THE AIMS OF 
 L. i LivAtvi' STUDY 
 
 CORSON 
 
 .rf'^SS<%'o
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE AIMS OF LITERARY 
 STUDY
 
 •J^^y^
 
 THE AIMS OF LITERARY 
 STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 HIRAM CORSON, LL.D. 
 
 Professor of English Literature in the Cornell Univer- 
 sity ; author of ' An Introductioti to the Study of 
 Robert Browning's Poetry^ 'An hitrodttction 
 to the Study of Shakespeare^ ' A Primer 
 of English Verse, chiefly in its Esthetic 
 and Organic Character,' etc. 
 
 l^cbj iork 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 London: Macmillan & Co.. Ltd. 
 I901 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Copyright, 1894, 
 By MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped December, 1894. Reprinted 
 April, August, December, 1895; July, 1898 ; July, 1899 
 July, 1901. 
 
 yorbjooti iSrrss : 
 
 J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 MIN, 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 The main portion of the matter con- 
 tained in this little book, was contributed 
 to Poet-Lore, to the editors of which my 
 thanks ai'e dice for kind permission to 
 reprint it here. In the opening section 
 I have repeated much of an Address to 
 a graduating class of the Ogontz School, 
 entitled '■ WJiat Does^ what Knows, 
 what Is.' 
 
 H. C. 
 
 ^61582
 
 The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. 
 
 — Si. Paul. 
 
 Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise 
 From outward things, whate'er you may be- 
 lieve : 
 There is an inmost centre in us all, 
 Where truth abides in fulness; and around, 
 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
 This perfect, clear perception — which is truth ; 
 A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
 Blinds it, and makes all error : and * /<? know ' 
 Rather consists in opening out a way 
 Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
 Than in effecting entry for a light 
 Supposed to be without. 
 
 — Bro7uning's 'Paracelsus.' 
 
 W^e teach and teach 
 Until, like drumming pedagogues, we lose 
 The thought that zuhat we teach has higher 
 
 ends 
 Than being taught and learned. 
 
 — A ugusta Webster. 
 
 6
 
 THE AIMS OF LITERARY 
 STUDY. 
 
 nrO the aged John of Patmos, in 
 Robert Browning's ' A Death in 
 the Desert,' is attributed the doctrine 
 of the trinal unity of man, ' How 
 divers persons ' (the word being used 
 in the sense of parts played), 
 
 How divers persons witness in each man 
 Three souls, which make up one soul : first, 
 
 to wit, 
 A soul of each and all the bodily parts, 
 Seated therein, which works, and is what 
 
 Does, 
 And has the use of earth, and ends the man 
 Downward; but, tending upward for advice, 
 Grows into, and again is grown into 
 
 7
 
 8 THE AIMS OF 
 
 By the next soul, which, seated in the brain, 
 Useth the first "with its collected use, 
 And feeleth, thinketh, willeth, — is what Knows: 
 Which, duly tending upward in its turn. 
 Grows into, and again is grown into 
 By the last soul, that useth both the first, 
 Subsisting whether they assist or no, 
 And, constituting man's self, is what Is — 
 And leans upon the former, makes it play, 
 As that olayed off the first : and, tending up. 
 Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man 
 Upward in that dread point of intercourse, 
 Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him. 
 What Does, what Knows, what Is; three souls, 
 one man. 
 
 In Mrs. Browning's ' Aurora Leigh,' 
 Aurora says to Romney : 
 
 life, you've granted me, 
 Develops from within. But innermost 
 Of the inmost, most interior of the interne, 
 God claims his own. Divine humanity 
 Reneiving nature, . . .
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 9 
 
 There must be but an infinitesimally 
 small part of our absolute being which 
 comes to consciousness in this life, 
 however much we may be educated, 
 in the common acceptation of that 
 word, and however extended our out- 
 ward and our inward experiences may 
 be. Back of our conscious and active 
 powers, is a vast and mysterious domain 
 of unconsciousness — but a domain 
 which is, nevertheless, our true being, 
 and which is unceasingly influencing 
 our conscious and active powers, and, 
 as it is rectified or unrectified, more 
 or less determining us to act accord- 
 ing to absolute standards, or according 
 to relative, conventional, and expedient 
 standards. 
 
 The rectification or adjustment of
 
 lO THE AIMS OF 
 
 that which constitutes our true being, 
 should therefore transcend all other 
 aims of education, however important 
 these may be. In comparison with 
 this rectification or adjustment, the 
 stores of knowledge which the acquisi- 
 tive faculty may heap up, and the 
 sharpening of the intellect, sink into 
 comparative insignificance. 
 
 The condition under which our souls 
 silently shape themselves to whatever 
 is, spiritually speaking, most shapely, 
 outside of ourselves, is, that we attain 
 to what Wordsworth calls ' a wise pas- 
 siveness.' It is a thing to be attained 
 to, and a very difficult thing to be 
 attained to, especially in these days 
 of stress and strain in temporal mat- 
 ters. A luise passiveness. The epithet
 
 LITERARY STUDY. II 
 
 ' wise ' means wise in heart ; and a 
 wise passiveness I understand to be 
 quite synonymous with the Christian 
 idea of humihty — that is, not a self- 
 depreciation, but, rather, a spontaneous 
 and even unconscious fealty, an un- 
 swerving loyalty, to what is spiritually 
 above us. That is humility. In the 
 poem in which the phrase occurs 
 ('Expostulation and Reply'), the 
 poet says : 
 
 The eye — it cannot choose but see; 
 
 We cannot bid the ear be still; 
 Our bodies feel, where'er they be, 
 
 Against, or with our will. 
 
 Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress; 
 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness.
 
 12 THE AIMS OF 
 
 Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
 Of things forever speaking, 
 
 That nothing of itself will come, 
 But we must still be seeking? 
 
 'The eye, it cannot choose but see ; ' 
 but it sees according to what we are ; 
 it is in the service of our essential 
 selves. 'We cannot bid the ear be 
 still; ' but it hears according to what 
 we are; it is in the service of our 
 essential selves; and according as our 
 essential selves are shapely or un- 
 shapely, the eye and the ear report 
 of the shapely or the unshapely. 
 
 Blessed be William Wordsworth 
 among teachers, and rectifiers of the 
 human spirit. 
 
 The rectification or adjustment of 
 the 'what Is,' I repeat, should tran-
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 1 3 
 
 scend all other aims of education, 
 however important these may be. 
 The acquisition of knowledge is a 
 good thing ; the emendation and 
 sharpening of the intellect is a good 
 thing; the cultivation of science and 
 philosophy is a good thing; but there 
 is something of infinitely more impor- 
 tance than all these — it is, the recti- 
 fication, the adjustment, through that 
 mysterious operation we call sympathy, 
 of the unconscious personality, the 
 hidden soul, which cooperates with 
 the active powers, wdth the conscious 
 intellect, and, as this unconscious 
 personality is rectified or unrectified, 
 determines the active powers, the con- 
 scious intellect, for righteousness or 
 unrighteousness.
 
 14 THE AIMS OF 
 
 And this fact needs to be enforced, 
 and will need to be enforced, for a 
 long time yet to come, judging from 
 the present state of the educational 
 world, namely, that it is only through 
 the Svhat Is ' that the 'what Does ' 
 and the Svhat Knows,' can be recti- 
 fied or adjusted. Attempts at a direct 
 rectification or adjustment of these, 
 must be more or less failures. No 
 Traciatus de emendatione intellecius will 
 avail much which ignores the deter- 
 mining power back of the intellect. 
 
 That all spirit is mutually attrac- 
 tive, as all matter is mutually attrac- 
 tive, is an ultimate fact beyond which 
 we cannot go, and which we must 
 accept as a fact. And it is on this 
 fact, that the rectification of the 'what
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 1 5 
 
 Is ' must be based. Spirit to spirit. 
 'As in water face answereth to face, 
 so the heart of man to man.' (Prov- 
 erbs xxvii, 19.) And here we are 
 at the very basal fact of Christianity 
 — a religion which is only incident- 
 ally a doctrine — only incidentally 
 addressed to the Svhat Knows; ' it is, 
 first of all, a religion whose impreg- 
 nable fortress is a divine personality 
 in whom all that is spiritually poten- 
 tial in man was realized. Whatever 
 attacks may be made upon the origi- 
 nal records of Christianity, upon the 
 august fabric of the Church, with its 
 creeds and dogmas, and formularies, 
 and paraphernalia, this fortress will 
 stand forever, and mankind will for- 
 ever seek and find refuge in it.
 
 1 6 THE AIMS OF 
 
 The Church, through the centuries, 
 has been kept alive, not by the letter 
 of the New Testament, for the letter 
 killeth, but by a succession of sancti- 
 fied spirits, 'the noble Living and the 
 noble Dead,' through whom the Christ 
 spirit has been transmitted, whose 
 'echoes roll from soul to soul, and 
 grow forever and forever.' 
 
 When Christ said 'Follow me,' he 
 addressed the 'what Is ' in human 
 nature. Follow me, — not from an 
 intellectual apprehension of principles 
 involved in my life, but through deep 
 sympathy, through the awakening, 
 vitalizing, actuating power of incar- 
 nate Truth; through a response of 
 your spiritual nature to mine; and in, 
 and by, and through, th?t response,
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I 7 
 
 your essential life will be brought into 
 harmony with, and carried along by, 
 the spiritual forces of the world, and 
 thus conducted by them to the king- 
 dom of eternal truth within yourselves. 
 To sharpen the intellect, the 'what 
 Knows,' without rectifying the 'what 
 Is,' is a dangerous thing — dangerous 
 to the individual — dangerous to soci- 
 ety. The results of it we see every 
 day, and read of in the newspapers, 
 in the actions of smart men of our 
 country — men who can falsify bank 
 accounts, and appropriate large sums 
 of other people's money to their own 
 use; who use high political positions 
 for purely selfish ends, and serve the 
 prince of darkness in various ways. 
 These men have had a good educa-
 
 l8 IHE AIMS OF 
 
 tion, as it is called; some of them, 
 it may be, are graduates of colleges, 
 who have carried off the most coveted 
 prizes. They have been, perhaps, 
 instructed in the intellectual evidences 
 of Christianity, which are no evi- 
 dences at all; but we find that all this 
 avails not for righteousness. 
 
 In the following pages I shall speak 
 particularly of poetry, as a means of 
 educating the 'what Is ' — poetry, 
 which Wordsworth has defined as 'the 
 breath and finer spirit of all know- 
 ledge, the impassioned expression 
 which is in the countenance of all 
 science.' In poetical study, the basal 
 principle of spirit to spirit must be 
 all-controlling; to it, all other features 
 of the study must be subordinated.
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 1 9 
 
 We can know a true poem only so 
 far as we can reproduce it sympa- 
 thetically within ourselves — in other 
 words, we know it to the extent to 
 which our own spirits respond to the 
 spiritual appeal which it makes to us. 
 
 The spiritual appeals which are 
 made by every form of art, be it in 
 color, in sound, in stone, in poetry, 
 or whatever may be the medium 
 employed, must be responded to 
 directly, immediately (in the literal 
 sense of the word), or not at all. 
 Of course, the extent of the response 
 may be indefinitely increased. But 
 there must be, to begin with, a direct, 
 immediate response, however limited 
 it may be. There's no roundabout 
 way to such appeals. The inductive
 
 20 THE AIMS OF 
 
 method is not applicable to spiritual 
 matters. The very word, induction, 
 is absurd, in connection with the 
 spiritual. It belongs exclusively to 
 the intellectual domain. 
 
 If we apply the insulated intellect 
 to a poem, as is done in the methods 
 called 'thorough,' in which attention 
 is given to all things (and some others) 
 except the one thing needful, the 
 result being 'as if one should be 
 ignorant of nothing concerning the 
 scent of violets, except the scent 
 itself,' — if we apply the insulated 
 intellect to a poem, I say, we get 
 only the definite thought which articu- 
 lates it. The indefinite spiritual ele- 
 ment which every true poem must 
 have, and which constitutes its real
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 2 1 
 
 life, as a poem, we can know only 
 when our own spirits respond to it, 
 and then we may be said to know it 
 more vitally than we know the defi- 
 nite, intellectual element of it; for it 
 is a matter of inward consciousness, 
 and there is nothing more vital and 
 positive than that. The Svhat Is ' 
 has been reached and called forth, to 
 some extent. 
 
 I'he meaning of the word 'know' 
 needs to be extended. It is too 
 much confined to the conclusions of 
 the discursive understanding. I have 
 often heard it said, once heard a 
 prominent divine say, that we cannot 
 know spirit. Why, really, there is 
 nothing we can know better. Spirit- 
 ual consciousness is certainlv a more
 
 2 2 THE AIMS OF 
 
 vital kind of knowledge than any we 
 can have of material things. 
 
 In +hese days of the almost un- 
 limited monarchy of the Svhat Knows,' 
 in our schools, the greatest and most 
 difficult problem to be solved (and I 
 fear that professional educators are 
 most in the way of its solution), is, 
 how to secure a better balancing than 
 now generally exists of the intellectual 
 and the spiritual man. And when 
 this problem shall have been success- 
 fully solved, and the results of its 
 solution shall have become general 
 (and it is within the possibilities of 
 the future that they may), there will 
 then be a civilization more linked 
 with the eternal, because proceed- 
 ing more from the 'what Is' of the
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 23 
 
 human kingdom, and therefore a 
 more Christian civilization than that 
 in which we are living — a civiliza- 
 tion such as the world has never yet 
 known.
 
 24 THE ALMS OF 
 
 ! ITERATURE, more especially po- 
 etic and dramatic literature, is 
 the expression in letters of the 
 spiritual, cooperating with the intel- 
 lectual, man, the former being the 
 primary, dominant coefficient. This 
 definition, it is presumed, will be 
 accepted by every cultivated person 
 who has experienced, to any extent, 
 that is, responded to, and assimilated, 
 the informing life of any great liter- 
 ary product, poetic or dramatic. (In 
 the spiritual is meant to be included 
 the whole domain of the emotional, the 
 susceptible or impressible, the sympa- 
 thetic, the intuitive; in short, the
 
 LIIERARY STUDY. 25 
 
 absolute in man, the Svhat Is,' — that, 
 by and through which man holds rela- 
 tionship with the essential spirit of 
 things, as opposed to the phenomenal 
 of which the senses are cognizant, and 
 which the intellect then sets in order 
 — classifies under systematic forms.) 
 The inference is, therefore, easy, 
 as to what should be the leading aim 
 of literary study — ^ that literature is 
 not a mere knowledge subject, as the 
 word knowledge is usually understood, 
 namely, that with which the discurs- 
 ive, formulating intellect has to do. 
 But it is a knowledge subject (only 
 that and nothing more) if that higher 
 form of knowledge be meant, which is 
 quite outside of the domain of the 
 intellect — a knowledge which is a
 
 26 THE AIMS OF 
 
 matter of spiritual consciousness and 
 which the intellect cannot translate 
 into a judgment. It is, nevertheless, 
 at the same time, the most distinct 
 and vital kind of knowledge. 
 
 But in the prevailing methods of 
 literary study, it can hardly be dis- 
 puted, the intellectual or secondary 
 factor has precedence — is, indeed, 
 almost exclusively taken into account; 
 and the consequence is, that students 
 are shut off from the higher and more 
 educating factor. And there is even 
 a worse state of things than this, in 
 many schools: the intellectual factor 
 (which may be said to articulate the 
 spiritual) is itself largely excluded 
 by technical study, or by a study of 
 details which rests within itself.
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 27 
 
 When a teacher has himself assimi- 
 lated the informing spiritual life of a 
 work of genius, he is not likely to be 
 disposed to taper his instruction into 
 the merely technical, still less to keep 
 the minds of his students occupied 
 with details, and these, too, con- 
 sidered apart from the general vitality 
 to which they may contribute. But 
 very many of those who conduct liter- 
 ary studies in the schools, have not 
 themselves assimilated the informing 
 spiritual life of the works studied; 
 and they are, in consequence, liable 
 to become, by reason of the kind of 
 study to which their unfitness obliges 
 them to resort, mere Gradgrinds who, 
 like their prototype, Thomas, the iron- 
 monger, in Dickens's novel of 'Hard
 
 28 THE AIMS OF 
 
 Times,' are disposed even to dis- 
 parage the subtler metal of the spirit, 
 with all its quickening power. With 
 literature as a power they have noth- 
 ing to do; its value with them con- 
 sists in its furnishing material for 
 various kinds of drill which deal 
 with things quite apart from whatever 
 constitutes the power of any work of 
 genius. 
 
 In the study of a great literary 
 product, details must come last — must 
 come after there has been an adequate 
 response to the informing life of the 
 work. Then, when details are con- 
 sidered, the student is, to some extent, 
 prepared to feel what they contribute 
 to the general vitality. (I, of course, 
 suppose a work which has an organic
 
 LITER.4RY STUDY. 29 
 
 unity, with no superfluous, unorgan- 
 ized elements. It would not otherwise 
 be a great literary product.) To be- 
 gin with details, as is often (in the 
 schools, generally) done, requires that 
 they be studied per se, and such study 
 must be utterly 'vain and impotent,' 
 so far as their relationship to the 
 whole structure is concerned. Details 
 are lifeless considered apart from 'the 
 atmosphere that moulds, and the 
 dynamic forces that combine.' 
 
 Another feature of the literary work 
 of schools which is often made too 
 much of, is the study of Histories of 
 English Literature and of the relations 
 of literary masterpieces to the periods 
 in which they were produced. All 
 works of genius render the best ser-
 
 30 THE AIMS OF 
 
 vice, in literary education, when they 
 are first assimilated in their absolute 
 character. It is, of course, important 
 to know their relations to the several 
 times and places in which they were 
 produced; but such knowledge is not 
 for the tyro in literary study. He 
 must first know literature, if he is 
 constituted so to know it, in its abso- 
 lute character. He can go into the 
 'philosophy ' of its relationships later, 
 if he like, when he has a true literary 
 education, and when the 'years that 
 bring the philosophic mind ' have 
 been reached. Every great produc- 
 tion of genius is, in fact, in its essen- 
 tial character, no more related to one 
 age than to another. It is only in its 
 phenomenal character (its outward
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 3 I 
 
 manifestations), that it has a special 
 relationship. (See Note i.) 
 
 Such a little book, of two or three 
 days' reading, as Stopford Brooke's 
 'Primer of English Literature' the 
 student might read through a number 
 of times, in order that the literature 
 be mapped out in his mind, and 
 authors be located as to time (See 
 Note 2) ; but Histories of Literature 
 cannot do much for literary education, 
 which must come first, and which, in 
 its true sense, is a spiritual education, 
 and this, no amount of mere literary 
 knowledge or literary history, will, of 
 itself, induce. It must be induced 
 on the basis of what is permanent and 
 eternal — of what is independent of 
 time and place.
 
 32 THE AIMS OF 
 
 Most undergraduates in our colleges 
 and universities are not prepared for 
 any historical treatment of the litera- 
 ture. As a preparation for this, they 
 should first know, in the true sense of 
 ' know ' which I have indicated, the 
 leading productions along the whole 
 line of the literature from Chaucer to 
 the present time, and have a feeling 
 of its historical current. 
 
 Those features of a work of genius 
 which reveal the special influences of 
 time and place (and they are, of 
 course, common to all works of gen- 
 ius) are, more or less, adventitious, 
 do not constitute a part of its essen- 
 tial, informing vitality. That must 
 come from the absolute personality of 
 the author; it is that which maintains
 
 LITERARY STUDY. ^^ 
 
 a hold upon the interests of mankind, 
 and it is that which it should be the 
 leading object of literary study to 
 assimilate. "Tis life, for which we 
 pant; more life, and fuller, that we 
 want,' or ought to want, if we don't. 
 *I came,' said the divine life-giver, 
 'that men might have life, and have it 
 abundantly.' He meant, of course, 
 the absolute life of the spirit; and 
 it is this absolute life which great 
 productions of genius may, in their 
 degree, give, or rather awaken in the 
 soul, if the right attitude toward them 
 be taken. 
 
 Mrs. Browning, in her * Aurora 
 Leigh,' speaks of great poets as 'the 
 only truth-tellers, now left to God, — 
 the only speakers of essential truth,
 
 34 THE AIMS OF 
 
 opposed to relative, comparative, and 
 temporal truths; the only holders by 
 His sun-skirts, through conventional 
 grey glooms; the only teachers who 
 instruct mankind, from just a shadow 
 on a charnel-wall, to find man's verit- 
 able stature out, erect, sublime, — the 
 measure of a man, and that's the 
 measure of an angel, says the apostle.' 
 One may know all the relations of a 
 work of genius (such, for exi^mple, 
 as Dante's 'Divina Commedia ') to 
 time and place, may have traced out 
 all the contemporary influences which 
 were exerted upon its author, and yet 
 he may not know, in any true sense, 
 the work itself. He may have the 
 mere scholar's knowledge of it. Pro- 
 fessor Brandl, in his valuable Life of
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 35 
 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, traces the 
 influences of other works which the 
 poet was under in the composition of 
 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Christa- 
 bel.' These influences it is interest- 
 ing enough to have so traced ; but to 
 know these two poems (each unique 
 of its kind, in English poetry) as 
 manifestations of the poet's absolute 
 genius, to assimilate that in them 
 which insures them a permanency of 
 vitality, is quite a different thing. 
 
 What is miscalled the Philosophy of 
 Literature (true philosophy must be 
 based on the absolute) and regarded 
 as of great, of prime importance, 
 indeed, in literary study, in some of 
 our institutions of learning, especially 
 those which have been most German-
 
 36 THE AIMS OF 
 
 ized, namely, the relations of works 
 of genius to their several times and 
 places, should rather be called the 
 Physiology of Literature. The mode 
 in which genius manifests itself, at 
 certain times, in certain places, and 
 under certain circumstances, may be 
 explained to some extent; but the 
 genius itself cannot be explained. 
 Environments stimulate or suppress, 
 they do not, and cannot, make genius 
 — that exceptional spiritual constitu- 
 tion of a man which brings him into 
 a more intimate relationship with the 
 essential world than men in general 
 are brought. The genius of Shake- 
 speare cannot be explained by the 
 circumstances of the age of Elizabeth. 
 That age was the most favorable,
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 37 
 
 perhaps, in the history of the world, 
 for the exercise of dramatic gerfius. 
 But there had first to be the dramatic 
 genius to be acted upon and brought 
 into play. There were many other 
 dramatists of the time, as favorably 
 circumstanced as was Shakespeare; 
 more favorably circumstanced, in- 
 deed, than he; but they were all 
 inferior to him in the constitution of 
 their genius, and consequently in what 
 they produced. None of them had 
 the deep sense of the constitution, 
 the eternal fitness, of things which 
 Shakespeare had (as is clearly shown 
 by their productions); and that deep 
 sense was due to the greater vitality 
 of his essential being which he brought 
 with him, potentially, into the world,
 
 38 THE AIMS OF 
 
 which he possessed independently of 
 all the influences of his time and 
 place (Jiow he possessed it, we cannot 
 get at), and which these influences 
 aftenvards only brought into play. 
 
 There was but one Chaucer, in the 
 14th century, and he still ranks among 
 the greatest of English poets — in his 
 own peculiar domain is superior to 
 them all. 
 
 The great poetic genius is a vara 
 avis in tej-ris, who can be fostered, 
 but not made, by his age. His age 
 determines more or less the 7?iode in 
 which he manifests his power; but 
 the essential life of what he produces 
 must come from his own absolute 
 being. 
 
 Genius is genius. And it makes
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 39 
 
 its appearance in uncivilized as well 
 as in civilized life. It is in the 
 human constitution, all the elements 
 of which will assert themselves in 
 individuals, some time or other, how- 
 ever much these elements may be 
 generally suppressed. The human 
 spirit is a complexly organized, indi- 
 vidualized divine force, which in most 
 men is 'cabined, cribbed, confined,' 
 and, in consequence, more or less 
 quiescent; only in a very few does it 
 attain to an abnormal quickening — 
 such a quickening as leads to a more 
 or less direct perception of truth, which 
 is a characteristic of genius. But 
 there have always been men, in all 
 times and places, and in all condi- 
 tions of life, whose spiritual sensitive-
 
 40 THE AIMS OF 
 
 ness has been exceptional — men who 
 have served as beacons to their fel- 
 lows. It is the spiritual sensitiveness 
 of the few which has moved the mass 
 of mankind forward — the few, en- 
 dowed with 'the vision and the faculty 
 divine.' 'Where there is no vision, 
 the people perish ' (Proverbs, xxix, 
 1 8). The intellect plays a secondary 
 part. Its place is behind the instinc- 
 tive antennae which conduct along 
 their trembling lines, fresh stuff for the 
 intellect to stamp and keep — fresh 
 instinct for it to translate into law. 
 
 The exceptional spiritual sensitive- 
 ness which characterizes men of gen- 
 ius, makes them more susceptible and 
 responsive to the permanent, the 
 eternal, than are other men. We
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 4 1 
 
 cannot make a genius by education, but 
 education should be conducted genius- 
 waj'd ; the 'what Is ' should, at least, 
 receive as much consideration as the 
 'what Knows' or the 'what Does.' 
 This is the condition, the indispens- 
 able condition, under which a limited 
 response is secured to the creations of 
 genius. It cannot be secured by an 
 exclusive exercise of the 'what Knows,' 
 in its analytic mode of activity. And 
 I would add, that a sympathetic and, 
 therefore, a synthetic response must, 
 in some measure, be given to a crea- 
 tion of genius, before the analytical 
 faculty has or can have anything to 
 do. And unless conscious analysis 
 finally bloom into unconscious syn- 
 thesis, it fails of its end.
 
 42 THE AIMS OF 
 
 A large class of people, in these 
 days (I speak from my own pretty 
 long experience), are pleased to have 
 a great concrete creation translated 
 into the barren abstract — a creation 
 which might do something for their 
 souls, if they would take the right 
 attitude toward it, if they would be 
 obedient to its Mcravoare. The lan- 
 guage of the intellect has become 
 their vernacular ; and accordingly they 
 must have the concrete, which is the 
 vernacular of genius, translated into 
 their vernacular, the abstract, before 
 it mean anything to them. 
 
 What is understood by scholarship, 
 in these days, may be, often is, a 
 great obstacle to the truest and highest 
 literary culture. German literary and
 
 LITERARY SITJDY. 43 
 
 philological scholarship has certainly 
 been a very great obstacle. 
 
 Let us have the most thorough and 
 the most exact scholarship possible; 
 but, if such scholarship be made an 
 end to itself, it may prove a decided 
 evil to him who makes it an end to 
 itself; for his own intellectual and 
 spiritual life is more or less subordi- 
 nated to it, and he is in danger of 
 becoming desiccated into a Dr. Dryas- 
 dust. 'Is not the life more than the 
 food, and the body more than the 
 raiment? ' 
 
 It requires a man of exceptionally 
 strong powers to bear great acquire- 
 ments without being weighed down 
 by them. Where one of great ac- 
 quirements does not possess strong
 
 44 THE AIMS OF 
 
 asserting and resisting powers, the 
 degeneracy which may be, and often 
 is, induced by an uncontrolled scholar- 
 ship, manifests itself, in many cases, 
 through a piddling analysis which has 
 no end beyond itself. That is a quite 
 reliable symptom of such degeneracy. 
 One can get deeply interested in 
 almost anything the most insignificant, 
 if he keep at it long enough to bring 
 himself down to it, even in second- 
 hand postage stamps. Where the 
 intellectual and spiritual powers are 
 strongly vital, their dominant ten- 
 dency is toward synthesis — toward 
 'bringing together what else were dust 
 from dead men's bones, into the unity 
 of breathing life.' The more intense 
 a man's intellectual and spiritual life
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 45 
 
 becomes, the more he demands that 
 exercise of his powers induced by 
 the organization of manifold elements 
 — elements fused by the alchemy of 
 the imagination into a new and living 
 whole, whose synthesis calls forth that 
 harmonious energizing of the soul 
 which constitutes its highest life and 
 delight.
 
 46 THE AIMS OF 
 
 A GREAT impulse has, of late 
 years, been imparted to the study 
 of the English language and litera- 
 ture, and that study has been intro- 
 duced into all our institutions of 
 learning, from the highest down to 
 the lowest grade; and in most of our 
 Colleges and Universities it is repre- 
 sented by a special professor. Text- 
 books on the English language abound, 
 and so do Manuals and Histories of 
 English Literature, and elaborately 
 annotated editions of selected works 
 of classic authors, poetical and prose. 
 Methods are discussed ad 7iausea?n, 
 almost, in school institutes and educa-
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 47 
 
 tional conventions, and the opinions 
 of prominent educators are solicited 
 by journals of education, as to the 
 best thing to be done for the study 
 of English. 
 
 But the question is far from gratui- 
 tous whether all the means so strenu- 
 ously employed for the end in view, 
 prove correspondingly efficient. They 
 certainly do not. The evidences 
 against such result are too strong to 
 leave much faith in the means em- 
 ployed. And the grand defect of 
 those means may be said to be, that 
 the language and its literary products 
 are not sufficiently studied as living 
 organisms. Words are too much 
 studied as completely significant indi- 
 viduals^ and the study of literary
 
 48 THE AIMS OF 
 
 products is too much devoted to their 
 accidents, and not enough, scarcely at 
 all, indeed, to their substances. Per- 
 haps it is not a rash statement to 
 make, that many teachers think it the 
 prime business of scholastic discipline 
 to deal with accidents. In the words 
 of Chaucer, 
 
 Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, 
 
 and grynde, 
 And turnen substaunce into accident ! 
 
 The lamentable ignorance of the 
 mother tongue which prevails in the 
 lower schools, and not much less in 
 the Colleges and Universities, will 
 not be remedied by the study of 
 text-books on the language, nor by 
 anv amount of technical instruction
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 49 
 
 imparted by the teacher. There is, 
 at present, a superabundance of such 
 study and such instruction; but the 
 results are certainly very far from 
 gratifying. Little or no vital know- 
 ledge of the language is imparted or 
 acquired by these means, and what- 
 ever susceptibility to literature any 
 student might otherwise have, is more 
 or less deadened by petty details, 
 grammatical, philological, and other, 
 and irrelevant matters of every kind, 
 which drink up all the sap of the 
 mind {of?inem sucum ingenii bibtuity as 
 Quintilian says of the treatises on 
 rhetoric, in his time), make impos- 
 sible all continuity of thought and 
 feeling, and shut off all synthetic 
 appreciation. Here is, no doubt, one
 
 50 THE AIMS OF 
 
 explanation of the very limited stock 
 of thought which many students pos- 
 sess, after having been for several 
 years at school. It would seem that 
 thought were not an object in 'liter- 
 ary ' exercises, to say nothing of 
 feeling, but formulae and technical 
 knowledge of various kinds. Students 
 are taught methods, but comparatively 
 few attain unto the proposed objects 
 of the methods, which objects are 
 often lost sight of, altogether, in the 
 gri)id to which they are subjected. 
 It is the merest truism that the 
 leading aim in the teaching of Eng- 
 lish should be, i. to enlarge the 
 student's vocabulary, and, 2. to culti- 
 vate a nice sense of the force of 
 words which constitute a large pro-
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 5 I 
 
 portion of every language, whose 
 meanings are not absolute, but rela- 
 tive and conditional, being variously 
 modified and shaded according to 
 their organization in the expression 
 of thought and feeling; and, 3. (the 
 sole end of i and 2), to speak and 
 write good live English, of the best 
 verbal material and texture, and 
 closely fitting the thought which it 
 clothes. John Philpot Curran once 
 said of an advocate whose language 
 was too big and sounding for his 
 thought, 'it will never do for a man 
 to turn painter merely on the strength 
 of having a pot of colors by him, 
 unless he know how to lay them on. ' 
 These three things can be secured 
 (the capacity for them being postu-
 
 52 THE AIMS OF 
 
 lated) only through an extensive and 
 sympathetic reading of good authors, 
 the subject-matter being made the 
 prime object, and the ne quid nimis 
 being strictly observed in incidental 
 instruction, that the student's thought 
 and feeling be not kept disintegrated. 
 It is in their social life, so to 
 speak, that a large proportion of 
 words must be known, to be truly 
 known. As solitaries, they are more 
 or less opaque, reflect no variety of 
 hue, do not come into relation with 
 feeling. Their radical ideas may be 
 learned from dictionaries, and these 
 are all that the mere word-monger, 
 who makes words an end to them- 
 selves, may know of them. They 
 must be variously organized in the
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 53 
 
 expression of thought and feeling 
 before all their moral potentialities 
 are brought out. 
 
 Take, for example, the word 'moral, ' 
 just used, and see the variety of shade 
 and extension of meaning it admits 
 of, as illustrated by the passages cited 
 from various authors, in the Century 
 Dictionary. Or take the common word 
 'even,' adjective and adverb, as used 
 by Shakespeare, whose varied force, 
 derived from context, is so well set 
 forth and illustrated in Dr. Alexan- 
 der Schmidt's 'Shakespeare-Lexicon.' 
 Shakespeare, as a great expresser, one 
 of the greatest of whom we have 
 record, knew, and had to know, words 
 in their social life, or, rather say, in 
 their inherent capabilities of social
 
 54 THE AIMS OF 
 
 life; for he first brought out, in a 
 very large number of words, those 
 capabilities. He caused them to take 
 on a variety of coloring according to 
 their relationships. But this variety 
 of coloring cannot be adequately 
 presented, really cannot be presented 
 at all, in definitions, however precise 
 they may be. It can be presented only 
 in the passages in the plays in which 
 such words occur. Apart from the 
 passages which illustrate their change- 
 able hues, definitions are barren. 
 
 Such an author as Washington Irv- 
 ing, whose matter is always interest- 
 ing, always delightful, indeed, and 
 whose use of language is so unaffected 
 and free from strain, would be excel- 
 lent for young students. Through
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 55 
 
 such an author, their vocabulary could 
 be enlarged in a most pleasing way, 
 and they could hardly, unless very 
 stupid, get false impressions of mean- 
 ing, from the author's nice use of 
 words. They could also be more or 
 less unconsciously impressed as to the 
 peculiar domains of the Anglo-Saxon 
 and the Latin vocabularies of the lan- 
 guage; for Irving' s writings exhibit 
 everywhere the influence upon his 
 vocabulary of his subject and purpose. 
 According as any composition of his 
 is keyed, so to speak, is there a 
 greater or less proportion of Latin or 
 Anglo-Saxon words. It would be hard 
 to find a Latin word used where its 
 Saxon equivalent, if there is one, 
 would be preferable, or vice versa.
 
 56 THE AIMS OF 
 
 Better is it than a mere conformity 
 to the general advice so often given, 
 to use Saxon words in preference to 
 those of Latin origin, to have a nice 
 sense of the peculiar domains of these 
 two chief elements of the language; 
 and this nice sense can be best 
 derived from the reading of authors 
 who wrote unaffectedly and with an 
 unerring feeling of those domains. 
 
 Furthermore, and moi-e than all, 
 students who should read sympatheti- 
 cally all of Irving' s works, with the 
 requisite guidance and inspiration 
 from the teacher (and a teacher with- 
 out inspiring power should have noth- 
 ing to do with conducting literary 
 studies) could hardly help being 
 wholesomely influenced by the genial
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 57 
 
 personality of the author which every- 
 where informs them. And inspiring 
 power must come from an author's or 
 a teacher's beings and not from his 
 brain. 
 
 Being is teaching, the highest, the 
 only quickening mode of teaching; 
 the only mode which secures that 
 unconscious following of a superior 
 spirit by an inferior spirit — of a 
 kindled soul by an unkindled soul. 
 'Surely,' says Walt Whitman, 
 
 Surely whoever speaks to me in the right 
 
 voice, him or her I shall follow, 
 As the water follows the mooh, silently, with 
 
 fluid steps anywhere around the globe. 
 
 And so, to get at the being of a great 
 author, to come into relationship with 
 his absolute personality, is the highest
 
 58 THE AIMS OF 
 
 result of the study of his works. I 
 have just said, par parenthese, that a 
 teacher without inspiring power should 
 have nothing to do with conducting 
 literary studies. The teacher who 
 unites in himself a fulness of intel- 
 lectual and spiritual vitality, in whom 
 the 'what Knows' and the Svhat Is' 
 work harmoniously together, is an 
 epistle known and read of all his 
 students. The young are quicker, 
 often, to discover such vitality, or the 
 want of it, than adults are. After a 
 recitation or a lecture, they feel their 
 faculties refreshed or dulled, accord- 
 ing to the vitality or non-vitality of 
 their teacher. The inspiring power 
 of personality is quite as much needed 
 in scientific teaching. Many are the
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 59 
 
 men still living, in whom the great 
 naturalist, Professor Louis Agassiz, 
 continues to live, in this world. And 
 they are far superior as naturalists by- 
 reason of what he elicited from them 
 of the 'what Is.' He thus brought 
 them into a deeply sympathetic rela- 
 tionship with the animal kingdom — 
 a relationship which is the condition 
 of sagacious insight. 
 
 I have named Irving as peculiarly 
 adapted to the ends stated; but Eng- 
 lish and ^American literature, it need 
 not be said, abounds in material, 
 poetical and prose, equally excellent, 
 equally informed with the personali- 
 ties of their authors, and fitted for 
 all grades of students in the lower 
 schools.
 
 6o THE AIMS OF 
 
 For range of power, for great 
 diversity of subject, for poetic, philo- 
 sophic, and logical cast of mind, for 
 depth of feeling, for an inspiring 
 vitality of thinking, for periodic and 
 impassioned prose which, running 
 through the whole gamut of expres- 
 sion, is unequalled in English Litera- 
 ture, no more educating author could 
 be selected for advanced students than 
 Thomas De Quincey. A good educa- 
 tion in the language as a living 
 organism, could be got through his 
 writings alone; and his wealth and 
 vitality of thought and feeling could 
 hardly fail, unless opposed by extra- 
 ordinary obtuseness, to excite and 
 enliven, and strengthen the best facul- 
 ties of thought and feeling in any
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 6 1 
 
 reader. How much a student might 
 do for himself, by loyally reading all 
 of De Quincey's Works, as they are 
 presented in Dr. Masson's edition! 
 And by loyally reading, I do not 
 mean accepting everything as gospel, 
 but reading with an undivided intent 
 mind and open heart; in short, giving 
 the best of himself to the author, for 
 the time being. 
 
 Students do not do enough for them- 
 selves, in these days of vast educa- 
 tional machinery. They for the most 
 part confine themselves to the pre- 
 scribed work of the schools. They 
 are, in fact, obliged to do this, in 
 order to keep up with the heterogene- 
 ous class work imposed upon them, 
 and to prepare for examinations.
 
 62 THE ALMS OF 
 
 They have so much to gobble up that, 
 to turn aside to read, in a genial, 
 sympathetic way, a great inspiring 
 author, as they should be encouraged, 
 and allowed an opportunity, to do, is 
 quite impossible. The school bill of 
 fare, with moral dyspepsia in its wake, 
 must be gone through with, mat 
 coeluvi. 
 
 A distinguished Greek professor 
 told me, some time ago, that he had 
 great difficulty in inducing even his 
 most advanced students, to read Greek 
 authors outside of the prescribed 
 course, and added that when he was 
 a boy, at College, he and others of 
 his class, would arrange to read among 
 themselves large quantities of Greek 
 literature, without the knowledge of the
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 63 
 
 professor. I fear such things are but 
 rarely done in these days, not because 
 students are less earnest than they 
 once were (they were never more 
 earnest, perhaps, than they are at 
 present); nor because the best pro- 
 fessors are less inspiring, but because 
 they have not the requisite leisure. 
 The one prime object, I iterate, 
 to be always kept in view, is, that the 
 minds and feelings of students be 
 occupied with the subject-matter, and 
 be diverted from that as little as pos- 
 sible. It may seem to many culti- 
 vated people, who are not conversant 
 with the 'literary' exercises of the 
 schools, at the present time, that to 
 insist upon making the subject-matter 
 the prime object, is quite gratuitous,
 
 64 THE AIMS OF 
 
 such object being with them a thing 
 of course. But it is very far from 
 being gratuitous. There is nothing 
 in literary study which needs so much, 
 at the present time, to be insisted 
 upon. It is perhaps not going too 
 far to say that, in the literary study 
 of the schools, the subject-matter is 
 gene7'ally subordinated to, and its 
 virtue quite nullified by, verbal and 
 syntactical exegesis, and other school- 
 master things, which are dealt with 
 for their own sake. 
 
 It is through the subject-matter, 
 too, that the interest of students can 
 be best maintained (young people are 
 always interested in whatever has life 
 in it, which cannot be so truly said 
 of some of their teachers); and if so
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 65 
 
 maintained, whatever incidental in- 
 struction may be called for (and to 
 be called for, it must be relevant to 
 the subject-matter), will tell the better 
 upon them. But even if relevant, it 
 must not be allowed to divert the 
 current of thought and feeling into 
 standing pools. 
 
 By a close adherence to the subject- 
 matter, a love of thought would in time 
 be induced. There are many learned 
 people who have not attained, witli 
 all their learning, to a love of thought. 
 And one may be painfully learned and 
 yet have an unkindled soul. I have 
 known 'good ' students who were de- 
 cidedly averse to thought. They pre- 
 ferred exercising their minds, or, 
 rather, indulging their minds, in the 
 
 E
 
 66 THE ALMS OF 
 
 minutiae of literary scholarship which 
 demanded little or no mental grasp. 
 They were very laborious in doing 
 nothing. 
 
 (By subject-matter, I should be- 
 fore have explained, I do not mean, 
 simply, the articulating thought of a 
 literary production, poetical or prose, 
 but all that is embodied in the organic 
 shapings of the language — the expres- 
 sion, in its fullest sense, some of 
 which is addressed to, and must be 
 apprehended by, the intellect, some 
 of which is addressed to the suscep- 
 tible nature, and must be sympa- 
 thetically assimilated; — in short, the 
 author's whole vieaning, intellectual 
 and spiritual.) 
 
 Again, reading must not be done
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 67 
 
 in expectation of an examination on 
 details. The teacher might talk with 
 his class familiarly, and encourage the 
 class to talk, about their reading — 
 its subject-matter, of course. He 
 could thus get a sufficient estimate 
 of their varied appreciation, to grade 
 them (if that were necessary); but he 
 should not directly 'examine' them, 
 to determine what each should be 
 'marked,' on a scale of ten, or a 
 hundred, or any other scale which 
 might be adopted in the school. 
 They would then read for the ex- 
 amination, and would thus be more 
 or less shut off from some of the 
 best influences which might otherwise 
 act upon them. 
 
 Examinations are the bane of liter-
 
 68 THE AIMS OF 
 
 ary study, for the reason that they 
 largely determine the character of this 
 study, in the schools. They must 
 deal specially, if not exclusively, with 
 the definite, with matters of fact, and 
 these are accordingly made the main 
 subject of study. Examinations on 
 a play of Shakespeare, have generally 
 nothing to do with the play as a play, 
 with the dramatic action, with the 
 artistic expression in its highest sense; 
 they are rather examinations on Eliza- 
 bethan English, and de onuiibus rebus 
 et quibusdam atiis, except the play. 
 But, as Hamlet says, in quite another 
 connection, 'the play's the thing.' 
 The opinion is prevalent among 
 educators, that clear, definite, intel- 
 lectual conceptions are the only meas-
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 69 
 
 lire of true education; and that in- 
 definite impressions, in order to be 
 educating, must be intellectualized as 
 far as possible; that truly to know 
 really means this. On the contrary, 
 it may be maintained, that in the 
 domain of the spiritual (and to this 
 domain the higher literature primarily 
 l)elongs), it is all important that 
 indefinite impressions, derived, for 
 example, from a great creation of 
 genius, should long be held in solu- 
 tion (to use a chemical figure), and 
 not be prematurely precipitated into 
 barren judgments which have no 
 quickening power. They then cease 
 to have a spiritual action. One should 
 be well cliarged with a great author, 
 through long, sympathetic, Svisely pas-
 
 70 THE AIMS OF 
 
 sive' reading of his works, before any 
 attempt be made at defining, formu- 
 lating, precipitating, which 'refuse the 
 soul its way.' But the tendency is 
 strong in the other direction — so 
 strong as to lead to the attempt to 
 'make square to a finite eye the circle 
 of infinity.' In this respect, the 
 squaring of the circle has not yet 
 been given up. 
 
 We must long inhale the choral 
 atmosphere of a work of genius before 
 we attempt, if we attempt at all, any 
 intellectual formulation of it; which 
 formulation must necessarily be com- 
 paratively limited, because genius, as 
 genius, is transcendental, and there- 
 fore outside of the domain of the 
 intellect. The human spirit can be
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 7 1 
 
 educated only through the concrete 
 and the personal; and these may be 
 said to constitute the vernacular lan- 
 guage of genius. But if this language, 
 in our educational systems, be trans- 
 lated into the abstract, into the lan- 
 guage of the intellect, so far as it can 
 be, its proper function is defeated. 
 The spiritual man is not responsive 
 to the abstract. The word must be- 
 come flesh in order to be spiritually 
 responded to. The response of the 
 intellect to the abstract, does not 
 quicken. 
 
 The intellect should be trained and 
 habituated to clear, distinct, and ade- 
 quate conceptions concerningall things 
 that are objects of clear conceptions. 
 But it must hot be unduly fostered to
 
 72 THE AIMS OF 
 
 the benumbing of the spiritual facul- 
 ties. That such benumbing often 
 results from such cause, is unquestion- 
 able. 
 
 The most practical education (but 
 this, so considered, preeminently 
 practical age does not seem to know 
 it) is the education of the spiritual 
 man; for it is this, and not the 
 education of the intellectual man, 
 which is, must be (or Christianity has 
 made a great mistake) the basis of 
 individual character; and to individ- 
 ual character (not so much to institu- 
 tions, to the regulations of society, to 
 the State, to moral codes) humanity 
 chiefly owes its sustainment. 
 
 There have been men who were, in 
 their time and place, regarded as
 
 LITER.A.RY STUDY. 73 
 
 wholly unpractical. Nobody could see 
 what they were good for in this world. 
 But they really were the most practical 
 men of their generation — the most 
 practical by reason of their contribu- 
 tions to the spiritual life of the world. 
 
 The Lord promised Abraham that 
 he would spare Sodom for the sake of 
 fifty righteous men, and that he would 
 not destroy it for lack of five of those 
 fifty, of ten, of twenty, of thirty, of 
 forty. (Genesis, xviii, 26-32.) 
 
 Perhaps, at the present day, there 
 are cities which might spiritually be 
 called Sodoms, and which are saved 
 from destruction by as small a number 
 of the righteous (in Hebrew phrase, 
 those to whom the Lord speaks, or 
 with whom the Lord is). These are
 
 74 THE AIMS OF 
 
 more than men of sharpened intellects. 
 They have that which is represented 
 as the one source of strength for all 
 the heroes of Hebrew history. The 
 Lord is with them ; that is, their 
 j;/5'/>////'^/ rectification has brought them 
 into a greater or less degree of har- 
 mony with the divine immanence. 
 
 To return now from this digression, 
 and drop down to the suspended sub- 
 ject of examinations: this is the great 
 objection to them in literary study, 
 that they must necessarily be based on 
 the intellectually definite elements of 
 a literary work — on the intellectual 
 articulation of it — and they thus 
 necessarily induce an exclusive atten- 
 tion on the part of students, to these 
 elements, and shut them off, more or
 
 LITER.\RY STUDY. 75 
 
 less, from the life of the work studied. 
 The time must come, it is perhaps in 
 the far future, when literary examina- 
 tions will be through vocal interpreta- 
 tion which will reveal the extent of a 
 student's assimilation of the intellec- 
 tually indefinite elements of a literary 
 work. But there will then have to be 
 higher ideals of vocal culture than the 
 educational world, at the present time, 
 can boast of. 
 
 I have been present at literary ex- 
 aminations which brought out answers, 
 acceptable indeed to the examiners, 
 but which no more evidenced the 
 students' knowledge of the works on 
 which they were examined, than the 
 boy Bitzer's definition of a horse, in 
 the 2d Chapter of Dickens's 'Hard
 
 76 THE AIMS OF 
 
 Times,' evidenced that he knew any- 
 thing of the noble animal he defined, 
 though it was entirely satisfactory to 
 Thomas Gradgrind, the examiner on 
 the occasion, who believed that 'facts 
 alone are wanted in life. Plant noth- 
 ing else, and root out everything else : ' 
 
 'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty 
 teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, 
 four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. 
 Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy 
 countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs 
 hard, but requiring to be shod with 
 iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' 
 
 Hereupon, Mr. Gradgrind said to 
 poor little Sissy Jupe, who had been 
 asked to define a horse, but who, in 
 her trepidation, could not, 'Now, girl 
 number twenty, you know what a horse
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 77 
 
 is.' Yes, she did know, with a ven- 
 geance, if her knowledge was derived 
 from Bitzer's definition. 
 
 Let it not be understood that there 
 is implied in the foregoing remarks, 
 any depreciation of grammatical, phil- 
 ological, rhetorical, or any other kind 
 of instruction for which the work 
 studied affords material. Philology, 
 on its higher planes, is a great 
 science, one of the greatest, indeed, 
 which has been developed in modern 
 times. But it is a science. It is not 
 literature. And in literary study, the 
 only true object of which is to take 
 in the life of the work studied, that 
 object must not be defeated by the 
 teacher's false notions of thorough- 
 ness, which result in his obtruding
 
 78 THE ALMS OF 
 
 Upon the student's attention all man- 
 ner of irrelevant things, even to the 
 utter exclusion of the one thing need- 
 ful. The irrelevant things may have 
 their importance, but they must also 
 have their proper time and place. A 
 man of reputed wisdom once said, 'to 
 everything there is a season, and a 
 time to every purpose (or matter) 
 under the heaven.' It is not in 
 season, for example, for a teacher, 
 while pretending to study, with a 
 class, a poem, as a poem, to 
 
 chase 
 A panting syllable through time and space, 
 Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, 
 To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark. 
 
 And yet such unseasonable things are 
 done, in these philological days, in
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 79 
 
 the name of literary study. If the 
 poem were studied merely as a monu- 
 ment of the language, and the study 
 were called philological, there would 
 be no objection thereto. But when 
 philological study sails under false 
 colors, it does a wrong to what must 
 certainly be considered the higher 
 study, upon which it should never be 
 obtruded, when that study is going 
 on, except where its services are really 
 in requisition; and they rarely are, in 
 strictly literary study. All the philo- 
 logical knowledge which may really 
 be needed, can be found in Webster's 
 International, The Century, Skeat's 
 Etymological, or any other good dic- 
 tionary in present use. 
 
 When a student perfectly under-
 
 8o THE AIMS OF 
 
 stands a familiar word, in a poem, or 
 any other composition he may be 
 reading, to obtrude its etymology, 
 however interesting it may be, upon 
 his attention, is an impertinence pure 
 and simple. For example, every civi- 
 lized, English-speaking boy or girl 
 knows what a sofa is. In the follow- 
 ing passage from Cowper's Task (Book 
 1. vv. 86-88), 
 
 Thus first necessity invented stools, 
 Convenience next suggested elbow chairs, 
 And luxury the accomplished Sofa last, 
 
 the word 'accomplished,' as used 
 here, really needs explanation; but in 
 two different editions of 'The Task,' 
 in my library, prepared for the use of 
 the young, no explanation is given of
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 8 I 
 
 it, but in both, the Arabic origin 
 of 'sofa' is given, in one the ques- 
 tion is asked what other words in 
 English have been derived from the 
 Arabic, and in the other, the student 
 is required to explain 'accomplished.' 
 In the name of all that is reasonable, 
 what has the young student to do with 
 words of Arabic origin, while he is 
 reading Cowper's Task? Uncalled 
 for, wholly unnecessary information is 
 obtruded upon the student's attention, 
 and an explanation is required of him 
 which it was the business of the editor 
 himself to give. 
 
 The true aim of culture is to induce 
 soul states or conditions, soul atti- 
 tudes, to attune the inward forces to 
 the idealized forms of nature and of
 
 82 THE AIMS OF 
 
 human life produced by art, and not 
 to make the head a cockloft for stor- 
 ing away the trumpery of barren 
 knowledge, a greediness for which 
 may increase, does often increase, as 
 true intellectual and spiritual vitality 
 declines. ' Parva /eves capiunt animos. ' 
 Literary knowledge and literary cul- 
 ture are two quite distinct things — so 
 distinct that a student may possess a 
 large fund of the one, and be almost 
 destitute of the other. He may be 
 able to answer any question asked 
 him on English literary biography, 
 or history, or the cheap philosophy 
 of English literature presented in his 
 text-book, or on ten thousand other 
 things merely incident to the litera- 
 ture, without ever having truly assimi-
 
 LITERARY STUDY. S;^ 
 
 lated any single poem or impassioned 
 prose composition; for assimilation, 
 in such case, is largely a spiritual 
 process. Such acquirement has, by 
 itself, no more to do with literary 
 culture, in its strict sense, with the 
 quickening of sensibility, suscepti- 
 bility, impressibility, with a cultiva- 
 tion of an instinctive sense of beauty 
 and deformity, with that aesthetic 
 synthesis which every true literary art 
 product demands (and, in fact, any 
 other form of art product, whether in 
 sound, in color, or stone), than a 
 knowledge of all the contents of 
 guide-books to the great picture- 
 galleries of Italy has to do with an 
 adequate appreciation, that is, assimi- 
 lation, of any one of the masterpieces
 
 84 THE ALMS OF 
 
 contained in these galleries. The 
 art-student who takes one picture to 
 his heart, does more than he who 
 crams himself with histories of art 
 and palavering guide-books. These 
 are all well enough in their way, as 
 are Manuals and Histories of Litera- 
 ture; but when they are made to take 
 the place of, and entirely to exclude, 
 the means and processes by and 
 through which alone true culture can 
 be reached, if reached at all, they are 
 worse than useless, for they tend to 
 benumb, more or less, the faculties 
 addressed by art. 
 
 Fortunately, much of the finest 
 genius of our day is employing prose 
 fiction as its most efficient instrument 
 and form; and students who, in their
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 85 
 
 regular literary studies are fed on 
 husks, can turn, and, it is to be 
 hoped, many of them do turn, in their 
 leisure hours, to great novels which, 
 while being intensely interesting, are 
 instinct with the poetic, are informed 
 with intellect, heart, and conscience, 
 and often grapple with the most se- 
 rious questions of life and destiny. 
 
 In studying a poem with a class of 
 students — a poem, not the material 
 which it may afford for other kinds 
 of study — one very important aim of 
 the teacher should be, to keep the 
 minds of the class up as near as 
 possible to 'the height of the argu- 
 ment' — to the height of the poet's 
 thought and feeling, and to guard 
 against lowering the temperature of
 
 86 THE AIMS OF 
 
 their minds and feelings with chilling 
 commonplace. With this aim, he 
 should carefully avoid loosening, so 
 to speak, more than is absolutely nec- 
 essary, the close poetic texture of the 
 language; for it is all important that 
 the student should become accustomed 
 to think and feel, as far as he is able, 
 in the idealized language of the higher 
 poetry — 'that condensed presentation 
 of thought which leaves a large mat- 
 ter impressed on the mind by a 
 very small number of happily-assorted 
 words.' If this condensed presenta- 
 tion of thought is all resolved, for the 
 sake of making it more easily compre- 
 hended, the student might as well 
 study plain prose of the loosest tex- 
 ture, so far as his poetical culture is
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 87 
 
 concerned. Poetry should be appre- 
 ciated as directly as possible through 
 its own language, and not through a 
 resolution of that language into the 
 language of prose. It is only by 
 meeting as directly as possible the 
 elliptical energy of thought intensified 
 by feeling, that the best play of the 
 student's powers is induced. His 
 mind will, in time, attain to that 
 tension which will cause it to spring 
 over the chasms of a great poet's 
 expression instead of bridging them.
 
 88 THE AIMS OF 
 
 TN annotated editions of poems, de- 
 signed for the use of schools, the 
 word 'supply ' should but rarely appear 
 in the notes. But it crops cut every- 
 where in the analysis-run-mad system 
 pursued by some editors. The stu- 
 dent is everywhere told to supply this 
 and to supply that. Every ellipsis is 
 filled out, every metaphor is resolved 
 into a simile or elaborate comparison, 
 or the student is asked so to resolve 
 it, every Quos ego is completed by 
 giving what the speaker would prob- 
 ably have said if he had not been 
 interrupted, or had not interrupted 
 himself, as Neptune did when he felt
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 89 
 
 he was losing, through indignation, 
 his self-control, and thought it best to 
 compose himself as well as the agi- 
 tated waves (^quos ego — sed niotos 
 prcestat coviponere fliiciiis). 
 
 The habit is thus induced and con- 
 firmed of reading the language of 
 poetry as a foreign language, that is, 
 by mentally resolving it into the more 
 loosely-textured, more familiar, lan- 
 guage of prose. 
 
 Ellipses and interruptions and 
 checked utterances are really a part of 
 the poetic or dramatic expression 
 itself. 
 
 Macbeth, in his soliloquy ('If it 
 were done when 'tis done,' etc., A. i. 
 S. vii.), omits, in his great eagerness 
 for news when Lady Macbeth enters.
 
 90 THE AIMS OF 
 
 the last word of the sentence he is 
 uttering, and this omission has a dra- 
 matic effect which would be lessened 
 if the last word were supplied: 
 
 I have no spur 
 To prick the sides of my intent, but only 
 Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself 
 And falls on the other — How now ? What 
 news ? (See Note 3.) 
 
 It is hard even for the best qualified 
 and most judicious editor of poetry, 
 to observe the ne quid nimis, in his 
 annotations. He may be engaged by 
 a publishing firm to prepare an edi- 
 tion of some poem, for an adequate 
 compensation, and he may desire that 
 the publishers be Gatisfied as to the 
 quantity of editorial matter they get 
 for their money. And so, where the
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 91 
 
 subject-matter, for some distance, does 
 not need elucidrttion, he will be 
 tempted, in order that no page go 
 without its notes, to introduce un- 
 called for etymologies, and other mere 
 obstructions to the current of the 
 student's thought and feeling. 
 
 Students are often required, in the 
 schools, to write out paraphrases of 
 poems — an exercise very much to be 
 condemned. It is a very old exer- 
 cise, but it is certainly none the better 
 for being old. It prevents the mind 
 from becoming conformed to the con- 
 triving spirit of poetic genius, as 
 exhibited in the elliptical and, wholly 
 relatively speaking, inverted construc- 
 tion of poetic language. 
 
 I have in my library 'The first six
 
 92 THE AIMS OF 
 
 books of Tslilton's Paradise Lost, ren- 
 dered into grammatical construction; 
 the words of the text being arranged, 
 at the bottom of each page, in the 
 same natural order with the concep- 
 tions of the mind; and the ellipsis 
 properly supplied, without any altera- 
 tion in the diction of the poem. . . . 
 Designed for the use of our most 
 eminent schools, and of private gen- 
 tlemen and ladies; and also of for- 
 eigners of distinction, who would 
 read this admirable poem with un- 
 derstanding and taste. By the late 
 James Buchanan, author of the Brit- 
 ish Grammar, etc. . . . Edinburgh : 
 
 I773-' 
 
 To read the Paradise Lost in such 
 an edition would be almost as bad
 
 LITEFLVRY STUDY. 93 
 
 as to read it in the 'emended ' text 
 of Dr. Bentley's edition, with all its 
 'wild and unfeeling corruptions.' 
 
 'The words of the text,' says the 
 title of Buchanan's Milton, 'being 
 arranged ... in the same natural 
 order with the conceptions of the 
 mind.' 
 
 'Natural,' as applied to the order 
 of words in a sentence, is a purely 
 relative term, the order being largely 
 determined by the degree to which 
 thought is impassioned or unimpas- 
 sioned. What is really meant by the 
 'natural' order of words, in a sen- 
 tence, in any language, is that which 
 is the usual order; but an unusual 
 order, due to the intensifying effect 
 upon the mind, of strong feeling, is
 
 94 THE AIMS OF 
 
 certainly no less natural — it is, so to 
 speak, more highly natural. We are 
 more familiar with the natural on the 
 lower planes. The question should 
 be whether the so-called inversions 
 (and whatever other features may 
 characterize the diction of the higher 
 poetry and differentiate it from that 
 of plain, unimpassioned prose), be 
 organic, that is, be inr^eparable from 
 the exp?'ession; and if so, they are 
 'natural' — just as natural as the 
 order of the plainest prose. They 
 are the result of formative feeling, 
 and they should be received by the 
 mind of the reader in their organic 
 character, otherwise the special effect 
 resulting from the construction of the 
 language is lost. The effect of
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 95 
 
 Back to thy punishment, 
 False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings, 
 Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue 
 Thy lingering, 
 
 is quite different from that of 'False 
 fugitive, go back to thy punishment, 
 and add wings to thy speed, lest I 
 pursue thy lingering with a whip of 
 scorpions,' as Buchanan puts it, in 
 what he calls 'the same natural order 
 with the conceptions of the mind.' 
 
 The 'natural ' order, then, is a vari- 
 able order, depending largely upon the 
 pitch of the mind and the feelings. 
 
 The order of the words of the angel 
 announcing the fall of Babylon (Rev. 
 xiv, 8, and xviii, 2), is more 'natural ' 
 in the Greek, and in the Latin of the 
 Vulgate, than it is in the King James's
 
 g6 THE AIMS OF 
 
 version, as it expresses more distinctly 
 the dominant idea in the mind of the 
 angel : 
 
 "ETTfiTe;' eweae Ba^vXwv tj fieydXr), 
 
 Cecidit, cecidit Babylon ilia magna, 
 
 Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city 
 
 (xiv, 8), 
 Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen (xviii, 2). 
 
 The Revision gives what is, under 
 the circumstances, the more 'natural' 
 order : 
 
 Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great. 
 
 This, then, is the conclusion of the 
 whole matter: organic forms of lan- 
 guage, to be educating, must be directly 
 apprehended by the mind, and not be 
 rf'dormed by being extenuated (thinned 
 out), disordered, or disarranged.
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 97 
 
 It is all important that in early life 
 concrete standards of poetry be im- 
 planted in the mind and feelings — 
 standards in the form of passages from 
 the great Masters of Song, in which 
 spiritualized thought has reached the 
 ultimate limits of expression, the 
 thought and the feeling having taken 
 on forms which are inseparable from 
 themselves. Abstract standards, in 
 estimating poetry, are of but little 
 worth, if, indeed, they are worth any- 
 thing. And people who need defini- 
 tions of poetry, are generally people 
 who have not experienced much of 
 the thing itself. With those who 
 have, poetry is poetry, and there an 
 end. 
 
 Anyone who, when a child, had his
 
 98 THE AIMS OF 
 
 memor}' well stored with passages 
 from the great poets, and who, later, 
 more fully assimilated them, has 
 within himself a standard far more 
 reliable than any abstract standards 
 he may have been taught — a standard 
 which he will more or less spontane- 
 ously and unconsciously apply, in his 
 reading of poetry, according as that 
 standard has become a part of him- 
 self. The poets whose triumphant 
 expressions he has lovingly assimi- 
 lated, live in //////, according to his 
 assimilating capacity, and he need not 
 consult any objective narrowly formu- 
 lated law, as he has, to a greater or 
 less degree, the higher law which is 
 beyond formulation, within himself. 
 
 I
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 99 
 
 T TOW is the best response to the 
 essential life of a poem to be 
 secured by the teacher from the stu- 
 dent? I answer, hf the fullest inter- 
 pretative vocal rendering of it. (And 
 by 'fullest' I mean, that the vocal 
 rendering must exhibit not only the 
 definite intellectual articulation or 
 framework of a poem, through empha- 
 sis, grouping, etc., but must, through 
 intonation, varied quality of voice, 
 and other means, exhibit that which is 
 indefinite to the intellect. T/ie latter 
 is the ?nain object of vocal rendenng. 
 A product of the insulated intellect 
 does not need a vocal rendering.
 
 lOO THE ALMS OF 
 
 On the part of the teacher, two 
 things are indispensable: i. that he 
 sympathetically assimilate what con- 
 stitutes the real life of the poem, that 
 is, its spiritual element as distin- 
 guished from the intellectual; 2. that 
 he have that vocal cultivation de- 
 manded for a complete and effective 
 rendering of what he has assimilated. 
 He may be able to lecture very bril- 
 liantly about poetry, even about poetry 
 which he has not taken to himself; he 
 may, indeed, have but superficially read 
 what he is lecturing about; his lecture 
 may be largely a rehash of the criti- 
 cism which has gathered around a 
 certain poem, and his hearers may 
 be charmed with his fine talk and 
 made to feel that they have been
 
 LITERARY STUDY. lOI 
 
 introduced in a Yery pleasant way 
 to the poem on which he has lect- 
 ured, and that they really know it. 
 If he is a skilful analyst, he can 
 the more readily convince them that 
 he has put them in possession of the 
 poem, when the fact is, they don't 
 know it at all in its real life. 
 
 If the two indispensable conditions 
 I have mentioned — a sympathetic as- 
 similation on the part of the teacher, 
 and the vocal cultivation demanded for 
 a full and effective rendition of what 
 he has assimilated — if these indispen- 
 sable conditions be not met, he has 
 failed in his duty to his students. He 
 may not know and they may not know, 
 that he has failed in his duty.
 
 I02 THE AIMS OF 
 
 Lecturing about poetry does not, 
 of itself, avail any more, for poetical 
 cultivation, than lecturing about music 
 avails, of itself, for musical cultiva- 
 tion. In both cases, the lecturing is 
 valuable to the extent to which vocal 
 or instrumental interpretation is intro- 
 duced, and in the way of giving shape 
 to, or organizing, what has previously 
 been felt, to some extent, on the part 
 of the hearers; but lecturing must not 
 take the place of inward experience. 
 
 When the high ideal of vocal culture 
 presented in Dr. James Rush's 'Phi- 
 losophy of the Human Voice,' shall 
 have been generally realized in the 
 educational world, there can then be 
 some hopes entertained of securing 
 the best results of literary study in
 
 LITERARY STUDY. IO3 
 
 the schools. A literary examination 
 may then be made to mean some- 
 thing. The student instead of being 
 catechised about the merely intellec- 
 tual articulation of a poem, the occa- 
 sion of its composition, the influences 
 which the poet was under when he 
 composed it, its vocabulary, and a 
 thousand other things, will be required 
 to render it, in order that he may 
 show, through his voice, to what extent 
 he has experienced it within himself, 
 responded to and assimilated what the 
 intellect cannot define or formulate. 
 
 Again, vocal interpretation is the 
 most effective mode of cultivating in 
 students a susceptibility to form (or 
 style, in its only true sense). Form 
 must first be addressed to the feelings.
 
 I04 THE AIMS OF 
 
 By form I mean organic embodiment 
 — that unification of matter and man- 
 ner upon which so much of the vi- 
 tality and effectiveness of expressed 
 spiritualized thought depend. Form 
 maybe mechanical — due to 'imposi- 
 tion of the foreign hand; ' but I speak 
 of form as a manifestation of the plas- 
 tic spirit of a poem, and for such form 
 we must go to the great masters. 
 The literary forms of a period are as 
 good evidence of vitality and power 
 (or the absence of these) as are the 
 thought and spirituality which they 
 embody, for they are inseparable from 
 that vitality. The wonderful dramatic 
 blank verse of Shakespeare is the 
 expression of great creative energy 
 (without the latter it could not have
 
 LITERARY STUDY. IO5 
 
 been produced), as the rhyming coup- 
 let of Pope is the expression of the 
 want of it. It is through organic 
 form that we respond to the moulding 
 spirit; and adequately to voice such 
 form is the most effective mode of 
 securing a response on the part of 
 students, to the moulding spirit. 
 
 The style of any author who has 
 what may truly be called style {le stylc^ 
 c'est rhom/nc), is a manifestation of 
 his personality (see Note 4); and, in 
 order truly to appreciate his style, his 
 personality must be responded to. 
 And such response must be a spirit- 
 ual response. Whatever intellectual 
 analysis be applied, it must be based 
 on what has first been felt to be the 
 moulding spirit. Young students are
 
 T06 THE AIMS OF 
 
 put too soon to the analysis of style 
 — too soon, for the reason that they 
 have not first /^// it; and the conse- 
 quence is that they are thus shut off 
 from assimilating the moulding spirit. 
 Verse, especially, must first be 
 appreciated as an inseparable part of 
 the expression^ that is, felt in its 
 organic character, before it is ana- 
 lyzed, and it therefore needs, more 
 than prose, to be vocally interpreted. 
 The mere scholarship of verse will 
 not induce such appreciation. One 
 may know all the scholarship which 
 has gathered around the subject of 
 prosody, and yet verse may be to him 
 but little more than an artificial form 
 of language, quite separable from the 
 meaning. One may be susceptible,
 
 LITERARY STUDY. IO7 
 
 to a very subtle degree, to organic 
 verse, and know nothing of the scholar- 
 ship; and another may know all the 
 scholarship, and be insensible to it 
 as a conductor of the indefinitely 
 spiritual. 
 
 There is no true estimate among 
 the leaders in the educational world, 
 of what vocal culture, worthy of the 
 name, costs; and the kind of encour- 
 agement which it receives from them 
 is in keeping with their estimate of 
 it. Vocal culture should begin very 
 early, the earlier the better. It should 
 be one of the first things attended to 
 in the primary schools, and should 
 be continued through all grades of 
 instruction up to and through the 
 University. A system of vocal train-
 
 I08 THE ALMS OF 
 
 ing might be instituted in the lower 
 schools which would give pupils com- 
 plete command of the muscles of 
 articulation, extend the compass of 
 the voice, and render it smooth, 
 powerful, and melodious. A power 
 of varied intonation should be espe- 
 cially cultivated, as it is through in- 
 tonation that the reader's sympathies 
 are conducted, and the hearer's sym- 
 pathies are secured. Intonation is 
 the choral atmosphere of reading. 
 
 A systematic and scientific cultiva- 
 tion of the reading voice should be 
 conducted with reference to the ren- 
 dering of the masterpieces of poetical 
 and dramatic literature, as that of the 
 singing voice is conducted with refer- 
 ence to the renderincr of the master-
 
 LITERARY STUDY. IO9 
 
 pieces of music. A boy's voice may 
 be trained for the usual platform 
 spouting; but such training would not 
 serve for the rendering of Tennyson's 
 'In Alemoriam, ' for example, or Mil- 
 ton's Paradise Lost. 
 
 The reading voice demands at least 
 as much cultivation as the singing 
 voice. Perhaps, in most cases, a five 
 years' judicious training of the sing- 
 ing voice would result in greater 
 excellence than a five years' equally 
 judicious training of the reading 
 voice. But what a ridiculous contrast 
 is presented by the methods usually 
 employed for the training of the 
 speaking voice, and those employed 
 for the training of the singing voice ! 
 Dr. James Rush, in his 'Philosophy of
 
 no THE AIMS OF 
 
 the Human Voice,' after characteriz- 
 ing the absurdities of the former, 
 says: 'Then visit a Conservatorio of 
 Music; observe there the elementary 
 outset, the orderly task, the masterly 
 discipline, the unwearied superinten- 
 dence, and the incessant toil to reach 
 the utmost accomplishment in the 
 Singing-Voice; and afterwards do not 
 be surprised that the pulpit, the 
 senate, the bar, and the chair of 
 medical professorship, are filled with 
 such abominable drawlers, mouthers, 
 mumblers, clutterers, squeakers, chant- 
 ers, and mongers in monotony! nor 
 that the Schools of Singing are con- 
 stantly sending abroad those great 
 instances of vocal wonder, who tri- 
 umph along the crowded resorts of
 
 LITERARY STUDY. Ill 
 
 the world; who contribute to the halls 
 of fashion and wealth, their most 
 refined source of gratification; who 
 sometimes quell the pride of rank 
 by a momentary sensation of envy; 
 and who draw forth the admiration 
 and receive the crowning applause of 
 the Prince and the Sage.' 
 
 'If any one would sing,' says Ware 
 ('Hints on extemporaneous preach- 
 ing'), 'he attends a master, and is 
 drilled in the very elementary prin- 
 ciples; and only after the most labori- 
 ous process, dares to exercise his voice 
 in public. ... If he were learning 
 to play on the flute for public exhibi- 
 tion, what hours and days would he 
 spend, in giving facility to his fingers, 
 and attaining the power of the sweetest
 
 112 THE AIMS OF 
 
 and most expressive execution! If 
 he were devoting himself to the organ, 
 what months and years would he labor, 
 that he might know its compass, and 
 be master of its keys, and be able 
 to draw out, at will, all its various 
 combinations of harmonious sound, 
 and its full richness and delicacy of 
 expression ! 
 
 'And yet he will fancy that the 
 grandest, the most various, and most 
 expressive ot all instruments, which 
 the Infinite Creator has fashioned by 
 the union of an intellectual soul with 
 the powers of speech, may be played 
 upon without study or practice; he 
 comes to it a mere uninstructed tyro, 
 and thinks to manage all its stops, 
 and command the whole compass of
 
 LITERARY STUDY. II3 
 
 its varied and comprehensive power. 
 He finds himself a bungler in the 
 attempt, is mortified at his failure, 
 and settles it in his mind forever that 
 the attempt is vain.' 
 
 In all large bodies of students, there 
 are always some who speak well, not 
 by reason of what their Institutions 
 have done for them, but in spite of 
 what they have not done. On impor- 
 tant public occasions, these come to 
 the front — on such occasions as con- 
 tests for prizes in oratory. Commence- 
 ment Days, etc. ; and the Institutions 
 with which they are connected, virtu- 
 ally, if not actually, say. Behold, 
 Ladies and Gentlemen, what we have 
 done for these dear young men ! They 
 are now ready to go forth into the 
 
 H
 
 114 THE AIMS OF 
 
 world, and to express themselves be- 
 fore public audiences with an elegant 
 effectiveness. Their cultivated vocal 
 organs and their graceful limbs will 
 impart a vitality, a power, and an 
 impressiveness, to the social, political, 
 moral and religious principles with 
 which they have been imbued within 
 our walls ! 
 
 It is thus that many great institu- 
 tions of learning practically impose 
 upon the public, lb avoid such 
 imposition, their Presidents should 
 say. Ladies and Gentlemen, the stu- 
 dents who will appear before you, on 
 the present occasion, are the best 
 speakers we have to show; and they 
 were selected, not by reason of their 
 having most profited by the training
 
 UTER.4RY STi^DY. I I 5 
 
 afforded by the Institution (for we 
 have no training worth mentioning in 
 the science and art of speaking), but 
 by reason of their natural aptitude. 
 
 Some such speech the Presidents of 
 our Colleges and Universities ought 
 to make, in justice to some of the 
 young men who are brought forward 
 on public occasions. For is it not 
 an undeniable fact, that the young 
 men who acquit themselves best on 
 such occasions, who hold up what 
 little oratorical reputation their foster- 
 ing mothers enjoy, owe those fostering 
 mothers nothing, for any power of 
 speech they may possess? In that 
 respect, those fostering mothers have 
 been to them little better than indif- 
 ferent, even unkind, stepmothers.
 
 Il6 THE ALMS OF 
 
 Where fostering mothers pretend to 
 do something for their dear children, 
 in the way of vocal culture, they do 
 it in such a niggardly way (by employ- 
 ing, at small salaries, teachers with a 
 very slim outfit for their work, with 
 not even refined voices, perhaps, with 
 no affinities for the higher things of 
 literature, and consequently with no 
 ability vocally to interpret them), that 
 bad is often, if not generally, made 
 worse — and a worse which it is after- 
 wards hard to remedy. In the matter 
 of vocal tniimng, /aci'/is est descensus, 
 \ioyj facilis is shown by the 'studied 
 improprieties of speech ' and action 
 which are sure to result when that 
 training is unintelligent and shallow; 
 seii levocai'e graJum, hie labor^ hoc 
 ot-us est.
 
 LITERARY STUDY. II7 
 
 The verses, in The Rosciad of 
 Churchill, 875-890, in which the elo- 
 cution of the Irish tragedian, Henry 
 Mossop, of the last century, is char- 
 acterized (not altogether justly, how- 
 ever, from the accounts we have of his 
 acting), are quite applicable to the 
 elocution of many unfortunate college 
 students who have been trained on 
 the economical plan above mentioned 
 (see Note 5) : 
 
 Mossop, attached to military plan, 
 
 Still kept his eye fixed on his right-hand man ; 
 
 Whilst the mouth measures words with seem- 
 ing skill, 
 
 The right hand labours and the left lies still. 
 
 For he resolved on Scripture-grounds to go, 
 
 What the right doth, the left hand shall not 
 know. 
 
 With studied impropriety of speech 
 
 He soars beyond the hackney critic's reach;
 
 Il8 THE AIMS OF 
 
 To epithets allots emphatic state, 
 
 Whilst principals ungraced, like lackeys, wait, 
 
 In ways first trodden by himself excels, 
 
 And stands alone in indeclinables; 
 
 Conjunction, preposition, adverb, join 
 
 To stamp new vigour in the nervous line; 
 
 In monosyllables his thunders roll. 
 
 He, she, it, and, we, ye, they, fright the soul. 
 
 But whether the teacher be master 
 or not, of his subject, he is often 
 obliged, generally obliged, to work 
 under such unconquerable disadvan- 
 tages, that no good results can be 
 reasonably expected. Students come 
 under his instruction with the evil 
 results of years of neglected speech, 
 — results which to counteract would 
 require as many more years of the 
 most careful and judicious training. 
 Furthermore, they have had no liter-
 
 LITERARY STUDY. II9 
 
 ary education, in its true sense, i.e., 
 spiritual education, which is not got 
 in the schools; and without such edu- 
 cation reading, which, to be worthy 
 of the name, should exhibit the co- 
 operation in literature of the spiritual 
 and the intellectual, is quite impos- 
 sible. One might exhibit, in his 
 reading, the intellectual articulation 
 or framework of a poem, or any other 
 product of the higher literature, but 
 he would not by merely so doing, 
 realize the true object of reading. 
 The intellectual coefficient can be 
 apprehended through silent reading; 
 the main object of vocalization is to 
 exhibit the spiritual coefficient, which 
 is indefinite to the intellect, and needs 
 to be vocally rendered as much as a
 
 I20 THE AIMS OF 
 
 musical composition needs to be 
 vocally or instrumentally rendered. 
 
 Taken as it stands in the King 
 James's version, whatever the real 
 meaning may be, in the Hebrew, 
 a comprehensive characterization of 
 good reading is found in the 8th 
 chapter and 8th verse of the Book of 
 Nehemiah: 'So they read in the book 
 in the law of God distinctly, and gave 
 the sense, and caused them to under- 
 stand the reading.' 
 
 To read distinctly, to give the 
 sense, to cause to understand (in the 
 Scripture sense), meet all the condi- 
 tions of effective reading. 
 
 I . To read distinctly. ' Words, ' says 
 the Rev. Gilbert Austin, in his Xhiro- 
 nomia,' 'are to be delivered from the
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 121 
 
 lips as beautiful coins newly issued 
 from the mint, deeply and accurately 
 impressed, perfectly finished, neatly 
 struck by the proper organs, distinct, 
 in due succession, and of due weight.' 
 (See Note 6.) 
 
 If one whose words are more or less 
 inhuman, were trained to such an enun- 
 ciation as is described in this passage, 
 he would be even morally elevated. 
 His enunciation would strike in. 
 
 2. To give the sense. 
 
 I have defined literature as the 
 expression, in letters, of the spiritual, 
 cooperating with the intellectual, 
 man, the former being the primary, 
 dominant coefficient. A production 
 of the pure intellect does not belong 
 to the domain of literature proper.
 
 122 THE AIMS OF 
 
 By 'giving the sense,' in reading, 
 is generally meant, the vocal render- 
 ing of the thought-element, which 
 rendering, to be distinct and effective, 
 demands, in the first place, a perfect 
 articulation; in the second place, that 
 all the successive and involved groups 
 of thought be presented with a dis- 
 tinctness of outline, none of them 
 being jumbled together; in the third 
 place, that the relative value of these 
 groups of thought be exhibited by 
 bringing some into the foreground, 
 by a fulness of expression, and throw- 
 ing others back, by employing a 
 greater or less degree, as may be re- 
 quired, of abatement of voice (reduc- 
 tion of pitch and force), of monotony, 
 acceleration of voice, and other means;
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I 23 
 
 and in the fourth place (not to enum- 
 erate other means of 'giving the 
 sense '), by what I will call the slight- 
 ing of certain parts of discourse, 
 uttering them as if they said them- 
 selves, the mind not coming down 
 upon them. The voice should be 
 trained especially upon what may be 
 called background. Emphasis is re- 
 garded by many readers as the all- 
 important thing; but it is really the 
 least important. (See Note 7.) Any 
 untrained voice can emphasize. The 
 difficult thing to do well is the oppo- 
 site of emphasis — the slighting of 
 certain subordinate parts of discourse. 
 Whatever is sufficiently implied, or 
 should be taken for granted, or has 
 been anticipated, and, in short, all
 
 124 THE AIMS OF 
 
 the outstanding relations of the main 
 movement of thought and feeling, 
 require to be slighted in expression, 
 in order that they may not unduly 
 reduce the prominence and distinct- 
 ness of the main movement. Only 
 the well-trained voice can manage 
 properly the background of what is 
 presented; and if the background is 
 properly managed, the foreground will 
 generally have the requisite distinct- 
 ness. When a reader endeavors to 
 make everything tell, he makes noth- 
 ing tell. Ambitious reading often 
 defeats its own end. 
 
 The same principle which Herbert 
 Spencer sets forth, in his admirable 
 article on the Philosophy of Style, 
 as underlying the current maxims of
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I 25 
 
 rhetoric, namely, economy of the re- 
 cipient's attention, must be obserYed in 
 vocal delivery. The reader who keeps 
 his hearers constantly on the qui vive, 
 by bringing everything to the front, 
 soon exhausts their minds; while the 
 reader who so manages the back- 
 ground of what he is presenting that 
 there is, on the part of his hearers, an 
 alternation of tension and relaxation 
 of mind (both being quite sponta- 
 neous and unconscious), may read 
 twice or three times as long as the 
 other, and exhaust the minds of his 
 hearers less. And their impressions, 
 too, from what they have heard, will 
 be much more distinct, and, if the 
 relative values of successive and in- 
 volved groups of thought, and sections
 
 126 THE AIMS OF 
 
 of thought, are nicely exhibited, much 
 more cor7-ect^'\\\ be their impressions. 
 
 A lightsoiiieness of vocal movement 
 ove?' the subordinate parts of discourse, 
 such as induces a spontaneous and 
 unconscious reduction of attention on 
 the pa?-t of the hearers, is one of the 
 most important things to cultivate in 
 elocution. 
 
 When the 'sense,' and only that has 
 been distinctly presented, the more 
 important part of interpretative read- 
 ing has yet to be achieved. In ren- 
 dering spiritualized thought, thought 
 interfused with feeling, the reader 
 must, 
 
 3. Cause to understand. The Scrip- 
 tural use of 'understand' has refer- 
 ence, not to the discursive intellect, but
 
 LliERARV SrUDV. I27 
 
 to the understanding heart ('the great 
 intuitive^ or non-discursive organ') — 
 to a sympathetic appropriation and 
 assimilation of divine truth. So the 
 meaning of 'cause to understand,' is, 
 that the reader must, by his intonation 
 (the choral atmosphere of speech), by 
 the vocal coloring, so to speak, which 
 he gives to spiritualized thought, in- 
 duce, in his hearers, a sympathetic 
 response to the spiritual element. 
 This is, in fact, the all-important 
 thing to be done, in interpretative 
 reading. Thought which is presented 
 in a white light, does not necessarily 
 demand a vocal rendering. A prop- 
 osition of Euclid cannot be enforced 
 by the voice, as there is nothing to be 
 enforced. It is independent, too, of
 
 128 THE AIMS OF 
 
 form. It might be expressed in bar- 
 barous Latin, which the student might 
 have to interpret with the aid of gram- 
 mar and dictionary, and the meaning 
 would be the same as it would be if 
 expressed in the most perfect Greek. 
 But spiritualized thought demands 
 organic form, and can be enforced 
 and rendered more apprehensible 
 through a sympathetic intonation of 
 the voice of a reader who has ade- 
 quately assimilated it. The voice 
 serves as a chorus to call forth, to 
 guide, and to interpret, the sympa- 
 thies of the hearer. 
 
 To read distinctly, to give the 
 sense, to cause to understand, bring 
 into play the three persons of the 
 trinal unity presented in Browning's
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I 29 
 
 * Death in the Desert; ' to read dis- 
 tinctly belongs to the 'what Does; ' to 
 give the sense belongs to the 'what 
 Knows; ' to cause to understand (as 
 I have explained it) belongs to the 
 'what Is; ' and it is the latter, alone, 
 in the reader, w4iich can effectively 
 reach the 'what Is' in the hearer. 
 
 Take, for exam])le, the two follow- 
 ing stanzas from Tennyson's 'Palace 
 of Art: ' 
 
 But in dark corners of her palace stood 
 Uncertain shapes; and unawares 
 
 On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of 
 blood, 
 And horrible nightmares, 
 
 And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame 
 And, with dim fretted foreheads all. 
 
 On corpses three-months-old, at noon she came, 
 That stood against the wall. 
 
 I
 
 T30 THE AIMS OF 
 
 In order distinctly 'to give the 
 sense,' the construction of the lan- 
 guage is such as to require the employ- 
 ment of all modes of grouping (that 
 is, uniting the syntactically connected, 
 but far separated, ideas, and keeping 
 apart those which are not so con- 
 nected. fSee Note 8.) 
 
 The adverb 'unawares' in the first 
 of these stanzas, qualifies 'came,' in 
 the second, they being separated to 
 the extent of five verses; 'came ' is the 
 antecedent of the preposition 'on,' 
 immediately following 'unawares.' 
 The relative clause, 'That stood against 
 the wall,' is separated from its ante- 
 cedent 'corpses,' by the predication, 
 'at noon she came.' 
 
 The dire confusion which has come
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I3I 
 
 upon the beauty-loving soul, seems to 
 be symbolized in the very syntax of 
 these stanzas. 
 
 In order to address distinctly to the 
 ear, the connection of 'unawares ' with 
 'at noon she came,' abatement, that 
 is, a reduction of pitch, force, and 
 expression, must be employed upon 
 what intervenes, and also an acceler- 
 ated utterance (the object of the latter 
 being to connect the related ideas, 
 'unawares' and 'at noon she came,' 
 as soon as possible. To make the 
 words stand out well, the voice must 
 be carried through a wider interval 
 upon 'unawares,' by reason of its 
 remoteness from 'at noon she came,' 
 than would otherwise be necessary; 
 and 'at noon she came ' must be
 
 132 THE AIMS OF 
 
 uttered with an extra force (Dr. Rush's 
 'emphatic tie '), to mark distinctly to 
 the ear its connection with 'unawares.' 
 In the abated portion, the phrase, 
 'with dim fretted foreheads all,' must 
 receive, for nice grouping, a second 
 degree of abatement. After bringing 
 out strongly *at noon she came,' the 
 voice should drift down, in a slighting 
 way, upon 'That stood against the 
 wall.' 
 
 Now the object of this grouping, 
 which the reader, skilled in vocally 
 presenting the anatomy of speech, 
 would do quite spontaneously, is, 
 simply 'to give the sense; ' but the 
 more important part of reading 
 remains to be done, namely, 'to cause 
 to understand,' that is, as has been
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 1 33 
 
 explained, by intonation (which I have 
 called the choral atmosphere of read- 
 ing), by vocal coloring, to induce a 
 sympathetic response (see Note 9) 
 to the dire and awful 'confusion,' 
 described in previous stanzas, which 
 has been wrought in the beauty-loving 
 soul who has shut out Love, and has 
 been in turn shut out from Love, the 
 kingdom of whose thought has been 
 divided, and upon whom 'deep dread 
 and loathing of her solitude ' has 
 fallen. 
 
 I have often thought, when reading 
 that dramatic description of Christ in 
 the synagogue, in the 4th chapter of 
 Luke, that the impression he made 
 on the congregation, was largely, if 
 not altogether, due to his vocal ren-
 
 134 THE AIMS OF 
 
 dering of the passage he read from 
 the book of the prophet Esaias (the 
 passage itself must have been familiar 
 to them all) : 
 
 'And he came to Nazareth, where 
 he had been brought up: and, as his 
 custom was, he went into the syna- 
 gogue on the sabbath day, and stood 
 up for to read. And there was deliv- 
 ered unto him the book of the prophet 
 Esaias. And when he had opened 
 the book, he found the place where it 
 was written, The Spirit of the Lord is 
 upon me, because he hath anointed 
 me to preach the gospel to the poor; 
 he hath sent me to heal the broken- 
 hearted, to preach deliverance to the 
 captives, and recovering of sight to 
 the blind, to set at liberty them that
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 1 35 
 
 are bruised, to preach the acceptable 
 year of the Lord. And he closed the 
 book, and he gave it again to the 
 minister, and sat down. And the eyes 
 of all them that were in the synagogue 
 were fastened on him.' 
 
 It may have been that he read more 
 of what is now the 6ist chapter of the 
 prophet Isaiah, than is recorded. It 
 is a beautiful chapter in our English 
 version; it may have been more beau- 
 tiful in the Hebrew, and Christ may 
 have read it in a half chant, as was 
 probably the custom, in which an 
 indefinite spiritual intonation rose 
 above the definite thought, and mys- 
 teriously touched the souls of those 
 who heard it; reached the innermost 
 recesses of the spirit.
 
 136 THE ALMS OF 
 
 When it is said that 'the eyes of all 
 them that were in the synagogue were 
 fastened on him,' it does not appear 
 that he had yet spoken in his own 
 person. And some of them did not 
 know who he was. It was evidently 
 the effect which his reading had upon 
 them which caused all eyes to be 
 fastened on him. I fancy that an 
 impressive intonation came from the 
 reader's own being — from the spirit- 
 ual consciousness he had of the deep 
 below deep in the meaning of what 
 he read. That he took what he read, 
 as pertaining to himself, his own 
 explicit statement is recorded: 'And 
 he began to say unto them, This day 
 is this scripture fulfilled in your 
 ears.'
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I 37 
 
 I will here repeat what I wrote and 
 published more than thirty years ago: 
 
 Let the earnest student, who knows 
 that good things are difficult, and who 
 strives and labors to realize a lofty 
 standard of vocal excellence, if he 
 find not the living teacher who is able 
 to meet his wants, devote himself to 
 a reverential study of 'The Philosophy 
 of the Human Voice,' by Dr. James 
 Rush. The analysis exhibited in this 
 profound work, will satisfy much of 
 the cilft-iosity of him who desires to 
 read the history of his voice; 'for,' 
 to adopt the words of the learned 
 author, in the introduction to the first 
 edition (1827), 'I feel assured, by the 
 result of the rigid method of observa- 
 tion employed throughout the inquiry,
 
 ZT^8 THE AIMS OF 
 
 that if science should ever come to 
 one consent on this point, it will not 
 differ essentially from this record. 
 The world has long asked for light 
 on this subject. It may not choose 
 to accept it now; but having idly 
 suffered its own opportunity for dis- 
 covery to go by, it must, under any 
 capricious postponement, at last re- 
 ceive it here. . . . Truth, whose first 
 steps should be always vigorous and 
 alone, is often obliged to lean for 
 support and progress on the arm of 
 Time; who then only, when support- 
 ing her, seems to have laid aside his 
 wings. ' 
 
 Dr. Rush, it appears, was led to the 
 study which resulted in this great pro- 
 duct of vocal science, by his hearing,
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I 39 
 
 when a young man, the tragic actress, 
 Mrs. Siddons, in her Shakespearian 
 roles, to whose voice he never refers 
 without the expression of an enthusi- 
 astic admiration. 
 
 In the section of his work, 'Of the 
 Median Stress,' 'the aim and power 
 of which,' he says, *"in the very tor- 
 rent of expression," is to "beget a 
 temperance which may give it smooth- 
 ness," ' he pays the following tribute 
 to the Great Actress, one marked 
 characteristic of whose wonderful voice 
 was 'the median stress,' 'the graceful 
 vanish of her concrete : ' 
 
 'If she could now be heard, I would 
 point in illustration to Britain's great 
 Mistress of the voice. Since that 
 cannot be, let those who have not
 
 140 THE AIMS OF 
 
 forgotten the stately dignity of Mrs. 
 Siddons, bear witness to the effect of 
 the graceful vanish of her concrete, 
 and of that swelling energy by which 
 she richly enforced the expression of 
 joy, and surprise, and indignation. 
 But why should I be so sparing in 
 praise, as to select her eminent ex- 
 emplification of the single subject 
 before us; when it seems to my recol- 
 lection that a whole volume of elocu- 
 tion might be taught by her instances. 
 *It is apparently a partial rule of 
 criticism, but when drawn from deli- 
 cate perceptions, made wise by culti- 
 vation, it is the best, — to measure the 
 merit of Actors, by their ability to 
 give with audible conformity, that 
 same expression of the poet, which
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I4I 
 
 the soul of the hearer is whispering 
 to itself. Such is the rule, which, in 
 my early days of ignorance, but not 
 of insensibility, set up this great 
 Woman's voice as the mirror of poetic 
 feeling; in which one might recognize 
 himself, and love the equal picture as 
 his own. All that is smooth and flex- 
 ible, and various in intonation; all 
 that is impressive in force, and in 
 long-drawn time; all that is apt upon 
 the countenance, and consonant in 
 gesture, gave their united energy, and 
 gracefulness of grandeur, to this one 
 great model of Ideal Elocution. Hers 
 was that height of excellence which, 
 defying mimicry, can be made imag- 
 inable only by being equalled. 
 
 'Such was my enthusiastic opinion,
 
 142 THE AIMS OF 
 
 before a scrutiny into speech had 
 developed a boundless scheme of criti- 
 cism; which while it admits that 
 nature may hold the unrevealed power 
 of producing occasional instances of 
 rare accomplishment of voice; yet 
 assures us that nothing but the influ- 
 ence of some system of principles, 
 arising out of well observed instinct, 
 can ever produce multiplied examples 
 of excellence, or give to any one the 
 perfection of art. There is a power 
 in science which searches, discovers, 
 amplifies, and completes; and which 
 all the strength of spontaneous effort 
 can never reach. I do not wish to 
 be asked, how this " most noble mother 
 of the world " (see Note lo), with only 
 those unwritten rules of genius, that
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 1 43 
 
 Still allowed her to incur the dangers 
 of the scanty doctrines of her art, — 
 would be accounted by the side of 
 another Siddons making her selections 
 of sentiment and taste, from the 
 familiar rudiments and measurable 
 functions of the voice; and able by 
 the authority of an indulgent disci- 
 pline to be a rational critic o\er 
 herself. With a full reliance on the 
 surpassing efficacy of scientific prin- 
 ciples, still in the contentment of 
 recollection, I would not wish to 
 answer this question. 
 
 'The vision of the Great Actress is 
 before me ! If I am beset by an 
 illusion, which another hearing might 
 dispel, I rejoice to think I can never 
 hear her again.'
 
 144 THE AIMS OF 
 
 Note i, Page 31. 
 
 • If it be said that Shakespeare wrote per- 
 fect historical plays on subjects belonging to 
 the preceding centuries, I answer, that they 
 are perfect plays just because there is no care 
 about centuries in them, but a life which all 
 men recognize for the human life of all time ; 
 and this it is, not because Shakespeare sought 
 to give universal truth, but because, painting 
 honestly and completely from the men about 
 him, he painted that human nature which is, 
 indeed, constant enough, — a rogue in the fif- 
 teenth century being, at heart, what a rogue 
 is in the nineteenth and was in the twelfth; 
 and an honest or a knightly man being, in like 
 manner, very similar to other such at any other 
 time. And the work of these great idealists 
 is, therefore, always universal; not because it 
 is not portrait, but because it is complete por- 
 trait down to the heart, which is the same in 
 all ages : and the work of the mean idealists
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 1 45 
 
 is not universal, not because it is portrait, but 
 because it is //a^portrait, — of the outside, tlie 
 manners and the dress, not of the heart. Thus 
 Tintoret and Shakespeare paint, both of them, 
 simply Venetian and English nature as they 
 saw it in their time, down to the root; and it 
 does for all time ; but as for any care to cast 
 themselves into the particular ways and tones 
 of thought, or custom, of past time in their 
 historical work, you will find it in neither of 
 them, nor in any other perfectly great man 
 that I know of.' — Ricskin's ^Modern Painlers.'' 
 
 Note 2, Page 31. 
 
 J. R. Green's * Short History of the English 
 People ' would be preferable to any direct 
 History of the Literature which attempts to 
 philosophize about its relationships. 'It is a 
 history,' says the author, in his Preface, ' not 
 of English Kings or English Conquests, but of 
 the English People. At the risk of sacrificing 
 much that was interesting and attractive in 
 itself, and which the constant usage of our 
 historians has made familiar to English readers, 
 
 K
 
 146 THE ALMS OF 
 
 I have preferred to pass lightly and briefly 
 over the details of foreign wars and diploma- 
 cies, the personal adventures of kings and 
 nobles, the pomp of courts, or the intrigues of 
 favorites, and to dwell at length on the inci- 
 dents of that constitutional, intellectual, and 
 social advance in which we read the history 
 of the nation itself. It is with this purpose 
 that I have devoted more space to Chaucer 
 than to Cressy, to Caxton than to the petty 
 strife of Yorkist and Lancaster, to the Poor 
 Law of Elizabeth than to her victory at Cadiz ; 
 to the Methodist revival than to the escape of 
 the Young Pretender. 
 
 * . . . If I have said little of the glories 
 of Cressy, it is because I have dwelt much on 
 the wrong and misery which prompted the 
 verse of Longland and the preaching of Ball. 
 But on the other hand, I have never shrunk 
 from telling at length the triumphs of peace. 
 I have restored to their place among the 
 achievements of Englishmen the " Faerie 
 Queene" and the " Novum Organum." I have 
 set Shakespeare among the heroes of the
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I47 
 
 Elizabethan age, and placed the scientific 
 inquiries of the Royal Society side by side 
 with the victories of the New Model. If some 
 of the conventional figures of military and 
 political history occupy in my pages less than 
 the space usually given them, it is because I 
 have had to find a place for figures little 
 heeded in common history — the figures of 
 the missionary, the poet, the printer, the mer- 
 chant, and the philosopher.' 
 
 Note 3, Page 90. 
 
 It should be noticed that the third ictus of 
 the verse is wanting : 
 And fdlls I on the 6th | er . . . j How n6w] what 
 
 n6ws ? 
 
 It would be a defect if the third ictus fell 
 upon the first word addressed to Lady Mac- 
 beth. 
 
 A note in a French edition of the tragedy 
 says: ^ falls on the other {side) signifie : elle 
 tombe tout entiere de I'autre cote, au lieu de 
 retomber en selle. Peut-etre faut-il retablir le 
 mot sous-entendu side, ce qui retablit aussi 
 le vers.'
 
 148 THE AIMS OF 
 
 Note 4, Page 105. 
 
 ' Quand on voit le style nature!/ says Pas- 
 cal, in his Pensi'es, ' on est tout etonne et 
 ravi : car on s'attendait de voir un auteur, et 
 on trouve un homme. Au lieu que ceux qui 
 ont le gout bon, et qui en voyant un livre 
 croient trouver un homme, sent tout surpris 
 de trouver un auteur.' 
 
 Note 5, Page 117. 
 
 * His syllables fell from him like minute- 
 guns, even in or-din-a-ry con-ver-sa-tion, and 
 the nickname of the " teapot actor," referred 
 to his favorite attitude with one arm on his 
 hip and the other extended.' — Dr. Doran''s 
 * Annals of the English Slage.^ 
 
 Note 6, Page 121. 
 
 ' Dilucida vero erit pronunciatio, primum, 
 si verba tota exegerit, quorum pars devorari, 
 pars destitui solet, plerisque extremas syllabas 
 non preferentibus, dum priorum sono indul- 
 gent.' — Quintilian, lib. xi. c. 3.
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 1 49 
 
 Note 7, Page 123. 
 
 In the section of his work, '■Of the Faults of 
 Readers^'' Dr. Rush remarks: 'It is not my 
 intention to go into a notice of the faults of 
 emphasis, in the common acceptation of the 
 term. They all resolve into a want of true 
 apprehension on the part of the reader. It 
 should, however, be remarked, that through 
 ignorance of other constituents of an enlarged 
 and definite elocution, which our present in- 
 quiry has taught us to appreciate and to apply, 
 this well-known subject of stress-laying empha- 
 sis, has, in the art of reading, held an importance 
 which, within the narrow school of imitation, 
 has restrictively assumed the very name of the 
 art itself. " How admirably she reads,^' said a 
 thoughtless critic, of an actress, who, with per- 
 haps a proper emphasis of Force, was, never- 
 theless, deforming her part, by every fault of 
 Time and Intonation. The critic was one of 
 those who have neither knowledge nor docil- 
 ity, and therefore deserved neither argument 
 nor correction. Emphasis being almost the
 
 150 THE AIMS OF 
 
 only branch of the art in which there is any- 
 thing like an approach towards a rule of in- 
 struction, this single function, by a figure of 
 speech grounded on its importance, is taken, 
 in the limited nomenclature of criticism, for 
 the sum of the art. Even Mr. Kemble, whose 
 eulogy might have been founded upon other 
 merits, made the first stir of his fame, if we 
 have not been misinformed, by a new " read- 
 ing," that is, by a new application of stress, to 
 some of the words in Hamlet. 
 
 ' We have awarded to the emphasis of stress 
 its due, but not its undue degree of conse- 
 quence ; and perhaps it may be hereafter 
 admitted that much of the contention about 
 certain unimportant points of this stress-laying 
 emphasis, and of pause, has arisen from critics 
 on the drama finding very little else of the 
 vast compass of speech, on which they were 
 able to form for themselves a discriminative 
 opinion, or on which they were willing to 
 expose their ignorance to others. When 
 under a scientific institute of elocution, we 
 shall have more important matters to study
 
 LITERARY STUDY. 151 
 
 and delight in, we may perhaps find that much 
 of this trifling lore of italic notation, which 
 now serves to keep up contention in a daily 
 gazette, will be quite overlooked, in the high 
 court of philosophic criticism.' 
 
 Note 8, Page 130. 
 
 ' The inversions of style, the intersections 
 of expletives, and the wide separation of ante- 
 cedents and relatives, which are allowed in 
 poetry, may be made sufficiently perspicuous, 
 through the circumspection of the mind, and 
 the advancing span of the eye, in the delib- 
 erate perusal of a sentence. But in listening 
 to the speech or the reading of others, we can 
 employ no scrutinizing hesitation; and though 
 the memory may retrace, to a certain limit, 
 the intricacies of construction, the best dis- 
 cernment cannot always anticipate the sense 
 of a succeeding member, nor the nature and 
 position of its pause. The higher poetry, in 
 the contriving spirit of its eloquence, gives 
 many instances of extreme involution of style. 
 A reader, therefore, is frequently obliged to
 
 152 THE ALMS OF 
 
 employ other means, for exhibiting the true 
 relationship of words, besides that simple cur- 
 rent of utterance, which may be sufficient for 
 the clear syntax of a more natural idiom.' — 
 Dr. Rush's ^Philosophy of the Human Voice.'' 
 
 Note 9, Page 133. 
 
 I mean of course, sympathetic in an art 
 sense, a sympathetic response being a repro- 
 duction, within one's self, of feelings described, 
 or exhibited, in a work of poetic or dramatic 
 art. De Quincey, in a note on his use of the 
 word, ' sympathy,' in his essay ' On the knock- 
 ing at the gate, in Macbeth,' says : ' It seems 
 almost ludicrous to guard and explain my 
 use of a word in a situation where it would 
 naturally explain itself. But it has become 
 necessary to do so, in consequence of the 
 unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at 
 present so general, by which, instead of taking 
 it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing 
 in our minds the feelings of another, whether 
 for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approba- 
 tion, it is made a mere synonyme of the word
 
 LITERARY STUDY. I 53 
 
 pity ; and hence, instead of saying, " sympathy 
 with another," many writers adopt the mon- 
 strous barbarism of "sympathyy2?r another." ' 
 
 Note 10, Page 142, 
 
 ' I refer here to the salutation of Corio- 
 lanus to Volumnia : for it is in this character 
 Mrs. Siddons always comes upon my memory; 
 embodying the pathos, the matron dignity, 
 and the indignation, together with the other 
 moral solemnities of the scene of intercession 
 in the Volcian camp.' — Dr. RusJi's N'ote.
 
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