.

Therefore, let me repeat that no writing can be said to be truly grasped until it has been analyzed, either mentally or in writing. It will often be found that the essential points are summed up in notable sentences or clauses. Very systematic writers, like Higginson or John Fiske. have landing-places, so to speak, where they pause to glance back over the way they have travelled, or to indicate the nature of the rest of the journey. Such writers are very easy of analysis. But without such view-points.. — and poetry is almost always without them. — we must make up for their absence by more alertness of attention, insight, and imagination. The more complex the work. — as for example in such a case as Goethe's " Faust." — the more prolonged and exacting the task, but also the more intense and delightful the thrill of discovery. Whoever has felt it will sympathize with Dowden's description: u The happiest moment in the hours of study of a critic of literature is when seemingly by some divination, but really as the result of patient observation and thought, he lights upon the central motive of a great work. Then, of a sudden, order begins to form itself from the crowd and chaos of his impressions and ideas. There is a moving hither and thither, a grouping or co-ordinating of all his recent experiences, which goes on of its own accord, and every instant his vision becomes clearer, and new meanings disclose themselves in what has been lifeless and unilluminated. It seems as if he could even stand by the artist's side and co-operate with him in the process of creating. With such a sense of joy upon him, the critic will think it no hard task to follow the artist to the sources from whence he drew his material, — it may be some dull chapter in an ancient chronicle, or some gross tale of passion by an Italian novelist, — and he will stand by and watch with exquisite pleasure the artist handling that crude material, refashioning and refining it, and breathing into it the breath of a finer life."

When we have thus gained entrance to the heart of an author by the doorway of one work, we may well undertake to find other ways through other works, and finally to inquire concerning his production as an organic whole, What was his relation to others before and after

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what was his own special mission, his own force as a part of the history of literature. This does not mean personal gossip, into which so many writers of text-books, and, alas ! so many literary critics of good powers are prone to fall. Let me illustrate what the study of English literature should not be, by giving in full the questions relating to Sir Philip Sidney from a book very popular and much used among women's clubs :

1. Give some account of the life, character and attainments of Sir Philip Sidney.

2. What tragical event occurred during his residence in France?

3. Give the date of that event.

4. Of what country was he elected king?

5. Why did he not accept the crown ?

6. Mention Sidney's prose works.

7. What estimate was placed upon them by his own age?

8. Which one is now most highly esteemed ?

9. Had any prose fiction been written in English before Sidney wrote his?

10. How does he rank among the prose writers of his time?

11. In what kind of poetical composition did he excel?

The first thing that strikes us about these questions is that all may easily be answered by consulting any cyclopaedia, and they make no

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S3 demand which shall require the student to read so much as a single line of Sidney's writing. The only faculty called into exercise is memory. There is nothing to encourage reflection, nothing which has the slightest tendency to cultivate the critical faculty, nothing which even hints at what constitutes the life and power of any one of Sidney's writings.

Suppose, in place of these unprofitable inquiries, we substitute questions which cannot be answered without a careful and critical study of Sidney's own utterances. — questions which demand knowledge at first-hand, and whose answers hinge upon the exercise of individual judgment and upon comparative study with other authors, also at first-hand. Let us take, for example, Sidney's " Defence of Poetry," and apply to it some such method as this : —

1. Discuss Sidney's definition of poetry. Offer a better, either original or quoted.

2. Discuss Sidney's canons of dramatic composition. Compare the state of the English Drama as described by him with its succeeding developments, and say how far these were the effect of a direct departure from Sidney's principles.

3. As an argument for the usefulness and supremacy of poetry, has the lapse of three centuries impaired the value of this essay?

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4. Compare this earliest critical writing of importance on the Art of Poetry with such notable modern ones as those of Shelley, Emerson, and Matthew Arnold, and state how they differ or agree in their views of

(a) Rhyme or melody as a factor in poetry.

(b) Moral purpose in relation to art.

(c) Nature of poetic inspiration.

5. Sidney and the early writers, in classifying poetry, have much to say of the mould into which it is cast (as heroic, lyric, dramatic, etc.), — a classification commonly omitted by later writers. Reasons for this difference of treatment.

Not one of these questions, observe, can be answered in any parrot-fashion or without direct study of the masterpiece by the student himself, in the exercise of his own critical faculty and powers of comparison. Others might be added, looking toward the interpretation of the work on its historical side, through the general movement of the life and mind of the times ; but these should come later, and might involve more extensive libraries and greater expenditure of time and money than are available to most students. For such an undertaking as I have indicated, — namely, the interpretation of particular masterpieces of literature through critical study, — the means are fortunately open to every one. All, or nearly all, the great classics of our language are available in cheap editions ; he who will may take counsel with the great ones of earth and learn what has been the message of each to mankind. For, as has been truly said, " If your study does not directly or indirectly enrich the life of man, it is but a drawing of vanity with cart-ropes, a weariness to the flesh, or at best, a busy idleness."

IV. The Art Of Composition

HERE is no surer way of finding out exactly how much or how little one knows of a given subject than to attempt to write about it. Accordingly the writing of essays should have some part in every study, with due attention to certain important steps that must precede and attend the act of composition.

First, let us consider what place books may rightly occupy in the preparation. Richter has offered the maxim : " Never read till you have thought yourself empty ; never write till you have read yourself full-" I should accept this advice with certain reservations. I should wish to make a distinction between books according as they fall into the one or the other of two classes : fact books or opinion books. Books furnishing ready-made opinions, critical writings, are now so numerous and enticing . that the temptation to let them take the place of individual study is very great indeed. George Eliot, speaking of this subject, says : " Who learns to discriminate shades of color by considering what is expected of him? The habit of expressing borrowed judgments stupefies the sensibilities which are the only foundations of genuine judgment, just as the constant reading and retailing of results from other men's observations through the microscope, without ever looking through the lens oneself, is an instruction in some truths and some prejudices, but is no instruction in observant susceptibility; on the contrary, it breeds a habit of inward seeing according to verbal statement, which dulls the power of outward seeing according to visual evidence."

I agree with the writers quoted, that all books of this nature should follow, and not precede, individual study at first-hand. But there is another class of books — let us call them fact-books — which should not come under this sentence of postponement. They are the books which throw light on obscure allusions, inaccessible facts, contemporary conditions, or the books which are in any way collateral with the theme, and help to furnish the proper atmosphere for its understanding. Such books may go along with, or even precede, original study. For example, the student of Dante would be very foolish to deny

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himself the light of Longfellow's notes, or to refuse the aid of such books as Scartazzini's "Hand-Book," or Mrs. Oliphant's " Makers of Florence." On the other hand, he will do well to refrain from Dante essays, such as Canon Farrar's, or Miss Blow's, or Harris' " Spiritual Sense of the Divina Commedia," — critical writings merely, — until after he has studied " The Divine Comedy " itself. So with Shakespeare. The notes explanatory of the text should go along with the text itself ; the opinions of Hudson, Dowden, and Schlegel are of immense value, as they supplement, probably enlarging or modifying your own ; but shun them until you are possessed of some of your own.