"Annie came to school one day with her hair most beautifully done in
ringlets," I explained, "and of course I fell in love with her at once.
I wrote her a letter.... 'My Dear Annie, do you think yourself bonny
to-day?' and the wee besom replied: 'No, I don't!' Then I wrote her
again.... 'Do you ever tell lies?' and to this she answered: 'No,
never!' Then I calmly handed her the _Life of George Washington_."
"But Aw never read it!" she cried with a gay laugh.
"I know ... and that's why you have never reformed, my dear kid," I
said.
"Ellen," said Janet, "d'ye mind that day when you and me got up and
walked oot o' the room?"
"What day was that?" I asked; "you two went out of the room so often
that I gave up trying to see you."
"It was the day when a man cam to the schule and stood in the room when
ye was teachin' us. There was a new boy, the caravan boy that had never
been to schule in his life, and ye said that he was better than any o'
us."
"So Jan and me took the tig," said Ellen, "and we went oot and sat on
the dike."
Janet hee-heed.
"D'ye mind what we said, Ellen? We said we werena to go back to the
schule; we were to go up to Rinsley schule to Mester Lawson."
"Aye," said Ellen, "and we said we wudna gie ye another sweetie ... no,
never!"
"And I suppose you gave me sweeties next day?" I suggested.
"We gave ye a whole ha'penny worth o' chocolate caramels," said Janet.
Her head rested on my knee and she smiled up in my face. "Ye were far
ower easy wi' us," she said seriously, "we never did half the lessons ye
gave us to do."
"I know, Jan, but I didn't particularly want you to do lessons; all I
wanted was that you should be Janet Brown and no one else. I wanted you
to be a good kind lassie ... and of course, as you know, I failed." And
she pulled my nose at this.
"I didn't like the school when I was there," said Margaret; "I never was
so glad in my life as when I was fourteen."
"Poor Margaret," I said, "your schooling should be the pleasantest
memory of your life. What you learned from books doesn't matter at all;
what matters is what you were. And it seems that memory will bring to
you a picture of an unhappy Margaret longing to leave school. What a
tragedy!"
"Is being happy the best thing in life?" asked Margaret.
"Not the best," I answered; "the best thing in life is making other
people happy ... and that's what the books mean by 'service.'"
* * *
Margaret came over to my bothy to-night to ask if I would help Nancy
with her home lessons.
"She's crying like anything," said Margaret.
I went over to the farmhouse. Nancy sat at the kitchen table with her
books spread out before her. She was wiping her eyes and looked like
beginning to weep again.
"It's her pottery," explained Frank, "she canna get it up at all."
Macdonald had ordered the class to learn the first six verses of Gray's
_Elegy_, and threatened dire penalties if each scholar wasn't word
perfect.
"I'm afraid I can't help you much, Nancy," I said. "You'll just have to
set your teeth and get it up. Don't repeat it line by line; read the six
verses over, then read them again, then again. Read them twenty times,
then shut the book and imagine the page is before you, and see how much
of the stuff you can say." I used to find this method very effectual
when I got up long recitations in my younger days.
Macdonald gives his higher classes long poems. They have learned up
pages of _Marmion_ and pages of _The Lady of the Lake_; and now he is
giving them the long and difficult _Elegy_. I must ask him some day what
his idea is. I made learning poetry optional when I was in the school.
I eschewed all long poems, and I never asked a child to stand up and
"say" a piece. My view was that school poetry should be school
folk-song; I used to write short pieces on the board and the classes
recited them in unison. I gave no hint of expression, for expression
should always be a natural thing. I have been timid of expression ever
since the day I heard, or rather saw, a youth recite _The Dream of
Eugene Aram_. When he came to the climax ... "And lo! the faithless
stream was dry!" I suddenly discovered that I was dry too, and I did not
wait until Eugene was led away with "gyves upon his wrists." I once saw
Sir Henry Irving in _The Bells_. I was a schoolboy at the time and I
straightway spent all my pocket money on books dealing with elocution; I
also would tear my hair before the footlights! Looking back now I wonder
why Irving bothered with stuff of that sort; why his sense of humour
allowed him to grope about the stage for the axe to kill the Polish Jew
I don't understand. All that melodramatic romantic business is simply
theatrical gush. It appeals to the classes that devour the _Police
News_.
Expression when taught is gush. When I gave my bairns a bit of _The
Ancient Mariner_ the whole crowd brightened up and shouted when they
came to the verse:--
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood
And cried: "A sail! A sail!"
They understood that part, but they put no special expression into the
stanza:--
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody sun at noon
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.
The boys used to emphasise the adjective in the second line, but that
was perhaps natural in a community where strong language is the
prerogative of grown-ups. I suppose that a teacher of expression would
have pointed out that the right arm must be raised gracefully at the
third line, and the voice lowered awfully to show the marvellous
significance of the fact that the crudoric sun was no bigger than the
moon.
All I tried to give my bairns was an appreciation of rhythm. They loved
the trochaic rhythm of a poem, _Marsh Marigolds_, by G. F. Bradby, that
I discovered in a school anthology:--
Slaty skies and a whistling wind and a grim grey land,
April here with a sullen mind and a frozen hand,
Hardly a bird with the heart to sing, or a bud that dares to pry,
Only the plovers hovering,
On the lonely marsh, with a heavy wing
And a sad slow cry.
And it used to make me joyful to hear them gallop through Stevenson's
delightful _My Ship and I_:--
Oh! it's I that am the captain of a tidy little ship,
Of a ship that goes a-sailing on the pond,
And my ship it keeps a-turning all around and all about,
But when I'm a little older I shall find the secret out
How to send my vessel sailing on beyond!
I never gave them a poem that needed any explanation. I picture
Macdonald painfully explaining the _Elegy_.... "Yes, children, the
phrase 'incense-breathing morn' means...."
I'm gravelled; I haven't the faintest notion of what the phrase means.
Gray annoys me; he is far too perfect for me. I fancy that he rewrote
each line about a score of times in his mania for the correct word. Gray
is Milton with a dictionary.
I once read that Stevenson studied the dictionary often, used to spend a
rainy day reading the thing, and his prose does give me the impression
that he cared more for how he said a thing than for the thing itself. I
think George Douglas a greater writer; indeed I should call him the
greatest novelist Scotland has produced. His style is inevitable; his
whole attention seems to be riveted on the matter of his story, and his
arresting phrases seem to come from him naturally and thoughtlessly.
When you read of Gourlay's agony in Barbie market on the day that his
son's disgrace is known to everyone, you see the great hulk of a man,
you hear his great breaths ... you are one of the villagers who peep at
him fearfully. Every word is inevitable; the picture is perfect. I
should be surprised if anyone told me that Douglas altered a single word
after he had written it.
When I want to feel humble I take up _The House with the Green
Shutters_. I have read it a score of times, and I hope to read it a
score of times again.