Racial and Nationalistic Hurdles in the Teaching of Literature

Abstract

The German poet and critic, Heinrich Heine, in the introduction to his essays on the Female Characters of Shakespeare, begins as follows: know a good Christian in Hamburg who has never been able to reconcile himself to the fact that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was born a Jew, a member of a race which he thoroughly despises. The difficulty, which this good Christian encounters in the case of Jesus Christ, I encounter in the case of William Shakespeare. In spite of all his great qualities, I cannot forget that Shakespeare is after all an Englishman and that he belongs to the most perverse nation that God in his wrath has ever created. Heine must not be taken too seriously. He was far from being as bitter as his words imply. But Heine points to something frequently overlooked: that a racial or nationalistic prejudice is often a hurdle in the way of those who are studying a great author or a great literature. Who has not felt, occasionally, when reading a review in one of our best periodicals that the judgment of the reviewer was finally determined by a racial or nationalistic bias? This may not happen frequently yet often enough to show the importance of racial bias in the study of literature. If this is true among adults, who presumably have grown up, the presence of such hurdles in the minds of adolescents must be still more serious. A mind-set, as psychologists tell us, is very important: valuable when kindly disposed; very much of a disadvantage when hostile. Some of us are old enough to remember the difficulties faced by teachers of German, during and immediately following World War I. The difficulties were not as noticeable after World War II. But, in those years students were set against studying German and the teacher, no matter how objective he tried to be, was constantly exposed to the charge of being pro-German. It is difficult to teach any literature without enthusiasm. But enthusiasm, at that time, served only to fan the flames of prejudice. The nationalistic hurdle was for a time too high to be jumped by either pupil or teacher. But the subject under discussion here has to do with Greek and Roman literature and you may feel that here pro-German, pro-French, anti-this or pro-that, have no parallels. I have come to believe that there are such hurdles even in the study of ancient literatures and that some of these hurdles have been erected by the teaching profession itself. But before I go into that matter I want to point out a few examples to show that the teaching of the Greek and Latin literatures is not quite removed from the nationalistic slants of to-day. R. W. Livingston in his book: The Greek Genius, speaks of the great difference between our life and the life at Athens: Greece seems very far away. Yet there are two places in England in which, amid the smoke and wealth and elaboration of our