found in the average kit) will, like this man, always give a good account of themselves in oral composition but not necessarily in reading. If we could teach all students to write well, it appears that after a little exercise in the new medium they would show that they had been learning to speak well at the same time; but we could not be sure that they were reading properly. Oral reading for the good writer as well as the poor one is the needful test of apprehension.

The college, however, cannot teach all students to write well. It can, for the most part, secure only a certain amount of technical correctness. After this has been reached, further work in writing for the most of them takes time that could be spent less laboriously to both student and instructor and to better advantage. Writing unfortunately will not enlarge a student's vocabulary or make him think (except in the meager terms of writing not incorrectly), unless he is the sort that would do both of these things anyway. Accurate reading aloud will do both. At present and under the inevitable conditions of class work, only the best writers acquire that necessary sense of proportion which written composition is capable-though laboriously, it is true-of conveying. In oral reading, even the poorest student cannot escape it. Let us secure grammatical and intelligible writing by all means, but examine whether it is practical to try to go further.

THEME WORK UNDULY SPECIALIZES

The purpose of a college is to acquaint the student with the achievements of history, and to teach him how to observe and think. Obviously, theme work does nothing toward accomplishing the first purpose unless the student writes upon assigned reading. Even if he knows how to read correctly, his reactions upon his reading are either comparatively

thin or are made so by the limitations of his ability or inclination to express himself. Obviously, too, when his themes are confined to discussions of what he reads, he does nothing toward accomplishing the second purpose of the collegeteaching him how to observe and evaluate what goes on around him. But even when he has freer and more personal range, neither habits of observation nor habits of thinking are likely to be improved by theme work unless he has already the temperament demanding self-expression. And what he says is again so restricted by his concentration on the means of saying it and by the limits which time sets to his labor, that neither is exercised uncramped. The work devoted to theme writing, after the necessary amount of correctness has been attained, is, thus, work unduly specialized and diverted from the main purpose of the college.

Unless a person knows how to read he cannot become educated. It is the basic requirement of all education. It is the perception that to write properly, however desirable, is not the basic requirement of all education, which occasions the restlessness of the students and of the other departments of the college with the English department. Unless a person knows how to summarize properly he does not know how to think, which is the basic aim of education. It is the perception that all this theme work seems unable to teach students to read and think which makes the rest of the college feel that it is time spent unprofitably. There is a growing uneasiness as to its value and a growing discontent with the incommensurate labor involved for both instructor and student. But undesirable as it is, it seems necessary until we can find something better. The oral study of literature, which I propose in its place, will secure both accurate reading and accurate thinking.

It consists of reading aloud, and a return in the student's own words of what has been read. Paraphrase should, if

need be, form a part of the reading exercise itself-so much reading, so much paraphrasing; and at the end of each group of ideas, an abstract. There is no better and more inexpensive training of the mind than making paraphrases and abstracts of what has been read. To get an idea in one set of words and give it in another set; to get a progressive series of ideas on one scale and reproduce them on a smaller -these two simple and universally available processes require not only original accuracy of apprehension but a thorough grasp of the primary principles of proportion and emphasis. A student who can make an adequate and proportional abstract of a sonnet in one sentence has a grasp on the fundamental machinery of thinking as well as on the sonnet itself. If all college teachers could hear how often a student will read a sonnet and be unable to tell what it is about; how often on being questioned he will demonstrate ignorance of a large or even the principal portion of it (of fourteen lines which he has prepared!), and reply that he did not think it mattered, since he understood and liked the other part-they would concede that the time given to such a class is given to all the rest of the college.

In a "reading and returning" class a student receives the highest mental training it is in the power of the college to give—namely, the perception of what ideas are superior, what subordinate, and what on a smaller scale negligible— and without this mental training the knowledge and the culture with which we store the mind are both unavailable and misleading. Even the instructor of the college who refuses to admit that a man is known by the English he keeps will readily admit that a study so basic to all studies may justly occupy a place, especially since it takes up less time and energy than the English department does at present with written composition. Even the English department should welcome the substitution. For at present, amusingly and illogi

cally enough, for all the time it takes, no student of English sets about reading an English author with the same scientific spirit in which he demonstrates a problem on the blackboard or performs an experiment in chemistry under the eye of the teacher. Nor is any English work read and checked up as carefully as one in a foreign language; and the intensive study given to Dante or Goethe, let us say, has its sole English counterpart in the labored recital of a student's meager reaction to campus topics or to some assigned essays.

THE SPECIAL VALUES OF THE ORAL STUDY OF LITERATURE

I think, then, that this combination of elocution and composition which I have called the oral study of literature, will better serve the purposes of the college and the English department than theme work, in securing correct reading and thinking and in exercising both upon more profitable material. But, in addition, it will do what theme work cannot accomplish for even the best of themesters. It will secure cooperation with the printed page-a perception of that fusion of emotional and intellectual content which goes to make up what we call good literature. This is the aim of all English teaching not exclusively compositional.

THE CO-OPERATION WITH LITERATURE

To teach literature and not the appreciation of it is like presenting a picture gallery to the blind. It is well known that the higher forms of literature cannot be appreciated by young people except when read aloud, and that reading aloud enriches the appreciation of even discerning minds. It is not necessary to remind the lecturer on literature how much he must rely upon reading aloud (even though, as too often, he communicates rational or emotional values alone and not the two together). The subtler the art, the more necessary

is vocal embodiment to point it out. In a class in the oral study of literature mere translation is important only as a means to accuracy, since the habit of misapprehension is universal; but its main business is the appreciation of literature. If to read aloud accurately requires a closer thought analysis than the average student ever gives to anything else, to read aloud illuminatively requires a sympathetic and imaginative co-operation which the average student can cultivate nowhere else, and which is the aim of lecturing about literature when not merely biographical and historical.

THE APPRECIATION OF POETRY AND STYLE

I have said that the subtler the literature, the more necessary is vocal embodiment to point it out. Upon poetry the necessity rests with a two-fold obligation. That this is an unpoetic age may not be entirely because it is a scientific one. It may well be because the beauty of verse as verse lies in its rhythmic utterance, and we no longer utter it. In the general failure to appreciate orally its metrical values, it appears to be but a cramped and crabbed sort of prose. When the comic column of a newspaper prints verse as prose, one reads it asking oneself why anybody should write in so pointless, feeble, or peculiar a fashion, until some odd word or arrangement reveals the presence of rhyme or meter and thus explains the puzzle. The best sonnet written as prose is queer stuff to the eye; and if read aloud in such a way as to sacrifice the fundamental quality of poetry, it is equally queer stuff to the ear. On the other hand, those oral readers of poetry who have any appreciation of it as such, fall for the most part into two divisions: the one preserves nothing whatever but the metrical values and reads with a scansion repellent to sense and humanity; the other reads in a saccharine monotone equally devastating to humanity and sense. Both shear away the intended sense from