Art principles in literatureDonnelly, Francis P. (Francis Patrick)
Philosophy
Art principles in literature
Donnelly, Francis P. (Francis Patrick)
Aesthetics; Literature
The final outcome of the baneful influence of the scientific atmosphere
is the almost complete perversion of the good old word, scholar. No
one can lay claim now to the title scholarly, unless he is equipped
with a formidable array of facts and figures. He must bristle with the
fretful quills of half a hundred sciences. In the study of the classics
he is so busy with the words of the text that he has not time for their
meaning. When he has settled the conflicting claims of innumerable
variant readings and all the arguments for the same, he has no leisure
left for the old-fashioned practice of trying to appreciate the accepted
reading. Scholarship is now a matter of memory, a something that deals
with introductions, footnotes, excursuses and critical apparatuses. Plead
guilty to an ignorance of all this, and you may be indulgently permitted
to call yourself judicious, appreciative, discerning, capable of enjoying
a literary masterpiece, but you could not presume to call yourself
scholarly. Justin McCarthy, in an article about his old schoolmaster,
alludes to the same fact. “I never knew a scholar,” he declares, “so
thorough who was less of a pedant, but I ought to say, perhaps, that the
general character of his teaching was not what would be called in our
days scholarly.”
This steady elimination of the subjective element of education with
the corresponding development of the objective side during the years of
the nineteenth century, all tended to the extinction of the individual.
Another factor also coöperated in achieving this result. The classes in
school and college grew more numerous, and the schoolmaster became in
turn a teacher, a professor, a lecturer. With each change he drew further
away from his hearers. The greater the audience the weaker the personal
note, the less individual the expression. The lecturer on a classical
author must stray more from the text than the teacher. He is necessarily
more general and hence more impersonal. He feels bound to give facts more
than impressions. He is committed to the formulating of theories based
on a dissection of the text, and shrinks from setting forth the feelings
which a masterpiece excites. The lecturer tends to subordinate the author
to his lecture, where the teacher’s more humble lot leads him to efface
himself in the presence of the author.
This leads us to set forth the proper attitude of the teacher toward
the text, and we could not begin the discussion better than by giving a
further description of Justin McCarthy’s old schoolmaster.
“I have,” he wrote, in March, 1899, “the most delightful and
tender memories of my dear old schoolmaster in Cork. He was
not, indeed, the first schoolmaster I ever had, but he taught
me all or put me in the way of learning all that I have ever
known, and after this long lapse of time I feel as strongly as
ever how much I owe him. His name was John Goulding, and he
kept a school in the city of Cork, my birthplace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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