1The Nature of Man. New York, 1903, chap. xii.
8 Le Devois Present de la Jeunesse, in Boutroux's Morale Sociale, chap. xi.
4 Inductive Sociology. New York, 1901, chap. iii.
5 Les Selections Sociales. Paris, 1896, chaps, viii-xv. ' Organisme et Socie'te'. Paris, 1896, part v, p. 313.
* Conscience et Volontds Sociales. Paris, 1897. "Morale Sociale. Paris, 1899.
432 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE society fashion, in a way that interferes with individual free- dom, private judgment, and personal conscience, are forms of degeneration now too common.
XIII. In view of all this, what is the true inner purpose and ideal of social organizations for youth? Left entirely to themselves they tend to disorder and triviality, and con- trolled too much by adults they tend to lose zest and spon- taneity; thus the problem is to find the golden mean between both, so that the teaching instinct, one of the noblest and strongest in adults, shall best utilize its counterpart in adoles- cents, viz., the passion to push on to the standpoint of ma- turity and learn of it. The opposite tendencies are also always present and often dominant. Adult guidance, as by an iron law, always tends to become formal, technical, and contentless, to rule instead of to inspire, to make requirements, like the present invasion of the high school by the college, that demand precocity to meet them, and to distrust freedom and autonomy, while youth reacts by excluding or defying such guidance, so that curricula and student life separate and then both degener- rate, as we now see in many American colleges, which, because they are large, gravitate all the more to the mechanical, school methods of teaching and disciplining masses of students.
Now one chief purpose of this chapter is to propose, as a partial solution of this problem,.a radical change of base in the pedagogy of the vernacular language, literature, and history, and I urge that the prime purpose in all this field which should determine every choice of matter and method is moral, viz., to so direct intelligence and will as to secure the largest meas- ure of social service, advance altruism and reduce selfish- ness, and thus advance the higher cosmic order. Youth loves combat, and this may be developed into debate; it loves dis- tinction and to exert influence, and this suggests oratory; it loves to assume roles and to widen sympathy by represent- ing at this circumnutating stage, with its keen sense of char- acter, manifold types of human life, and has a passion for the theater, and this suggests the drama, which always has this supreme moral quality — that the good is victorious. Its very best safeguard and its highest ideal is honor, and this has its best expression in what may be called the ethnic Bible of SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 433 the Saxon race in its adolescent stage, the literature of chiv- alry. Its religious instincts are at their very best, and to these our Scriptures make the noblest appeal. One or all of these four have been cultivated in all the better spontaneous organi- zations of youth, and in some fashion all have at the best periods of education constituted the best and most central subject-matter; while taught without them, or when the method or matter is bad, education rings hollow. Let us briefly glance at each.
A. Rhetoric means oratory. Its object is to persuade intel- lect, will, and heart. As Aristotle conceived it, it comprised the methods of giving truth the superiority which belongs to it by its nature. Quintilian understood it to involve all things concerning the good, the beautiful, and the true, which could be brought into controversy. It has often been called the parent of liberty, which it is one of the prime duties of a free State to foster and one of the chief duties of a good man to cultivate. It inspires action, and at its best is impelled by a sense of duty. Every youth with high and true ambition, and with that nobility which classic rhetoric conceived as inherited distinction, turns to it instinctively. In Rome it had in some respects its most favorable environment. There was the Forum with all its temples and porticoes, monuments of victories, statues of great men, every spot historic, with always forenses or loiterers, who made a tumultuary audience. The comitia or assembly of the people for the enactment of new laws; the senate or conscript fathers with powers greater than the Areopagus or most modern parliamentary bodies; the danger to every citizen of accusation, and to every officer of impeach- ment, so that each must cultivate this art of self-defense; the wide range of topics and of methods of treatment; the free- dom of the judges from constraint by law, which made the appeal to common sense, equity, discretion, and even their emotions, more effective, in striking contrast with the 240,000 points which Hardwicke says the modern judge and lawyer may be asked to consider from the six hundred volumes of law reports; the open-mindedness and influence which is now sometimes reversed in the fear of the hearer lest he shall be deceived by the orator's arts — no wonder that under such con- ditions the triumphs of eloquence were almost unprecedented.
434 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE The Athenians, roused from apathy to the unanimous cry to be led to liberty or death against Philip; the bestowal of the golden crown despite the plea of ^Eschines; the precipitate flight of Catiline; the voluntary exile of Verres, etc.; these incidents we all know, and they fire the heart of youth.
In Greece, Rome, and in modern times it was after the golden period that teachers of rhetoric arose who gradually grew trifling, artificial, and sophistical. One prime secret of the achievements of the ancient orators was that the best of them were good men, honest, disinterested, patriotic, and loved liberty. Quintilian deemed it a crime against the public to give skill in speaking to bad men. All that they said was reen- forced by their character, and often by their acts. Rhetoric was directly based upon ethics and enriched by literature and history. In Rome there was no other education from the cradle than to be an orator. Higher than proof stood virtue and credibility. Some of the most eloquent Stoics lacked, if they did not despise, every personal and stylistic grace, but spoke concisely and with an intensity of conviction and solidity of judgment that carried everything before them. The best rhetoricians of classic times not only argued and arrayed motives of action, but knew how to work upon the heart as we do not. The earliest preparation for this was by teaching music, including rhythm, harmony, lyre-playing, modulation of the voice, and often dancing, to give harmony and grace to the body and to cadence the soul. Youth were told legend and history, paraphrased Homer and the drama- tists, and formed their style upon the content of this backbone of ethnic culture. They were apprenticed to orators, who felt it their duty to let no great and noble deed go without eulogy or no hero die without a panegyric. They must also influence the emotions. Aristotle, as we can not too often remember, defined education as teaching men to fear aright. The orator must see public danger afar off and sound the alarm, wherever power became united with criminal disposition. Prudence is to some extent anticipatory pain. To direct this, one of the most fundamental instincts of the soul, so that all dangers and vices shall be feared in the right proportion and with rightly graduated intensity, sometimes to inflame fear to a panic, but more often to allay it — this was one of the orator's chief tasks.
SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 435 Again, he must guide anger in the same way against those objects which are most worthy of righteous indignation. The noble man or State will brook no insult or insolence, will resent spite and contempt, and will feel strong, deep rage only at great wickedness. The orator was thus in a sense the keeper and director of the public and sometimes private ire, which might now be kindled in invective or impeachment and fanned to a flame of retaliatory rage, or, where irascibility was excessive, it must be placated. Pity, too, had wide range which the ora- tor must control. Pleaders tore open the clothes of their clients in the Forum to show their wounds, or brought in tear- ful wives and children and described in glowing terms the cruelties and tortures that procurators and others had inflicted upon their victims, often addressing the sympathy of the judges or the people cather than law. Pathos is one of the strongest passions cf the human soul, which may be wrought almost to a frenzy, and of which Christian oratory has the story of the Cross as its masterpiece. To love aright is religion as taught by Jesus and Paul; so of shame, benevolence, emu- lation, right ambition, of all these the orator should be master, and he must play upon the heart and bring out all its rich diapason of emotion and make the good and the true and beau- tiful glow and everywhere prevail.
When the pugnacious instincts develop, and when, as we shall see in the next chapter, reason begins to knit the mental centers to a higher unity, both ethics and logic have here a new union and a new function. Controversy is often a rage, and disputation is a higher vent for the new zest for conflict. The charm of a thesis to be defended before the world, of pointing out a flagrant fallacy, of refutation and rebuttal, was the life of the old academic debating society, of which down to the last third of the last century nearly every college and prepara- tory school had two, with weekly discussions of great political, moral, and literary themes of current interest, and with fre- quent joint debates. These societies in the days of their prime were always the centers of interest for some of the best men, and generally brought to the surface another class of leaders than those who excelled in scholarship. Here all social dis- tinctions were forgotten; courses in rhetoric and even logic, and perhaps history and related subjects, were given a new 436 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE interest; the library was ransacked for authorities and points for citation; competition prompted men to buy and beg books for society libraries, and a new order of champions and of hero worship was sometimes developed. As these societies declined, debates became less studied and serious. The social features that had made their very names attractive paled before the closer friendships of the Greek letter fraternities, in some of which debates still hold a place, but they are sus- tained with abated ardor, perhaps because conversation has steadily developed in range of topics, freedom, and animation, so that the growing social instincts afford other vents and channels for the same interplay of facts and opinions.
In all the German universities, Vereine exist for the dis- cussion, formal and informal, of general and of special topics. The " unions " of Oxford and Cambridge, which have existed with unabated interest for a number of decades, are organized and conducted in every possible detail like Parliament. Ques- tions take the form of bills which are in the end passed or lost by vote. When these were organized, they were almost the only medium of intercourse between the different colleges, many of which had their own debating clubs. These unions are often able to bring down leading members of Parliament to defend bills which they are advocating at Westminster, and statesmen have found themselves attacked here always with the greatest freedom, and sometimes with a rare force and acumen. Here, as in all such organizations, young men are great sticklers for rules and technicalities, and the details of parliamentary usage are insisted on with extreme strictness and literalness. The Scotch universities have always shown great fondness for these organizations and for discussion.
Since 1889, on the initiative of Harvard College, which had for a few decades conspicuously neglected if not disparaged this work, a new stimulus has been given, and over one hun- dred colleges are now organized into a league for inter- collegiate debate. This movement has introduced a new method and even style of work. Champions are very care- fully chosen after a competition which animates a good deal of previous preparation, and the subject is divided so that each debater presents a definite part of it. College rivalry is much involved, and generally its representatives are very carefully SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 437 coached by the professors, under whose tuition they rehearse and are prepared to meet the arguments of the other side. This work has reacted upon the curriculum, and in 1898 Sheldon found twenty-seven colleges offering one hundred and four courses in forensics and allied subjects. These debates rarely reach a high level of interest or ability, and are sadly lacking in spontaneity. Unlike the Oxford and Cambridge discussions, they are very rarely enlivened by a free play of wit and humor or repartee.
The dangers of these academic debates are great and ob- vious, but not insuperable. Often individuals have no free- dom of choosing their own sides, and occasionally young de- baters prefer to talk against their convictions as an exercise in cleverness. It is unfortunate, too, to become prematurely interested in one side "of any great open question, but perhaps the gravest evil is the danger of cultivating too great readiness in speech. This tends to superficiality, loose thinking, and rabulistic ratiocination. It is a mental calamity to be able to talk glibly upon any subject. Form should be based on and come after matter, and the judicial type of mind which finds or maintains equanimity against the widest diversity of view is not favored. Young debaters, especially of the preparatory, and, to a less extent, of the collegiate stage, are also too prone to wrangle, to raise specious, factitious, and even verbal issues, and sometimes to lapse to personalities.
The modern instructor of elocution or declamation is as unqualified as his colleagues, who teach English, rhetoric, ethics, or logic, to meet this need. Only a reconstruction and new focalizing cooperation of these can effect what is required. The present tendencies in this direction are perhaps the very best in the field, but are still feeble.
As I write, I have before me twenty-eight text-books, mostly new, for high school and college, devoted solely or chiefly to what is usually entitled rhetoric. Many frankly as- sume that the chief business of the teacher of English is " with the art of composition strictly understood." It is his function to make what the pupil has to say tell for all it is worth, and it is no part of his function to supply the pupil with something worth saying. One says that rhetoric teaches " proper words in proper places." The teacher must be " all the time on the 438 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE watch for errors " and never let one pass. He confesses that not one student in ten thousand has anything to say; that during the preceding eleven years, up to 1884, after reading thousands of students' themes, " an onerous and thankless task/' he found only a " tedious mediocrity "; and states that every year a certain college sends out men, some of them high scholars, whose manuscripts would disgrace a boy of twelve. A college " can not conduct an infant school for adults," etc. These are precisely the results which a method so degenerate, all form and no substance, is calculated to produce. Even Abbott, who insists that clear writing can be reduced to fifty- six rules and taught, states that this " does not imply think- ing clearly." Nearly all expatiate on the comma, colon, semicolon, period, and, especially of late, the paragraph, to which one devotes nine chapters; some treat of spelling and give copious details about proof-reading, and many have one or more chapters on English grammar. Nearly all discuss style under the captions of clearness, force, and elegance; or purity, propriety, and precision of diction, and expatiate on the differences between narration, description, and argument. Some discuss versification, elocution, and figures of speech.
Good use is often defined at great length with copious ex- amples of vulgarisms; some are nearly half made up of quota- tions from eminent writers largely borrowed from other text- books, which use them as a common fund of example and illus- tration. One has over 250 topics for composition, and another author prints original compositions of his own for illustra- tive purposes. Some give long vocabularies of words often misused. One gives six lines on invention; another treats the art of authorship, and lays great stress on a schematic analysis of topics preparatory to writing compositions upon them. Long lists of reference books are sometimes given. In one, Whittier's Snow-Bound suggests sixty-seven different topics, and composition from pictures is a specialty. Some lay great stress on purity and would exclude every foreign phrase that has an English equivalent. Euphony is emphasized by another, who also declares that to warp a word from its estab- lished usage is like defacing a public monument. A few treat of beauty and sublimity. One would give practise in writing book reviews, analyzing sermons, and expatiating on proverbs.
SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 439 Nearly all the modern works proclaim in the preface that they are more " practical " than other works; some that they have aimed to be chiefly interesting and stimulating; and many that they are expressly intended to meet the needs of both high school and college. Many modern works on rhetoric have nothing to say of oratory in any of its aspects, and but few speak of the drama. These things have their place, but the decadence is that they have usurped the central places and all perspective and proportion are lost.
B. The drama (from drao, I act) at its best represents moral collisions and their results, and is a kind of solution of ethical problems which often best takes the place of experi- ence, the fees of which are high. To be impressive its theme must be lofty and its treatment ideal. It ought to express national life, although it has done so only in Greece, Spain, and especially in England, where it has been most national. In its early modern development it was a powerful tool in the hands of the clergy in the days of the mysteries in presenting religious ideals, with its three platforms, representing heaven, earth, and hell. In the moralities, where it was laicized, it was more or less a school of virtue. The many hundred char- acters that have been created for the stage are typical more than personalities in life or history; the unity of time, place, and action is greater and more condensed than in novels; the clash of opposing individualities, the crises of action, and the whole ethology of hypocrites, misers, heroes, soldiers, shrews, cowards, pedants, misanthropes, doubters, optimists, pessi- mists, beggars, irascibles, villains, saints, spendthrifts, who are set in action, are greater. At its best the drama presents events that are typical or central in interest for human life, perhaps those which are cardinal or epoch-making in history, or even national. It always involves conflict, collision, and passion between good and evil characters and motives. Per- haps the denouement of the tragedy involves an apparition of fate in which the great but hard lesson is taught that the individual is forever subordinate to the race or social com- munity. Perhaps the conflict is between sense and duty; be- tween innocent purity and bedizened vice; between the meshes of conventional lies and honest truth. Tempests of passion, which sometimes howl through human life, are let loose, but 44° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE in the end there is a great calm because we rise to a higher plane. All true tragedy, therefore, is one of the most effective ways of teaching morals, of revealing God to man. It pre- sents beauty and sublimity for the sake of truth; it can not be separated from morals or entirely from religion without lan- guishing and lapsing. The drama ought to be truer than history. Art is man's addition to nature; it is his contribu- tion to the continuance and consummation of creation; it anthropomorphizes nature and history on ever higher planes by humanizing both more and more.
The drama thus reveals the human heart and will, and teaches the way of the power that makes for righteousness in the world. It strengthens, inspires, perfects, and gives moral exaltation. We leave an ideal dramatic presentation with nervous tension physically relieved. We have had a great moral experience by proxy, and feel that the good rules. We have fought Apollyon vicariously and seen him fly, and we glow with a wholesome ethical exhilaration. Everything has converged toward the end in a climax, after which rewards are meted out with poetic justice in a way that gives ethical satisfaction. The emotional nature, which so tends to grow dull and inert or to vent itself in partial and thus over-intense expression, has been broadened, deepened, and sanified. If similar experiences await us, we are predisposed and our decisions preformed aright, and the suspense is not tediously protracted to the point of moral enervation as in a long novel. The reforms of the drama have been to dethrone artifice, af- fectation, formality, and above all, flippant and mawkish melo- dramatization of novels that represent only physical emotion, tawdriness and vulgarity, and its object still is to hold a " mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own features, scorn, her own image, and the very age and body his form and pressure." Lamb was perhaps right that much of Shakespeare is obsolete and hardly suited to represent modern life on the stage, and that the Greek drama rightly edited is more akin to our own life; and yet acting, says Froude, has been the special amusement of the English and was the " result of the strong, tranquil expression of their lives, of their thorough power over themselves and power over circumstances." Thus, troubled with no speculations or social problems, and ex- SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 441 uberant and vigorous in spirit, " they were able in the strict and literal sense of the word to play with life." " Thus the lesson given by long experience, by the certain punishment of ill-doing, by the rewards that follow on bravery, forbearance, and self-sacrifice, is on a mimic stage conveyed to men; and thus every actor, who is more than a mere machine, and who has an ideal of any kind, has a duty which lies beyond the scope of his personal ambition. His art must be something to hold in reverence."
The decay of the modern theater from this high ideal is most unfortunate for youth, the nature and needs of which, few institutions in history have ever been so adequate to deal with in a helpful and exalting way. Not merely for literature but for life, it is well for academic youth to interest them- selves in the way gre^at actors conceive and interpret great characters on the stage; to see true love glorified and made ideal and triumphant; to see hate, rage, and jealousy over- whelmingly defeated; to hear taught in song what great lives have learned by suffering; to feel the influence of noble per- sonalities that " pay with what they are," and of smaller ones that pay with what they do; to thrill with the triumphs of moral and even physical heroes; to criticize and compare characters and plots, and the degree of stageability of the crea- tions of Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Tennyson, and Ibsen; to define the personalities of Siegfried, Parsifal, Othello, Senta, Goetz, Egmont, Faust, Cymbeline, Miranda, Ophelia, Hamlet, Tell, and some scorces of others, as a lesson in the study of characters that are clear, generic, and simple, per- haps the personification of only a single motive, less intricate than the problems of life but a good preliminary to them. Corson thinks that the time will come when the only examina- tion in literature will be oral impersonation.