According to the naÏvely formal method of division of the old-fashioned homiletics, the title itself offers a quite inevitable outline for the discussion in this chapter—an outline that takes this form: (1) literature; (2) literature in the school; (3) literature in the elementary school; and while we may smile at the pat formality of the little syllabus, we cannot resist its logic. Perhaps we can retain the logic while we disguise the formality.

When one proposes to enter for any purpose or from any point of view, a large field, especially a field that has already been much explored, he feels that he must hasten to define his bounds, to stake out his particular claim. But he makes a mistake if, in his haste to do this, he fails to make clear his understanding of the location of the large field and his conception of its nature. Any new discussion of literature must justify itself at the beginning by declaring from what point of view it will proceed and in what direction it will move. This seems a good place, then, to declare that this whole discussion will concern itself with literature as a part of the training of children. Yet this discussion must constantly proceed in the light of certain fundamental conclusions concerning literature in general, and in its essential nature, and it will help us to stand upon common ground to state these conclusions.

Literature, like every other subject that would claim a place as a discipline in school, is called upon in our day of re-examination and readjustment of the curriculum to make good its claim by showing that it has in its nature something distinctive by virtue of which it performs in the child's education some distinctive service. It is true, that no subject of human interest is a quite detached island; pursued far enough, its edges blur and mingle with the edges of neighboring interests, so that there are regions where the two are indistinguishable. But every body of material has a characteristic center where it declares itself unmistakably. However widely it radiates from this center, however many or however distant areas it touches and mingles with upon its borders, in this center it is itself and nothing else. This becomes clear when we consider some of the larger subjects of educational discipline. There is, for example, a well-defined subject, geography, though if one pursues it far, he comes in one direction upon geology; in other directions, upon history or economics or sociology or politics. Or to take another group of subjects, there is a region in which you are dealing with anatomy, though on the edges of it you pass imperceptibly into physiology or general biology.

For several reasons it is especially difficult to fix the bounds of literature. It touches the margins of every other human interest; it may reach into any of the areas about it for subject-matter; it shares with all other subjects its means of expression; it lends to all other subjects certain of its methods and devices, when these other subjects must be presented effectively; its very name is applied loosely and half figuratively to writing upon any subject, and for whatever purpose produced. But for all this, literature, too, has its distinctive center, where it can be differentiated from everything else.

We begin to make this differentiation when we say that literature is art—that it is one of the fine arts. We set it apart from the other arts by the fact that it uses language as its medium, and we set it apart from other writing by the fact that it uses language in the way art must use it—not for technical purposes, not as a medium for teaching facts or doctrines, not to give information, but to produce artistic pleasure; not to conserve use, but to exhibit aesthetic beauty.

When one's mind is clear on this point, he will not be confused by the fact that literature handles matter from other provinces—history for example—or by the fact that other kinds of writing borrow the devices of literature to beautify or otherwise make effective their own material. When Scott takes from history the figure of Richard Coeur de Lion, it is not for the purpose of teaching historical fact, but for the sake of putting into his picture a striking person and an effective motive. When Macaulay employs many figures of speech, when he rounds out his periods and balances them carefully, when he uses picturesque concrete and particular persons and objects rather than abstractions and generalizations, all to make clear and vivid the information he is giving, he is still writing history and not literature, since he is aiming first at fact and not first at beauty.

This recognition of literature as art, and the differentiation of it from the other kinds of writing, so far from being a mere bit of aesthetic theory remote from the teacher and his child, is the fundamental and essential step in the teacher's procedure, because it constitutes at once a clue to lead him in his choice of material, a guide to direct him in the method of using it, and a standard to indicate the nature of the result he may reasonably hope for. When the teacher knows that he is to choose his literature as art he is freed from the obligation of selecting such things as will contain technical information, historical facts, desirable moral lessons, or other utilitarian matter. This is far from saying that in choosing he will be indifferent to the actual material details or to the moral atmosphere of his bit of literature. The fitness or unfitness, the beauty or ugliness of these will often be the ground of his adoption or rejection. It does mean, however, that technical and professional details of fact and teaching, matters which are always subsidiary and secondary in literature as literature, cannot dictate his choice when he is choosing from the point of view of art.

The habit of regarding literature as art clarifies immediately the teacher's conception of his method of handling it. To teach literature as literature is not to teach it as an adjunct to some other discipline; it is not to teach it as reading-lessons, or spelling-lessons, nor as grammar—though incidentally the lessons in literature will have great value in all these directions; it is not to teach it as botany, as history, as mythology, as politics, as naval or military tactics, or as ethics—though again, by way of teaching it as literature, interesting by-products in any of these subjects may accrue.

It is equally true that a clear understanding of the fact that the results aimed at and legitimately hoped for are to be of the literary, artistic kind, and not of the utilitarian or scientific kind, will lighten and irradiate the teacher's problem and through him the children's task, doing away with the sense of burden and substituting for a vague and shifting end, a definite and delightful purpose.

To take a specific instance—it is very little to the purpose of literature to have taught a class that Longfellow was an American poet who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and that, though the myth and legend of Hiawatha properly belong to the Iroquois, Longfellow transferred it to the Objibways. So far as the distinctively literary result goes, these facts are neither here nor there. But the enjoyment of the music of the verse, the loving appropriation and appreciation of some of the beautiful images and pictures, some grasp of the large meaning, the noble trend, of the whole poem, a general tuning-up of the class to something like unison with its emotion, a better taste in the whole class, and in a few members of it some improvement in their own powers of expression—these are the kind of result at which the teacher aims when he teaches literature as art.

The question of literature in the school has taken on a new aspect in this our current day, and especially in American schools, owing to the decidedly diminished place left for it in the modern curriculum. This has come about most naturally in the vast enrichment of the course on the side of scientific and occupational material. And naturally, too, in the process of turning from a purely book-education, we have tended to turn also from literature—a field which for many generations has seemed to be inextricably shut up in books. But it is also true that, in a large part, this turning-away from literature has been from literature wrongfully apprehended and mistakenly taught. Whatever be the explanation of the smaller place given to literature, no thoughtful student of modern education, no matter how firmly he believes in the function of literature, can regret that it should take in the curriculum its due and proportionate place. Such a student knows best the follies and absurdities achieved by untrained and inartistic teachers, in whose hands literature is made the center to which they attach any and all other matters of training; he best knows the fact that literature leaves many of the child's powers and capacities untouched; he best knows the danger of over-stimulating those powers and capacities that literature does develop and strengthen, and that it is a misfortune for a child or a class to live prevailingly in an atmosphere distinctively literary; and he knows that a few specimens chosen aright and taught aright produce the essentially literary result more surely and more safely than such a programme as could once be seen in school—a programme that seemed to reflect the teacher's desire to give the children within the grammar school all the reading that they ought reasonably to be expected to have up to maturity.

The choosing of literature for use in school creates immediately several important conditions. The bit chosen is elevated at once into the dignity and isolation of a discipline, and is set apart from matter to be read once and casually, for recreation or amusement, at home or in hours of intellectual play, to the single child or a small group of homogeneous children. In view of the fact that the specimen is being chosen for use in class, it must be broad and typical, appealing, as it were, to the universal child. It must not be merely fanciful, freakish, satirical, or witty, because, while there is pretty sure to be some child in every class who would appreciate its flavor, the others would not, and could not be brought to such appreciation. It should not be too imaginative, since it must make its appeal to a group whose experience has been of many kinds and degrees, and it cannot count upon any uniform body of apperception material that has paved the way into a very delicate or very pervasive imaginative atmosphere. It must not be too emotional, because the teacher must be aware of the hysterical children in every class, and because it is next to impossible to tune up any social group as large and as mixed as the class to anything like a high emotional unison or complete artistic like-mindedness. What the class, that composite child, needs are such things as display the broader, simpler aspects of life and art, such as call out in them the simpler and more direct responses.

If one is giving a story or a poem a single reading, and reading it merely for recreation, he may pass so lightly over the details, and may so handle its structure, that its weaknesses and faults may not appear, or may easily be lost sight of in the emphasis laid upon the pleasant and successful aspects. But a bit of literature selected for the class must be worth while in every particular; it is to be lingered over, digested, assimilated; it must be fitted to stand out in the light of searching criticism—and the assembled class soon comes to be a very acute and exacting critic; it is to stand the test of individual question and community judgment. If, therefore, it is to become, as one must hope, a part of the children's experience, a contribution to their artistic and moral well-being; if it is to be a bit of real education, it must be sound in structure, trustworthy in detail, satisfactory in issue. No matter how simple it is, it should be good art, and chosen upon the same critical principles that one would apply in choosing good literature of any degree of complexity.

While it is a great mistake to suppose that literature for children is a bit of garden ground to be considered apart from the general landscape, it is true that there are certain characteristics of children within the elementary period, and certain accepted conclusions concerning the nature and spirit of their other work, that must be taken as guides in the matter of their literature. It is not sufficient—though it cannot be too often said that it is necessary—that the literature be good; that, no matter how simple it be or how complex, it must satisfy the demands of good criticism—however important it be that it be good, it is equally important that it be fit.

One who reads the courses of study and lists of reading prepared for the elementary grades, and examines the manuals for their teachers, comes near concluding that the larger number of mistakes, and the mistakes most disastrous, lie here—in losing sight of the principle of fitness. For in these formal lists, and suggested in the manuals, one may find, first and last, heaped up all that various teachers have themselves happened to like; all that critics have praised; all whose titles sound as if they ought to be good; all that is concerned more or less remotely with other things the children are studying; all that a generation of mistaken educational logic has suggested; all that a mature reader ought to have read in a life-time; all that a blind interpretation, both of childhood and of literature, has called suitable—historical works, American literature, Shakespeare's comedies, the Idylls of the King, sentimental and bloodthirsty juveniles—a chaotic and accidental jumble. Out of some such haphazard impulse and some such failure to apply the law of fitness come such mistakes as the introduction of fifth-grade children into the mazes of a satiric social comedy like A Midsummer-Night's Dream, or the placing of first-year secondary children amid the bitter jests and baffling irony of The Vicar of Wakefield. Such pedagogical misfits arise out of sheer ignorance of the child's nature and its needs, and of the plainest principles of literary interpretation. They persist year after year because of the blind following of supposed authority, nowhere so blind as in matters of literary opinion.

The preparation that should be made by the teacher who is to choose and teach this literature is, after all, not so very formidable. We will leave out of the discussion that mystic thing called the teacher's gift. Undoubtedly there is such a thing; but it descendeth upon whom it listeth, enabling him to choose by intuition and to teach by inspiration the special bits of literature that prove to be best for the children. But such a person is not safe, unless he supplement his gift with knowledge; his choice is purely personal and esoteric, his principles accidental and incommunicable.

What is the nature of the supplement such a teacher must make to his gift? What is the training with which the teacher without the gift must fortify himself? It is little more than one would like to have for his personal culture, and little other than he is obliged to have for his contact with the children in other directions. By dint of much reading of literature and some reading in good criticism he must bring himself to a sane view of the whole subject, realizing what literature is and what it is not; what it can be expected to accomplish in human culture, and what we cannot reasonably ask of it. He must know something of its laws, that he may know how to judge it and when he has judged it aright. This process will inevitably have refined and deepened his taste and broadened his artistic experience in every direction. Of course, he will not talk to his children about literature as an art, about critical problems, structural principles, and all that; no more will he, when he is guiding his class in evolving for themselves food and shelter by way of beginning the study of history, talk to them about primitive culture and social evolution. But he is an ill-equipped and untrustworthy guide if he does not have in his own consciousness these large explaining points of view. It is precisely so with the large fundamental principles of literature. One gathers certainty and power for the choice and teaching of the merest folk-tale, if he is able to see in it the working of the great and simple laws of all art. And more specifically he must imbue himself with the spirit of the childlike literature. He must know and love the wonderful old folk and fairy tales, not regarding them as matter for the nursery and the kindergarten, merely, but learning to love them as great but simple art. He must read the hero tales and romances till he knows them as a treasure house out of which he may draw at his need. Many, many children's stories and poems he must read to be able to judge them and he must read all those artists, Carroll, Stevenson, Pater, Hauptman, who in Alice, The Child's Garden, The Child in the House, Hannele, have done so much to interpret for us in the artist's way the consciousness of the child.

In teaching literature, as in all that he does for the children, he will have use for all the knowledge he can get of childhood and children; for all that he can learn of the trend of conclusion in psychology and educational philosophy; for all knowledge he can acquire as to the meaning and import of all the other subjects of elementary instruction. Only then can he choose and teach literature that is fit in both the necessary senses—adapted to the children and harmonious in spirit with the other interests they are pursuing. Out of such knowledge of his material and his children there should grow a reasonably clear and consistent vision of the result he hopes to reach and the steps he must take to reach it. Out of all these elements should come the courage to examine fearlessly the traditional material. Better still, out of this combination will come that faith, enthusiasm, and respect for his material, that confidence in its usefulness, that hopefulness as to its results, which are desirable in a teacher of any subject, but which are absolutely essential in the equipment of a teacher of literature; because he must above all things radiate both light and warmth; he must diffuse about his material and his children the breath of life and the glow of art.