THE TEACHER'S ATTITUDE TOWARD CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Two things must be admitted at the start—first, that no person is qualified to judge the value of new books who is not well acquainted with the old ones; second, that the only test of the real greatness of any book is Time. It is, of course, vain to hope that any remarks made on contemporary authors will not be misrepresented, but I have placed two axioms at the beginning of this article in order to clear the ground. I am not advocating the abandonment of the study of Homer and Vergil, or proposing to substitute in their stead the study of Hall Caine, Mrs. Ward, and Marie Corelli. I do not believe that Mr. Pinero is a greater dramatist than Sophokles, or that the mental discipline gained by reading The Jungle is equivalent to that obtained in the mastery of Euclid.

I am merely pleading that every thoughtful man who is alive in this year of grace should not attempt to live his whole life in the year 400 B.C., even though he be so humble an individual as a teacher. The very word "teacher" means something more than "scholar"; and scholarship means something more than the knowledge of things that are dead. A good teacher will remember that the boys and girls who come under his instruction are not all going to spend their lives in the pursuit of technical learning. It is his business to influence them; and he cannot exert a powerful influence without some interest in the life and thought of his own day, in the environment in which his pupils exist. I believe that the cardinal error of a divinity-school education is that the candidate for the ministry spends over half his time and energy in the laborious study of Hebrew, whereas he should study the subjects that primarily interest not his colleagues, but his audience.

A preacher who knows Hebrew, Greek, systematic theology, New Testament interpretation, and who knows nothing about literature, history, art, and human nature, is grotesquely unfitted for his noble profession.

In every age it has been the fashion to ridicule and decry the literary production of that particular time. I suppose that the greatest creative period that the world has ever known occurred in England during the years 1590-1616, and here is what Ben Jonson said in 1607: "Now, especially in dramatic, or, as they term it, stage-poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy, all license of offence to God and man is practised. I dare not deny a great part of this, and am sorry I dare not." In 1610 he wrote, "Thou wert never more fair in the way to be cozened, than in this age, in poetry, especially in plays; wherein, now the concupiscence of dances and of antics so reigneth, as to run away from nature and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that tickles the spectators." And in 1611 he said, "In so thick and dark an ignorance as now almost covers the age ... you dare, in these jig-given times, to countenance a legitimate poem." And the age which he damned is now regarded as the world's high-water mark!

A man who teaches physics and chemistry is supposed to be familiar not only with the history of his subject, but its latest manifestations; with the work of his contemporaries. A man who teaches political economy and sociology must read the most recent books on these themes both in Europe and America—nay, he must read the newspapers and study the markets, or he will be outstripped by his own pupils. A man who teaches drawing and painting should not only know the history of art, but its latest developments. And yet, when the teacher of literature devotes a small portion of the time of his pupils to the contemplation of contemporary poets, novelists, and dramatists, he is not only blamed for doing so, but some teachers who are ignorant of the writers of their own day boast of their ignorance with true academic pride.

A teacher cannot read every book that appears; he cannot neglect the study and teaching of the recognised classics; but his attitude toward the writers of his own time should not be one of either indifference or contempt. The teacher of English literature should not be the last man in the world to discover the name of an author whom all the world is talking about. And I believe that every great university should offer, under proper restrictions, at least one course in the contemporary drama, or in contemporary fiction, or in some form of contemporary literary art. The Germans are generally regarded as the best scholars in the world, and they never think it beneath their dignity to recognise living authors of distinction. While the British public were condemning in true British fashion an author whom they had not read—Henrik Ibsen—German universities were offering courses exclusively devoted to the study of his works. Imagine a course in Ibsen at Oxford!

But not only should the teacher take an intelligent interest in contemporary authors who have already won a wide reputation, he should be eternally watchful, eternally hopeful—ready to detect signs of promise in the first books of writers whose names are wholly unknown. This does not mean that he should exaggerate the merits of every fresh work, nor beslobber with praise every ambitious quill-driver. On the contrary,—if there be occasion to give an opinion at all,—he should not hesitate to condemn what seems to him shallow, trivial, or counterfeit, no matter how big a "seller" the object in his vision may be. But his sympathies should be warm and keen, and his mind always responsive, when a new planet swims into his ken. One of the most joyful experiences of my life came to me some years ago when I read Bob, Son of Battle with the unknown name Alfred Ollivant on the title-page. It was worth wading through tons of trash to find such a jewel.

And is the literature of our generation really slight and mean? By "Contemporary Literature" we include perhaps authors who have written or who are writing during the lifetime of those who are now, let us say, thirty years old. Contemporary literature would then embrace, in the drama, Ibsen, BjÖrnson, Victor Hugo, Henri Becque, Rostand, Maeterlinck, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Pinero, Jones, and others; in the novel, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, BjÖrnson, Hugo, Daudet, Zola, Maupassant, Heyse, Sudermann, Hardy, Meredith, Stevenson, Kipling, Howells, Mark Twain, and many others; in poetry, to speak of English writers alone, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, Morris, Kipling, Phillips, Watson, Thompson, and others. Those who live one hundred years from now will know more about the permanent value of the works of these men than we do; but are these names really of no importance to teachers whose speciality is literature?