Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 211, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 September 1917 — LITERATURE IS NOT TAUGHT [ARTICLE]

LITERATURE IS NOT TAUGHT

Diversity of Human Nature Makes the Subject Beyond the Ability of Any Professor. “Why cannot literature be taughtF asks a professor of English In The New Republic. “Why cannot you teach a person how to fall in love, or have the measles? Expose him, and if he be susceptible, the trick la done, and you may wisely call in the parson or the doctor, ar the case may be. But no amount of lecturing will Improve or hasten the matter. I have analysed with loving care the dark beauty of Shelley’s maiden spirit, and found no man among forty willing even to acknowledge the introduction later; I have paraded the sturdy English virtues of Tom Jones before damsels whose economic dependence, and need to be supported in literature, was all too evident, and they have turned up their noses at him as *not in our set.* And then suddenly I have discovered the oddest matings—the two-mlle runner eloping with Jane Austen, to whom he had never been formally presented, and a former preceptress of mathematics, with hock-bottle shoulders, dizzily delighted by the rough wooing of George Borrow, whom she had met by chance In the stacks."