Copyright 1924, 1929 SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY For permission to use copyrighted material grateful acknowledgment is For copyrighted pictures reproduced as illustrations, thanks are due to Mr. 336.6 Copyright 1927 in the Philippine Islands by SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY All rights reserved PREFACE The present volume is designed for the last year of the secondary school course in literature. It has been prepared in accordance with certain principles that have governed the entire series, and, like the other volumes, is the result of many years' thought and experience. The books in the series are not merely anthologies, in which selections have been inserted according to gradation or type or any other casual plan, but seek to gain results that are quite beyond the scope both of the usual volume of selections and of a course based on editions of separate classics. A re-statement of the principles of choice and organization is suggested by the completion of the series. 1. The course in literature in the secondary school should not be technical, planned by scholars for those who are to be experts in literary history, linguistics, or criticism, but humanistic, the chief means for supplying that introduction to the mind of the past that is necessary to a well-rounded education. In the secondary school, as in the college, modern tendencies toward specialization carry possibilities of evil as well as good. Not only has the number of subjects in the curriculum increased enormously, but it has become the habit of each specialist to look to his subject-matter rather than to his pupils for the determination of his method. In the case of literature this means that many editions of the classics are prepared from the point of view of the specialist and stress technical erudition rather than the needs of youth. 2. Those who avoid the evil of technical scholarship may fall into the error of supposing that literature serves no other purpose than that of pleasure or aesthetic enjoyment, thus losing entirely the discipline of humane letters. With the loss of the influence of the classics, we need something that will represent to our generation what earlier periods found in Latin and Greek. Now the liberalizing effect of classical humanism consisted in the fact that it helped prepare the way for the modern idea of progress; it showed men that they could recover the achievements of past ages and build on these foundations a modern civilization. Out of the philosophy, history, and literature of the ancient world came the intellectual awakening that was the prelude of the Renaissance. Translated into present-day conditions, this means that in literature in the English tongue, both that which is native English and that which has been translated from other languages, we have even richer stores to draw upon than those who lived at the time of the revival of learning. We have our own great tradition; we are not limited to the tradition of Greece and Rome. Literature, therefore, is not an aesthetic and pleasure-giving subject alone, any more than it is a field for philological and historical learning alone. Rightly used, it supplies a humane discipline fit to take the place of the old classical scholarship. 3. A third error is to regard the classics, ancient and modern, as out of date and remote from present interests. There has been a tendency to make the popular magazine, the newspaper, and contemporary oneact plays take the place of all other #27994 |