t consisted in the
acquiring of a state of being, a condition of organs, a capacity of
tasting life, of creating and sharing the joys and meanings in it. Their
learning has largely consisted in the fact that they have learned at
last to let their joys go. They have become the most satisfactory of
scholars, not because of their power of knowing, but because of their
willingness to be powerless in knowing. When they have been drilled to
know without joy, have become the day-labourers of learning, they are
given diplomas for cheerlessness, and are sent forth into the world as
teachers of the young. Almost any morning, in almost any town or city
beneath the sun, you can see them, Gentle Reader, with the children,
spreading their tired minds and their tired bodies over all the fresh
and buoyant knowledge of the earth. Knowledge that has not been throbbed
in cannot be throbbed out. The graduates of the colleges for women (in
The Association of Collegiate Alumnae) have seriously discussed the
question whether the college course in literature made them nearer or
farther from creating literature themselves. The Editor of _Harper's
Monthly_ has recorded that "the spontaneity and freedom of subjective
construction" in certain American authors was only made possible,
probably, by their having escaped an early academic training. The
_Century Magazine_ has been so struck with the fact that hardly a single
writer of original power before the public has been a regular college
graduate that it has offered special prizes and inducements for any form
of creative literature--poem, story, or essay--that a college graduate
could write.

If a teacher of literature desires to remove his subject from the
uncreative methods he finds in use around him, he can only do so
successfully by persuading trustees and college presidents that
literature is an art and that it can only be taught through the methods
and spirit and conditions that belong to art. If he succeeds in
persuading trustees and presidents, he will probably find that faculties
are not persuaded, and that, in the typical Germanised institution of
learning at least, any work he may choose to do in the spirit and method
of joy will be looked upon by the larger part of his fellow teachers as
superficial and pleasant. Those who do not feel that it is superficial
and pleasant, who grant that working for a state of being is the most
profound and worthy and strenuous work a teacher can do,--th