puts the experience of his mind down it becomes more real to other men
on paper than their own experiences are to them in their own lives.

It is hardly necessary to point out that whatever our conventional
courses in literature may be doing, whether in college or anywhere else,
they are not bringing out this creative joy and habit of creative joy in
the pupils. Those who are interested in literature-courses--such as we
have--for the most part do not believe in trying to bring out the
creative joy of each pupil. Those who might believe in trying to do it
do not believe it can be done. They do not believe it can be done
because they do not realise that in the case of each and every pupil--so
far as he goes--it is the only thing worth doing. They fail to see from
behind their commentaries and from out of their footnotes, the fact that
the one object in studying literature is joy, that the one way of
studying and knowing literature is joy, and that the one way to attain
joy is to draw out creative joy.

_Second._ And if literature is to be taught as an art it must be taught
as a way of life. As long as literature and life continue to be
conceived and taught as being separate things, there can be no wide and
beautiful hope for either of them. The organs of literature are
precisely the same organs and they are trained on precisely the same
principles as the organs of life.

Except an education in books can bring to pass the right condition of
these organs, a state of being in the pupil, his knowledge of no matter
how long a list of masterpieces is but a catalogue of the names of
things for ever left out of his life. It is little wonder, when the
drudgery has done its work and the sorry show is over, and the victim of
the System is face to face with his empty soul at last, if in his
earlier years at least he seems overfond to some of us of receiving
medals, honours, and valedictories for what he might have been and of
flourishing a Degree for what he has missed.

There was once a Master of Arts,
Who was "nuts" upon cranberry tarts:
When he'd eaten his fill
He was awfully ill,
But he was still a Master of Arts.

The power and habit of studying and enjoying human nature as it lives
around us, is not only a more human and alive occupation, but it is a
more literary one than becoming another editor of AEschylus or going down
to posterity in footnotes as one of the most prominent bores that
Shakespeare ever