Greenfield High School - Bulletin Yearbook (Greenfield, MO)

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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-

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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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as 4 4- Q, K H-W - - y W.-W-.--.--.--..--W -- ilili tionist ever claimed that the work of his laboratory is intended to beget a love for the dog. In the old days we were at least allowed to loiter along the highway, to behold the scenes created by the master, to inhale the delicious odors suggested by the scene, and to drink in the inspiration that comes from contact with truth as mterpeted by one who held communion with nature and with God. Or, to change the figure, we saw the whole magnifi- cent building at once, and, however imperfect the vision, it was better than that of the near- sighted man who beholds only one column or pilaster at a time, passes on to a window or a square foot of fresco, and finally tries to sum up the -whole from his contracted vision of its arts. A P The change in the books we read has not been less striking. When we were children '-just a few years ago-Louise Alcott's sweet, wholesome stories were the classics of child- hood. When we laid them aside-not one whit worse for what has been termed their senti- mental gushi'-we picked up the genial narrative poems of Longfellow, J. G. Holland, or the novels of the latter. Washington. Irving had a place in every family library, and we wander- ed with him through the hallowed corridors of Westminster Abbey, viewed the Alhambra by moonlight, or gamboled over the hills and through the sleepy hollows . of the Catskills. We smiled at the quaint humor of Oliver Wendell Holmes and lived with David Copperfield so in- timately that We recognized Creakle when we went to school in the morning. We tried to induce Little Emily to play on the beach with us and to gather shells-which were hickory nuts in the woods. We were certain that that other boy was a James Steerforth. Urith Heep was a. stubby haired, clammy handed villain whom we recognized by intuition then and frequently see now. Many were the times we met Agnes Wickfield and-little did it matter to us that we saw her in many different faces--so true did Dickens paint virtuous womanhood. Naturally we read some light literature, but through allp that we read there ran a vein of virility and it was all sustained by the stamina of truth. i . But one fair May morning at Manilla Bay, Dewey sent to the bottom of the sea the iieet that stood for Castilian glory in the orient and for the old ideas in the West. We awoke to the fact the old order changeth, yielding to the new. We began to expand, and the expansion wrought wonders with our consciousness. When we heard from San Juan Hill and Santiago, and of the gallantry of the sons of New York fighting side by side with the cow- boys of the plains and the lads of Dixie Land, we felt the could never again do small things, for our republic had grown to the fullness of manly power. , e . ' Coincident with the Spanish- American War came Richard Carvel and David Hamm, two hundred thousand strong, and we took took them to our bosonis that were 'throbbing with an ineffable sense of greatness. Others came, whole troops of them, until Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch reached the climax by handing out nearly nine hundred thousand vol- umes, all 'of which we read eagerly, and .clamored for more. It is, indeed, terrific'-the pace we have set in producing and reading books since that rfarfoff date in history, May lst, 1898. Practically all of the literature ,now produced in our country is fiction, which,'to avoid drawing fine distinctions, I shall call novels, and practically all that is read by our boys and girls is novels-good novels, bad novels, and seemingly indiiferent novels. But, whatever kind of novels, they are badly read. True reading is an active process requiring intellectual activity under control of the will. Much of the present day reading not only never engen- ders a thought, but positively destroys the power to to think. The average boy leans back in his chair, his feet on a level with his cranium, and surrenders himself to the book: while his sister relines on the sofa, fixes her eye on the page, andlapses into dreainland. Instead of taking possession of the book, they allow the book to take possession of them and to de- stroy their ability to assimilate. To, use Bacon's figure, they swallow ,everything without mastication. I A I Q ' .One thing I do not careto do: that is, to attack the novel as a piece of literature. It is a new and strange creature that has come into the literary world, developed almost whol- ly during the nineteenth century, but it is a lusty youth, and has many graces distinctively its own. I am inclined to look upon it not as of illegitimate birth, but rather as the heir to all the ages in foremost files of time. It is the one literary form that is characteristic of modern civilization. In it is fixed an objective point, to reach which detail is subdued, truth