manner of treatment results from a combination of two of these. Pupils can grasp these from the beginning of their study of poetry. The treatment of Snow-Bound is clearly realistic. May it be considered pastoral? Is Evangeline prevailingly romantic or pastoral? Which of the words shall be applied to Gray's Elegy, to L'Allegro, to We Are Seven, to The Highwayman, to Dauber, to The Man with the Hoe? The mood of every poem may be related by the pupils to the period in which it was written, to influences in the career of the poet, but the rise and fall of these as fashions in literary history may be pointed out by the teacher or recognized by the pupils. To take advantage again of every opportunity to prove to the class that school study of verse is the reflection of outside interests, the teacher should show that while realism is the prevailing element in contemporary verse, romantic and pastoral feelings are not dead. If Mr. Masefield is the prototype of realism, Mr. Noyes and Miss Lowell may stand as the singers of romance, while Miss Teasdale keeps alive the pastoral. Teach that form is subordinate to content.-Teachers who are not able to master for themselves and impart to others the essence of poetry will always take refuge in a show of definite knowledge based on recognition and analysis of mere form. In no sense is the form the poetry. A pupil can perform the most amazing feats in remembering rime schemes, in scanning irregular stanzas, in defining kinds of sonnets, in repeating long passages, yet remain untouched by the primal beauty, unmoved by the glorious thrill, unresponsive to the imaginative stimulation, rigidly immobile to the transforming message of sublime poetry, exactly as a child can analyze and manipulate involved sentences without ever correcting the inaccuracies in his own speech. Form is not to be disregarded in the simplest verse; the eye must see its structure, the ear must hear its rhythm, meter, and rime, but behind these externals, beyond this apparent visual entity, there is the essence of the poetry which must flash from the printed page and the delivered words through the eye and ear into the deepest consciousness of the pupil. It is no exaggeration to assert that a child should be changed by intimacy with The Vision of Sir Launfal, though mature minds should be able to realize why that composition ranks low in the scale of poetic achievement. Study of Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead, and The Story of a Round House should so impress the poignant pathos of these masterpieces upon the sensitive feelings that all life should be a larger, fuller, more noble experience. Milton's sonnet on his blindness should never fade from memory, nor should "the poetry of earth is never dead." Nature should be more beautiful because poets have shown pupils what unceasing delights it provides. Even cities may be seen with newly opened eyes after one has read Written on Westminster Bridge, In Lady Street, and The Barrel Organ. Poets have made autumn and winter as glorious as spring and summer. Shelley's poem will change the aspect of the clouds, and Wordsworth's lines have made both solitary violet and single star mean more to their beholder. Red poppies mean more to the reader of poetry than to the ignorant person. Trees are more beautiful when we realize who alone can make them. It is upon the contents, the meaning, then, that the emphasis must be placed in all teaching of poetry. Exercises. See page 348. CHAPTER V The appeal of the dramatic form.-Next to the highest form of lyric poetry, drama is the most difficult kind of literature to teach well in high school. Many a teacher believes he is presenting the form effectively because the class seems to attack it with enthusiasm, to enjoy the passages read, and to be able to answer a few leading questions almost accurately. Yet if he will conscientiously scrutinize his work and its results he may be forced to admit that he is accepting a show of knowledge and appreciation for the things themselves, that for the results he secures he consumes too much time and energy, and that so far as permanent patronage of good plays is concerned, intentions are never carried into action, that later discussions show an ineradicable confusion of dramatic art with screen photographs. Fortunately for all teachers of English the very essence of dramatic presentation appeals to pupils. It appeals not only to young persons; observation will report as keen enthusiasm in any group or organization from city club to church over the prospect of performing a play. Young persons are a little more naïve in their outbursts of delight and more mobile in assuming rôles, but not because of youth are they more interested in dramatics. They are more ready to translate into action the inherent dramatic sense possessed in varying degrees by all persons. The difficulty of teaching drama.-The difficulty of teaching drama-as differentiated from merely reading itlies first of all in its highly specialized form. A page of a printed play has a totally different appearance from that of every other form of literature. It is easy to say that dialogue occurs in prose fiction, but the absence from the page of the familiar marks, phrases, arrangements, and explanations, confuses the high school pupil who meets a play for the first time. You can test yourself for the reverse of this by looking at a few of the printed plays by Sir James M. Barrie, in which preliminary casts of characters are omitted, stage directions are printed in ordinary type, quotation marks are used, and speeches are not labeled with the names of characters. Until you become accustomed to this hybrid formneither prose fiction nor drama-you are likely to be ill at ease as you read. The second difficulty lies in the restriction of time and place, although a few minutes' discussion will open the way for fuller understanding of these limits. The third difficulty is dependent upon the retirement of the author from the action. This seems so obvious to mature and trained readers that they are likely to overlook the adjustments necessary for the pupil who in fiction has been told such things as what a character thought, what he intended to do, what he dreamed, how he felt, what impression a remark made upon him, what even his appearance was, and how he behaved under circumstances in which he said nothing. Notice that these remarks when applied to a novel are rightly in the past tense; when applied to a play they should be in the present tense. The play must live in the present before our eyes. Until it does, the reader, the teacher, the pupil is not grasping the drama. Unless the pupil does see the action actually going on before his mind's eye, all teaching no matter how carefully prepared and energetically conducted is a flat failure. Mr. William Gillette, the finished American actor, expressed this difficulty better than any one else when he wrote that the e! printed book is not the play-it contains merely the directions for a play. Until the characters live, move, speak, act, e feel, there is no play, exactly as there is no music if the printed sheets merely lie upon the music rack. Only the musician's hands and the singer's voice can produce from those black and white directions the living music. There comes into being a play only when the teacher's guidance and the pupils' imaginations create the real drama from the directions provided upon the pages. The greatest difficulty produces the greatest benefit.This leads to the statement of the next element of difficulty, although its recognition and solution produce the greatest single benefit derived from the study and reading of playsthe awakening of the imagination. Countless mature persons of more than average intelligence do not care to read plays; many of them frankly declare they cannot get much from the form. They do not know how to make their imaginations function properly to receive the delight of a dramatic masterpiece. They are shutting themselves off from an entire section of great literature, for as the theatrical production of the world is controlled now, they will have few opportunities to see upon the stage the most worthy dramas extant and those being written. The responsibility of the teacher, therefore, grows with the need and opportunity for the proper presentation of dramatic material to all his classes. Base teaching upon knowledge of the stage. So the last difficulty becomes apparent. Plays can be studied only be superficially when teacher and pupils know little or nothing be about the stage, its traditions, methods of production, schools of acting, differences of interpretation; yet without some knowledge of all these, how can a play be studied as drama? Let me cite a simple illustration. A boy had been asked to read a few one-act plays in order that a class might select one to present. In his report he described a clever |