Part 11

for all the critical commentaries of Teutonic pedants on the character and attributes of Helen of Troy as these have (to them) been revealed by archaeological investigations. I dare say that Bishop St. Remi of Reims never said in so many words "Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian; destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed," and that the Meroving monarch did not go thence to issue an "order of the day" that the army should forthwith march down to the river and be baptized by battalions; but there is the clear, unforgettable picture of the times and the men, and it will remain after the world has forgotten that some one has proved that St. Remi never met Clovis, and that he himself was probably only a variant of the great and original "sun-myth."

Closely allied with the teaching of history and forming a link as it were with the teaching of English, is a branch of study at present unformulated and unknown, but, I am convinced, of great importance in education as a method of character development. Life has always focused in great personalities, and formal history has recognized the fact while showing little discretion, and sometimes very defective judgment, in the choices it has made. A past period becomes our own in so far as we translate it through its personalities and its art; the original documents matter little, except when they become misleading, as they frequently do, when read through contemporary spectacles. Now the great figures of a time are not only princes and politicians, conquerors and conspirators, they are quite as apt to be the knights and heroes and brave gentlemen who held no conspicuous position in Church or state. I think we need what might be called "The Golden Book of Knighthood"--or a series of text books adapted to elementary and advanced schools--made up of the lives and deeds (whether attested by "original documents," or legendary or even fabulous does not matter) of those in all times, and amongst all peoples, who were the glory of knighthood; the "parfait gentyl Knyghtes" "without fear and without reproach." Such for example, to go no farther back than the Christian Era, as St. George and St. Martin, King Arthur and Launcelot and Galahad, Charles Martel and Roland, St. Louis, Godfrey de Bouillon and Saladin, the Earl of Strafford, Montrose and Claverhouse, the Chevalier Bayard, Don John of Austria, Washington and Robert Lee and George Wyndham. These are but a few names, remembered at random; there are scores besides, and I think that they should be held up to honour and emulation throughout the formative period of youth. After all, they became, during the years when these qualities were exalted, the personification of the ideals of honour and chivalry, of compassion and generosity, of service and self-sacrifice and courtesy, and these, the qualifications of a gentleman and a man or honour, are, with the religion that fostered them, and the practice of that religion, the just objective of education.

Much of all this can even now be taught through a judicious use of the opportunities offered instructors in English, whether this is through the graded "readers" of elementary education, or the more extended courses in colleges and universities. Very frequently these opportunities are ignored, and will be until we achieve something of a new orientation in the matter of teaching English.

Now it may be I hold a vain and untenable view of this subject, but I am willing to confess that I believe the object of teaching English is the unlocking of the treasures of thought, character and emotion preserved in the written records of the tongue, and the arousing of a desire to know and assimilate these treasures on the part of the pupil. I am very sure that English should not be taught as a thing ending in "ology," not as an intricate science with all sorts of laws and rules and exceptions; not as a system whereby the little children of the Ghetto, and the offspring of Pittsburgh millionaires, and the spectacled infant elect of Beacon Hill may all be raised to the point where they can write with acceptable fluency the chiseled phrases of Matthew Arnold, the cadenced Latinity of Sir Thomas Browne, the sonorous measures of Bolingbroke or the distinguished and resonant periods of the King James Bible. Such an aim as this will always result in failure.

The English language is the great storehouse of the rich thought and the burning emotion of the English race, and all this, as it has issued out of character, works towards the development of character, when it is made operative in new generations. There is no other language but Latin that has preserved so great a wealth of invaluable things, and English is taught in order that it all may be more available through that appreciation that comes from familiarity. There is no nobler record in the world: from Chaucer down to the moderns is one splendid sequence of character-revelations through a perfect but varied art, for literature is also a fine art, and one of the greatest of all. Is it not fair to say that the chief duty of the teacher of English is to lead the student to like great literature, to find it and enjoy it for himself, and through it to come to the liking of great ideas?

In the old days there was an historical, or rather archaeological, method that was popular; also an analytical and grammarian method. There was also the philological method which was quite the worst of all and had almost as devastating results as in the case of Latin. It almost seems as though English were being taught for the production of a community of highly specialized teachers. No one would now go back to any of those quaint and archaic ways digged up out of the dim and remote past of the XIXth century. We should all agree, I think, that for general education, specialized technical knowledge is unimportant and scientific intensive methods unjustifiable. For one student who will turn out a teacher there are five hundred that will be just simple voters, wage-earners, readers of the Saturday Evening Post and the New Republic, members of the Fourth Presbyterian Church or the Ethical Society, and respectable heads of families. The School of Pedagogy has its own methods (I am given to understand), but under correction I submit they are not those of general education. Shall I put the whole thing in a phrase and say that the object of teaching English is to get young people to like good things?

You may say this is English Literature, not English. Are the two so very far apart? English as a language is taught to make literature available. "Example is better than precept." Reading good literature for the love of it will bring in the habit of grammatical speaking and writing far more effectively than what is known as "a thorough grounding in the principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws should be deduced from examples. Philology, etymology, syntax are derivatives, not foundations. "Practice makes perfect" is a saying that needs to be followed by the old scholastic defensive "distinguo." Practice in reading, rather than practice in writing, makes good English composition possible. The "daily theme" may be overdone; it is of little use unless thought keeps ahead of the pen.

I would plead then for the teaching of English after a fashion that will reveal great thoughts and stimulate to greater life, through the noble art of English literature and the perfectly illogical but altogether admirable English language. The function of education is to make students feel, think and act, after a fashion that increasingly reveals and utilizes the best that is in them, and increasingly serves the uses of society, and both history and English can be so taught as to help towards the accomplishment of these ends.

There is another factor that may be so used, but I confess I shall speak of it with some hesitation. It is at present, and has been for ages, entirely outside the possibility even of consideration, and in a sense that goes beyond the general ignoring of religion, for while Catholics, who form the great majority of Christians, still hold to religion as a prime element in education, there are none--or only a minority so small as to be negligible--who give a thought to art in this connection. I bring forward the word, and the thing it represents, with diffidence, even apologetically: indeed, it is perhaps better to renounce the word altogether and substitute the term "beauty," for during the nineteenth century art got a bad name, not altogether undeservedly, and the disrepute lingers. So long as beauty is an instinct native to men (and it was this, except for very brief and periodic intervals, until hardly more than a century ago, though latterly in a vanishing form), it is wholesome, stimulating and indispensable, but when it becomes self-conscious, when it finds itself the possession of a few highly differentiated individuals instead of the attribute of man as such, then it tends to degenerate into something abnormal and, in its last estate, both futile and unclean. In its good estate, as for example in Greece, Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and in Oriental countries until the last few decades, beauty was so natural an object of endeavour and a mode of expression, and its universality resulted in so characteristic an environment, it was unnecessary to talk about it very much, or to give any particular thought to the educational value of the arts which were its manifestation through and to man, or how this was to be applied. The things were there, everywhere at hand; the temples and churches, the painting and the sculpture and the works of handicraft; the music and poetry and drama, the ceremonial and costume of daily life, both secular and religious, the very cities in which men congregated and the villages in which they were dispersed. Beauty, in all its concrete forms of art, was highly valued, almost as highly as religion or liberty or bodily health, but then it was a part of normal life and therefore taken for granted.

Now all is changed. For just an hundred years (the process definitely began here in America between 1820 and 1823) we have been eliminating beauty as an attribute of life and living until, during the last two generations, it is true to say that the instinctive impulse of the race as a whole is towards ugliness in those categories of creation and appreciation where formerly it had been towards beauty. Of course the corollary of this was the driving of the unhappy man in whom was born some belated impulse towards the apprehending of beauty and its visible expression in some art, back upon himself, until, conscious of his isolation and confident of his own superiority, he not only made his art a form of purely personal expression (or even of exposure), but held himself to be, and so conducted himself, as a being apart, for whom the laws of the herd were not, and to whom all men should bow.

The separation of art from life is only less disastrous in its results than the separation of religion from life, particularly since with the former went the separation of art (and therefore of beauty) from its immemorial alliance with religion. It was bad for art, it was bad for religion, and it was worst of all for life itself. Beyond a certain point man cannot live in and with and through ugliness, nor can society endure under such conditions, and the fact is that, however it came to pass, modern civilization has functioned through explicit ugliness, and the environment it has made for its votaries and its rebels indifferently, is unique in its palpable hideousness; from the clothes it wears and the motives it extols, to the cities it builds, and the structures therein, and the scheme of life that romps along in its ruthless career within the sordid suburbs that take the place of the once enclosing walls. And the defiant and segregated "artists," mortuary art museums, the exposed statues and hidden pictures, the opera subsidized by "high society," and the "arts and crafts" societies and the "art magazines" and "art schools" and clubs and "city beautiful" committees, only seem to make the contrast more apparent and the desperate nature of the situation more profound.

It is a new situation altogether, and nowhere in history is there any recorded precedent to which we can return for council and example, for nothing quite of the same sort ever happened before. It is also a problem of which formal education must take cognizance, for the lack is one which must somehow be supplied, while it reveals an astonishing lacuna in life that means a new deficiency in the unconscious education of man that renders him ineffective in life; defective even, it may be, unless from some source he can acquire something of what in the past life itself could afford.

Indeed it is not merely a negative influence we deal with, but a positive, for, to paraphrase a little, "ugly associations corrupt good morals." Youth is beaten upon at many points by things that not only look ugly, but are, and as in compassion we are bound to offer some new agency to fill a lack, so in self-defence we must take thought as to how the evil influence of contemporaneousness is to be nullified and its results corrected.

I confess the method seems to me to lean more closely to the indirect influence rather than the direct. It is doubtful if "art" can really be taught in any sense; the inherent sense of beauty can be fostered and an inherent aptitude developed, but that is about all. As for the building up of a non-professional passion for art I am quite sure it cannot be done, and should hardly be attempted, and very likely the same is true of the application of beauty.

Text books on "How to Understand" this art or that are interesting ventures into abstract theory, but they are little more. We must always remember that art is a result, not a product, and that sense of beauty is a natural gift and not an accomplishment. On the other hand, much can be accomplished by indirection, and by this I mean the buildings and the grounds and the cultural adjuncts that are offered by any school or college. The ordinary type of school-house--primary, grammar or high school--is, in its barren ugliness and its barbarous "efficiency," a very real outrage on decency, and a few Braun photographs and plaster casts and potted plants avail nothing. Private schools and some colleges--by no means all--are apt to be somewhat better, and here the improvement during the last ten years has been amazing, one or two universities having acquired single buildings, or groups, of the most astonishing architectural beauty. In no case, however, has as yet complete unity been achieved, while the arts of painting, sculpture, music and the drama, as vital and operative and pervasive influences, lag far behind, and formal religion with its liturgies and ceremonial, its constant and varied services and its fine and appealing pageantry--religion which is the greatest vitalizing and stimulating force in beauty is hardly touched at all.

Bad art of any kind is bad anywhere, but in any type of educational institution, from the kindergarten to the post graduate college, it is worse and less excusable than it is elsewhere, unless it be in association with religion, while the absence of beauty at the instigation of parsimony or efficiency is just as bad. I am firmly persuaded that we need, not more courses of study but more beautiful environment for scholars under instruction.

I have touched cursorily on certain elements in education which need either a new emphasis or an altogether new interpretation; religion, history, art, but this does not mean that the same treatment should not be accorded elsewhere. There are certain studies that should be revived, such as formal logic, there are others that need immediate and complete restoration, as Latin for example, there are many, chiefly along scientific and vocational lines, that could well be minimized, or in some cases dispensed with altogether: one might go on indefinitely on this line, however, weighing and testing studies in relation to their character-value, but certainly enough has already been said to indicate the point of view I would urge for consideration. Before I close, however, I want to touch on two points that arise in connection with college education, if, even for the sake of argument, we admit that the primary object of all formal education is the "education" of the character-capacity in each individual.

Of these two, the first has to do with the college curriculum, but I need to devote little time to this for the principle has already been developed and applied in a singularly stimulating and lucid book called "The Liberal College," by President Meiklejohn of Amherst, to which I beg to refer you. The scheme is a remarkable blending of the prescribed and the elective systems, and provides for the freshman year five compulsory studies, viz.: Social and Economic Institutions, Mathematics and Formal Logic, Science, English and Foreign Languages; for the sophomore year European History, Philosophy, Science, Literature, and one elective; for the junior year American History, History of Thought and two electives, and for the senior year one required study, Intellectual and Moral Problems, and one elective, the latter, which takes two-thirds of the student's time, must be a continuation of one of the four subjects included in the junior year. It seems to me that this is a singularly wise programme, since it not only determines the few studies which are fundamental, and imposes them on the student in diminishing number as he advances in his work, but it also provides for that freedom of choice which permits any student to find out and continue the particular line along which his inclinations lead him to travel, until his senior year is chiefly given over to the fullest possible development of the special subject. The fad for free electives all along the line was one of those curious phenomena, both humorous and tragic, that grew out of the evolutionary philosophy and the empirical democracy of the nineteenth century, and it wrought disaster, while the ironclad curriculum that preceded it was almost as bad along an opposite line. This project of Dr. Meiklejohn's seems to me to recognize life as a force and to base itself on this sure foundation instead of on the shifting sands of doctrinaire theory, and if this is so then it is right.

For after all there is such a thing as life, and it is more potent than theory as it also has a way of disregarding or even smashing the machine. It is this force of life that should be more regarded in education, and more relied upon. It is the living in a school or a college that counts more than a curriculum; the association with others, students and teachers, the communal life, the common adventures and scrapes, the common sports, yes, and as it will be sometime, the common worship. It is through these that life works and character develops, and to this development and instigation of life the school and college should work more assiduously, minimizing for the moment the problems of curricula and pedagogic methods. If I am right in this there is no place for the "correspondence school," while the college or university that numbers its students by thousands becomes at least of doubtful value, and perhaps impossible. In any case it seems to me self-evident that a college, whatever its numbers, must have, as its primal and essential units, self-contained groups of not more than 150 students segregated in their own residential quad, with its common-room, refectory and chapel, and with a certain number of faculty members in residence, the whole being united under one "head." There may be perhaps no reason why, granting this unit system, these should not be multiplied in number until the whole student body is as great as that of a western state university today, but to me the idea is abhorrent of an "university" with five or ten thousand students all jostling together In one inchoate mass, eating in numerical mobs, assembling in social "unions" as large as a metropolitan hotel and almost as homelike, or taking refuge for safety from mere numbers in clubs, fraternities and secret societies. A college such as this is a mob, not an organism, and as a mob it ought to be put down.

I said at the outset of this lecture that we could not lay the present failure of civilization to the doors of education, however great its shortcomings, for the causes lay deeper than this. I maintain that this is true; and yet formal education can not escape scatheless, for it has failed to admit this decline while acknowledging the claim set up for it that it could and would achieve this end. Certainly it will incur a heavy responsibility if it does not at once recognize the fact that while it can not do the half that has been claimed for it, it can do far more than it is doing now, and that in a very large degree the future does depend for its honour or its degradation on the part formal education is to perform at the present crisis. To do this it must execute a volte face and confess that it can only develop inherent potential, not create capacity, and that the primary object of its activities must be not the stall-feeding of intellect and the practical preparation for a business career, but the fostering and the building up of the personal character that denotes the Christian gentleman. I do not think that I can do better for a conclusion than to quote from the "Philosophy of Education" by the late Dr. Thomas Edward Shields.

"The unchanging aim of Christian education is, and always has been, to put the pupil into possession of a body of truth derived from nature and from Divine Revelation, from the concrete work of man's hand and from the content of human speech, in order to bring his conduct into conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the civilization of his day.

"Christian education, therefore, aims at transforming native instincts while preserving and enlarging their powers. It aims at bringing the flesh under the control of the spirit. It draws upon the experience and the wisdom of the race, upon Divine Revelation and upon the power of Divine grace, in order that it may bring the conduct of the individual into conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the civilization of the day. It aims at the development of the whole man, at the preservation of unity and continuity in his conscious life; it aims at transforming man's native egotism to altruism; at developing the social side of his nature to such an extent that he may regard all men as his brothers; sharing with them the common Fatherhood of God. In one word, it aims at transforming a child of the flesh into a child of God."

VII

THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC RELIGION

If philosophy is "the science of the totality of things," and "they are called wise who put things in their right order and control them well," then it is religion, above all other factors and potencies, that enters in to reveal the right relationships and standards of value, and to contribute the redemptive and energizing force that makes possible the adequate control which is the second factor in the conduct of the man that is "called wise." Philosophy and religion are not to be confounded; religion is sufficient in itself and develops its own philosophy, but the latter is not sufficient in itself, and when it assumes the functions and prerogatives of religion, it brings disaster.

Religion is the force that relates action to life. Of course it has other aspects, higher in essence and more impalpable in quality, but it is this first aspect I shall deal with, because I am not now speaking of religion as a purely spiritual power but only of its quality as the great coordinator of human action, the power that establishes a right ratio of values and gives the capacity for right control. Whether we accept the religion of the Middle Ages or not; whether we look on the period as one of high and edifying Christian civilization, or as a time of ignorance and superstition, we are bound to admit that society in its physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects was highly organized, and coordinated after a most masterly fashion. It was more nearly an unit, functioning lucidly and consistently, than anything the world has known since the Roman Empire. Whatever its defects, lack of coherency was not one of them. Life was not divided into water-tight compartments, but moved on as a consistent whole. Failures were constant, for the world even then was made up of men, but the ideal was perfectly clear-cut, the principles exactly seen and explicitly formulated; life was organic, consistent, highly articulated, and withal as full of the passion of aspiration towards an ultimate ideal as was the Gothic cathedral which is its perfect exemplar.

The reason for this coherency and consistency was the universal recognition and acceptance of religion as the one energizing and standardizing force in life, the particular kind of religion that then prevailed, and the organic power which this religion had established; that is to say, the Church as an operative institution. So long as this condition obtained, which was, roughly speaking, for three hundred years, from the "Truce of God" in 1041 to the beginning of the "Babylonian Captivity" of the Papacy at Avignon in 1309, there was substantial unity in life, but as soon as it was shaken, this unity began to break up into a diversity that accomplished a condition of chaos, at and around the opening of the sixteenth century, which only yielded to the absolutism of the Renaissance, destined in its turn to break up into a second condition of chaos under the influence of industrialism, Puritanism and revolution.

Since the accomplishment of the Reformation, this function of religion has never been restored to society in any degree comparable with that which it maintained during the Middle Ages. The Counter-Reformation preserved the institution itself in the Mediterranean lands, but it did not restore its old spiritual power in its entirety. Amongst the peoples that accepted the Reformation the new religion assumed for a time the authority of the old, but the centrifugal force inherent in its nature soon split the reformed churches into myriad fragments, so destroying their power of action, while the abandonment of the sacramental system progressively weakened their dynamic force. As it had from the first compounded, under compulsion, with absolutism and tyranny, so in the end it compromised with the cruelty, selfishness, injustice and avarice of industrialism, and when finally this achieved world supremacy, and physical science, materialistic philosophy and social revolution entered the field as co-combatants, it no longer possessed a sufficient original power either of resistance or of re-creative energy.