intellectual life is not free from certain dangers if we lead it too
exclusively. Intellectual excesses, by the excitement which they
communicate to the whole system, have a direct tendency to drive men
into other excesses, and a too great refinement in one direction may
produce degrading reactions in another. Still the cultivation of the
mind, reasonably pursued, is, on the whole, decidedly favorable to
morality; and we may easily understand that it should be so, when we
remember that people have recourse to sensual indulgences simply from a
desire for excitement, whilst intellectual pursuits supply excitement of
a more innocent kind and in the utmost variety and abundance. If,
instead of taking a few individual instances, you broadly observe whole
classes, you will recognize the moral utility of culture. The most
cultivated classes in our own country are also the most moral, and these
classes have advanced in morality at the same time that they have
advanced in culture. English gentlemen of the present day are superior
to their forefathers whom Fielding described; they are better educated,
and they read more; they are at the same time both more sober and more
chaste.
I may add that intellectual men have peculiar and most powerful reasons
for avoiding the excesses of immorality, reasons which to any one who
has a noble ambition are quite enough to encourage him in self-control.
Those excesses are the gradual self-destruction of the intellectual
forces, for they weaken the spring of the mind, not leaving it well
enough to face the drudgery that is inevitable in every career. Even in
cases where they do not immediately lead to visible imbecility, they
make the man less efficient and less capable than he might have been;
and all experienced wrestlers with fate and fortune know well that
success has often, at the critical time, depended upon some very
trifling advantage which the slightest diminution of power would have
lost to them. No one knows the full immensity of the difference between
having power enough to make a little headway against obstacles, and just
falling short of the power which is necessary at the time. In every
great intellectual career there are situations like that of a steamer
with a storm-wind directly against her and an iron-bound coast behind.
If the engines are strong enough to gain an inch an hour she is safe,
but if they lose there is no hope. Intellectual successes are so
rewarding that they are worth any sacrifice of pleasure; the sense of
defeat is so humiliating that fair Venus herself could not offer a
consolation for it. An ambitious man will govern himself for the sake of
his ambition, and withstand the seductions of the senses. Can he be ever
strong enough, can his brain ever be lucid enough for the immensity of
the task before him?
"Le jeune homme," says M. Taine, "ignore qu'il n'y a pas de pire
deperdition de forces, que de tels commerces abaissent le coeur,
qu'apres dix ans d'une vie pareille il aura perdu la moitie de sa
volonte, que ses pensees auront un arriere-gout habituel d'amertume et
de tristesse, que son ressort interieur sera amolli ou fausse. Il
s'excuse a ses propres yeux, en se disant qu'un homme doit tout toucher
pour tout connaitre. De fait, il apprend la vie, mais bien souvent aussi
il perd l'energie, la chaleur d'ame, la capacite d'agir, et a trente ans
il n'est plus bon qu'a faire un employe, un dilettante, ou un rentier."
PART III.
_OF EDUCATION._
LETTER I.
TO A FRIEND WHO RECOMMENDED THE AUTHOR TO LEARN THIS THING AND THAT.
Lesson learned from a cook--The ingredients of knowledge--Importance
of proportion in the ingredients--Case of an English author--Two
landscape painters--The unity and charm of character often dependent
upon the limitations of culture--The burden of knowledge may diminish
the energy of action--Difficulty of suggesting a safe rule for the
selection of our knowledge--Men qualified for their work by ignorance
as well as by knowledge--Men remarkable for the extent of their
studies--Franz Woepke--Goethe--Hebrew proverb.
I happened one day to converse with an excellent French cook about the
delicate art which he professed, and he comprised the whole of it under
two heads--the knowledge of the mutual influences of ingredients, and
the judicious management of heat. It struck me that there existed a very
close analogy between cookery and education; and, on following out the
subject in my own way, I found that what he told me suggested several
considerations of the very highest importance in the culture of the
human intellect.
Amongst the dishes for which my friend had a deserved reputation was a
certain _gateau de foie_ which had a very exquisite flavor. The
principal ingredient, not in quantity hut in power, was the liver of a
fowl; but there were several other ingredients also, and amongst these a
leaf or two of parsley. He told me that the influence of the parsley was
a good illustration of his theory about his art. If the parsley were
omitted, the flavor he aimed at was not produced at all; but, on the
other hand, if the quantity of parsley was in the least excessive, then
the _gateau_ instead of being a delicacy for _gourmets_ became an
uneatable mess. Perceiving that I was really interested in the subject,
he kindly promised a practical evidence of his doctrine, and the next
day intentionally spoiled his dish by a trifling addition of parsley. He
had not exaggerated the consequences; the delicate flavor entirely
departed, and left a nauseous bitterness in its place, like the
remembrance of an ill-spent youth.
And so it is, I thought, with the different ingredients of knowledge
which are so eagerly and indiscriminately recommended. We are told that
we ought to learn this thing and that, as if every new ingredient did
not affect the whole flavor of the mind. There is a sort of intellectual
chemistry which is quite as marvellous as material chemistry, and a
thousand times more difficult to observe. One general truth may,
however, be relied upon as surely and permanently our own. It is true
that everything we learn affects the _whole_ character of the mind.
Consider how incalculably important becomes the question of proportion
in our knowledge, and how that which we are is dependent as much upon
our ignorance as our science. What we call ignorance is only a smaller
proportion--what we call science only a larger. The larger quantity is
recommended as an unquestionable good, but the goodness of it is
entirely dependent on the mental product that we want. Aristocracies
have always instinctively felt this, and have decided that a gentleman
ought not to know too much of certain arts and sciences. The character
which they had accepted as their ideal would have been destroyed by
indiscriminate additions to those ingredients of which long experience
had fixed the exact proportions. The same feeling is strong in the
various professions: there is an apprehension that the disproportionate
knowledge may destroy the professional nature. The less intelligent
members of the profession will tell you that they dread an
unprofessional use of time; but the more thoughtful are not so
apprehensive about hours and days, _they_ dread that sure transformation
of the whole intellect which follows every increase of knowledge.
I knew an English author who by great care and labor had succeeded in
forming a style which harmonized quite perfectly with the character of
his thinking, and served as an unfailing means of communication with
his readers. Every one recognized its simple ease and charm, and he
might have gone on writing with that enviable facility had he not
determined to study Locke's philosophical compositions. Shortly
afterwards my friend's style suddenly lost its grace; he began to write
with difficulty, and what he wrote was unpleasantly difficult to read.
Even the thinking was no longer his own thinking. Having been in too
close communication with a writer who was not a literary artist, his own
art had deteriorated in consequence.
I could mention an English landscape painter who diminished the
pictorial excellence of his works by taking too much interest in
geology. His landscapes became geological illustrations, and no longer
held together pictorially. Another landscape painter, who began by
taking a healthy delight in the beauty of natural scenery, became
morbidly religious after an illness, and thenceforth passed by the
loveliest European scenery as comparatively unworthy of his attention,
to go and make ugly pictures of places that had sacred associations.
For people who produce nothing these risks appear to be less serious;
and yet there have been admirable characters, not productive, whose
admirableness might have been lessened by the addition of certain kinds
of learning. The last generation of the English country aristocracy was
particularly rich in characters whose unity and charm was dependent
upon the limitations of their culture, and which would have been
entirely altered, perhaps not for the better, by simply knowing a
science or a literature that was closed to them.
Abundant illustrations might be collected in evidence of the well-known
truth that the burden of knowledge may diminish the energy of action;
but this is rather outside of what we are considering, which is the
influence of knowledge upon the intellectual and not the active life.
I regret very much not to be able to suggest anything like a safe rule
for the selection of our knowledge. The most rational one which has been
hit upon as yet appears to be a simple confidence in the feeling that we
inwardly want to know. If I feel the inward want for a certain kind of
knowledge, it may perhaps be presumed that it would be good for me; but
even this feeling is not perfectly reliable, since people are often
curious about things that do not closely concern them, whilst they
neglect what it is most important for them to ascertain. All that I
venture to insist upon is, that we cannot learn any new thing without
changing our whole intellectual composition as a chemical compound is
changed by another ingredient; that the mere addition of knowledge may
be good for us or bad for us; and that whether it will be good or bad is
usually a more obscure problem than the enthusiasm of educators will
allow. That depends entirely on the work we have to do. Men are
qualified for their work by knowledge, but they are also negatively
qualified for it by their ignorance. Nature herself appears to take care
that the workman shall not know too much--she keeps him steadily to his
task; fixes him in one place mentally if not corporeally, and conquers
his restlessness by fatigue. As we are bound to a little planet, and
hindered by impassable gulfs of space from wandering in stars where we
have no business, so we are kept by the force of circumstances to the
limited studies that belong to us. If we have any kind of efficiency,
very much of it is owing to our narrowness, which is favorable to a
powerful individuality.
Sometimes, it is true, we meet with instances of men remarkable for the
extent of their studies. Franz Woepke, who died in 1864, was an
extraordinary example of this kind. In the course of a short life he
became, although unknown, a prodigy of various learning. His friend M.
Taine says that he was erudite in many eruditions. His favorite pursuit
was the history of mathematics, but as auxiliaries he had learned
Arabic, and Persian, and Sanskrit. He was classically educated, he wrote
and spoke the principal modern languages easily and correctly;[1] his
printed works are in three languages. He had lived in several nations,
and known their leading men of science. And yet this astonishing list of
acquirements may be reduced to the exercise of two decided and natural
tastes. Franz Woepke had the gift of the linguist and an interest in
mathematics, the first serving as auxiliary to the second.
Goethe said that "a vast abundance of objects must lie before us ere we
can think upon them." Woepke felt the need of this abundance, but he
did not go out of his way to find it. The objectionable seeking after
knowledge is the seeking after the knowledge which does not belong to
us. In vain you urge me to go in quest of sciences for which I have no
natural aptitude. Would you have me act like that foolish camel in the
Hebrew proverb, which in going to seek horns lost his ears?
LETTER II.
TO A FRIEND WHO STUDIED MANY THINGS.
Men cannot restrict themselves in learning--Description of a Latin
scholar of two generations since--What is attempted by a cultivated
contemporary--Advantages of a more restricted field--Privilege of
instant admission--Many pursuits cannot be kept up simultaneously--The
deterioration of knowledge through neglect--What it really is--The
only available knowledge that which we habitually use--Difficulty in
modern education--That it is inevitably a beginning of many things and
no more--The simpler education of an ancient Greek--That of
Alcibiades--How the Romans were situated as to this--The privilege of
limited studies belongs to the earlier ages--They learned and we
attempt to learn.
It appears to be henceforth inevitable that men should be unable to
restrict themselves to one or two pursuits, and you who are in most
respects a very perfect specimen of what the age naturally produces in
the way of culture, have studied subjects so many and so various that a
mere catalogue of them would astonish your grandfather if his shade
could revisit his old home. And yet your grandfather was considered a
very highly cultivated gentleman according to the ideas and requirements
of his time. He was an elegant scholar, but in Latin chiefly, for he
said that he never read Greek easily, and indeed he abandoned that
language entirely on leaving the University. But his Latin, from daily
use and practice (for he let no day slip by without reading some ancient
author) and from the thoroughness and accuracy of his scholarship, was
always as ready for service as the saddled steeds of Branksome. I think
he got more culture, more of the best effects of good literature, out of
that one language than some polyglots get out of a dozen. He knew no
modern tongue, he had not even the common pretension to read a little
French, and in his day hardly anybody studied German. He had no
scientific training of any kind except mathematics, in which I have
heard him say that he had never been proficient. Of the fine arts his
ignorance was complete, so complete that I doubt if he could have
distinguished Rigaud from Reynolds, and he had never played upon any
musical instrument. The leisure which he enjoyed during a long and
tranquil existence he gave entirely to Latin and English literature, but
of the two he enjoyed Latin the more, not with the preference of a
pedant, but because it carried him more completely out of the present,
and gave him the refreshment of a more perfect change. He produced on
all who knew him the impression of a cultivated gentleman, which he was.
There is only an interval of one generation between you and that good
Latinist, but how wide is the difference in your intellectual regimen?
You have studied--well, here is a little list of what you have studied,
and probably even this is not complete:--
Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, mathematics, chemistry,
mineralogy, geology, botany, the theory of music, the practice of music
on two instruments, much theory about painting, the practice of painting
in oil and water-color, photography, etching on copper, etc., etc., etc.
That is to say, six literatures (including English), six sciences
(counting mineralogy and geology as one), and five branches or
departments of the fine arts.
Omitting English literature from our total, as that may be considered to
come by nature to an Englishman, though any real proficiency in it costs
the leisure of years, we have here no less than sixteen different
pursuits. If you like to merge the theory of music and painting in the
practice of those arts, though as a branch of study the theory is really
distinct, we have still fourteen pursuits, any one of which is enough to
occupy the whole of one man's time. If you gave some time daily to each
of these pursuits, you could scarcely give more than half an hour, even
supposing that you had no professional occupation, and that you had no
favorite study, absorbing time to the detriment of the rest.
Now your grandfather, though he would be considered quite an ignorant
country gentleman in these days, had in reality certain intellectual
advantages over his more accomplished descendant. In the first place, he
entirely escaped the sense of pressure, the feeling of not having time
enough to do what he wanted to do. He accumulated his learning as
quietly as a stout lady accumulates her fat, by the daily satisfaction
of his appetite. And at the same time that he escaped the sense of
pressure, he escaped also the miserable sense of imperfection. Of course
he did not know Latin like an ancient Roman, but then he never met with
any ancient Romans to humiliate him by too rapid and half-intelligible
conversation. He met the best Latinists of his day; and felt himself a
master amongst masters. Every time he went into his study, to pass
delightful hours with the noble authors that he loved, he knew that his
admission into that august society would be immediate and complete. He
had to wait in no antechamber of mere linguistic difficulty, but passed
at once into the atmosphere of ancient thought, and breathed its
delicate perfume. In this great privilege of instant admission the man
of one study has always the advantage of men more variously cultivated.
Their misfortune is to be perpetually waiting in antechambers, and
losing time in them. Grammars and dictionaries are antechambers, bad
drawing and bad coloring are antechambers, musical practice with
imperfect intonation is an antechamber. And the worst is that even when
a man, like yourself for instance, of very various culture, has at one
time fairly penetrated beyond the antechamber, he is not sure of
admittance a year hence, because in the mean time the door may have been
closed against him. The rule of each separate hall or saloon of
knowledge is that he alone is to be instantly admitted who calls there
every day.
The man of various pursuits does not, in any case, keep them up
simultaneously; he is led by inclination or compelled by necessity to
give predominance to one or another. If you have fifteen different
pursuits, ten of them, at any given time, will be lying by neglected.
The metaphor commonly used in reference to neglected pursuits is
borrowed from the oxidation of metal; it is said that they become rusty.
This metaphor is too mild to be exact. Rust on metal, even on polished
steel, is easily guarded against by care, and a gun or a knife does not
need to be constantly used to keep it from being pitted. The gunsmith
and the cutler know how to keep these things, in great quantity, without
using them at all. But no one can retain knowledge without using it.
The metaphor fails still more seriously in perpetuating a false
conception of the deterioration of knowledge through neglect. It is not
simply a loss of polish which takes place, not a loss of mere
surface-beauty, but absolute disorganization, like the disorganization
of a carriage when the axle-tree is taken away. A rusty thing may still
be used, but a disorganized thing cannot be used until the lost organ
has been replaced. There is no equivalent, amongst ordinary material
losses, to the intellectual loss that we incur by ceasing from a
pursuit. But we may consider neglect as an enemy who carries away the
girths from our saddles, the bits from our bridles, the oars from our
boats, and one wheel from each of our carriages, leaving us indeed still
nominally possessors of all these aids to locomotion, but practically in
the same position as if we were entirely without them. And as an enemy
counts upon the delays caused by these vexations to execute his designs
whilst we are helpless, so whilst we are laboring to replace the lost
parts of our knowledge the occasion slips by when we most need it. The
only knowledge which is available when it is wanted is that which we
habitually use. Studies which from their nature cannot be commonly used
are always retained with great difficulty. The study of anatomy is
perhaps the best instance of this; every one who has attempted it knows
with what difficulty it is kept by the memory. Anatomists say that it
has to be learned and forgotten six times before it can be counted as a
possession. This is because anatomy lies so much outside of what is
needed for ordinary life that very few people are ever called upon to
use it except during the hours when they are actually studying it. The
few who need it every day remember is as easily as a man remembers the
language of the country which he inhabits. The workmen in the
establishment at Saint Aubin d'Ecroville, where Dr. Auzoux manufactures
his wonderful anatomical models, are as familiar with anatomy as a
painter is with the colors on his palette. _They_ never forget it.
_Their_ knowledge is never made practically valueless by some yawning
hiatus, causing temporary incompetence and delay.
To have one favorite study and live in it with happy familiarity, and
cultivate every portion of it diligently and lovingly, as a small yeoman
proprietor cultivates his own land, this, as to study, at least, is the
most enviable intellectual life. But there is another side to the
question which has to be considered.
The first difficulty for us is in our education. Modern education is a
beginning of many things, and it is little more than a beginning. "My
notion of educating my boy," said a rich Englishman, "is not to make him
particularly clever at anything during his minority, but to make him
overcome the rudimentary difficulties of many things, so that when he
selects for himself his own line of culture in the future, it cannot be
altogether strange to him, whatever line he may happen to select." A
modern father usually allows his son to learn many things from a feeling
of timidity about making a choice, if only one thing had to be chosen.
He might so easily make a wrong choice! When the inheritance of the
human race was less rich, there was no embarrassment of that kind. Look
at the education of an ancient Greek, at the education of one of the
most celebrated Athenians, a man living in the most refined and
intellectual society, himself mentally and bodily the perfect type of
his splendid race, an eloquent and powerful speaker, a most capable
commander both by sea and land--look at the education of the brilliant
Alcibiades! When Socrates gave the list of the things that Alcibiades
had learned, Alcibiades could add to it no other even nominal
accomplishment, and what a meagre, short catalogue it was! "But indeed I
also pretty accurately know what thou hast learned; thou wilt tell me if
anything has escaped my notice. Thou hast learned then thy letters
([Greek: grammata]), to play on the cithara ([Greek: kitharizein]) and
to wrestle ([Greek: palaiein]), for thou hast not cared to learn to play
upon the flute. This is all that thou hast learned, unless something has
escaped me." The [Greek: grammata] which Alcibiades had learned with a
master meant reading and writing, for he expressly says later on, that
as for speaking Greek, [Greek: hellenizein], he learned that of no other
master than the people. An English education equivalent to that of
Alcibiades would therefore consist of reading and writing, wrestling and
guitar-playing, the last accomplishment being limited to very simple
music. Such an education was possible to an Athenian (though it is fair
to add that Socrates does not seem to have thought much of it) because a
man situated as Alcibiades was situated in the intellectual history of
the world, had no past behind him which deserved his attention more than
the present which surrounded him. Simply to speak Greek, [Greek:
hellenizein], was really then the most precious of all accomplishments,
and the fact that Alcibiades came by it easily does not lessen its
value. Amongst a people like the Athenians, fond of intellectual talk,
conversation was one of the best and readiest means of informing the
mind, and certainly the very best means of developing it. It was not a
slight advantage to speak the language of Socrates, and have him for a
companion.
The cleverest and most accomplished Romans were situated rather more
like ourselves, or at least as we should be situated if we had not to
learn Latin and Greek, and if there were no modern language worth
studying except French. They went to Greece to perfect themselves in
Greek, and improve their accent, just as our young gentlemen go to Paris
or Touraine. Still, the burden of the past was comparatively light upon
their shoulders. An Englishman who had attempted no more than they were
bound to attempt might be a scholar, but he would not be considered so
He might be a thorough scholar in French and English,--that is, he
might possess the cream of two great literatures,--but he would be
spoken of as a person of defective education. It is the fashion, for
example, to speak of Sir Walter Scott as a half-educated man, because he
did not know much Greek, yet Sir Walter had studied German with success,
and with his habit of extensive reading, and his immense memory,
certainly knew incomparably more about the generations which preceded
him than Horace knew of those which preceded the Augustan era.
The privilege of limiting their studies, from the beginning, to one or
two branches of knowledge, belonged to earlier ages, and every
successive accumulation of the world's knowledge has gradually lessened
it. Schoolboys in our time are expected to know more, or to have
attempted to learn more, than the most brilliant intellectual leaders of
former times. What English parent, in easy circumstances, would be
content that his son should have the education of Alcibiades, or an
education accurately corresponding to that of Horace, or to that which
sufficed for Shakespeare? Yet although the burdens laid upon the memory
have been steadily augmented, its powers have not increased. Our brains
are not better constituted than those of our forefathers, although where
they learned one thing we attempt to learn six. They learned and we
attempt to learn. The only hope for us is to make a selection from the
attempts of our too heavily burdened youth, and in those selected
studies to emulate in after-life the thoroughness of our forefathers.
LETTER III
TO A FRIEND WHO STUDIED MANY THINGS.
An idealized portrait--The scholars of the sixteenth century--Isolated
students--French students of English when isolated from
Englishmen--How one of them read Tennyson--Importance of
sounds--Illusions of scholarship--Difficulty of appreciating the
sense--That Latin may still be made a spoken language--The early
education of Montaigne--A contemporary instance--Dream of a Latin
island--Rapid corruption of a language taught artificially.
In your answer to my letter about the multiplicity of modern studies you
tell me that my portrait of your grandfather is considerably idealized,
and that, notwithstanding all the respect which you owe to his memory,
you have convincing proof in his manuscript annotations to Latin authors
that his scholarship cannot have been quite so thorough as I represented
it. You convey, moreover, though with perfect modesty in form, the idea
that you believe your own Latin superior to your grandfather's,
notwithstanding the far greater variety of your studies. Let me confess
that I _did_ somewhat idealize that description of your grandfather's
intellectual life. I described rather a life which might have been than
a life which actually was. And even this "might have been" is
problematical. It may be doubted whether any modern has ever really
mastered Latin. The most that can be said is that a man situated like
your grandfather, without a profession, without our present temptation
to scatter effort in many pursuits, and who made Latin scholarship his
unique intellectual purpose, would probably go nearer to a satisfactory
degree of attainment than we whose time and strength have been divided
into so many fragments. But the picture of a perfect modern Latinist is
purely ideal, and the prevalent notion of high attainment in a dead
language is not fixed enough to be a standard, whilst if it were fixed
it would certainly be a very low standard. The scholars of this century
do not write Latin except as a mere exercise; they do not write books in
Latin, and they never speak it at all. They do not use the language
actively; they only read it, which is not really using it, but only
seeing how other men have used it. There is the same difference between
reading a language and writing or speaking it that there is between
looking at pictures intelligently and painting them. The scholars of the
sixteenth century spoke Latin habitually, and wrote it with ease and
fluency. "Nicholas Grouchy," says Montaigne, "who wrote a book _de
Comitiis Romanorum_; William Guerente, who has written a commentary upon
Aristotle; George Buchanan, that great Scotch poet; and Marc Anthony
Muret, whom both France and Italy have acknowledged for the best orator
of his time, my domestic tutors (at college), have all of them often
told me that I had in my infancy that language so very fluent and ready
that they were afraid to enter into discourse with me." This passage is
interesting for two reasons; it shows that the scholars of that age
spoke Latin; but it proves at the same time that they cannot have been
really masters of the language, since they were "afraid to enter into
discourse" with a clever child. Fancy an Englishman who professed to be
a French scholar and yet "was afraid to enter into discourse" with a
French boy, for fear he should speak too quickly! The position of these
scholars relatively to Latin was in fact too isolated for it to have
been possible that they should reach the point of mastery. Suppose a
society of Frenchmen, in some secluded little French village where no
Englishman ever penetrates, and that these Frenchmen learn English from
dictionaries, and set themselves to speak English with each other,
without anybody to teach them the colloquial language or its
pronunciation, without ever once hearing the sound of it from English
lips, what sort of English would they create amongst themselves? This is
a question that I happen to be able to answer very accurately, because I
have known two Frenchmen who studied English literature just as the
Frenchmen of the sixteenth century studied the literature of ancient
Rome. One of them, especially, had attained what would certainly in the
case of a dead language be considered a very high degree of scholarship
indeed. Most of our great authors were known to him, even down to the
close critical comparison of different readings. Aided by the most
powerful memory I ever knew, he had amassed such stores that the
acquisitions, even of cultivated Englishmen, would in many cases have
appeared inconsiderable beside them. But he could not write or speak
English in a manner tolerable to an Englishman; and although he knew
nearly all the words in the language, it was dictionary knowledge, and
so different from an Englishman's apprehension of the same words that it
was only a sort of pseudo-English that he knew, and not our living
tongue. His appreciation of our authors, especially of our poets,
differed so widely from English criticism and English feeling that it
was evident he did not understand them as we understand them. Two things
especially proved this: he frequently mistook declamatory versification
of the most mediocre quality for poetry of an elevated order; whilst, on
the other hand, his ear failed to perceive the music of the musical
poets, as Byron and Tennyson. How _could_ he hear their music, he to
whom our English sounds were all unknown? Here, for example, is the way
he read "Claribel:"--
"At ev ze bittle bommess
Azvart ze zeeket lon
At none ze veeld be ommess
Aboot ze most edston
At meedneeg ze mon commess
An lokez dovn alon
Ere songg ze lintveet svelless
Ze clirvoic-ed mavi dvelless
Ze fledgling srost lispess
Ze slombroos vav ootvelless
Ze babblang ronnel creespess
Ze ollov grot replee-ess
Vere Claribel lovlee-ess."
This, as nearly as I have been able to render it in English spelling,
was the way in which a French gentleman of really high culture was
accustomed to read English poetry to himself. Is it surprising that he
should have failed to appreciate the music of our musical verse? He did
not, however, seem to be aware that there existed any obstacle to the
accuracy of his decisions, but gave his opinion with a good deal of
authority, which might have surprised me had I not so frequently heard
Latin scholars do exactly the same thing. My French friend read
"Claribel" in a ridiculous manner; but English scholars all read Latin
poetry in a manner not less ridiculous. You laugh to hear "Claribel"
read with a foreign pronunciation, and you see at once the absurdity of
affecting to judge of it as poetry before the reader has learned to
pronounce the sounds; but you do not laugh to hear Latin poetry read
with a foreign pronunciation, and you do not perceive that we are all of
us disqualified, by our profound ignorance of the pronunciation of the
ancient Romans, for any competent criticism of their verse. In all
poetry, in all oratory, in much of the best and most artistic
prose-writing also, sound has a great influence upon sense: a great
deal is conveyed by it, especially in the way of feeling. If we do not
thoroughly know and practise the right pronunciation (and by the right
pronunciation I mean that which the author himself _thought in_ whilst
he wrote), we miss those delicate tones and cadences which are in
literature like the modulations of the voice in speech. Nor can we
properly appreciate the artistic choice of beautiful names for persons
and places unless we know the sounds of them quite accurately, and have
already in our minds the associations belonging to the sounds. Names
which are selected with the greatest care by our English poets, and
which hold their place like jewels on the finely-wrought texture of the
verse, lose all their value when they are read with a vicious foreign
pronunciation. So it must be with Latin poetry when read by an
Englishman, and it is probable that we are really quite insensible to
the delicate art of verbal selection as it was practised by the most
consummate masters of antiquity.
I know that scholars think that they hear the Roman music still; but
this is one of the illusions of scholarship. In each country Latin
scholars have adopted a conventional style of reading, and the sounds
which are in conformity with that style seem to them to be musical,
whilst other than the accepted sounds seem ridiculous, and grate harshly
on the unaccustomed ear. The music which the Englishman hears, or
imagines that he hears, in the language of ancient Rome, is certainly
not the music which the Roman authors intended to note in words. It is
as if my Frenchman, having read "Claribel" in his own way, had affirmed
that he heard the music of the verse. If he heard music at all, it was
not Tennyson's.
Permit me to add a few observations about sense. My French friend
certainly understood English in a very remarkable manner for a student
who had never visited our country; he knew the dictionary meaning of
every word he encountered, and yet there ever remained between him and
our English tongue a barrier or wall of separation, hard to define, but
easy to perceive. In the true deep sense he never understood the
language. He studied it, laid regular siege to it, mastered it to all
appearance, yet remained, to the end, outside of it. His observations,
and especially his unfavorable criticisms, proved this quite
conclusively. Expressions often appeared to him faulty, in which no
English reader would see anything to remark upon; it may be added that
(by way of compensation) he was unable to appreciate the oddity of those
intentionally quaint turns of expression which are invented by the craft
of humorists. It may even be doubted whether his English was of any
ascertainable use to him. He might probably have come as near to an
understanding of our authors by the help of translations, and he could
not converse in English, for the spoken language was entirely
unintelligible to him. An acquisition of this kind seems scarcely an
adequate reward for the labor that it costs. Compared with living
Englishmen my French friend was nowhere, but if English had been a dead
language, he would have been looked up to as a very eminent scholar, and
would have occupied a professor's chair in the university.
A little more life might be given to the study of Latin by making it a
spoken language. Boys might be taught to speak Latin in their schooldays
with the modern Roman pronunciation, which, though probably a deviation
from the ancient, is certainly nearer to it than our own. If colloquial
Latin were made a subject of special research, it is likely that a
sufficiently rich phrase-book might be constructed from the plays. If
this plan were pursued throughout Europe (always adopting the Roman
pronunciation) all educated men would possess a common tongue which
might be enriched to suit modern requirements without any serious
departure from classical construction. The want of such a system as this
was painfully felt at the council of the Vatican, where the assembled
prelates discovered that their Latin was of no practical use, although
the Roman Catholic clergy employ Latin more habitually than any other
body of men in the world. That a modern may be taught to think in Latin,
is proved by the early education of Montaigne, and I may mention a much
more recent instance. My brother-in-law told me that, in the spring of
1871, a friend of his had come to stay with him accompanied by his
little son, a boy seven years old. This child spoke Latin with the
utmost fluency, and he spoke nothing else. What I am going to suggest is
a Utopian dream, but let us suppose that a hundred fathers could be
found in Europe, all of this way of thinking, all resolved to submit to
some inconvenience in order that their sons might speak Latin as a
living language. A small island might be rented near the coast of Italy,
and in that island Latin alone might be permitted. Just as the
successive governments of France maintain the establishments of Sevres
and the Gobelins to keep the manufactures of porcelain and tapestry up
to a recognized high standard of excellence, so this Latin island might
be maintained to give more vivacity to scholarship. If there were but
one little corner of ground on the wide earth where pure Latin was
constantly spoken, our knowledge of the classic writers would become far
more sympathetically intimate. After living in the Latin island we
should think in Latin as we read, and read without translating.
But this is dreaming. It is too certain that on returning from the Latin
island into the atmosphere of modern colleges an evil change would come
over our young Latinists like that which came upon the young Montaigne
when his father sent him to the college of Guienne, "at that time the
best and most flourishing in France." Montaigne tells us that,
notwithstanding all his father's precautions, the place "was a college
still." "My Latin," he adds, "_immediately grew corrupt, and by
discontinuance I have since lost all manner of use of it._" If it were
the custom to speak Latin, it would be the custom to speak it badly; and
a master of the language would have to conform to the evil usages around
him. Our present state of ignorance has the charm of being silent,
except when old-fashioned gentlemen in the House of Commons quote poetry
which they cannot pronounce to hearers who cannot understand it.
NOTE.--An English orator quoted from Cicero the sentence "Non
intelligunt homines quam magnum vectigal sit parsimonia." He made the
second vowel in _vectigal_ short, and the House laughed at him; he
tried again and pronounced it with the long sound of the English _i_,
on which the critical body he addressed was perfectly satisfied. But
if a Roman had been present it is probable that, of the two, the short
English _i_ would have astonished his ears the less, for our short _i_
does bear some resemblance to the southern _i_ whereas our long i
resembles no single letter in any alphabet of the Latin family of
languages. We are scrupulously careful to avoid what we call false
quantities, we are quite utterly and ignorantly unscrupulous about
false sounds. One of the best instances is the well-known "veni, vidi,
vici," which we pronounce very much as if it had been written _vinai_,
_vaidai_, _vaisai_, in Italian letters.
LETTER IV.
TO A STUDENT OF LITERATURE.
Studies, whatever they may be, always considered, by some a waste of
time--The classical languages--The higher mathematics--The
accomplishments--Indirect uses of different studies--Influence of
music--Studies indirectly useful to authors--What induced Mr. Roscoe
to write the lives of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X.
Whatever you study, some one will consider that particular study a
foolish waste of time.
If you were to abandon successively every subject of intellectual labor
which had, in its turn, been condemned by some adviser as useless, the
result would be simple intellectual nakedness. The classical languages,
to begin with, have long been considered useless by the majority of
practical people--and pray, what to shopkeepers, doctors, attorneys,
artists, can be the use of the higher mathematics? And if these studies,
which have been conventionally classed as serious studies, are
considered unnecessary notwithstanding the tremendous authority of
custom, how much the more are those studies exposed to a like contempt
which belong to the category of accomplishments! What is the use of
drawing, for it ends in a worthless sketch? Why should we study music
when after wasting a thousand hours the amateur cannot satisfy the ear?
A _quoi bon_ modern languages when the accomplishment only enables us to
call a waiter in French or German who is sure to answer us in English?
And what, when it is not your trade, can be the good of dissecting
animals or plants?
To all questionings of this kind there is but one reply. We work for
culture. We work to enlarge the intelligence, and to make it a better
and more effective instrument. This is our main purpose; but it may be
added that even for our special labors it is always difficult to say
beforehand exactly what will turn out in the end to be most useful.
What, in appearance, can be more entirely outside the work of a
landscape painter than the study of ancient history? and yet I can show
you how an interest in ancient history might indirectly be of great
service to a landscape painter. It would make him profoundly feel the
human associations of many localities which to an ignorant man would be
devoid of interest or meaning; and this human interest in the scenes
where great events have taken place, or which have been distinguished by
the habitation of illustrious men in other ages, is in fact one of the
great fundamental motives of landscape painting. It has been very much
questioned, especially by foreign critics, whether the interest in
botany which is taken by some of the more cultivated English landscape
painters is not for them a false direction and wrong employment of the
mind; but a landscape painter may feel his interest in vegetation
infinitely increased by the accurate knowledge of its laws, and such an
increase of interest would make him work more zealously, and with less
danger of weariness and _ennui_, besides being a very useful help to the
memory in retaining the authentic vegetable forms. It may seem more
difficult to show the possible utility of a study apparently so entirely
outside of other studies as music is: and yet music has an important
influence on the whole of our emotional nature, and indirectly upon
expression of all kinds. He who has once learned the self-control of the
musician, the use of _piano_ and _forte_, each in its right place, when
to be lightly swift or majestically slow, and especially how to keep to
the key once chosen till the right time has come for changing it; he who
has once learned this knows the secret of the arts. No painter, writer,
orator, who had the power and judgment of a thoroughly cultivated
musician, could sin against the broad principles of taste.
More than all other men have authors reason to appreciate the indirect
utilities of knowledge that is apparently irrelevant. Who can tell what
knowledge will be of most use to _them_? Even the very greatest of
authors are indebted to miscellaneous reading, often in several
different languages, for the suggestion of their most original works,
and for the light which has kindled many a shining thought of their own.
And authors who seem to have less need than others of an outward help,
poets whose compositions might appear to be chiefly inventive and
emotional, novelists who are free from the restraints and the
researches of the historian, work up what they know into what they
write; so that if you could remove every line which is based on studies
outside the strict limits of their art, you would blot out half their
compositions. Take the antiquarian element out of Scott, and see how
many of his works could never have been written. Remove from Goldsmith's
brain the recollection of his wayward studies and strange experiences,
and you would remove the rich material of the "Traveller" and the
Essays, and mutilate even the immortal "Vicar of Wakefield." Without a
classical education and foreign travel, Byron would not have composed
"Childe Harold;" without the most catholic interest in the literature of
all the ages, and of many different peoples from the North Sea to the
Mediterranean, our contemporary William Morris would never have
conceived, and could not have executed, that strong work "The Earthly
Paradise." It may not seem necessary to learn Italian, yet Mr. Roscoe's
celebrity as an author was due in the first place to his private
fondness for Italian literature. He did not learn Italian in order that
he might write his biographies, but he wrote about Lorenzo and Leo
because he had mastered Italian, and because the language led him to
take an interest in the greatest house of Florence. The way in which
authors are led by their favorite studies indirectly to the great
performance of their lives has never been more clearly illustrated than
in this instance.
When William Roscoe was a young man he had for his friend Francis
Holden, nephew of Mr. Richard Holden, a schoolmaster in Liverpool.
Francis Holden was a young man of uncommon culture, having at the same
time really sound scholarship in several languages, and an ardent
enthusiasm for literature. He urged Roscoe to study languages, and used
especially, in their evening walks together, to repeat to him passages
from the noblest poets of Italy. In this way Roscoe was led to attempt
Italian, and, having once begun, went on till he had mastered it. "It
was in the course of these studies," says his biographer, "that he first
formed the idea of writing the Life of Lorenzo de' Medici."
LETTER V.
TO A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN WHO REGRETTED THAT HIS SON HAD THE TENDENCIES OF
A DILETTANT.
Inaccuracy of the common distinction between amateur pursuits and more
serious studies--All of us are amateurs in many things--Prince
Albert--The Emperor Napoleon III.--Contrast between general and
professional education--The price of high accomplishment.
I agree with you that amateurship, as generally practised, may be a
waste of time, but the common distinction between amateur pursuits and
serious studies is inconsistent. A painter whose art is imperfect and
who does not work for money is called an amateur; a scholar who writes
imperfect Latin, not for money, escapes the imputation of amateurship,
and is called a learned man. Surely we have been blinded by custom in
these things. Ideas of frivolity are attached to imperfect acquirement
in certain directions, and ideas of gravity to equally imperfect
acquirement in others. To write bad Latin poetry is not thought to be
frivolous, but it is considered frivolous to compose imperfectly and
unprofessionally in other fine arts.
Yet are we not all of us amateurs in those pursuits which constituted
our education--amateurs at the best, if we loved them, and even inferior
to amateurs if we disliked them? We have not sounder knowledge or more
perfect skill in the ancient languages than Prince Albert had in music.
We know something of them, yet in comparison with perfect mastery such
as that of a cultivated old Greek or Roman, our scholarship is at the
best on a level with the musical scholarship of a cultivated amateur
like the Prince Consort.
If the essence of dilettantism is to be contented with imperfect
attainment, I fear that all educated people must be considered
dilettants.
It is narrated of the Emperor Napoleon III. that in answer to some one
who inquired of his Majesty whether the Prince Imperial was a musician,
he replied that he discouraged dilettantism, and "did not wish his son
to be a Coburg." But the Emperor himself was quite as much a dilettant
as Prince Albert; though their dilettantism did not lie in the same
directions. The Prince was an amateur musician and artist; the Emperor
was an amateur historian, an amateur scholar, and antiquary. It may be
added that Napoleon III. indulged in another and more dangerous kind of
amateurship. He had a taste for amateur generalship, and the
consequences of his indulgence of this taste are known to every one.
The variety of modern education encourages a scattered dilettantism. It
is only in professional life that the energies of young men are
powerfully concentrated. There is a steadying effect in thorough
professional training which school education does not supply. Our boys
receive praise and prizes for doing many things most imperfectly, and it
is not their fault if they remain ignorant of what perfection really is,
and of the immensity of the labor which it costs. I think that you would
do well, perhaps, without discouraging your son too much by chillingly
accurate estimates of the value of what he has done, to make him on all
proper occasions feel and see the difference between half-knowledge and
thorough mastery. It would be a good thing for a youth to be made
clearly aware how enormous a price of labor Nature has set upon high
accomplishment in everything that is really worthy of his pursuit. It is
this persuasion, which men usually arrive at only in their maturity,
that operates as the most effectual tranquillizer of frivolous
activities.
LETTER VI.
TO THE PRINCIPAL OF A FRENCH COLLEGE.
The Author's dread of protection in intellectual pursuits--Example
from the Fine Arts--Prize poems--Governmental encouragement of
learning--The bad effects of it--Pet pursuits--Objection to the
interference of Ministers--A project for separate examinations.
What I am going to say will seem very strange to you, and is not
unlikely to arouse as much professional animosity as you are capable of
feeling against an old friend. You who are a dignitary of the
University, and have earned your various titles in a fair field, as a
soldier wins his epaulettes before the enemy, are not the likeliest
person to hear with patience the unauthorized theories of an innovator.
Take them, then, as mere speculations, if you will--not altogether
unworthy of consideration, for they are suggested by a sincere anxiety
for the best interests of learning, and yet not very dangerous to vested
interests of any kind, since they can have little influence on the
practice or opinion of the world.
I feel a great dread of what may be called _protection_ in intellectual
pursuits. It seems to me that when the Government of a country applies
an artificial stimulus to certain branches of study for their
encouragement by the offer of rewards in honor or in money beyond the
rewards inherent in the studies themselves, or coming naturally from
their usefulness to mankind, there is a great danger that men may give a
disproportionate attention to those favored branches of study. Let me
take an example from the practice of the Fine Arts. A Government, by
medals and crosses, or by money, can easily create and foster a school
of painting which is entirely out of relation to the century in which it
exists, and quite incapable of working harmoniously with the
contemporary national life. This has actually been done to a
considerable extent in various countries, especially in France and in
Bavaria. A sort of classicism which had scarcely any foundation in
sincerity of feeling was kept up artificially by a system of
encouragement which offered inducements outside the genuine ambition of
an artist. The true enthusiasm which is the life of art impels the
artist to express his own feeling for the delight of others. The offer
of a medal or a pension induces him to make the sort of picture which is
likely to satisfy the authorities. He first ascertains what is according
to the rule, and then follows it as nearly as he is able. He works in a
temper of simple conformity, remote indeed from the passionate
enthusiasm of creation. It is so with prize poems. We all know the sort
of poetry which is composed in order to gain prizes. The anxiety of the
versifier is to be safe: he tries to compose what will escape censure;
he dreads the originality that may give offence. But all powerful
pictures and poems have been wrought in the energy of individual
feeling, not in conformity to a pattern.
Now, suppose that, instead of encouraging poetry or painting, a
Government resolves to encourage learning. It will patronize certain
pursuits to the neglect of others, or it will encourage certain pursuits
more liberally than others. The subjects of such a Government will not
follow learning exclusively for its delightfulness or its utility;
another consideration will affect their choice. They will inquire which
pursuits are rewarded by prizes in honor or money, and they will be
strongly tempted to select them. Therefore, unless the Government has
exercised extraordinary wisdom, men will learn what they do not really
care for and may never practically want, merely in order to win some
academical grade. So soon as this object has been attained, they will
immediately abandon the studies by which they attained it.
Can it be said that in these cases the purposes of the Government were
fulfilled? Clearly not, if it desired to form a permanent taste for
learning. But it may have done worse than fail in this merely negative
way; it may have diverted its youth from pursuits to which Nature called
them, and in which they might have effectually aided the advancement and
the prosperity of the State.
Let us suppose that a Government were to have a pet study, and offer
great artificial inducements for success in it. Suppose that the pet
study were entomology. All the most promising youth of the country would
spend ten years in emulating Messrs. Kirby and Spence, and take their
degrees as entomological bachelors. But might it not easily happen that
to a majority of the young gentlemen this pursuit would have acted
positively as a hindrance by keeping them from other pursuits more
likely to help them in their professions? It would not only cost a great
deal of valuable time, it would absorb a quantity of youthful energy
which the country can ill afford to lose. The Government would probably
affirm that entomology, if not always practically useful in itself, was
an invaluable intellectual training; but what if this training used up
the early vigor which might be needed for other pursuits, and of which
every human being has only a limited supply? We should be told, no
doubt, that this powerful encouragement was necessary to the advancement
of science, and it is true that under such a system the rudiments of
entomology would be more generally known. But the vulgarization of
rudiments is not the advancement of knowledge. Entomology has gone quite
as far in discovery, though pursued simply for its own sake, as it would
have gone if it had been made necessary to a bachelor's degree.
You will ask whether I would go so far as to abolish degrees of all
kinds, Certainly not; that is not my project. But I believe that no
Government is competent to make a selection amongst intellectual
pursuits and say, "This or that pursuit shall be encouraged by
university degrees, whilst other pursuits of intellectual men shall have
no encouragement whatever." I may mention by name your present autocrat
of Public Instruction, Jules Simon. He is a literary man of some
eminence; he has written several interesting books, and on the whole he
is probably more competent to deal with these questions than many of his
predecessors. But however capable a man may be, he is sure to be biassed
by the feeling common to all intellectual men which attributes a
peculiar importance to their own pursuits. I do not like to see any
Minister, or any Cabinet of Ministers, settling what all the young men
of a country are to learn under penalty of exclusion from all the
liberal professions.
What I should think more reasonable would be some such arrangement as
the following. There might be a board of thoroughly competent examiners
for each branch of study separately, authorized to confer certificates
of competence. When a man believed himself to have mastered a branch of
study, he would go and try to get a certificate for that. The various
studies would then be followed according to the public sense of their
importance, and would fall quite naturally into the rank which they
ought to occupy at any given period of the national history. These
separate examinations should be severe enough to ensure a serviceable
degree of proficiency. Nobody should be allowed to teach anything who
had not got a certificate for the particular thing he intended to
profess. In the confusion of your present system, not only do you fail
to insure the thoroughness of pupils, but the teachers themselves are
too frequently incompetent in some speciality which accidentally fails
to their share. I think that a Greek master ought to be a complete
Hellenist, but surely it is not necessary that he should be half a
mathematician.
To sum up. It seems to me that a Government has no business to favor
some intellectual pursuits more than others, but that it ought to
recognize competent attainment in every one of them by a sort of diploma
or certificate, leaving the relative rank of different pursuits to be
settled by public opinion. And as to the educators themselves, I think
that when a man has proved his competence in one thing, he ought to be
allowed to teach that one thing in the University without being required
to pass an examination in any other thing.
LETTER VII.
TO THE PRINCIPAL OF A FRENCH COLLEGE.
Loss of time to acquire an ancient language too imperfectly for it to
be useful--Dr. Arnold--Mature life leaves little time for
culture--Modern indifference to ancient thinking--Larger experience of
the moderns--The moderns older than the ancients--The Author's regret
that Latin has ceased to be a living language--The shortest way to
learn to read a language--The recent interest in modern languages--A
French student of Hebrew.
I was happy to learn your opinion of the reform so recently introduced
by the Minister of Public Instruction, and the more so that I was glad
to find the views of so inexperienced a person as myself confirmed by
your wider knowledge. You went even farther than M. Jules Simon, for you
openly expressed a desire for the complete withdrawal of Greek from the
ordinary school curriculum. Not that you undervalue Greek,--no one of
your scholarship would be likely to undervalue a great literature,--but
you thought it a loss of time to acquire a language so imperfectly that
the literature still remained practically closed whilst thousands of
valuable hours had been wasted on the details of grammar. The truth is,
that although the principle of beginning many things in school education
with the idea that the pupil will in maturer life pursue them to fuller
accomplishment may in some instances be justified by the prolonged
studies of men who have a natural taste for erudition, it is idle to
shut one's eyes to the fact that most men have no inclination for
school-work after they have left school, and if they had the inclination
they have not the time. Our own Dr. Arnold, the model English
schoolmaster, said, "It is so hard to begin anything in after-life, and
so comparatively easy to continue what has been begun, that I think we
are bound to break ground, as it were, into several of the mines of
knowledge with our pupils; that the first difficulties may be overcome
by them whilst there is yet a power from without to aid their own
faltering resolution, and that so they may be enabled, if they will, to
go on with the study hereafter." The principle here expressed is no
doubt one of the important principles of all early education, and yet I
think that it cannot be safely followed without taking account of human
nature, such as it is. Everything hangs on that little parenthesis "if
they will." And if they will _not_, how then? The time spent in breaking
the ground has been wasted, except so far as the exercise of breaking
the ground may have been useful in mental gymnastics.
Mature life brings so many professional or social duties that it leaves
scant time for culture; and those who care for culture most earnestly
and sincerely, are the very persons who will economize time to the
utmost. Now, to read a language that has been very imperfectly mastered
is felt to be a bad economy of time. Suppose the case of a man occupied
in business who has studied Greek rather assiduously in youth and yet
not enough to read it with facility. Suppose that this man wants to get
at the mind of Plato. He can read the original, but he reads it so
slowly that it would cost him more hours than he can spare, and this is
why he has recourse to a translation. In this case there is no
indifference to Greek culture; on the contrary, the reader desires to
assimilate what he can of it, but the very earnestness of his wish to
have free access to ancient thought makes him prefer it in modern
language.
This is the most favorable instance that can be imagined, except, of
course, those exceedingly rare cases where a man has leisure enough, and
enthusiasm enough, to become a Hellenist. The great majority of our
contemporaries do not care for ancient thought at all, it is so remote
from them, it belongs to conditions of civilization so different from
their own, it is encumbered with so many lengthy discussions of
questions which have been settled by the subsequent experience of the
world, that the modern mind prefers to occupy itself with its own
anxieties and its own speculations. It is a great error to suppose that
indifference to ancient thinking is peculiar to the spirit of
Philistinism; for the most cultivated contemporary intellects seek light
from each other rather than from the ancients. One of the most
distinguished of modern thinkers, a scholar of the rarest classical
attainments, said to me in reference to some scheme of mine for renewing
my classical studies, that they would be of no more use to me than
numismatics. It is this feeling, the feeling that Greek speculation is
of less consequence to the modern world than German and French
speculation, which causes so many of us, rightly or wrongly, to regard
it as a palaeontological curiosity, interesting for those who are curious
as to the past of the human mind, but not likely to be influential upon
its future.
This estimate of ancient thinking is not often expressed quite so openly
as I have just expressed it, and yet it is very generally prevalent even
amongst the most thoughtful people, especially if modern science has had
any conspicuous influence in the formation of their minds. Tho truth is,
as Sydney Smith observed many years ago, that there is a confusion of
language in the use of the word "ancient." We say "the ancients," as if
they were older and more experienced men than we are, whereas the age
and experience are entirely on our side. They were the clever children,
"and we only are the white-bearded, silver-headed ancients, who have
treasured up, and are prepared to profit by, all the experience which
human life can supply." The sense of our larger experience, as it grows
in us and becomes more distinctly conscious, produces a corresponding
decline in our feelings of reverence for classic times. The past has
bequeathed to us its results, and we have incorporated them into our own
edifice, but we have used them rather as materials than as models.
In your practical desire to retain in education only what is likely to
be used, you are willing to preserve Latin. M. Jules Simon says that
Latin ought to be studied only to be read. On this point permit me to
offer an observation. The one thing I regret about Latin is that we have
ceased to speak it. The natural method, and by far the most rapid and
sure method of learning a language, is to begin by acquiring words in
order to use them to ask for what we want; after that we acquire other
words for narration and the expression of our sentiments. By far the
shortest way to learn to read a language is to begin by speaking it. The
colloquial tongue is the basis of the literary tongue. This is so true
that with all the pains and trouble you give to the Latin education of
your pupils, you cannot teach them as much Latin, for reading only, in
the course of ten years, as a living foreigner will give them of his own
language in ten months. I seriously believe that if your object is to
make boys read Latin easily, you begin at the wrong end. It is
deplorable that the learned should ever have allowed Latin to become a
dead language, since in permitting this they have enormously increased
the difficulty of acquiring it, even for the purposes of scholarship.
No foreigner who knows the French people will disapprove of the novel
desire to know the modern languages, which has been one of the most
unexpected consequences of the war. Their extreme ignorance of the
literature of other nations has been the cause of enormous evils.
Notwithstanding her central position, France has been a very isolated
country intellectually, much more isolated than England, more isolated
even than Transylvania, where foreign literatures are familiar to the
cultivated classes. This isolation has produced very lamentable effects,
not only on the national culture but most especially on the national
character. No modern nation, however important, can safely remain in
ignorance of its contemporaries. The Frenchman was like a gentleman shut
up within his own park-wall, having no intercourse with his neighbors,
and reading nothing but the history of his own ancestors--for the Romans
were your ancestors, intellectually. It is only by the study of living
languages, and their continual use, that we can learn our true place in
the world. A Frenchman was studying Hebrew; I ventured to suggest that
German might possibly be more useful. To this he answered, _that there
was no literature in German_. "_Vous avez Goethe, vous avez Schiller, et
vous avez Lessing, mais en dehors de ces trois noms il n'y a rien._"
This meant simply that my student of Hebrew measured German literature
by his own knowledge of it. Three names had reached him, only names, and
only three of them. As to the men who were unknown to him he had decided
that they did not exist. Certainly if there are many Frenchmen in this
condition, it is time that they learned a little German.
LETTER VIII.
TO A STUDENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES.
Standard of attainment in living languages higher than in ancient
ones--Difficulty of maintaining high pretensions--Prevalent illusion
about the facility of modern languages--Easy to speak them badly--Some
propositions based upon experience--Expectations and disappointments.
Had your main purpose in the education of yourself (I do not say
self-education, for you wisely accept all help from others) been the
attainment of classical scholarship, I might have observed that as the
received standard in that kind of learning is not a very elevated one,
you might reasonably hope to reach it with a certain calculable quantity
of effort. The classical student has only to contend against other
students who are and have been situated very much as he is situated
himself. They have learned Latin and Greek from grammars and
dictionaries as he is learning them, and the only natural advantages
which any of his predecessors may have possessed are superiorities of
memory which may be compensated by his greater perseverance, or
superiorities of sympathy to which he may "level up" by that acquired
and artificial interest which comes from protracted application. But the
student of modern languages has to contend against advantages of
situation, as the gardeners of an inhospitable climate contend against
the natural sunshine of the south. How easy it is to have a fruitful
date-tree in Arabia, how difficult in England! How easy for the
Florentine to speak Italian, how difficult for us! The modern linguist
can never fence himself behind that stately unquestionableness which
shields the classical scholar. His knowledge may at any time be put to
the severest of all tests, to a test incomparably more severe than the
strictest university examination. The first _native_ that he meets is
his examiner, the first foreign city is his Oxford. And this is probably
one reason why accomplishment in modern languages has been rather a
matter of utility than of dignity, for it is difficult to keep up great
pretensions in the face of a multitude of critics. What would the most
learned-looking gown avail, if a malicious foreigner were laughing at
us?
But there is a deep satisfaction in the severity of the test. An honest
and courageous student likes to be clearly aware of the exact value of
his acquisitions. He takes his French to Paris and has it tested there
as we take our plate to the silversmith, and after that he knows, or may
know, quite accurately what it is worth. He has not the dignity of
scholarship, he is not held to be a learned man, but he has acquired
something which may be of daily use to him in society, or in commerce,
or in literature; and there are thousands of educated natives who can
accurately estimate his attainment and help him to a higher perfection.
All this is deeply satisfying to a lover of intellectual realities. The
modern linguist is always on firm ground, and in broad daylight. He may
impede his own progress by the illusions of solitary self-conceit, but
the atmosphere outside is not favorable to such illusions. It is well
for him that the temptations to charlatanism are so few, that the risks
of exposure are so frequent.
Still there _are_ illusions, and the commonest of them is that a modern
language may be very easily mastered. There is a popular idea that
French is easy, that Italian is easy, that German is more difficult, yet
by no means insuperably difficult. It is believed that when an
Englishman has spent all the best years of his youth in attempting to
learn Latin and Greek, he may acquire one or two modern languages with
little effort during a brief residence on the Continent. It is certainly
true that we may learn any number of foreign languages so as to speak
them badly, but it surely cannot be easy to speak them well. It may be
inferred that this is not easy because the accomplishment is so rare.
The inducements are common, the accomplishment is rare. Thousands of
English people have very strong reasons for learning French, thousands
of French people could improve their position by learning English; but
rare indeed are the men and women who know both languages thoroughly.
The following propositions, based on much observation of a kind wholly
unprejudiced and tested by a not inconsiderable experience will be
found, I believe, unassailable.
1. _Whenever a foreign language is perfectly acquired there are peculiar
family conditions. The person has either married a person of the other
nation, or is of mixed blood._
2. _When a foreign language has been acquired (there are instances of
this) in quite absolute perfection, there is almost always some loss in
the native tongue. Either the native tongue is not spoken correctly, or
it is not spoken with perfect ease._
3. _A man sometimes speaks two languages correctly, his father's and his
mother's, or his own and his wife's, but never three._
4. _Children can speak several languages exactly like natives, but in
succession, never simultaneously. They forget the first in acquiring the
second, and so on._
5. _A language cannot be learned by an adult without five years'
residence in the country where it is spoken, and without habits of close
observation a residence of twenty years is insufficient._
This is not encouraging, but it is the truth. Happily, a knowledge which
falls far short of mastery may be of much practical use in the common
affairs of life, and may even afford some initiation into foreign
literatures. I do not argue that because perfection is denied of us by
the circumstances of our lives or the necessities of our organization we
are therefore to abandon the study to every language but the mother
tongue. It may be of use to us to know several languages imperfectly,
if only we confess the hopelessness of absolute attainment. That which
is truly, and deeply, and seriously an injury to our intellectual life,
is the foolishness of the too common vanity which first deludes itself
with childish expectations and then tortures itself with late regret for
failure which might have been easily foreseen.
LETTER IX.
TO A STUDENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES.
Cases known to the Author--Opinion of an English linguist--Family
conditions--An Englishman who lived forty years in France--Influence
of children--An Italian in France--Displacement of one language by
another. English lady married to a Frenchman--An Italian in
Garibaldi's army--Corruption of languages by the uneducated when they
learn more than one--Neapolitan servant of an English gentleman--A
Scotch servant-woman--The author's eldest boy--Substitution of one
language for another--In mature life we lose facility--The resisting
power of adults--Seen in international marriages--Case of a retired
English officer--Two Germans in France--Germans in London--The
innocence of the ear--Imperfect attainment of little intellectual
use--Too many languages attempted in education--Polyglot
waiters--Indirect benefits.
My five propositions about learning modern languages appear from your
answer to have rather surprised you, and you ask for some instances in
illustration. I am aware that my last letter was dogmatic, so let me
begin by begging your pardon for its dogmatism. The present
communication may steer clear of that rock of offence, for it shall
confine itself to an account of cases that I have known.
One of the most accomplished of English linguists remarked to me that
after much observation of the labors of others, and a fair estimate of
his own, he had come to the rather discouraging conclusion that it was
not possible to learn a foreign language. He did not take account of the
one exceptional class of cases where the family conditions make the use
of two languages habitual. The most favorable family conditions are not
in themselves sufficient to _ensure_ the acquisition of a language, but
wherever an instance of perfect acquisition is to be found, these family
conditions are always found along with it. My friend W., an English
artist living in Paris, speaks French with quite absolute accuracy as to
grammar and choice of expression, and with accuracy of pronunciation so
nearly absolute that the best French ears can detect nothing wrong but
the pronunciation of the letter "_r_." He has lived in France for the
space of forty years, but it may be doubted whether in forty years he
could have mastered the language as he has done if he had not married a
native. French has been his home language for 30 years and more, and the
perfect ease and naturalness of his diction are due to the powerful home
influences, especially to the influence of children. A child is born
that speaks the foreign tongue from the first inarticulate beginnings
It makes its own child language, and the father as he hears it is born
over again in the foreign land by tender paternal sympathy. Gradually
the sweet child-talk gives place to the perfect tongue and the father
follows it by insensible gradations, himself the most docile of pupils,
led onward rather than instructed by the winning and playful little
master, incomparably the best of masters. The process here is nature's
own inimitable process. Every new child that is born to a man so
situated carries him through a repetition of that marvellous course of
teaching. The language _grows_ in his brain from the first
rudiments--the real natural rudiments, not the hard rudiments of the
grammarian--just as plants grow naturally from their seeds. It has not
been built by human processes of piecing together, but has developed
itself like a living creature. This way of learning a language possesses
over the dictionary process exactly the kind of superiority which a
living man, developed naturally from the foetus, possesses over the
elastic anatomical man-model of the ingenious doctor Auzoux. The
doctor's models are remarkably perfect in construction, they have all
the organs, but they have not life.
When, however, this natural process of growth is allowed to go forward
without watchful care, it is likely to displace the mother tongue. It is
sometimes affirmed that the impressions of childhood are never effaced,
that the mother tongue is _never_ forgotten. It may be that it is never
wholly forgotten, except in the case of young children, but it may
become so imperfect as to be practically of little use. I knew an
Italian who came to France as a young man and learned his profession
there. He was afterwards naturalized, married a French lady, had several
children, pursued a very successful career in Paris, and became
ultimately French Ambassador at the court of Victor Emmanuel. His French
was so perfect that it was quite impossible for any one to detect the
usual Italian accents. I used to count him as a remarkable and almost
solitary instance of a man speaking two languages in their perfection,
but I learned since then that his French had displaced his Italian, and
so completely that he was quite unable to speak Italian correctly, and
made use of French invariably when in Italy. The risk of this
displacement is always greatest in cases where the native tongue is not
kept up by means of literature. Byron and Shelley, or our contemporary
Charles Lever, would run little risk of losing English by continental
residence, but people not accustomed to reading and writing often forget
the mother tongue in a few years, even when the foreign one which has
displaced it is still in a state of imperfection. Madame L. is an
English lady who married a Frenchman; neither her husband nor her
children speak English, and as her relatives live in one of our most
distant colonies, she has been separated from them for many years.
Isolated thus from English society, living in a part of France rarely
visited by her countrymen, never reading English, and writing it little
and at long intervals, she speaks it now with much difficulty and
diffidence. Her French is not grammatical, though she has lived for many
years with people who speak grammatically; but then her French is fluent
and alive, truly her own living language now, whilst English is, if not
wholly forgotten, dead almost as our Latin is dead. She and I always
speak French together when we meet, because it is easier for her than
English, and a more natural expression. I have known some other cases of
displacement of the native tongue, and have lately had the opportunity
of watching a case of such displacement during its progress. A sergeant
in the Italian army deserted to join Garibaldi in the campaign of 1870.
On the conclusion of peace it was impossible for him to return to Italy,
so he settled in France and married there. I found some work for him,
and for some months saw him frequently. Up to the date of his marriage
he spoke no language but Italian, which he could read and write
correctly, but after his marriage the process of displacement of the
native tongue began immediately by the corruption of it. He did not keep
his Italian safely by itself, putting the French in a place of its own
as he gradually acquired it, but he mixed the two inextricably together.
Imagine the case of a man who, having a bottle half full of wine, gets
some beer given him and pours it immediately into the wine-bottle. The
beer will never be pure beer, but it will effectually spoil the wine.
This process is not so much one of displacement as of corruption, it
takes place readily in uncultivated minds, with feeble separating
powers. Another example of this was a Neapolitan servant of an English
gentleman, who mixed his Italian twice, first with French and afterwards
with English, producing a compound intelligible to nobody but himself,
if indeed he himself understood it. At the time I knew him, the man had
no means of communication with his species. When his master told him to
do anything, he made a guess at what was likely to be for the moment his
master's most probable want, and sometimes hit the mark, but more
generally missed it. The man's name was Alberino, and I remember on one
occasion profiting by a mistaken guess of his. After a visit to
Alberino's master, my servant brought forth a magnificent basket of
trout, which surprised me, as nothing had been said about them. However,
we ate them, and only discovered afterwards that the present was due to
an illusion of Alberino's. His master had never told him to give me the
trout, but he had interpreted some other order in that sense. When you
asked him for mustard, he would first touch the salt, and then the
pepper, etc., looking at you inquiringly till you nodded assent. Any
attempt at conversation with Alberino was sure to lead to a perfect
comedy of misunderstandings. He never had the remotest idea of what his
interlocutor was talking about; but he pretended to catch your meaning,
and answered at haphazard. He had a habit of talking aloud to himself,
"but in a tongue no man could understand."
It is a law that cultivated people can keep languages apart, and in
their purity, better than persons who have not habits of intellectual
analysis. When I lived in Scotland three languages were spoken in my
house all day long, and a housemaid came to us from the Lowlands who
spoke nothing but Lowland Scotch. She used to ask what was the French
for this thing or that, and then what was the Gaelic for it. Having been
answered, she invariably asked the farther question which of the three
words, French, Gaelic, or English, _was the right word_. She remained,
to the last, entirely incapable of conceiving how all the three could be
right. Had she learned another language, it must have been by
substitution for her own. This is exactly the natural process which
takes place in the brains of children who are transferred from one
country to another. My eldest boy spoke English in childhood as well as
any other English child of his age. He was taken to the south of France,
and in three months he replaced his English with Provencal, which he
learned from the servants about him. There were two ladies in the house
who spoke English well, and did all in their power, in compliance with
my urgent entreaties, to preserve the boy's native language; but the
substitution took place too rapidly, and was beyond control. He began by
an unwillingness to use English words whenever he could use Provencal
instead, and in a remarkably short time this unwillingness was succeeded
by inability. The native language was as completely taken out of his
brain as a violin is taken out of its case: nothing remained, _nothing_,
not one word, not any echo of an accent. And as a violinist may put a
new instrument into the case from which he has removed the old one, so
the new language occupied the whole space which had been occupied by
English. When I saw the child again, there was no means of communication
between us.
After that, he was removed to the north of France, and the same process
began again. As Provencal had pushed out English, so French began to
push out Provencal. The process was wonderfully rapid. The child heard
people speak French, and he began to speak French like them without any
formal teaching. He spoke the language as he breathed the air. In a few
weeks he did not retain the least remnant of his Provencal; it was gone
after his English into the limbo of the utterly forgotten.
Novelists have occasionally made use of cases similar to this, but they
speak of the forgotten language as being forgotten in the manner that
Scott forgot the manuscript of "Waverley," which he found afterwards in
the drawers of an old writing-desk when he was seeking for
fishing-tackle. They assume (conveniently for the purposes of their art)
that the first language we learn is never really lost, but may be as it
were under certain circumstances _mislaid_, to be found again at some
future period. Now, although something of this kind may be possible when
the first language has been spoken in rather advanced boyhood, I am
convinced that in childhood a considerable number of languages might
succeed each other without leaving any trace whatever. I might have
remarked that in addition to English, Provencal, and French, my boy had
understood Gaelic in his infancy, at least to some extent, though he did
not speak it. The languages in his case succeeded each other without any
cost of effort, and without any appreciable effect on health. The
pronunciation of each language was quite faultless so far as foreign
accent went; the child had the defects of children, but of children born
in the different countries where he lived.
As we grow older this facility of acquisition gradually leaves us. M.
Philarete Chasles says that it is quite impossible for any adult to
learn German: an adult may learn German as Dr. Arnold did for purposes
of erudition, for which it is enough to know a language as we know
Latin, but this is not mastery. You have met with many foreign residents
in England, who after staying in the country for many years can barely
make themselves intelligible, and must certainly be incapable of
appreciating those beauties of our literature which are dependent upon
arrangements of sound. The resisting power of the adult brain is quite
as remarkable as the assimilating power of the immature brain. A child
hears a sound, and repeats it with perfect accuracy; a man hears a
sound, and by way of imitation utters something altogether different,
being nevertheless persuaded that it is at least a close and
satisfactory approximation. Children imitate well, but adults badly, and
the acquisition of languages depends mainly on imitation. The resisting
power of adults is often seen very remarkably in international
marriages. In those classes of society where there is not much culture,
or leisure or disposition for culture, the one will not learn the
other's language from opportunity or from affection, but only under
absolute necessity. It seems as if two people living always together
would gain each other's languages as a matter of course, but the fact is
that they do not. French people who marry foreigners do not usually
acquire the foreign language if the pair remain in France; English
people under similar conditions make the attempt more frequently, but
they rest contented with imperfect attainment.
If the power of resistance is so great in people who being wedded
together for life have peculiarly strong inducements for learning each
other's languages, it need surprise us little to find a like power of
resistance in cases where motives of affection are altogether absent.
Englishmen who go to France as adults, and settle there, frequently
remain for many years in a state of half-knowledge which, though it may
carry them through the little difficulties of life at railway stations
and restaurants, is for any intellectual purpose of no conceivable
utility. I knew a retired English officer, a bachelor, who for many
years had lived in Paris without any intention of returning to England.
His French just barely carried him through the small transactions of his
daily life, but was so limited and so incorrect that he could not
maintain a conversation. His vocabulary was very meagre; his genders
were all wrong, and he did not know one single verb, literally not one.
His pronunciation was so foreign as to be very nearly unintelligible,
and he hesitated so much that it was painful to have to listen to him. I
could mention a celebrated German, who has lived in or near Paris for
the last twenty years, and who can neither speak nor write the language
with any approach to accuracy. Another German, who settled in France as
a master of languages, wrote French tolerably, but spoke it
_in_tolerably. There are Germans in London, who have lived there long
enough to have families and make fortunes, yet who continue to repeat
the ordinary German faults of pronunciation, the same faults which they
committed years ago, when first they landed on our shores.
The child hears and repeats the true sound, the adult misleads himself
by the spelling. Seldom indeed can the adult recover the innocence of
the ear. It is like the innocence of the eye, which has to be recovered
before we can paint from nature, and which belongs only to infancy and
to art.
Let me observe, in conclusion, that although to know a foreign language
perfectly is a most valuable aid to the intellectual life, I have never
known an instance of very imperfect attainment which seemed to enrich
the student intellectually. Until you can really feel the refinements of
a language, your mental culture can get little help or furtherance from
it of any kind, nothing but an interminable series of misunderstandings.
I think that in the education of our boys too many languages are
attempted, and that their minds would profit more by the perfect
acquisition of a single language in addition to the native tongue. This,
of course, is looking at the matter simply from the intellectual point
of view. There may be practical reasons for knowing several languages
imperfectly. It may be of use to many men in commercial situations to
know a little of several languages, even a few words and phrases are
valuable to a traveller, but all intellectual labor of the higher kind
requires much more than that. It is of use to society that there should
be polyglot waiters who can tell us when the train starts in four or
five languages; but the polyglot waiters themselves are not
intellectually advanced by their accomplishment; for, after all, the
facts of the railway time-table are always the same small facts, in
however many languages they may be announced. True culture ought to
strengthen the faculty of thinking, and to provide the material upon
which that noble faculty may operate. An accomplishment which does
neither of these two things for us is useless for our culture, though it
may be of considerable practical convenience in the affairs of ordinary
life. It is right to add, however, that there is sometimes an _indirect_
intellectual benefit from such accomplishments. To be able to order
dinner in Spanish is not in itself an intellectual advantage; but if the
dinner, when you have eaten it, enables you to visit a cathedral whose
architecture you are qualified to appreciate, there is a clear
intellectual gain, though an indirect one.
LETTER X.
TO A STUDENT WHO LAMENTED HIS DEFECTIVE MEMORY.
The author rather inclined to congratulation than to condolence--Value
of a selecting memory--Studies of the young Goethe--His great faculty
of assimilation--A good literary memory like a well-edited
periodical--The selecting memory in art--Treacherous memories--Cures
suggested for them--The mnemotechnic art contrary to the true
discipline of the mind--Two instances--The memory safely aided only by
right association.
So far from writing, as you seem to expect me to do, a letter of
condolence on the subject of what you are pleased to call your
"miserable memory," I feel disposed rather to indite a letter of
congratulation. It is possible that you may be blessed with a selecting
memory, which is not only useful for what it retains but for what it
rejects. In the immense mass of facts which come before you in
literature and in life, it is well that you should suffer from as little
bewilderment as possible. The nature of your memory saves you from this
by unconsciously selecting what has interested you, and letting the rest
go by. What interests you is what concerns you.
In saying this I speak simply from the intellectual point of view, and
suppose you to be an intellectual man by the natural organization of
your brain, to begin with. In saying that what interests you is what
concerns you, I mean intellectually, not materially. It may concern you,
in the pecuniary sense, to take an interest in the law; yet your mind,
left to itself, would take little or no interest in law, but an
absorbing interest in botany. The passionate studies of the young
Goethe, in many different directions, always in obedience to the
predominant interests of the moment, are the best example of the way in
which a great intellect, with remarkable powers of acquisition and
liberty to grow in free luxuriance, sends its roots into various soils
and draws from them the constituents of its sap. As a student of law, as
a university student even, he was not of the type which parents and
professors consider satisfactory. He neglected jurisprudence, he
neglected even his college studies, but took an interest in so many
other pursuits that his mind became rich indeed. Yet the wealth which
his mind acquired seems to have been due to that liberty of ranging by
which it was permitted to him to seek his own everywhere, according to
the maxim of French law, _chacun prend son bien ou il le trouve_. Had he
been a poor student, bound down to the exclusively legal studies, which
did not greatly interest him, it is likely that no one would ever have
suspected his immense faculty of assimilation. In this way men who are
set by others to load their memories with what is not their proper
intellectual food, never get the credit of having any memory at all, and
end by themselves believing that they have none. These bad memories are
often the best, they are often the selecting memories. They seldom win
distinction in examinations, but in literature and art. They are quite
incomparably superior to the miscellaneous memories that receive only as
boxes and drawers receive what is put into them. A good literary or
artistic memory is not like a post-office that takes in everything, but
like a very well-edited periodical which prints nothing that does not
harmonize with its intellectual life. A well-known author gave me this
piece of advice: "Take as many notes as you like, but when you write do
not look at them--what you remember is what you must write, and you
ought to give things exactly the degree of relative importance that
they have in your memory. If you forget much, it is well, it will only
save beforehand the labor of erasure." This advice would not be suitable
to every author; an author who dealt much in minute facts ought to be
allowed to refer to his memoranda; but from the artistic point of view
in literature the advice was wise indeed. In painting, our preferences
select whilst we are in the presence of nature, and our memory selects
when we are away from nature. The most beautiful compositions are
produced by the selecting office of the memory, which retains some
features, and even greatly exaggerates them, whilst it diminishes others
and often altogether omits them. An artist who blamed himself for these
exaggerations and omissions would blame himself for being an artist.
Let me add a protest against the common methods of curing what are
called treacherous memories. They are generally founded upon the
association of ideas, which is so far rational, but then the sort of
association which they have recourse to is unnatural, and produces
precisely the sort of disorder which would be produced in dress if a man
were insane enough to tie, let us say, a frying-pan to one of his
coat-tails and a child's kite to the other. The true discipline of the
mind is to be effected only by associating those things together which
have a real relation of some kind, and the profounder the relation, the
more it is based upon the natural constitution of things, and the less
it concerns trifling external details, the better will be the order of
the intellect. The mnemotechnic art wholly disregards this, and is
therefore unsuited for intellectual persons, though it may be of some
practical use in ordinary life. A little book on memory, of which many
editions have been sold, suggests to men who forget their umbrellas that
they ought always to associate the image of an umbrella with that of an
open door, so that they could never leave any house without thinking of
one. But would it not be preferable to lose two or three guineas
annually rather than see a spectral umbrella in every doorway? The same
writer suggests an idea which appears even more objectionable. Because
we are apt to lose time, we ought, he says, to imagine a skeleton
clock-face on the visage of every man we talk with; that is to say, we
ought systematically to set about producing in our brains an absurd
association of ideas, which is quite closely allied to one of the most
common forms of insanity. It is better to forget umbrellas and lose
hours than fill our minds with associations of a kind which every
disciplined intellect does all it can to get rid of. The rational art of
memory is that used in natural science. We remember anatomy and botany
because, although the facts they teach are infinitely numerous, they are
arranged according to the constructive order of nature. Unless there
were a clear relation between the anatomy of one animal and that of
others, the memory would refuse to burden itself with the details of
their structure. So in the study of languages we learn several languages
by perceiving their true structural relations, and remembering these.
Association of this kind, and the maintenance of order in the mind, are
the only arts of memory compatible with the right government of the
intellect. Incongruous, and even superficial associations ought to be
systematically discouraged, and we ought to value the negative or
rejecting power of the memory. The finest intellects are as remarkable
for the ease with which they resist and throw off what does not concern
them as for the permanence with which their own truths engrave
themselves. They are like clear glass, which fluoric acid etches
indelibly, but which comes out of vitriol intact.
LETTER XI.
TO A MASTER OF ARTS WHO SAID THAT A CERTAIN DISTINGUISHED PAINTER WAS
HALF-EDUCATED.
Conventional idea about the completeness of education--The estimate of
a schoolmaster--No one can be fully educated--Even Leonardo da Vinci
fell short of the complete expression of his faculties--The word
"education" used in two different senses--The acquisition of
knowledge--Who are the learned?--Quotation from Sydney Smith--What a
"half-educated" painter had learned--What faculties he had developed.
An intelligent lady was lamenting to me the other day that when she
heard anything she did not quite agree with, it only set her thinking,
and did not suggest any immediate reply. "Three hours afterwards," she
added, "I arrive at the answer which ought to have been given, but then
it is exactly three hours too late."
Being afflicted with precisely the same pitiable infirmity, I said
nothing in reply to a statement you made yesterday evening at dinner,
but it occupied me in the hansom as it rolled between the monotonous
lines of houses, and followed me even into my bed-room. I should like to
answer it this morning, as one answers a letter.
You said that our friend the painter was "half-educated." This made me
try to understand what it is to be three-quarters educated, and
seven-eighths educated, and finally what must be that quite perfect
state of the man who is whole-educated.
I fear that you must have adopted some conventional idea about
completeness of education, since you believe that there is any such
thing as completeness, and that education can be measured by fractions,
like the divisions of a two-foot rule.
Is not such an idea just a little arbitrary? It seems to be the idea of
a schoolmaster, with his little list of subjects and his professional
habit of estimating the progress of his boys by the good marks they are
likely to obtain from their examiners. The half-educated schoolboy would
be a schoolboy half-way towards his bachelor's degree--is that it?
In the estimates of school and college this may be so, and it may be
well to keep up the illusion, during boyhood, that there is such a thing
attainable as the complete education that you assume. But the wider
experience of manhood tends rather to convince us that no one can be
fully educated, and that the more rich and various the natural talents,
the greater will be the difficulty of educating the whole of them.
Indeed it does not appear that in a state of society so advanced in the
different specialities as ours is, men were ever intended to do more
than develop by education a few of their natural gifts. The only man who
came near to a complete education was Leonardo da Vinci, but such a
personage would be impossible to-day. No contemporary Leonardo could be
at the same time a leader in fine art, a great military and civil
engineer, and a discoverer in theoretical science; the specialists have
gone too far for him. Born in our day, Leonardo would have been either a
specialist or an amateur. Situated even as he was, in a time and country
so remarkably favorable to the general development of a variously gifted
man, he still fell short of the complete expansion of all his
extraordinary faculties. He was a great artist, and yet his artistic
power was never developed beyond the point of elaborately careful labor;
he never attained the assured manipulation of Titian and Paul Veronese,
not to mention the free facility of Velasquez, or the splendid audacity
of Rubens. His natural gifts were grand enough to have taken him to a
pitch of mastery that he never reached, but his mechanical and
scientific tendencies would have their development also, and withdrew so
much time from art that every renewal of his artistic labor was
accompanied by long and anxious reflection.
The word "education" is used in senses so different that confusion is
not always avoided. Some people mean by it the acquisition of knowledge,
others the development of faculty. If you mean the first, then the
half-educated man would be a man who knew half what he ought to know, or
who only half knew the different sciences, which the wholly educated
know thoroughly. Who is to fix the subjects? Is it the opinion of the
learned?--if so, who are the learned? "A learned man!--a scholar!--a man
of erudition! Upon whom are these epithets of approbation bestowed? Are
they given to men acquainted with the science of government? thoroughly
masters of the geographical and commercial relations of Europe? to men
who know the properties of bodies, and their action upon each other? No:
this is not learning; it is chemistry, or political economy, not
learning. The distinguishing abstract term, the epithet of Scholar, is
reserved for him who writes on the AEolic reduplication, and is familiar
with the Sylburgian method of arranging defectives in [Greek: o] and
[Greek: mi]. The picture which a young Englishman, addicted to the
pursuit of knowledge, draws--his _beau ideal_ of human nature--his top
and consummation of man's powers--is a knowledge of the Greek language.
His object is not to reason, to imagine, or to invent; but to conjugate,
decline, and derive. The situations of imaginary glory which he draws
for himself, are the detection of an anapaest in the wrong place, or the
restoration of a dative case which Cranzius had passed over, and the
never-dying Ernesti failed to observe."
By the help of the above passage from an article written sixty-three
years ago by Sydney Smith, and by the help of another passage in the
same paper where he tells us that the English clergy bring up the first
young men of the country as if they were all to keep grammar schools in
little country towns, I begin to understand what you mean by a
half-educated person. You mean a person who is only half qualified for
keeping a grammar school. In this sense it is very possible that our
friend the painter possesses nothing beyond a miserable fraction of
education. And yet he has picked up a good deal of valuable knowledge
outside the technical acquirement of a most difficult profession. He
studied two years in Paris, and four years in Florence and Rome. He
speaks French and Italian quite fluently, and with a fair degree of
correctness. His knowledge of those two languages is incomparably more
complete, in the sense of practical possession, than our fossilized
knowledge of Latin, and he reads them almost as we read English,
currently, and without translating. He has the heartiest enjoyment of
good literature; there is evidence in his pictures of a most intelligent
sympathy with the greatest inventive writers. Without having a
scientific nature, he knows a good deal about anatomy. He has not read
Greek poetry, but he has studied the old Greek mind in its architecture
and sculpture. Nature has also endowed him with a just appreciation of
music, and he knows the immortal masterpieces of the most illustrious
composers. All these things would not qualify him to teach a grammar
school, and yet what Greek of the age of Pericles ever knew half so
much?
This for the acquisition of knowledge; now for the development of
faculty. In this respect he excels us as performing athletes excel the
people in the streets. Consider the marvellous accuracy of his eye, the
precision of his hand, the closeness of his observation, the vigor of
his memory and invention! How clumsy and rude is the most learned pedant
in comparison with the refinement of this delicate organization! Try to
imagine what a disciplined creature he has become, how obedient are all
his faculties to the commands of the central will! The brain conceives
some image of beauty or wit, and immediately that clear conception is
telegraphed to the well-trained fingers. Surely, if the results of
education may be estimated from the evidences of skill, here are some of
the most wonderful of such results.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] According to M. Taine. I have elsewhere expressed a doubt about
polyglots.
PART IV.
THE POWER OF TIME.
LETTER I.
TO A MAN OF LEISURE WHO COMPLAINED OF WANT OF TIME.
Necessity for time-thrift in all cases--Serious men not much in danger
from mere frivolity--Greater danger of losing time in our serious
pursuits themselves--Time thrown away when we do not attain
proficiency--Soundness of former scholarship a good
example--Browning's Grammarian--Knowledge an organic whole--Soundness
the possession of essential parts--Necessity of fixed limits in our
projects of study--Limitation of purpose in the fine arts--In
languages--Instance of M. Louis Enault--In music--Time saved by
following kindred pursuits--Order and proportion the true secrets of
time-thrift--A waste of time to leave fortresses untaken in our rear.
You complain of want of time--you, with your boundless leisure!
It is true that the most absolute master of his own hours still needs
thrift if he would turn them to account, and that too many _never_ learn
this thrift, whilst others learn it late. Will you permit me to offer
briefly a few observations on time-thrift which have been suggested to
me by my own experience and by the experience of intellectual friends?
It may be accepted for certain, to begin with, that men who like
yourself seriously care for culture, and make it, next to moral duty,
the principal object of their lives, are but little exposed to waste
time in downright frivolity of any kind. You may be perfectly idle at
your own times, and perfectly frivolous even, whenever you have a mind
to be frivolous, but then you will be clearly aware how the time is
passing, and you will throw it away knowingly, as the most careful of
money-economists will throw away a few sovereigns in a confessedly
foolish amusement, merely for the relief of a break in the habit of his
life. To a man of your tastes and temper there is no danger of wasting
too much time so long as the waste is intentional; but you are exposed
to time-losses of a much more insidious character.
It is in our pursuits themselves that we throw away our most valuable
time. Few intellectual men have the art of economizing the hours of
study. The very necessity, which every one acknowledges, of giving vast
portions of life to attain proficiency in anything makes us prodigal
where we ought to be parsimonious, and careless where we have need of
unceasing vigilance. The best time-savers are the love of soundness in
all we learn or do, and a cheerful acceptance of inevitable limitations.
There is a certain point of proficiency at which an acquisition begins
to be of use, and unless we have the time and resolution necessary to
reach that point, our labor is as completely thrown away as that of a
mechanic who began to make an engine but never finished it. Each of us
has acquisitions which remain permanently unavailable from their
unsoundness, a language or two that we can neither speak nor write, a
science of which the elements have not been mastered, an art which we
cannot practice with satisfaction either to others or to ourselves. Now
the time spent on these unsound accomplishments has been in great
measure wasted, not quite absolutely wasted, since the mere labor of
trying to learn has been a discipline for the mind, but wasted so far as
the accomplishments themselves are concerned. And even this mental
discipline, on which so much stress is laid by those whose interest it
is to encourage unsound accomplishment, might be obtained more perfectly
if the subjects of study were less numerous and more thoroughly
understood. Let us not therefore in the studies of our maturity repeat
the error of our youth. Let us determine to have soundness, that is,
accurately organized knowledge in the studies we continue to pursue, and
let us resign ourselves to the necessity for abandoning those pursuits
in which soundness is not to be hoped for.
The old-fashioned idea about scholarship in Latin and Greek, that it
ought to be based upon thorough grammatical knowledge, is a good
example, so far as it goes, of what soundness really is. That ideal of
scholarship failed only because it fell short of soundness in other
directions and was not conscious of its failure. But there existed, in
the minds of the old scholars, a fine resolution to be accurate, and a
determination to give however much labor might be necessary for the
attainment of accuracy, in which there was much grandeur. Like Mr.
Browning's Grammarian, they said--
"Let me know all! Prate not of most or least
Painful or easy!"
and so at least they came to know the ancient tongues grammatically,
which few of us do in these days.
I should define each kind of knowledge as an organic whole and soundness
as the complete possession of all the essential parts. For example,
soundness in violin-playing consists in being able to play the notes in
all the positions, in tune, and with a pure intonation, whatever may be
the degree of rapidity indicated by the musical composer. Soundness in
painting consists in being able to lay a patch of color having exactly
the right shape and tint. Soundness in the use of language consists in
being able to put the right word in the right place. In each of the
sciences, there are certain elementary notions without which sound
knowledge is not possible, but these elementary notions are more easily
and rapidly acquired than the elaborate knowledge or confirmed skill
necessary to the artist or the linguist. A man may be a sound botanist
without knowing a very great number of plants, and the elements of
sound botanical knowledge may be printed in a portable volume. And so it
is with all the physical sciences; the elementary notions which are
necessary to soundness of knowledge may be acquired rapidly and at any
age. Hence it follows that all whose leisure for culture is limited, and
who value soundness of knowledge, do wisely to pursue some branch of
natural history rather than languages or the fine arts.
It is well for every one who desires to attain a perfect economy of
time, to make a list of the different pursuits to which he has devoted
himself, and to put a note opposite to each of them indicating the
degree of its unsoundness with as little self-delusion as may be. After
having done this, he may easily ascertain in how many of these pursuits
a sufficient degree of soundness is attainable for him, and when this
has been decided he may at once effect a great saving by the total
renunciation of the rest. With regard to those which remain, and which
are to be carried farther, the next thing to be settled is the exact
limit of their cultivation. Nothing is so favorable to sound culture as
the definite fixing of limits. Suppose, for example, that the student
said to himself "I desire to know the flora of the valley I live in,"
and then set to work systematically to make a herbarium illustrating
that flora, it is probable that his labor would be more thorough, his
temper more watchful and hopeful, than if he set himself to the
boundless task of the illimitable flora of the world. Or in the pursuit
of fine art, an amateur discouraged by the glaring unsoundness of the
kind of art taught by ordinary drawing-masters, would find the basis of
a more substantial superstructure on a narrower but firmer ground.
Suppose that instead of the usual messes of bad color and bad form, the
student produced work having some definite and not unattainable purpose,
would there not be, here also, an assured economy of time? Accurate
drawing is the basis of soundness in the fine arts, and an amateur, by
perseverance, may reach accuracy in drawing; this, at least, has been
proved by some examples--not by many, certainly, but by some. In
languages we may have a limited purpose also. That charming and most
intelligent traveller, Louis Enault, tells us that he regularly gave a
week to the study of each new language that he needed, and found that
week sufficient. The assertion is not so presumptuous as it appears. For
the practical necessities of travelling M. Enault found that he required
about four hundred words, and that, having a good memory, he was able to
learn about seventy words a day. The secret of his success was the
invaluable art of selection, and the strict limitation of effort in
accordance with a preconceived design. A traveller not so well skilled
in selection might have learned a thousand words with less advantage to
his travels, and a traveller less decided in purpose might have wasted
several months on the frontier of every new country in hopeless efforts
to master the intricacies of grammatical form. It is evident that in the
strictest sense M. Enault's knowledge of Norwegian cannot have been
sound, since he did not master the grammar, but it was sound in its own
strictly limited way, since he got possession of the four hundred words
which were to serve him as current coin. On the same principle it is a
good plan for students of Latin and Greek who have not time to reach
true scholarship (half a lifetime is necessary for that), to propose to
themselves simply the reading of the original authors with the help of a
literal translation. In this way they may attain a closer acquaintance
with ancient literature than would be possible by translation alone,
whilst on the other hand their reading will be much more extensive on
account of its greater rapidity. It is, for most of us, a waste of time
to read Latin and Greek without a translation, on account of the
comparative slowness of the process; but it is always an advantage to
know what was really said in the original, and to test the exactness of
the translator by continual reference to the _ipsissima verba_ of the
author. When the knowledge of the ancient language is not sufficient
even for this, it may still be of use for occasional comparison, even
though the passage has to be fought through _a coupes de dictionnaire_.
What most of us need in reference to the ancient languages is a frank
resignation to a restriction of some kind. It is simply impossible for
men occupied as most of us are in other pursuits to reach perfect
scholarship in those languages, and if we reached it we should not have
time to maintain it.
In modern languages it is not so easy to fix limits satisfactorily. You
may resolve to read French or German without either writing or speaking
them, and that would be an effectual limit, certainly. But in practice
it is found difficult to keep within that boundary if ever you travel or
have intercourse with foreigners. And when once you begin to speak, it
is so humiliating to speak badly, that a lover of soundness in
accomplishment will never rest perfectly satisfied until he speaks like
a cultivated native, which nobody ever did except under peculiar family
conditions.
In music the limits are found more easily. The amateur musician is
frequently not inferior in feeling and taste to the more accomplished
professional, and by selecting those compositions which require much
feeling and taste for their interpretation, but not so much manual
skill, he may reach a sufficient success. The art is to choose the very
simplest music (provided of course that it is beautiful, which it
frequently is), and to avoid all technical difficulties which are not
really necessary to the expression of feeling. The amateur ought also to
select the easiest instrument, an instrument in which the notes are made
for him already, rather than one which compels him to fix the notes as
he is playing. The violin tempts amateurs who have a deep feeling for
music because it renders feeling as no other instrument can render it,
but the difficulty of just intonation is almost insuperable unless the
whole time is given to that one instrument. It is a fatal error to
perform on several different instruments, and an amateur who has done so
may find a desirable limitation in restricting himself to one.
Much time is saved by following pursuits which help each other. It is a
great help to a landscape painter to know the botany of the country he
works in, for botany gives the greatest possible distinctness to his
memory of all kinds of vegetation. Therefore, if a landscape painter
takes to the study of science at all, he would do well to study botany,
which would be of use in his painting, rather than chemistry or
mathematics, which would be entirely disconnected from it. The memory
easily retains the studies which are auxiliary to the chief pursuit.
Entomologists remember plants well, the reason being that they find
insects in them, just as Leslie the painter had an excellent memory for
houses where there were any good pictures to be found.
The secret of order and proportion in our studies is the true secret of
economy in time. To have one main pursuit and several auxiliaries, but
none that are not auxiliary, is the true principle of arrangement. Many
hard workers have followed pursuits as widely disconnected as possible,
but this was for the refreshment of absolute change, not for the
economy of time.
Lastly, it is a deplorable waste of time to leave fortresses untaken in
our rear. Whatever has to be mastered ought to be mastered so thoroughly
that we shall not have to come back to it when we ought to be carrying
the war far into the enemy's country. But to study on this sound
principle, we require not to be hurried. And this is why, to a sincere
student, all external pressure, whether of examiners, or poverty, or
business engagements, which causes him to leave work behind him which
was not done as it ought to have been done, is so grievously, so
intolerably vexatious.
LETTER II.
TO A YOUNG MAN OF GREAT TALENT AND ENERGY WHO HAD MAGNIFICENT PLANS FOR
THE FUTURE.
Mistaken estimates about time and occasion--The Unknown
Element--Procrastination often time's best preserver--Napoleon's
advice to do nothing at all--Use of deliberation and of intervals of
leisure--Artistic advantages of calculating time--Prevalent
childishness about time--Illusions about reading--Bad economy of
reading in languages we have not mastered--That we ought to be thrifty
of time, but not avaricious--Time necessary in production--Men who
work best under the sense of pressure--Rossini--That these cases prove
nothing against time-thrift--The waste of tune from
miscalculation--People calculate accurately for short spaces, but do
not calculate so well for long ones--Reason for this--Stupidity of
the Philistines about wasted time--Toepffer and Claude
Tillier--Retrospective miscalculations, and the regrets that result
from them.
Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage
when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author? On the
same principle, people will give a higher price to a picture-dealer than
they would have given to the painter himself. The picture that has been
once bought has a recommendation, and the quoted passage is both
recommended and isolated from the context.
Trusting to this well-known principle, although I am aware that you have
read everything that Sir Arthur Helps has published, I proceed to make
the following quotation from one of his wisest books.