DELECTATIO SOLA

The new English 15, explains Professor F. O. Matthiessen frankly, will not help anyone in any way to pass the divisionals. It grew out of his feeling that Harvard needed a course in pure literary enjoyment, distinct from abstract esthetics on the one hand and historical of factual study on the other. It is perhaps symbolical that graduates students are excluded, because such a course is the antithesis of the Ph.D. system and its usual scholarly sterility.

As he pointed out, literature courses and the methods by which they operate are only of some fifty years standing in Harvard. These methods have been and still are, in the main, scientific, emphasizing the historical changes which condition art, or its sociological and economic causes. But the approach which gives literature its chief significance and uncovers its closest bonds with the serious and comic business of living is the personal, informal, circumspect way of feeling out of a poem its final emotional substance and seeing how it jibes with ones' own experience. It may be said with truth that literature is not taught in a rigidly scientific manner in Harvard. The real fact is that it is taught indecisively, middlingly and aimlessly, with unwise emphasis on artistic forms or the collective states of mind of literary epochs.

The issue is more than educational; it is the fundamental one of whether the masterworks of the past are documents, to be classified, analyzed in the post-mortem manner, of the laboratory, or "the precious life-blood of a master-spirit treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life", a life of which we may gratefully partake to augment our own substance. The signs are everywhere decipherable that the universities and critics of today have the sickness of an acquisitive society of the intellect; they need to be more respectfully, curiously inquisitive before the monuments to the past. English 15 is the course for those who might be called the sublimely inquisitive in our midst.