Critic and Teacher

8 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY That which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friend~, was his in full measure. To have known him intimately as te?Lcher and friend was a great privilege, and in a real sense a libe~al education. He performed a notable service for his university and nati~e province, partly because of his great intellectual powers, the breadth of his training and his unfai1ing aesthetic discrimination, but not less because of the unshakable integrity of his character and his devotion to the things of the mind in an intensely practical age which chiefly esteems worldly success. n. CRITIC AND TEACHER A. S. P. WOODHOUSE The common opinion is that Professor Alexander was first and last a great teacher-perhaps the greatest this University has seen-and that in him the actlvities of scholar and critic were subordinated to those of the instructor and educator. In this common opinion there is a large measure of truth, but it needs to be placed in its proper context. That he was unsurpassed in oral instruction, no one who has had the privilege of studying under him will question. One memory among many , stands out. It is of the bleak lecture theatre in the old Medical Building: grim and repellent setting, but the only available room large enough to accomlllodate his audience of honours-men, pass-men, and those who'came in . from other colleges and faculties to hear him expound Browning or read Rossetti's Sister Helen, and to gain thereby entrance to a new world. One ,will not forget the serried ranks of unselected students, the power that his words had over them, the hushed attention that was their tribute to him and to the experience into which they. were being drawn. It is.not easy to recover the secret of that amazing success. Many things contributed to it: . his sympathetic insight into the mind of his author and of his audience, which enabled him to mediate between them) a wide tolerance coupled with uncompromising standards of literary excellence, a sanity of judgment and cogency of argument that won the intellectual respect of his hearers, a quiet but pervasive sense of humour, and unrivalled powers of interpre- , tative reading, free from every hint of the elocutionist's art.' He was not a spectacular lecturer. He disdained the tricks of the trade, and emotionalism in, all its forms withered in his presence. No one was ever moved to go out and give the Toronto yell for Browning when the last lecture was over; but Browning meant more to him for the rest of his days. And hefe perhaps we approach the secret: the emphasis was on meaning. In great literature-in poetry, let us say,-the meaning embraces intellectual content and ' feeling and art, which there become one and indivisible: the meaning in its fullest sense is a unifying experience, and to stop,short of that experience is to fail of a complete comprehension of the poem.1 But it can be aplCf . "Study of Literature" (1898), xv. The date 'in brackets indicates the edition of Select Poems in which the essay appears as an introduction. The quotations from Select WILLIAM JOHN ALEXANDER 9 proached in different ways; and ill ni·ne out of ten of the poems with which Professor Alexander dealt, and for nine out of ten of the students to whom he spoke, the best way into the experience was through an exposition of the content, the meaning in its more limited and ordinary sense. On that '.method generally his treatment of the work was grounded; and it gave a firm foundation for whatever he had to say of feeling and of artistry. Often it was not necessary to say very much: the feeling and the artistry were borne in upon the audience in the very terms of the exposition and in the · reading that accompanied i~. And so he brought them, almost unawares, to the experience which was the total meaning of the poem. . This was essentially the-method of the teacher; but it was one that could be ~uccess­ fully applied only by a teacher who was also...