deemed the question improper. I visited the eleventh recitation in Othello in a
high school class of nineteen pupils, not one of whom knew how the story
ended, so intent had they been kept on its verbiage. Hence, too, has come the
twelve feet of text-books on English on my shelves with many standard works,
edited for schools, with more notes than text. Fashion that works from above
down the grades and college entrance requirements are in large measure
responsible for this, perhaps now the worst case of the prostitution of content to
form.
Long exposure to this method of linguistic manicuring tends to make students
who try to write ultra-fastidiously, seeking an over-refined elaboration of petty
trifles, as if the less the content the greater the triumph of form alone could be.
These petty but pretty nothings are like German confectionery, that appeals to
the eye but has little for taste and is worse than nothing for the digestion. It is
like straining work on an empty stomach. For youth this embroidery of details is
the precocious senescence that Nordau has so copiously illustrated as literary
decadence. Language is vastly larger than all its content, and the way to teach it
is to focus the mind upon story, history, oratory, drama, Bible, for their esthetic,
mental, and above all, moral content, as shown in the last chapter. The more
unconscious processes that reflect imitatively the linguistic environment and that
strike out intuitively oral and written vents for interests so intense that they must
be told and shared, are what teach us how to command the resources of our
mother tongue. These prescriptions and corrections and consciousness of the
manifold ways of error are never so peculiarly liable to hinder rather than to help
as in early adolescence, when the soul has a new content and a new sense for it,
and so abhors and is so incapable of precision and propriety of diction. To hold
up the flights of exuberant youth by forever being on the hunt for errors is, to
borrow the language of the gridiron, low tackle, and I would rather be convicted
of many errors by such methods than use them. Of course this has its place, but it
must always be subordinated to a larger view, as in one of the newly discovered
logia ascribed to Jesus, who, when he found a man gathering sticks on Sunday,
said to him, "If you understand what you are doing, it is well, but if not, thou
shalt be damned." The great teacher who, when asked how he obtained such rare
results in expression, answered, "By carefully neglecting it and seeking utter
absorption in subject-matter," was also a good practical psychologist. This is the
inveterate tendency that in other ages has made pedagogic scribes, Talmudists,
epigoni, and sophists, who have magnified the letter and lost the spirit. But there
are yet other seats of difficulty.