22 LITEKAEY VALUES 



living thing itself. If the teacher, by his own liv- 

 ing voice and an occasional word of comment, can 

 bring out the soul of a work, he may help the stu- 

 dent's appreciation of it ; he may, in a measure, im- 

 part to him his own larger and more intelligent 

 appreciation of it. And that is a true service. 



Young men and young women actually go to col- 

 lege to take a course in Shakespeare or Chaucer or 

 Dante or the Arthurian legends. The course be- 

 comes a mere knowledge course, as Professor Corson 

 suggests. My own first acquaintance with Milton was 

 through an exercise in grammar. We parsed " Par- 

 adise Lost." Much of the current college study of 

 Shakespeare is little better than parsing him. The 

 minds of the pupils are focused upon every word 

 and line of the text, as the microscope is focused 

 upon a fly's foot in the laboratory. The class prob- 

 ably dissects a frog or a star-fish one day, and a 

 great poet the next, and it does both in about the 

 same spirit. It falls upon one of these great plays 

 like hens upon a bone in winter : no meaning of 

 word or phrase escapes it, every line is literally picked 

 to pieces ; but of the poet himself, of that which makes 

 him what he is, his tremendous dramatic power, 

 how much do the students get ? Very little, I fear. 

 They have had an intellectual exercise and not 

 an emotional experience. They have added to their 

 knowledge, but have not taken a step in culture. 

 To dig into the roots and origins of the great poets 

 is like digging into the roots of an oak or a maple, 

 the better to increase your appreciation of the beauty 



