THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

LITERATURE

THE study of English literature in our schools and colleges on a scale proportionate to its importance is of comparatively recent date. I suppose we should not be far wrong in fixing that date at about thirty years back.1 Up to that time, although the colleges in London and other great centres could boast distinguished professors of the subject, it had hardly been recognised, even in the higher forms of schools at all. School histories of England, in an appendix to the successive chapters, may have furnished the names of the great authors in prose and verse who adorned each reign, with a list of their more important. works, but that was all. To whom the credit is due of leading the movement which has brought about the remarkable change in this respect, it might be difficult to say. But there is no doubt that the movement received a great impetus about the time just mentioned by the publication,

1 This address was delivered at University College, Bristol, at the opening of the Session 1889-1890.

through the Clarendon Press at Oxford, of a series of selected works of the great English classics, thoroughly edited and annotated, under the general direction of the late Professor Brewer, of King's College. Single plays of Shakspeare, separate portions of the Canterbury Tales, selected poems of Dryden, and so forth, were one by one issued, under the care of the editors best qualified for the task, and at a price that made them available for use in all the higher-class schools and colleges in the country. "The authors and works selected," so ran the prospectus of the series, "are such as will best serve to illustrate English literature in its historical aspect. As' As 'the eye of history,' without which history cannot be understood, the literature of a nation is the clearest and most intelligible record of its life. Its thoughts and its emotions, its graver and its less serious modes, its progress or its degeneracy, are told by its best authors in their best words. This view of the subject will suggest the safest rules for the study of it."

Admirable words, worthy of the large-minded and large-hearted scholar who inspired, if he did not actually frame, them; and we can well understand how they must have brought light and inspiration to many a schoolmaster and student, who had never entertained the idea of Chaucer and Bacon as possible factors in education, though it had seemed the most obvious thing in the world to study the masterpieces of Schiller, Dante, or

Molière. At the time we are speaking of, the average schoolmaster would have scouted the idea of an English classic becoming a text-book in his school. He might indeed give out a canto of Marmion to be learned by heart as a holiday task, but that was for a mere exercise of memory, or to keep the lad from being too noisy on a wet day. I remember how Dr. Arnold, in one of his letters, expresses an ardent wish that he might have the opportunity of studying a play of Shakspeare with his sixth form, on the same scale of attention and precision as they studied a book of Thucydides ! But this was but an aspiration, and the times were not ripe for a change, even if the remorseless limits of years and months admitted of any diminution of the space allotted to Latin and Greek.

I do not at all say that the prejudice of the average teacher against the introduction of English writers into the curriculum of his school was altogether unworthy, and to be laughed at. It had its root in a true conviction that nothing was worth teaching that did not involve some labour and trouble on the part of the learner-that did not awake and exercise in him some new powers —that was not, in a word, a discipline. It was this feeling that was sound and worthy of all respect in the prejudice against English literature as an element in education. The picture of Addison, or Pope in a boy's hands connected

itself with that of a half-hour of idleness-harm

less perhaps, but still idleness-spent in an armchair by the fire or on a sunny lawn, a half-hour withdrawn from more serious and profitable study. And if any one, reading these suppressed thoughts of the teacher, were to retort that after all Addison and Pope might be as worthy literature as Horace and Aristophanes, the answer would be ready: "Yes, but it takes some trouble to get at the meaning of Horace and Aristophanes. The language in which they wrote obliges the student to give thought and trouble to the subject. An English book does nothing of the kind."

And it was to those who cherished this conviction, and yet were quite aware that Hooker and Bacon, Shakspeare and Milton, De Foe and Swift must have an important message to those who spoke their tongue, that, as I have said, such words as Professor Brewer's came like something of a revelation. English literature, it now appeared, might ask some labour and attention on the part of the student, might evoke and train some new powers. It might link itself with history, or rather claim to be itself a department of history, and history had long ago been established as a necessary branch of education. And moreover, as such, it admitted of being examined. in, and the final test by examination has always, I suppose, been present to the mind of the teacher when considering the appropriateness of a subject for his pupils.

From the first, then, English literature has

been regarded by the teacher as something to be examined in; and from the first this has largely determined the form in which it has been taught. The connexion of an author with his own time— how far he has either reflected the deeper convictions and aims of that time, or perhaps only its passing moods and fashions; the obligations of the writer to foreign models, or to the influence of a revived study of ancient literature-these and many such inquiries were seen to be wholesome and instructive ways of studying the author, and throwing light upon his genius and our appreciation of him. And in all sound teaching of the subject such topics have always, of course, found a place. But even here, and in the hands of teachers of real and wide scholarship, I think may be perceived the first shadow of a danger which might in time spread and overcast the entire subject. In the hands of a teacher who himself loved and enjoyed the author he was treating of, it would be impossible but that something of his own taste and appreciation should be transferred to the student who listened to him, provided always that the student had in him the germs of taste and appreciation at all. But here again the terminal examination began to cast its "shadow before." How are you to examine upon a young student's enjoyment of the Faerie Queene or the Rape of the Lock? Even though he has learned to feel, and ardently to relish, the exquisite yet wholly different flavours