of the world of fact. A wholly different kind of objection comes now and then from poet or essayist, who maintains that insight into literature is a case of the divine fire; either you have it or you have n't it in you; it cannot be communicated.

For many years I have heard it said that literature cannot be taught, and for many years I have known that the young of the college world, in some of the places where this study is still permitted, troop into English literature classes, overrunning the elective courses, clamoring for work in literature, for more and more. If literature cannot be taught, the young have not found it out. The frequent gibe that this is because literature work is a 'snap is, year after year, disproved; first, by the fact that the best students, the most indefatigable workers, flock to it; and second, by the fact that, in classes where the standard is held high, students work with a passionate enthusiasm, an intensity, an ungrudging devotion, which certainly is not surpassed in any other subject, and is perhaps rarely equaled. Mathematician, scientist, historian may shake their heads, regarding this as evidence of mental aberration on the part of the young; but the young do not heed the shaking. Some inner intellectual and spiritual necessity impels them; they feel, if they cannot formulate, that which is necessary for their growth; they are full of a hunger and thirst which nothing else, it would seem, will satisfy.

There is practical evidence enough to show that literature can be taught with resulting gain. So vigorous and so prolonged a demand on the part of the young must represent a vital necessity; and their testimony is better than any other as to the possibility of teaching literature. Many in later years say that their study of literature helped them more than any other part of their edu

cational preparation, in the wear and tear of life, stayed by them best and longest. Sham attainment does not endure in this way. He is indeed a bold person who would assert a priori what are the limits of that which can be taught; supply should bear some relation to demand in the immaterial as in the material world, and the demand, where good work gains a foothold, is great.

The reason why this should exist is self-evident, as is the reason why we should meet it with utmost effort. If literature be that writing to which depth and sincerity of thought and feeling and beauty of form have given permanence, securing for us an inner revelation of human experience at different moments of race-experience, it seems natural that the young should delve with passionate eagerness into the profoundest records of the life of the race; that they should welcome any guidance which makes them more sure of its great meanings, brings larger knowledge and experience to bear upon its problems. The shock of surprise wherewith they face the new worlds opened to them by study of literature, the joy of intellectual discovery, bear witness to the potency of the work. Traditionless, some of them, having sufsuffered from lack of books at home, and from the crowding out in the schools of that humanistic training which has been so large a factor in whatever civilization we possess, they find in the study of literature something fresh, full of challenge, making them aware of wider horizons than they had dreamed of before.

I am convinced, from long study of the problem, long observation, that literature, as an academic discipline, supplies elements which can be found in nothing else; that it not only can be taught, but, under the conditions obtaining in our modern world, must be

taught, in the interests of our higher civilization; taught with profound purpose, for its incomparable service in the matter of method, and in the matter of substance.

To the mathematician's criticism that the study of literature lacks method, and fails in the matter of mental discipline, we answer that precisely this kind of study is needed to supplement the training given by mathematics. We recognize mathematics as a necessity; for certain uses its training is invaluable; yet its narrow track is inadequate for the larger uses of life. Exact and indispensable in helping make the world of matter serve our need, it is useless in that greater world of the inner life not dominated by laws of matter. Working along the lines of logic to determined ends, it takes no count of the shifting stuff of life with its uncertainties; and its training rather unfits than fits the mind for the relative judgments, the delicate adjust ments that it must make to the human dilemma. There are no axioms or formulæ that can help in a great spiritual crisis, nor can mathematical methods of thought then guide mind and soul. The abstract certainties of mathematics betray us in lives which have a way of not following strict laws of algebraic or geometrical demonstration; we need a mental training that will enable us to weigh, compare, sift; to make wise judgments even where some factors are uncertain; to estimate probabilities. To face any difficult human situation, expecting life to run in the smooth grooves which one's training in mathematical thought would lead one to believe, is to invite madness. In life, if not in mathematics, two plus two may make anything from twenty-five to chaos; one plus one may make infinity in a reckoning truer than mathematics knows.

equipment is our dilemma; rigidly mathematical training is wholly inadequate to prepare the young human being for the issues of life. Mathematics may teach us how to build bridges, but not to build lives; to compute the stars, but not to compute the action of the human soul in a world of shifting circumstance. Versus the unfailingly accurate results of true mathematical thinking are complicating elements that require our entire intellectual and spiritual self-possession: in the former, an error invalidates the whole; in life, an error may mean finding the trail that leads furthest and highest.

For coping with uncertainty, our intellectual training should prepare us by constant work involving judgment. In work in literature, as in work in history, a mass of material confronts us it may be confused and confusing records. It is necessary to sift and choose, and, by means of finer logic, work out an interpretative idea, representing one's best decision in regard to the puzzling matter. Not here is the easier task of putting down in figures the indisputable result of uncontested fact; here is the necessity of discriminating, of finding relative values, as constantly in the recurring dilemmas of life. This selection matures the judgment and strengthens the intellectual fibre, as by an act of creation. Such training is indispensable for method, because it deals with the complexity of life in its welter of warring motives and conflicting claims; because it requires constructive thinking, based upon all the data attainable; and the student is compelled to summon all his faculties and think, to give full account of the intellectual power that is in him.

A work of great literature, shaped in the light of an informing conception, comes, in a sense, nearer than can anything else to the quick of human need

interpretation. It is Coleridge who speaks of poetry as having ‘a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex and dependent on more fugitive causes.' It is this logic, the logic of art, rather than the barren logic of the formula, that will help in facing perplexities; the logic that, dealing with the complex, searches out the ways of law, of harmony in the tangle of things, that selective power in which the will is ever involved. Perpetual choice is demanded by the artist in creating, a sense of fitness in view of the whole design; for student and critic, what better intellectual discipline can be devised than that involved in tracing the delicate mental adjustments, whereby each word and phrase is made to render its share in working out the central meaning? We cannot escape the fine interrelations of existence, and this subtler logic of art is supremely needed in human life to create perfectness and integrity from the multiform, varying elements.

To the charge that the study of literature is not an intellectual discipline we can answer further that the great masterpieces of literature bring us face to face, no less than do the greatest philosophical theories, with the profoundest questions of human destiny. The problems presented alike by philosophy and by tragedy, concerning human fate, human responsibility, challenge the intellect as far as it can go, and further. They reckon ill who leave these out of any system of training of the young. If the charge be that study of literature is not a purely intellectual discipline, herein lies its peculiar glory, and the peculiar opportunity that comes through it. It is the attempt to make the word educational synonymous with intellectual, and the word intellect synonymous with reason, that has been the crowning academic curse of our country and of

our time. Conscious of a larger need, we must protest against the over-mastery of intellectual disciplines, which, busy primarily with the problems of the external world, do not even challenge the deepest in mere intellect. The peculiar service of great literature lies in the fact that it is greatly intellectual, and that it is something more, bringing home to the individual the profoundest problems of human destiny with that mastery of resources known only to great art.

Those who, busy with the positive sciences, charge that study of literature brings you into a world of imaginings, and does not stand for truth of observed fact; those who, like my friend the historian, regard the teaching of literature as mere idle utterance of preferences, a substanceless and bodiless something that has little to do with recorded fact, should really inform themselves of the many-sided study of fact necessary for the interpretation of a piece of literature in any period. Presented with the problem of interpreting master and masterpiece against the background of the background of the age which produced them, you must delve deep into the time if you are to understand the product of the time. A wide and accurate knowledge of the historical setting is necessary; of great political events; of great events in the world of thought, the expression of philosophy at the moment. A great poem or prose masterpiece becomes a focus, a centre, where many lines converge; patient investigation, following the many lines, is the insistent duty of the student. The self-expression of a human soul is to be read and understood in the light of all obtainable information regarding the author's life, the influences that formed mind and character; and regarding the history of the literature of the country, that his place in it may be found. What knowledge of classic

literature is necessary, in order to follow the development of great types! How much must be done with masterpieces of other countries of all times, that one may reach an understanding of literary forms and one man's use of them! How much with questions of linguistic growth and change that knowledge of words and of inflections, of the changing significance of words, that must accompany study of literature in each period! Modern linguistic work gives an opportunity for close discipline as exigent in its demand for accuracy of fact as the mathematical training of the present day, or that of Greek and Latin in earlier days; moreover, it depends less than did the latter on mere memory, and more upon observation of the laws of development, more on the ways of reasoning from phenomenon to phenomenon, combining the exactness in detail of older-fashioned study of the classics-that drill that has played a major part in fashioning mind and character of many generations — with evolutionary method, knowledge of the laws of growth, that power to trace continuity in fact which is the crowning achievement of the scholarship of our time.

Fact and herein lies the worth of this as of other humanistic studies, that through it all, beyond it all comes the deeper challenge, the need to employ fact for further ends, for intellectual or spiritual interpretation. The task of delving into fact to find its deepest significance challenges the deepest that is in you, tests reason and insight to the uttermost. In this day of impassioned clinging to external things, of love of fact for fact's sake; of observation and experiment studies where, often, not enough data can be gathered for any real intellectual conclusion, there is need of such study of fact, not as a resting-place for the mind, but as an aid to larger understanding.

Training in history in order to understand the web of circumstance that forms a background for a great work of literature; training in language in order to get the full import of word and phrase; training in philosophy in order to accustom the mind to the gravest problems of thought; then, the attempt to interpret the master's embodiment in art of his reading of the riddle of existence who can deny the profundity of the challenge of this discipline? Who can deny its validity as intellectual training in its study of mere fact, or its supreme importance as the only lasting record of the greater facts of the inner life? Who can say, remembering that the rightful meaning of the word teach is but to guide, from the Anglo-Saxon tacean, to show, that the maturer mind may not help the younger to understand the deep records of human experience, suggesting wise ways of bringing philosophy, bringing history to bear upon it, illuminating by literary comparisons and contrasts, bringing, it may be, a wealth of information and a gift of interpretative power that will intensify ten-fold its meaning for the struggling student? For the true teacher of literature the task is to serve as stimulus, to quicken, to make the student aware of great things to be done, to point out the veins where he may dig; to help a bit with the hard things, constantly spurring him on, but to let him do his own digging so far as may be.

III

If the objectors betray ignorance of the importance of the subject-matter involved, they betray ignorance also of the methods and the ideals manifest in this work at its best. The world in general, even the world of scholars working along other lines, has no idea of the greatness of the task; the glory of it; the

difficulty of its discipline as carried on even in properly conducted classrooms in American colleges; the possible profundity of its presentation, and the indispensable nature of such work, from the point of view of method, from the point of view of substance, if the young are to reach their full stature. The exact knowledge demanded as an aid to understanding; the energy of intellectual endeavor that must go into the interpretation of the underlying idea of any great work of literature, make it a searching test, not only of a man's knowledge, and of his power of ever gaining fresh knowledge, but of his power in pure thought, his imaginative insight, of all that he is capable of doing with utmost effort of mind and of soul. That which is the ideal of the instructor must necessarily be impressed upon the student; what he has done and done wisely he must make his pupils do. Slighter, simpler though the student's task must be, it must make him aware of the height and the depth of his subject, of the manifold effort required to meet its demands. Many an American youth, who considers the pursuit of letters unmanly, effeminate, would prove, grown soft and pampered in his machine-eased life, utterly incapable of straining to the great endeavor of the work done with the strenuousness of intellectual purpose that should go into it. What can be done to make him aware of the profound challenge of the work, and his great need of it?

It is precisely in one aspect of the scientist's formulation of the case against literature in our educational system that the deepest validity of its claim lies; that the great need is suggested of a large and larger part for literature in our lives; a large and larger part in our academic work. It does not, we are told, deal with observed fact; it has elements upon which you cannot put thumb and finger; its signi

ficance cannot be detected by eye or ear, and it therefore has no solid foundation in reality. Herein lies the arraignment, and herein lies the overwhelming reason for encouraging the young in the pursuit of this study, which recognizes the inner values of life, as well as the outer; which resists that 'shrinkage to the world of the five senses' demanded by modern intellectual process; which is aware of a larger world, with wider horizons, than contemporary knowledge will admit; a deeper life than mere intellectualism can fathom. If there be any witness to the fact that we are greater than the sight of our eyes and the hearing of our ears, and speculation based upon the material they offer us; that there is something within us which cannot be satisfied with training limited to this observation, literature is surely the lasting record of that larger self. That deeper something demands recognition; it meets expression in literature; why should not literature be made to serve in a practical way the greater ends of life?

Has not Puck been much abroad in our world of late, some cosmic Puck, turning our universe upside down, reversing values, bewildering and deluding mankind? It comes to seem, to many of the gravest educators, that that discipline is hardest, severest, and best for mind-forming, which is busy only with things in space; and that that which presents the profoundest achievement of the race, the inner life, recorded in spiritual and intellectual conceptions subtly blended in forms of beauty, is supposed to be an easy something whose study is undertaken only by the smatterer and the dilettante. The records of the life of the soul count for so little among us; the records of all physical and material matters count for so much! Surely anything that will keep the young from