FROM the memories of my mid-Victorian childhood, before the instruction
of a governess had reached a point at which the plunge was made into a
preparatory school, three names emerge with remarkable distinctness.
"Little Arthur," from whom I derived my earliest knowledge of the
History of England; "Henry," by whom I was grounded in the rudiments of
the dead Latin tongue (but who must be carefully distinguished from
JAMES HENRY, the Virgilian, who in turn had nothing whatever to do with
HENRY JAMES the novelist), and OLLENDORFF, the illustrious author of a
series of manuals for the teaching of living foreign languages.
OLLENDORFF, I fear, is not even the shadow of a name to the present
generation. There is no mention of him in _The Encyclopaedia Britannica_
or in _Chambers_. Even in his own country he seems to have lapsed into
obscurity, and in MENDEL'S voluminous _Conversations-Lexikon_ there is
only a brief reference to the Ollendorffian method, but no account of
the man or his history.
Yet he must have existed; OLLENDORFF cannot have been a mere symbol. And
as students of SHAKSPEARE have endeavoured to reconstruct the man from
his plays so I feel sure that the character of OLLENDORFF, his interests
and politics, might very well be reconstructed from a study of his
dialogues. One must admit that his Teutonic patronymic is an obstacle to
his revival, but that difficulty can be surmounted by the adoption of an
_alias_. For example, by the omission of one of the "f's" and the
transposition of one other letter his name, read backwards, becomes
Frondello, which is at once euphonious and void of all racial offence.
The Ollendorffian method, it may be noted for the benefit of the
ignorant, did not merely depend on the employment of question and
answer; it aimed at conveying information drawn from the homely affairs
of daily life and the relations between persons belonging to different
trades and occupations. "Have you," OLLENDORFF would ask, "the hat of
the gardener's son?" And when this had been duly and correctly
translated into German or French the pupil proceeded to the answer, "No,
but I have the boots of the grocer's brother-in-law."
I think OLLENDORFF built better than he knew; or perhaps he did know. A
strong vein of Socialism runs through all his examples, which seem to
show a lively appreciation of the Communistic principle. To him there
was nothing wrong or dangerous in this mutual interchange and enjoyment
of property. He drew no hard-and-fast lines between _meum_ and _tuum_.
We cannot help thinking that, at a time when so much depends on the
fusion of classes, a new edition of these immortal dialogues, brought up
to date so as to meet the exigencies of the new poor, the new rich, the
old aristocracy and the new plutocracy, would be fraught with the most
salutary results.
The following are some crude suggestions of the lines on which the
revision might be carried out:--
"Have you the leathern waistcoat of the taxi-driver?--"No, but I have
the reach-me-down trousers of an inferior quality to those worn by the
village postman."
"Have you the smooth-running automobile of the prosperous grocer?"--"No,
but I have the loan of the push-bicycle of my former under-gardener's
uncle."
"Are you going to marry the beautiful daughter of the shoemaker?"--"Yes,
and her brother has just become engaged to the widow of my cousin the
marquis."
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[Illustration: _Mr. Arthur Wontner_ (_to himself_). "WELL, I DON'T THINK
MUCH OF YOUR TASTE IN CLOTHES."]
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