to give you the most unfavorable view possible of your kind. On entering
you choose a side, unless you are condemned to be suspended in the
middle. Then you look at your antagonists on the opposite side. What a
long, unrelenting row of humanity! These are the grown-ups. You look for
some play of emotion, some evidence of curiosity, pleasure,
exhilaration, such as you might naturally expect from those who are
taking a little journey in the world.
Not a sign of any such emotion do you discern. They are not adventuring
into a wonder-world. They are only getting over the ground. One feels
like putting up a notice: "Lost, somewhere on the road between infancy
and middle age, several valuable faculties. The finder will find
something to his advantage."
I have no quarrel with Old Age. It should be looked upon as a reward of
merit to be cheerfully striven for.
Old Age hath still his honor and his toil.
Nor do I object to the process of growth. It belongs to the order of
nature. Growing is like falling,--it is all right so long as you keep
on; the trouble comes when you stop.
What I object to is the fatalistic way in which people acquiesce in the
arrest of their own mental development. Adolescence is exciting. All
sorts of things are happening, and more are promised. Life rushes on
with a sweet tumult. All things seem possible. It seems as if a lot of
the unfinished business of the world is about to be put through with
enthusiasm. Then, just as the process has had a fair start, some evil
spirit intervenes and says: "Time's up! You've grown all you are to be
allowed to. Now you must settle down,--and be quick about it! No more
adolescing; you are adults!"
Poor adults! Nature seems to have been like an Indian giver, taking away
the gifts as soon as they are received,--
The gifts of morn
Ere life grows noisy and slower-footed thought
Can overtake the rapture of the sense.
The extinction of the early poetry and romance which gave beauty to the
first view of these realities has often been accomplished by the most
deliberate educational processes. There are two kinds of
education,--that which educates, and that which eradicates. The latter
is the easier and the more ancient method.
Wordsworth writes:--
Oh, many are the poets that are sown
By Nature, men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine.
But with this broad-sowing of the highest gifts it is astonishing how
few come to maturity. I imagine that the Educational Man with the Hoe is
responsible for a good deal of the loss. In his desire for clean culture
he treats any sproutings of the faculty divine as mere weeds, if they
come up between the rows.
If the Educational Man with the Hoe is to be feared, the Educational Man
with the Pruning Shears is an equal menace.
There is an art, once highly esteemed, called topiary. The object of
topiary when carried to excess was to take a tree, preferably a yew
tree, and by careful trimming to make it look like something else, say a
peacock standing under an umbrella. Curious effects could be produced in
this way, leafy similitudes of birds and animals could be made so that
the resemblance was almost as striking as if they had been cut out of
gingerbread.
The object of educational topiary is to take a child, and, by careful
pruning away of all his natural propensities, make of him a miniature
grown-up. It is an interesting art, for it shows what can be done; the
only wonder is why any one should want to do it. If you would see this
art at its best, turn to Miss Edgeworth's "Frank," a book much admired
in its day. Frank, to begin with, was a very likable little boy. If he
was not made of the "sugar and spice and all things nice" that little
girls are made of, he had all the more homely miscellaneous ingredients
that little boys are made of. The problem of the careful father and
mother was to take Frank and reduce him in the shortest possible time to
the adult frame of mind. To this end they sought out any vagrant fancies
and inquisitive yearnings and wayward adventurousness, and destroyed
them. This slaughter of the innocents continued till Frank's mind was a
model of propriety.
It was hard work, but there was a satisfaction in doing it thoroughly.
The evening meal was transformed into a purgatorial discipline, and as
he progressed from course to course Frank's mind was purified as by
fire.
Here is one occasion. There was a small plumcake, and Frank was required
to divide it so that each of the five persons present should have a just
share. Frank began to cut the cake, but by a mistake cut it into six
pieces instead of five.
This miscarriage of justice sent dismay into the hearts of his parents.
They felt that he was at the parting of the ways. It was a great moral
crisis, in which his character was to be revealed. What would Frank do
with that sixth piece of cake? Perhaps--horrible thought!--he might eat
it. From this crime he was saved only to fall into the almost equal sin
of unscientific charity. In order to save trouble he proposed to give
the extra piece to his father, and when questioned he could give no
better reason than that he thought his father liked cake.
"'What right have you to give it to any of us? You were to judge about
the size of the pieces, and you were to take care that we each have our
just share. But you are going to give one of us twice as much as any of
the others.'"
Justice triumphed. "Frank took the trouble to think, and he then cut the
spare bit of cake into five equal parts, and he put these parts by the
side of the five large pieces and gave one of the large and one of the
small pieces to each person, and he then said: 'I believe I have
divided the cake fairly now.' Everybody present said 'yes,' and
everybody looked carefully at each of the shares, and there appeared
exactly the same quantity in each share. So each person took a share,
and all were satisfied."
That is to say, all were satisfied except Frank's mother. She was afraid
that the family meal had not yielded its full educational value.
"'My dear Frank,' said his mother, 'as you have divided the cake so
fairly, let us see how you will divide the sugar that was upon the top
of the cake, and which is now broken and crumbled to pieces in the
plate. We all like sugar; divide it equally amongst us.'
"'But this will be very difficult to do, mamma, because the pieces of
sugar are of such different sizes and shapes. I do not know how I shall
ever divide it exactly. Will it do if I do not divide it quite exactly,
ma'am?'
"'No,' said his mother, 'I beg you will divide it quite exactly.'"
Frank gathered his fragments into five little mounds, and after
carefully measuring their height, declared that they were equal.
"'They are of the same length and breadth, I acknowledge,' said the
father, 'but they are not of the same thickness.'
"'Oh, thickness! I never thought of thickness.'
"'But you should have thought of it,' said his father."
At last Frank, seeing that there was no other way to satisfy the
demands of distributive justice, went to the closet, and brought forth a
pair of scales. "By patiently adding and taking away, he at last made
them each of the same weight, and everybody was satisfied with the
accuracy of the division."
This habit of accuracy, developed in the family meals, saved them from
the temptation of wasting time in flippant conversation.
Miss Edgeworth's most striking plea for grown-up-edness versus childish
curiosity was elaborated in her story of Frank and his orrery. Frank had
read of an orrery in which the motions of the planets were shown by
ingenious mechanism. Being a small boy, he naturally desired to make
one.
For several days he almost forgot about his Roman History and Latin
Grammar and the "Stream of Time," so absorbed was he in making his
orrery. He had utilized his mother's tambour frame and knitting needles;
and wires and thread held together his planets, which were made of
worsted balls. It was a wonderful universe which Frank had created--as
many great philosophers before him had created theirs--out of the inner
consciousness. When it had been constructed to the best of his ability,
the only question was, would his universe work,--would his planets go
singing around the sun, or was there to be a crash of worlds? Frank knew
no other way than to put it to the test of action, and he invited the
family to witness the great experiment. He pointed out with solemn joy
his worsted earth, moon, and planets, and predicted their revolutions
according to his astronomy.
But the moment his father's eye rested upon it all, he saw that it was
absurd.
He "pointed out the defects, the deficiencies, the mistakes,--in one
word, the absurdities,--but he did not use that offensive word, for he
was tender of Frank's feelings for his wasted work."
"'Well, papa,' said Mary, 'what is your advice to Frank?'
"'My first advice to you, Frank,' said his father, 'and indeed the
condition upon which I now stay and give up my time to you is that you
abide steadily by whatever resolution you now make, either quite to
finish or quite to give up this orrery. If you choose to finish it you
must give up for some time reading anything entertaining or instructive;
you must give up arithmetic and history.'
"'And the "Stream of Time" and the lists?' said Mary.
"'Everything,' said his father, 'to the one object of making an
orrery,--and when made as well as you possibly could with my assistance
make it, observe that it will only be what others have repeatedly made
before.... Master Frank will grow older, and when or why or how he made
this orrery few will know or care, but all will see whether he has the
knowledge which is necessary for a man and a gentleman to possess. Now
choose, Frank.'"
Frank seized the orrery. "'Mary, bring your work basket, my dear,' said
he.
"And he pulled off one by one, deliberately, the worsted sun, moon,
earth, and stars, and threw them into the work basket which Mary held.
Mary sighed, but Frank did not sigh. He was proud to give his father a
proof of his resolution, and when he looked around he saw tears, but
they were tears of pleasure, in his mother's eyes.
"'Are you sure yet that I can keep to my good resolution?'
"'I am not quite sure, but this is a good beginning,' said his father."
The aim of all this discipline was to make Frank just like his father.
Now I am not saying anything against Frank's father. He was a truly good
man, and well-to-do. Still, there have always been so many just like him
that it would not have done much harm if Frank had been allowed to be a
little different.
I cannot help thinking how different was a contemporary of his, Michael
Faraday. Faraday had not any one to look after him in his youth, and to
keep him from making unnecessary experiments. When he felt like making
an experiment he did so. There was no one to tell him how it would come
out, so he had to wait to see how it did come out. In this way he wasted
a good deal of time that might have been spent in learning the things
that every educated Englishman was expected to know, and he found out a
good many things that the educated Englishman did not know,--this caused
him to be always a little out of the fashion.
He let curiosity get the better of him, and when he was quite well on in
years he would try to do things with pith-balls and electric currents,
just as Frank tried to do things with worsted balls before his father
showed him the folly of it. Some of his experiments turned out to be
very useful, but most of them did not. Some of them only proved that
what people thought they knew was not so. Faraday seemed to be just as
much interested in this kind as in the other. He never learned to mind
only his own business, but was always childishly inquisitive, so he
never was so sure of things as was Frank's father.
Still, it takes all sorts of people to make up a world, and if a person
cannot be like Frank's father, it is not so bad to be like Faraday.
Frank's father would have been shocked at Faraday's first introduction
to the problems of metaphysical speculation. "I remember," he says,
"being a great questioner when young." And one of his first questions
was in regard to the seat of the soul. The question was suggested in
this way. Being a small boy, and seeing the bars of an iron railing, he
felt called upon to try experimentally whether he could squeeze through.
The experiment was only a partial success. He got his head through, but
he could not get it back. Then the physical difficulty suggested the
great metaphysical question, "On which side of the fence am I?"
Frank's father would have said that that was neither the time nor the
place for such speculation, and that the proper way to study philosophy
was to wait till one could sit down in a chair and read it out of a
book. But to Faraday the thoughts he got out of a book never seemed to
be so interesting as those which came to him while he was stuck in the
fence.
When Frank learned a few lines of poetry, he asked to be allowed to say
them to his father.
"'I think,' said his mother, 'your father would like you to repeat them
if you understand them all, but not otherwise.'"
Of course that was the end of any nonsense in that direction. If Frank
was kept away from any poetry he could not altogether understand, he
would soon be grown-up, so that he would not be tempted by any kind of
poetry any more than his father was.
I am sure Frank's father would have disapproved of the way my
Philosopher takes his poetry. His favorite poem is "A frog he would
a-wooing go,"--especially the first quatrain. His analysis is very
defective; he takes it as a whole. He likes the mystery of it, the quick
action, the hearty, inconsequent refrain:--
A frog he would a-wooing go--
Heigh ho! says Rowley--
Whether his mother would let him or no--
With a rowly-powly, gammon and spinach.
Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.
This to him is poetry. Everything is lifted above the commonplace. The
frog is no cousin to the vulgar hop-toad, whose presence in the garden,
in spite of his usefulness, is an affront. He is a creature of romance;
he is going a-wooing,--whatever that may be;--he only knows that it is
something dangerous. And what a glorious line that is,--
Whether his mother would let him or no.
It thrills him like the sound of a trumpet. And great, glorious Anthony
Rowley! It needs no footnote to tell about him. It is enough to know
that Rowley is a great, jovial soul, who, when the poetry is going to
his liking, cries, "Heigh ho!"--and when Rowley cries, "Heigh ho!" my
Philosopher cries, "Heigh ho!" too, just to keep him company. And so the
poem goes on "with a rowly-powly, gammon and spinach," and nobody knows
what it means. That's the secret.
Now I should not wish my Philosopher always to look upon "A frog he
would a-wooing go" as the high-water mark of poetical genius; but I
should wish him to bring to better poetry the same hearty relish he
brings to this. The rule should be,--
Now good digestion wait on appetite,
And health on both.
When I see persons who upon the altar of education have sacrificed
digestion, appetite, and health, I cannot but feel that something is
wrong. I am reminded of an inscription which I found on a tombstone in
a Vermont churchyard:--
Here lies cut down like unripe fruit
The only son of Amos Toot.
* * * * *
Behold the amazing alteration
Brought about by inoculation:
The means employed his life to save
Hurled him, untimely, to the grave.
Sometimes the good housewife has chosen carefully every ingredient for
her cake, and has obeyed conscientiously the mandates of the cookbook.
She has with Pharisaic scrupulosity taken four eggs and no more, and two
cups of sugar, and two teaspoonfuls of sifted flour, and a pinch of
baking powder, and a small teacupful of hot water. She has beaten the
eggs very light and stirred in the flour only a little at a time. She
has beaten the dough and added granulated sugar with discretion. She has
resisted the temptation to add more flour when she has been assured that
it would not be good for the cake. And then she has placed the work of
her hands in a moderately hot oven, after which she awaits the
consummation of her hopes. In due time she looks into the moderately hot
oven, and finds only a sodden mass. Something has happened to the cake.
Such accidents happen in the best of attempts at education. The outcome
is disappointing. The ingredients of the educational cake are excellent,
and an immense amount of faithful work has been put into it, but
sometimes it does not rise. As the old-fashioned housekeeper would say,
it looks "sad."
It is easier to find fault with the result than to point out the remedy;
but so long as such results frequently happen, the business of the home
and the school is full of fascinating and disconcerting uncertainty. One
thing is obvious, and that is that it is no more safe for the teacher
than for the preacher to "banish Nature from his plan." Of course the
reason we tried to banish Nature in the first place was not because we
bore her any ill-will, but only because she was all the time interfering
with our plans.
The fact is that Nature is not very considerate of our grown-up
prejudices. She does not set such store by our dearly bought
acquirements as we do. She is more concerned about "the process of
becoming" than about the thing which we have already become. She is
quite capable of taking the finished product upon which we had prided
ourselves and using it as the raw material out of which to make
something else. Of course this tries our temper. We do not like to see
our careful finishing touches treated in that way.
Especially does Nature upset our adult notions about the relations
between teaching and learning. We exalt the function of teaching, and
seem to imagine that it might go on automatically. We sometimes think of
the teacher as a lawgiver, and of the learner as one who with docility
receives what is graciously given.
But the law to be understood and obeyed is the law of the learner's
mind, and not that of the teacher's. The didactic method must be
subordinated to the vital. Teaching may be developed into a very neat
and orderly system, but learning is apt to be quite disorderly. It is
likely to come by fits and starts, and when it does come it is very
exciting.
Those who have had the good fortune in mature life to learn something
have described the experience as being quite upsetting. They have found
out something that they had never known before, and the discovery was so
overpowering that they could not pay attention to what other people were
telling them.
Kepler describes his sensations when he discovered the law of planetary
motion. He could not keep still. He forgot that he was a sober,
middle-aged person, and acted as if he were a small boy who had just got
the answer to his sum in vulgar fractions. Nobody had helped him; he had
found it out for himself; and now he could go out and play. "Let nothing
confine me: I will indulge my sacred ecstasy. I will triumph over
mankind.... If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I cannot
help it." In fact, Kepler didn't care whether school kept or not.
Now in the first years of our existence we are in the way of making
first-rate discoveries every day. No wonder that we find it so hard to
keep still and to listen respectfully to people whose knowledge is
merely reminiscent. Above all, it is difficult for us to keep our
attention fixed on their mental processes when our minds make forty
revolutions to their one.
There, for instance, is the Alphabet. Because the teacher told us about
it yesterday she is grieved that we do not remember what she said. But
so many surprising things have happened since then that it takes a
little time for us to make sure that it's the same old Alphabet this
morning that we had the other day. She is the victim of preconceived
ideas on the subject, but our minds are open to conviction. Most of the
letters still look unfamiliar; but when we really do learn to recognize
Big A and Round O, we are disposed to indulge our sacred ecstasy and to
"triumph over mankind."
If the teacher be a sour person who has long ago completed her
education, she will take this occasion to chide us for not paying
attention to a new letter that is just swimming into our ken. If,
however, she is fortunate enough to be one who keeps on learning, she
will share the triumph of our achievement, for she knows how it feels.
There is coming to be a greater sympathy between teachers and learners,
as there is a clearer knowledge of the way the mind grows. But even yet
one may detect a certain note of condescension in the treatment of the
characteristics of early childhood. The child, we say, has eager
curiosity, a myth-making imagination, a sensitiveness to momentary
impressions, a desire to make things and to destroy things, a tendency
to imitate what he admires. His mind goes out not in one direction, but
in many directions. Then we say, in our solemn, grown-up way: "Why, that
is just like Primitive Man, and how unlike Us! It has taken a long time
to transform Primitive Man into Us, but if we start soon enough we may
eradicate the primitive things before they have done much harm."
What we persistently fail to understand is that in these primitive
things are the potentialities of all the most lasting satisfactions of
later life.
Browning tells us how the boy David felt when he watched his sheep:--
Then fancies grew rife
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep
Fed in silence--above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie
'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the
sky:
And I laughed,--"Since my days are ordained to be passed with my
flocks,
Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know."
All this is natural enough, we say, in a mere boy,--but he will outgrow
it. But now and then some one does not outgrow it. He has become a man,
and yet in his mind fancies are still rife. They throng upon him and
crave expression. The things he sees, the people he meets, are all
symbols to him, just as the one eagle which "wheeled slow as in sleep"
was to the shepherd lad the symbol of a great unknown world. That which
he sees of the actual world seems still to him only a strip "'twixt the
hill and the sky,"--all the rest he imagines. He fills it with vivid
color and absorbing life. He peoples it with his own thoughts.
We call such a person a poet; and if he is a very good poet, we call him
a genius; and, in order to do him honor, we pretend that we cannot
understand him, and we employ people to explain him to us. We treat his
works as alcohol is treated in the arts. It is, as they say,
"denaturized," that is, something is put into it that people don't
like, so that they will not drink it "on the sly!"
Yet all the time the plain fact is that the poet is simply a person who
is still in possession of all his early qualities. Wordsworth gave away
the secret. He is a boy who keeps on growing. He is
One whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure.
Where others see a finished world, he sees all things as manifestations
of a free power.
Even in their fixed and steady lineaments
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying.
This ebbing and flowing mind with its ever-changing expression is the
charm of early childhood. It is the charm of all genius as well. Turn
to Shelley's "Skylark." The student of Child Psychology never found more
images chasing one another through the mind. The fancies follow one
another as rapidly as if Shelley had been only four years old. Frank's
father would have been troubled at the lack of business-like grasp of
the subject. What was the skylark like? It was
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
Then again, it was
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight.
It was
Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought.
It was like a high-born maiden, like a rose, like a glow-worm, like
vernal showers. The mind wanders off and sees visions of purple
evenings and golden lightnings and white dawns and rain-awakened
flowers. These were but hints of the reality of feeling, for
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.