Memory Work in Literature
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Abstract
IT is my purpose this morning to enter a plea for the reintroduction of a method of English training that has of late years fallen into neglect and even into discredit. In my boyhood days, as doubtless in yours, it was the custom in preparatory schools to have the pupils commit to memory selections of prose and verse, and recite them on Friday afternoons. As well as I remember, this practice was begun in the primary grades; I know that it was continued through the grammar-school and high-school grades. As a training in public speaking, I am not sure that this discipline accomplished a great deal; but in broadening insensibly the vocabulary, in revealing hidden harmonies of thought and expression, in developing a feeling for rhythm in poetry and for sentence structure in prose, in enriching the mind with a storehouse of suggestive material that will unfold into new beauty and deeper meaning with advancing years, and above all in fostering a habit that will at last transform a duty of boyhood into a pleasure of manhood, it is my conviction that no other discipline can ever take the place of this systematic memorizing of good literature. Even memory itself seems today to be a discredited faculty. Memory has, I concede, a troublesome way of slipping out of its own sphere and simulating the functions of reason and judgment. In arithmetic, for example, the teacher cannot be too careful that memoriter repetitions shall not usurp the place of independent reasoning. In English grammar the ability to reel off rules and definitions does not imply the ability to speak or to write with even passable correctness. These, however, are the misapplications of memory. No faculty should be judged by its abuse. "Savoir par cceur n'est pas savoir," says Montaigne; but the schools of Montaigne's day stuffed the 'Read at the annual meeting of the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Southern States, Trinity College, Durham, N. C.