Greenfield High School - Bulletin Yearbook (Greenfield, MO)

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iff 1 f Tiazr.-.-sfirfflerl-fJi'iS2?f'ff2'1f1 ff--21+ 'I ' l l E l l l l l l 5 A I l l l l I PROF I N EVRARD Former Superlntenoent of Greenfield Hlgh School Now Instructor 1n Englleh M1seour1 Valley College Marehall MISSOUYI - . . - , ' . 1 ' . , L - , i ' , n , . l .

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Books, and the Reading of Them. I. N. Evrard. - F making books there is no end, and the reading of them is incessant. And this pro- digious quantity of stuff called books and the perusal of it called reading have be- come so much a part of our lives and take so much of our nerves and our money , that we may well stop in the rush for a short while and take note of what we read and how we read. We may profit by going even further in this investigation and, by noting the ancient landmarks our fathers have set, determine, in some measure, how far we have gone in the road of progress-if, indeed, we have gone that way at all. Time was when, in our schools, reading was taught as a matter of pronunciation and punctuation. Moreover, the pronunciation was syllabification and the syllables meaningless sounds. Punctuation was a matter of pauses, purely mechanical, and woe unto the pupil who failed to count one at a comma, two at a semicolon, three at a colon or failed to come to a full stop and let his voice fall at a period. This was oral reading. True, no other kind was taught. And what was taught never touched upon the meaning of the sentence, the in- terpretation of the thought. Definitions were learned-I could quote some of them now. But, while I have become familiar with many of the words defined, most of the definitions are stowed away with other incomprehensible rubbish then acquired. Some formal English was taught, too, the most striking element of which was false syntax. Rightly named. It was false-perniciously so. By and by, a wise man came out of the east who sounded the 'clarion note that inter- pretation is the important thing in the study of literature. He asserted true syntax may be studied as profitably as false syntax. He even had the temerity to suggest that discourse is not an ebullition that gushes spontaneously from the pen of genius, but that in this, as in other creative work, there is no excellence without labor, that this labor must be well plan- ned and faithfully excuted, thatlthe laborer in this field must be one who looks out upon the Worldiand comprehends the wisdom and the joys and sorrows of men and penetrates the re- cesses of the human heart. Then, the pendulum of fads-that pendulum that dictates the clothes we shall wear, the thoughts we shall utter, and, in some degree the very affections of our heartse-swung to the opposite extreme. Literature, or the study of it, became interpretation' 'with a. ven- geance.. Little-souled individuals began to impartmeanings to to the utterances of the mas- ters, and, that no mistakes might be made, the masterpiece was torn to shreds, the shreds to fibres , and these fibres reduced to microscopic atoms, which were placed under the glass of criticism and viewed by all who would comprehend. Time plans were made of Shakespeare's plays that the Bard of Avon himself would not have recognized, purposes were imputed that must have disturbed the sleepers in the silent city of the dead, who were supposed to have originated them. Nor did these directors of reading stop here. In order that every mind might be disabused of error, they assumed the responsibility of showing what was wrong with the creations studied. They criticized lVIacaulay's paragraphs, Eliot's character devel- opment, and '1'ennyson's verse, notwithstanding each of these is an acknowledged master in the particular work mentioned. And this, all of it, with the avowed purpose of creating a love for literature. I have spoken thus fully of the old way and the new because we have all profited or suffered by each. Both methods have been in vogue in recent years, and are, in modified forms, in vogue now. When I see at work the more recent 'multiplication table method of teaching literature, when I see the cold, clammy hand of a 'modern dissector of soulfulness picking out, piece by piece, the organs of a once lthrobbmgbeing being, or pointingout a better way to create the soul of a work that has thrilled the ages, Irejoice that I was brought up under the old regime. We dccry vivisection'-perliaps with good reason-but no vivisec-