EDWIN MARKHAM VISITS THE SCHOOL

From time to time many distinguished lecturers, poets, artists, actors and men of affairs speak and read from the studio platform to the students and friends of the School.

One of the most distinguished and welcome visitors to the School in recent weeks was Edwin Markham, prophet, poet and honored friend of the School, citizen of New York City and of the world. Mr. Markham spoke on "Poetry and Science," after which he read selections from his poems.

"The scientist," said Mr. Markham, "when he approaches a thing, says, ‘Leave your emotion, your art and your religion out of it-approach it in the cold light of the mind.'

"That gives you the understanding of the world in terms of science, in terms of matter-of-fact. But after we have understood the world in terms of the intellect, the heart of the man is still unmoved. A man lives in his emotions more than he does in his intellect. It is our hearts that warm and glorify our lives. The heart, or rather the man, comes back from his exploration of the world by the intellect and asks 'What does all that collection of scientific knowledge mean? The answer to this question is given to us by art. Art taken in a large sense includes religion which is the art of life. All the arts are trying to express the same thing-trying to reveal the beauty of life. At the head of all the arts is Poetry.

"Poetry is the concrete expression of the unfamiliar beauty and wonder of the world, the beauty that is the smile upon the face of truth. Upon the face of every truth there is a splendor, There is there is an illumination, which the heart seizes upon. a beauty upon the face of every truth, and the revelation of this beauty is the function of the poet.

"The scientist gives you the truth and stops. The poet who gives you the truth only is not a real poet. He must make you feel the wonder, the strangeness which is upon every truth. All art elevates the soul. Any work of art that does not leave you uplifted, that does not lead you to see the dignity and worth of life, does not leave with you a sense of the deep, the beautiful, the mysterious, is not in any real sense a work of art at all. I do not believe that any artistic effort whose aim is to dishearten and discourage is really a work of art in the highest sense. Life The artist not only shows is courage, life demands courage. us the beauty of life, but creates in us the courage of life.

"When I was a young man I had charge of a school of boys and girls. One day in came the superintendent. I am always very much impressed in the presence of important persons. This superintendent was much impressed with himself. He sat down as though he were a mountain. He was large not only in his own opinion, but he was also a Hercules in size. There was an American flag draped on the front wall of the school room. Suddenly the superintendent stood up, and with a big gesture said, 'What is that flag for?' A little girl immediately stood up and said, 'Mr. Superintendent, that flag is to cover up a bad spot on the wall.' That was what the flag meant to a practical person. It had been placed on the wall that day by the teacher to cover up the spot.

"What is the flag to the poet? He sees in it the symbol of the hopes and aspirations of a great people. Suddenly, to the eye of the poet, it becomes something vast, something dignified, something sacred. Everything from dust to deity has that mysterious side. The poet has to find that beautiful and expressive thing, then express it in noble language.

"Well, I could talk on until the moon rises. That would be easy for me to do."

(Here Dr. Curry surreptitiously extracted some books from Mr. Markham's leather bag, and laid them on the desk before him. Laughter and applause from the audience.)

"Very well, then, I will pick the feathers out of the tail of my judgment and stick them into the wings of my imagination." Then Mr. Markham read by request, "The Man With the Hoe," prefacing the poem with these words:

"This is the man at the bottom of the ladder. He has no time to think, to rest, to aspire. There is nothing but labor in his whole life. Labor is all right in small quantities. Drudgery benumbs the spiritual forces. This poem is a protest against drudgery. This man has made two blades of grass grow where one grew before. This man may be said to be at the basis of the social problem."

After "The Man With the Hoe" Mr. Markham read his "Lincoln, the Man of the People," and closed with a group of delightful quatrains.

TESTS IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE

We cannot refrain from expressing the gratification, not unmixed with surprise, with which we read the article in the "New Republic" for June 22, entitled "The Great College Illusion, by Dickinson S. Miller, Professor of Apologetics at the General Theological Seminary, New York City.

Professor Miller is speaking of the failure of the colleges to test their educational product by results. "The College," he says, "is suffering from absent mindedness.... a kind of occupational psychosis, a physician might call it." And that isn't the worst of it apparently for "they have no clear idea of what their product ought to be. Amazing to state, their attention is not fixed upon their product at all. The truth is that in one vital respect it (the college) is inferior to a factory, namely that a factory is anxiously attentive to its output." The writer notes in the college "an extraordinary lack of tests; tests, that is, that tell how far it is educating. What has a student got from us in his four or three years, what difference have we wrought in him, with our classes, with the college life and the college tone?"" Then Professor Miller proceeds to make his application in the matter of tests to the teaching of literature:

"He (the instructor) must be free to 'follow the gleam' of fertile and stimulating interest. He must justify himself by results. As he teaches his eye must be on his product.

If applied, for instance, in a course on the history of literature in some past century, the teacher would feel that his objective was an interest and comprehension in the student's mind of the spirit of that time as expressed in literature. Such information as is requisite that the student may know his way about is strictly incidental to this aim; but in the fight between information and education the former must be subjugated and no aim control save that of finding the documents or passages in that literature which will hold the student and live for him. Through this door alone can he be given the freedom of that literature. General summaries and chronicles must give way to the concrete page and impression.

The threadbare maxim that you can learn to do a thing only by doing it is hackneyed in utterance but by no means in application, except in laboratory subjects. It has become so 'tiresome' in print that we do not realize how refreshing it would be in practice. The true way to teach is that of the distinguished painter in a Paris atelier who passes from easel to easel giving a stroke of the eye' to each pupil's painting and suggesting how

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to improve it; or of the eminent Leipsic pianist for whom one pupil after another plays a piece receiving criticism. The student's mind must produce; and be corrected when it produces amiss, fecundated when it produces meagerly." [Italics ours ].

It would be hard to write a better description of the method of teaching literature in the School of Expression than Professor Miller has here expressed.

If there is one thing that no student of the School of Expression is allowed to forget, it is that "assimilation and not information" is the aim in the teaching of literature. Assimilation, as tested by vocal expression, is the primary object of the work in creative thinking and the interpretive study of literature, done at the School of Expression.

In the spring "Expression" we had this to say on the subject of the proper teaching of literature: "The School of Expression offers four years' work in literature-not in the history of literature or the biography of authors; not in analysis or critical studies of the text; not in linguistic studies or in formal studies of metre-though we do something of all these things; but in the study and interpretation of the works of literature themselves, as works of art. By that we mean that we study a poem, not only intellectually, but imaginatively. We study a play or a story by recreating its spirit through the aid of the imagination, and we test our conception by the only test which Art knows-expression.'

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The School of Expression has been saying this in one form or another, in season and out of season, for forty years, ever since the School was founded. More than that, it has practiced it; and in the colleges and universities where our graduates are teaching Expression they are practicing it as well as they can under present conditions; but no department of English, so far as we know, undertakes to test the students' knowledge of literature by oral expression. There are signs of dissatisfaction, however, even in the colleges and in the Annual Catalogue of the School of Expression for the current year, we publish a sympathetic "Appreciation" by Allene Gregory Allen, Ph. D., Teacher of Literature in the University of Illinois, of the methods employed by the School of Expression in the teaching of literature.

SPACE-BINDERS VS. TIME-BINDERS

Count Korzybski has just written a very interesting book which a great many people are talking about. In it, he tells what is the matter with the world, basing what he has to say on mathematical measurements. He says that the living world is made up of vegetables and animals and people. Of course, we knew that before. But this is the new thing, and here we can see the real scientific spirit at work. Count Korzybski says that up to now scientists have been looking for the likenesses between vegetables and animals and people, when they should really have been looking for the unlikenesses. He says that the only thing vegetables do is to store up vitamines; and afterwards animals and men eat these vitamines for food. He says that the only unlikeness animals have from vegetables is that they are conscious of space, that is that they move about from place to place. He calls them space-binders. The only unlikeness that man has from animals is that he can move about from time to time. Man is a time-binder.

Now Count Korzybski says that the trouble with the world is that only a few men have found out that man is a time-binder, and that most of us think we are space-binders, and so we go about just like animals, fighting with each other about Space. He says that our ethics and law and politics and economics and government and "social science" are back-numbers because they are built on the theory that man is a space-binder instead of a time-binder; and that the people who are really on the right track are the technologists and the chemists and the rest who are interested in conquering the World of Knowledge for man; and that the generals and the politicians and the lawyers and the economists are just a plain garden variety of space-binder and that the sooner we find it out and "get back on our own reservation," as Mr. Dooley would say, the better it will be for all of us.

And now we know what we are at the School of Expression, - we're time-binders. We are trying to transcend space and to interpret man and life in terms of the spirit and of art. For it's not only the technicians and the chemists who are on the right track. The Poets and the Artists are on the right track too. And they were on it long before the technicians and the chemists arrived. Homer and Chaucer and Dante and Shakespeare and William Morris and Romain Roland, and the great painters and the great musicians are all on the right track and have been from the beginning. We thank Count Korzybski