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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS Whatever opinion one may have as to the methods and objects of the higher study of literature, it is clear that with beginners two things must be aimed at : first, as clear an understanding as may be of the particular masterpiece under consideration ; second, a sense as keen and well developed as may be of its beauty in detail and as an artistic whole. Until the student is able to understand the meaning of what he reads and to distinguish beauty from its counterfeits, the study of the principles of aesthetics can hardly bring him any true or sound culture. The cultivation of the sense of the beautiful in literature occupies the second place, not because it is regarded as second in importance, but because understanding must come first in point of time, because until one knows the meaning of a bit of literature he cannot possibly determine whether it is ugly, or beautiful, or a mere counterfeit of beauty. A good deal of sport has been made, of recent years, of what has been called sign-board criticism, and much of it has been rightly the object of ridicule : in the first place, because of its silly and hysterical character ; and, secondly, because it has been offered to such persons, under such circumstances, and in such ways as made it nothing short of impertinent. But it is hard to see how true sign-board criticism can ever be banished from the study of any of the arts or from the observation of beauty of any kind ; or to see how, when practised by the right person, under the right circumstances, it can fail to be useful and evennecessary to one who is just learning where and how to look for the things that please the lover of good literature. Most of us know the bitterness, when looking at a fine bit of landscape or a sunset, of hearing some glib ent...