24 The Place of Literature in Education

Huxley, in one of his essays, defines education as the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature. By Nature he means not merely things and their forces; but men and their ways; and a knowledge of Nature implies by inference the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. This definition of education is comprehensive; it includes both science and literature. While Science concentrates on facts and inquires into the secret laws in conformity with which they behave to their scheduled capacity, literature deals with men and women and lays bare the passions and ideals that control them. Huxleys nature is all embr^cive; it comprises both man and the objective world. The world, adds he, is a chessboard in which the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe. God or the sleepless, unerring Player across the table is hidden from our view. But we know that He who always plays fair draws with those of us who play well but checkmates those others who play 111 - quickly and without pity. Both the artist and the scientist point to the same end, that is to say, a knowledge of the, universe though their methods be different. Literature, which is, like Science, a gateway to knowledge, is an elastic term; it includes poetry, drama and fiction, essays and criticism, biography and autobiography, besides many a hybrid that dodges, classification. If education means, as it should, the building up of character, each one of the different literary types has a profound educative value; it brings out many of the latent faculties of the human mind and helps it to reach its full stature. Imagination, says Napoleon, rules the world. Nothing is a greater fillip to the imagination than poetry. It is a mistake to suppose that the poetic fancy always loves to dwell in the cloudland behind the rainbow, scornful of the ground. There are no^ doubt poets like Shelley whose poetry is full of impossible idealism. Prometheus Unbound \s a four-act drama by Shelley; its leadirig idea is the perfectibility of man or the possible emancipation of mafvfrom all kinds of bondage, social and political. But this ideal, which is obviously inspired by the French Revolution, is swathed in such ethereal imagery that it becomes at most points vague and seems to bear more than one interpretation. Again, Shelleys Skylark is symbolic of the poets own aspiration after an ideal world which is difficult to reach. But there are other poets - and their name is legion - which stimulate the imagination to nobler and more practical ends. The entire poetry of Wordsworth is dominated by the conception of Nature as law and impulse. As impulse, Nature intoxicates and inspires, and as law she restrains and controls. When we stand at the foot of a mountain and look at the hills rising behind and above one another like an amphitheatre or behold the sunrise from Shakarpariah in Islamabad, we feel no doubt intoxicated. But soon do we realise that we must revise and correct our first sensations of maddening joy and correct them into finer atoms of spiritual energy. This is the moral which Wordsworth, the sage of Rydal Mount, points in his poem Three Years She Grew, it underlies his Tintern Abbeyand the rest of his poetry of nature. Scotts ballads inspire us with patriotism; Keats poetry brings home to us the truth:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Byrons panegyric on the Isles of Greece in Don Juan stirs the historical imagination. No education is complete that does not develop an insight into human nature. If nature is great, human nature is greater. Character in relation to circumstances, man as the sport of Fate, passions and their impact on human destiny and the countless little humours of life at all levels, from the serious and the grave to the light and the gay, are the staple of both drama and fiction. Lear, Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet are, as everybody knows, the four great tragedies of Shakespeare. Each as a study in one of the deepest passions of human nature. Wild ambition brings about the fall of Macbeth; unreasoning jealousy lead Othello to ruin; and Lear is the victim of filial ingratitude. HamletIs the tragedy of a thoughtsick person in an intensely practical world, of a square peg trying desperately to fit into a round hole. You must be practical like Fortinbras and must not be unpractical like Hamlet, if you are to face out the stem realities of life. And even as you fight out the problems of life, you must have faith in a divinity that shapes our ends from behind the screen. This seems to be the final appeal of the great tragedy of Shakespeare. One sees then how the commonplace argument that the study of literature makes men dreamy and sentimental admits of an easy and complete refutation. The old English atmosphere of Lear, the old Scottish atmosphere of Macbeth, the old Danish atmosphere of Hamlet and the Renaissance Italian atmosphere of Othello do not make the problems of the Shakespearean tragedy either parochial or antiquated; they are of neverfailing, perpetual interest. There is nowhere a subtler analysis of human motives than in the psychological fiction of Hardy, George Eliot is simple. Silas Marner, a handloom weaver, lives a lonely life in Raveloe. His one emotion is love of gold and his one pleasure is the handling of that gold after his day is over. One stormy evening in November, all his gold is stolen. But on New Years Eve, he finds a little golden-haired girl crawling in_o,his cottage. Silas adopts the giri whom he calls Eppie and finds peace in life. It is one of the remarkable little novels of the Victorian Era that emphasises once again what the bible teaches: man does not live by bread alone. If Silas loses his gold, he establishes a vital human contact and realises himself through love and self-sacrifice. In a word, it is a story of loves triumph over Mammon. Hardy paints human actions as growing out of circumstances which are beyond control. Meredith in his novels like The Ordeal of Richard Feveral and The Egoist exposes the shortcomings of human nature which constitute the stuff of all that is comic in life. The historical novels of Scott, Dumas and conjure up as with the magicians wand the glories of the dead past that gives up its dead only to the creative artist. The stories of Tolstoy and the rest of the Russian novelists, who have a keener sense of the real, unfold the moral significance of trivial events, making the peasant and the prisoner the texts of a deep philosophy of life. Again, as we jostle along the street of men and women we delight in noting the analogues of the humours of London life in the Victorian age which Dickens has caught for all time in his Pickwick Papers. These are, to be sure, no small gains form the point of view of mental discipline. It is sometimes urged that the method of science is reason while the method of literature is imagination. This is certainly a narrow view. The scientist needs imagination to the same extent as the man of letters. Without imagination, no scientist can discover the laws of nature as, without reason, literature would become the loose talk of a lunatic. Who has not read Carlyles Heroes and Heroworship. In these lectures, Carlyle presents before us a whole array of great figures as they emerge out of myth and history - Odin, Shakespeare, Dante, Luther, 3ohnson and Rouseau. Heroes, prophets, representatives or immortal types of humanity - call them what you will, they restore to us the oft-forgotten high ideals of life, instinct

with, moral energy and free of cant. Carlyles teachings are mainly two: first, history is a biography of great men and, secondly, might is right. By might, Carlyle of course means moral, not physical, force. The first lesson, which is a half-truth, emphasises the meaning of personality in history, while the second, which is a whole truth, forces on our attentions the moral order of the universe. Carlyles reason is not dry like that of the logician; it is dissolved in emotions. Next come biography and autobiography. While at school, we read Longfellows lines: Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, . And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time. When we read now Lockharts Life of Scott and Boswells Life of Johnson, two of the best biographies in English literature, those lines of the American poet acquire a deep meaning. Against an illuminating background of table-talk and anecdotes, Samuel Johnson stands out in bold relief as a great moral figure in an age of low morals. Clear your mind of cant - that was message to the world. Often and often have great men of action derived strength and inspiration from literature. Gladstone, one Englands famous

Prime Minister, was a fine classical scholar. Literature, says Carlyle, is the thought of thinking souls; the mind that feeds on it is both well trained and well stored.