To attempt to give a concrete illustration of the method in which any teaching is to be carried on is in a way to try for the impossible. Every class and every pupil must be treated according to the especial nature of the case and the personal equation of the teacher. I perhaps expose myself to the danger of seeming egotistic if I insert here an experience of my own, and, what is of more consequence, I may possibly obscure the very points I am endeavoring to make clear. As well as I can, however, I shall set down an actual talk, in the hope that it may afford some hint of the way in which even difficult pieces of literature may be made to appeal to a child. Of course this is not in the least meant as a model, but solely and simply as an illustration.

I once asked a fine little fellow of eight what he was doing at school. He answered—because this happened to be the task which at the moment was most pressing—that he was committing to memory William Blake's "Tiger."

"Do you like it?" I asked.

"Oh, we don't have to like it," he responded with careless frankness, "we just have to learn it."

The form of his reply appealed to one's sense of humor, and I wondered how many of my own students in literature might have given answers not dissimilar in spirit, had they not outgrown the delicious candor which belongs to the first decade of a lad's life. The afternoon chanced to be rainy and at my disposal. I was curious to see what I could do with this combination of Blake and small boy, and I made the experiment. I should not have chosen the poem for one so young; but it is real, compact of noble imagination, the boy was evidently genuine, and a real poem must have something for any sincere reader even if he be a child.

The following report of our talk was not written down at the time, and makes no pretense of being literal. It does represent, so far as I can judge, with substantial accuracy what passed between the straightforward lad and myself. Too deliberate and too diffuse to have taken place in a school-room, it yet gives, on an extended scale, what I believe is the true method of "teaching literature" in all the secondary-school work. I do not claim to have originated or to have discovered the method; but I hope that I may be able to make clearer to some teachers how children may be helped to do their own thinking and thus brought to a vital and delighted enjoyment of the masterpieces they study.

I began to repeat aloud the opening lines of the poem.

"Why," said the boy, "do you know that? Did you have to learn it at school when you were little like me?"

"I'm not sure when I did learn it," I answered; "I've known it for a good while; but I didn't just learn it. I like it."

I repeated the whole poem, purposely refraining from giving it very great force, even in the supreme symphonic outburst of the magnificent fifth stanza:

"It sounds rather pretty," I commented, as carelessly as possible.

"Yes, I suppose so," he assented colorlessly, looking at me rather suspiciously.

He was a shrewd little mortal, and he had been so often told at school that he should like this and that for which in reality he did not care a button that he was on his guard. I made a casual remark about something entirely unrelated to the subject. It was well that the lad should not feel that he was being instructed. Then in a manner as natural and easy as I could make it I asked:

"Did you ever see a tiger?"

"Oh, yes; I've seen lots of them at the circus. Tom Bently never went to but one circus, but I've been to four."

"What does a tiger look like?" I went on, ignoring the irrelevant.

"He's a fierce-looking thing! Didn't you ever see one?"

"Yes, I've seen them, but I wondered if they looked the same to you as they do to me."

"Why, how do they look to you?"

"I asked you first. It's only fair for you to say first."

"Well," the small boy said, with a fine show of being determined to play fair, "I think they look like great big, big, big cats. Did you think that?"

"That's exactly what I should have said. They really are a sort of cat, you know. Did you ever see a keeper stir them up?"

"Oh, yes, sir; and they snarled like anything, and licked their lips just like this!"

He gave a highly gratifying imitation, and then added vivaciously: "If I were the keeper, I'd keep stirring them up all the time. They did look so mad!"

"And they opened and shut their eyes slowly," I suggested, "as if they'd like to get hold of their keeper."

"Yes; and their eyes were just like green fire."

"'Burning bright,'" I quoted; and then without giving the boy time to suspect that he was being led on, I asked at once: "Did you ever see a cat's eyes in the dark?"

"Oh, I saw our cat once last summer, when we were in the country, under a rosebush after dark, when Dick and I got out of the window after we'd gone to bed. She just scared me; her eyes were just like little green lanterns. Dick said they were like little bicycle lamps."

"If it had been a tiger under a bush in the night,—'in the forests of the night,'—"

"Oh," interrupted the boy with the eagerness of a discoverer, "is that what it means! Did he see a tiger in the night under a bush? A real, truly tiger, all loose? I'd have run away."

"I don't know if he ever saw one," I answered. "I rather think he saw a tiger or a picture of one, or thought of one, and then got to thinking how it must seem to come across one in the woods; when one was travelling, say, in the East where tigers live wild. If you came upon one in the forest in the dark, what do you think would be the first thing that would tell you a tiger was near?"

"I'd hear him."

"Did you ever hear a cat moving about?"

"No," the boy said doubtfully. "Aunt Katie says Spot doesn't make any more noise than a sunbeam. Could a sunbeam make a noise?"

"She meant that Spot didn't make any. You'd never hear a tiger coming, for it's a kind of cat, and moves without sound. You wouldn't know that way."

"I'd see him."

"In the night? You couldn't see him."

"Yes, I could! Yes, I could!" he cried triumphantly. "I'd see his eyes just like green fire."

I had interested the lad and taken him far enough to feel sure he would follow me if I helped him on a little faster. I was ready to use clear suggestion when I felt that he would respond to it as if the thought were his own.

"Well," I said, "don't you see that this is just what the man who wrote the poem meant? He got to thinking how the tiger would look in the night to anybody that came on him in the forest and saw those eyes like green fires shining at him out of the jungle. Don't you suppose you or I would think they were pretty big fires if we saw them, and knew there was a tiger behind them?"

"I guess we should! Wooh! Do you suppose Bruno'd run?"

Bruno was a small and silky water-spaniel, a charming beast in his way, but not especially welcome at this point of the conversation.

"Very likely;" I slid over the subject. "The man knew that he would have a feeling how big and strong that tiger must be: and it gave him a shock to think what a fearful thing the beast would be there in the dark, with all the warm, damp smells of the plants in the air, and the strange noises. It would almost take away his breath to think what a mighty Being it must have taken to make anything so awful as a tiger."

"Yes," the lad said so quietly that I let him think a little. He had snuggled up against my knee and laid hold of my fingers, and I knew some sense of the matter was working in him. After a moment or two I asked him if he could repeat the first verse of the poem as if he were the man who thought of the tiger in the jungle there, with fierce eyes shining out of the dark, and who had so clear an idea of the mighty creature that he couldn't help thinking what a wonderful thing it was that it could be created. The boy fixed his eyes on mine as if he were getting moved and half-consciously desired to be assured that I was utterly serious and sympathetic; and in his clear childish voice he repeated in a way that had really something of a thrill in it:

"If a traveller were in the jungle in the dark night," I went on after a word of praise for his recitation, "I suppose he couldn't see much around him, the trees would be so thick. He'd have to look up to the sky to see anything but the tiger's eyes."

"He'd see the stars there," the boy observed, just as I had hoped he would. "I've seen stars through the trees. I was out in the woods long after dark once."

"Were you really? The man must have thought the stars looked like the eyes, as if when the animal was made the Creator went to the sky itself for that fire. Think of a Being that could rise to the very stars and take their light in His hand."

"Ouf!" the small man cried naÏvely. "I shouldn't want to take fire in my hand!"

"The writer of the poem was thinking what a wonderful Being He must be that could do it; but that if He could make a creature like the tiger, He would be able to do anything."

The boy reflected a moment, and then, with a frank look, asked: "Did the fire in a tiger's eyes really come out of the stars?"

"I don't think that the poem means that it really did," was my answer. "I think it means that when the poet thought how wonderful a tiger is, with the life and the fierceness shining like a flame in his eyes, and how we cannot tell where that fire came from, and that the stars overhead were scarcely brighter, it seemed as if that was where the green light came from. He was trying to say how wonderful and terrible it was to him,—especially when he thought of coming upon the beast all alone in the forest in the night with nobody near to defend him."

The boy was silent, and thinking hard. He had evidently not yet clearly grasped all the idea.

"But God didn't make a tiger on an anvil and put pieces of stars in for eyes," he objected.

"You told me yesterday that Bruno swims like a duck. He doesn't really, for a duck goes on the top of the water."

"Oh, but I meant that Bruno goes as fast as a duck."

"And you wanted me to know how well he swims, I suppose."

"Why, of course. Bruno can swim twice as fast as Tom Talcott's dog."

"You said that about the duck to make me know what a wonderful swimmer Bruno is, and the man who wrote the poem wanted you when you read it to feel how wonderful the tiger seemed to him; its eyes as if they were of fire brought from the stars, its strength so great that it seemed as if his muscles had been beaten out on an anvil from red-hot steel by some Being mighty enough to do something no man could begin to do. The poem doesn't mean that a tiger was really made in this way; but it does mean that when you think of the strength and fearfulness of the creature, able to carry off a man or even a horse in its jaws, this is the best way to give an idea of how terrible the animal seemed."

The boy accepted this, and so we came to the fifth verse. The range of ideas here is so much beyond the mind of any child that it was necessary to suggest most of them, to go very slowly, and in the end to be content with a childishly inadequate notion of the magnificent conception. I gave frankly a suggestion of the creation of all the animals at the beginning, and of how the angels might have stood around like stars, watching full of interest and of kindness. The boy was easily made to feel as if he had seen the making of the deer and the lamb and the horse, and of how the angels might see in one or another of the animals a help or a friend to man.

"Then suppose," I said, "that the angels should see God make the great tiger, royal and terrible. What would they see?"

"Oh, a great fierce thing," the lad returned. "Do you suppose he'd jump right at the deer and the lambs?"

"He would make the angels think how he could. How different from the other animals he'd be."

"Yes, he'd have big, big, sharp teeth, and he'd lash his tail, and he'd put out his claws. Do you suppose he'd sharpen his claws the way Muff does on the leather chairs?"

"Very likely he would," I said. "At any rate the angels would think how the other animals would be torn to pieces if the tiger got hold of them; and they would think of what would happen to men. Perhaps they would imagine some poor Hindu woman, with her baby on her back going through a path in the jungle, and how the tiger might leap out suddenly and tear them both to pieces. The angels couldn't understand how God could bear to make any animal so cruel, or how He could be willing to have anything so wicked in the world. They would be so sorry for all the suffering that was to come that they would throw down their spears and not be able to keep back the tears."

"But angels wouldn't have spears, would they?"

I went to a shelf of the library in which we were talking and took down a volume in which I found a picture of St. Michael in full armor.

"It is like the fire from the stars," I said. "Of course nobody ever saw an angel to know how he would look, but to show how strong and powerful an angel might be, a good many men that make pictures have painted them like knights."

"But men that had spears wouldn't cry; I shouldn't think angels would."

"Even the strongest men cry sometimes, my boy; only it has to be something tremendous to make them. A thing that would make the angels 'water heaven with their tears' must be something so terrible that you couldn't tell how sad it was."

"Well, anyway, I'd rather be a tiger than a lamb," he proclaimed rather unexpectedly.

"Very likely," I assented, "but I think you'd rather have a lamb come after Baby Lou than a tiger."

"Oh, I wouldn't want a tiger to get Baby Lou!" he cried with a tremor.

"I suppose that is the way the angels might feel at the idea of the tiger's killing anybody," I rejoined.

With a lad somewhat older one would have gone on to develop the thought that to the watching angels the tiger, leaping out fierce and bloodthirsty from the hand of the Creator, would be like the incarnation of evil, and that in their weeping was represented all the sorrowful problem of the existence of evil in the Universe; but this on the present occasion I did not touch upon.

"So the angels," I went on, "couldn't keep back their tears; but what did God do?"

"Why, He smiled!" the boy answered, evidently with astonishment at the thought which now for the first time came home to him. "I shouldn't think He'd have smiled."

"When you were so disappointed the other day because the carriage was broken and you couldn't go over to the lake in it, do you remember that Uncle Jo laughed?"

"Oh, he knew we could go in his automobile."

"He knew."

"Yes, he knew," began the boy, "and so—" He stopped, and looked at me with a sudden soberness. "What did God know?" he asked seriously.

"He must have known that somehow everything was right, don't you think? He knew why He had made the tiger, just as He knew why He had made the lamb, and so He could see that everything would be as it should be in the end."

"But—but—"

The boy was speechless in face of the eternal problem, as so many greater and wiser have been before him. It seemed to me that we had done quite enough for once, so I broke off the talk with a suggestion that we try the boy's favorite game. That was the end of the matter for the time, but in the library of the lad's father the copy of Blake is so befingered at the page on which "The Tiger" is printed that it is evident that the boy, with the soiled fingers of his age, has turned it often. How much he made out of the talk I cannot pretend to say, but at least he came to love the poem.

I said at the start that I do not give the conversation, which is actual, as a sample, but as an illustration. The poem called for more leading on of the pupil than would many, for as Blake is one of the most imaginative of English writers, his conceptions are the more subtle and profound. A class, moreover, cannot be treated always with the same deliberation as that which is natural in the case of a single child; but the essential principle, I believe, is the same everywhere.