It is infinitely better that a child’s school life provide him with a capacity for the enjoyment of literature than that he have a technical knowledge of a few pieces of literature, because the latter endows him with a narrow, academic viewpoint, while the former makes possible a future growth, without a capacity for which life must be narrow and one-sided. A boy or girl may know that Shakespeare wrote _Twelfth Night_ or _Macbeth_, that Milton created “The Hymn to the Nativity” or Shelley “The Skylark,” be able to paraphrase each and analyze the sentences that comprise them, and not be a bit better fitted for life than he would be without that knowledge. But he is better equipped for life if he has acquired a capacity for the enjoyment of literature, so that to read a great book gives him pleasure or causes him to respond with sympathy, and the English teacher who does not develop this capacity in children has failed in his function.
The approach to the great field of literature must be through specific examples, just as the approach to an understanding of art or architecture must be through the canvases of Raphael, Cimabue, or Giotto, or the temples that were the triumphs of Egyptian, Babylonian, or Hellenic builders. But if they are to be enjoyed, acquaintance with these specific examples must be made in a pleasurable manner. They first must be beheld in a perspective that gives glimpses of them as complete and beautiful wholes, and not through the detailed workmanship of architrave or abacus or by focusing the attention on the massing of figures according to square or triangular outline. And just as the understanding and enjoyment of one great structure or painting give added interest to every other one, so, in the realm of literature, each masterpiece enjoyed gives capacity for the enjoyment of every other masterpiece met with in the future. Therefore the story, because it is a means of flashing the entire structure on the screen and making it possible for children to see the completed whole in all its beauty, is the English teacher’s most valuable tool.
Take _Evangeline_ as an example. Most children leave school knowing that Longfellow wrote that poem, and that Evangeline lost her lover on the wedding day and spent the remainder of her life seeking him. But you cannot coax them to read the poem again because of the memory of the time when they studied it. And the pity of it is that there is no work of American literature so appealing to boys and girls in the adolescent period as _Evangeline_, if it is presented wisely.