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THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION 
 
 Pamphlet No. 49 
 
 A Note on the 
 Teaching of ' English Language 
 
 and Literature', 
 with some Suggestions 
 
 By 
 
 R. B. McKerrow, Litt.D. 
 
 Formerly Lecturer in English Literature and Bibliography at King's College 
 (University of London) 
 
 June, 1921 
 
A copy of this pamphlet is supplied to all full members of 
 the Association. They can obtain further copies (price Is.) on 
 application to the Secretary, Mr. A. V. Houghton, 2 Bloomsbury 
 Square, W.C. 1. 
 
 ^-^^^ The following Publications have been issued by the Association, 
 and those still in print can be purchased by members : 
 
 1907-20. 
 
 1. Types of English Curricula in Boys' Secondary Schools. 
 
 (Out of print.) Price 6d. 
 
 2. The Teaching of Shakespeare in Secondary Schools (Pro- 
 
 visional suggestions). (Out of print.) Price Id. 
 
 3. A Short List of Books on English Literature from the 
 
 beginning to 1832, for the use of Teachers. Price 6d. 
 
 4. Shelley's View of Poetry. By A. C. Bradley, Litt.D. 
 
 (Out of print.) Price Is. 
 
 5. English Literature in Secondary Schools. By J. H. 
 
 Fowler, M.A. Price 6d. 
 
 6. The Teaching of English in Girls' Secondary Schools. By 
 
 Miss G. Clement, B.A. (Out of print.) Price 6d. 
 
 7. The Teaching of Shakespeare in Schools. 
 
 (Out of print.) Price 6d. 
 
 8. Types of English Curricula in Girls' Secondary Schools. 
 
 (Out of print.) Price 6d. 
 
 9. Milton and Party. By Professor O. Elton, M.A. 
 
 (Out of print.) Price 6d. 
 
 10. Romance. By W. P. Ker. Price Is. 
 
 11. What still remains to be done for the Scottish Dialects. 
 
 By W. Grant. Price Is. 
 
 12. Summary of Examinations in English affecting Schools. 
 
 Price 6d. 
 
 18. The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare's Art. By Sidney 
 Lee, D.Litt. (Out of print.) Price Is. 
 
 14. Early Stages in the Teaching of English. 
 
 (Out of print.) Price 6d. 
 
 15. A Shakespeare Reference library. By Sidney Lee, D.Litt. 
 
 Price Is. 
 
 16. The Bearing of English Studies upon the National Life. 
 
 By C. H. Herford, Litt.D. (Out of print.) Price Is. 
 
 17. The Teaching of English Composition. By J. H. 
 
 Fowler, M.A. (Out of print.) Price Is. 
 
 18. The Teaching of Literature in French and German Secondary 
 
 Schools. By Elizabeth Lee. (Out of print.) Price 6d. 
 
 19. John Bunyan. By C. H. Firth, LL.D. 
 
 (Out of print.) Price Is. 
 
 20. The Uses of Poetry. By A. C. Bradley, Litt.D. Price Is. 
 
 21. English Literature in Schools. A list of Authors and 
 
 Works for Successive Stages of Study. Price Is. 
 
 22. Some Characteristics of Scots Literature. By J. C. Smith. 
 
 Price Is. 
 
THE ENGLISH '' A 
 
 Pamphlet No. 49 
 
 A Note on the 
 Teaching of ' English Language 
 
 and Literature', 
 with some Suggestions 
 
 By 
 
 K. B. McKerrow, Litt.D. 
 
 Formerly Lecturer in English Literature and Bibliography at King's College 
 (University of London) 
 
 June, 1921 
 
NOTE 
 
 The Publications Sub-Committee of the English 
 Association, without accepting responsibility for the 
 views set forth in this Pamphlet, have issued it as a 
 contribution of value to .the discussion of the teaching of 
 English. 
 
A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF < ENGLISH 
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE', WITH 
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS 
 
 AMONG the minor results of the Great War has been a revival in 
 the interest taken by educationalists and by the general public in the 
 historical study of English Literature and of the English Language. 
 This interest, which seems to be in the main though by no means 
 entirely due to the desire to obviate the f waste of time 9 on e unpracti- 
 cal 5 subjects such as Greek and Latin, and to substitute something 
 of more living interest, has shown itself in a number of articles, 
 discussions and conferences on the matter, most of which have no 
 doubt in their way been of value, but which seem seldom to have 
 touched upon what after all is the real essence of the question, namely, 
 the value of ( English' as an educational subject. By this value 
 I mean the extent to which the mind of a student who has been 
 througli a course in English will, apart from the examination-facts 
 (names, dates, &c.) which he has learnt, have been refined and made 
 more responsive to the appreciation of beauty, strengthened to reason 
 more justly, and broadened to appreciate a wider range of ideas. To 
 what extent will the study of English increase the student's own 
 enjoyment of life and make him a better citizen of the world ? For, 
 after all, this is surely the main purpose of education. 
 
 We must remember that, whether we like it or not, English will in 
 the future have to take the place of classics in the education of the 
 great majority. Few students wfll have the time to make an 
 adequate study of both subjects, and it is hard to deny that if the 
 choice must be made between them, English is provided that one 
 important condition be fulfilled -the more suitable for an Englishman 
 of to-day. That condition is that the English course shall be as good 
 an instrument of general training as the classical course was. Now 
 the classical course at its best afforded a very fine all-round education, 
 not only in literary appreciation and technique, but also in clearness 
 of thought and in reasoned exposition, in the understanding of 
 a most interesting and important period of the world's history, in art, 
 
 A 2 
 
 .X * ^ 
 
4 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 and in philosophy. If the English course is to replace the classics it 
 must afford a training as wide, as deep, and as stimulating in every 
 respect as the classical course at its best. Indeed, in some ways it 
 must be an improvement upon that, for the classical education no 
 longer meets the needs of to-day. 
 
 But does it afford such a training ? I venture to say that at present 
 it does not. 
 
 It is, I think, by no means an unusual feeling among at any rate 
 the younger section of those who are engaged in the teaching 
 of English subjects that all is not well with the study. It does not 
 seem as a rule to attract the best students, and in the general opinion 
 does not rank with most of the other divisions of the curriculum. 
 Indeed, in some 'quarters it seems to be looked on almost as a sham 
 kind of learning, an amateurish sort of business altogether, for the 
 teaching of which real scholarship is of less importance than a good 
 presence and fluent diction. And yet considering what the subject 
 is : that it deals, or should deal, with the very flower of our national 
 life, taking account of almost all the best work ef the best minds of 
 the modern world ; one might naturally suppose that hardly any other 
 subject could surpass it in interest and real importance. 
 
 Again, some teachers do not feel that the results of the English 
 course are satisfactory. The students, even granting that they are not 
 the best, do not seem to have benefited from the time which they have 
 spent over the study as they should have done. Their knowledge is 
 often scrappy, they seem unable to envisage their subject from 
 any point of view but that of the text-books in which they have 
 studied it ; they show little or no power of independent judgement, 
 and they are often singularly blind and, indeed, indifferent to the 
 merits of whatever does not happen to have fallen within the scope of 
 their particular studies. With some of them, indeed, the course 
 of literature seems to do little else but develop a power of fluent and 
 uncritical laudation, with the help of innumerable cliches, of the 
 particular objects of their teacher's admiration. 
 
 Lastly, some of the teachers, though perhaps only a few, are not 
 entirely satisfied with themselves and their own grasp of their subject. 
 Some of them feel that they have not the general knowledge of the 
 language and literature which they ought to have, and are obliged to 
 have recourse to specializing in some particular small sub-section or 
 period, and frankly confessing that they are not much interested in the 
 rest. They do the best they can, often complaining of the inadequacy 
 of the methods by which they themselves were taught, but most 
 of them continue to follow these very methods in their own teaching. 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 5 
 
 Now the view that I venture to put forward is that the usual 
 teaching of English, both language and literature, is on an altogether 
 wrong basis. That it is treated far too much as a mere instruction in 
 unco-ordinated facts, an affair of memory rather than of reason, that 
 little or no attempt is made to plan out for students such a course as 
 can be adequately dealt with within the time allotted to it, and that 
 the educative value of the subject is merely assumed without any 
 attempt to justify the assumption. Lastly, and most important 
 of all, no consideration is usually given to the question of whether 
 a student is to continue his work after the particular course is com- 
 pleted or whether that is to be the end of it, a question which makes 
 an enormous difference in the way in which the course should be 
 planned, and, indeed, in the best method of approaching the subject as 
 a whole. It is my belief that in the study of English we have 
 a medium of the very greatest potential value for both mental and 
 aesthetic training provided that it is properly handled, fully able 
 to take the place of classics on the aesthetic side and having the 
 additional advantage that, covering as it does more than a thousand 
 years of differing conditions, it may be made a far more powerful 
 instrument for stimulating the imagination and producing that form 
 of mental suppleness which can adapt itself to unfamiliar conditions, 
 than could possibly be afforded by any but the widest study of Greek 
 and Latin. It is, or should be, an interesting subject on account of 
 the familiarity of its elementary stages, while it is attractive to many 
 by reason of its apparent ' practical 5 value. Lastly, there is no 
 subject which can so easily be followed up by the student in after-life, 
 provided only that the elements have been properly mastered. The 
 material is ready to hand at little or no expense especially to those 
 within reach of a library. The study can be pursued at home; it 
 needs no laboratory, workshop or special apparatus. It can be carried 
 on as well in town as in the country, in winter as in summer, by the 
 weakling as well as by the most robust. Much can even be done in 
 trains or trams, or in the intervals of a busy day. At the same time 
 it is a living subject. Even as regards its past there is still much to be 
 learnt, new light is constantly being thrown on the old problems, and 
 new problems are constantly arising, to be met by new methods of 
 investigation, and all the while new material is constantly being added 
 in the literature of the day, which in its turn gains a fresh interest 
 from a knowledge of that of the past from which it ultimately 
 sprang. 
 
 i 
 
6 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 THE ENGLISH COURSE AS IT is. 
 
 Now, always remembering that the purpose of study is not, or 
 should not be, the mere acquisition of a number of more or less 
 obscure facts in order to pass an examination, let us consider the 
 usual English course as it is to-day. It is evident that the details of 
 the course will vary at the different educational centres, and there will 
 be still more difference in the teaching itself. Methods of instruction 
 in English are naturally much less fixed than in the case of a subject 
 with a teaching tradition of centuries, such as Latin, or even of the 
 more generally taught sciences such as physics or chemistry. Never- 
 theless we can, with due reservations, say fairly well what will at 
 present be expected from a student who sits for a degree in English, 
 and what will not be expected from him. 
 
 Instruction in English literature, and to some extent in the outlines 
 of the history of the language, is generally begun in the secondary 
 schools, but I do not propose to discuss the teaching in these, for 
 there is nothing that can be called a e usual 9 course, and, indeed, time 
 could seldom be allowed for much specialization in English, even if 
 this were desirable. It seems to me that the teaching of children to 
 speak and write modern English with ease and correctness, and to 
 appreciate good modern work in which the language presents no 
 difficulty, should in a secondary school be the principal aim. Any- 
 thing of an antiquarian nature, and especially such things as the 
 memorizing of notes, or the discussion of obscure allusions or variant 
 readings of texts should in any case be avoided. It is far better to 
 encourage the average child to like good modern I do not mean ultra- 
 modern poetry and fiction, and to give him a taste for reading which 
 may afford him a Vast amount of pleasure in after-life, than to run 
 the risk of his leaving school with the idea that literature is a boring 
 and difficult subject dealing with things written in crabbed language 
 by people whose only merit is that of being dead. 
 
 Even supposing, however, that the student who takes up English 
 as his special study at the University has read a certain number of 
 English texts already, and to this extent is not altogether unprepared, 
 he is unlikely to have done much of the detailed work to which he 
 will now have to apply himself, and the subject will therefore be in 
 the main a new one. Let us see what will be expected of him. 
 
 In the first place a certain number of works belonging to various 
 periods of our literature will be e set 3 . These set books will probably 
 include one or more poems in Anglo-Saxon, or, as we now call it, Old 
 English, with or without a portion of a ( Reader * consisting of mis- 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 7 
 
 cellaneous pieces from the same period ; certain works of the thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries, including a selection from Chaucer ; and a 
 larger number of more modern works ranging from the Elizabethan 
 period to the nineteenth century. The student will be expected to 
 get up these set books for examination purposes, that is to say that 
 he must be prepared to translate the earlier ones and paraphrase the 
 more difficult passages of the later into modern English, to explain 
 allusions, to give contexts, and to state the more important external 
 facts about the works in question and their authors. Further, he will 
 be expected to acquire a general knowledge of English literary history, 
 with possibly more detailed knowledge of some particular period. 
 Lastly, an acquaintance with the history of the language from Anglo- 
 Saxon times or earlier will at least be hoped for, as well as with 
 the rudiments of philology in general. 
 
 The trouble is that if the student is taught by the usual methods, 
 he does not get, and, in the time at his disposal, cannot possibly get 
 this knowledge in a form in which it can have real educational value, 
 for the ground to be covered is far too large and too diverse. A 
 genuine understanding of all the subjects so glibly enumerated in the 
 prospectus of a university course of English could not be acquired in 
 double or ten times the amount of study that the average student can 
 give to them, and the result of forcing so large a mass of strange 
 material at one time on his notice is, as a general rule, merely to con- 
 fuse him and to fill his mind with a collection of smatterings that it 
 can neither digest nor retain. 
 
 Let us consider some of the subjects in a little more detail. To 
 begin with, there is Old English. This would not be by any means 
 an easy language even if we had only to study it as written at one time 
 and in one place, and if we had before us a great mass of work set 
 down in the form of a correct phonetic transcript of the language as 
 actually spoken at that time and place. As a matter of fact', what has 
 come down to us is a large number of texts representing the language 
 as spoken at different times during some five hundred years and in a 
 rariety of places scattered over England, while to make matters worse, 
 we have not, as a rule, the works in the form in which they were 
 originally written, but transcripts made at varying later dates by 
 scribes who lived in other parts of the country and who therefore 
 spoke a more or less different dialect. The result is that almost all 
 the manuscripts represent a mixture of different forms of the language. 
 It is true that from the mass of these manuscripts scholars have been 
 able to reconstruct the language as spoken in different dialects and at 
 different times, but this is the labour of experts. The average student 
 
8 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 may without any great difficulty succeed in mastering for examina- 
 tion purposes the set texts : that is to say that, given a piece of 
 these texts, he will be able to give the modern English equivalent. 
 Having done this he may be able to translate an exceptionally easy 
 piece of similar work ( unseen % but he will certainly not be able to 
 make much of a piece of work of a different kind. For example, he 
 may have a thorough knowledge of the Cura Pastoralis and be able 
 to read hardly a word of any Old English poem, or he may ( know ' 
 one poem, such as Elene or Christ, and yet be able to make nothing 
 at all of Beowulf or The Wanderer. He will probably not have 
 sufficient grasp of the language to translate into it the briefest passage 
 of modern English. He has, in fact, not learnt the language at all but 
 merely memorized the modern equivalents of the works he has studied. 
 And what else could be expected } The vocabulary of Old English 
 is very large and the use of it curiously vague. It is often a matter 
 of the greatest difficulty to discover any relation between the various 
 uses of a word, and to get at what may be called the central idea, 
 while especially in the case of the very frequent compound words the 
 sense of the whole seems often to have little relation to that of the 
 parts. But if it were only a question of a large vocabulary the diffi- 
 culty could be got over by a good memory ; the real trouble is that in 
 most O.E. texts a word occurs in such a variety of forms that the 
 student, by the study of the texts alone, never gets it clearly fixed in 
 his mind. ' I am not, of course, referring to the varieties in the root 
 vowels of a word which are caused by ( ablaut 3 or by the influence of 
 inflections ; these present a difficulty of their own but no greater than 
 is to be found, for example, in modern German ; but to the varieties 
 in which the same tense or case of a word may occur in a single text. 1 
 It is perfectly true that a thorough study of O.E. phonology will make 
 the relation of most of these forms clear enough to the student and 
 by much use of dictionary and grammar he will in the end come to 
 regard one form of a word as the normal and the others as variations 
 from it ; but this will be the result of the settling down of a great 
 amount of work, and will certainly never come at all in the course of 
 his ordinary studies for a degree. 
 
 1 It may be well in order to make my meaning clear to those unacquainted 
 with the language to take a few examples from Beowulf: thus the dative singular of 
 ieldo, old age, appears as ylde and eldo : iede, easy, as yde and ede : the accusative 
 of isenbyme, an iron corslet, as isembyman and irenbyrnan : the accusative sing, of 
 sweord, sword, as sweord, swurd and swyrd : the third person pret. sing, of 
 gangan, go, as geong, giong, and gang : the third pers. pret. sing of findan, find, 
 &sfand,fondj an&funde, and so on : examples might be multiplied indefinitely. 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 9 
 
 Bad enough as is the result of studying Old English from two or 
 three selected texts of some length, that of working from those so- 
 called * Readers' which contain short pieces in a variety of dialects 
 and from all periods may well be far worse. Such a method greatly 
 increases the difficulty to which I have just referred, for the student 
 has hardly time to get to know even a few of the commonest words in 
 one form of the language before he meets with them in another and 
 quite different form. No sane person would try to teach English to 
 a foreigner ignorant of the language by the aid of a book of selections 
 consisting of snippets from Chaucer, Burns, the Authorized Version 
 of the Bible, Anstey's Voces Populi, the Sam Weller passages of 
 Pickivick, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and Masefield's Everlasting 
 Mercy, and yet such a procedure would be only a little more 
 absurd than to place in the hands of a beginner in Old English a 
 Reader containing examples of the language taken from periods some 
 four centuries apart, and from dialects extending from north of the 
 Humber to Kent and from East Anglia to Wessex. 
 
 What is the result of feeding a student with assorted scraps of this 
 sort ? Practically this : whereas before he began his studies he had 
 a definite and clear idea of English, so that to him c son' meant 
 a certain human relationship and ( sun ' a certain celestial body, his 
 idea of these two words has become surrounded by a sort of nebulous 
 aura so that sun, son, sonne, sone, sune, sunne, soun, and probably also 
 suna, sunu, zonne and a few others, will all seem to him merely 
 equivalent forms to be interpreted as either f son ' or ( sun ' according 
 to the context. His idea of English has simply been shaken up and, 
 so to speak, loosened. True, you have probably enabled him to 
 translate, or let us rather say to guess, the modern equivalent of much 
 that was incomprehensible to him before, but what is the educational 
 value of a mere ability to translate ? If it is only the ' meaning ' of the 
 works that the student requires, much better to give him ready-made 
 translations at once and have done with it. The ability to puzzle out 
 the meaning of a passage, say of Cynewulf, or even of the much 
 easier Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with frequent references to a Glossary 
 for the hard words, and without a knowledge of the correct pro- 
 nunciation or any real understanding of the verbal forms met with is, 
 if the student is to go no further, utterly worthless in comparison of 
 the time spent on learning to do it. 
 
 What is in the way is antiquarianism and a false idea of scholar- 
 ship. If a man is to be trained as an expert in Old English, there 
 is no harm in his studying it on the lines at present followed though 
 he would save time by working differently but when the time to be 
 
 A 3 
 
10 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 devoted to it is short the matter is otherwise. Then we must aim at 
 a method which, whether it teaches much or little, must at any rate 
 teach something definite, that is more or less complete in itself and 
 that can be retained in the mind, not a mere collection of unco-or- 
 dinated scraps that could only be made available by much more ex- 
 tended study. I shall later make some suggestions as to how I think 
 this might be done. 
 
 When we pass from Old English to Middle English the matter is 
 in some respects worse. In the case of Old English there is as a 
 general rule no great' difficulty about pronunciation : the values given 
 to the letters by the great majority of scribes were similar and a few 
 simple rules suffice. When, however, in later times we have Norman 
 scribes trying to reproduce English texts we may often be at a loss to 
 know what were the sounds really intended. Again, there is no diffi- 
 culty to the trained philologist, but we are dealing not with him but 
 with the beginner, who finds a word taking a variety of forms and is 
 simply confused among them. 
 
 The result is that no attempt is generally made either by the teacher 
 or the student to read Middle English texts in accordance with the 
 original pronunciation. Poetry is read with sufficient attention to the 
 difference of stress and to the presence of final e's to preserve a 
 certain amount of rhythm, and care will perhaps be taken to trill r in 
 positions in which it is now silent, and to differentiate between wh 
 and w, while, of course, an attempt will be made at the guttural 
 sound of 3. What more is done depends on the idiosyncrasy of the 
 teacher, but there will generally be only the vaguest knowledge of the 
 true pronunciation, and even this will in working at the texts be 
 ignored ; the majority of words, especially those which approximate 
 closely in form to modern English, being pronounced in the modern 
 fashion. 
 
 Indeed, it is hard to see what else can be done. It is quite absurd 
 to expect that the student who has to master a series of texts corres- 
 ponding to four or five different states of the language, in no two of 
 which texts the written forms are likely to have the same relation to 
 the sounds that they represent, and no one of which is likely even to 
 be consistent in spelling within itself, will acquire a sufficient know- 
 ledge of each stage of the language to ignore the forms of the words 
 that he has before him and read his text as a contemporary. The 
 most he can be expected to arrive at is an indefinite sort of queerness 
 of pronunciation that will at any rate prevent what he reads from 
 being mistaken for modern English. 
 
 I imagine that some will object that it does not matter how we read 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 11 
 
 Middle English, seeing that we read Latin with two different pro- 
 nunciations in this country, and the Germans, French and Italians all 
 pronounce it differently, while no one of these pronunciations even 
 approximates to that of the time of Cicero. This would perhaps be 
 a fair argument if, in the first place, we had a settled pronunciation, 
 universally adopted throughout the country, for Middle English ; and 
 in the second place, if all our texts belonged to one time and one 
 dialect as the Latin texts ordinarily studied do. Then if our studies 
 were to be for literary purposes alone we could, I think, quite well adopt 
 a fixed pronunciation regardless of whether it represented the original 
 manner of speech or not. 
 
 But in the study of English everything is different. We are not 
 studying a language at the height of its development but one in pro- 
 gress, and a great part of its interest, with perhaps all of its merit as 
 an educational subject, lies in the tracing of this development. The 
 history of a language is in the main and, as regards mediaeval times, 
 almost entirely, the history of its pronunciation, 1 and without 
 accuracy in pronunciation it is impossible for the student to get a 
 clear idea in fact any useful idea of the changes in it as a whole. 
 I believe that he could be given a knowledge of the language as actually 
 spoken at certain selected dates in such a way that its history would 
 be perfectly clear to him. 
 
 At present he does indeed learn something of the history of the 
 language, but generally as a thing quite apart from the texts that he 
 reads. In fact, most of the philology generally taught seems to be 
 directed mainly to explaining the relationship between Old English 
 and the other branches of the Germanic Group. A student will be able 
 to give the history of original (hypothetical) Germanic vowels and 
 consonants to the end of the Old English period and enumerate the 
 'laws* which summarize the influence upon each other of neighbour- 
 ing sounds, and so on ; but from this point onwards his knowledge is 
 usually scrappy. The fact is that Middle English is such a mixture 
 of dialects that only a genuine expert can find his way about in it. 
 Of the relationship between the vowel system of Chaucerian English, 
 that of, say, the Shakespearian period, and modern English, the 
 average student will be quite ignorant, or at most he will have some 
 vague ideas as to the changes in pronunciation of certain words to 
 
 1 I do not mean to ignore Semantics/ an interesting and fruitful study, but 
 the changes in the meaning of words cannot, it seems to me, be satisfactorily 
 investigated apart from their pronunciation, seeing that many changes of 
 meaning are due to the influence of, or to confusion with, words of somewhat 
 similar sound. 
 
12 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 
 
 which his attention has, for some reason or other, been particularly 
 drawn, without any general knowledge of the phonetic laws by which 
 these changes are governed. 
 
 Of course, at the same time as he studies the language of the set 
 books with a view of being able to translate them into modern 
 English, the student will be expected to acquire a general knowledge 
 of their subject-matter, the views held as to their authorship and the 
 circumstances in which they were written, the allusions which they con- 
 tain to contemporary events, the sources from which their authors 
 drew inspiration and the like, in fact all the material generally to be 
 found in the annotated editions. In practise, however, the general 
 tendency seems to be to lay comparatively little stress on anything 
 except language in dealing with the earlier works, and this even in 
 the case of such a poem as Piers Plowman, the chief interest of which 
 is as a commentary on the life and beliefs of its age. 
 
 When we come to the sixteenth century the circumstances are 
 different. The language of Shakespeare is sufficiently near, in out- 
 ward semblance, to modern English for it to be possible to discard 
 the contemporary spelling and to transcribe the texts into that of our 
 own day. Practically all work done by the ordinary student on texts 
 from 1550 onwards is done on so-called modernized texts in which 
 both spelling and punctuation have been made to accord with modern 
 practice ; and, as a rule, no attempt whatever is made to treat the 
 languages something with an existence of its own ; it is regarded as 
 modern English with a few queer words and queer phrases which 
 need explanation. An alien language is forced upon Shakespeare just 
 as truly as an alien stage, and his work suffers by it. 
 
 For the general reader there is, of course, no other way ; but this 
 method of reading Shakespeare is a very great hindrance to a student 
 whose business it is to obtain a connected view of the development of 
 our language and literature. It is not necessary here to urge the 
 point, for any that have agreed with me so far will certainly agree in 
 this. 
 
 In studying the set books of this period the language is then, as 
 a rule, ignored or passed over as lightly as possible, except for the 
 explanation of actual difficulties, the student's attention being directed 
 mainly to the external history of the works dealt with, to the allusions 
 to contemporary persons and events, and to the explanation of 
 obscure passages. An attempt may also perhaps be made at aesthetic 
 criticism, at any rate in connexion with Shakespeare, but how much 
 time is devoted to this will depend very much upon the teacher. 
 
 Later texts are, of course, treated pretty much as those of the 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 13 
 
 sixteenth century, save that there will be less to say about the 
 meaning of words or phrases, for there will be little or nothing strange 
 to the reader. Subject-matter and topical allusions will come in for 
 a still greater share of attention, but as a rule the student is left to 
 work at these texts for himself with the aid of annotated editions. 
 
 To turn now from the study of texts to that of literary history in 
 general. I believe that as an instrument of education English literary, 
 history as usually taught must be regarded as a failure, chiefly on 
 account of its narrowness and provincialism. It is far too much 
 a matter of remembering unimportant details about the lives and 
 quarrels of writers most of which have no bearing whatever on the 
 work for which the writers are remembered. It is stuff that can 
 be got up for an examination, but that, once the examination is over, 
 passes from the students memory without leaving a trace. Further- 
 more, quite an extraordinary proportion of the statements made in 
 general histories of English literature with regard to works and writers 
 earlier than the seventeenth century rests on evidence so slender that 
 there is hardly any other subject in which it would be accepted as of 
 value. Much of it is a heritage from the days of uncritical compilers 
 whose hastiest statements have come to be accepted almost as if 
 inspired. Indeed, modern critical work has been very largely directed 
 to the destruction of hitherto . accepted views and to showing how 
 little is to be regarded as really certain. 
 
 But the chief fault of the majority of text-books and of the ordinary 
 teaching is that on the one hand far too much knowledge of detail aa 
 regards English literature is expected, and on the other too little? 
 attention is paid to those historical and social conditions which; 
 moulded that literature, and to the European literature of which it was' 
 in early days a comparatively unimportant branch. The relationship 
 between English and continental literature varied, of course, at differ- 
 ent periods, but it is not too much to say that at least until 1600 
 English literature can only be effectively and educatively studied as 
 a part of European literature generally ; without a knowledge of that 
 and not a knowledge of names alone, but of the works themselves 
 its development cannot be understood. 
 
 This does not imply that the surviving English literature of certain 
 periods may not be more important than the surviving continental 
 literature of the same period, for this depends on the accident of 
 preservation. Among the examples of Old English literature is, indeed, 
 the most important example of early Germanic epic, but this is due 
 to the chance survival of the single MS. of Beowulf. Studied by 
 itself Beowulf throws no light whatever on English literature. 
 
14 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 Neither the scenes nor the characters are English, and the poem as 
 a whole is of Scandinavian or, at least, continental ancestry, even 
 though it may have been actually composed on English soil. As one, 
 and from its date the most important among the survivals of a great 
 epic literature Beowulf is of the deepest interest, but as a rule little or 
 no attempt is made to give the student any real knowledge of this 
 literature as a whole. 
 
 The same thing is the case with the later Old English poetry, that 
 which is more markedly Christian. It is not in any real sense English 
 but is a part of the Christian literature of Europe. 
 
 But even more when we come to deal with the literature of the 
 twelfth to the fifteenth centuries is it impossible to treat English 
 literature as a subject by itself. So treated it is hardly more than 
 a mass of unrelated fragments, and study of it can merely lead to the 
 filling of the mind with disconnected facts of little interest or 
 educational value. Very different, however, is the result of studying 
 the development of north European literature as a whole during the 
 period. It is then easy to observe the development of the various 
 tendencies and the great groupings of legendary subject-matter. A 
 real intelligible history of this literature as a whole is possible, and the 
 English part of it falls into its place, the apparently disconnected 
 fragments being shown to represent various branches the relationship 
 of which is clear. The study of English literature by itself is some- 
 thing like a study of botany which should be restricted to the flowers 
 that happen to be growing in a single suburban garden. 
 
 What can be made of the English representatives alone of the 
 Arthurian Legend, of the Charlemagne romance, of the Troy ro- 
 mance, of the beast-epic, or, indeed, of the English representatives of 
 any of the great continental motives of story, but a collection of 
 unrelated scraps? The student is no doubt told that for much of 
 the English work there are foreign origins and these are probably 
 named, but as a rule he has not read a line of them and knows nothing 
 or at least is not required to know anything of their history and 
 interconnexions. 
 
 Worst of all the Latin literature of the Middle Ages is usually 
 ignored altogether, though it is in reality the connecting framework 
 of the whole, and a constant source from which writers in the 
 vernacular obtained their material. * 
 
 But even supposing that for the study of our earlier literature as a thing 
 apart and self-contained we could substitute a study of European 
 literature in general with English as a particular branch, would this be 
 sufficient to render ' middle English 5 a satisfactory educational 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 15 
 
 subject? Not, I think, if it is studied solely as literature. If we 
 are honest with ourselves we must, I think, confess that, however much 
 of interest there may be in English mediaeval literature, there is 
 remarkably little that shows a trace of inspiration or can even be placed 
 in the first or second rank on the ground of literary technique. Our 
 students would indeed gain something by an acquaintance, however super- 
 ficial, with the literature of France, Italy and Germany. Here they 
 would at least find in some of the work a high level of sincerity, a breadth 
 of intelligence and a nobility of conception, to say nothing of technical 
 skill, which places it in an altogether different category from such 
 compilations and adaptations as Layamon^s Brut, Havelok, and the 
 Cursor Mundi, or, indeed, from almost anything produced in England 
 before the time of Chaucer. But this incidental gain would still 
 hardly justify us in offering to the younger generation a knowledge of 
 a mass of second or third-rate stuff such as makes up nine-tenths of 
 Middle English on the pretence that we are educating them. 
 
 If, however, the study of .early English literature be held to be not 
 merely the study of the imperfect beginnings of our literary art and 
 technique, but of those forces which are the creators and maintainers 
 of literary art and technique and which determine its development, 
 namely human belief and intellect as conditioned by time and society, 
 we at once raise our subject to one of the very highest in educational 
 value. If instead of taking literature by itself we study it as a mani- 
 festation of something greater; if we can make clear to our students that 
 thus and thus did the thought of Europe change, and thus and thus 
 is the change shown in its literature, we are genuinely teaching 
 something : we are, indeed, teaching them that most valuable of all 
 ideas, namely the possibility of different outlooks upon life. 
 
 But it will perhaps be objected that what I am advocating is really the 
 study of history, not of literature. It is certainly the study of a kind 
 of history, but of that kind which seems at present to be most neglected, 
 namely the history of ideas, and of general conceptions of life. With 
 so-called political history, that which deals with kings and wars and 
 treaties, literature is only occasionally concerned, but with social and 
 even more with intellectual history it is very greatly concerned indeed. 
 And the teaching need not be very abstruse nor very detailed. The 
 main thing is to keep a due sense of proportion and not to treat the 
 purely local events of our own island as of supreme importance at 
 a time when the intellectual centre of the world was elsewhere. The 
 teaching of history on sounder lines will at any rate add very much 
 to the students 5 respect for men of earlier ages as rational beings, 
 and rid them of the absurd fancy that everything that does not accord 
 
16 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 with the present-day ideas should be dismissed as ignorance and 
 superstition. 1 
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR REFORM. 
 
 The remedy which I venture to propose for the present unsatis- 
 factory state of English study is its entire reorganization on lines 
 which I shall now proceed to set down. 
 
 First, however, let me say that I do not pretend to offer a course 
 in English of universal application. Such a thing would naturally 
 be impossible. A course suitable for a student who is to end his 
 school-life at eighteen or nineteen would naturally be a very different 
 thing from one for a student who intends to take honours in the 
 subject at a university. Unfortunately, however, we by no means 
 always know how far a student will carry his studies in the subject, 
 for even those who intend to pursue the study to a degree standard 
 may for one reason or another have to break off at an earlier point. 
 It is, therefore, necessary so to arrange matters that, as far as possible 
 and with reasonable reservations, the course shall be, if I may use the 
 phrase, continuously complete. Any student who at least goes 
 through with the immediate part of the course on which he has 
 entered must always have learnt something which, so far as it goes, is 
 complete in itself if it be only the merest outline and not a collection 
 of beginnings, and must have learnt it so thoroughly that it will have 
 become a part of himself. If in later life he has inclination and 
 opportunity to proceed further, he must find it at least a useful 
 foundation. 
 
 Now I venture to think that, if taught on the lines that I propose, 
 the subject is quite capable of being broken up in the way indicated, 
 indeed, far more easily so broken up than as generally taught at present, 
 and even if a student who drops the subject at a very early stage may 
 have learnt little or nothing of what is usually understood by e English ' 
 he will at least have learnt something quite worth learning and likely to 
 be remembered. It will, however, be impossible for me here to indicate 
 the kind of modifications that will be needed for special cases, and it 
 must be understood that I am only attempting to deal with the matter 
 as a whole. I have assumed that the study of English language and 
 literature from the historical side will not begin much before the 
 age of fifteen or sixteen, and have supposed a continuous course in 
 
 1 Perhaps I had better say that I have no wish to advocate a raid by the 
 teacher of e English ' on the province of the teacher of { History '. By all means 
 let this part of the subject be tauglit as ' history ' if the history teacher can and 
 will undertake it. On this side there is no real dividing line between the two 
 subjects and none should be drawn. 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 17 
 
 it carried on up to a B. A. standard. If it were begun much earlier 
 many modifications would be necessary. Much of the ground 
 would have to be gone over twice or even thrice, taking only the 
 broadest outlines first and filling in the details later. So too, if we 
 knew that the student had no intention of taking a full course in the 
 subject. In such a case the linguistic side of the teaching might 
 perhaps be dropped altogether. There would at any rate be little use 
 in" teaching Old English to one who would not proceed to the study 
 of later forms of the language. But that such modifications may 
 be necessary will, I think, be understood without more explanation. 
 
 Further, in order to guard against misapprehension, I should 
 perhaps say, once for all, that I do not propose to discuss the aesthetic 
 side of English teaching. This is by no means because I undervalue 
 it, far from it, but because, so far as I can see, all the aesthetic training 
 that it is possible for the student to receive can be worked into the 
 present course indeed, into almost any course of English. It is 
 much less a question of what one teaches than of how one teaches it. 
 Indeed, for aesthetic training alone it seems to me that we need 
 nothing whatever beyond modern work and work which, being 
 accessible in translation or in modernized forms, can be treated as 
 modern. Of what use for this is linguistic study or literary history 
 as usually understood ? Dates do not matter, authors do not matter : 
 nothing matters but the works as we have them now. The fewer 
 the difficulties of language and interpretation that intervene between 
 the subjects of our study and ourselves the better. But aesthetic 
 training, however important, is not the whole of education. 
 
 Such training there must certainly be, and plenty of it, but? other 
 things besides; and because the desirability of aesthetic training 
 seems to me to be generally acknowledged, even though there may 
 sometimes be room for improvement in the methods employed, it is 
 on these other things that I lay most stress in what follows. 
 
 In the first place the course of study should be separated into two 
 distinct stages. The first, the absorptive stage, which we will call ele- 
 mentary (though I claim that a student who has been through it will 
 have a much better knowledge of the subject than the average advanced 
 student of to-day) will be characterized on the positive side by a far 
 more thorough grounding in the historical and social background of 
 literature, by a much closer attention to what is called comparative 
 literature, and by a more careful training in the language as spoken 
 and written at certain well-defined periods of our history than is 
 customary at present ; and on the negative side by the complete dis- 
 regard of what may be called problems of transmission or, in other 
 
18 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 words., by the avoidance of all those special difficulties which arise 
 from the way in which our early literature has been handed down to us. 
 
 In the second or advanced stage, or stage of research, the student 
 will receive definite preparation for the study of original texts. We 
 will take these two stages in their order. 
 
 If literature is, as it is generally held to be, a reflection of life, 
 there can surely be no profitable study of it without some knowledge 
 of that life of which it is the reflection. When we are dealing with 
 the literature of a foreign country we acknowledge this readily enough. 
 Who, for example, would attach any weight to the judgement upon 
 Chinese literature of an Englishman who did not know that the 
 social life and habits of thought of the Chinese differed from those of 
 his own countrymen, and how they differed? But when we are 
 dealing with our own literature of a past age we seem to forget this 
 and to expect our students to arrive at a real knowledge and appreciation 
 of the works of former times by studying those works alone, indepen- 
 dent of their environment. This is surely wrong. There must be a basis 
 of historical knowledge. The students need know little of the super- 
 ficial kind of history which deals with wars and politics, but they 
 must know something of the great changes in life and thought which 
 accompanied and inspired the literature with which they are to deal. 
 
 The students should therefore, I think, first be put through some 
 such course of general history as I shall attempt to sketch later. 
 This should be illustrated so far as possible by references to literature, 
 which should at this stage be treated purely as illustrative matter, 
 with no discussion of authors or style or inter-relationship. At this 
 point it is history, not literature that we are teaching. 
 
 At the same time the aesthetic side of the study should be pursued 
 with the aid of modern literature or, when necessary, translations 
 of older works ; the object being to give the students a general idea 
 of literature in its chief developments and to lead them to find plea- 
 sure in it. 
 
 Next should come the stage of literary history proper ; and this 
 should throughout be treated with constant reference to the history 
 which has already been studied. It must be taught on the broadest 
 lines. I shall go more into detail later, but I should like at this point 
 to insist that we must keep a due proportion in our teaching, and 
 remembering that we have a vast period to cover, must not break up 
 the impression of continuity by devoting in the general course too 
 much attention to particular authors and works, however important 
 these may be. 
 
 At the same time as we are teaching our general literary histoiy 
 the students must study particular examples chosen from various 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 19 
 
 periods. Here, I think a radical change of practice is necessary. 
 Our background of literary history must be even and continuous, 
 but our points of .particular study must be limited in number and 
 distinct from one another. At present an attempt is often made to 
 introduce the student to a more or less continuous series of texts 
 extending from early times to the present day. I think that we 
 should at first concentrate on some three or four periods of our lan- 
 guage and literature, and study texts chosen from these periods with 
 far greater thoroughness and, if I may use the term, ( actuality y than 
 is now usual, so that the students may arrive at a real understanding 
 of the language and literature of the particular periods chosen. If 
 they continue their studies, they will be able to fill the gaps. If not, 
 they will at least have learnt something well. 
 
 To explain more fully we may outline an English course somewhat 
 as follows. 
 
 So far as general history is concerned the student will begin, say, 
 with a summary knowledge of the extent and general political relations 
 of the Roman Empire in the time of Augustus, of the distribution of 
 peoples in Europe at that period and of the changes in this distribution 
 which took place during the decline of the Empire. He will learn 
 little or nothing of particular Emperors or Popes but will be given 
 a general knowledge of the spread of Christianity in Europe, the 
 development of the various intellectual centres, and the change in 
 importance of various parts of Europe, so that he will be able to say 
 what countries or what towns took the lead at various times in the 
 development of civilization, and what were the characteristics of their 
 particular activity. He will watch also the change in languages which 
 accompanied the change in the predominant civilization, the gradual 
 thrusting westward of the Celtic group and the varied fortunes of 
 Germanic and Romance all this of course in broad outline only. 
 
 He will have to know something of the history of the Christian 
 Church and its schisms, and of the broad differences of feeling and 
 outlook on the world to which these schisms correspond. 
 
 He will learn of the gradual extension of the known world in the 
 Middle Ages and something of the main routes of commerce, and of 
 the gradual improvement in means of communication with the con- 
 sequent quickening of the interaction of nation upon nation. 
 
 A general account of the chief scientific and philosophical theories 
 of the Middle Ages will form part of the course, so that the student 
 may come to understand something of the greatness of the mediaeval 
 idea of Christianity, and how that idea by the very perfection of its 
 self-sufficing completeness, by its sole preoccupation with revealed 
 religion, and by its conception of a world created and conducted 
 
20 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 entirely for the ultimate benefit of man, came to place authority on so 
 high a pedestal as to retard intellectual and moral progress for more 
 than a thousand years. 
 
 -And later he will learn of the re-awakening to the actual physical 
 world which is called the Renaissance, and will trace its spread from 
 country to country, nor merely as a renewed study of classical authors, 
 but as the beginning of a new set of ideas, of liberation from the past 
 and a new sense of a right to personal ideas and achievement. 
 
 He will learn also of the changes in the habits and manners of life 
 of the people from period to period and of the relation of class to 
 class ; and something of their education, so that he may realize 
 however imperfectly the kind and extent of knowledge that would be 
 expected, say, from a gentleman of rank, a prosperous merchant or 
 a peasant at different times in our history. 
 
 All this is, of course, general history. When we come to literature 
 itself we may be rather more precise. 
 
 In the first place it is absolutely essential that a student of English 
 literature should have read the important works of the Latin writers. 
 It is not in the least essential that he should read them in the original, 
 but a student to whom Virgil, Cicero, Ovid, Terence, Juvenal and 
 Horace l are no more than names cannot hope to attain a real under- 
 standing of the development of modern literature. With Greek the 
 case is rather different : it is mainly the lesser men such as Plutarch 
 and Diogenes Laertius of whom a knowledge is required. The 
 dramatists and Homer are of; little direct importance save, indeed, 
 for comparison or contrast until we come to quite modern times, 
 and Aristotle and Plato influenced modern literature more through 
 their interpreters (or misinterpreters) than at first hand. 
 
 When I say that Latin writers may be studied in translation I do 
 not mean to imply that a knowledge of Latin is unnecessary, for to 
 anyone who wishes to make more than the most superficial study of 
 English, it is obviously quite essential. Without it he certainly cannot 
 attain to any thorough knowledge of the mediaeval period ; but there 
 is the question of time. We cannot demand a classical scholar's 
 knowledge of Latin from every student of English, but we may fairly 
 insist that if a student cannot read the Latin authors of the classical 
 period in the original he shall do so in translations. The objection to 
 translations is of all kinds of pedantry one of the most foolish. 
 
 As he follows the history of literature he must read the great 
 
 continental works also in the original, of course, if he can, but if not, 
 
 in translations. He must read something not necessarily the whole 
 
 of certain of the French Chansons de Gestes, the Nibelungenlied, 
 
 1 We should probably include Pliny the Elder and Plautus. 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 21 
 
 some Icelandic sagas, some of the Arthurian legends and the like ; or, 
 if he will, he may save time by reading at least some of these in 
 a boiled-down form in Cox and Jones 5 Popular Romances of the Middle 
 Ages, or W. Wagner's Epics and Romances of the Middle Ages, to 
 mention two of the older works of this class : and he should not be 
 ignorant of such widely influential collections of legend and story as 
 the Gesta Romanorum and the Legenda Aurea. He should read the 
 whole of the Divina Commedia and perhaps the Vita Nuova, but 
 without spending too much time over the commentaries thereon. At 
 present the student will perhaps find it rather difficult to gain, an all- 
 round knowledge of the mediaeval literature of the continent by means 
 of translations alone, not so much because these do not exist as 
 because they are scattered and not readily accessible. A few carefully 
 selected examples, however, will do much in conjunction with such 
 a historical sketch as he may easily find, to familiarize him with the 
 main characteristics of that literature. 
 
 The literature of the Renaissance will present fewer difficulties, as 
 most of what is of first-rate importance is quite readily obtainable 
 in an English form. It is not necessary to lay down any exact 
 programme of study, but it will, I think, be agreed that anyone who 
 aims at a good understanding of English literature of the sixteenth 
 and early seventeenth centuries should at least have some knowledge 
 of Petrarch, Boccaccio, the French mysteres, Rabelais, Ariosto, 
 Montaigne and the writers of La Ple'iade. It is also most desirable, 
 if not indeed essential, that he should be acquainted with certain of 
 the Latin works of the humanists, amongst which the Colloquia of 
 Erasmus and the Encomium Moriae at least shall be read. Luckily 
 the last two works are accessible in cheap translations. It is not 
 necessaiy that the student should be overburdened with an immense 
 amount of reading, but a good knowledge of a few representative 
 works, or even of selected portions of them, combined with such 
 instruction as will call his attention to their essential characteristics 
 and inter-relations, is worth infinitely more than mere descriptions or 
 summaries. 
 
 The continental literature of the last three centuries stands in 
 a somewhat different relation to that of England. In the first place 
 a distinctively national literature had grown up here, which was no 
 longer so closely allied to that of the Continent ; and secondly the 
 very numerous examples of continental influence which are to be found 
 in it are for the most part obvious at sight. They take the form 
 generally of acknowledged translations and adaptations, and though 
 a general knowledge of the development of French and German 
 literature at least will greatly aid the student in the understanding of 
 
22 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 his main subject, he will as a rule by paying some attention to such 
 translations or adaptations as he comes across in any period, obtain 
 an adequate knowledge of the main directions in which continental 
 literature influenced English. It is, of course, desirable on general 
 grounds that the student of English should know the work of 
 Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, of Schiller and Goethe, but this will 
 help him less in the understanding of English than a knowledge of 
 such critics as Boileau and Lessing, or such philosophers as Descartes, 
 Voltaire, and Rousseau. In the case, however, of works which are 
 important, as theirs are, mainly on account of the thought or the 
 point of view, a good summary or description can much better take 
 the place of the original than in more purely ' literary 9 work. 
 
 We now come to the study of the English works themselves the 
 texts and here I have to make a suggestion that, I fear, will horrify 
 some of my readers. It amounts to no less than the re-writing of the 
 chosen texts in a normalized (phonetic) spelling, and the complete 
 neglect, in the elementary course, of the form in which they have 
 come down to us. 
 
 The essential thing to be held in view first, last, and all the time is 
 that language is a matter of sounds, not of written symbols. The 
 development of the sounds of English, of the spoken word, can be 
 traced from age to age by the help of definite phonetic laws, and 
 a clear and consistent picture of this development can be presented. 
 The change in the written form of words is quite otherwise. This 
 also is, of course, subject to laws, but to a far smaller extent and in 
 a very different way. For more than half the period over which our 
 study of ( English ' extends, the writing down of the language was 
 done by a very minute percentage of those who used it, and even so 
 the writers were in many cases of foreign origin, and had their own 
 peculiar ways of representing the English sounds. And then when 
 we come to printing, which one might have supposed would quickly 
 lead to standardization, we find on the one hand new spellings which 
 are probably due to Dutch or German compositors, and on the other 
 the deliberate retention of alternative forms to facilitate justification 
 of the lines of type. Lastly, throughout there is the influence of the 
 classical scholar, hankering after his, often imaginary, etymologies, 
 and trying to bring back our unhappy tongue, at least in its written 
 form, to what he supposes to be correct. The effect of all these 
 disturbing forces on the natural development of our spelling has been, 
 as is well recognized, so great that it almost seems to be haphazard. 
 It is impossible to work out any satisfactory history of it ; and in any 
 case it is not our language, but only an exceedingly bad method of 
 recording it. 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 23 
 
 I would in the first place advocate the teaching of phonetics as an 
 essential preliminary to any linguistic study whatever; and the 
 practising of the student in transcribing modern English into the 
 chosen phonetic alphabet. 1 Those who think there is any difficulty 
 about the elementary study of phonetics can never have tried it. The 
 ability to use even the simplest phonetic alphabet is of incalculable 
 assistance, not only in the study of one's own language at different 
 periods, by enabling one to note down the pronunciation of any word 
 in a way which will allow one afterwards at any time to reproduce it, 
 but also and even more in the study of any foreign language, and it is 
 nothing less than shameful that an instrument of such utility should 
 be denied to the majority of our students merely because so many of 
 the older generation of teachers never troubled to master it. 
 
 When the student has a sufficient knowledge of the sounds repre- 
 sented by the various letters of the phonetic alphabet a matter of 
 very few hours 5 tuition and practice he can begin to work at the ^ 
 earlier texts. These will be presented to him in such a normalized 
 form that, reading them as he reads his phonetic modern English, he 
 will pronounce the words approximately 2 as they were pronounced 
 at the time when the work was written, and learn the language as 
 a genuine spoken one. 
 
 So far as Old English is concerned the transcription into a phonetic 
 alphabet will cause little change in the general appearance of the text 
 
 1 It has been suggested to me that I should illustrate this part of the Paper by 
 some examples of early texts re-written phonetically ; but I tbink it better not 
 to do so, as I do not wish to advocate the adoption of any particular variety of 
 phonetic alphabet. Tbe selection of tbis should, I think, be matter for 
 consideration and experiment by a small committee of philological and phonetic 
 experts. None of the current alphabets seems altogether suitable for the 
 purpose. The existing attempts to reproduce the original pronunciation of 
 Chaucer and Shakespeare are for the most part eitber in Ellis's ( Palaeotype ' or 
 in the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association, both of which systems 
 were designed to furnish symbols for a much larger variety of sounds than we 
 should require, with the result that they use a number of unusual forms of 
 letters, and transcripts in them appear at first sight rather startling. Probably 
 Sweet's much simpler ' Broad Romic ' with the addition of a few diacritics or new 
 letters to represent the sounds of earlier periods would be found quite adequate. 
 Our aim should be to use the simplest notation compatible with reasonable 
 accuracy. 
 
 2 I do not, of course, claim that the use of a phonetic alphabet will by itself 
 enable a reader to reproduce speech with perfect correctness, but merely that 
 the methods of transcription proposed will conduce to a uniform, consistent 
 pronunciation which is, at any rate, very much nearer to being correct than we 
 could obtain by following the irregular spelling of the MSS., and will at the same 
 time enable us to form a much clearer idea of the workings of phonetic laws 
 through the centuries than we could do otherwise. 
 
24 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 especially if Sweet's Broad Romic is adopted. The difference will 
 be mostly in certain consonants and, of course, in the general uniformity 
 of the whole. 
 
 Middle English will, however, show much greater difference from 
 the spelling of the MSS. owing to increased irregularity in the scribal 
 practice ; and the English of Shakespeare even more. 
 The advantages claimed for such a method are : 
 
 1. The student learns something which approaches the real language 
 
 of the various periods, not a travesty of it dependent on the 
 pronunciation, of his particular teacher. 
 
 2. He sees how pronunciation varies from period to period, and 
 
 philology becomes a real science to him instead of a set of 
 arbitrary rules. 
 
 3. He is not worried by a variety of forms in the same text that 
 
 teach him nothing and simply prevent him from getting 
 a definite idea of the word. 
 
 The first and most obvious objection to the method proposed is 
 perhaps that our knowledge of English is not sufficient to enable us 
 to re-write texts with complete accuracy into the pronunciation of 
 their authors. 
 
 This is, no doubt, true ; there are certain texts of which the trans- 
 mission has been so bad that we cannot say when or where they were 
 written, and in any text one may find occasional words the correct 
 (usual) pronunciation of which is a matter of some doubt. 1 But this 
 surely is of little importance. It is not proposed that all texts should 
 be re-written phonetically, and those of which the transmission is 
 very bad are just those which one is least likely to wish to put before 
 elementary students. In the case of the other texts we have to take 
 the risk of being occasionally wrong in the form adopted ; but even so, 
 the result will only be that the students mispronounce a word here and 
 there instead of, as at present, mispronouncing all of them. Besides, 
 in the present state of philology the number of phonetic errors will 
 certainly not be more than the errors of spelling which are now made 
 in a text edited from several manuscripts, seeing that the phonetic 
 equivalents are deduced from known and proven laws whereas the form 
 of a word depends on the idiosyncrasy of a particular scribe. 
 
 Any objection on the score of arbitrary interference with traditional 
 forms seems to me to be mere pedantry. The way in which an 
 anonymous scribe chose to write a particular sound may be a matter 
 
 1 Sometimes also we may meet with the more troublesome case of a sound 
 which was in process of change at the date of the work with which we are dealing, 
 with the result that alternative pronunciations of certain words would be in use 
 together and equally correct. We must then simply choose one and stick to it. 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 25 
 
 of interest to advanced students, but it is not a thing that deserves 
 any particular regard, and it certainly need not concern a beginner. 
 There is no possible breach of faith in departing from it. 
 
 After all, the tampering with the old texts here proposed is hardly 
 a new thing. Our texts are already tampered with, though to less 
 purpose. We do not now present them even to the advanced student 
 in the form in which they have come down to us. The various 
 handwritings of the MSS. are normalized into a readable print in 
 which the shapes of the letters are uniform ; not even the original 
 spellings are kept, for we generally expand the contractions. We 
 go even further than this in many students' texts, for we introduce 
 corrections and emendations ; we break up a continuously written 
 text into lines of verse, and sometimes construct an altogether new 
 text by the collation of several MSS. In the case of writers of the 
 sixteenth century and later we introduce a spelling and punctuation 
 quite different from that of the original. 
 
 Lastly, if it be argued that a student, who has studied, say, Chaucer 
 in a phonetic transcript, would find the traditional spelling a hindrance 
 when he comes to do original work I can only say that I do not 
 believe it. Personal experience has shown me that the use of a 
 phonetic spelling in teaching modern English to foreign students 
 does not lead in any way to confusion. I have never found the 
 slightest tendency to confound the phonetic with the conventional 
 spelling. The phonetic spelling seems to be associated solely with 
 the sound of the word, and whatever errors the student may make in 
 the conventional spelling, he appears never to substitute the phonetic 
 one. All that seems necessary to avoid this confusion is that the 
 phonetic spelling should be really a phonetic one, not a half and half 
 makeshift. If a student is told that ' calf is pronounced c carf y he 
 may spell it so : if he is told that the phonetic equivalent is ( kaaf * he 
 will not be at all likely to make a similar error. 
 
 Of course such a method of teaching implies a good deal of new 
 work. In the first place the teacher will need a far more precise and 
 extensive knowledge of the progress of linguistic change than he 
 generally has at present, and a certain number of new text-books will 
 be required, but the first requirement can hardly be regarded as an 
 argument against the proposal, and the provision of new text-books is 
 neither difficult nor, even now, very expensive. It would probably not 
 be necessary that students should read a great bulk of literature 
 re-written on phonetic principles; for learning, as they would, the 
 correct pronunciation from the very first with ease and certainty, they 
 would be spared all the confusion and vagueness which is now 
 common. The language of each of the periods which they would 
 
26 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 study would be at once definite and distinct ; as definite and distinct 
 as are, for example, Latin and modern Italian, and they would be 
 regarded as they should be as manners of speech and not manners 
 of writing. 
 
 Few texts would suffice, for, at any rate in elementary teaching, 
 the periods selected must show sufficient changes in the language for 
 the student easily to keep them distinct. The details of the course 
 would naturally to some extent depend on the results of experiment, 
 for there are several points upon which differences of opinion are 
 likely to arise. I would suggest that the following might be for the 
 average student the most suitable scheme. 
 
 Let him begin with Old English, taking first perhaps a brief series 
 of single sentences and short passages, written, of course, in the chosen 
 phonetic script, which need by no means be genuine early texts. 
 These could be accompanied by instruction in grammar and in the 
 peculiarities of the language, which should, I think, in the first 
 instance, be taught as a foreign or shall we say independent 
 language without reference to modern English. We cannot forbid the 
 student to notice that some of the words are very like words of the 
 same meaning in modern English, any more than we can when he is 
 studying German, but we must be careful not to insist on the 
 resemblance, lest, if we do, he comes to regard Old English (subcon- 
 sciously of course) as merely a perverted form of the English of to-day. 
 Especially must we avoid the extraordinary and most absurd habit, 
 formerly perhaps more common than at present, of translating Old 
 English words by modern words which are, indeed, etymologically 
 their descendants but now have an altogether different meaning. 1 
 Nothing can tend more strongly to give an air of unreality to the 
 whole subject. 
 
 The student, having been given a rough idea of the general character 
 of the language, can now attack his first long text. What this should 
 be must depend to some extent on his age. In many ways a prose 
 text forms a better beginning for the study of a language than a verse 
 one, but unfortunately there is little Old English prose that can be 
 regarded as sufficiently interesting to hold the attention of any but the 
 most earnest worker, and it is quite possible that Elene, Christ, or 
 even a selection from Beowulf would be more suitable for our purpose. 
 In any case the total amount of material which the student has to 
 read must be sufficient to familiarize him with all the commoner words. 
 
 1 E.g., mod (mind, courage) translated as 'mood', or even worse, modig 
 (brave) translated as c moody'. The same objection applies to translation by 
 antiquated words, as rod (the Cross) translated ' rood ' ; sweart (black, gloomy) 
 translated ' swart' ; stede (place) as { stead', &c., &c. 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 27 
 
 Being relieved from all confusion and uncertainty arising from vary- 
 ing forms he should attain an adequate vocabulary much more quickly 
 than by the usual method, but no way of learning a language will 
 dispense with time and trouble. 
 
 It will, I think, be a great help to the student, besides assisting 
 him to regard Old English as a genuine language, if he is given 
 occasional exercises in translating modern English into Old. Such 
 exercises may not only be made the means of providing examples 
 of grammatical rules, but also of familiarizing him with common 
 or philologically important words which do not happen to occur in the 
 texts which he is studying. 
 
 The next stage in the course should, I think, be the language 
 of Chaucer, but this should not be attempted until the student is so 
 thoroughly familiar with Old English that there is no longer the 
 least danger of his confusing the forms of the two. Fortunately, in 
 the case of Chaucer the selection of material is an easier matter than 
 in that of Old English, as any of the works which are usually read 
 will serve the purpose well enough. The student will, of course, have 
 these chosen works presented to him in the phonetic script to which 
 he is well accustomed, and using from the beginning the correct 
 pronunciation, will probably find the language present little difficulty. 
 
 About this time systematic instruction in the history of the language 
 might begin, the student being given a general idea of the relationship 
 of the languages within the Germanic group, all words being, of course, 
 presented to him as sounds, or in the phonetic script adopted. He 
 will also be in a position to learn something of the phonetic laws 
 governing the sound changes between Old English and the fourteenth 
 century, but this subject can hardly at the present stage be gone into 
 in detail. 
 
 The next step should be the English of Shakespeare, presented in 
 a similar way as sound alone. The student will, of course, in all 
 probability be already familiar, in modern spelling, with the plays 
 which he now reads with the old pronunciation, but it is difficult to 
 see how this can inconvenience him. Had he attempted previously 
 to read Shakespeare in a non-modern pronunciation he might have 
 found his new reading confusing, but he is quite unlikely to have 
 done this. 
 
 The student has now acquired three separate languages, which 
 should be sufficiently distinct and definite in his mind to be remem- 
 bered without danger of confusion. He should be able without a 
 moment's hesitation to give the sound-form of any common English 
 word as it was at any one of these periods, and should be able to 
 express a simple modern phrase in a form which, if perhaps not exactly 
 
28 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 colloquial or usual, would at any rate have been intelligible to 
 Cynewulf, Chaucer or Shakespeare ; and if he can do this he will have 
 a very much better idea of the development of the language than the 
 great majority of those who are called advanced students in English 
 at the present day. 
 
 Further, he will be in a position to increase his knowledge. Having 
 the three points to which all that he learns further may be referred, 
 he will find it a comparatively easy matter to fill in the gaps, both in 
 the matter of pure philology and in the study of texts. 
 
 The question arises what is the next step. Should he be content 
 with these three distinct forms of the language, and in future study 
 neglect the niceties of pronunciation and proceed to work with the 
 traditional texts alone ? It seems to me that this is a question which 
 must be solved by experience. Those students who are later to 
 proceed to more advanced study of the language might perhaps with 
 profit familiarize themselves with two or perhaps three other forms of 
 it in phonetic script, namely Early Middle English in the form, say, 
 of a selection from Layamon ; later fifteenth century prose represented 
 by Malory, or the Caxton Troy-Book ; and lastly, the English of the 
 late seventeenth or early eighteenth century as represented by Dryden 
 or Pope. There is, however, an evident objection in giving to the 
 ordinary student as many as five or six different forms of the language 
 to study consecutively, and it is probable that a better result might 
 be obtained by concentrating on the three periods first mentioned and 
 afterwards going back and bridging the gaps by the study of short 
 phonetically transcribed texts accompanied by more advanced philo- 
 logical study. 
 
 The question whether we need ever set the ordinary student to work 
 at the regular MS. texts can, I think, be answered in the negative. 
 In the great majority of cases he will not wish to proceed further with 
 reading texts after his course is finished, and if he does, the ordinary 
 texts will present little or no difficulty to him, for they will only offer 
 unusual spellings of words with which he is already familiar, just such 
 a trifling difficulty as one meets with on reading, for the first time, 
 the text of Shakespeare in the spelling of one of the early quartos. 
 Then, too, if this method of normalizing became usual, all the important 
 texts would in a short time be available in this form, just as all the 
 classical texts are available in a normal form, and all the chief 
 Elizabethan plays in modern spelling. 
 
 Of course, if the student is himself to become a teacher of English 
 literature, it is advisable that he should go further. In a University 
 course such phonetic methods as I have been describing might then 
 perhaps end with the second year out of three (or, better, the third year 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 29 
 
 out of four), and the remaining year be spent in the rudiments of 
 what I have called advanced work, that part of the work which is 
 more especially concerned with questions of transmission. Those 
 again who intend to engage in investigation on their own account, 
 and not merely in the imparting to others of what is already known, 
 will need to go further still. For them an advanced course, most 
 of it necessarily post-graduate, will be desirable. 
 
 In such an advanced course the method of approaching the subject 
 should be in some respects altogether different from that of the 
 elementary course. The purpose would no longer be to put the 
 student in possession of the main outlines of the knowledge already 
 gained, but to show him how that knowledge was arrived at and to 
 enable him to add to it. He would, of course, have to widen and 
 deepen his general elementary knowledge in all directions, but he 
 would have in addition, as a special subject of study, the question of 
 the relation between the literary work which has come down to us and 
 that work as composed by its original author the question of trans- 
 mission. 
 
 As regards literary and general history nothing need be said. 
 Further study will grow naturally out of the elementary work. The 
 student will merely require a closer and more detailed knowledge of 
 what he has already learnt in outline. His knowledge of the history 
 of ideas may well be broadened by some more special study of the 
 history of philosophy and of science, but this can be left without too 
 close definition. If he can obtain a general familiarity with the 
 literary development of another age especially that of Greek and 
 Roman literature, or of some non-European group, it will almost 
 certainly be of assistance to him. 
 
 As regards linguistics. He will, of course, have to fill the gaps 
 between the typical periods studied, and will also have to study more 
 in detail the relations between the development of English and that 
 of other languages of the group. He may also be required to know 
 something of the different dialects and their development, all of which, 
 however, will be a much simpler matter now that he has certain fixed 
 points to which everything can be related, than it would be otherwise. 
 If he can find time and energy to study, even in an elementary fashion, 
 some language altogether outside the European group he will, I think, 
 find that this will very considerably help him, not only by broadening 
 his views, but by forcing him to a closer and more careful considera- 
 tion of the real meaning and implication of the grammatical forms of 
 which he makes use. When, for example, one studies such a language 
 as Chinese or Japanese, one finds that it is no longer a case of transla- 
 ting one word by another word, but of getting at the idea underlying 
 
30 A NOTE ON THE TEACHING OF 
 
 an English phrase and reproducing this from an altogether different 
 point of view. Such an exercise will give him, in perhaps an even 
 better manner, that precise understanding of the meaning of his own 
 language which is rightly claimed as resulting from the practice of 
 Latin prose composition. 
 
 In all these points, however, the ordinary courses of study and the 
 text-books in general use, with that additional clearness of under- 
 standing that his knowledge of phonetics gives him, will serve him well 
 enough, especially as the puzzling out of things for himself in face of 
 difficulties will be a useful part of his training. It is in its way of 
 treating, or rather of neglecting, questions of transmission of text? 
 that the present course of study is in general most deficient. In 
 this department we need a careful and systematic study of the 
 relation between the text in the form in which we have it and the 
 text as it would have been spoken (dictated) or read aloud by its 
 original composer. In its widest sense this is the science of textual 
 criticism. It includes all such things as the means of appraising the 
 relative value of different texts, the recognition of probable errors, 
 scribal or typographical, and the method of weeding out such errors 
 and getting back as nearly as possible to the original text exactly as 
 it was first composed. For this a number of things are necessary that 
 are seldom or never systematically taught to students of English. To 
 begin with, as the first stage in the preservation of literature is 
 usually in writing, the student must have a general reading 
 acquaintance with the ordinary scripts of different periods, not only 
 in order that he may himself be in a position to work from MSS., but 
 that he may be able to judge of likely errors in copying from one MS. 
 to another. He will then, at least, be able to avoid the common 
 mistake of supposing that if two words look somewhat alike in the 
 writing of to-day, they were necessarily similar to one another in a 
 mediaeval or renaissance script, and likely to be confused by a copyist. 
 And he must know more about MSS. than the mere hand-writing. 
 He must know how and under what conditions, and by what class of 
 men they were commonly written, for the particular trend of a man^s 
 ordinary thoughts and occupations will influence the errors that he 
 makes. He must also know something about actual materials and 
 processes of writing, and the gathering of leaves of a manuscript into 
 book-form, for anything which will enable him to follow more closely 
 in his mind the actual process of the coming into being of the 
 manuscript, and to judge of its rank as good and careful or slovenly 
 and cheap work, will help him in the consideration of its probable 
 authority as a text. Especially also must he have some general 
 knowledge of the nationality of the scribes at different times, so that 
 
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 31 
 
 he can detect the work, for example, of a French scribe whose own 
 language may influence him in the direction of certain peculiarities in 
 transcribing English, peculiarities which must then be ignored in con- 
 sidering the text which has been transcribed, just as we ignore the 
 mis-spellings and other curiosities of language that we may find, for 
 example, in an English "phrase occurring in a French novel. 
 
 Further, as the advanced student of English often has more to do 
 with texts of which the earliest surviving form is in print, he must 
 have a general knowledge of the methods of printing and the manu- 
 facture of books in early times. This is, indeed, for the student of 
 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature of even more importance 
 than a knowledge of manuscript for the student of the earlier 
 centuries, for printing imposes on the text, as originally written, a 
 number of processes capable of modifying it far more considerably 
 than the copying of an average scribe. In short, bibliographical 
 knowledge, the study of the book itself as the medium of transmission, 
 is an absolutely essential part of an advanced training in English. 
 But I need not labour this point, as I have already dealt with it in some 
 detail elsewhere. 1 
 
 The science, such as it is, of textual criticism will, of course, be 
 a subject of study. To a great extent it deals with the questions of 
 transmission by manuscripts and printed books to which we have just 
 referred, but it should also take cognizance of editorial methods and 
 the manner of presentation of texts for the modern reader. The 
 attention of advanced students must be deliberately directed to such 
 matters as these if we are to avoid in future the irrational jumbles of 
 different methods of textual reproduction which in the past have done 
 so much to hinder the progress of English study. 
 
 To this science of textual criticism must certainly be joined 
 a sketch of the historical development of the study of our language and 
 literature, and this not as a means of commemorating those who have 
 been before us, but for the purpose of criticising their methods, and 
 evaluating their statements. In such subjects as linguistic study and 
 literary history, every new student has to make use of an enormous 
 mass of material collected by others, and it is absolutely essential that 
 from the very outset he should acquire some knowledge of the probable 
 strength of the foundations on which he builds. The greatest mis- 
 fortune from which the study of English has suffered is that in its 
 early days it seems to have been regarded as a suitable pastime for 
 any literary amateur without special training. Nothing is more 
 deplorable than the time and space wasted in much modern work 
 
 1 ( Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students, &c.' in Transactions 
 of the Bibliographical Society, vol. xii, pp. 211-318. 
 
32 ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
 
 in reproducing or discussing the opinions and annotations of many 
 early editors and critics whose work is quite evidently not worth the 
 paper that it is printed upon. Until we can rid ourselves of our 
 undue reverence for authority in this and in many other matters, the 
 study of English can never take the position to which it should, 
 of right, lay claim. 
 
 To sum up, I plead for : 
 
 (1) A careful consideration of what we are really trying to do in 
 teaching ' English/ in order that the various possibilities of the 
 subject may be properly developed in their due proportions, and that 
 when, and as, ' English ' replaces the classics as the main vehicle of 
 literary and humanistic training, there shall be no loss to education 
 but rather a gain. 
 
 (2) The planning of the English course to fit the needs of students, 
 so that whether we teach them much or little, they shall learn some- 
 thing more or less complete in itself, and not merely fragments which 
 are of no use and, indeed, cannot be retained without further study 
 to link them together. 
 
 (3) The definite separation of the study into two parts, in the first 
 of which problems of transmission are altogether ignored, and (in 
 accordance with this) : 
 
 (4) The use, in the first part, of texts so normalized or re-transcribed 
 that the student inevitably learns, from the beginning, the correct 
 pronunciation. 
 
 (5) The restriction of the linguistic study (in the first part of the 
 course) to the language of about three distinct periods, e.g. (1) Old 
 English (West-Saxon of about 900 A.D.), (2) the end of the fourteenth 
 century, and (3) the end of the sixteenth century. The language of 
 these periods to be taught much more thoroughly than at present, 
 and with correct pronunciation. 
 
 (6) The treatment of earlier English literature as a branch of the 
 literature of Europe, and not as a thing in itself. 
 
 (7) The teaching of literature, at any rate in the elementary stages 
 and when dealing with the earlier work, not merely as literature but 
 as the expression of changing modes of life and thought. 
 
 (8) Definite training, in the second part of the course, for the study 
 of original texts and for research. 
 
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