1 3 1822 01382 3034
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 3 1822 01382 3034
 
 OLD AND NEW
 
 OLD AND NEW 
 
 SUNDRY PAPERS 
 
 BY 
 
 C. H. GRANDGENT, L.H.D. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 IQ2O
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1920 
 HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ALTHOUGH the following essays and addresses form 
 rather a miscellaneous lot, they have this hi common, 
 that they treat, hi general, of changes in fashion, es- 
 pecially hi matters of speech and of school. Four of 
 the papers have already appeared hi print: " The 
 Dark Ages," " Fashion and the Broad A," " Numeric 
 Reform in Nescioubia," " Is Modern Language Teach- 
 ing a Failure ? " For permission to republish these I 
 gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness respectively 
 to the Secretary of the Modern Language Association 
 of America, the Editor of The Nation, the Secretary of 
 the Simplified Spelling Board of New York, and the 
 Editors of The School Review. 
 
 C. H. G.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. NOR YET THE NEW 3 
 
 II. FASHION AND THE BROAD A 25 
 
 III. THE DOG'S LETTER 31 
 
 IV. NUMERIC REFORM m NESCIOUBIA 57 
 
 V. Is MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING A FAILURE ? . . . . 65 
 
 VI. THE DARK AGES 92 
 
 VII. NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 121 
 
 VIII. SCHOOL 150
 
 OLD AND NEW
 
 I 
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 1 
 
 Old things need not be therefore true, 
 O brother men, nor yet the new. 
 
 WHEN Arthur Hugh Clough penned these lines, he little 
 dreamed how quickly the second member of his apparently 
 axiomatic proposition would become obsolete. " New 
 things need not be therefore true " ? It sounds like an 
 echo from a forgotten past; yet only a few score years ago 
 it was a perfectly safe assertion, as safe as " All's not gold 
 that glitters," or " Where there's a will there's a way." 
 
 There was a time when the old had the right of way and 
 the new had to turn out or force its passage, when the idea 
 of innovation gave pause, when the successful or even the 
 unsuccessful experience of ages created a presumption in 
 favor of accepted usage, when a departure from tradition 
 demanded an excuse. " I love everything that's old," says 
 one of the characters in She Stoops to Conquer, " old friends, 
 old times, old manners, old books, old wine." The same 
 author once said: " When I was a young man, being anx- 
 ious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new 
 propositions. But I soon gave this over; for I found that 
 generally what was new was false." Of wellnigh universal 
 application was the opinion uttered later by Daniel Web- 
 ster with reference to a certain political platform: " What 
 is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable." 
 
 1 An address to the Smith College chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa on 
 May 17, 1919.
 
 4 OLD AND NEW 
 
 " We have changed all that," as Moliere's quack doctor 
 observed. The heart and the liver no longer abide in the 
 respective places to which the former school of medicine 
 and its accomplice, Dame Nature assigned them. " Time- 
 honored custom " is without honor. The very word " time- 
 honored " is now used ordinarily in derision. To say that 
 a thing is old is to condemn it without a trial. An old style 
 must be a bad one, an old thought is not worth thinking. 
 What we admire is the " music of the future," the " new 
 art," the " modem school." To a strictly judicial mind, it 
 would seem, the quality of age or of novelty would carry no 
 necessary implication of value; the question of acceptance 
 would be decided on the basis of intrinsic merit. But the 
 judicial mind is rare. We are unconsciously swept along 
 by the tide of opinion, and that tide has set hi the direction 
 of the untried. When did it turn ? 
 
 I believe that the ancients (if one may venture a generali- 
 zation) were preponderantly inclined to favor antiquity; 
 not because they were ancients for of this they were 
 cheerfully unaware but because the notion of progress 
 was in their day foreign to the general run of men. This 
 was surely the case in the Middle Ages. Only with the 
 gradual enlargement of men's horizon by the unfolding and 
 the penetration of a vanished glorious civilization, and by 
 the discovery of unsuspected continents and races, did the 
 taste for innovation develop, a love of change for its own 
 sake, an eagerness to find in one's inner as well as in the 
 outer world fresh fields to conquer, a desire to exploit the 
 individual self; and this tendency was in the Renaissance 
 tempered by a worship of ancient Rome and Greece. Then 
 came, hi the period we call neo-classical, a renewed sub- 
 mission to authority, a satisfaction with things as they are 
 and as they have been. Yet we find in the eighteenth cen-
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 5 
 
 tury again a growing spirit of speculation, a battle of new 
 ideas for in those days they still had to battle. 
 
 With the French Revolution came an overturn in the 
 procedure of judgment. Henceforth it is to be no longer 
 the new, but the old, that must fight for its existence. The 
 burden of proof is on tradition, the presumption is in favor 
 of novelty. Let only a fashion be proclaimed as new, and 
 its right to prevail finds general approval. The revolution- 
 ist becomes the popular hero. In an interesting article on 
 " Theology in Paradise Lost" Professor R. E. Neil Dodge 
 speaks thus of Satan: 
 
 But Satan has a higher claim on our attention than mere epic im- 
 portance: he is the greatest embodiment in English poetry of one 
 eternal type of the human spirit the rebel. On this point, Milton 
 could hardly have guessed the extraordinary future of his creation; 
 for the rebel, as a human type entitled to respect and often to sym- 
 pathy, was not recognized in Europe till the period of the French 
 Revolution. Cromwell and the Puritans might be rebels, but only 
 in the eyes of the Royalists: in their own eyes they were liberators. 
 The term " rebel " was in itself a term of reproach, and was to remain 
 such till the days of Byron. Milton, therefore, would be not a little 
 perplexed at our strange modern sympathy with Satan, which to him 
 would be almost incomprehensible. 
 
 This brings me to the real subject of my discussion, the 
 fashion of rebellion. For the insurgent attitude has now 
 become a pose. With sundry ups and downs, the fortune 
 of the Miltonic Satan has prospered, until in our generation 
 he has become a favorite society figure. The drawing-room 
 anarchist, the literary rebel, the artistic iconoclast lay down 
 the law for all of us. Among the conventions of the day, 
 the most conspicuous is the convention of revolt. The only 
 really unconventional person among us is the one who is 
 not revolting against convention. If we wish to praise a 
 young poet or painter, we must begin by making it plain 
 that he is a revolter. Magazines, books, pictures are in
 
 6 OLD AND NEW 
 
 full tilt against some invisible adversary; and one must 
 be very old-fashioned, as well as very bold, to ask whether 
 the mysterious foe can by any possibility be a windmill. 
 Occasionally, however, an elderly swimmer does contrive 
 to lift his head sufficiently out of the flood to wonder what 
 it is all about. 
 
 A good many years ago there was in Boston a national 
 assembly of Christian Endeavorers. They swarmed in 
 streets, shops, parks, eating-houses, one could scarcely stir 
 without stepping on them; and their general aspect was 
 that of holiday-makers. After conscientiously studying 
 them for several days, an observer timidly inquired: " Are 
 these people endeavoring to do anything in particular, or 
 are they just endeavoring ? " We might, if we dared, put 
 a similar question to our revolters: " Are you revolting 
 against anything in particular, or are you just revolting ? " 
 Many of them, I suspect, would be at a loss for an answer; 
 after a moment's cogitation, however, they would doubt- 
 less reply that they were revolting against the Victorian 
 Age. And, in fact, the Victorian Age appears to be the 
 special butt of their scorn. In the rich vocabulary of their 
 terms of obloquy, " Victorian " is the very worst. It desig- 
 nates self-complacency, cant, hypocrisy, convention not 
 the convention of revolt, of course, but the convention of 
 decency. Quite vainly would one plead that the Age of 
 Victoria, rated according to genius, bids fair to take rank 
 with the ages of Pericles, Augustus, Elizabeth, and Louis 
 XIV; that future generations may possibly regard the time 
 of Thackeray^ Dickens, George Eliot, George Meredith, 
 Thomas Hardy, of Browning and Tennyson, of Arnold and 
 Newman, of Mill and Darwin and Huxley and Spencer and 
 Kelvin and Lister as rather a hard one to match in the 
 annals of letters and science. Such a suggestion would, of
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 7 
 
 course, appeal only to critics who knew the Victorian Age 
 and some other ages. One might, however, put forward 
 with more confidence the consideration that the Victorian 
 Age has been dead for a good while, and that it is a pure 
 waste of hind-leg power to go on forever kicking at a corpse. 
 Still, even that argument would probably be unavailing; 
 so stubborn is the corpse-kicking habit, so firmly rooted is 
 convention. Indeed, if I mistake not, I have never come 
 across a convention more hide-bound than this same con- 
 vention of revolt. 
 
 However, not all the " lords of convention " are corpse- 
 kickers. Some of them kick against things that are still 
 alive, such as duty, self-control, propriety. I have some 
 hesitation in listing propriety among the living; but I be- 
 lieve it has not entirely succumbed to the new convention, 
 although it has been the object of the most furious calci- 
 tration. Marriage, of course, is doomed. So is work. None 
 of the new ideal heroes are salt-earners; they are too busy 
 with self-expression and self-development and self-analysis. 
 The more one thinks of it, the more evident it becomes that 
 all their interests begin with " self "; they are addicted to 
 every " self " compound except self-support. What is to 
 become of us when we shall all have adopted the new mode 
 of existence, I cannot imagine. When all are parasites, 
 what or whom are we to live on ? The new livers should 
 meditate on this, ere they push their propaganda too far. 
 Another danger threatens them. I have just expressed 
 some doubt regarding the longevity of their favorite victim, 
 propriety " sweet-tongued propriety," as Andre Chenier 
 once called it, " la decence au doux langage." Now, if pro- 
 priety should die, there could be no impropriety, inasmuch 
 as the continuance of the latter is wholly contingent on the 
 presence of the former. And if there were no impropriety,
 
 8 OLD AND NEW 
 
 they could no longer be improper, and life would have lost 
 its savor. Nothing is so disheartening to a shocker as to 
 find the " shockee " impervious to a shock. Of Baudelaire, 
 who was a bit overfond of shocking, is told this tale, which 
 is probably ben trovato. One day, having failed in all 
 other efforts to startle, he dyed his hair green. A friend 
 opportunely called, and the poet eagerly watched for a 
 manifestation of horror. Not a sign: the caller chatted 
 unconcernedly about the weather and the races, apparently 
 unconscious of anything unusual. At last the poet could 
 contain himself no longer. " Don't you see it ? " he 
 shouted. " See what ? " " My hair! " " Well, what about 
 your hair ? " " Can't you see it's green ? " shrieked Bau- 
 delaire. " Yes," drawled the other, with a yawn, " every- 
 body's wearing green hair this season." 
 
 I am gratified to find myself in the company of the dis- 
 criminating author of an article on " New Poetry and New 
 America," G. R. Elliott, who writes as follows of the " new 
 poets ": 
 
 They keep on extravagantly wooing nature and extravagantly 
 repudiating human convention. The prevailing creed of anti-con- 
 ventionalism is perhaps most striking in the poetry of Miss Amy 
 Lowell, since she pursues, more open-mindedly than any other present 
 American poet, the purely aesthetic aim. She wishes to be tied by 
 no dogma. But, as a matter of fact, she is tied to the dogma of anti- 
 conventionalism. It is the single unifying theme which runs through 
 all her volumes, providing the substance of some of her best poems 
 (such as " Patterns ") and of some of her worst. So fixed has the 
 cult become! Mr. Frost, unconsciously but inevitably, gives the 
 text of it in opening his North of Boston: " Something there is 
 that doesn't love a wall." That something is surely the spirit of our 
 new poetry. Its hatred of the walls of human convention has itself 
 become conventional. It is no longer the spontaneous poetic out- 
 break of a century ago, voicing a spontaneous social outbreak against 
 dead conventions which had become intolerable. It is now a decadent 
 cult-concept lingering on into a new age.
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 9 
 
 I cannot resist the temptation to quote a bit more of 
 Mr. Elliott's criticism of the " new poetry ": 
 
 Its call to salvation amounts to this: our great need at the present 
 time is that we should face, more frankly than ever before, our destruc- 
 tive desires, and in thus facing them learn to master them. In facing 
 those desires the new poetry, as already stated, has shown itself adept 
 and vivid. But what is its notion of mastering them ? The firmest 
 answer to this question that I have been able to find in many volumes 
 of new poetry is this of Mr. Oppenheim: 
 
 Be what you are; 
 
 Then you can take your desires and lift them and harness them; 
 
 Men that can harness Niagara can harness gluttony. . . . 
 The idea of putting on harness is so rare in our new poetry, and so 
 prominent just now in our national state of mind, that one accepts 
 it here with gratitude. If Mr. Oppenheim could only learn what the 
 word harness means he would be in a fair way toward writing, or 
 helping others to write, some fine national poetry. But unfortunately 
 he has no more notion than his colleagues of what the word really 
 means. The race-horses of desire run through the whole course of 
 his poetry barebacked and without bridles. All thought of being 
 harnessed in the sense of being controlled, either from within or from 
 without, is expressly repudiated by the author again and again. In 
 the code of Mr. Oppenheim and his colleagues, harnessing our desires 
 means expanding them in such a way that, by an inexplicable trans- 
 formation, our evil desires turn into good desires. 
 
 Now that our author has led us to the Imagists, I sup- 
 pose it behooves me to include them in my survey, inas- 
 much as everybody is voluble about them, following the 
 example so notably set by themselves. Not without reser- 
 vation, however, do I class them as revolters: they are by 
 no means such out and out revolutionists as they think 
 or, I should rather say, as they would have us believe; for 
 I suspect some of them, at least, of knowing more than 
 they seem to know. They are quite aware, for instance, 
 that while loudly proclaiming themselves midwives at the 
 birth of a new art, they are really but imitators, translat- 
 ing into uncongenial Anglo-Saxon an artistic experiment
 
 10 OLD AND NEW 
 
 tried with some success in French, thirty-odd years ago. 
 They must know, too, that through the French Symbolists 
 they are the indirect issue of Walt Whitman, whom, for 
 some reason, they seem inclined to avoid mentioning, as 
 if he were a discreditable relation, rather than the most 
 successful member of the family. Some of them, no doubt, 
 have heard of versi sciolti, for several centuries a recognized 
 poetic form in Italian. Indeed, the use of irregular rhythms 
 was familiar to hoary antiquity: it may be found in the 
 Hebrew psalms; in the cadenced prose of classic Latin; 
 in the cursus, or fixed patterns for the ends of clauses, of 
 the medieval Latinity; in the Church sequence, originally 
 a piece of prose set to music. One may record in passing 
 Tieck's experiments in polyphonic prose. There are only 
 
 two new features in the modern vers libre movement: one 
 
 t * 
 
 is its typography, the other is the tremendous cackle raised 
 over it. No, the free versifiers are but pseudo-Satans, 
 devotees of near-novelty. 
 
 The Imagist claim to the invention of a hitherto un- 
 known type of rhythm is easily exploded. It has been 
 blown to flinders scientifically, with regular laboratory ap- 
 paratus and uncompromising method, by Dr. W. M. Pat- 
 terson of Columbia, in his remarkable book called The 
 Rhythm of Prose. " According to the results of our experi- 
 ments," he declares, " there is no psychological meaning 
 to the claims for a third genre between regular verse and 
 prose, except hi the sense of a jumping back and forth from 
 one side of the fence to the other." A similar conclusion 
 may be reached, without resorting to time-sense machine 
 or padded chamber, by the layman who will take the trouble 
 to write out in short, irregular lines a choice passage of 
 prose. The outcome is an Imagist poem, absolutely indis- 
 tinguishable from an intentional one, except, perhaps, by
 
 NOR YET THE NEW II 
 
 its weightier cargo of ideas. This experiment has been most 
 convincingly performed by Professor J. L. Lowes, who, by 
 the magic of typography alone, has transmuted various 
 selections from the prose of George Meredith into Imagist 
 poems indisputably better than any which the Imagists 
 themselves have produced. 
 
 These new gentlemen, in fact, carry our minds back to 
 Monsieur Jourdain, who all his life had been talking prose 
 without knowing it. Furthermore, they do not even stick 
 to their own principles. They tell us that the unit of poetry 
 is the stanza, which is made up of a given series of cadences, 
 and that these sequences are repeated from strophe to 
 strophe. Now, I have failed to discover a single poem in 
 which this rule is observed; and I have found only two or 
 three in which there is apparent the least inclination to 
 follow it. Some of the poets, however, would express the 
 principle a bit differently: according to these, the essence 
 of poetry is nothing more nor less than a happy succession 
 of varied intonations exactly my definition, acoustically 
 speaking, of good prose as distinguished from bad prose. 
 Some years ago, Professor F. N. Scott, of Michigan, worked 
 out a plausible theory that the rhythm of prose is a rhythm 
 of pitch, whereas the rhythm of poetry is a rhythm of ac- 
 cent. Whether he be right or wrong, there is in my mind 
 not the slightest doubt that " free verse " is a particular 
 development of prose, and not of poetry, as far as its form 
 is concerned; its virtues are the recognized virtues of well 
 written prose, its failures bring it into the category of medi- 
 ocre prose. To say this is by no means to condemn it. The 
 thing to be reprehended is the confusing misuse of the word 
 " verse." Tea and coffee are both of them excellent bever- 
 ages; most of us enjoy them both, each at its proper hour; 
 but nothing is gained by calling both of them tea.
 
 12 OLD AND NEW 
 
 Some distance back, I referred to Anglo-Saxon as an 
 " uncongenial " medium for the reproduction of the essays 
 of the vers libristes of France. In thus speaking I had in 
 mind not so much the superior smoothness and delicacy of 
 the French language as the nature of French metrics. The 
 neo-Latins have never been accustomed to anything like 
 the regular beat of English and German measures. Their 
 traditional poetic movement, compared to ours, is so fluid 
 that the step to free verse is a very short one, and necessi- 
 tates no sharp break with old habits. It means a use of the 
 same phrasing in lines of variable, instead of constant, 
 length. Most of La Fontaine's fables, indeed, are to my 
 ear composed in vers libres. For a Frenchman the real 
 wrench comes when he tries to give up rime. For him, 
 what determines the poetic structure is the harmony of 
 endings, as, for us, the pattern of accents. And we need 
 not be surprised to see that in a great part of French free 
 verse, the rime is kept, though happily released from cer- 
 tain restrictions that appeal only to the eye. In Mallarm6, 
 the leading theorist of the Symbolists, we find the same 
 confusion of prose and poetry that I noted in our Imagists 
 with this significant difference, that MaUamae" is con- 
 scious of what he is doing. " Verse," he says, " exists 
 everywhere in language where rhythm exists everywhere, 
 that is, but in advertisements and newspapers. In the 
 genus we call prose there are verses, sometimes admirable 
 ones, in all rhythms. But, really and truly, there is no such 
 thing as prose: first there is the alphabet; after that, 
 nothing but verses, more or less compact, more or less 
 loosely knit. Every time that one strives for style, the 
 result is versification. The official type of verse should be 
 reserved for moments of soul-crisis. . . . Our present poets, 
 instead of taking it as their starting-point, all of a sudden
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 13 
 
 let it spring up to crown a poem or a period." For the 
 sensitive and dainty Mallarme there is no drink but tea. 
 
 In conception, in substance, the Imagist work is for the 
 most part essentially poetic. It is poetry of the most evan- 
 escent type, so tenuous in thought and feeling that only the 
 most exquisite diction can justify its perpetuation in cold 
 print. Such justification frequently makes itself felt as we 
 read, whatever doubts may arise afterward. As we turn 
 the pages of an Imagist volume, we seem to be idly watch- 
 ing a procession of pretty soap-bubbles, rising one after 
 another, light, graceful, glittering, iridescent, to live in pure 
 beauty for one instant and then fade into the atmosphere 
 without leaving a trace. In truth, nothing definite is be- 
 queathed to the memory. Our only picture, on closing the 
 book, is the generic image of the bubble, the bright, fragile, 
 aqueous film momentarily vivified by a gentle breath of 
 tepid air. That is all; save that we may recall the names 
 of some of the poets whose bubbling has given us most 
 pleasure. Now and then we encounter an Imagist who be- 
 longs to a different class, his ebullitions being of a solider 
 consistency. Such a one can describe a woodpile with such 
 skill as to make his description exactly as interesting as the 
 woodpile itself, and not without the woodpile's suggestion 
 of labor. Another, cynically frolicsome, may exhaust him- 
 self in a macabre orgy; while a colleague may drearily ob- 
 serve in the universe a reflection of his own perversity and 
 gloom. Another still, like a fanciful will-o'-the-wisp, ap- 
 pears to be mischievously eluding pursuit, and can scarcely 
 be conceived otherwise if tracked into privacy than 
 as all aquiver with gelatinous mirth over a huge hoax 
 perpetrated on a band of solemn votaries. 
 
 I shall now ask you to make an abrupt but alliterative 
 transition, from poetry to painting. I might speak of the
 
 14 OLD AND NEW 
 
 musical rebel, if I knew anything about music. But I do 
 not; whereas I have at least a certain illusion of familiarity 
 with painting and versifying through having dabbled a bit 
 in these two arts. Now rebellion is just as rife in picture- 
 making as in verse-making. 
 
 For still the new transcends the old 
 In signs and tokens manifold. 
 
 It is on the one hand a more thorough-going rebellion, and 
 on the other a less happy one in its results. Few products 
 in the world of art have aroused such a mixture of pity and 
 indignation as the output of the post-impressionists, the 
 futurists, the cubists, the vorticists, and all the other ists 
 that are wildly clutching for a straw of publicity. 
 
 Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, 
 Amaze th' unlearn'd and make the learned smile. 
 
 Yet the painters have more excuse than the poets for their 
 vagaries. In the first place, it must be observed that a 
 painter generally expects to make his living from his art, 
 while a poet almost always has other resources. Secondly, 
 in numbers, good painters are to good poets as a hundred, 
 perhaps a thousand, to one. As you walk the length of 
 the endless picture galleries of Europe, as you tramp year 
 by year, through the miles and miles and miles of perfectly 
 good paintings in the annual Salon of Paris, just consider 
 for a moment what is the chance of a livelihood for a poor 
 devil whose only title to recognition is that he paints well! 
 Why, everybody paints well. The museums, the exhibi- 
 tions, the shops are crammed with beautifully executed 
 pictures which nobody wants. A high standard of techni- 
 cal excellence has become so general that the capable artists 
 outnumber the capable purchasers. To paint adequately is 
 to be submerged in the crowd; to paint better than anyone
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 15 
 
 ever painted before is impossible; the only possibility of 
 attracting notice lies in painting worse than anyone ever 
 painted before. Hence the post-impressionists, the cubists, 
 the futurists, the vorticists. A frenzied advertising, which 
 will quickly defeat its own end; for already it is beyond 
 anyone's power to do worse than has been done, and all 
 that remains for the notoriety-seeker is to devise a new 
 kind of worseness. 
 
 I do not mean to insist that no other factors have entered 
 into these freak-producing movements. Human motives 
 are always mixed; the course of events draws its water 
 from many tributaries. There is constantly the inborn 
 human desire to know, the craving for experimentation. 
 Furthermore, an artist who is very hungry, very self- 
 conceited, and very disappointed is likely to assume, in 
 all honesty, that the world is rotten, that art has grown 
 mechanical and needs a fresh formula; whereupon he pro- 
 ceeds to start a revolutionary school, and, if he be suffi- 
 ciently unbalanced, is sure to find a following. This may 
 come to pass even without the stimulus of physical hunger, 
 so insatiable is the craving for publicity. Moreover, there 
 is the general Satanic tendency of the tune. It is almost as 
 easy to Satanize in painting as in prose or poetry; and 
 Satan is so much more romantic than Michael! The poet 
 Richepin inaugurated a subsequently respectable career by 
 the publication of a mildly unpleasant book of verse entitled 
 Blasphemes. Why should not a painter blaspheme a little 
 
 at any rate, just enough to make people look around ? 
 When a certain French sociologist who was also an artist 
 
 was lecturing in Cambridge, he explained to one of his 
 audiences how it was that a great political leader of his 
 acquaintance came to be a socialist. The leader in question 
 originally was an academic person, apparently cut out for
 
 1 6 OLD AND NEW 
 
 a straight conservative, or, at most, for a moderate radical. 
 But he was also an orator, and an orator must orate; nay, 
 when he has once tasted the blood of popular applause, he 
 is a tiger, nevermore to be appeased. Now, a conservative 
 may pronounce a smug and tidy address on imports and 
 exports, but he cannot make you tingle; a moderate radical 
 may utter an earnest exhortation, but his hearers' flesh 
 does not creep nor does their hair stand on end. To thun- 
 der and lighten on the platform, one must be at least an 
 advanced radical; to toss back one's locks and roll one's 
 eyes, one must push on into socialism; for teeth-gnashing 
 and the highest flights of rhetoric, nothing short of the most 
 revolutionary brand will do. Thus our statesman, as the 
 exigencies of his oratorical impulse augmented, progres- 
 sively drifted to the left. Such, at least, was the lecturer's 
 story. 
 
 Let us return to our sheep. It is a matter of common 
 knowledge that the nature of these creatures is to follow 
 their leader, even (we are credibly informed) when the 
 leader jumps overboard, or to take a less striking but 
 more frequent occurrence when he heads for the fold. 
 It is even thus with our rebels and rebel chiefs. Jumping 
 out of one convention, they bolt forthwith into another and 
 a narrower one. All art is conventional, but to different 
 degrees. The conventions of nineteenth century painting, 
 from Ingres and Delacroix to Manet, being almost as broad 
 and varied as nature herself, gave free scope to any type of 
 genius. But with each new school in this present century 
 has come a narrowing of convention, an exaggeration of the 
 factitious and the esoteric. When we reach cubism, we 
 have an art that contains no other ingredient than con- 
 vention. To the intelligent but uninstructed observer a 
 cubist picture means nothing at all; it arouses no pleasur-
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 17 
 
 able sensation, it suggests no thought, it carries no message. 
 Only when we have been provided with a key can we pene- 
 trate the mysteries of the artist's intention; and then our 
 sole feeling is one of surprise that he should have thought 
 it necessary to keep such property locked up. Our cham- 
 pions of freedom have not merely swapped old bondage for 
 new; they have exchanged a camp for a cell. 
 
 In the various realms of art in prose and poetry, in 
 music, in painting and sculpture (architecture, curiously 
 enough, seems to have been little affected) in the realms 
 of art, Bolshevism, though it may occasionally try our 
 temper and interfere with our enjoyment, has not seriously 
 threatened our health. It becomes, on the contrary, a 
 real menace when it invades the fields of politics and of 
 education. Of its political aspect I shall not speak, for I 
 can say nothing that most people have not thought and 
 heard many times. Pedagogical revolution, on the other 
 hand, has, I believe, never been to express myself in 
 pedagogical terminology adequately apperceived nor 
 properly correlated with Imagism, Vorticism, and Nihilism. 
 Yet only a moment's reflection is needed to show that they 
 all are manifestations of the same Satanistic movement. 
 All are based on the assumption that whatever has been 
 customary must be bad, and that anything which is or 
 seems novel must be good. The title of " Modern School " 
 carries conviction, no matter how fantastic its program. 
 Its projector bids us discard the studies that have for cen- 
 turies been our intellectual bread and meat, because, he 
 avers, they have not sufficiently proved their worth; and 
 then he would have us fill up our depleted curriculum with 
 subjects whose worth has not even been tried. Always the 
 same na'ive faith in newness! His eventual test of worthi- 
 ness, it would seem, is to be popularity. A topic which the
 
 1 8 OLD AND NEW 
 
 children avoid is unworthy, one that they prefer is worthy. 
 As if the pupils' choice, in general, were not determined by 
 their estimate of the comparative difficulty of the subjects ! 
 Yet the Modernists assure us that the new studies are to 
 be intrinsically quite as hard as the old. Well, if they are, 
 I venture to prophesy that they will promptly become quite 
 as unpopular; whereupon they will have to give way to 
 newer ones whose hardness is still unknown, and these will 
 yield the place to newest and very newest. There is no 
 stopping-point in this course. 
 
 The whole Modernist propaganda is based on the false 
 assumption that knowledge can be acquired without pain- 
 fully conscious effort, if we but pick out alluring kinds of 
 knowledge. It ignores the fundamental fact that to the 
 normal man or woman, and still more to the normal child, 
 labor is unpleasant. Work was given to our first parents, 
 not as a reward, but as a punishment. I do not mean to 
 say that there is no joy in work; but the joy that is in it is 
 the joy of accomplishment, which comes into bloom with 
 the completion of the task, and does not begin to bud until 
 the end is in sight. Always cruel is the beginning, the act 
 of will that sets the machinery going, especially if there be 
 a period of doubt or a chance of evasion. As we grow older, 
 we lose our youthful hopefulness, our expectation of a 
 miracle such as breaking a leg before school opens 
 that may postpone the dreaded moment. We form the 
 habit of taking up each task mechanically, without debat- 
 ing the question whether we shall do so or not. Further- 
 more, with the lengthening sight of age, we see the end from 
 a greater and greater distance, and the anticipatory satis- 
 faction of achievement sets in at an increasingly early stage. 
 Such is our reward for having formed the habit of doing our 
 job, whether we liked it or not. Woe to him who has never
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 19 
 
 subjected himself to this discipline, who has never taught 
 himself to obey the command of duty, who all through life 
 suffers the agony of dilatory beginning without the happy 
 prospect of a speedy and successful finish ! 
 
 The Modernist error is due in large measure to a con- 
 fusion of work and play. Both are natural, both are needed, 
 and both give satisfaction. Yet they are opposites, not 
 different names for the same thing. The pleasure of work 
 comes from the consciousness of power, the stimulus of 
 tense application, and the contemplation of the constant 
 approach of the desired result; its joy is progressive; it is 
 happiest of all in retrospect. The delight of play consists 
 in relaxation, in yielding, unhampered, to the primitive 
 instincts, in concentration on the present moment; its 
 satisfaction is rather of the diminuendo than the crescendo 
 type, and attains perhaps its maximum just before the sport 
 really begins. To turn play into an obligatory item in the 
 curriculum is to rob it of its sunshine. To attempt, on the 
 other hand, to make play out of work is to beget a monster 
 that is neither the one nor the other. 
 
 The great danger of the Modernistic theory lies in its 
 coincidence with the innate laziness of man. When peda- 
 gogical Satans are proclaiming from the housetops that 
 Latin and Greek and mathematics are not only hard and 
 uninteresting, but useless, how can children, or even 
 parents, be blamed for demanding that these outworn 
 studies be abolished and replaced by brand new ones 
 Vaguely imagined as both profitable and entertaining ? 
 Entertainment is what schoolboys are now led to expect; 
 and, as it is what their primeval instinct craves, they are 
 disappointed if the school is not a hall of unbroken amuse- 
 ment. It must be remembered that hi this country the 
 schools are really under the government of the pupils: the
 
 20 OLD AND NEW 
 
 American child governs his parents, the parents elect the 
 School Boards, and these manage the schools. Although the 
 control is indirect, the sovereignty resides in the children. 
 With the New Education there has appeared on the scene 
 the New Educator, known as the Educational Expert. Do 
 not imagine that an Educational Expert is a person who has 
 ever educated anybody: no, he is one whose business it is 
 to tell others how to do it; his expertness has been acquired, 
 not hi the school, but in the laboratory. In the old days a 
 teacher who had distinguished himself in his work would in 
 time become principal of a school; then, as the years went 
 on, if he proved himself equally capable in his latter posi- 
 tion, he might be made superintendent. That was the 
 kind of expert on whom we used to rely. It is all different 
 now. The teaching and the supervising functions are sepa- 
 rate from the start; some are trained to teach, others to 
 superintend. You know what is meant by an Efficiency 
 Expert in a factory. He is a man who calculates not only 
 the most economical disposition and use of machinery, but 
 also the most time-saving motions of body and limbs, the 
 hours of the day at which people can work under highest 
 tension, the proportion of pressure and relaxation condu- 
 cive to a maximum output. In the imagination of the 
 workingman, the Expert is an ogre who stands over him 
 with a stop-watch in one hand and a club in the other, 
 ready to " swat " him if he diminishes his speed by a frac- 
 tion of a second or deviates a hair's breadth from the pre- 
 scribed and never-changing movements of his hands. Now 
 what the Efficiency Expert is to industry, that the Educa- 
 tional Expert aims to be to pedagogy. It is as unnecessary 
 for him to have been a teacher as for the Efficiency man to 
 have been a laborer. Loaded to the muzzle with statistics, 
 principles of management, educational theory, and peda-
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 21 
 
 gogical psychology, he is prepared to apply to the children 
 the very latest system of intellectual feeding and to exact 
 from the teacher all the calculable motions of maximum 
 efficiency. He talks a language of his own, almost philo- 
 sophic in its unintelligibility to the layman. 
 
 A man in all the world's new fashion planted, 
 That hath a mint of phrases in his brain. 
 
 Above all, he is " aggressive." Has it ever struck you 
 how the use of this adjective has changed since Satanism 
 came into vogue ? If a man is wanted for any kind of job 
 mayor, floor-walker, professor, or secretary of a peace 
 conference he must be " aggressive." School principals, 
 in recommending boys to the college "-'mission committee, 
 take special pains to note whether the lads are " aggressive " 
 or not. " Smith does not rank very high in his studies, but 
 he is a natural leader, captain of the football team, president 
 of his class, and editor of the school paper, a fine, manly, 
 aggressive young fellow, who, I am sure, will, if admitted, 
 do no discredit to the college." " Jones is an excellent 
 scholar, fond of books, a young man of high standards and 
 the strictest sense of honor, but not conspicuous in leader- 
 ship in fact, if the truth must be told, rather lacking in 
 aggressiveness, a fault which a college atmosphere will 
 doubtless correct." After sundry abortive resolves, I have 
 looked up " aggressive " in the International Dictionary. 
 You may be surprised to learn that it means " tending or 
 disposed to aggress." But I did not stop there. Following 
 up the trail, I found that " to aggress " is " to commit the 
 first act of hostility or offense; to begin a quarrel or con- 
 troversy; to make an attack." This summum desideratum 
 of Modernism is, therefore, in the plain English of a few 
 years ago, a " disposition to commit the first act of hostility
 
 22 OLD AND NEW 
 
 or offense." Let us not forget who it was that " committed 
 the first act of hostility or offense," who first " began a 
 quarrel or controversy ": Satan. 
 
 Fortunately it is not upon the child that the Educator's 
 expert aggressiveness is wreaked, but upon the teacher. 
 The child must be kept in good humor, or he will become 
 aggressive himself, and then good-bye to the Expert. But 
 who cares what happens to the teacher ? She for it 
 nearly always is a she ought to regard it as a privilege 
 to be coached in the latest tackles, to be forced to keep up 
 with educational theory from day to day, to have to devote 
 her school hours largely to experiments and records. It is 
 always a comfort to know that you are doing a thing exactly 
 according to the right formula. " We have reached a 
 point," recently declared an Educator in a public meeting, 
 " where Education is as exact a science as mathematics." 
 Observe what an advance we have made over the casual 
 and impulsive Mr. Gradgrind, who never would have dared 
 to put forth such a claim as that. Another Expert gladdens 
 our hearts by assuring us that it is unnecessary to study 
 algebra or geometry; all agree in the doctrine that the ac- 
 quisition of facts of any kind is positively deleterious. I 
 once heard a Superintendent exclaim: " At last we have 
 got the colleges where we want 'em. They've got to take 
 what we say. If we say that a course in blacksmithing and 
 nothing else is a proper preparation for college, the colleges 
 have got to accept blacksmithing as a preparation." This 
 is a note of frequent recurrence, a warning note, which 
 means that if our colleges do not stand firm, they will 
 presently become institutions in which blacksmiths are 
 taught the alphabet and the multiplication table, and all 
 education above the primary stage will have vanished from 
 the land. If I do not quote more abundantly from the
 
 NOR YET THE NEW 23 
 
 utterances of Educators, it is not because there is any 
 dearth of material. Such an idea would immediately be 
 dispelled by a glance at their Reports. Once, after a very 
 full demonstration by an Efficiency Expert, an auditor 
 remarked: " You Experts seem to have devised a way to 
 economize everything except words." 
 
 Let us return for a moment to our advocate of black- 
 smithing. It is no doubt an admirable thing to afford 
 boys and girls a free, easily accessible means of learning 
 the trades by which they are to gain a livelihood; and I 
 can see that there may be a distinct advantage in begin- 
 ning this instruction very early. Self-respect, earnestness, 
 alacrity may well be increased by the consciousness that 
 one is on the way to independence. The mistake comes in 
 assuming that such training is the equivalent of education, 
 in the sense in which this term has generally been used. 
 Vocational study may be a precious supplement to educa- 
 tion, but cannot be a substitute for it. Unless men and 
 women are to turn into unthinking mechanisms as our 
 various Experts apparently would have them they must 
 possess some resources outside their particular work; they 
 must acquire some general outlook on the world, some con- 
 ception of what the generations of men have thought and 
 wrought. Unless they be initiated into this intellectual 
 life in their schooldays, they are likely to remain dummies 
 ever after good mechanics, no doubt, but failures as 
 human beings, and incompetents if we consider them as 
 responsible members of a democracy. Humanity, after 
 all, is more precious than efficiency. We can better afford 
 to sacrifice some share of the latter than to stunt the former. 
 
 The former it is, however, that has been slighted by our 
 Modernist revolters be they pedagogical, artistic, or 
 literary all of them prone, as we have seen, to tie them-
 
 24 OLD AND NEW 
 
 selves up with arbitrary formulas and to plunge into the 
 bondage of an unnatural convention. A common tendency 
 to depart from the normally human, in a chase after some 
 variety of abnormal effectiveness, seems to be the conse- 
 quence of basing one's philosophy on the gratuitous as- 
 sumption that the new must surpass the old. As prophets 
 of the super-new, our super-efficient revolutionists turn 
 their backs upon experience, forgetting that Satan fell be- 
 cause of overconfidence in his own efficiency. Lest we 
 also fall, let us fortify ourselves against the foul fiend by 
 repeating Clough's wise motto: 
 
 Old things need not be therefore true, 
 O brother men, nor yet the new. 
 
 And let us join (of course metaphorically) in the prayer of 
 worthy Bishop Still: 
 
 But belly, God send thee good ale enough, 
 Whether it be new or old!
 
 II 
 
 FASHION AND THE BROAD A 1 
 
 " THERE was a silence for a brief space, after my some- 
 what elaborate exposition of these self-evident analogies. 
 Presently a person turned towards me I do not choose 
 to designate the individual and said he rather expected 
 my pieces had given pretty good ' sahtisfahction.' " Thus 
 wrote the genial Autocrat in 1857. " Sahtisfahction " was 
 then one of those expressions " that fix a man's position for 
 you before you have done shaking hands with him " ; a 
 " prahctical mahn " was another. Nowadays such a pro- 
 nunciation would simply mark the speaker as a probable 
 Scotchman; but in the New England of 1840 to 1860 the 
 broad a, a sound of comparatively recent introduction, was 
 running riot through countrified and vulgar speech; in 
 such words as handsome, matter, Saturday, one may still 
 occasionally hear it from the lips of an elderly rustic. 
 
 When I was a boy of nine or so, I struck up an intimacy 
 with a Yankee peddler, a man of sociable disposition and 
 infinitely persuasive tongue, though a stranger to books. 
 For him I painted signs and composed circulars, chiefly 
 designed, as I remember, to exalt the virtues of a certain 
 magic liniment in which he dealt. Would it were possible 
 for me now to cherish towards anything in the world such 
 unquestioning faith as I had in his liniment a faith which 
 
 1 Reprinted from The Nation of January 7, 1915.
 
 26 OLD AND NEW 
 
 I am convinced the excellent man fully shared! And would 
 that any journey could now afford me such keen delight as 
 I took in my peregrinations aboard a broom-masted and 
 pan-girt wagon over the quiet, sun-flooded roads of central 
 Massachusetts! For by way of compensation for literary 
 services rendered, my kindly commercial friend used to let 
 me drive his horse. Vivid indeed is my recollection of our 
 halts before shaded homesteads, our protracted and usually 
 successful parleys with lean housewives, hungry for con- 
 versation. Then, after adequate preliminary discussion of 
 weather and harvest, of the havoc wrought by " cahter- 
 pillars " on the " ahple " and " che'y " crop, were shiny 
 tins produced, " notions " of all sorts, goods for the " pahn- 
 try," " gimblets," and " hahmers." 
 
 " Ahples " have decayed, " hahmers " have been laic^on 
 the shelf. At present, New England restricts the " ah " 
 vowel, in the main, to a few specific classes of words 
 especially those in which an a (sometimes an au) is followed 
 by a final r, by an r that precedes another consonant, by an 
 " m " written Im, or by the sound of " f ," " s," or " th " : as 
 far, hard, balm, laugh, pass, rather, path. In the first two 
 categories, and in the word father, " ah " possesses nearly 
 all the English-speaking territory; concerning the other 
 classes, there is wide divergence, although flat a appears 
 everywhere to be disappearing from words like balm. 
 Yankeedom itself is divided over such combinations as 
 ant, can't, dance, example, in which a nasal and another 
 consonant follow the vowel; aunt, however, always has 
 broad a. " Ah," in this region, is best preserved in rural 
 communities and among people of fashion, the latter being 
 more or less under British influence. For, in southern Eng- 
 land, the style is essentially the same as in the typical 
 Yankee village, save that the " ah " is of a broader quality.
 
 FASHION AND THE BROAD A 27 
 
 In our ordinary urban speech, " ah " before w, and also 
 before/, s, and th (except in father), has been losing ground 
 of late. Not long since, one of our legislators was derided 
 by a fellow law-giver presumably a member of the po- 
 litically dominant race for saying " Nahahnt," the only 
 pronunciation by which the peninsula of Nahant is known 
 to our native seamen. 
 
 In the United States beyond the Hudson perhaps be- 
 yond the Connecticut the flat a prevails before /, s, th, 
 and n "haf," "past," " rSther," "path," "chance"; 
 although there is a little " ah " spot in Virginia. Never- 
 theless, a perceptible leveling process is going on, due partly 
 to travel, to the example of actors and lecturers, still 
 more to schools. Curiously enough, it is very common for 
 teachers in the " 8, " dominion to inculcate " ah," and for 
 " ah "-born pedagogues to insist on " a." Inasmuch as the 
 " a " country is vastly the more extensive, one may assume 
 that by this scholastic tendency " ah," in the land as a 
 whole, is gaining converts faster than " &." What the out- 
 come shall be, no one can tell. Usage is forever changing, 
 and almost always inconsistent. The Yankee naturally 
 says " cahnt " for can't, but never for the noun cant. Of 
 two Cambridge brothers, aged three and four, who had 
 never been away from home and never separated, one in- 
 variably said " bahsket," the other " basket," although 
 both parents pronounced " bahsket." 
 
 Great have been the shifts of fashion with regard to our 
 first vowel. It is a common belief that English and Yankee 
 " ah " represents the older style of speech; but the con- 
 trary is true. The fast West is in this matter more con- 
 servative than the pahst-loving East. Earlier English 
 " ah " became " a " by the sixteenth century, and until 
 1780, or thereabouts, the standard language had no broad
 
 28 OLD AND NEW 
 
 a. People said not only "fast," but "father," "far," 
 " hard." By " a" I am designating, of course, the quality, 
 not the duration, of the sound. Benjamin Franklin, who 
 in 1768 recorded phonetically the pronunciation of his day, 
 knew no " ah," although he maintained that additional 
 letters were needed to represent two other vowels, the " u " 
 of hut and the " aw " of law. This was in his Scheme for a 
 New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling. Sheridan, 
 in 1780, has no " ah " in his list of vowel sounds. Not until 
 1784 do we come upon something like it, in Nares's Ele- 
 ments of Orthoepy (London). Seven years later, Walker 
 reports a practice that is virtually the present southern 
 English one. The evidence we possess seems to indicate 
 a very sudden incursion of " ah " into London speech be- 
 tween 1780 and 1790. For many years after that, however, 
 " ah " and " " contended for the supremacy. 
 
 In America, it would appear, broad a was slower in get- 
 ting a foothold. Very few traces of it are to be found in the 
 eighteenth century. Noah Webster, in his Dissertations on 
 the English Language, 1789, prefers " a " even in aunt, as 
 well as in jaunt, sauce; but in 1806 he finds a place for 
 " Italian a " in such words as ask, dance, demand, father, 
 psalm. Yet Alden, in 1813 (An Introduction to Spelling and 
 Reading, sixth edition), gives no recognition to the new 
 sound, prescribing " bark " with the vowel of back, and 
 " lawf " for laugh. Meanwhile, contradictory testimony 
 comes from an Essai Raisonne sur la Grammaire et la Pro- 
 nonciation Angloise a I'usage des Francois qui desirent d'ap- 
 prendre I'Anglois, par Duncan Mackintosh et ses deux filles, 
 Boston, 1797, in which, besides the usual drt, fdr, Idrge, 
 bdth, ddnce, qudff, etc., we are confronted with " ah " in 
 arm and in are this latter word being elsewhere in the 
 eighteenth century always described as "air." Further-
 
 FASHION AND THE BROAD A 29 
 
 more, Mackintosh would have us pronounce " ah " in a 
 long list of words in which present-day Boston knows only 
 "a": Daniel, for instance, Italian, imagine, navigate, 
 Paris, rational, travel, satisfy, and so on. One cannot help 
 suspecting a Scottish strain in his pronunciation; and this 
 suspicion is confirmed by his remark that it takes a very 
 delicate ear to distinguish the i of bid and hit from the u of 
 bud and hut. 
 
 In 1830 appeared Worcester's first dictionary, contain- 
 ing both " ah " and a sound intermediate between " ah " 
 and " a," which latter he recommends as some of his 
 English predecessors had done for use before/, s, th, and 
 nasals. " To pronounce the words, fast, last, glass, grass, 
 dance, etc.," he declares, " with the proper sound of short 
 a as in hat, has the appearance of affectation; and to pro- 
 nounce them with the full Italian sound of a, as in part, 
 father, seems to border on vulgarism." The compromise 
 vowel which he, and others, tried to introduce, never met 
 with much success. It is too closely akin to the two ex- 
 tremes. In New England especially, where " ah " and " a " 
 are less remote from each other than in most of the present 
 English-speaking world, it is hard to establish a vowel be- 
 tween them. Li spite of dictionaries and teachers, people 
 have continued to use, in the doubtful words as hi the 
 others, either the broad or the flat a. 
 
 From Worcester's statement, and from other evidence, 
 we may infer that " ah ' : first prevailed in vulgar speech, 
 and that " fast," as late as 1830, retained a flavor of by- 
 gone preciosity. Today, on the contrary, in the conscious- 
 ness of most Americans, " fahst " implies a striving after 
 old-world elegance, while " fast " is characteristic of up-to- 
 date democracy. Thus do we change our vowels, as our 
 garments, in accordance with the inscrutible decrees of
 
 30 OLD AND NEW 
 
 Fashion. The pride of yesterday is the scorn of today. 
 Broadway Jones would despise both the sartorial and the 
 linguistic style which to " the young man whom they call 
 John " (for I am sure it was he) gave unqualified " sahtis- 
 fahction.'
 
 Ill 
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 
 
 HUMANITY'S most primitive satisfaction, next to the fulfil- 
 ment of physical needs, is the sense of power. Before the 
 child has acquired the art of standing on two limbs, he finds 
 a way of gratifying man's innate desire to be a controlling 
 factor in the universe. At first by repeated accident, then 
 by vaguely conceived experiment, he learns that certain 
 movements of his hands or feet certain muscular con- 
 tractions that can be produced at will are capable of 
 causing results perceptible to eye and ear, nay, startling 
 and momentous in the little world he inhabits. Adult life 
 holds in reserve no joy so complete as that of shattering, 
 with one swift touch, an elaborately constructed pinnacle 
 of blocks. Indeed, so keen is the pleasure, and so impatient 
 the expectation, that ofttimes the craving defeats its own 
 end, prematurely launching the fateful blow and demolish- 
 ing the edifice ere the height thereof is sufficient to generate 
 a complete portion of uproar in its demolition; even as the 
 over-ambitious statesman, snatching at the crown before 
 his popularity is ripe, may have to content himself with a 
 lieutenant-governorship. 
 
 " The sports of grown-ups," wrote St. Augustine, " are 
 called business; but when children indulge in like business, 
 the grown-ups punish them." Tragic is the tune when the 
 infant transfers his attention from blocks to vases, flower- 
 pots, or fragile articles of furniture. Then he experiences, 
 to his amazement and rage, the fickleness of favor; ap- 
 
 31
 
 32 OLD AND NEW 
 
 proving smiles are turned to scowls, sweet baby-talk to 
 words of harshness, caresses perhaps to disgraceful smacks. 
 Fortunately the outraged autocrat has at his command a 
 means of coercion acquired long before the block-building 
 age, a method discovered and assiduously practised in the 
 early days of cradlehood. By the proper exercise of dia- 
 phragm, larynx, and jaw an exercise usually begun at 
 the moment of entrance into this world of sorrow he can 
 create an aerial disturbance, perceived by the ear as sound, 
 which will compel attention and, not infrequently, obedi- 
 ence. Scientific experiment has ascertained how many 
 trials are needed by a rat to grasp the idea that by taking 
 a particular turn or giving a special push he can penetrate 
 from one chamber of his prison-house to a more desirable 
 one; but who shall say how quickly the babe apprehends 
 the relation between the causative howl and its effect, the 
 demanded ministration ? 
 
 " The first cries of babies are entreaties; if one is not 
 careful, they soon become orders." So says Rousseau. 
 " Children begin by getting assistance, and end by getting 
 service. . . . When the infant stretches out his hand, with 
 an effort, and in silence, he expects to reach the object, 
 having no estimate of its distance; he is simply mistaken. 
 But when he whines and yells as he extends his hand, he is 
 no longer in error about the distance, he is either command- 
 ing the object to approach or commanding you to bring it 
 to him. . . . No sooner do children reach the stage of re- 
 garding the people who surround them as instruments which 
 it is in their power to operate, than they make use of them 
 to follow out their own inclination and to supplement their 
 own weakness. That is how they become troublesome, ty- 
 rannical, imperious, ill-natured, stubborn a progress 
 which does not spring from an inborn spirit of domination,
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 33 
 
 but which imparts that spirit to them; for no long experi- 
 ence is needed to perceive how agreeable it is to work with 
 other people's hands and to be able to move the universe 
 merely by moving one's tongue." 
 
 Our tyrant, however, is not always tyrannizing. He has 
 his innocuous moments, in which he reveals an interesting, 
 almost attractive side. As he lies in his crib, dimly aware 
 that by sundry mysterious exertions he can make a noise, 
 he frequently uses this strange and fascinating power, not 
 for domination, but for the sheer gratification of his sense 
 of being somebody. Long before he can achieve any pre- 
 concerted result with hands or feet, he is able to produce 
 intentionally several varieties of sound, which afford him 
 the same kind of pleasure that is later to be derived from 
 the toppled blocks. His joy comes from the perceptible 
 realization of a purpose. Birds, no doubt, rejoice in their 
 song for the same reason. An act of volition is translated 
 into an audible product, which, as time goes by, is artisti- 
 cally developed, and which, at all stages, is proof of power. 
 
 Inasmuch as this power must, in the first instance, be 
 revealed to the child by chance, by the oft-repeated hear- 
 ing of a noise inadvertently brought forth, it is evident that 
 the earliest acoustic experiments must be such as require 
 only a current of ah* blown through a vocal apparatus un- 
 prepared. Before anything else, comes a nasal vowel of 
 uncertain character; next follow sundry modifications of 
 this utterance by shutting and opening the lips: wawa, 
 mama) baba, papa. At the teething period, when the point 
 of the tongue instinctively seeks the sore gums, we begin 
 to hear dental consonants: nana, dada, tata. If, in an ener- 
 getically bright mood, the child sends forth a vigorous puff 
 through a mouth loosely closed, the alternate sudden separa- 
 tion of the lips by the passing exhalation and the immediate
 
 34 OLD AND NEW 
 
 return of the pair to position, allowing an intermittent out- 
 flow while the breath lasts, can be heard as a purr, delight- 
 ful to the ear of the juvenile practitioner. Such a noise 
 (which we may call a labial trill) is occasionally made by 
 adults to express cold; preceded by a firm closure of the 
 lips that is, a p it may denote exhaustion. This com- 
 bination, made sonant by simultaneous vibration of the 
 vocal chords, is sometimes employed by German coachmen 
 to stop a horse: brr. The sonant purr, very loud and shrill, 
 mostly without the b, is used by noisy girls here at home 
 as a call. 
 
 The lip-trill is not utilized as a regular element of speech 
 by any civilized people, being too wasteful of breath and 
 too hard to combine with other sounds, except b and p; 
 but I believe it has been reported as a feature of some savage 
 tongue. Two other trills, however, have found general ac- 
 ceptance as speech sounds. One is a vibration of the front 
 rim of the tongue against the gums or the forward part of 
 the roof of the mouth: the tongue's edge, made very thin, 
 is held in light contact with the surface behind the teeth; 
 it is now pushed aside by the escaping air, now restored to 
 its place by its own resiliency. This trill, when sonant, as 
 it usually is, we often call the " Italian r." It exacts a good 
 supply of breath, though not so much as is required for the 
 labial purr; it demands also a nice adjustment. For these 
 reasons, no doubt, it is seldom produced by the infant; 
 indeed, it frequently remains a difficult sound for the child 
 who is learning to speak. If, on the other hand, the vibra- 
 tion be made, not with the tongue-tip, but with the uvula, 
 it calls for little breath and, once started, can be long con- 
 tinued without exertion. The uvula is the small muscular 
 tag that dangles, in the back of the mouth, from the middle 
 of the lower edge of the velum, or soft palate. To produce
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 35 
 
 the vibration, the back of the tongue is so raised that the 
 uvula rests upon it, fitting, when the operation is neatly 
 performed, into a central groove which furrows the tongue 
 from rear to front. The air, as it runs out over the tongue, 
 lifts the light tag, which then falls, to be at once lifted 
 again; and thus arises a flapping movement heard as a 
 trill. When surd, or voiceless, it is the usual type of jota, 
 the Spanish./. When voiced, or sonant, it is the r commonly 
 heard in the cities of France and Germany. This trill is 
 one of the delights of early babyhood, even in countries 
 where the sound is unknown to adults. Lying on its back, 
 with gently flowing breath, the infant " hurreth " to its 
 heart's content, though nearly always, I fancy, without 
 premeditation. 
 
 Let us suppose, however, that our juvenile triller dwells 
 in a land where the trill forms one of the recognized elements 
 of speech. In this case, he may profitably turn pleasure 
 into business, preserving the noise of his early delecta- 
 tion and making use of it in the more earnest pastime of 
 imitating those mysteriously significant sequences of sounds 
 which issue from the lips of mature experience. If maturity 
 prefers to the easy-going flutter of the uvula a more exact- 
 ing whirr of the tongue-tip, the child is constrained to forget 
 the former and accept the latter, often at considerable ex- 
 pense. Most European languages employ one or the other of 
 these vibrations, which for the non-trilling foreigner consti- 
 tute the chief difficulty in the way of learning to speak those 
 idioms. An Englishman or an American, for instance, who 
 would acquire either Italian or French must first acquire 
 the vibratory habit, and first of all must acquire the belief 
 that the canine consonant is really a possibility and a neces- 
 sity; to which end he must gradually eradicate his settled 
 conviction that the Italians and the French are wrong in
 
 36 OLD AND NEW 
 
 pronouncing as they do, a practice excusable only in con- 
 sideration of their inability to speak plain English. That 
 Anglo-Saxon is doomed to failure who sets out to conquer 
 a continental tongue and fails to concentrate his attack on 
 the r. By him, the Italian poco is heard as porco; and while 
 his heart says carne, his mouth says cane. Let him reflect 
 that in practising a vexatious and unseemly trick of internal 
 gymnastics he is merely reverting to the custom of his an- 
 cestors; let him remember that, only a few generations ago, 
 the men of Merrie England were as whirry and burry as 
 the best of them. 
 
 It is, in fact, not an uncommon procedure for a language, 
 in the course of time, to relax the severity of the whirring 
 requirement and content itself with a little buzz emanating 
 from the quarter where the whirr should be produced. Thus 
 the French or the German ear is nowadays often satisfied 
 by a weak rasping noise made in the back of the mouth, a 
 sort of delabialized w. Similarly English, whose earlier r 
 was of the Italian type, has in modern times generally re- 
 duced it to a vague fricative, withdrawing the tongue-point 
 so far from the front of the palate that a continuous and 
 rather spacious channel replaces the valvular flip-flap of 
 older days. Spanish seems a bit inclined to follow the same 
 course, when the r is neither initial nor double; but the 
 more vociferous Italian is less ready to yield. In a great 
 part of the United States a region, let us say, north of 
 the Ohio and stretching from the Hudson to the Rockies 
 the retracting tendency is exaggerated and the tip of the 
 tongue is curled up toward the middle of the roof of the 
 mouth, leaving a curiously shaped passage, which, though 
 very wide, strikingly modifies the acoustic effect of the 
 outgoing breath. A similar pronunciation may be heard 
 in Kent. This strange sound, which seems to afford its
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 37 
 
 utterers an inexplicable satisfaction, does not convey in 
 the least the impression of an r to anyone accustomed to 
 either variety of the trill; it suggests merely an obstructed 
 formation of the preceding vowel. The Middle Western 
 par , court, for example, impress the unpractised ear rather 
 as pa, coat spoken with one's mouth full. 
 
 We have found, then, apart from the labial purr, two 
 types of trilled r , the uvular and the lingual, and for each 
 of these an untrilled substitute. Which of these came first 
 in the history of human speech ? Inasmuch as the uvular 
 vibration is so natural to the child, one would suppose that 
 it must have led the way; but there is no evidence that 
 such was the case. Perhaps in the heroic age both men and 
 babes had mightier breath. Hercules, who strangled snakes 
 in his cradle, may have celebrated his triumph with a lingual 
 athleticism impossible to an infantile generation that was 
 " orba di tanto spiro." Be that as it may, we can find no 
 sign of a primitive utilization of the mobile uvula. From 
 prehistoric days to the eighteenth century, at least in 
 western Europe, the normal r appears to have been a whirr, 
 strong or feeble, of the tongue-tip. Beside this, however, 
 we must assume that there existed, at least in some periods 
 and in some regions, a wholly untrilled variety; otherwise 
 we could never account for at least one peculiar develop- 
 ment that occurred in several branches of our Indo-Euro- 
 pean family. In these in Latin and in Germanic under 
 certain conditions an s between vowels changed to z and 
 then to r . Testimony of such alteration remains in English 
 was and were, in Latin pignus and pignora. Now this new 
 r must at the start have been untrilled; in fact, it must 
 have been closely similar to modern English r in red, which 
 is not far from z. After coming thus into existence, the 
 novel sound was doubtless assimilated to the commoner
 
 38 OLD AND NEW 
 
 trilled r. The latter seems then to have held fairly general 
 sway until modern times, despite some traces, both in an- 
 tiquity and in the Middle Ages, of a lapse from its distinctive 
 vibrant quality such traces as change of r to d, reduction 
 of rs to s, palatization of r, and local medieval confusion of 
 r and z. In the sixteenth century a fashion of speaking z 
 for r sprang up in Paris and central France: " chaize," 
 " mazy," " Pazy," as Palsgrave testified in 1530 (Jehan 
 Palsgrave, L'Esdaircissement de la languefranqoise, London) 
 were used for chaire, mari, Paris. People said " Masia " 
 for Maria, " ma mese " for ma mere. Conversely, some 
 pronounced " courin," " rairon," " sairon " for cousin, rai- 
 son, saison. This style seems to have died away about 
 1620, perhaps leaving as a permanent memento the word 
 chaise beside the earlier chaire. Next followed the great 
 shift from front to rear of the mouth. At the tune of the 
 Precieuses, in the seventeenth century, it would appear 
 that the uvular trill came to be substituted for the lingual in 
 Parisian choice society, whence it spread little by little 
 through northern France and a good part of northerly 
 Europe. In Germany it apparently turns up in the first 
 half of the eighteenth century. At present this r, or its 
 untrilled substitute, is characteristic of the urban pronun- 
 ciation of the greater portion of France and Germany, being 
 least favored in the south. It is still avoided in song and, 
 in Germany, on the tragic stage. 
 
 To account for the passage from tongue-tip to uvula it 
 has been suggested that in a chilly climate the growth of 
 polished society and the development of indoor conversa- 
 tion may naturally have led to the adoption of less strenu- 
 ous habits of speech, a more subdued tone replacing the 
 loud voice that befits life in the open air. A softer voice 
 means a less energetic expulsion of air from the lungs, a
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 39 
 
 smaller current of breath flowing through the vocal organs. 
 Now, as I have said, to make the end of the tongue vibrate, 
 a considerable body of moving air is needed, whereas a 
 moderate outflow suffices to keep the uvula bobbing. A 
 further reduction in the discharge of breath may have led 
 to the omission of even this easy flap and the adoption, in 
 its place, of a weak consonantal noise produced in the back 
 of the mouth. How soon this last substitution occurred, 
 we do not know. The Revolutionary dandies known as 
 Incroyables are said to have discarded r from their speech; 
 perhaps in reality they replaced it by a very feeble frica- 
 tive. 
 
 Interesting it is to picture the advocates of elegance and 
 decorum refining not only their words but their tones, mod- 
 ulating their voices and attuning them to their dainty con- 
 cepts, cultivating an internal, secluded coo in place of the 
 more open and vigorous roll of the outer end of the tongue. 
 The newer sound, to be sure, fails to please the unaccus- 
 tomed ear of the modern Anglo-Saxon, whose own r has 
 been softened almost to the vanishing point; but with 
 habit comes appreciation of its gentle effectiveness. Much 
 depends on the degree of ease and delicacy with which it 
 is brought forth. When neatly trilled, on the stage, it 
 reveals the advantage of extreme audibility produced by 
 a minimum of effort. In song, where a more voluminous 
 output of air is customary, and the breath is under stricter 
 control, the old lingual trill appears appropriate, the more 
 so since we consciously or unconsciously associate vocal 
 music with Italian. In speech, this tongue-roll is still 
 widely used in rural districts and small towns, sporadically 
 in large cities; some French actors cling to it. Many 
 Frenchmen hear no difference, or fancy themselves to be 
 uttering one sound when really making the other. Whether
 
 40 OLD AND NEW 
 
 the uvula is ultimately destined to supplant the tongue-tip 
 altogether, it would be rash to guess. 
 
 Did the uvular fashion, in its spread over northern 
 Europe, invade England ? We have reason to believe that 
 it did. From tune to time one comes across an individual 
 speaker who substitutes for r a feeble sound very similar 
 to w identical with it, in fact, save that the lips are 
 generally parted. This habit, sporadic hi America, is by 
 no means rare in the mother country. A couple of genera- 
 tions ago, it was a regular feature of dandified pronuncia- 
 tion. Now, it is difficult to derive this substitute from any 
 type of r , however vowel-like, except one made in the back 
 of the mouth; whereas its evolution from the uvular con- 
 sonant would present no difficulty. The sound is, indeed, 
 not essentially different from the softened, untrilled variety 
 of uvular r common in France and Germany. Moreover, 
 in Northumberland the uvular trill actually exists to the 
 present day. It is described by A. J. Ellis in his English 
 Dialects. The burr is weak, he says, between vowels, as in 
 " to marry a very merry lass," and in the ending er; in 
 some places it is so reduced as to resemble w. I have heard 
 it quite identical in sound with the untrilled French r. 
 
 Ellis's " very merry lass " is suggestive of those speakers 
 sometimes met at home, particularly in New England and 
 in the South, who altogether omit the r between vowels in 
 many words oftenest, perhaps, in ve'y. Clie'y and be'y 
 also are familiar to observers of the older generation. That 
 was the generation which bu'ied its fust wife in '66 and 
 ma'ied its second in '68. Some of my own family have 
 lived in Sh'ewsbu'y. A curious borderland type is that 
 which sounds its r before a consonant and suppresses it 
 before a vowel, the inconsistent creature who is ve'y so'y 
 to be late, having hu'ied so that he can't hordly breathe.
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 41 
 
 One would like to know whether this elimination of the 
 canine letter came about, like its transformation into w, 
 through a shift from the lingual to the uvular production. 
 Here we cannot be quite sure; but in all probability no 
 such shift is to be assumed, only a gradual fading out of an 
 untrilled r of the front variety. 
 
 Normally, in our southern states, in New England, and 
 in most of Old England, at the present time, r is sounded 
 consonant-fashion only before a vowel, and then only as a 
 feeble murmur. We say fah, paht, but rat, try, very. Ele- 
 gant speakers in England, to be sure, are apt to give the r 
 in such words as very where it stands between vowels 
 a smart little flap, which, however, is foreign to us. Such 
 rimes as Maud and Lord, harm and balm are called " Cock- 
 ney rimes " in Great Britain, " New England rimes " in 
 America quite unjustly in both cases; for they represent 
 the speech of all the areas just named. Now, the distinction 
 made between r before a vpwel and r before a consonant, 
 as in Mary and Martha, leads to a double pronunciation of 
 words ending in r star , for instance. When the muster- 
 ing of members in a phrase causes one of these words to 
 march before a word beginning with a consonant, the r of 
 course maintains its final silence: starlight is as r-less as 
 star. But when the next follower begins with a vowel, the 
 r makes itself heard, as in star of the night. The word star 
 therefore has, in our r-slighting speech, two pronunciations, 
 stah and star, according to what comes after it. So it is, 
 potentially, with every r-tailed vocable. Peppa becomes, in 
 proper company, pepper and salt, with as good an r as there 
 is in peppery. Fatha's at home, but mother isn't. I re- 
 member, I rememba the house where I was bawn. Stah- 
 light, stah bright, very fuhst star I've seen tonight. The waw, 
 the long war is over. But that is not the end of the story.
 
 42 OLD AND NEW 
 
 If the vowel that precedes the r is one formed by lifting 
 the tongue pretty high up, such as ee in the front of the 
 mouth, or oo in the back, we cannot easily pass straight 
 from this sound to an r, and consequently we introduce 
 an obscure glide vowel between the two; that is, we say, 
 if we are r-pronouncers, not beer, but bee-ur; not poor , but 
 poo-ur; not door, but do-ur (that is, in America the 
 mother country says daw). Now, where and when the r 
 itself becomes inaudible, its former presence, in these words, 
 is betrayed by the lingering of this glide; only, instead of 
 gliding to an r, we now glide over it. Hee-uh's to good old 
 bee-uh; bee-ur and wine. Poo-uh man! poo-ur old man! 
 More and mo-uh. But there is mo-uh still. 
 
 Like our simian cousins, we are creatures of imitation. 
 Our habits are in great measure useless copies of something 
 originally purposeful. Most of our grammar and syntax 
 is blind imitation of things that once had a meaning. Even 
 so it is, probably, with the changes in our vocabulary and 
 pronunciation. Having developed an enormous number 
 of couples such as star and stah, pepper and peppa, war and 
 waw, we unconsciously increase the list by adding to it all 
 the words that properly terminate in an obscure vowel or 
 an ah or an aw. To the pair peppa: pepper and salt we 
 assimilate soda: sodar and salt. The Shah, the Shahr of 
 Persia, after the model of fah, far away. Raw clams, rawr 
 oysters. Linden sawr another sight. But inasmuch as the 
 category of the obscure vowel vastly outnumbers those of 
 ah and aw, its attractive force is vastly superior, and the 
 type of sodar and salt is correspondingly more frequent 
 than those of Shahr and sawr. Emmar Eameses and Louisar 
 Alcotts are not only far commoner, but more inevitable, 
 than rawr oysters. Still, it is hard drawring the line. If I 
 have heard Yankee schoolmistresses teaching their German
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 43 
 
 classes ich hdber es, I have heard them also teaching their 
 French pupils il ar eu. Obviously, the principle is this: r 
 is a stopper, a sound inserted to prevent hiatus after the 
 obscure vowel and, with many speakers, after ah and aw. 
 We should use it also after the vowel of fur, if there were 
 any occasion; but it so happens that all our words which 
 contain that vowel at the close are already provided with 
 an r. However, when we try to talk French, we are inclined 
 to say peur a peu. On the other hand, we are never tempted 
 to apply the stopper after the higher vowels, those which 
 call for an audible glide: never should we say, for instance, 
 tee-ur and coffee for tea and coffee, nor too-ur and too for two 
 and two. That is partly because hiatus after ee or oo, if it 
 be found objectionable, is easily and automatically stopped 
 by the development of the end of these vowels, respectively, 
 into y or w: if we dislike be a sport, do it now, we naturally 
 pronounce bee-y-a sport, doo-w-it now. Another reason is 
 that the r-less forms of beer and poor are bee-uh and poo-uh, 
 not bee and poo, and therefore they do not serve as models 
 for be and do, for tea and two. The surviving uh of bee-uh, 
 poo-uh is a constant reminder that the r is an integral part 
 of the word, not a mere stopper. Whereas a phrase like 
 better and better is felt to be betta-r-an betta, the r belonging 
 as much to the following as to the preceding word, the 
 normal form of which is betta. The French pursue a similar 
 course, with / as a stopper, when they say aime-t-il after 
 the model of vient-il; and, in careless speech, with z for a 
 hiatus-breaker, when they say quatres yeux. The practice 
 I have been describing, the use of r to prevent hiatus, is 
 not common to all the regions that keep r only before a 
 vowel: it is prevalent indeed, wellnigh universal in 
 southern England and in New England; but it has not 
 taken root in our own South. A few Englishmen, and per-
 
 44 OLD AND NEW 
 
 haps more Yankees, aware of the phenomenon, have with 
 considerable pains rid themselves of the habit. Among 
 these am I. 
 
 We have wandered far from the whirring tongue-point. 
 Let us return to the history of that whirr in English. Said 
 Ben Johnson in his English Grammar, printed in 1640: 
 " R is the Dogs letter, and hurreth in the sound; the tongue 
 striking the inner palate, with a trembling about the teeth. 
 It is sounded firme in the beginning of the words, and more 
 liquid in the middle, and ends: as in rarer, riper, and so in 
 the Latine." Apparently the trill was longer and more 
 vigorous when it was initial. So it is now in Spanish; and 
 so it is with our modern elocutionists who trill the r. In 
 1768 Benjamin Franklin devised A Scheme for a New Al- 
 phabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling, in the course of 
 which he describes the production of our consonant with 
 " the tip of the tongue a little loose or separate from the 
 roof of the mouth, and vibrating." Sheridan's dictionary 
 of 1780 and Smith's Attempt to Render the Pronunciation 
 of the English Language easy to Foreigners, 1795, recognize 
 only one type of r, probably the tip-trill. 
 
 Similarly Noah Webster's Grammatical Institute of the 
 English Language, published in Hartford, Conn, (third 
 edition in 1784), declares that " R always has the same 
 sound, as hi barrel, and is never silent." Possibly I am 
 over-suspicious, but I seem to detect in this last clause a 
 note of protest, or at least of warning. When anyone takes 
 the trouble to tell us that a thing is never done, we wonder 
 why he should do so, unless the thing in question is done 
 only too often. At any rate, in his Dissertations on the 
 English Language, Boston, 1789, Webster confesses that 
 " some of the southern people, particularly in Virginia, 
 almost omit the sound of r, as in ware, there. In the best
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 45 
 
 English pronunciation the sound of r is much softer than 
 in some of the neighboring languages, particularly the Irish 
 and Spanish." But the ninth, or 1 794, edition of his Ameri- 
 can Spelling-Book repeats the asseveration that " r has only 
 one sound, as in barrel" The same year and the same city, 
 Boston, witnessed the eighth edition of a work by Caleb 
 Bingham entitled The Young Lady's Accidence, wherein fair 
 readers are cautioned not to say " I cotch a werry bad cold " 
 nor " the wessel lays at the voff." An r-less wharf was 
 known, then, to eighteenth century Bostonians. My copy 
 of The Young Ladies' and Gentlemen's SpelUng-Book has 
 unfortunately lost its title-page; but I conjecture that it 
 belongs to the same time and place. This aristocratic 
 manual contains, among pairs of words " similar in sound," 
 bust and burst, calk and cork, dust and durst, father and far- 
 ther, fust and first. Benjamin Dearborn's Columbian Gram- 
 mar, Boston, 1795, offers a list of " Improprieties," in which 
 are registered dazzent, gal, kose (coarse), skase (scarce), all 
 bereft of the canine letter. Yet E. Hale has the courage 
 to assert, in his S petting-Book, Northampton, 1799, that r 
 " is formed by turning up and quickly vibrating the end of 
 the tongue in the middle of the mouth." Noehden's Ger- 
 man Grammar, 1800, however, admits that r "is deprived 
 of much of its force and shrillness by the English mode of 
 pronunciation," and that " in English the sound is partic- 
 ularly slight at the end." Jonathan Ware's New Introduc- 
 tion to the English Grammar, Windsor, Vt., 1814, presents 
 a novel feature, to wit, a number of texts spelled phoneti- 
 cally according to the local pronunciation, for correction 
 by the pupils: here figure galz and konfield. In J. A. Cum- 
 mings's Pronouncing Spelling-Book, Boston (third edition 
 in 1822), the " words liable to be confounded " comprise 
 alms and arms, balm and barm, burst and bust, calk and cork,
 
 46 OLD AND NEW 
 
 colonel and kernel, durst and dust, farther and father, furze 
 and fuzz, pillow and pillar. Samuel Willard, in The General 
 Class-Book, Greenfield, Mass., nineteenth edition 1840, be- 
 gins bravely: " R is never silent." But he continues thus: 
 " In the beginning of a word, and when it comes between 
 two vowels, as hi rag or very, it has a great deal of sound; 
 but when it conies before a consonant, as hi harm or bird, 
 it has very little sound. After several vowels, however, it 
 is heard almost as a distinct syllable, thus hire, more, and 
 the like are necessarily pronounced like higher, mower, while 
 feared, corn, etc., differ little hi pronunciation from fe-ud 
 and caw-un." Elsewhere he adds: " The long common 
 sound of i, o, and u is often pronounced short, so as to make 
 first appear like fust, worth like wuth, and burst like bust. 
 This is very improper." Says Lowell: " The genuine 
 Yankee never gives the rough sound to r when he can help 
 it, and often displays considerable ingenuity in avoiding it 
 even before a vowel." 
 
 What is the " rough sound " of r ? Returning to 1791, 
 we find Walker distinguishing two kinds of r which he calls 
 " rough " and " smooth." " The rough r," he says, " is 
 formed by jarring the tip of the tongue against the roof of the 
 mouth near the fore teeth: the smooth r is a vibration of 
 the lower part of the tongue, near the root, against the in- 
 ward region of the palate, near the entrance of the throat." 
 The " rough r," or lingual trill, is used before vowels; the 
 " smooth r," apparently a uvular trill, is used under all 
 other conditions. " In England," however, " and particu- 
 larly hi London, the r hi lard, bard, card, regard, etc., is pro- 
 nounced so much in the throat as to be little more than the 
 middle or Italian a, lengthened into load, baad, caadrre- 
 gaad." In 1791, then, while r before a vowel was still 
 sounded as a roll of the tongue-tip, r before a consonant
 
 1 
 I 
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 47 
 
 was, according to Walker's theoretical standard, a uvular 
 or a velar sound, and in point of fact was nearly or entirely 
 silent in London and often elsewhere. Here we have evi- 
 dence of an ancestor of the present Northumbrian burr and, 
 in the second degree, of the modern w-like r; evidence, also, 
 of an eighteenth century beginning of the total suppression 
 of r not followed by a vowel. 
 
 Smart, whose Grammar of English Pronunciation ap- 
 peared in London in 1810, has the same " rough r," but a 
 different " smooth " one, the latter being with him welhiigh 
 identical with our Middle Western consonant. " Smooth r 
 is produced by curling back the tongue till its tip almost 
 points toward the throat, while its sides lean against the 
 gums of the upper side teeth and leave a passage hi the 
 middle for the voice." In the standard usage of his day, 
 therefore, r is trilled only before a vowel and not always 
 then, for hi London, he tells us, " smooth r " is often sub- 
 stituted for " rough," and a vowel sound for the " smooth." 
 This common London practice of 1810 is essentially that of 
 today, not only in London, but hi southern England, New 
 England, and our South. The dog's consonant, continues 
 Smart, " is more frequently the cause of a defect in pro- 
 nunciation than any other." Some persons, he says, can 
 produce no r; others have a guttural burr then evidently 
 regarded as a provincialism; the Irish substitute the 
 " rough " or trilled r for the " smooth." Some followers 
 of Walker and Smart seem to have used the term " rough 
 r " to designate a consonant r of any type, even quite un- 
 trilled. Thus, no doubt, it was employed by Lowell in the 
 passage cited above. 
 
 * Tr hat can we infer from all this testimony ? A natural 
 conclusion would seem to be that the thirty years from 
 1790 to 1820 saw most of the development from a univer-
 
 48 OLD AND NEW 
 
 sally trilled r to the modern usage of southern England, 
 southern United States, and New England. Scotland and 
 Ireland kept the old trill; northern England, less conserv- 
 ative than these countries but less radical than the south, 
 preserved under all conditions either an untrilled consonant 
 or a burr; our middle Atlantic states retained or restored 
 under all circumstances the unvibrated consonant, which, 
 in an exaggerated form, spread over the Middle West. A 
 conservative or reactionary influence in America was prob- 
 ably exercised by some of the Scotch settlements. The 
 decline of r apparently began in London; it spread very 
 rapidly in England and presently hi our country. In the 
 American regions affected by the anti-r movement, the 
 fashion grew until it reached in the forties, fifties, and 
 sixties a degree unknown across the Atlantic, threatening 
 to destroy the consonant even when a vowel followed. 
 This extreme tendency has been checked; moreover, 
 schools and travel have in some measure leveled other 
 sectional differences, but East is still East and West is 
 West. As far as we have any common standard, it is that 
 of the high-comedy stage, which is based on the usage of 
 southern England. 
 
 In some words the decline of r began long before 1790. 
 Harsh, marsh lost their r, in some localities, a good many 
 centuries ago. In 1718 an authority named Arnold ob- 
 serves that r is silent in partridge, scarce, and three other 
 words. A certain Konig in 1748 notes r-lessness in four 
 words, among which are horse and partridge. In all of these 
 words except the last (which, with its two r's, is an espe- 
 cially easy victim), it is to be observed that r was followed 
 by an s or an sh. By a curious coincidence, the Latin 
 language betrays a similar instability of r before s: sur- 
 sum, for example, was pronounced susum; dorsum turned
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 49 
 
 to dossum; persica became pessica, whence Italian pesca, 
 French pesche and peche, and ultimately our peach. Fur- 
 thermore, the vulgar pronunciation of our above-mentioned 
 English words is not hahsh, mahsh, scahs, pahtridge, haws, 
 but hash, mash, scass, pattridge, hoss, with a short vowel. 
 What does this indicate ? It means that the r disappeared 
 before the period when r regularly affected the sound of the 
 preceding vowel, lengthening and broadening a to ah and 
 o to aw; short u was similarly lengthened. The most im- 
 portant stage of these changes came in the latter eighteenth 
 century. The words in question, losing their r before that 
 time, preserved their earlier vowel. It follows that a word 
 whose vulgar pronunciation not only is r-less, but shows the 
 short instead of the long vowel, presumably lost its r before 
 the general r-discarding fashion set in: such words are dass 
 for dar'st, bust for burst, cuss, fust, nuss, puss for purse, wuss 
 all of them containing after the r the destructive s. 
 Wuth has instead of 5 the kindred th. Gal seems to stand 
 apart. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment the influence of an r on the 
 vowel that goes before it. The type of r that we must keep 
 in mind is a trill of the tongue's end, the whole organ, more 
 or less wedge-shaped, being tilted diagonally up towards 
 the gums, to which its thin edge is loosely applied. To 
 make a transition to this posture from that of the obscure 
 vowel, or the first vowel of colonel, or the " Italian a," is very 
 easy, as it involves little more than lifting up the front rim; 
 such combinations as we find in baker, fur, far present small 
 difficulty to anyone who has the trilling habit. On the 
 other hand, if the tongue has been bunched together in the 
 back of the mouth, as in the formation of oo or o, or in the 
 front of the mouth, as for ee or ai, the passage to r is com- 
 plex and difficult, especially in the latter case. Poor is hard
 
 50 OLD AND NEW 
 
 to trill; peer and pair are still harder. We have already 
 observed the introduction of an obscure glide vowel in such 
 groups, a pronunciation poo-ur, pee-ur. Another and a more 
 radical means of relief consists in altering the main vowel 
 itself, flattening the tongue toward the shape required for 
 ah. Thus, hi French, the Lathi perjectum, mercantem be- 
 come parfait, marchand; and hi English we have clerk and 
 Clark, merchant and Marchant, Derby and Darby, sergeant 
 and Sargent, person and parson, mercy and Marcy. At the 
 present day, nearly all the English-speaking world has re- 
 laxed the utterance of vowels before r, no matter how 
 greatly this consonant may have lost its asperity. We pro- 
 nounce poor with the vowel of put, not with that of boot; 
 beer with the vowel of bit, not with that of beet; pair with 
 the vowel of pet or pat, not with that of pain. Often the 
 sound has descended still lower hi the scale. Poor in our 
 South is reduced to po. When oo is preceded by a y, it is 
 apt to drop to o and then to aw: your becomes yore y then 
 yawr and yaw; pure, in England, is often pyaw, obscure is 
 sounded obskyaw, furious \sfyawrious. The reason for this 
 is that y demands a bunching of the tongue hi the front of 
 the mouth, oo a bunching hi the rear, r a slant to the front; 
 and the rapid sequence of these three positions taxes too 
 severely our indifferent linguistic agility. Sure, which used 
 to begin with sy instead of sh, is frequently pronounced 
 shore (sho in our southern states), shawr, or show. When 
 the oo between y and r is unaccented, we reduce it to the 
 obscure vowel. After having coquetted for a century or so 
 with natoor or nater, nattooral or natteral, usage has settled 
 down to nacher, nacheral, pikcher, capcher, and the like, 
 with or without the final r. The pedantic piktyoor has no 
 warrant hi the usage of good society, hi the practice of the 
 stage, nor in the history of the language.
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 51 
 
 Now let us look at some of the principal changes effected 
 by a following r in the eighteenth century. Perhaps the 
 most important is that which concerns a. During most of 
 the eighteenth century, except perhaps for a few foreign 
 words, there was no sound ah in standard English. The 
 earlier ah had become d, the vowel of man. Franklin, in 
 1768, makes no mention of ah, nor does Sheridan, hi 1780. 
 Not until 1784 do we find a vowel which may be approxi- 
 mately an " Italian a," hi Nares's Elements of Orthoepy, 
 London; it occurs before/, s, th, before Im, before n fol- 
 lowed by another consonant, even in trans- and in -graph, 
 but, it would seem, not yet before r, inasmuch as Nares 
 assigns to clerk and sergeant the vowel d. Walker, in 1791, 
 is the first to record a return of the full ah. He reports ah 
 as employed universally before an r that is final or followed 
 by a consonant, as in car, cart, but not in carry. Usage was 
 in his time divided when the next consonant was not an r 
 but a spirant, as in half, pass, path. Before n with a con- 
 sonant after it, ah, according to Walker, was going out of 
 use, being regarded as inelegant: that is, fashion was turn- 
 ing from dahnce, cahn j t to dance, can't. We seem to find, 
 then, between 1780 and 1790 a sudden incursion of ah 
 which may have existed considerably earlier in vulgar prac- 
 tice into polite London society. As far as the car, cart 
 words were concerned, it had come to stay; but with re- 
 gard to the half, pass, path category, and still ifiwe to that 
 of can't and dance, there is still bitter strife. In all the 
 classes, for many years after Walker, ah and d struggled 
 for the supremacy. German grammars written in English 
 early in the nineteenth century give as the equivalent of 
 German a sometimes English aw, sometimes a sound be- 
 tween the vowel of law and that of father. England ap- 
 pears to have beaten America, in this development, by a.
 
 52 OLD AND NEW 
 
 decade or more. The earliest American mention of " Ital- 
 ian a " that I have found is in 1806 by Webster, who assigns 
 it to such words as ask, dance, demand, father, psalm; be- 
 fore r, no doubt, he took it for granted. Having once 
 established itself, ah was particularly favored in New 
 England and a part of Virginia. In the former region, 
 between 1830 and 1850, it may be said to have raged, in- 
 fecting such words as adder, apple, caterpillar, hammer, 
 handsome, ladder, matter, pantry, practical, satisfactory, 
 Saturday, shadow, sparrow. 
 
 Next in importance is the alteration of the vowel in such 
 cases as bird, fir, her, herb, earn, pearl, world, word, curl, fur. 
 In all these words the i, the e (or ea), the o, and the u are 
 now pronounced alike; but they were all different at the 
 start, and their course is far from clear, involved as it is in 
 many eddies of local and transient fashion. By the middle 
 of the century the vowel of sun had doubtless changed from 
 the oo of soon, pronounced short, to its present value; in 
 fact, we have evidence that as early as 1643 sun an d son 
 were alike (Richard Hodges, A Special help to orthographic, 
 London, 1643). Before r, both u and o as in curl, word 
 seem to have been spoken as we speak the u of hut; this 
 is still the practice of the Irish. We have, then, by 1750, 
 an established pronunciation of ur and or as they are now 
 generally heard in hurry and worry. Long before this time 
 ir had coincided with er in a pronunciation which varied 
 between the present e of merry and the present i of mirth. 
 In 1653 Wallis describes the stressed e of English " vertue " 
 as like French " e feminine." Sterpin, a Frenchman living 
 in Denmark, identified English ir with Danish 0r, hi a work 
 published about 1665 or 1670. In 1678 a Norwegian named 
 Boiling declared in his English grammar that English first, 
 thirst have Danish ^, while church, nurse have u. Cooper, in
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 53 
 
 1685, makes er like ur, and both of them like ir in bird. An 
 Essai Raisonne sur la Grammaire et la Pronunciation An- 
 gloise, a V usage des Francois qui desirent d'apprendre VAn- 
 glois par Duncan Mackintosh et ses deux filles, Boston, 
 1797, regards the vowel of cur , fir, her and that of but, under 
 as identical with the French e oije. Yet even to the present 
 day some elocutionists insist on giving to ir, er, ear, as in 
 birth, her, pearl, the sound of e in merry. 
 
 In the middle of the eighteenth century we have, before 
 an r that is final or followed by a consonant, a tendency 
 toward the/r sound in two categories of words: one cate- 
 gory comprises the words containing u or o, then pronounced 
 u as hi hut; the other contains the words with i or e (or ea), 
 then pronounced sometimes e as hi pet, sometimes e as hi pert. 
 Between these two categories there was much confusion, 
 many words changing their sound from e to u. Shifts from 
 e toe must have been still more frequent. Sheridan, 1780, 
 tells us to say e infirm, herb, pearl, stern, but u in fir, first, 
 her, stir. Webster, 1 784, advocates ' ' short e, nearly ' ' in birth, 
 firm, earth, person, " short u " in fir, bird, her. Donald 
 Fraser, in 1794 (The Columbian Monitor, New York) would 
 have us pronounce i (?) in mirth, girdle, squirrel, etc., but 
 u in first, thirst, fir, sir, thirty, dirt, flirt, bird, third, birch, 
 thirteen, shirt, mirth (!), stirrup. It is likely that authorities 
 often failed to mention e simply because they did not know 
 how to describe it. Smart, in 1810, evidently recognized it, 
 but did not contribute much to its general recognition. 
 Not before Worcester, 1830, do I find e installed in the sys- 
 tem of English pronunciation as a vowel distinct from all 
 others and as the regular sound of er, ir, and ur, final or 
 before a consonant. Among the German grammars, Follen, 
 1831, says that German o has " no correspondent sound in 
 English"; but Fosdick, 1838, pronounces o "nearly as
 
 54 OLD AND NEW 
 
 the English u in. fur "; while Ollendorff, 1839, defines it as 
 English i in bird. Says Monteith, in 1844, " is pro- 
 nounced like the French eu. The inflection given by a 
 native of London to ir , in such words as birth, mirth, is a 
 still more correct pronunciation of the o" The most sur- 
 prising feature of this statement is the implication that e 
 could seem a distinctively Cockney sound to a New Eng- 
 lander in 1844. By 1830 the present standard pronuncia- 
 tion of all these words must have been pretty well estab- 
 lished. One can now distinguish three local shades of 
 variance, the common American, the southern American, 
 and the English; but the differences are slight. 
 
 Startlingly different, on the other hand, is the New York 
 City substitute for er namely, a combination of some 
 kind of e with an ee that is made abnormally far back in 
 the mouth. The earliest mention of this pronunciation 
 that I have discovered occurs in Oliver Wendell Holmes's 
 Professor at the Breakfast-Table, 1859: there the New York 
 rendering of first is analyzed as " fe-eest," the/e having the 
 vowel of French le. For lack of an adequate symbol, dia- 
 lect writers represent it as " foist "; and people who know 
 it only through print so pronounce it, just as non- Yankee 
 actors, unfamiliar with the Yankee short o, say hull for 
 whole and but for boat and stun for stone, in New England 
 rural plays. Although this odd distortion of er, in such 
 words as girl, berth, earn, worst, curl, is most marked in New 
 York City, it was formerly, in a milder variety, extremely 
 prevalent in Philadelphia, and may still be heard from 
 elderly Philadelphians. It is common, too, in the Caro- 
 linas, and is found sporadically elsewhere. For some reason, 
 it has an irresistible attraction for German and Hebrew 
 learners of our language. How it originated, I cannot tell. 
 
 Another American dialect peculiarity extends over the
 
 THE DOG'S LETTER 55 
 
 whole region of the curled-back r. I have already stated 
 that this consonant invades the preceding vowel and im- 
 parts to it a strange, stuffy quality. If the vowel in ques- 
 tion is in present standard English a short e, the pervasive 
 r may transform it into an u, changing American to " Amur- 
 rican." When I was a boy, I used to hear English people 
 say that an American could always be detected by his pro- 
 nunciation of very. Never could I imagine what they meant, 
 until for the first time I happened to hear a Middle West- 
 erner's " vurry." " Sturrup " and " surrup " represent a 
 much older shift; and " squurrel " must be of long standing 
 in America. 
 
 Before taking leave of the " mining " letter, let us recall 
 that it may not only affect the sound of a vowel, but take 
 the place of one; that is, it may be used syllabically. When 
 we say blackberry, we may utter it at full length, just as it 
 is spelled. On the other hand, we may reduce it to two 
 syllables, saying " blackbry." I remember hearing a club- 
 house lecture by a British officer who invariably made but 
 two syllables of military. But we may steer a middle 
 course, allowing our blackberry its full portion of syllables, 
 while suppressing the e; then we get " blackb-r-ry." So 
 " Roxb-r-ry." " Duxb-r-ry." If we are good r-ists, we may 
 even get in Canterbury two syllabic r's. Similarly a faith- 
 ful /--devotee easily gets a syllabic r in " giv-r," " ov-r," 
 " und-r," " sail-r." Now this same use of r is mentioned 
 by John Hart in 1570, with givr and undr among the ex- 
 amples. As Cooper, in 1685, assures us that final r was 
 trilled, we can imagine what Hart's givr sounded like: some- 
 thing not at all similar to the " givr " of our Middle West, 
 with its choked and vibrationless end-syllable. For the 
 faithless, this final syllable is of course nothing but the ob- 
 scure vowel, and " giva," " ova," " unda," " saila " close
 
 56 OLD AND NEW 
 
 exactly like Anna, Clara, Emma, Ida, Louisa, soda, sofa 
 save that in some rural dialects the latter change their 
 terminal vowel to y, becoming " sody," " sofy," and so on. 
 Such, in brief, is the history of the canine letter. Born 
 under the most favorable auspices, sturdiest of the conso- 
 nants, it has partaken of the softening effects of civilization. 
 On European soil only the outskirts Scotland, Ireland, 
 Spain, Italy have preserved nearly intact its pristine 
 strength. Elsewhere it has weakened and declined, now 
 transformed to an internal burr, now sunk to a feeble un- 
 trilled fricative, now become a mere colorless vowel. In 
 song it still lingers, and to some extent in declamation. 
 America has, in the main, followed about the same paths 
 as the parent lands; but our enterprising Middle West, 
 unwilling to abandon the r tradition, has developed and 
 cherished an r-substitute, homely, to be sure, but vigorous 
 and aggressive. What has the future in store ? Will decay 
 pursue its course; or will a reaction set in, restoring to the 
 English-speaking world a real r of some kind, or a tolerable 
 substitute ? Will there be an interchange between the 
 populations that trill with the tongue, those that trill with 
 the uvula, and those that trill not at all; or will each con- 
 tinue to turn a hostile ear to the linguistic products of the 
 other ? With these questions I have naught to do. It is 
 hard enough for an historian to tell the truth when he 
 confines his statements to the past.
 
 IV 
 NUMERIC REFORM IN NESCIOUBIA 1 
 
 THE partisans of an arduous and unpopular movement 
 ought to be interested, even if they cannot be cheered, by 
 an account of a bold attempt at betterment hi a different 
 but similar field hi a distant country. Of course you all 
 know as well as I do where Nescioubia is; and it is doubt- 
 less unnecessary for me to remind you that the Nesciou- 
 bians, while they have long enjoyed the advantages of a 
 rational orthography, have retained to our day the practice 
 of computing solely with Roman numerals. 
 
 It seems almost incredible that a people should have 
 simplified either its spelling or its numbers without having 
 sense enough to reform the other; but such is unhappily 
 the case. A few years ago this inconsistency became ap- 
 parent to some thoughtful Nescioubians; and, after much 
 private deliberation, they began openly to discuss the possi- 
 bility of substituting for their cumbrous notation the Arabic 
 figures long since adopted by other nations. As the Ameri- 
 can papers have furnished but scanty information on the 
 subject, I venture to present to you such authentic facts 
 as I have been able to gather concerning the crusade that 
 followed. 
 
 The would-be innovators brought forward, it would ap- 
 pear, several fairly cogent arguments. Firstly, they said, 
 the teaching of mathematics is so impeded by the use of 
 
 1 An address delivered before the Simplified Spelling Board in New York, 
 on April 7, 1914. 
 
 57
 
 58 OLD AND NEW 
 
 Roman symbols, especially in long division, that Nescioubian 
 children are fully two years behind the youth of other lands, 
 spending as they do upon the mastery of needless mechani- 
 cal difficulties the precious moments that might better be 
 devoted to things of intrinsic worth. The vast majority of 
 them, hi fact, never learn to reckon at all, and simply put 
 down as their result any alphabetical combinations that 
 association may suggest, blindly hoping that the outcome 
 may not be too wide of the mark. They have indeed al- 
 most lost the sense of number. Besides, they are so gener- 
 ally dispirited by their futile efforts that they lack the 
 courage to attack their other studies with the vigor requisite 
 to success. 
 
 Secondly, an incalculable amount of time, patience, and 
 energy is wasted by the Nescioubian all through lif e hi deal- 
 ing with irrationally complicated sequences of signs. 
 
 Thirdly, the commerce of Nescioubia and her national 
 influence (which might be so beneficial to the world) are 
 suffering from the inability of Nescioubians to count as 
 other people do. Even professional mathematicians are 
 seldom quite sure of their results. A curious vagueness and 
 uncertainty have come to pervade all Nescioubian thought. 
 The Arabic notation, they urged, is so simple and logical 
 that it can be learned in a few hours and can be written 
 without continual reference to a table. Why, then, should 
 we not adopt it ? 
 
 You would scarcely believe what a storm of protest was 
 aroused by this seemingly commendable proposal. Bitter- 
 est among the opponents were the journalists (or, as they 
 are called in that country, the Osteocephali), and particu- 
 larly those who had never been able to count with accu- 
 racy beyond thirteen. " Underminers of our civilization," 
 " destroyers of Nescioubian mathematics," " grotesque
 
 NUMERIC REFORM IN NESCIOUBIA 59 
 
 iconoclasts " these are a few of the epithets hurled by 
 Osteocephalia at the startled reformers. Arguments seemed 
 unnecessary the Arabic numbers were so funny! When, 
 however, the " grotesque iconoclasts " picked up courage to 
 ask for reasons, the Osteocephali responded with one voice: 
 
 " The arithmetic of Romulus and Julius Caesar is good 
 enough for me! " 
 
 " But," said the reformers timidly, " Romulus and 
 Caesar calculated somewhat differently. Which style do 
 you advocate ? " 
 
 " The arithmetic of Romulus and Julius Caesar is good 
 enough for me !" 
 
 " Allow us to point out," insisted the iconoclasts, " that 
 your use of numbers is not exactly that favored by Caesar. 
 For instance, on your library, erected in 1900, you have 
 inscribed MCM, which, on a public monument, would not 
 have approved itself to Caesar's contemporaries." 
 
 " The arithmetic of Romulus and Julius Caesar is good 
 enough for me! " 
 
 It became evident that the Osteocephali were like those 
 talking dolls which, no matter how hard they may be 
 pressed, can say only " Mama! " 
 
 Disappointed though they were, the reformers continued 
 their propaganda, and now and then made a convert. A 
 good many mathematicians admitted, in theory, the su- 
 periority of the Arabic system, but denied the possibility 
 of its application to Nescioubian problems. Others, more 
 independent, thought the change might very conceivably 
 be advantageous, but declared that it should come about 
 spontaneously, without concerted pressure from any self- 
 constituted body. The Arabic numbers, apparently, were 
 to fold their tents and silently steal hi without anybody 
 noticing them.
 
 60 OLD AND NEW 
 
 Others still conceded that the substitution might perhaps 
 be assisted by conscious effort on somebody's part (not 
 their own), but stoutly maintained that it should be effected, 
 if at all, very gradually, by the adoption, let us say, of one 
 Arabic figure hi a generation. The number nine, they 
 thought, might be a good one to begin with, as it is written 
 in two ways, IX and VIIII, neither of them wholly con- 
 venient in complex practical computation. 
 
 Not all the mathematicians, however, were so revolu- 
 tionary. Some of those who adorned the higher walks of 
 the profession were convinced that the introduction of 
 Arabic signs would destroy at one blow the philosophic 
 spirit of their science. How, they asked, could one specu- 
 late on the fourth dimension unless four were written IV ? 
 What impression would their beautifully elaborated de- 
 ductions make, if they were associated in the student's 
 mind with a horrid Arabic 4 ? 
 
 The conciliatory mood exhibited by a few influential 
 scientists began to alarm the conservatives, especially the 
 manufacturers of those ponderous tomes of numerical refer- 
 ence tables which the Roman notation renders indispen- 
 sable. In self-defense they enlisted the services of an 
 eminent pedagogue, who proved, by a series of psychological 
 experiments, that children can perform long division more 
 rapidly, more correctly, and with less mental strain, by 
 the use of the Roman numbers than by the use of the 
 Arabic. 
 
 The Osteocephali were triumphant. Vainly did the in- 
 novators urge that the psychological experimenters in 
 charge of the laboratories had possessed but a misty idea of 
 the values of the new signs, being generally under the im- 
 pression, for example, that the figure 7 represented sixteen. 
 Such details were deemed irrelevant. It should be ex-
 
 NUMERIC REFORM IN NESCIOUBIA 6l 
 
 plained that in Nescioubia the exponents of Psychology 
 (and, above all, Experimental Psychology) are looked upon 
 as the recipients of divine inspiration. To doubt one of 
 their utterances on any subject is sacrilegious and danger- 
 ous, too, since the occult powers bestowed on the Psychol- 
 ogist may, in popular belief, be used for destruction as well 
 as for enlightenment. 
 
 Despite such crushing rebuffs, the cause of reform slowly 
 went on gaining adherents most of them, to be sure, of 
 the acquiescent rather than the militant type. But at this 
 point a new obstacle arose. " The advent of Arabic num- 
 bers," declared the Osteocephali, " would ruin the contin- 
 uity of mathematical thought." This argument made a 
 profound impression on the non-mathematical public. "If," 
 continued the newspaper scientists, " we should write four 
 with a single Arabic figure, we should lose sight of the fact 
 that four presented itself to the Roman consciousness as 
 five minus one, and we should thus cut ourselves off from 
 all contact with our ancestors." 
 
 " But the Romans were not the ancestors of most of us," 
 objected the reformers. 
 
 " That makes no difference. They were somebody's an- 
 cestors. Besides, they were our predecessors, anyhow; and 
 they invented our numbers. How are we to think con- 
 sistently if we throw away the reminder that for them four 
 was not four, but five minus one ? " 
 
 " In any event," answered the radicals, " the Roman 
 numerals would not perish from the face of the earth; and 
 the knowledge that four is five minus one would still be 
 accessible to persons desirous of that information." 
 
 "Ah! but our youth would lack, at the most impression- 
 able age, the ever present and suggestive record of the 
 Roman conception of four."
 
 62 OLD AND NEW 
 
 " But," urged the innovators, so far recovering from their 
 consternation as to be able to collect some of their wits, 
 " the Romans did not conceive of four as five minus one. 
 When they wanted to express it properly, they wrote IIII; 
 and they regarded IV as a handy but rather undignified 
 abbreviation." 
 
 " The advent of Arabic numbers," replied the Osteo- 
 cephali, " would rum the continuity of mathematical 
 thought." 
 
 On this point it was generally granted that the Osteo- 
 cephali had scored a victory. Following up their advantage, 
 they proceeded to display the ridiculousness of the new 
 mathematics. The papers, from tune to tune, published 
 numbers written and sums done (incorrectly of course) in 
 Arabic style; and that part of the public which could rea$ 
 neither notation roared with laughter. 
 
 " How," it was asked, " could a schoolboy be expected 
 to keep a straight face when he encountered eighty-eight 
 disguised as two doughnuts, instead of seeing it in its simple 
 and natural representation, LXXXVIII ? How could any 
 one of us preserve his respect for the Number of the Beast " 
 which is held sacred by the Nescioubians " if he saw 
 it appear, not in its ancient, venerable, and perspicuous 
 image of DCLXVI, but transformed into three wriggling 
 polliwogs ? " 
 
 " You should not balk at the strangeness of our system," 
 faltered the dismayed reformers. " Everything new is 
 strange. You should consider its simplicity." 
 
 "Simplicity!" sneered the conservatives. "Have you 
 the face to call it simple, when it employs more signs than 
 the old one ? For the numbers up to and including one 
 hundred, your method requires ten different symbols, o, i , 
 2, 3> 4> 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; ours, only five, I, V, X, L, C. The
 
 NUMERIC REFORM IN NESCIOUBIA 63 
 
 Roman notation is, then, just twice as simple as the Arabic, 
 as far as these numbers are concerned. When it comes to 
 the smaller numbers, those under fifty, which one oftenest 
 meets, the superiority of the old way is still greater; we use 
 three signs, you still need ten we are therefore three and 
 a third times as simple as you." 
 
 The reformers were discouraged, and no wonder. Friends 
 of the movement began to suggest compromises. " Let us 
 keep the Roman signs, to which the people are so passion- 
 ately attached," they counseled; "but let us use them 
 with Arabian directness." This proposition met with con- 
 siderable approval. When, however, the question arose, 
 how Arabian directness was to be infused into the Roman 
 numerals, there were more minds than men. 
 
 One enthusiast, profoundly moved by the simplicity 
 argument of the Osteocephali, expressed his conviction that 
 only one symbol should be employed, preferably the letter 
 I, which should be repeated as many times as the number 
 to be written exceeded unity; thus, he declared, would be 
 attained the maximum of practicable simplification; al- 
 though in the abstract (he reluctantly admitted) a still 
 higher degree of simplicity might be reached by using no 
 symbol at all. 
 
 Another philosopher discovered that, inasmuch as the 
 real basis of Roman counting is duplication, systematic 
 perfection is to be won only by carrying out that principle 
 consistently: for instance, to express two we double one, 
 to express twenty we double ten, and so forth; we ought 
 therefore to write eight IVIV, eighteen IXIX, thirty-four 
 XVIIXVII. Against him arose a third, affirming that the 
 foundation of Romanism, as we now practise it, is not addi- 
 tion, but subtraction; hence we should write six, for ex- 
 ample, not VI but IVX.
 
 64 OLD AND NEW 
 
 A middle course between these two extremes was advo- 
 cated by a Radical-Conservative member. " We must dis- 
 tinguish," he said, " between long and short numbers. Then 
 we can express long numbers by subtraction, short numbers 
 by addition. Eight, which is short, we may continue to 
 write VIII; but eighty-eight, which is long, we shall write 
 XIIC." 
 
 When asked where he would draw the line between short 
 and long, he replied that, being a strictly practical man, he 
 left these details to the mathematical theorists. 
 
 Such was the situation last winter. Because of recent 
 storms, I have been for several weeks without news from 
 Nescioubia. According to the latest advices, the reformers 
 were full of good hope. But the Nescioubians were still 
 using the Roman numerals.
 
 IS MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 
 A FAILURE? 1 
 
 WE traffickers in living tongues are admirable exponents of 
 that attitude of mind which some sociologists call " the 
 noble discontent." Discontented we all are; if not with 
 our own ministrations, at least with the efforts of our fel- 
 lows, and especially with the operations of those instructors 
 who immediately precede us. If we be high school teachers, 
 let us recall what we said, at the beginning of the year, about 
 the modest attempts made to impart a little German to our 
 pupils in the grammar school: did we not express a prefer- 
 ence for children who had not tried to study a foreign lan- 
 guage in the grades at all, devoutly wishing that our charges 
 had spent their extra time on English grammar ? What 
 does the college instructor remark, when he first sizes up the 
 hopeful product that comes to him from the high school ? 
 Does he not invariably declare that the years spent on 
 French in the preparatory school have been worse than 
 wasted, and that his best students are those who never 
 opened a French book before ? As to the observations of 
 collaborators in the same institution, each on the peda- 
 gogical ability of his colleague in the next grade below, 
 they are better forgotten than remembered. And the sad- 
 dest part of it is making allowance for the exaggeration 
 
 1 An address before the Joint Session of the Classical and Modern 
 Language Conferences of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club at Ann Arbor, 
 Mich., March 28, 1907 thirteen years ago. 
 
 6s
 
 66 OLD AND NEW 
 
 due to recurrent disappointment and discouragement al- 
 lowing, too, for the different standards of successive teachers, 
 each of whom has his peculiar antipathies among the 
 countless possible kinds of failure the saddest part of it 
 is that these uncomplimentary estimates are, for the most 
 part, substantially correct. The amount of positive, accu- 
 rate knowledge carried from one grade to another seems, in 
 proportion to the quantity of ignorance and misapprehen- 
 sion, insignificant. 
 
 But, it may be urged, all this is true of other subjects as 
 well. The teachers of English composition, history, music, 
 drawing make the same lament; and the only reason why 
 anatomy, hygiene, physiography, meteorology, astronomy, 
 botany, and zoology do not give rise to a like complaint is 
 that these topics are disposed of in a single year. Both 
 foreign and domestic critics affirm that the American school- 
 boy shows a general deficiency of from three to five years, 
 as compared with the French or German child of the same 
 age. Are not his shortcomings in modern languages merely 
 one manifestation of a national incompetency in matters 
 of education ? 
 
 True it undoubtedly is that our boys and girls are, on the 
 average, some four years behind those of France and Ger- 
 many in common book-learning. We shall perhaps be able 
 to pursue our subject with a clearer understanding if we 
 turn aside for a moment to consider the origin of this back- 
 wardness. The blame has sometimes been put, and with 
 some justice, upon our migratory habits and upon the het- 
 erogeneous character of our population. But there are 
 other and more fundamental causes: three, especially, call 
 for more extended examination. 
 
 The most obvious source of the transatlantic superiority 
 is the Spartan discipline maintained in the foreign schools,
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 67 
 
 a discipline which forces pupils through a curriculum so 
 crowded that neither American scholars nor American 
 parents would submit to it for a year. The school child 
 in Europe is hi a state of bondage: from the age of six to 
 eighteen he scarcely knows any occupation but study; his 
 whole life centers in school, while, as we all know, for the 
 American youth of that age school is merely one element 
 in a highly variegated existence. No doubt we might ad- 
 vantageously imitate our neighbors by insisting on more 
 expert school management, by strengthening somewhat 
 our grip upon our students, and above all by making the 
 award of diplomas depend in some degree on the successful 
 performance of school duties. In a community where public 
 instruction is directed by a committee chosen by parents, 
 who hi turn are controlled by their children, we have a kind 
 of indirect educational self-government which makes strict 
 standards impossible. Fortunately there are some Ameri- 
 can cities to which this criticism no longer applies; but 
 those towns are few indeed in which the general administra- 
 tion is in the hands of the really competent. If, however, it 
 came to an absolute choice between our happy-go-lucky 
 method with the abundant opportunity it affords our 
 children for wholesome exercise, play, spontaneity, and 
 varied experience and the scholastic sweat-shop of some 
 Europeans with its renunciation of so much that makes 
 childhood worth living we might still prefer our back- 
 wardness to a proficiency bought at such a price. 
 
 Another reason for the quicker progress of the foreign 
 pupil is the greater inducement offered him to study. There 
 is no doubt that our children are as intelligent as those of 
 other nations. In organizing a concert, a dramatic per- 
 formance, a magazine in fact, in any task that does not 
 fall within the scope of school routine, the young American
 
 68 OLD AND NEW 
 
 is the equal of any boy on earth; in resourcefulness and 
 enterprise it would be hard to match him. Only when he 
 turns to prescribed study does he show himself a drone. 
 And why ? Because he sees nothing to be gained by appli- 
 cation. Under our ordinary administration nothing but 
 death can prevent him from getting his diploma; and the 
 promises of the joy of superior enlightenment, of enhanced 
 civic usefulness, of higher social prestige are to him not 
 only vague and unsubstantial, but contrary to everyday 
 experience. Who are the men that tower above their fel- 
 lows in the columns of the newspapers ? They are for the 
 most part the untutored geniuses whose education went 
 little if at all beyond the red schoolhouse. All the talk 
 about the advantages of learning is, like the stories of storks 
 and Santa Claus, only a part of the well-meaning fictiqn 
 with which grown-up folks try to blind their offspring to 
 the realities of life. Our boy good-naturedly studies a little, 
 to oblige his parents and teachers; but as to really exerting 
 himself, he very seldom thinks that worth while. Not so 
 the schoolboy in the crowded Old World. He knows only 
 too well the value of scholarship; he foresees the cruel com- 
 petition, the fierce struggle for existence, that await him; 
 and he has reason to strain every nerve to attain that de- 
 gree of proficiency which may assure him a modest liveli- 
 hood in the career that fate has marked out for him. As 
 America fills up, as the opportunities for money-making 
 without capital decrease, as the requirements in the per- 
 formance of all labor advance, the value, the necessity of 
 special training and of general discipline will become more 
 and more apparent; and some day the American boy's 
 outlook upon the future may be as clear and calculating as 
 that of his European brother. May that day be slow to 
 come!
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 69 
 
 The third and least important cause, which is a direct 
 outcome of the pitiless competition just mentioned, is the 
 better equipment of the teacher in France and Germany. 
 The qualifications demanded of this unfortunate being 
 would be likely to debar 99 per cent of the secondary school 
 instructors in America. But are all these requirements 
 really conducive to the welfare of the pupils ? No, in large 
 measure their only effect is to reduce the host of candidates. 
 A long training in Romance philology, with original investi- 
 gation of some topic in Old French or Provencal, does not 
 perceptibly increase the efficiency of a teacher of elemen- 
 tary French, nor is it necessary even for an adequate presen- 
 tation of modern French literature. On the other hand, the 
 absolute requirement of a thorough practical knowledge 
 obtained in part by at least a year's residence abroad of 
 the language to be taught is one that we shall do well 
 gradually to adopt. There is nothing more essential to the 
 teacher than the confidence that springs from complete 
 mastery of his subject. When his chief preoccupation in 
 the classroom is not to impart what he knows, but to con- 
 ceal what he does not know, the value of his labor is ques- 
 tionable. A very gratifying improvement in this respect 
 has occurred in American schools in the last quarter of a 
 century; in another twenty-five years, at the same rate of 
 progress, the standard for high school teachers of foreign 
 languages in our principal cities will not be inferior, in the 
 really important things, to that maintained in France and 
 Germany. And this increased equipment need not be ac- 
 companied by any diminution of human sympathy. 
 
 In addition to these three very patent reasons for the 
 comparatively slow advance of our children, there is a fourth 
 which has not been set forth until recently, and even now 
 does not receive the consideration it deserves. The cUffi-
 
 70 OLD AND NEW 
 
 culties of English spelling are in themselves enough to 
 account for the whole deficiency under discussion. They 
 have been, during the past year or two, so often and so well 
 set before the public that there is no need of expatiating on 
 the subject now. There seems to be no doubt that our 
 children spend two or three years in learning or rather 
 in trying to learn to spell. For French and especially 
 for German children this process is much easier, owing to 
 the more logical character of the orthography; in actual 
 time spent, it is safe to assume that English and American 
 pupils labor under a handicap of at least a year. But there 
 is a disadvantage worse even than the loss of time a 
 drawback so serious as to impair the efficiency of all school 
 work. It has been admirably stated by an Associate City 
 
 Superintendent of Schools in New York: 
 
 
 
 Next to learning by imitation, the child must be taught to learn by 
 association and analogy. He develops strength of mind by the exer- 
 cise of judgment. He must reason from known facts in the solution 
 of his little problems. If he conies to a new printed word and halts, 
 the teacher asks him to think of the oral word for which it stands. 
 Having learned that puff and muff stand for well-known oral words, 
 he is staggered at rough and enough, frequently used in conversation. 
 Having learned that these characters stand for well-known spoken 
 words which he wrote ruff and enuff from his knowledge of puff and 
 muff, he is again confused when the teacher tells him that dough is the 
 spelling of the well-known word his mother uses when speaking about 
 bread-making, and that cough stands for the malady so prevalent in 
 the nursery during winter time. 
 
 The stage of the child's tuition during which all the similar incon- 
 gruities of our spelling must be mastered, occupies many years of 
 school life, and the process has well-nigh produced a disbelief in rea- 
 son as a means of learning, and a total lack of confidence in inference. 
 The result of falling into absurd and ridiculous situations through the 
 exercise of his judgment, appears in a hesitancy or fear of drawing 
 any inferences upon data relating to other fields of knowledge. The 
 child has lost faith in his own conclusions with respect to problems 
 in arithmetic, biology, geography, history, etc. To what extent of
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 71 
 
 subject-matter and time the school child has suffered irreparable loss, 
 by failure to acquire confidence in the exercise of his judgment as a 
 result of his early stultification during the process of learning to master 
 the spelling of common words, may never be determined. 
 
 When we consider these four drawbacks the lack of 
 sufficient authority and competence on the part of the 
 school management, the absence of any strong incentive 
 to study, the inadequate training of teachers, and the stul- 
 tifying effect of our eccentric spelling far from wonder- 
 ing at the backwardness of our boys and girls, we may feel 
 a justifiable pride that they are no farther behind, and we 
 may conclude that both they and their instructors must be 
 made of superior stuff to achieve anything at all. It is 
 therefore apparent that a comparison of the results ob- 
 tained in any one field of knowledge in our country should 
 not, in fairness, be made with the work done in that same 
 line abroad, but rather with the product in other branches 
 at home; and a just estimate of the value of our mod- 
 ern language teaching can be reached only by setting it 
 beside the instruction given in other departments here in 
 America. 
 
 Such a comparison can never be made with objective 
 exactness: it must express itself in terms of individual 
 opinion based on observation. And inasmuch as one's 
 judgment derives its value largely from the scope of the 
 investigation on which it is founded, it may not be inex- 
 pedient to set forth the personal views of one who has had 
 opportunities to study the question from the standpoint 
 of a college instructor in elementary French and German, 
 from the comprehensive experience of a director of all the 
 modern language instruction in the public schools of a 
 large city, and finally in the capacity of chairman of the 
 Romance department in a great university. In school and
 
 72 OLD AND NEW . 
 
 college alike one significant fact constantly obtrudes itself 
 namely, that the previously mentioned denial of the 
 worth of all foregoing instruction in a subject, constantly 
 on the lips of modern language teachers, is seldom or 
 never heard from the mouth of an instructor in classics or 
 mathematics. In these older topics one often hears, to be 
 sure, complaint and impatient criticism; but only in very 
 exceptional cases does the work done under a predecessor 
 appear wholly fruitless. The steps may be slow, but they 
 are sure; at each promotion the scholar has added a defi- 
 nite acquisition to his sum of knowledge. In the other new 
 subjects, however such as " science," history, and Eng- 
 lish composition the efforts seem, judging from such 
 comments as one may gather in the course of years, to be 
 fully as futile as in French and German. An eminent pro- 
 fessor in a scientific school has been heard to declare that 
 he would rather have, as advanced students of applied 
 science, men who had devoted themselves to Latin than 
 those who had spent their time on scientific studies; and 
 his voice is one of many. College instructors in English 
 composition are sometimes heard to regret that their pupils 
 ever tried to write English at school. It appears to be the 
 unanimous opinion of college professors of modern lan- 
 guages that their best pupils are those whose school years 
 were given mostly to Greek and Latin, while their poorest 
 are those in whose previous curriculum French or German 
 or " science " was the principal factor. On the other hand, 
 the boy from a good classical school finds that his college 
 Latin, Greek, and mathematics are the natural continua- 
 tion of what he has already acquired; and his instructor, 
 with no great upsetting or reviewing, simply takes him on 
 from the point he has reached under the guidance of his 
 former teacher.
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 73 
 
 It would seem, then, if our data and inferences are cor- 
 rect, that Latin, Greek, and mathematics are so taught as 
 to allow but little waste in the passage from one teacher to 
 another, while in other subjects the apparent or real loss 
 is most discouraging. Furthermore, school study of the 
 classics furnishes not only an excellent basis for further 
 work along the same line, but also the best foundation for 
 studies of a different character; while modern language 
 courses, in common with " science " and some other topics, 
 far from fitting a pupil to take up new branches of study, 
 do not adequately prepare him to continue what he has 
 begun. It is likely enough that French and German, as 
 taught today, are more effective than most of the other 
 new studies, but they are still vastly inferior to the classics. 
 And inasmuch as the modern tongues to a considerable 
 extent have replaced Greek and Latin in the secondary 
 school curriculum and in the ordinary college training, we 
 cannot regard any instruction in them as satisfactory which 
 does not produce results comparable to those derived from 
 the study of the old humanities. 
 
 Is the inferiority of the modern to the ancient languages, 
 as a means of mental discipline, inherent in these tongues, 
 or does it arise from causes that can be overcome ? A 
 priori it is not obvious why German, for instance, should 
 not furnish nearly as good an instrument for training the 
 attention, the reason, and the memory, as Latin. More- 
 over, long-continued search does reveal some exceptional 
 instances in which French and German have in fact been 
 made to bear most gratifying fruit. For it must be under- 
 stood that in all that has preceded we have been consider- 
 ing the general average, and not the unusual specific case. 
 Until we have, then, conclusive evidence to the contrary, 
 we may proceed on the assumption that the modern Ian-
 
 74 OLD AND NEW 
 
 guages can be used to good purpose in education. What 
 we need to do first of all is to discover the obstacles that 
 have hitherto prevented success. 
 
 From time immemorial until our own generation the 
 fundamental discipline of educated men throughout the 
 civilized world has been derived from Latin and Greek, 
 with more or less admixture of mathematics. The great 
 writers, the imposing figures in history, the mighty scholars 
 of every type have formed their intelligence on the classics; 
 all that we revere in the intellectual past derives from that 
 abundant source. The majestic tradition of classic study 
 gives to the old humanities a dignity that newer branches 
 of learning can never attain, unless it be after many cen- 
 turies of like achievement. In the far-distant future we 
 may picture a time when French and German will be uv 
 vested with the glory of ancient and perennial success; but 
 that thought affords us no present help, save the gift of an 
 ideal toward which our efforts may converge, a faith that 
 may brighten the hours of discouragement. Under the con- 
 ditions that face us today we cannot hope that either pupils 
 or teachers will approach our modern tongues in a spirit of 
 reverence comparable to that which properly hallows the 
 study of Greek and Latin. We must respect our subjects; 
 we must, if we can, make our students respect them; 
 but that respect will at best fall far short of veneration. 
 Hitherto the living languages have not enjoyed even the 
 moderate consideration that justly belongs to them; and 
 the slight esteem in which they have been held is due 
 mainly to the short-sighted policy of pedagogues who have 
 too often sacrificed the substantial to the showy, the facile, 
 and the frivolous. If we wish others to take us seriously, 
 if our pupils are to devote sober attention to our instruc- 
 tion, we must set a high standard for ourselves. No magis-
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 75 
 
 terial airs will help us, no lectures or upbraidings: what we 
 need is, in the first place, a thorough and ever-increasing 
 knowledge of the matter we are to teach, and, secondly, a 
 wise earnestness that is satisfied with nothing less than the 
 real intellectual development of our scholars. 
 
 On this score, then the honor in which our depart- 
 ment of learning is held we cannot, for long ages, equal 
 the classics; but we can distinctly improve our present 
 position. And we have an advantage which, if rightly used, 
 may offset the lack of time-sanctioned regard: I mean the 
 attractiveness born of actuality. If German, French, and 
 Spanish cannot be revered, let them benefit by that affec- 
 tion which the youthful mind instinctively bestows on all 
 that is alive. Let the learner realize that in studying a 
 foreign tongue he is penetrating the life, the thought, the 
 feeling of real people people who are like himself in most 
 things but interestingly divergent in others. Let him be 
 led to compare the effects of different material environ- 
 ment, dissimilar national traditions, contrary ideas of 
 beauty, various methods of utilizing words for the expres- 
 sion of what is in the mind. Nothing is more fascinating 
 than such comparisons and contrasts, affording as they do 
 ever longer and deeper glimpses into a world so near yet 
 so remote from our ken. Few things, on the other hand, 
 can be made more tiresome, if imparted in formal lectures, 
 with an appalling apparatus of specimens, charts, and wall 
 pictures of cheap and hideous design. The pupil must be 
 aroused to see things for himself; his curiosity must be 
 awakened by an incidental explanation, a casual remark, a 
 timely anecdote. Tact, insight, and overflowing fullness of 
 information must be the teacher's stock in trade. Even a 
 comparison of grammatical forms and constructions can be 
 made of absorbing interest, if not carried too far: a revela-
 
 76 OLD AND NEW 
 
 tion of the manifold ways in which human ingenuity uses 
 speech, combined with a discussion of the relative merits 
 of a foreign and a corresponding English idiom or inflection, 
 may impress the facts indelibly on the hearer's memory', 
 while kindling his desire for further knowledge. Such study 
 has the additional advantage of imparting to the child an 
 understanding of the real structure of English, of which he 
 is likely, otherwise, to remain hi eternal ignorance. More- 
 over, in languages that offer such a wide range of choice, 
 the reading can be so selected that the subject-matter itself 
 shall be an inducement to continued effort. Short stories 
 of adventure, devoid of mawkish sentimentality, are most 
 pleasing to the young beginner. Longer and more diversi- 
 fied works attract the student who is older or more ad- 
 vanced. Poetry, judiciously administered, may serve tp 
 train the ear, to cultivate the sense of beauty, to reveal 
 the latent harmonies of language; and verse of the right 
 kind, rightly presented, will appeal to the average girl or 
 boy. The pieces chosen should not be too childish; chil- 
 dren relish literature, especially poetry, that is a little above 
 them, but look down with speechless scorn on that which 
 lies in the least beneath their level. Furthermore, teachers 
 should not forget that poetry is a kind of music; it is in- 
 tended not merely for the mind, but for the hearing. The 
 reason why verse, particularly French verse, is so little and 
 in general so unsuccessfully used in the schoolroom is that 
 very few instructors know how to read it. The real rhythm, 
 the proper intonation can be acquired only by close and 
 patient imitation of a native elocutionist. The teacher who 
 does not possess the art does well, until he masters it, to 
 avoid the Castalian spring; and he who does possess it 
 should habitually do the " reading aloud " himself, instead 
 of compelling his pupils to murder the verse. Only after
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 77 
 
 the learner has heard the poem many times should he be 
 allowed to attempt it. 
 
 One reason why the living tongues are relegated to a 
 lower plane than Greek and Latin is that people includ- 
 ing scholars and teachers harbor a totally false concep- 
 tion of their difficulty. Our modern languages are fully as 
 hard as the ancient, and require to be studied just as in- 
 dustriously. I do not believe there is or ever was a lan- 
 guage more difficult to acquire than French; most of us 
 can name worthy persons who have been assiduously strug- 
 gling with it from childhood to mature age, and do not 
 know it now: yet it is treated as something that anyone 
 can pick up offhand When I thus compare the old and 
 the new tongues, I have in mind, of course, the degree and 
 kind of attainment that is expected in each. If we were as 
 careful of Latin pronunciation as we try to be of French, if 
 we compelled our pupils to talk Greek, as we labor to make 
 them speak German, the comparison might result differ- 
 ently; but even then the balance, in my opinion, would 
 be not far from even. The obstacles to proficiency in the 
 classics are more apparent than real, and they present 
 themselves most conspicuously at the outset. The inflec- 
 tions seem formidable, but, if attacked at the age when 
 memory is good, are soon mastered; and the very abun- 
 dance of forms, with definite rules for the use of each, re- 
 moves in great measure the endless and desperately intricate 
 syntactical problems that beset the student of French. The 
 copiousness of Latin and Greek grammar, for a scholar who 
 really learns the language, is an advantage rather than a 
 drawback: hi a book of moderate compass he has all that 
 he needs to know, every emergency is foreseen, every con- 
 struction has its formula; a French grammar of equal size 
 makes no provision for three-quarters of the puzzles that an
 
 78 OLD AND NEW 
 
 ordinary student encounters. Aside from the difference in 
 the inherent difficulty of languages, there is a great diver- 
 gence in the adequacy of textbooks. The classics have been 
 studied so long and so well, and the field they cover is so 
 definite and so restricted, that they are furnished with an 
 equipment which the modern tongues can probably never 
 rival. The completeness, the accuracy of a Latin lexicon 
 or a Lathi grammar may well fill us with envy. When I 
 look up a strange word in a Latin dictionary, I do so with 
 the firm belief that I shall find it, and my faith is nearly 
 always rewarded; but when I come upon an unknown term 
 in French, I turn to Littre or the Dictionnaire General with 
 a disheartening apprehension that it will not be there, and 
 my foreboding is usually justified. The same thing is true 
 of grammars and of textbooks generally. The task of the 
 Greek or Latin teacher, compared to ours, is an easy one, 
 and so is that of the pupil, if the learning of a given defi- 
 nite amount of Latin be compared with the acquisition of 
 the same amount of French. It is an incalculable advan- 
 tage to a language to appear harder than it is: both scholar 
 and instructor approach the study seriously, school boards 
 allow adequate provision of time and books, parents are 
 contented to have their children work hard, and the satis- 
 faction of achievement is multiplied fourfold. French stag- 
 gers under the fearful burden of apparent easiness. The 
 alphabet is identical with ours, although the letters all stand 
 for different sounds; a large part of the vocabulary is spelled 
 like English, although the meaning of the words is hardly 
 ever exactly the same. The superficial resemblances im- 
 press the learner; the fundamental distinctions he ignores. 
 It takes him four years or so if he keeps on that long 
 to convince himself that French really demands applica- 
 tion, and then he awakens to the fact that he has not been
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 79 
 
 learning the language at all. What he has been learning 
 is a sort of pidjin English made up of English substitutes 
 for French sounds and English transliterations of French 
 words, arranged in such fashion as to signify nothing in 
 any tongue that man ever spoke. In fact, he has never 
 expected his text to mean anything, French being, in his 
 conception, a kind of speech in which people talk a great 
 deal without ever saying anything in particular. Let us 
 consider an ordinary university class in French literature, 
 made up of students of average ability, who have had, for 
 the most part, some four years of French, usually three at 
 school and one in college : it is safe to say that of these boys, 
 at the beginning of the year, not more than one in ten can 
 read a page of easy French understandingly. They think 
 they understand it, while in reality they miss the point of 
 nearly every significant sentence they read. When such 
 pupils are once awakened from their delusion, if they are 
 not too discouraged to continue at all, they are ready to 
 make good progress, having realized at last that their slip- 
 shod ways have led to naught. Unhappily few reach the 
 Socratic stage of knowing that they know nothing; and 
 parents and school authorities are not likely to suspect the 
 truth. German has the good fortune to seem rather hard, 
 though not so hard as Greek and Latin: it has a queer- 
 looking alphabet, and the beginner is obliged to memorize 
 a good many declensions. The result is that German, in 
 general, is much better studied and better taught, in 
 secondary schools, than French, and a more substantial 
 knowledge is attained. Anyone who has given elemen- 
 tary instruction, in school and college, in both these lan- 
 guages, can testify that German is twice as satisfactory to 
 teach as French, the reason being, no doubt, that the former 
 language looks a great deal harder while it is in reality
 
 80 OLD AND NEW 
 
 considerably easier. What are we to do about it ? We 
 can hardly erect scarecrows along the path of the French 
 pupil. We can, however, refrain from distorting the truth; 
 we can insist upon accuracy from the start, in pronuncia- 
 tion, in comprehension, in inflection, in construction; we 
 can refuse to be satisfied with approximations and mean- 
 ingless guesses. The whole tendency of French instruction 
 has been to disguise its difficulty; to represent the subject 
 as one in which serious exertion is unnecessary a thing 
 that can be caught by intuition; to grade the progress and 
 conceal the obstacles so adroitly that the learner shall never 
 be aware of them. The object of this disingenuous policy 
 has no doubt been to induce children to study French; its 
 effect has been the opposite, for while it may often have led 
 pupils to elect French as a part of their program, it has 
 uniformly deterred them from studying it. 
 
 In the case of a branch of scholarship so recently de- 
 veloped it is natural that there should be no underlying 
 uniformity of purpose; and that, presumably, is why 
 our efforts are so scattering, so unfocused. If we had a 
 clear conception of what we are teaching a language for, 
 we should be more likely to concentrate our forces and thus 
 avoid the waste incident to unsystematic endeavor. Why, 
 hi fact, is it worth while to teach or to study French or 
 German ? How many of us can answer that question ? 
 How many have so much as asked it ? The first and most 
 obvious answer, the one given in three cases out of four, is 
 that we teach French and German hi order that our pupils 
 may know these languages, because it is a pleasant and 
 useful thing to know them. And if we inquire further in 
 what this pleasure and this utility consist, either we receive 
 no response at all or we are told that it is delightful to con- 
 verse with foreigners and profitable to be able to conduct
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 8 1 
 
 foreign business correspondence. By this time it must be 
 obvious that we are on the wrong tack. How many of our 
 pupils, unless they have enjoyed exceptional advantages, 
 can speak French to a Frenchman with anything like pleas- 
 ure to either party ? How many ever secure positions as 
 foreign business correspondents through the training that 
 we give them ? No: if this is our object, we must confess 
 that our instruction is a gigantic failure. And even if we 
 succeeded, the end attained would be insignificant in pro- 
 portion to the expenditure of time and labor. Only a tiny 
 fraction of those who study French will ever go abroad or 
 have frequent opportunity to display their skill at home; 
 and if all those who study German are to become commer- 
 cial correspondents, that profession will have to expand a 
 thousandfold. It is just such frivolous and inane state- 
 ments as those cited, and the thoughtlessness from which 
 they spring, that have prevented our subjects from win- 
 ning the esteem of the community. If our branch of learning 
 has no better claim to consideration, it is not worthy of a 
 place in any public school curriculum. 
 
 Let us look at the matter from another side. The modern 
 tongues have been introduced into schools and colleges 
 mainly as a partial or total substitute for the classics. Now, 
 as I have said before, it is through the classics that the man 
 of European stock, from ancient times almost until our own 
 day, has received his mental discipline: it is they that have 
 taught him how to observe, how to discriminate, how to 
 reason, how to remember; they have afforded practice in 
 analysis and synthesis; they have cultivated the taste and 
 broadened the horizon. It is they that have given man the 
 intellectual power to cope with any problem that may con- 
 front him; it is they that have made him an educated be- 
 ing. Among the other topics that our children study,
 
 82 OLD AND NEW 
 
 mathematics stand forth as affording a part, but only a 
 part, of the necessary discipline: they teach concentration 
 and accuracy, but not much more; and there is no indica- 
 tion that mathematical study will increase as Greek and 
 Latin dwindle. Natural science and the host of minor sub- 
 jects recently adopted, while they impart interesting and 
 sometimes valuable information, furnish none of the requi- 
 site training. It is to modern languages that we must look 
 for the shaping of that strong, versatile, well-rounded in- 
 telligence without which civilized man will relapse into 
 barbarism. Perhaps, in spite of the best endeavor, French 
 and German will prove inadequate means; if they do, 
 either the classics must be restored or another discipline 
 must be found, else our race will degenerate. At all events 
 we must see to it that they have a fair trial. We hava a 
 duty and a glorious opportunity. Our object must be the 
 discipline of the mind, the training of observation, judg- 
 ment, and memory, the development of aesthetic discrimi- 
 nation and enjoyment, the opening of a wider outlook on 
 the world, the cultivation of a love of good reading. If we 
 strive with all our might for these things, we shall soon find, 
 I am sure, that our work will assume a new dignity, our 
 pupils will face their books with a better spirit, our depart- 
 ment will deserve and win a respect which it has never en- 
 joyed before; and, lastly as a by-product, so to speak 
 our scholars will learn a great deal more French and 
 German than they ever acquired when the mastery of these 
 languages was our sole ideal. 
 
 The long vogue of the classics has given them more than 
 an exalted position and a superior array of textbooks; it 
 has provided them with a consistent, effective, and long- 
 tried system of instruction. In our groping we may find 
 a guide in the traditional practices of our elder companion;
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 83 
 
 or, to speak concretely, the French teacher may learn some- 
 thing by occasionally looking in upon his Latin colleague 
 next door. It cannot be repeated too often that Latin in- 
 struction has been a success; for a thousand years or so it 
 has been the one conspicuous success in the field of educa- 
 tion. Our successes are still before us. A modestly recep- 
 tive frame of mind is the appropriate one for us when we 
 are face to face with classical practices. When the living 
 tongues first began to supersede the ancient hi our schools, 
 their advent was accompanied by a spirit of enthusiastic 
 innovation similar to that which quickened the Romantic 
 movement in art. There was the same talk of bursting 
 narrow bonds, discarding outworn tradition, and return- 
 ing to nature. The Romantic ebullition soon subsided, 
 leaving, however, some permanent and beneficial memen- 
 tos of its passage. So it has been with the Romantic period 
 of linguistic pedagogy: the excitement is calmed, the ex- 
 travagant claims of iconoclasts are exploded, the revolu- 
 tionary spirit has abated, the allurements of the new no 
 longer blind us to the abiding worth of the old. Something, 
 however, we have gained: the conviction that language is 
 a thing alive and that its inherent interest must be utilized 
 as the best incentive to study. Our experience has profited 
 our classical brethren as well as ourselves; and if we ex- 
 amine their policy today, we shall see that while it has suf- 
 fered no fundamental alteration, it has grafted upon itself 
 some of the fruits of neo-linguistic theorizing. It has not, 
 however, fallen into the error of believing that all difficul- 
 ties can be solved by a formula that will-o'-the-wisp 
 which has led us on such mad chases. The idea that there 
 is a pedagogic panacea, a sovereign method that can make 
 everything right, is a fallacy that we have now well-nigh 
 outgrown, although it still smolders, and sometimes crops
 
 84 OLD AND NEW 
 
 up where one would least expect it. A few years ago I re- 
 ceived a visit from a Japanese professor, an eminently 
 learned and practical man, who was traveling around the 
 world on a quest for the one sovereign method of teaching 
 a foreign language. It seems that in Japanese schools the 
 children have English, if I remember aright, six hours a 
 week for ten years, but seldom learn enough to be of ma- 
 terial use. The authorities trusting that the western 
 world, which has been in the business a good while, had 
 found the right formula sent my visitor on his mission. 
 I described to him all the methods I knew the " natural," 
 the " direct," the " cumulative," the " categorical," all 
 that had ever been written with a capital M but soon 
 I found that he knew them as well as I did, and had tried 
 them all. " Have you devised nothing better ? " he asketf. 
 " Nothing," I admitted; " haven't you discovered a way ? " 
 " None," said he. And we parted, sadder but no wiser than 
 before. East and West may put their heads together: the 
 precious formula will never come. This the Latins seem to 
 have known all along, although there was a time when they, 
 too, were a little dazzled by Friar Tuck's lantern. 
 
 But Latin tradition possesses something besides the nega- 
 tive virtue of skepticism. It has the very positive merit of 
 doing one thing at a tune and doing that thoroughly; of 
 building only on a firm foundation; of never stepping for- 
 ward until the present foothold is secure. That, with a 
 fitting sense of the dignity of the subject taught, and an 
 unquestioning faith in the utility of every part of it, is the 
 most valuable lesson that our classical colleagues can teach 
 us. In our eagerness to hurry on to the things that seem 
 practical and interesting, we almost invariably neglect 
 those prosaic fundamentals without which there can be 
 no real progress nor even genuine, sustained interest,
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 85 
 
 because there is no understanding. The inflections of verbs, 
 the use of pronominal forms, the significance of tenses and 
 moods, the meaning of connectives afford the indispensable 
 clue to the foreign sentence: to proceed without them is as 
 futile as to engage on mathematical operations with no 
 knowledge of the signs of addition, subtraction, multiplica- 
 tion, and division. The attitude of the average schoolboy 
 confronted with a French sentence is that which a person 
 unacquainted with the plus mark might assume toward the 
 formula a+b. " It is something about a and b" he says, 
 " but what a has to do with b I cannot tell." It is just this 
 knowledge of the relations of words and clauses that is all- 
 important in the comprehension of a foreign tongue. We 
 must look out for the plus and minus symbols, and we must 
 realize that the thorough mastery of them requires much 
 time, drill, and patient repetition. It does not follow that 
 the first two or three years of study should be nothing but 
 a dull grind: the very practice in conjugation and syntax 
 can be interestingly diversified, illustrated by attractive 
 texts; the ingenuity of pupils may be aroused in devising 
 new variations and in executing manifold imitations of 
 model constructions. Furthermore, a considerable amount 
 of fairly rapid sight-reading or translation, done at first 
 mainly by the instructor, may be introduced, as a relief 
 and a stimulus, from the very start. The exhilarating exer- 
 cise of swift reading should never be abandoned; but we 
 should avoid the almost universal mistake of making all 
 translations rapid and superficial. Here is one of the chief 
 causes of our failure. For several years, both in school and 
 in college, a given portion of text should be minutely ana- 
 lyzed and parsed. In no other way can pupils be made to 
 heed the really essential things; in no other way can the 
 belief be hammered into them that the foreign writer actu-
 
 86 OLD AND NEW 
 
 ally means something, and that his words, when turned 
 into English, must invariably make sense. 
 
 Our young school children need constant oversight. 
 They are often left too much to their own devices. For 
 instance, after they have had a few lessons in grammar, a 
 bit of German is assigned to them to translate at home. 
 This is a task for which they are totally unfit. To ask them 
 to do it is to put upon them the work that belongs to the 
 teacher. For a long time, all, or nearly all, the new reading 
 or translation should be done in the classroom, and the 
 pupil's home lesson should be a review. The same thing 
 is true of grammar: very few children are capable of assim- 
 ilating linguistic principles from a book until the rules and 
 examples have been carefully expounded by the living voice. 
 The bane of much of our instruction is that the master does 
 not teach he " hears lessons." Vigilant watch must be 
 kept, also, to prevent the child from falling into error 
 through ignorance of English. This applies not only to 
 the interpretation of grammatical statements, but likewise, 
 and still more, to the translation of foreign texts. It is im- 
 possible, without the closest and most sympathetic atten- 
 tion, to imagine what idea a common English word may 
 suggest to the youthful mind. I remember that in a class 
 which I was visiting a little girl translated the German 
 schlau by pretty. Her teacher corrected, rebuked, and 
 passed on. Wondering how the child got such a notion, I 
 turned to the vocabulary of the reader, and there I found 
 the definition, schlau cunning. The only meaning that 
 this child, or almost any American of her years, ever at- 
 tached to cunning was pretty. A large proportion of the 
 faulty translation that so vexes teachers is due merely to 
 lack of familiarity with English words; and for this the 
 child is seldom to blame. The difficulty is increased in the
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 87 
 
 case of boys and girls of foreign parentage who have no 
 native language at all. In the evening high schools of 
 Boston I have met many a youth of eighteen or twenty 
 who scarcely had the gift of human speech: his parents, 
 perhaps, spoke only German, the school teachers had spoken 
 only English, and he had never learned either tongue well 
 enough to do anything but express the most rudimentary 
 concepts. Such pupils naturally demand special treatment 
 and unwearying patience. 
 
 In our field of education, more, perhaps, than in any 
 other, the attempt has been made to fit the same coat upon 
 all comers: sometimes the infant has been smothered in 
 the pedagogic raiment of the grown-up; oftener the adult 
 has been all too scantily clad in the educational dress of 
 babyhood. It seems self-evident but it obviously needs 
 to be repeated many times that the method best suited 
 to one age not only may be, but must be, ill adapted to 
 another; that a course which is natural to the child must 
 be unnatural to the man. Some general principles the 
 pedagogue should always bear in mind; but the applica- 
 tion of them, the method itself, should vary with perfect 
 freedom according to the age, antecedents, and ability of 
 the scholars. It should vary, also, in accordance with the 
 character and competence of the master. Few spectacles 
 are more painful than that of a teacher conscientiously 
 endeavoring to pursue a course for which he is by nature or 
 training unfit. Everyone who adopts the pedagogic pro- 
 fession should strive to qualify himself to pattern his in- 
 struction after any rational system that may be required; 
 but every born teacher will develop out of the system 
 adopted a way of his own. 
 
 If a language is to seem alive it must be read aloud and 
 spoken. And here we meet the greatest of the permanent
 
 88 OLD AND NEW 
 
 and unavoidable obstacles in our field of instruction the 
 difficulty of pronunciation. Here again the French teacher 
 has a harder task than the German: firstly, because the 
 French sounds and intonations are more remote from Ameri- 
 can habits, secondly, because the standard exacted by the 
 French ear is higher than that demanded by the German, 
 and thirdly, because proficiency in German pronunciation 
 is often facilitated by the presence of many pupils of Ger- 
 man extraction. I shall therefore consider primarily the 
 French side of the problem, although the general principles 
 involved belong equally to German. It is well to accept 
 once for all the fact that French pronunciation is hard and 
 requires a vast amount of intelligent teaching and patient 
 exercise. Almost invariably it is slighted. In bad schools 
 it is scarcely taught at all, the teacher expecting that scnol- 
 ars will " pick it up " heaven knows where. Hosts of 
 boys are sent up to college who do not even know that the 
 5 at the end of plural nouns is silent. For such pupils 
 French is no living language it can hardly be a language 
 at all. Other teachers, more conscientious, waste a great 
 deal of time in hearing pupils read aloud without ever hav- 
 ing taught them how to read. Such reading merely con- 
 firms them in their bad habits. The commonest mistake 
 consists in offering only a brief (and generally incorrect) 
 exposition of principles at the first lesson and then trusting 
 to subsequent occasional directions and a large amount of 
 unconnected reading. There is only one time to learn to 
 pronounce, and that is at the very beginning: if scholars 
 do not pronounce right, they will pronounce wrong; and 
 when they have pronounced wrong for some months they 
 are generally incurable. Not only do they take no pleasure 
 in their work, feeling that what they acquire is a mere sham, 
 but they are afraid to open their mouths to utter a French
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 89 
 
 sound; if they want to ask the meaning of a French word, 
 they do not dare to speak, because they cannot pronounce 
 it. The bogy of French pronunciation cannot be dodged; 
 it must be conquered. Now, many American teachers who 
 know this full well, and are anxious to do their duty, have 
 not the courage to undertake the task, being conscious that 
 their own pronunciation is imperfect. Of course an in- 
 structor should embrace every opportunity to prepare him- 
 self for his business in every way, and in this respect more 
 than any other; but the idea that a teacher not to the man- 
 ner born is unfit to impart a good pronunciation is a delu- 
 sion as harmful as it is natural. The best results I have 
 ever seen achieved in French pronunciation, with large 
 classes of schoolboys, were obtained by an elderly American 
 gentleman whose own accent, though carefully acquired, 
 was not that of a Parisian. I am not sure that he had ever 
 been abroad. But he taught pronunciation with the same 
 seriousness and thoroughness with which he taught gram- 
 mar, composition, or translation; he never would let a 
 class go until every member of it pronounced as well as he 
 did; and while his pronunciation was far from satisfactory 
 to himself, it was admirable in the mouth of a pupil. In- 
 deed, on the general question whether a Frenchman or an 
 American is the better teacher of French pronunciation, 
 there may well be a difference of opinion. There are ad- 
 vantages on both sides. The Frenchman has confidence 
 in himself, and this confidence is shared by his scholars, 
 who feel sure that they are getting the real thing; this is 
 worth much. On the other hand, the American knows the 
 difficulties that are to be overcome: if he has succeeded hi 
 consciously acquiring an absolutely good accent, he is ob- 
 viously in a position to show others how to do it; if he has 
 not, his pronunciation, moderately good but less foreign
 
 90 OLD AND NEW 
 
 than that of the foreigner, is less discouraging to his pupils 
 and more readily imitated by them. 
 
 Of whatever race the master be, he should not be satisfied 
 with English substitutes for French sounds. Usually there 
 is no attempt made to teach any French sound but u and 
 the four nasal vowels; all the rest are unquestioningly re- 
 placed by the English vowels and consonants that most 
 nearly resemble them, although both teachers and pupils 
 may be haunted by the consciousness that they are really 
 pronouncing English and not French at all. Especial pains 
 should be taken to appropriate some kind of French r; the 
 r may, indeed, be regarded as the central feature in the 
 acquisition of any foreign language by an English-speaking 
 person. Perhaps the most striking and characteristic ele- 
 ment of a spoken tongue the one by which we guess the 
 nationality of a stranger without understanding a word 
 he says is intonation, the varied sequence of pitch; and 
 that is seldom even mentioned in schools. Every language 
 has its familiar inflections; these should be taught as care- 
 fully as the individual sounds. Very helpful is a set of 
 phrases provided with a musical notation of pitch and tune. 
 For the proper study of the single vowels and consonants 
 a phonetic alphabet is very desirable; without it the be- 
 ginner, unless he be provided with a phonograph, cannot 
 practise by himself and is helpless the moment he leaves 
 his teacher. 
 
 With a full consciousness of what is before him, with a 
 definite, systematic plan of campaign, with such help as 
 may be needed in the way of alphabet and music, the in- 
 structor should first drill his class long and carefully in 
 single sounds, then in syllables, then in words, and finally 
 in sentences always taking care that his pupils hear more 
 of his own correct pronunciation than of the faulty utter-
 
 MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING 91 
 
 ance of their comrades. Sound, syllable, word, or phrase 
 should be spoken by the learner immediately after the 
 master, before the auditory impression has become blurred. 
 If this initial practice is faithfully and rightly conducted, 
 the subsequent training and there must be much of it 
 throughout the course will be interesting and compara- 
 tively easy. Then both teacher and pupil will have the 
 satisfaction of at least striving to attain genuine French 
 and German. The schoolboy's diffidence his unwilling- 
 ness to hear his own voice attempting the strange tongue 
 will vanish; a sense of mastery will replace his distrust. 
 Then, and then only, will the modern languages come into 
 their own; not until then can we answer the question 
 whether modern language teaching is a failure.
 
 VI 
 THE DARK AGES 1 
 
 THE Century Dictionary gives the following definition: 
 " The dark ages, a period of European history, beginning 
 with or shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire of 
 the West (A.D. 476), marked by a general decline of learn- 
 ing and civilization. It was introduced by the great influx 
 of barbarians into western Europe in the fourth and fifth 
 centuries known as the wandering of the nations, and is 
 reckoned by Hallam as extending to the eleventh century, 
 when a general revival of wealth, manners, taste, and 
 learning began, and by others to the time of Dante in the 
 thirteenth century, or later." This last extension we may 
 well leave out of account; for to apply the term " dark " 
 to the century that saw the greatest scholar, the greatest 
 theologian, and the greatest poet of our Christian era would 
 be too manifestly unfit. 
 
 Let us confine our darkness to the period between the 
 fifth century and the eleventh. It will be all the more 
 opaque for this concentration. And then, pulling down 
 the shades before and behind, let us try to realize how 
 dark the darkness really was. I shall ask you to plunge 
 with me into the very thick of it. We are at the Frankish 
 court in the eighth century, on a visit to the Palace School. 
 Into this ancient institution of the Franks some new spirit 
 was infused by Charlemagne, who became himself a pupil, 
 
 1 An address delivered before the Modern Language Association of Amer- 
 ica in Philadelphia, on Dec. 26, 1912. 
 
 91
 
 THE DARK AGES 93 
 
 having called in Alcuin as a teacher. Here is his opinion 
 (recorded, to be sure, by his master) of the value of a 
 liberal education: " Could anyone really interested in the 
 pursuit and investigation of matters so important to society 
 at large, and truly desirous of practising such excellent 
 virtues, have it in his heart to hazard the daring assertion 
 that our discussion has been in vain ? For myself I frankly 
 confess that love of knowledge only has prompted my ques- 
 tions; and I thank you for your kindness in answering 
 them. I highly value the affectionate candor of your re- 
 plies, and feel convinced that they will be most profitable 
 to all who without prejudice or the blot of envy may sit 
 down and read them." 
 
 Today we are not so easily satisfied. At the recent 
 meeting of the National Education Association hi Chicago, 
 according to the papers, " high school education throughout 
 the United States was branded as ' generally bookish, 
 scholastic, abstract, and inadequate to meet the practical 
 problems of life/ in a report submitted to the national 
 council. . . . The report, based on investigation in twenty- 
 five States, declared the system of high school teaching 
 is just where it was thirty years ago and that this back- 
 wardness is due to the plan of high schools to prepare 
 pupils ' for colleges and universities rather than for life.' 
 ' The whole trouble with our high school education/ " de- 
 clared the reader of the report, " ' is that it is regarded 
 too much as merely a preparation for the university. 
 Instead of dealing with the problems of life today, the 
 students are taught to deal with the language, politics and 
 customs of fifteen centuries ago. Nearly all the high 
 school teachers are college graduates who have no adequate 
 knowledge of affairs outside of colleges. Their teaching 
 is, therefore, bookish, scholastic, and abstract. We need a
 
 94 OLD AND NEW 
 
 change of aim in high school teaching, a look in the direc- 
 tion of the farm, shop, and home. While we do not recom- 
 mend an education entirely vocational, we urge a departure 
 from the college idea.' ' 
 
 If we have reason for discontent even now, after so 
 many ages of enlightenment, what must have been the 
 barbarous teaching inflicted on the children of the eighth 
 century ? What can they have had to compare with a 
 really modern high school curriculum compounded, let us 
 say, of some English, a little German, a bit of elementary 
 algebra, a sample of plane geometry, some pages of Ameri- 
 can history, practice in geometrical and freehand drawing, 
 a good deal of shop-work, lessons in bookkeeping (of a type 
 used only in schools), training in salesmanship, a few hours 
 of botany, physiology, and calisthenics ? When Alcuin 
 was a boy, the secular course, in the school he attended, 
 comprised these subjects: grammar, rhetoric, jurispru- 
 dence, poetry, astronomy, physics, and explanation of the 
 Old Testament. Alcuin studied also the theology of the 
 New Testament, science, and general literature. If the 
 present day course is " generally bookish," what shall we 
 call this ? 
 
 Now let us suppose that the pupil has received his 
 elementary training, bookish or bookless as the case may 
 be, and, pushing his studies further, craves admission to 
 the brotherhood of scholars. In our era, as you are all 
 aware, the thing for him to do is to make himself an un- 
 disputed authority in some special matter, such as: the 
 art of fishing among the ancient Greeks; the serpent motive 
 in the ancient art of Central America and Mexico; isola- 
 tion as a criterion of species; the heredity of coat color in 
 mice; some new derivatives of pyromucic acid; the origin 
 of the stratified rocks of the New York series; the ways
 
 THE DARK AGES 95 
 
 and means of making payments; reactions of the crayfish 
 to sensory stimuli; the expansion and compressibility of 
 ether and alcohol in the neighborhoods of their boiling 
 points typical subjects culled at random from a list of 
 the particular fields cultivated at some tune by students of 
 distinction at my own university. I say " culled at ran- 
 dom." I should modify that statement. My choice was 
 restricted by the need of picking titles which I could pro- 
 nounce and you could understand. Now it is not to be 
 imagined for a moment that the cultivator of any one of 
 these gardens has ever tasted the fruit of any other that 
 the man who fishes among the ancient Greeks knows any- 
 thing about the ways and means of making payments, or 
 that the experimenter in the compressibility of alcohol 
 can divine the serpent motive in Central American art. 
 No. Each keeps strictly to his own domain. The one, 
 blind to the reactions of the crayfish, limits his diet to new 
 derivatives of pyromucic acid; the other, heedless of the 
 dangers of isolation as a criterion of species, confines his 
 walks to the stratified rocks of New York. Was it thus, 
 say, in the seventh century ? Quite the contrary. To 
 be a scholar in those remote times, one had to know all of 
 these subjects, or the things whose places they have taken 
 studies of corresponding difficulty and importance. 
 Look at St. Isidore's Origins: not a work of genius, by any 
 means, but a specimen of the kind of erudition a Dark Age 
 man was expected to possess, if he wanted to be regarded 
 as a master. The twenty books of that work treat of 
 grammar; rhetoric and dialectics; mathematics; medicine; 
 laws and times; ecclesiastical books and services; God, the 
 angels, and religious orders; church and sects, with a dis- 
 cussion of pagan gods; laws and societies; miscellaneous 
 lexicographical material; man and portents; animals; the
 
 96 OLD AND NEW 
 
 world and its parts; the earth and its parts; building and 
 fields; stones and metals; agriculture; war and sports; 
 ships, buildings, clothes; food and implements. But (you 
 will say) all of this information is second-hand, most of 
 it is superficial, much of it is false; it is better to find out 
 something fresh and true about the heredity of coat color 
 hi mice than to burden one's mind with a mass of hetero- 
 geneous and doubtful learning. Yet I ask: is it ? From 
 the point of view of science, regarded as an end in itself, 
 you are probably right although I may remark here that 
 the accusation of inaccuracy is a dangerous stone for the 
 scholarship of one age to throw at that of another: who can 
 tell how the results of all our " original research " will look 
 to the learned world a thousand years hence ? From the 
 standpoint of the state, on the other hand, the best gift 
 anyone can bestow is that of a judicious, well-rounded 
 citizen, fully informed in the soundest learning his age can 
 give. And in the interest of the individual, is not breadth 
 of understanding about as important as anything ? I 
 wonder whether there is to be found among the monarchs 
 of the world today or even among the presidents one 
 who could translate a difficult philosophical work from 
 Latin into the vernacular. Yet this was done by a ninth- 
 century English king who surely left nothing to be desired 
 on the score of efficiency. 
 
 Let us turn back to Charlemagne, one of whose biog- 
 raphers tells us that the great king " was ever learning, 
 and fond of learning; no subject came amiss to him; 
 everything from the most commonplace everyday occur- 
 rences to the profoundest philosophical and theological 
 inquiries interested him. The price of commodities; the 
 stocking and planting of farms; the building of houses, 
 churches, palaces, bridges, fortresses, ships, and canals;
 
 THE DARK AGES 97 
 
 the course of the stars; the text of the Scriptures; the ap- 
 pointment of schools; the sallies of wit; the hair-splitting 
 subtleties of metaphysics; the unknown depths of theology; 
 the origins of law; the reason of usage in the manner and 
 life of the nations; their traditions in poetry, legend, 
 and song; the mysterious framework of liturgical forms; 
 musical notation; the Gregorian chant; the etymology of 
 words; the study of languages; the flexion of verbs; and 
 many more topics. ... He spoke Latin as fluently as 
 German, and had a fair knowledge of Greek. Einhart 
 says that ' he spent much time and labor with Alcuin hi 
 the study of rhetoric, dialectics, and astronomy, learned 
 arithmetic, and with eager curiosity and intelligent scru- 
 tiny applied himself to the investigation of the motions of 
 the heavenly bodies.' ' 
 
 Einhart relates further: " After a long absence the most 
 victorious Charles returned into Gaul, and caused the chil- 
 dren, whom he had left with Clement as his pupils, to be 
 brought before him. He required them to be examined, 
 and was amazed at the commendable progress of the poorer 
 class of children, whose written productions were most 
 creditable to them. On the other hand, those of illustrious 
 parentage showed very poor specimens of their skill. He 
 then set the good scholars on his right, and the bad on his 
 left, saying: ' I praise you much, dear children, for your 
 excellent efforts, and desire you to continue so that you 
 may attain unto perfection; then I intend to give you rich 
 bishoprics, or splendid abbeys, and shall ever regard you 
 as persons of merit.' Then he turned in anger to those on 
 his left, who trembled at his frowns and the sound of his 
 voice, which resembled the roll of thunder, as he cried out 
 to them: ' Look here, ye scions of the best nobility, ye 
 pampered ones, who, trusting to your birth or fortune,
 
 98 OLD AND NEW 
 
 have disobeyed me, and instead of studying, as you were 
 bound and I expected you to do, have wasted your time in 
 idleness, on play, luxury, or unprofitable occupation.' He 
 then took his accustomed oath, and with uplifted head and 
 arm, said in a voice of thunder: ' By the king of heaven, 
 let others admire you as much as they please; as for me, 
 I set little store by your birth or beauty; understand ye 
 and remember it well, that unless you give heed speedily 
 to amend your past negligence by diligent study, you will 
 never obtain anything from Charles.' ' 
 
 Imagine, if you can, one of our college presidents or 
 trustees, or a governor at Commencement, " taking his 
 accustomed oath " and addressing the " swells " and 
 " sports " in such a style as this and promising " rich 
 bishoprics and splendid abbeys " to the " greasy grinds f " 
 Why, we ourselves, the official advocates of study, generally 
 feel constrained to express our admiration of it in depre- 
 catory terms. How often is it dinned into our ears that 
 scholastic success is no test of real ability, that the men 
 most useful in after-life are those who scorn to devote 
 themselves to books! Yet Charlemagne was no mere 
 academic theorist. Contrast with his attitude the super- 
 cilious pose so prevalent today prevalent among adults, 
 and still more among children. Has the world ever seen a 
 more completely self-satisfied being than an empty-headed 
 American high school pupil ? Here is an interesting bit 
 from the notes of a recent English traveler in our country, 
 who had been visiting one of our institutions of learning: 
 " I had formed no theory as to the value of some of the 
 best juvenile education in the Eastern States. But I had 
 learned one thing. I knew the secret of the fine, proud 
 bearing of young America. A child is not a fool; a child 
 is almost always uncannily shrewd. And when it sees a
 
 THE DARK AGES 99 
 
 splendid palace provided for it, when it sees money lavished 
 on hygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles for 
 its distraction, when it sees brains all bent on discovering 
 the best, nicest ways of dealing with its instincts, when 
 it sees itself the centre of a magnificent pageant, ritual, 
 devotion, almost worship, it naturally lifts its chin, puts 
 its shoulders back, steps out with a spring, and glances 
 confidently upon the whole world. Who wouldn't ? " 
 
 There is a supreme type of self-complacency which is 
 born of sheer ignorance, an ignorance so absolute as to 
 be unaware of the existence of anything to learn. And 
 this self-complacency, I have already said, is not confined 
 to school children: it is shared by old and young. It may 
 be called the dominating spirit of our time. One of its 
 marks is a contempt for thorough knowledge and a pro- 
 found distrust of anyone who is really well-informed. An 
 expert opinion on any subject becomes valueless the mo- 
 ment we learn that it emanates from a " college professor." 
 When a conspicuously competent person is suggested for 
 public office, the most damning accusation that can be 
 hurled at him is the epithet " academic." Few, indeed, can 
 bear up under the suspicion of actually knowing something. 
 
 A very serious college paper publishes an article by an 
 evidently earnest young man who maintains that scholar- 
 ship is essentially narrow and selfish; the really generous 
 student is he who works, not for the cultivation of his 
 own mind, but for the glory of his college. As if a college 
 could derive glory from anything but the fulfillment of its 
 proper mission, the cultivation of the individual minds 
 entrusted to it! The altruistic tone assumed by devotees 
 of college amusements is peculiarly irritating. I am 
 willing that children should make mud pies: it is their 
 nature to. But when they begin to declare that they are
 
 100 OLD AND NEW 
 
 making mud pies, not for their own delectation, but for 
 the embellishment of their city, it is time they were sent 
 on errands for their mother. Students are always ready 
 to do anything but study. Study is hard and distasteful, 
 because our boys and girls have never been used to mental 
 concentration; any other activity, whether it be athletics 
 or " social service," seems to them less painful, hence more 
 profitable. You are all aware how dangerous it is to 
 assume, on the part of our college classes, any definite 
 knowledge of any subject. Last year I had occasion to 
 question a good many students about our friend Charle- 
 magne; and one after another unblushingly assigned him 
 to the eighteenth century. A colleague in a " fresh water " 
 college could find no one in his class who knew what event 
 is celebrated on the fourth of July. In a course in French 
 literature, taken mainly by Juniors, a request to compare 
 a certain drama with Othello drew forth the admission that 
 a considerable part of the class knew nothing of Shak- 
 spere's play. " We had Hamlet" they cried, as if Shak- 
 spere were a disease from which one attack made them 
 immune. Of course it had never occurred to them that 
 anyone could be so mad as to read a book not prescribed. 
 You must have noticed how very difficult it has become 
 for college students not only to write but to read their 
 mother tongue. We give them books to study, and the 
 boys, for the most part, obligingly plow through them, for 
 they are good fellows; but they are no wiser after than 
 before. The text has conveyed nothing to them, because 
 they do not know the meaning of common English words. 
 
 It is not to be supposed (let me say once more) that 
 this vast and growing ignorance is peculiar to school and 
 college. It pervades society. Even the teacher and the 
 author are coming under its sway. Men of note are losing
 
 THE DARK AGES IOI 
 
 the power to speak or write their own language. This 
 subject was tellingly discussed by our last year's president, 
 and I need not dwell upon it. 
 
 The confusion of tongues, however, is not the only plague 
 fostered by darkness. Ignorance, having no means of 
 comparison, necessarily lacks a criterion, and is therefore 
 an easy prey to specious fallacy. It runs after every 
 novelty that for the moment appeals to its rudimentary 
 imagination. At what previous age in the history of 
 mankind has there been such a cult of the absurd as we 
 see today ? In art, literature, music, science, history, 
 psychology, education, religion, politics, the charlatan is 
 sure of a congregation, provided his antics be sufficiently 
 startling and grotesque. In the field of humor Washing- 
 ton Irving yields to Mutt and Jeff. In religion, we see 
 flourishing sects whose very names seem like a blasphe- 
 mous caricature. New schools of psychology are busily ex- 
 plaining the noted characters of fiction in the light of 
 arbitrary and eccentric physiological theories. Musicians 
 vie with one another in noisy cacophony. Of one of the 
 latest of the sowers of discord an up-to-date critic says: 
 " In his earlier years he wrote music which was thoroughly 
 clear and understandable, though of no special value. 
 Then, I surmise, he decided to draw attention to himself 
 forcibly by producing things of that wild extravagance 
 which he is now putting forth. It was a sort of artistic 
 lie. But there are plenty of persons who, if they tell lies 
 long enough, will actually end by implicitly believing them 
 
 to be the truth. That is 's case. He has come to 
 
 believe so implicitly in his own artistic lie that he now 
 lies with absolute sincerity. He wants to be a revolu- 
 tionist for the sake of being one." Of how many of our 
 one-day prophets can the same thing be said! Our critic
 
 102 OLD AND NEW 
 
 goes on to describe a composition by this artist: " It was 
 music which sounded something like what you might 
 expect if you placed a child at the piano and allowed 
 him to pound as he wished. Do not imagine I say this 
 because I am not modern hi my sympathies. There are 
 few who are more so than I. The unhappy consequence 
 
 of all this is that has founded a school and has a 
 
 number of disciples who try to ape his style without pos- 
 sessing his musical knowledge. And it so stands that 
 anybody will soon be able to write music, and however 
 impossible the things may turn out, they will be seriously 
 accepted as such." 
 
 In art, the Impressionists have long since been succeeded 
 by the Post-Impressionists, the Futurists, and the Cubists. 
 The Futurists, according to their own definition, " stand 
 upon the extreme promontory of the centuries; and why 
 should they look behind, when they have to break in myste- 
 rious portals of the Impossible." " To admire an old pic- 
 ture," they say, " is to pour our sensitiveness into a funeral 
 urn, instead of casting it forward in violent gushes of crea- 
 tion and action." " We stand," they declare, " on the 
 summit of the world, and cast our challenge to the stars." 
 " We must destroy hi sculpture, as hi every art, the tradi- 
 tional nobility of marble, and bronze also must go. The 
 sculptor can and must employ twenty different substances, 
 such as glass, wood, cardboard, cement, horsehair, leather, 
 wool, mirrors, electric light, and concrete. In the straight 
 lines of a match there is more truth and beauty than in all 
 the muscular contortions of the Laocoon." One of the prod- 
 ucts of this school is thus described: " Today at the Salon 
 d'Automne I have seen a Futurist sculpture group, and 
 a most extraordinary achievement it is. It does not fulfill 
 all the demands of the new art, for it is in the medium of
 
 THE DARK AGES 103 
 
 plaster, and there were no signs of such adventitious adorn- 
 ments as horsehair, mirrors, electric lights, and so on. 
 I should judge that it is intended to represent a group of 
 wrestlers, but I speak humbly and under correction; it 
 may have been intended for a battle-field or a surgical 
 operation. It is a medley of arms and legs, flowering, 
 so to speak, from a single torso. No head was visible. 
 It is the principle of the cinematograph applied to sculp- 
 ture." " Futurism," says an English journal, " is nothing 
 but a Latin Quarter escapade. But it is none the less a 
 symptom of the age. ... It is the cult of violence for 
 its own sake. It finds a motor car more beautiful than 
 the Victory of Samothrace. ... It is the art of an age 
 which is turning to irrationalism in politics as in meta- 
 physics." I remember examining, a few years ago, a 
 pretentious Italian periodical devoted to Futurism. Its 
 battle-cry was " Down with everything! " It would be 
 satisfied with nothing short of the overthrow of all existing 
 institutions and the creation of a brand-new society and 
 art. Especially were museums and libraries to be con- 
 signed to utter destruction. The published specimens of 
 the new art, which thus modestly offers itself as more than 
 a substitute for all that has been, make one quite content 
 to die before the Futurist future dawns. 
 
 Of the Cubists an ordinarily sedate critic has this to 
 say: " In this Autumn Salon, the snobbery of a few good 
 souls has been pleased to group morose and maniac geom- 
 eters with delirious dyers, crazily covering their defense- 
 less canvases with color puddles and diagrams which you 
 would say had been traced by some demented Bouvard and 
 Pecuchet. One of the most unformed daubs of this Salon 
 is dedicated: 'To mariners, travelers, and mountebanks.' 
 Taking into account the foreigners, cranks, and humbugs
 
 104 OLD 
 
 who are the main originality of this Salon in which 
 ' French ' taste was to be renewed we wonder the organ- 
 izing committee did not choose this ' symbolic and syn- 
 thetic ' picture for its poster." Here is a description of 
 a picture named " Mountaineers Attacked by Bears," and 
 dated " Annecy 1911 Paris 1912": " If I guess the 
 rebus aright, then you must make out in this picture's 
 tangle not only the episode of its title, but the route from 
 Annecy to Paris, railway and bridges, telegraph wires, 
 and the compartment in which the painter sat during his 
 journey, and the house in which he lives, as well as the 
 mountain site where the wicked bears attacked the poor 
 travelers and the gun they used for their defense. Of 
 bears and mountaineers, of road and landscape, only un- 
 formed morsels and scattered bits, thrown and cut ab"out 
 at random, remain, so that the mother bear herself would 
 no more recognize her little ones than her victims." 
 
 Concerning Post-Impressionism an expert tells us: " The 
 essence of Post-Impressionism is to distrust or to scorn 
 all tradition, and the diligence with which this distrust or 
 scorn is being expressed by faithful adherence to a new 
 tradition makes one wonder if the attraction may not be, 
 not the principles of the school, but the short cut it seems 
 to offer to art." It is no doubt true that many of the 
 senseless fads in all branches of mental activity are due, 
 in their inception, to the over-abundance of respectable 
 mediocrity, an abundance which leaves little chance of 
 recognition to the man of unbounded ambition but mod- 
 erate endowments, unless he can invent some glaring extrav- 
 agance to make himself conspicuous. But his trumpeting 
 would avail nothing, were it not for the dense ignorance of 
 his public. Lack of knowledge means lack of judgment, 
 and lack of judgment feeds the pretender. It is easier to
 
 THE DARK AGES 105 
 
 make a big stench than a sweet fragrance; and the fouler 
 the odor, the more inclined are the incompetent to sniff 
 rapturously and ejaculate: " How strong! " Listen to 
 Frederic Harrison on The Cult of the Foul: " The new 
 craze under which we are now suffering is the Cult of the 
 Foul, or to put it in Greek, it may be dubbed Aischro- 
 latreia worship or admiration of the Ugly, the Nasty, the 
 Brutal. Poetry, Romance, Drama, Painting, Sculpture, 
 Music, Manners, even Dress, are now recast to suit popular 
 taste by adopting forms which hitherto have been regarded 
 as unpleasing, gross, or actually loathsome. To be refined 
 is to be ' goody-goody ' ; gutter slang is ' so actual ' ; if a 
 ruffian tramp knifes his pal, it is ' so strong ' ; and if on 
 the stage his ragged paramour bites off a rival's ear, the 
 halfpenny press screams with delight. Painters are warned 
 against anything * pretty/ so they dab on bright tints to 
 look like a linoleum pattern, or they go for subjects to a 
 thieves' kitchen. The one aim in life, as in Art, is to shock 
 one's grandmother." 
 
 Does all this signify that we are more vicious, more 
 depraved than our fathers ? Are we witnessing a violent 
 reaction against accepted canons of decency in life ? I do 
 not think so. It does not seem to me that the general 
 moral conduct of the community is worse than it has been 
 before. If art, letters, dress are more indecent, it simply 
 means that we are more ignorant. By our neglect of the 
 past we have cut ourselves off from standards of all kinds, 
 and hence, like the new-born moth, are attracted by the 
 first glare. Dante had a word to say on this theme, many 
 centuries ago: " Just as the man who has lost the sight of 
 his bodily eyes has to depend on others for the distinction 
 of good and bad, so he who possesses not the light .of dis- 
 crimination always follows after the shout, be it true or
 
 106 OLD AND NEW 
 
 false. . . . Thus these blind people, who are well-nigh 
 countless, resting their hands on the shoulders of lying 
 guides, fall into the ditch, from which they cannot escape. 
 It is especially men of the people who are bereft of the 
 light of judgment, because, taken up from the beginning 
 of their life with some trade, they are obliged so to con- 
 centrate their minds on it that they think of naught else. 
 And inasmuch as the habit of any virtue, moral or intel- 
 lectual, cannot be assumed at once, but must be acquired 
 by practice, and they practise nothing but their handicraft 
 and bestow no care on other things, it is impossible for 
 them to have judgment. . . . They should be called sheep, 
 not men. For if one sheep should throw itself over a high 
 cliff, all the others would go after it." . 
 
 This is a passage to be meditated by our professional 
 educators. There was a time when schools attempted, at 
 least, to cultivate discrimination and to furnish the ma- 
 terial on which selection can be founded; but in these days 
 of " vocational training," when pupils are encouraged " to 
 practise nothing but their handicraft," it is, in Dante's 
 words, " impossible for them to have judgment." And it 
 is inevitable that in their blindness they should follow false 
 guides; for the loudest bellow is sure to issue from the 
 windiest prophet, the biggest blaze from those luminaries 
 that would rather be flashlights, and dazzle for one instant, 
 than gleam as modest but permanent stars in the sky. 
 " They that be wise," says a once popular book, " shall 
 shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that 
 turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." 
 But none of this for our Futurists, Post-Futurists, and Neo's 
 of every description. They have all taken as their watch- 
 word the motto of the melancholy jockey in The Arcadians: 
 A short life and a gay one!
 
 THE DARK AGES 107 
 
 One is tempted to say that the motto of their disciples 
 is that phrase of Tertullian's: " Credo quia absurdum." 
 But that would not be quite just. They do not believe 
 in folly (as Tertullian, for a quite different reason, did 
 hi wisdom) because it is absurd, but because they do not 
 know how absurd it is, and because folly has a louder 
 voice than common sense. Just as, in a crowded street 
 on a rainy day, every wayfarer tries to lift his umbrella 
 above all the others, so every preacher today is trying to 
 raise his utterance to a higher pitch than all his competi- 
 tors. Only by surpassing shrillness of exaggeration can 
 we get a hearing. We all feel it the politician on the 
 stump, the clergyman hi the pulpit, the professor in the 
 classroom even the president of a learned society de- 
 livering his presidential address: and we all yield more or 
 less to the temptation. If we do not, we are consigned to 
 back seats as " mere teachers," and get no more attention 
 than an organ-grinder playing Trovatore. 
 
 By this time it may have occurred to some of you that 
 the Dark Age I am discussing is not the period extending 
 from the fifth to the eleventh century, but a much nearer 
 one. I suggest, indeed, that we alter the Century defini- 
 tion to something like this: " The dark ages, an epoch in 
 the world's history, beginning with or shortly after the 
 French Revolution, marked by a general extension and 
 cheapening of education resulting in a vast increase of 
 self-confident ignorance. It was induced by the gradual 
 triumph of democracy, and will last until the masses, now 
 become arbiters of taste and science, shall have been raised 
 to the level formerly occupied by the privileged classes." 
 
 It is doubtless true that the aggregate of knowledge, 
 at the present day, is greater than ever before; but it is 
 equally true that the large shareholders in this knowledge
 
 108 OLD AND NEW 
 
 are no longer in control. Leadership has been assumed 
 by the untrained host, which is troubled by no doubt con- 
 cerning its competence and therefore feels no inclination 
 to improve its judgment. The ignorance characteristic 
 of our Dark Age is a supremely self-satisfied ignorance. 
 Ours is, I think, the first period in human history to belie 
 Aristotle's saying, " All men naturally desire to know." 
 Never before were conditions so favorable to the easy 
 diffusion of a false semblance of information. Cheap 
 magazines, Sunday supplements, moving pictures have 
 taken the place of books. Quickly scanned and quickly 
 forgotten, they leave in the mind nothing but the illusion 
 of knowledge. On the other hand, it must be admitted 
 that the number of persons who have received some school- 
 ing is more considerable than in any previous century; 
 but this admission must be accompanied by the corollary 
 that the schooling is proportionately ineffective. The 
 more widely education has been diffused, the thinner it has 
 been spread. We have now reached a stage where it seems 
 to be on the verge of reverting to the old system of appren- 
 ticeship to a trade. All this is natural and inevitable. 
 It is scarcely conceivable that democracy should ever 
 relinquish its hold. The civilized world is committed to 
 the principle of majority rule, believing that the suprem- 
 acy of the many results in the greatest good to the greatest 
 number. The masses must come into their inheritance, 
 even if that heritage, in their unskilled hands, bear for a 
 long time but little fruit. 
 
 In the early stages of the leveling process, the tendency 
 was to lift the plebs up toward the mental condition of 
 the patricians. Little by little, however, the power of 
 inertia has reversed the movement, and now equalization 
 has come to mean the lowering of the brahmin to the dead
 
 THE DARK AGES 109 
 
 level of the intellectual pariah. It is of this " downward 
 revision " of education that I am complaining, not of the 
 great democratic evolution of which it is an unfortunate 
 by-product. We are confronted by a definite evil, which 
 can and must be corrected; otherwise it would be useless 
 to complain at all. How frequently do we hear that the 
 high school diploma, and even the college degree, should 
 be " within the reach of every American boy! " And the 
 strongest tendency in our education today is to put it there. 
 When this dream shall have been realized, the result will 
 evidently be that the degree will be worth nothing to any- 
 body. The Spaniards have a saying that all Basques are 
 noble; so every American, it would seem, should be ex 
 qfficio a Bachelor of Arts. I have often thought that the 
 only way to satisfy the popular demand would be to confer 
 the A.B. on every child at its birth. But we can never 
 make a man a scholar by calling him one. If democracy 
 is to be a success (as we all hope and believe), that end 
 must be reached not by degrading education to the present 
 taste of the lowest part of the demos, but by lifting the 
 demos to a better understanding of the value of learning. 
 
 This all-important task has fallen of late into poor hands. 
 The principal of a big high school was discussing with me, 
 not long ago, the wholesale migration of the better class of 
 pupils from public to private establishments. " Parents," 
 he said, " are discovering that their children are getting 
 next to nothing in the public school. Why is it ? When 
 I compare the men who taught me, and taught me well, 
 with the present teachers, who can hardly be said to teach 
 anybody anything, I am puzzled to account for the differ- 
 ence. The older men were really no better scholars than 
 the new ones, and worked no harder. The only explana- 
 tion I can offer is that the earlier generation knew nothing
 
 1 10 OLD AND NEW 
 
 of pedagogy." What he rashly spoke, many masters are 
 thinking. However, it seems to me that we must, in 
 justice, make a distinction between pedagogy and pseudo- 
 pedagogy. The former exists, although the latter is so much 
 more in evidence that the name " educator," for many 
 intelligent people, has become a term of opprobrium. 
 While the genuinely serious student of education is still 
 groping, trying to find a spot on which to lay the founda- 
 tions of a science, a host of pseudo-educators, too unin- 
 structed to know any better, are loudly proclaiming them- 
 selves sole possessors of the whole secret of the art of 
 teaching. An easy career has been opened to young men 
 not overburdened with wit or learning. Having collected 
 some information about school administration and the 
 history of pedagogical speculation, a set of arbitrary form- 
 ulas, some bits of dubious psychology, and, above all, an 
 imposing technical vocabulary, they are accepted as 
 prophets by an equally ignorant public, and given control 
 of our schools. A specialist writes in The Forum: " For 
 a decade or two we have taught theories rather than chil- 
 dren, and the result is that the children have scarcely been 
 educated." 
 
 Even worse than empty theorizing is the disposition to 
 cater to the native indolence of the pupil and the foolish 
 indulgences of the parent. Listen to the words of the new 
 president of Amherst College, as reported by the press: 
 " The boy chooses on some special line the line of voca- 
 tion, the line of ' snaps/ the line of a certain profession or 
 the days that will let the student get out of town. What 
 do you get ? Any sort of training ? None at all. ... 
 The old classical curriculum believed that if you take 
 certain studies and work them through you'd get out of 
 them the deepest things of human experience." Alas! what
 
 THE DARK AGES III 
 
 does the typical boy or the typical parent or the typical 
 educator care for " the deepest things of human experi- 
 ence ? " The phrase has an unpleasant suggestion of the 
 difficult and the unpractical, and to call a study " un- 
 practical " is to damn it to the " lowest hell." What we 
 term " vocational training," being the most " practical " 
 thing of all and offering no considerable difficulty to the 
 pupil (much of it being, in fact, hi the nature of play), 
 is now first in favor. It is surely an excellent thing hi its 
 place as a supplement to education or as an apprentice- 
 ship for those who must remain uneducated. I believe it 
 is destined to render great service. But let us not make 
 the mistake of calling it " education." It should prepare 
 a boy to succeed in his business; probably it will, when it 
 is better developed. But it affords no more education than 
 is to be derived from the business itself. When we say 
 that " life is a school," we are conscious that our phrase 
 is a figure of speech: " vocational education " is another. 
 Perhaps the worst feature of it is that " vocational " sub- 
 jects are so apt to be chosen, not from vocation, not with 
 any intention of preparing for a career, but merely for the 
 purpose of avoiding real study. 
 
 The confusion arising from a new conception of the 
 functions of the state and the school, and from the neces- 
 sity of providing some kind of training adapted to the 
 needs of all, has given currency to certain fallacies, which 
 it is the duty of the better informed members of society 
 to meet and combat. First of all, let us ask ourselves what 
 should be the purpose of education in a democracy. Should 
 it be solely to fit men and women to perform efficiently 
 their daily economic task? That is, of course, an im- 
 poitant function, but it cannot be all. Otherwise progress 
 would become impossible as far as schooling can make it
 
 112 OLD AND NEW 
 
 so, and the life of man would hardly differ from that of a 
 horse. If the only object of life is to stay alive, of what 
 use is it to live at all ? The ideal of economic efficiency 
 is best realized by a machine. But the individuals we 
 have to deal with are not machines: they are human beings 
 of almost infinite capacities, destined to be citizens and 
 parents. They must be capable of living the life of the 
 spirit, of appreciating the good things in nature, hi con- 
 duct, and in art; they must be able to cope intelligently 
 with weighty problems of public policy; they must leave 
 behind them descendants who shall be more, rather than 
 less, competent than themselves. The higher we rise in 
 the scale of development, the less conspicuous the purely 
 economic aspect of the individual becomes. 
 
 " Let us cut loose from the past," is another favorite 
 cry, " and devote ourselves to the practical issues of the day ! 
 The past is dead. We will turn our backs upon it, and 
 give ourselves to the living present." How familiar these 
 words have become in the public press and in college 
 papers, and in assemblies of educators! Anything that 
 bears the label of actuality attracts the throng, whether 
 it be on the book-shelf or on the stage, in the public lecture- 
 hall or in the academic classroom. College courses deal- 
 ing with supposedly practical and contemporary things are 
 as crowded as those which reveal the treasures of the past 
 are deserted. Significant of this mood is the frequency 
 with which we see on a theater program the notice: " Time 
 the Present." " Only the present is real," say the 
 modernists. On the contrary, say I, nothing is more un- 
 real, more elusive, more fictitious. The time that was 
 present when I began this sentence is now gone by. The 
 present is an illusion: it is a perpetually shifting mathe- 
 matical line dividing the future of which (humanly speak-
 
 THE DARK AGES 113 
 
 ing) we know nothing, from the past, of which we know 
 much. 
 
 This clamor for the present resolves itself, then, into a 
 demand for the recent past. But where shall we find the 
 demarcation between the recent past and the more remote ? 
 At what period of man's existence has there been a break 
 in the continuity of his history ? Is there a date since 
 which human experience has had no connection with that 
 which preceded ? Search as we may, we shall discover 
 nothing but an endless chain. Today's thoughts and hap- 
 penings can be understood only in the light of yesterday's, 
 and those only through their relation to the events of the 
 day before. All the knowledge we possess, save in abstract 
 matters outside the confines of tune, is of the past, and the 
 further back we can project our vision, the more compre- 
 hensive, the more thorough, the more efficient is that knowl- 
 edge. The more efficient; and the more practical. For 
 our only guide in affairs public and private is comparison 
 with bygone things. What men shall do is determined by 
 what men have done; what men are to be is revealed by 
 what men have been. Everyone agrees that among all 
 subjects of study none is more essential nor more interest- 
 ing than human nature. 
 
 The proper study of mankind is man 
 
 is as familiar a quotation as ever. And where is man 
 better to be studied than in his records ? Just compare 
 in number, in variety, in significance the people whom 
 you know in the flesh with those you know through books. 
 " The reading of all good books," says Descartes, " is like 
 a conversation with the best people of bygone centuries." 
 
 Let me quote a paragraph from a contributor to one of 
 our leading journals: " Universities are beginning to see
 
 H4 OLD AND NEW 
 
 that theoretical, or absolute, truth the sort upon which 
 ideals are founded is difficult to deduce from a narrow 
 study of actual, contemporary life. Existence examined 
 at close range means loss of perspective. . . . Not only 
 do young men find it hard to project themselves back of 
 the present, but equally hard to pursue any line of thought 
 which has no practical bearings." Why is it that the 
 study of the past seems irksome to the new generation ? 
 It is partly because such study requires concentration and 
 judgment. But a more potent reason is to be found in a 
 false view of life, due to a shallow interpretation of social- 
 ism an idea that humanity is about to take a fresh start, 
 unhampered by all the influences that have made it. 
 Progress is possible only through utilization of experience. 
 A child with no parents or other elders to direct it would 
 be an idiot. If each individual had not profited by the 
 successes and failures of his predecessors, we should still 
 be in a state of primeval protoplasm. The present genera- 
 tion calls itself practical. But think of the waste of effort 
 that even partial ignorance of the past entails! We must 
 compute not only the trials and losses that might have 
 been avoided by knowledge of what others have done, but 
 also the labor spent hi duplication, hi learning lessons and 
 working out results long since accessible to the world. 
 
 Another prevalent fallacy, which has found favor even 
 in high quarters, is the belief that for the training of the 
 young one subject is just as good as another. This is 
 surely, on the face of it, an amazing doctrine to promul- 
 gate: it runs counter to all tradition and, as far as I am 
 aware, to all contemporary experience. One would think 
 the burden of proof should rest on its confessors. Yet 
 they have offered not a shred of evidence nothing but 
 bald assertion. And on the basis of this empty vocifera-
 
 THE DARK AGES 115 
 
 tion school programs and college admission requirements 
 are overturned. Perhaps our age has furnished no better 
 example than this of its sheeplike sequacity. We, here 
 present, are nearly all of us teachers, and as competent 
 as anybody to testify in this case; and I venture to say 
 there is not one among us who has not observed, in students 
 who have pursued widely different studies, a correspond- 
 ing difference in general aptitude. It does not stand to 
 reason that algebra should develop the same faculties as 
 freehand drawing or Greek the same as blacksmithing. 
 Probably the greatest divergence in the educational value 
 of studies is due to the varying degree to which they 
 require concentration, judgment, observation, and imagi- 
 nation. Some occupations can be pursued with tolerable 
 success while the mind is wandering; others, like arith- 
 metic and algebra, demand close and constant attention. 
 Some can be carried on by an almost mechanical process; 
 others, like Greek and Latin, call for continual reasoning 
 and the application of general principles to particular 
 cases. Some exact little of the mind, but much of the eye. 
 Some, restricted to practical realities, make no appeal to 
 the aesthetic sense; others, such as literature, native or 
 foreign, tend to develop the imagination while awaken- 
 ing appreciation of the beautiful. This, I know, is old- 
 fashioned doctrine; but until we have conclusive evidence 
 to offset our own observation and that of all our ancestors, 
 we shall do well to foster the studies most conducive to 
 the habits we wish to cultivate. 
 
 The fallacy just denned is closely related to another, 
 which it has been used to support: namely, the doctrine 
 that all study must be made agreeable to the student. 
 More and more the difficult subjects have been replaced 
 by easier ones, and these have been made easier yet by
 
 Il6 OLD AND NEW 
 
 the extraction of obstacles and the invention of painless 
 methods. Grammarless modern languages, delatinized 
 Latin, simplified mathematics omit the very features that 
 make study valuable. Predigested foods of all sorts have 
 almost deprived our youth of the power to use their own 
 teeth. Amusement is looked for, rather than instruction. 
 " Snap " courses have, indeed, been seriously defended on 
 the ground that even though they teach nothing tangible, . 
 they confer an indefinable something that is better than 
 knowledge. I would not deny that contact with a superior 
 mind may serve as an inspiration; it reveals unsuspected 
 possibilities of culture, and moves the responsive lad to 
 emulation. But if the responsive lad does not follow this 
 impulse, if he wilfully neglects a recognized opportunity, 
 he loses more than he gains. He has begun the acquisition 
 of a vicious habit which will make it harder for him, the 
 next time, to obey the call of duty. We shall not be far 
 wrong in saying that a student who puts nothing into a 
 course gets nothing out of it; and what he gets, in educa- 
 tion as in trade, is proportionate to what he gives. We 
 often hear, particularly from those who are not over- 
 successful in imparting information, attractive discourse 
 about " building character." Character is built by effort 
 from within, not by admired but unheeded eloquence 
 externally applied. We are every now and then called 
 upon to admire the self-educated man. But every edu- 
 cated man is self-educated. Our minds as well as our 
 characters are shaped by what we do ourselves, not by 
 what others do for us. The chief benefit of education lies 
 in the effort it demands. If school is to be a preparation 
 for life, it must train the child for the performance of 
 the duties that life has in store for him; it must develop 
 in him the habit of cheerfully and regularly accomplish-
 
 THE DARK AGES 117 
 
 ing irksome tasks. " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou 
 eat bread " is the law of life, and a wholesome law it is. 
 " The joy of work " is a noble phrase, and an excellent 
 maxim if properly understood; but the joy of work must 
 not be confounded with the joy of self-indulgence. In 
 self-indulgence the joy comes first, the pleasure is mainly 
 one of anticipation; and gloom is apt to follow after. 
 Work, for most people, is self-denial; and in self-denial 
 the conditions are reversed: it is the beginning that is 
 painful, and joy comes with the fulfillment. This joy may 
 be far greater than that of self-indulgence, but it is remote 
 from the chooser, who is likely to see only the preliminary 
 pain. It is natural for all of us since Adam's fall and 
 particularly for the inexperienced to choose the imme- 
 diate pleasure; and this innate tendency it is the business 
 of education to counteract. 
 
 " We do not value Knowledge, but Power," shout the 
 educational Cubists, who apparently would make a man 
 foursquare with nothing inside. We must no longer teach 
 a lad that 7x8= 56: that is simply knowledge. Let 
 him be aware that somewhere in the library there is a book 
 called an algebra, geometry, or something of the sort, in 
 which such tiresome facts are tabulated: that is Power. 
 When I was a child, we used to write in our copy-books, 
 " Knowledge is Power "; that maxim was held up to us 
 as the fundamental principle of education. And so it is! 
 Furthermore, it holds good for all life, not for school alone. 
 Knowledge is not only the greatest but almost the only 
 source of human power. What makes the success of our 
 captains of industry ? Clear, full, accurate information 
 concerning the industries to be captained, together with 
 sufficient imagination to conceive audacious plans for cap- 
 taining them. The same combination of keen imagination
 
 Il8 OLD AND NEW 
 
 with well-nigh exhaustive knowledge in many fields made 
 Napoleon great among generals and statesmen. Among 
 savages, who is the ruler ? The Medicine-Man, the only 
 one who knows. I have been told that even among prize- 
 fighters the best is he who knows most of the art of sparring. 
 Of course, knowledge, like anything else, to be valuable 
 must be ready for use. We hear, in fact, a great deal 
 of lamentation over the student crammed full of knowledge 
 which he cannot employ. In the lack of a living specimen, 
 let us assume the potential existence of a student thus 
 crammed. We may go so far as to admit that it is quite 
 within the range of possibility for a man to possess knowl- 
 edge for which he will never have any occasion, and also 
 knowledge which he will be unable to utilize when a suitable 
 occasion shall present itself. On the other hand, one thing 
 is certain: a man who does not possess knowledge cannot 
 use it under any circumstances. Our only chance of success 
 lies in acquiring knowledge as much of it as we can get 
 and keeping it well dusted, well labeled, well classified. 
 We shall never gain power from vague discourse about un- 
 known or unassimilated facts. What constitutes power ? 
 To a certain extent, strength of will. So far as that is a 
 product of education, it can be developed only by the sys- 
 tematic overcoming of obstacles, by resolutely doing the 
 things that lead to the achievement of our object, whether 
 we like them or not Aside from will force, power consists 
 in the ability to make swift and accurate comparisons and 
 deductions. But this is manifestly impossible, if we do not 
 know the terms to be compared and the data from which 
 inferences are to be drawn. It is only by dealing with 
 definite truths that judgment can be trained. 
 
 Now to retain these truths, to keep them clear and 
 correct, what we need above all is memory. And memory
 
 THE DARK AGES 119 
 
 (alas!) is even more discredited than knowledge. It is, 
 indeed, scarcely ever called by its simple name, being 
 customarily cited, in alliterative disparagement, as " mere 
 memory." The criticism of instruction that we oftenest 
 hear nowadays is that school children are " stuffed with 
 facts," to the detriment of Power. I should like to know 
 what these facts are. For nearly thirty years I have 
 been vainly trying to find some of them. The conclusion 
 has been forced upon me that this denunciation is a heri- 
 tage from a more primitive age, when children really were 
 taught facts, and when memory was not left in an embry- 
 onic state. The truth is that memory and imagination, 
 the two most important human faculties, are scarcely 
 cultivated at all. There was a time when mnemonic exer- 
 cises were in vogue, when the development of a quick, sure, 
 retentive memory was thought to be one of the principal 
 duties of the schoolmaster. That time has gone by; and 
 the disastrous results of its passing are everywhere ap- 
 parent. It is pitiful to see the agonies that the ordinary 
 college student has to suffer, if he is obliged to learn any- 
 thing outright. It is amazing to see how readily he forgets 
 the things which he is told and which, for the moment, he 
 apparently understands. What is the use of all our endless 
 lecturing, of our long assignments of " outside reading," if 
 the pupil's mind retains nothing but confused and mainly 
 erroneous impressions ? Memory is, indeed, the very basis 
 of all knowledge, and therefore of nearly all human power. 
 The main difference between a wise man and a fool is that 
 the one remembers, the other forgets. And memory, unlike 
 some of our attributes, depends largely upon training for 
 its efficiency. 
 
 The great tragic poet Alfieri has described his experi- 
 ence at the Academy of Turin as " eight years of unedu-
 
 120 OLD AND NEW 
 
 cation." " Uneducation," a natural fruit of our present 
 pedagogical theories, is perhaps the principal cause of our 
 intellectual darkness. Only when the educator shall have 
 been educated, the air cleared of noxious fallacies, and a 
 sound and virile conception of learning restored, will the 
 reign of Humbug come to an end. Not until then will light 
 begin to dawn on our Dark Ages.
 
 MEN go about, says St. Augustine, to wonder at seas and 
 waves and mountains and rivers and ocean and stars, when 
 they might find so much more that is worthy of study in 
 themselves. Ofttimes the hunter after foreign tongues is 
 only half conscious of his native language; often he is far 
 more interested hi the sounds and idioms of French or Span- 
 ish than hi those which fall from his own lips. The speech 
 that I am about to discuss has the disadvantages as well as 
 the advantage of familiarity. Those things which are always 
 about us, while they are the easiest to observe with ac- 
 curacy, are the ones that least arrest our attention. Only 
 by comparison with things more remote do they fully show 
 themselves to us. The moss-covered bucket of our child- 
 hood, indelibly stamped though it be on the memory, is 
 devoid of poetic charm indeed, of any significance 
 until experience contrasts it with urban plumbing. 
 
 The moss-covered dialect which distant linguistic wan- 
 derings have revealed to me is my own. It is one of my 
 earliest possessions, one of my first vehicles of expression. 
 Every cultivated man has at least two dialects. When 
 James Russell Lowell returned from the court of St. James 
 his speech was unmistakably British; but he had not for- 
 gotten the ways of Biglow, and he was doubtless master of 
 several intermediate fashions. I am inclined to believe 
 that even savages make some distinction between a cere- 
 monious and a workaday style. The son of an African
 
 122 OLD AND NEW 
 
 chief recently told me that in his tribe, whose language has 
 never been reduced to writing, there were certain profes- 
 sional rhetoricians, orators capable of holding a crowd for 
 hours in open-mouthed admiration by their polished dic- 
 tion. The children whom as a small child I knew had a 
 grown-up idiom for their elders, an unconstrained one for 
 their comrades. For my own part, though essentially a 
 city boy, I was nearly as much at home in the country, 
 where most of my relatives lived and where I spent a good 
 deal of my time. I spoke, therefore, three dialects: adult 
 urban, infantile urban, and rural the last acquired not 
 only in eastern, central, and western Massachusetts, but 
 also in New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont. Later J. 
 added two others the fashionable Boston style then 
 known as " West End " and the language of some British 
 playmates who were my companions during a sojourn hi 
 Germany. 
 
 When we speak of New England pronunciation, we gen- 
 erally have in mind, no doubt, the country rather than the 
 city usage, the former having remained more distinctively 
 local, the latter having been modified by race mixture 
 and by inter-urban communication. In twentieth century 
 Boston, the bulk of the population is of Irish descent and 
 keeps to some extent its Irish accent; the ordinary Yan- 
 kees use a mitigated Yankee speech shorn of its most con- 
 spicuous Yankeeisms; the upper circles and those who 
 aspire thereto are apt to favor a pronunciation derived, it 
 would seem, from that which prevailed in England a couple 
 of generations ago. Most interesting, of course, is the usage 
 that has most flavor of the soil. 
 
 In one respect all American dialects are surprisingly alike, 
 and no less surprisingly different from the speech of the 
 mother country; I mean in intonation. Again and again,
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 123 
 
 in the streets of a foreign city, I have caught from a pass- 
 ing pair a little fragment of an English phrase, often with- 
 out distinguishing the words; and scarcely ever could I 
 doubt whether the speaker was an American or an English- 
 man. Aside from differences in the quality of voice (the 
 British being generally more sonorous), tone sequences 
 clearly indicate the side of the Atlantic from which they 
 come. Our utterance is slow and monotonous, our vari- 
 ations in pitch are of small compass, we are greatly ad- 
 dicted to very slight rising-falling-rising inflections. We 
 seem to be holding ourselves in. The Englishman, on the 
 other hand, seems to be singing full-throated. To my ear, 
 the British intonations are today the most beautiful I know 
 hi any language. I say " today " because they have changed 
 notably within my recollection. They must have been 
 more or less consciously cultivated, much as a song-bird 
 studies its tune. All highly developed forms of utterance 
 are studiously acquired, the " tough " jargon of the East 
 Side no less than the dainty discourse of the Four Hun- 
 dred. Inasmuch as Canadian, Australian, and, I think, 
 South African inflections are closer to ours than to those 
 of England, it is likely that we represent the earlier type, 
 from which the insular Britons, by concerted aesthetic 
 endeavor, have departed. Can it be that the music of birds 
 first developed in similar fashion ? 
 
 Among Americans, I believe we New Englanders, though 
 less drawly than the South, are fondest of the double cir- 
 cumflex accent with a compass of less than half a tone, 
 which we often use at the end of a sentence, leaving an 
 impression of mental reservation. You may remember the 
 man in black, who seemed to be as fine a man as ever Ar- 
 temus Ward set eyes on, and who accosted that genial 
 showman on a railway train. " It's a fine day," said the
 
 124 OLD AND NEW 
 
 stranger. " ' Middlin,' ses I, not wishin to commit myself; 
 ' it's a middlin fine day.' ' Our American utterance in 
 general appears to be characterized by an unwillingness to 
 commit ourselves. Now, Artemus Ward may have said 
 either " middlin," with a falling-rising, or " middlin'," with 
 rising-falling-rising effect. The former is the more guarded; 
 it is markedly distrustful. The second is the normal Yankee 
 inflection, and expresses nothing more than habitual pre- 
 caution against the reactions of a malignant and ever- 
 watchful Providence. 
 
 Intonations deserve more study. Although they form 
 the most important element hi the acquisition of what is 
 called " a good accent," they are scarcely ever mentioned 
 in guides to pronunciation. No matter how correct be 
 one's production of individual units, the whole thing sounds 
 bad if the tune is wrong. Inflections can best be learned 
 by echoing phrase after phrase as it leaves the teacher's 
 mouth. Hard to discuss they obviously are, because we 
 have no means of portraying them. Even a musical nota- 
 tion will not do, their intervals being different from those 
 of the scale. They can be imitated on the violin, but not 
 on the piano. Perhaps their notes could be adjusted to 
 some oriental mode that recognizes minute intervals; but 
 these modes, I believe, are not written. I have sometimes 
 tried to fix intonations graphically on coordinate paper 
 that is, paper ruled into little squares. Letting the height 
 of each of these squares stand for a half-tone, I have repre- 
 sented the constantly gliding pitch of speech by a consecu- 
 tive wavy line crossing the sheet and traversing the squares 
 at the appropriate places. 
 
 The difficulty of notation exists also, though by no means 
 to the same degree, for the separate sounds of language. I 
 can pronounce a dialect vowel so that the hearer may catch
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 125 
 
 and reproduce it; but how shall I write it ? There are, to 
 be sure, excellent phonetic alphabets; none, however, can 
 be trusted to indicate all shades of difference; nor can the 
 general reader be trusted to decipher an esoteric script. As 
 to our ordinary spelling, it is hopeless, at least as far as 
 vowels are concerned. Our letters are like wax faces whose 
 features have been so rubbed off that they suggest no one 
 person more than another. To return to Artemus Ward, 
 it may be recalled that he could give to one of his waxwork 
 figures at will " a benevolent or a fiendish look." Even so 
 our overworked letters, expressing nothing in particular, 
 may register any expression. If I write u, who shall tell 
 whether I mean the vowel of duty, of brute, of put, of but, 
 of curl not to speak of the noun minute ? This unfortu- 
 nate type is like Full Private James in one of Gilbert's Bab 
 Ballads: 
 
 No characteristic trait had he 
 
 Of any distinctive kind. 
 
 And his fellows are no better. I suppose the archaisms 
 that encrust us must be sloughed off one by one. We have 
 got the Arabic numerals; we have got an intelligible method 
 of writing music; we are getting the metric system; some 
 day we shall invent an orthography. I believe that among 
 my various reasons for disliking the present English spell- 
 ing, the strongest of all is an aesthetic one. Adaptation to 
 purpose is a fundamental principle of beauty in useful 
 things; and our writing is about as well adapted to repre- 
 senting our speech as a flint knife is adapted to shaving. 
 The hideous clumsiness of our spelling exasperates me even 
 more than its inadequacy. 
 
 What are some of the things we should like to represent ? 
 Let us consider first the three principal diphthongs, to wit, 
 the combinations ou as in out, oi as in oil, i as in ice. So
 
 126 OLD AND NEW 
 
 great is the mental confusion induced by English orthog- 
 raphy that many educated persons, even some teachers of 
 diction, are unaware and can hardly be convinced that i 
 is as much a diphthong as ou and oi. Its first element is 
 generally the a oi father, its second is approximately the i 
 of pin; but, as is always the case with English diphthongs, 
 the transition is gradual, one vowel melting into the other. 
 Such is its composition in the standard speech of most of 
 the United States today, although some speakers here, as 
 in England, begin it with the a oifat rather than with that 
 oi father. In Benjamin Franklin's time the first part was 
 the vowel of but, and this pronunciation was recommended 
 as late as 1840 by Samuel Willard (the author of the Frank- 
 lin Primer and Reader) in his General Class-Book, published 
 in Greenfield, Mass. It still survives sporadically, oftenest 
 after a p or a b, as in pine, spider, buy, all of which I have 
 heard. However, the modern pronunciation was pre- 
 scribed in 1789 by Noah Webster. In Schuyler Clark's 
 American Linguist, issued in Providence in 1830, we read 
 that the word mine is equivalent to ma in in the sentence 
 " is ma in ? " Most of us have heard, no doubt, from 
 elderly people, a pronunciation of such words as kind, sky, 
 guide with a y consonant interposed between the k or g 
 and the i: kyind, etc. This was the practice of James 
 Freeman Clarke; it was also that of my father, who, how- 
 ever, was not a New Englander. It was fashionable in the 
 latter eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, though 
 promptly condemned by Webster. 
 
 Oi in New England, as elsewhere, is usually made up of 
 the vowel of law plus that of in loin. Throughout the 
 eighteenth century, here and in the whole English-speaking 
 world, oi and i were very generally confused, both being 
 pronounced, in all probability, as they now are by the Irish.
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 127 
 
 Lists of words identical in sound regularly contained, as 
 late as 1822, such pairs as boil bile, enjoin engine, foil file, 
 point pint, toil tile. Fraser's Columbian Monitor in 1794 
 drops into verse on the subject, as follows: 
 
 The sound of o i custom reconciles 
 
 With that of i spoke long: as, witness toils. 
 
 By 1795, however, Boston had taken alarm, as appears 
 from the Columbian Grammar of Benjamin Dearborn, which 
 condemns " bile " and " brile " as " improprieties." The 
 milder Samuel Willard calls " ile " for oil, " pint " for 
 point, " line " for loin " very old fashioned." They still 
 flourish, nevertheless, though now sunk to very lowly 
 estate, among Yankees and Englishmen alike. A recent 
 development is the separation of oi into two syllables, 
 making soil, for instance, into " so ill." This I have heard 
 of late from many schoolchildren, perhaps in an exagger- 
 ated reaction against " sile." 
 
 Ou has two pronunciations, according as the first element 
 is the a oi father or the a oifat " hah-oose " or " ha-oose "; 
 the former, in New England, is urban, the latter is rural. 
 This is not the case everywhere: in Baltimore, in Phila- 
 delphia, in southern England, the a-oo type has no sug- 
 gestion of rusticity. A variant of it consists in the insertion 
 of a y consonant before the diphthong, " ka-oo " (cow) be- 
 coming " kya-oo." Webster in 1789 tells us that ou, espe- 
 cially after p and c, is often improperly sounded " iou," 
 as " kiow," " piower," although ground, round, etc., are 
 pronounced " with tolerable propriety " by " the most 
 awkward countryman." I have myself observed no such 
 distinction: the people of my acquaintance who say 
 " ka-oo " or " kya-oo " say also " gra-oond." In the 
 times of Franklin and of Webster, the proper sound of ou 
 appears to have been not ah-oo but o-oo, with o as in poet
 
 128 OLD AND NEW 
 
 " ro-oond" and not "rah-oond." My father, when 
 reading aloud, said " ro-oond ": he was bred in Philadel- 
 phia, and I conjecture that in his childhood he had been 
 corrected for saying " ra-oond." Samuel Willard would 
 have us pronounce " raw-oond." " Many persons," he 
 says, " give to the o in this diphthong the Italian sound of 
 a in car: and what is unspeakably worse, many others give 
 it a flat sound, as in care." He adds careful directions for 
 the pronunciation of cow. The Biglow Papers show regu- 
 larly " kya-oo " or " ka-oo." Before leaving this diphthong, 
 I may note that one sometimes hears nowadays the ou of 
 out and about pronounced u-oo, with u as in but which, 
 unless the speaker has Southern characteristics, is a sign 
 that he comes from Canada. 
 
 We shall now pass to the so-called " long vowels," a, e, 
 o, oo, as in bait, beat, boat, boot. In reality, these sounds, 
 in New England as in Old England, are not pure vowels; 
 they do not end as they begin, for the passage in the mouth 
 or at the lips is narrowing from start to finish. It is scarcely 
 an exaggeration to say that standard English has no pure 
 long vowels: we apparently cannot keep our organs still 
 during a protracted utterance. Bait begins like bet; beet 
 begins like bit; boot starts its vowel like that of put. That 
 is why it is so hard for us to acquire the long vowels of 
 other languages. This breaking of the vowel is not very 
 ancient. In the eighteenth and the early nineteenth cen- 
 tury, people said bait, beet, boat, boot with pure vowels, that 
 of bait being open until about the last quarter of the eight- 
 eenth century, then apparently close, the others being close 
 all the time. The earliest mention of the diphthongization 
 I have been able to find is by our friend Samuel Willard, 
 who declares explicitly: " O begins with a sound, which is 
 never heard alone, except in the New England pronunci-
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 129 
 
 ation of such words, as whole, home, stone, which they pro- 
 nounce shorter than hole, comb, bone," and ends with oo as 
 in do; the a of cane begins with the e of men and ends with 
 the e of me. Pollen's Practical Grammar of the German Lan- 
 guage, Boston, 1831, informs us that German e is " nearly 
 like a in fate, yet closer, and without the sound of an e 
 which is slightly heard at the end of a long a in English." 
 We may assume that the breaking of o and a, and probably 
 of e and oo, was completed in New England by 1820 or 
 thereabouts. In e and oo the diphthongal quality is less 
 noticeable than in o and a. In Old England, o and a went 
 on developing, with a final result of ou and i in Cockney 
 usage, coat becoming " cout " (hi rime with scout} and 
 lady becoming " lydy." Elegant speech, stopping short on 
 the way to " cout," favored a form that begins like curt 
 and ends like coat. This latter type has been extensively 
 copied by people of fashion in Boston and some other New 
 England cities. Lady, in cultivated circles, has never 
 yielded to " lydy." The vulgar forms " lydy " and " py- 
 per," however, have to some extent invaded the vocabu- 
 lary of Boston street boys. It is interesting to note that 
 the rural " dreen " for drain is registered in 1795; and 
 that in 1789 our Yankee ancestors said " desate," " con- 
 sate," " resate," for conceit, etc. 
 
 When one of these vowels is followed by r , it tends to 
 drop down in the scale, especially if the r is the final sound, 
 as in pore, or stands before a consonant, as in port. The 
 effort to articulate the r has prevented the tongue from 
 reaching the height required for the clear vowel. In words 
 like for, short, the fall occurred centuries ago; here the 
 vowel is that of law. In pore, port, the decline is more 
 recent, and usage still varies between the o of poet and 
 vowel of paw. The latter has prevailed in England, where
 
 130 OLD AND NEW 
 
 pore is now "paw" and port is "pawt"; it is rapidly 
 gaining in our region, where " po-a " and " po-ut " are 
 succumbing, especially in cities, to " paw-a " and " paw-ut." 
 Our southern states solved the difficulty in a different way, 
 by keeping the o and suppressing the r, with " po " and 
 " pote " as a result. The e, as in fear, beard, has not de- 
 clined so low; it has usually remained at the stage of the 
 i in. fit. In 1789, by the way, Webster condemned " beerd " 
 and approved " baird " for beard; in my childhood I heard 
 elderly people say " Blue-Baird." In England, very com- 
 monly, a curious phenomenon has occurred: the accent 
 has been shifted from the main vowel, i, to the obscure 
 vowel that takes the place of the r , so that fear, fearing 
 become " fyah," " fyahring," " fyah " being similar to 
 German ja with / prefixed. Our Southerners often do 
 nearly the same thing, pronouncing here as " hyuh " or*as 
 " yuh." New England has not been involved hi this shift. 
 As for a, as in pare, pared, it has in general kept the value 
 which a regularly had in the seventeenth century, namely, 
 the sound of a in pan, or something very near it. Some- 
 times it has, instead, the eighteenth century value of a, 
 which is that of e in pen. In this matter the differences 
 appear to be individual rather than geographic. For care, 
 cards, chair, share the rustic Yankee in 1795 said " keer," 
 " keerds," " cheer," " sheer." Passing finally to oo, as in 
 poor, we find that this vowel is peculiarly sensitive to the 
 neighborhood of an r. First it drops to the vowel of put, 
 at which stage it remains in most words and in most re- 
 gions; but it easily descends further to o, poor becoming 
 " pore," which in the South is clipped to " po "; occasion- 
 ally it slips down to aw, and poor, pore, paw are all merged 
 in " paw." This last slip is pretty common in England 
 when the vowel in question is preceded by a y consonant;
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 131 
 
 the word your is indeed very often " yaw-a " or " yaw " 
 even in New England. In the old country an unwritten y, 
 as in pure, furious, produces the same effect, and we hear 
 " pyaw," " fyawrious." Sure, which once began with sy 
 and not, as at present, with sh, often turns up as " shore " 
 and " shaw." " Shore " for sure is listed by Dearborn in 
 Boston in 1795 as an " impropriety." 
 
 If the r is immediately followed by a vowel, it is less 
 effective as a modifier. Era, houri waver between the close 
 and the open, the sounds of eat, hoot on the one hand and 
 those of it, hook on the other; the former prevail hi America, 
 including New England, the latter in the mother country. 
 When we come to a and o, as in vary and story, the differ- 
 ence is more marked: on the west side of the Atlantic we 
 generally hear " vary," " story," on the east side " vaa-ry," 
 " staw-ry." To the British ear our pronunciation of Mary 
 is peculiarly painful. 
 
 Of the four " long vowels " which we have been discuss- 
 ing, two are in some cases subject to abbreviation, accom- 
 panied by a relaxation of tongue and lips, giving an opener 
 sound: these are oo and o, the two that are made in the 
 back of the mouth. Between long oo, as in boot, and short 
 oo, as in hook, the demarcation is not very clear, and some 
 words are continually flitting to and fro across the frontier. 
 The short vowel, in broom, cooper, hoof, proof, roof, room, 
 root, soon, soot, etc., goes back to the eighteenth century, 
 but probably was regarded until recently as a vulgarism. 
 Dearborn in 1795 condemns " huff, ruff, spunfull," as he 
 spells them. I think that in all the instances above cited 
 the short vowel prevails in New England. Soot of course 
 is still more commonly pronounced " sut," riming with 
 but. Although there are regional preferences concerning 
 these words, it is impossible to trace geographic limits.
 
 132 OLD AND NEW 
 
 The shortening of o, on the other hand, is almost wholly 
 confined to New England, although I have heard suppose 
 with the Yankee short o from the lips of an orator from 
 South Carolina. In his Dissertations on the English Lan- 
 guage, 1789, Noah Webster says: " is sometimes shortened 
 in common parlance, as in colt." Hale, in his English 
 Spelling-Book, Northampton, 1799, observes: " The short 
 sound of o is found in too few words to make a distinct 
 class: they are home, none, stone, whole, and their com- 
 pounds." We should now remove from the list none, which 
 is regularly " nun." Dearborn's " Improprieties," 1795, 
 include something that he spells " hum." I have already 
 quoted Willard's reference to " the New England pronun- 
 ciation of such words, as whole, home, stone, which they 
 pronounce shorter than hole, comb, bone." Of present cul- 
 tivated New England usage it may be said that some fiky 
 common words have the shortened vowel, while many 
 more have it in rustic speech. Why it should appear in 
 some words, and not in others which seem to offer the same 
 conditions, I cannot tell. One hears it in bone, stone, but 
 seldom in alone and never in groan, moan, tone. It is well- 
 nigh universal in whole, but is never heard in coal, hole, 
 mole, roll, shoal, soul, toll; goal does not come into consider- 
 ation, since its only popular form is " gool " or " gools." 
 The most extensive category is probably that in t: boat, 
 coat, note, throat, wrote; but even here I have never been 
 able to locate goat or float. The d list had, road, toad 
 is more consistent. I think that even hi city parlance the 
 short vowel predominates in both, folks, Holmes, most, only, 
 Polk, polka, whole and its derivatives. Colonel T. W. Hig- 
 ginson used the short o in Holmes. Whether the Autocrat 
 himself so pronounced his name I have never heard. There 
 are probably differences in the degree of prevalence in the
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 133 
 
 several states: I associate boat more particularly with 
 Maine; road, stone, toad with Massachusetts; but this 
 may be accident. Home and whole are general favorites. 
 Now, what is the vowel under consideration ? Is it simply 
 an o cut short ? Not quite, though very nearly; it has a 
 more open effect. Our coat tends toward French cotte; but 
 the latter, in Paris, is nearer to my pronunciation of curt, 
 much shortened. The sound, to describe it exactly, is the 
 " short u " labialized. Pronounce hum with the narrowed 
 lip aperture of roam, and you get New England home. Thus 
 but may be turned to boat, cut to coat, hull to whole, stun to 
 stone. Dialect writers, having no better way of indicating 
 the sound, have spelled " but," " cut," " hull," " hum," 
 " stun," and so on; and outsiders have imagined that the 
 vowel was really u. Actors especially, in rural drama, have 
 " hummed " and " butted " and " ludded " in a way I 
 have never known off the stage. " Hum " is, however, not 
 entirely mythical: it exists in some regions hi Connecticut; 
 and I am told that it may be found in Vermont, although 
 I never heard it there. James Russell Lowell once told me 
 that he had never heard it at all. 
 
 The other long vowels, e and a, are seldom shortened in 
 our dialects. " Crick " for creek is, of course, common 
 everywhere. The past participle of be is always " bin " or 
 " ben." " Nekked " for naked is prevalent in New England 
 and perhaps elsewhere. I have heard " sneck " for snake 
 in Massachusetts. Ate is still generally pronounced " et," 
 but perhaps this is a different phenomenon. 
 
 With the sound, or group of sounds, called " long u " we 
 enter upon a difficult and complicated subject. Let us 
 confine ourselves, for the present, to accented syllables. 
 Here the " long u " has three distinct values, which we may 
 call yoo, ee-oo, and oo. Of these, yoo and ee-oo are local or
 
 134 OLD AND 
 
 individual variants of the same type, while oo is a substi- 
 tute for both. As far as Franklin's usage is recorded by 
 himself, we find that he said " fee-oo " for few, but "noo," 
 " rool," " troo "; after n and r, then, he used the oo sub- 
 stitute. Webster's practice was quite different. According 
 to his Dissertations, " long u " invariably had one and the 
 same sound, which was neither oo nor a diphthong, but " a 
 separate vowel, which has no affinity to any other sound in 
 the language," and is best pronounced by countrymen and 
 children; in new, he declares, no e is heard, except hi Vir- 
 ginia, where they affect to say " nee-oo," " fee-oo." The 
 Virginian, it is to be noted, unlike Franklin, treated few and 
 new alike. What Webster's mysterious vowel was, I can- 
 not say; it would seem, however, that in his Connecticut 
 speech something like the old y (French u or German u) 
 was still in rural use. This sound, presumably foreign to 
 Franklin's Boston tongue, was, I think, tolerably wide- 
 spread among New England rustics, and led to the later 
 confusion of oo and ee-oo, as exemplified in " dooty " and 
 " skewl." " Grim-visaged waw," writes Lowell, " heth 
 smeuthed his wrinkled front," and capers " To the lascivi- 
 ous pleasin' of a loot." Perry, of Edinburgh, calls for 
 " long u " whatever that may mean in June, luce, 
 prune, ruse, spruce, strew, sure, truce, truth, yew, and also, 
 it would seem, in presume, true. Walker, on the other hand, 
 distinguishes tune, " tyoon," from rude, " rood," for which 
 he was taken to task by Webster in 1806. It seems evident 
 that the obscure counsels of Webster and Perry (whose 
 Only Sure Guide to the English Tongue was early and fre- 
 quently reprinted hi Worcester, Mass.) were misunder- 
 stood by later orthoepists and led to heroic attempts to 
 pronounce yoo or ee-oo after all consonants, but especially 
 after dentals, where they were favored also by Walker.
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 135 
 
 The resultant confusion perhaps did much to mix up oo 
 and ee-oo in the rural dialect. This mixing is already evi- 
 dent in Jonathan Ware's representation of Vermont speech 
 in 1814, where " dew " for do and " tew " for two appear 
 beside " trooth," " hooman," " redoosing," " obskoor," 
 " noomerator," " dootee," " dispooted," " constitooshun." 
 The confusion between oo and ee-oo was probably at its 
 height about 1820. At present the usage in New England 
 is as follows. At the beginning of a word, or after h, we say 
 yoo: as in union, hue. After the labials (p, b, m), the denti- 
 labials (/, v), the velar consonants (k, g), city people usually 
 say yoo, country people ee-oo: so pew, beauty, muse; few, 
 view; cue, Gulick. After all sorts oi dentals (/, d, n, th, I, s, 
 z) both city and country people who speak according to 
 nature say oo, while those who speak by the book say ee-oo, 
 occasionally yoo: examples are tune, due, new, thews, lute, 
 sue, resume. After other consonants (r, sh, zh, y, also / 
 preceded by another consonant) oo is the rule, but rustics 
 often use ee-oo: so rule, sure, juice, yew, blue. Survivals of 
 the old confusion are the still current " amoosin," " pe- 
 cooliar," and " lugoobrious." There used to be a popular 
 song called " Werry Pecooliar," whose unhappy author had 
 been " a great thlave " to the " mighty god Coopid." On 
 the other hand, " skewl " for school, and " dew " for do, 
 and " tew " for to or two may still be heard in the country. 
 The rural fondness for ee-oo is not " pecooliar " to New 
 England. In Miss Burney's Camilla a company of mis- 
 cellaneous players attempts a performance of Othello, each 
 actor sticking to his own local pronunciation; and the one 
 from Norfolk declaims: " The Deuk dew greet yew, 
 General." The most characteristic feature of New Eng- 
 land usage is the prevalence of oo after dentals, which, as 
 we have seen, goes back as far as Franklin. " Noo,"
 
 136 OLD AND NEW 
 
 "dooty," "stoodent," "loot," " soo," " prezoom " are 
 constantly heard among us, even from expert public 
 speakers. In fact, they are fairly prevalent throughout 
 the North. Professor Gildersleeve once gave me an en- 
 tertaining account of the strange linguistic mixture caused 
 by the importation of " noo " pronunciations, by the 
 Yankee schoolmistress, into the dialect of the youthful 
 negro, who nowadays may be heard uttering such anom- 
 alies as " Ahz gwahn home awn Toozdy." Sometimes the 
 y, which the prudent Yankee prefers to omit, has surrep- 
 titiously combined with the / or d, turning tune to " choon," 
 duty to " jooty." These pronunciations are described by 
 Webster, in 1789, as common but undesirable; they are 
 not used here at present, except by the Irish. So it is with 
 " shoot " for suit, " rezhoom " for resume, in which the y 
 has combined with 5 or z. 
 
 When the u is unstressed, and follows an accented sylla- 
 ble, the combination of its y element with a preceding /, d, 
 s, or 2 is unchecked by any sense of " jooty," and we get 
 " nacher," " verjer," " ishoo," " plezher," " sichawashun," 
 " ejacate," the oo being generally reduced, or nearly re- 
 duced, to the status of a neutral vowel. Inasmuch as 
 " nacher " and " nachoor " are expressly condemned by 
 Perry and by Webster, these pronunciations must have 
 been current in the second half of the eighteenth century; 
 how much earlier they existed, I do not know. Walker 
 advocates " feecher." According to Samuel Kirkham's 
 English Grammar, published in the first part of the nine- 
 teenth century, the d in educate, grandeur, verdure is to be 
 sounded as./. Samuel Willard informs us that " tu, in the 
 syllable following the accent, has a sound resembling that 
 of chu, as in nature, virtuous," and that the d in assiduous 
 has " very nearly the sound of y." Beside this usage there
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 137 
 
 has existed from early times another, which entirely sup- 
 presses the y. In 1643 Richard Hodges published in Lon- 
 don A Special help to orthographic, wherein we find commune 
 pronounced like common, ordure like order, pasture like 
 pastor, tenure like tenor, venture as venter. Benjamin Frank- 
 lin said " natteral." While Perry condemns " nater," 
 Isaiah Thomas hi 1785 (New American Spelling-Book, 
 Worcester, Mass.) declares that century is pronounced like 
 sentry. Presently The Young Ladies' and Gentkmen's 
 Spelling-Book identifies phonetically capture with captor, 
 culture with coulter, feature with fetor, gesture vn.\h jester. 
 Jonathan Ware's Vermont forms, hi 1814, betray the same 
 confusion that they showed in the case of accented u: our 
 common mother appears as " naychoor," " nacher," and 
 "nater"; " kreetyoor," " figyur," and " vurtu " (i. e., 
 " vurtew ") stand side by side with " vallooing," " mis- 
 fourtins," " unokkoopied," " kontinoos," " sitooation," 
 " kontribbited," and, in another category, " absoloot." A 
 little later, J. A. Cummings's Pronouncing Spelling-Book, 
 printed hi Boston, admits no difference between capture 
 and captor, value and valley. This practice has not died 
 out, but is now distinctively rural and old-fashioned, save 
 in a few words, such as " contribbit," " critter," " ockipy," 
 " vallible," which may be heard anywhere among the so- 
 cially unelect. An elderly Provincetown skipper, when 
 questioned about his health, may still reply: " I barly con- 
 tinner." Meanwhile Perry and Webster, with their in- 
 sistence on a cryptic " long u " under all circumstances, 
 have beguiled some of their uncritical followers into the 
 invention of such forms as " nate-your," " verd-your," 
 " iss-you," " as-your," which, however, have not found 
 acceptance in good society. 
 The comparatively modern vowels exemplified in cut and
 
 138 OLD AND NEW 
 
 cur offer no striking local characteristics. The " short u " 
 is, indeed, apt to be carried further back in the mouth in 
 the state of Maine than it is elsewhere, and sounds a little 
 like ah, so that sculpin to a Massachusetts ear almost sug- 
 gests " scahlpin." The New England cur is, of course, a 
 bob-tailed one, inasmuch as it has no r; whereas the Middle 
 Westerner is in such a hurry to get to his r that he runs 
 it into the preceding vowel, pronouncing the u and the r 
 simultaneously. The British cur is as r-less as ours, but 
 has a more open sound, considerably resembling our car. 
 For such a word as first, we distinguish London " fahst, 
 Boston " fuhst," Chicago " furst," and New York " fuh- 
 eest." Heard obviously stands apart: as Webster tells 
 us in 1789, this word was " heerd " in New England before 
 the Revolution, but since that event fashionable people 
 have imitated the British " hurd "; at present, of course, 
 " heerd " is very rural. 
 
 With regard to ah and a, New England is on the side of 
 the old country and at variance with all the rest of her own, 
 except a part of Virginia. I have discussed this subject 
 elsewhere, and shall not now go into details. Like the 
 vowels of cut and cur, our modern ah is a new sound, which 
 developed out of a in the last decades of the eighteenth 
 century. Before r unless the r was itself followed by a 
 vowel the eighteenth century a changed to ah both in 
 England and in all the United States: car, cart, carter be- 
 came " cahr," " cahrt," " cahrter "; then, in Old and New 
 England, " cah," " caht," " cahta " ; while carry kept its short 
 vowel. The split in usage came not here, but in cases about 
 one hundred and fifty of them in which the next consonant 
 was not r, but a fricative (f, s, or th}, an ns or nt, or an Im: 
 such words as half, laugh, pass, past, path; dance, advantage, 
 branch, can't, Nahant; calm, psalm most of which the
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 139 
 
 Yankee naturally pronounces with ah if they belong to his 
 everyday vocabulary. Can't always has ah, but the less 
 familiar cant, the noun, has a. Pantry took an ah, but pant 
 apparently came too late. " Commahnd," " demahnd," 
 lying just outside the nt category, are not uncommon. The 
 " Italian a " is most constant among farmers, less stable 
 among city people, whose convictions have been shaken by 
 contact with the Irish and also by the school teacher, who 
 has often insisted on a compromise vowel. With our rustics 
 the ah became such a favorite that it was extended to all 
 sorts of words outside our classes words like apple, ham- 
 mer, handsome, matter, Saturday, which even now some- 
 times retain the broad vowel. The fashion seems to have 
 been at its height between 1830 and 1850. The aun words, 
 such as laundry, launch, jaunt, generally take ah in New 
 England; and so does aunt, which is rather emancipated 
 from the group. The conflict between ah and a is the most 
 prolific source of enmity between East and West. To the 
 Easterner, the a smacks of interminable flatlands; to the 
 Westerner, the ah seems a sonorous affectation. It should 
 be added that the " broad a " of New Englanders, Italianate 
 though we be, is not so broad as that of Old England and 
 of most of the United States. Our grass really lies between 
 the " grahs " of a British lawn and the " grass " of the 
 boundless prairies. 
 
 Another pair of vowels is responsible for much disagree- 
 ment, though not a source of hostility. Shall we say " Sff " 
 or " awf," " d6g " or " dawg," " ISng " or " lawng," " on " 
 or " awn? " The two sounds that come into competition, 
 the vowel of lot and the vowel of law, are generally regarded 
 as the short and the long of one and the same type of o; 
 and so they are, approximately, in England, where both 
 law and lot are pronounced with the lips somewhat rounded,
 
 140 OLD AND NEW 
 
 the aperture being smaller for law than for lot. In America 
 the rounding of the lips for the sounds has disappeared, 
 except in New England (especially Maine), which keeps a 
 trace of it; the change seems to have occurred about a 
 century ago. To make an American aw, as in law, one 
 must, so to speak, swallow the tongue that is, draw it 
 as far back and as far down as it will go. The " short o " of 
 lot, in the United States, has become identical, save in 
 quantity, with the ah of father; only New England pre- 
 serves the distinction, using one vowel for hard (" hahd "), 
 another for " hod." The rest of the country pronounces 
 hot like German hat, thus introducing " Italian a " into a 
 vast new category of words while refusing it admission to 
 another. The American who scorns to say " pahst " for 
 past gladly pronounces " pahd " for pod. Actors of the 
 better class and trained elocutionists affect the English 
 practice, making both aw and 6 more or less round, and 
 differentiating 6 from ah. An actor who in a society r61e 
 should say " I've gaht ut " for " I've got it " would not 
 escape reprobation. Now, as I said, the vowels of law and 
 lot, however they be sounded, compete for acceptance in 
 several classes of words. In the first place, a and au before 
 an / that is followed by another consonant as in also, 
 alter, faidt, scald have in England both pronunciations; 
 in America they always have the sound of law, save that 
 the Yankee sometimes is heard to use 8. It is much the 
 same with the second class, in which an o (or, after w or #, 
 an a) precedes a surd fricative, as in cloth, lost, often, wash; 
 but here the Yankee 8 is notably commoner than in the 
 first. Before a sonant fricative or a liquid as in bother, 
 novel, rosin, was, and in doll, horrid, quarrel, swallow the 
 aw sound is alien to the usage of our Eastern cities, as it is 
 to the standard speech of the old country, but is pretty
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 141 
 
 frequent in all rural America. Before a nasal (as in long, 
 on, romp) or a sonant stop (as in dog, God, squab), the sound 
 is in England regularly 8, while in America there is diver- 
 sity: the words in ong (such as long, strong) always have aw 
 in natural American speech, and so have gone, dog, and dog- 
 gerel; bog, fog, log are almost as generally addicted to aw; 
 the word on normally has it hi the South; " Gawd " and 
 " God " are divided according to church and temperament 
 (one man confessed to me that he employed " God " in 
 profanity, " Gawd " hi prayer); the rest have in New Eng- 
 land the short vowel, elsewhere both the short and the long. 
 In the state of Maine certain common words have pro- 
 gressed or receded, as one may choose to call it from 
 aw to d: foggy has become " fogy," porgy is identical with 
 pogy, northward is " nothud." So on Cape Cod the old 
 salts say " nothud," " nothaly," " notheast," but always 
 " naw-west." The contest between our two vowels, long 
 and short, seems to have been going on for considerably 
 more than a century. E. Hale's Spelling-Book (Northamp- 
 ton, 1799) prescribes aw in cost, dross, frost, froth, moth, 
 scald, soft, tongs, d in fault, gone, halt, malt, swan, vault, 
 wand, wash. 
 
 The short vowels heard in bit, bet, bat, book are probably 
 today very nearly what they were two hundred years ago. 
 The first three, , , d, are a little closer and a little shorter 
 in England than in America; the difference is especially 
 noticeable in a word like bad, which in the Englishman's 
 mouth sounds to an American almost like bed, while the 
 American's rendering suggests to the Englishman a pro- 
 longed bleat. In this respect New England is like the rest 
 of the United States. The rustic substitution of fori, 
 which is so frequent in the Biglow dialect, can be traced 
 back to the eighteenth century. Dearborn, in 1795, criti-
 
 142 OLD AND NEW 
 
 cizes " sense " for since and " sperrit " for spirit; Ware, in 
 1814, gives us " entu " for into; and Cummings, in 1822, 
 mentions " desk " for disc and " set " for sit. This phonetic 
 tendency is still alive, and may attack a new word. The 
 state of Maine has the proud motto " Dirigo," which, as 
 the name of a hotel, is apt to become " Derrigo." The 
 opposite tendency manifested itself in the case of certain 
 words during the eighteenth century, when it was fashion- 
 able to say " frind," " gineral," " git," " sildom," " yis," 
 " yisterday." " Bliss " for bless is recorded also. Franklin 
 pronounced " frind " and " git." The conservative Irish 
 have clung to these forms; among Anglo-Saxons, " git," 
 the sole survivor, has outlived its good renown. In present 
 day Cockney English, a turns to , and cab, thank you be- 
 come " keb," " thenk you." The Yankee has restricted 
 this practice to a very few words, such as " hed," " hev*," 
 " hez," " kerridge," " ketch," " shell "; can becomes both 
 " ken " and " kin." I once heard a schoolboy declaim: " I 
 hev no friend or relative in the world but her; I never hed, 
 I never shell hev." And once, at Point Allerton, a retired 
 sea captain, entering the " settin' room " where one of his 
 daughters was ingeniously tormenting the piano while the 
 other with equal industry tortured her poor little voice, 
 beamed upon the long-suffering company and sententiously 
 remarked: "Music heth chahms." Although Franklin 
 was not ashamed to say " hez," such forms have now grown 
 countrified, as have " shet " for shut, which in Webster's 
 day was " now becoming vulgar," and " bresh " for brush, 
 " kiwer " for cover, " sich " for such, and " crap," " drap " 
 for crop, drop. 
 
 If the English language were left to its own devices, free 
 from all shackles of school and spelling, it would soon have 
 only two unaccented vowels, the two that begin about and
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 143 
 
 enough, that end sofa and lady, that stand in the middle of 
 probable and possible. Toward these, in familiar words and 
 in natural speech, all wholly unstressed vowels tend. And 
 of these two, the first would greatly encroach on the second, 
 as, in fact, it has already done, possible being now usually 
 pronounced in America with the middle vowel of probable, 
 enough with the initial vowel of about. The distinction be- 
 tween these sounds has become one of the niceties of care- 
 ful diction; it is much more generally observed in New 
 England than elsewhere in America. Particularly offensive 
 to the ear of the old-fashioned Yankee is the same substi- 
 tution in final syllables " goodnus " for goodness, " ah- 
 nust " for honest, " nakud " for naked, " stahp ut " for 
 stop it. When the vowel is itself the last sound of the word, 
 the substitution does not occur, barring such isolated cases 
 as Missouri. Under these circumstances, indeed, the New 
 England rural dialect has inverted the shift, turning sofa 
 to " sofy," soda to " sody," Sarah to " Sary." How an- 
 ciently this change was made, I cannot say. That it be- 
 longs as far back as the eighteenth century can be proved 
 as follows. People who say " sody " for soda would never 
 dream of pronouncing " betty " for " betta," i. e., better. 
 Now, since " betta," " dippa," " poka," end, in New Eng- 
 land, exactly like soda, sofa, there is no reason why the 
 farmer should not transform them into " betty," " dippy," 
 " poky," if the tendency were still in full vigor. Therefore 
 the active period of this tendency must antedate the fall of 
 final r, which reduced better to " betta "; and this fall 
 occurred not later than 1800. 
 
 Now that we are speaking of unaccented vowels we may 
 pause to note a divergence between English and American 
 practice. Languages, in general, are impatient of accumu- 
 lations of stressless vowels. England prefers to reduce
 
 144 OLD AND NEW 
 
 their number by omitting the weaklings; America, by re- 
 stressing them. Compare " difficlt " and " difficult," 
 " nessusry " and " necessary," " miltry " and " military," 
 " temprully " and " temporarily." In this last case, in- 
 deed, as in the case of primarily, our speakers often turn 
 the secondary stress into the principal one. The same in- 
 clination to accent every second syllable prompts us to say 
 " advocate," " h61iday," " Thackeray," rather than " ad- 
 vokit," " holidy," " Thackery." In this regard New Eng- 
 land is quite American, although some of our sophisticated 
 city folks consciously imitate the British habit. The Amer- 
 ican is more influenced than the Briton by spelling and 
 etymology. During two summers spent near Chatham, 
 on Cape Cod, I never heard that town called otherwise 
 than " Chat-ham "; so Walthamis " Walth-ham," Concord 
 is frequently " Con-cawd." Highland Light, near Provinte- 
 town, is in native parlance High Land Light. Webster, in 
 1789, complains of our susceptibility to the letter, citing as 
 instances, in the eastern states, " native," " peert," could 
 and would with the / sounded; in the middle states, " preju- 
 dice " and " practice." Readers of Martin Chuzzlewit re- 
 call the prevalence of " toe " for to; thus it was pronounced 
 by Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 Before leaving the vowels, which, as their name indicates, 
 are made of voice, it is fitting to say a word about their ma- 
 terial. The American tends to vocalize with a scanty supply 
 of breath, and to economize its outflow by keeping his 
 mouth nearly shut. On the other hand, he is uneconomical 
 of time, especially in the country. Partial closure of the 
 mouth and general relaxation of the vocal apparatus pro- 
 duce a choked nasal resonance, which characterizes his 
 speech. The term " nasality " is often wrongly applied to 
 a quality suggestive of nose but the reverse of nasal, being
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 145 
 
 caused by a stoppage of the nasal passages. Real nasality I 
 attribute to the religious temperament of the Puritans, 
 which favored inwardness and discouraged expansion. In 
 New England it is disappearing, with piety. 
 
 Of the consonants there are fewer things to say. Most 
 noteworthy is the weakness of final consonants in America. 
 While the Briton says " bitt," " bett," " batt," the Yankee 
 says " but," " b&t," " ba&t," with a prolonged vowel and 
 an enfeebled /. Still feebler is the final sonant, as in bid, bed, 
 bad. So weak is it that few hearers would detect its com- 
 plete omission. Last winter, in the streets of South Boston, 
 I came across two Yankees hawking wood. One had a sharp, 
 joyous cry of "fire wood, fire wood! " while the other 
 wailed monotonously " fire-woo', fire-woo'! " I followed 
 their cart long enough to hear their call full fifty times, and 
 never a d came from the doleful one. 
 
 Some individual consonants are worthy of mention. H 
 need not detain us, since the British confusion in its use 
 never seriously affected America, and the standard through- 
 out the English-speaking world is virtually the same. This 
 whole domain is familiar also with the confusion of final un- 
 accented ing and in, often absurdly called " dropping one's 
 g's "; in reality it involves no " dropping," merely an ad- 
 vancement of the nasal toward the front of the mouth. 
 " Readin," " writin," " speakin " were perfectly good 
 British pronunciations in the eighteenth century; and 
 " bringin," " ringin," " singin," " stingin " were preferred 
 by many to the forms that doubled the ing. Franklin, how- 
 ever, said ing, and American authorities discouraged in. 
 Nevertheless it flourished on this side as on the other. It is 
 still the favorite of the rustic and the negligent urban, and 
 not a few cultivated people in Boston and other New Eng- 
 land cities continue to cherish it for familiar use. The
 
 146 OLD AND NEW 
 
 reaction against it gave rise to the odd pronunciations 
 " capting," " certingly," " curting," " founting/' " mount- 
 ing," and so on. In 1795 we find stigmatized as improper 
 " brethering," "linning," "sarting," "severing." A lit- 
 erary gentleman of my acquaintance, very precise in his 
 language, habitually says " imaging " for imagine. 
 
 The exchange of v and w, unlike the abuse of h, took hold 
 of the eastern edge of our country. In 1789 Webster de- 
 clared: " The pronunciation of w for v is a prevailing prac- 
 tice in England and America; it is particularly prevalent in 
 Boston and Philadelphia. . . . Many people say weal, 
 wessel for veal, vessel." This pronunciation, he adds, is not 
 heard in Connecticut. In England the substitution of w for 
 v (and, in a misdirected search for correctness, of v for w) 
 was very general in the second half of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, and did not stamp the speaker as a boor. During the 
 next fifty years it came to be regarded as a Cockney vul- 
 garism, and now it has nearly disappeared. In America 
 there is no trace of its former existence save in Atlantic sea- 
 ports. A Boston young lady in 1794 had to be cautioned 
 against the use of " werry " and " wessel," but early in the 
 nineteenth century the danger must have been over. In 
 Philadelphia, however, such pronunciations could be oc- 
 casionally heard, from elderly and not necessarily ill-edu- 
 cated people, as late as 1850. In New York, judging from 
 dialect stories, they lingered in the slums some fifteen or 
 twenty years longer. " Wessel " may still be heard in Hali- 
 fax. It is along our seaboard that we must look for the most 
 abundant American traces of another eighteenth century 
 phenomenon, the absorption of wh by w. In England at 
 least, in all the southern part where is still identical with 
 wear, while with wile, whale with wail; and this practice was 
 current on our side of the ocean well along in the century
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 147 
 
 just past. Isaiah Thomas, of Worcester, in 1785, tells us 
 that weal and wheel, wet and whet, wight and white, witch and 
 which are " nearly alike in sound." " Wether " for whether 
 is cited in 1794 and 1814; wet and whet, wight and white, 
 witch and which figure in a list of homophones in 1822. 
 Lowell, in 1848, declares that the Yankee " omits alto- 
 gether " the " h in such words as while, when, where." This 
 habit has almost died out in New England, even among the 
 uneducated, except in some old seaports, such as Salem and 
 Gloucester. The wh, which had probably never disappeared 
 altogether, was restored under the influence of the spelling. 
 Whoa, however, is still frequently identical with woe; wharf 
 is " wawf " in sea-going places; and why, the interjection 
 (as distinguished from the interrogative particle), is almost 
 always " wy." 
 
 We now come to the most important, the most difficult, 
 the most strife-producing of consonants, the r, whose his- 
 tory I have traced elsewhere and need not now repeat. A 
 brief story shall suffice. Toward the evening of the eight- 
 eenth century our once domineering consonant, fallen from 
 vibrantly vociferous youth to a feebly fricative senility, 
 proceeded to decline still lower, perishing entirely from the 
 speech of southern England, of Yankeedom, and of our 
 southern states, or dissolving into a colorless vocalic mur- 
 mur, unless it was supported by a following vowel. Carry, 
 then, retained its r, such as it was, while car became " cah," 
 cart became " caht," and care (its e being silent) became 
 " ca-uh." Thus beside forest, with r, we have " faw-uh " or 
 " faw " (for), " fo-ut " or " fawt" (fort), " fo-uh " or " faw " 
 (fore). Poorest still maintained an advantage over poor; 
 cheery could vaunt its superiority over cheer, beard, and 
 mere. But new humiliation was in store. Even in this 
 refuge the dethroned tyrant was assailed; even between
 
 148 OLD AND NEW 
 
 vowels r began to vanish in the dialects of the South and of 
 New England. In the latter region, to be sure, the tendency 
 was checked by a reaction that set in over half a century 
 ago. Yet still many an elderly Bostonian is " ve'y so'y to be 
 late," still many a hoary-headed swain picks " be'ies " and 
 " che'ies," still the dead past " bu'ies its dead." On the 
 other hand, the new Yankee, who once more pronounces r 
 before vowels but not otherwise, who says " fah " but " far 
 away," " betta " but " better and betta," having fallen into 
 the habit of considering r merely as a general hiatus-stopper, 
 proceeds to call his daughters " Eller and Emma " or " Em- 
 mer and Ella," to eat " rawr oysters," to push " the sofer 
 against the wall," and all the time has " no idear of what he 
 is doing "; in other words, he inserts r between vowels, 
 while suppressing every r that is not followed by a vowel. 
 Meanwhile the middle Atlantic states harbored and revived 
 
 A 
 
 the dying consonant. The border states were more or less 
 divided, but Maryland sided in the main with the South, 
 Connecticut mainly with New England. When and how the 
 r was brought back to favor in New York and Pennsylvania, 
 I have never been able to find out. Was its life a genuine 
 survival from the mid-eighteenth century ? Was it a school- 
 masterly restoration ? I have sometimes discussed the 
 question with a Middle Westerner, and, in the words of the 
 poet, 
 
 He rather thought the one, 
 
 I rather think the other. 
 
 An argument against the survival theory is the fact that 
 western New York was settled from New England after the 
 decay of our consonant had set in. However that may be, 
 the r, kindled with fresh strength though still vibrationless, 
 was swept west with the human tide and established its 
 kingdom from the Hudson perhaps even from the Con-
 
 NEW ENGLAND PRONUNCIATION 149 
 
 necticut on some parts of the frontier to the Rockies. 
 Inasmuch as the stream of emigration from Virginia and the 
 Carolinas was r-less, the domain of our consonant found a 
 barrier on the south. To the west it still pushes on. It has 
 become a most aggressive and invasive and full-mouthed 
 kind of r, which seems to permeate everything, like a smell 
 of gasoline. In its presence one is scarcely conscious of 
 aught else. With r haughtily curling its tongue, the sturdy 
 West looks with triumph on the decrepit East and South. 
 R is the symbol of its strength, its enterprise, its self-con- 
 fidence. In this sign it shall conquer.
 
 VIII 
 SCHOOL 
 
 A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was, 
 Of dreams that wave before the half -shut eye; 
 And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, 
 For ever flushing round a summer sky. 
 
 IN no respect do " Anglo-Saxons " and " Neo-Latins " dif- 
 fer more essentially than in their reminiscences of school- 
 days. Compare Tom Brown and Le petit Chose, and you 
 will find a contrast that is characteristic of English and 
 French letters, a contrast which may help us to understand 
 certain differences in national temperament. School days 
 are the formative days of our lives. They may develop in us 
 for all time an out-of-door or an in-door spirit, an intimacy 
 or a merely nodding acquaintance with nature, an indif- 
 ference to transmitted learning or a reverence for knowl- 
 edge. French schools have considerably changed in the last 
 generation, but they remain really different from the Eng- 
 lish and, I think, still more different from ours. The French 
 visitor to an American school is surprised to see the class- 
 rooms adorned with busts and pictures which, he is told, are 
 the gifts of departed classes; from every wall gaze huge 
 portraits of old teachers, loved in retrospect by their former 
 pupils; libraries, laboratories, pianos, phonographs testify 
 to the affectionate remembrance of societies of alumni or 
 alumnae. Not only in private institutions does he behold 
 these evidences of perverted feeling, but in ordinary public 
 schools of all grades, establishments maintained by general 
 
 150
 
 SCHOOL 151 
 
 taxation and filled with children whose presence is prescribed 
 by law. Every year I receive an enthusiastically pressing 
 invitation to attend the annual banquet of the Alumni As- 
 sociation of a municipal grammar school which closed its 
 doors some forty-five years ago. I shall do it some year, 
 although the event comes at a most inconvenient season. 
 If only I could be sure of meeting Gus and George and Billy, 
 I should not hesitate a moment. Alas! I do not know 
 whether they are still alive. 1 
 
 When I tried to expound such sentiments to my French 
 visitor who was a real, flesh-and-blood visitor, and not, 
 like most of his kind, a hypothetical foreigner invented to 
 point a moral he fell to musing, and presently confessed 
 that he could discover in his heart no symptom of a desire to 
 revive his scholastic existence. If not a nightmare, it was a 
 hard apprenticeship. Some of his old mates he still loved, 
 to be sure, but with a love begotten of common misery. To 
 some of his old teachers he now felt grateful for what they 
 had given him. The recollection of some prank still pro- 
 voked a momentary chuckle. But the experience as a whole 
 was one that he preferred to forget. This is the frame of 
 mind I have habitually encountered among continental 
 Europeans, among Germans not less than among French, 
 Italians, and Spaniards. Transition from school to univer- 
 sity is for them like opening the doors of a prison-house; it 
 is a sudden passage from gloom to sunshine, from repression 
 to lawless independence. 
 
 My Frenchman, recovering from his amazement, made 
 inquiry concerning the intellectual activities of the school. 
 The first documents submitted to him were a copy of the 
 school newspaper, a program of the latest school concert, an 
 announcement of the next school dance; and he was hos- 
 1 They are. Since writing the above I have looked them up.
 
 152 OLD AND NEW 
 
 pitably invited to witness the impending school dramatic 
 performance. It was a great pity, he was told, that the 
 brevity of his stay would preclude the possibility of his en- 
 joying the school pageant, which had to be held late in the 
 spring; but fortunately there were school athletic contests 
 at all seasons football, hockey, basket ball, track events, 
 baseball, so climatically diversified that no moment of the 
 school year was wasted. Bewildered by this unexpected 
 abundance of scholastic interests, he clean forgot to ask 
 about the course of study, the matter with which he was 
 primarily concerned; and it did not occur to anyone else to 
 introduce the subject. Subsequently I explained to him 
 that we, like the ancient Greeks, regard the education of the 
 body as no less important than the training of the mind, an 
 opinion with which he agreed " in principle "; then I pointed 
 out that physical competitions encourage self-confidence, 
 alertness, and the habit of mutual assistance, known as 
 " team play." To account for the dramatics and dances, I 
 set forth our idea of the school as a " civic centre " and our 
 desire to make it seem a place of voluntary rather than com- 
 pulsory sojourn. Furthermore, at the risk of getting be- 
 yond my depth in sociological waters, I maintained that our 
 ordinary high school pupils, crude as they may appear, rep- 
 resent a degree of refinement notably higher than the stage 
 attained by their parents, who, recognizing the inferiority 
 unremittingly imputed to them by their offspring, are 
 prone to depend upon the latter for social guidance in 
 fact, to leave to them the conduct of all social functions 
 and therefore contemplate with complacency the develop- 
 ment of the young as arbiters of elegance. It is natural, 
 then, I concluded, that mothers and fathers, wishing to see 
 their children happy and respected, should think more of 
 their success in play than of their attainments in the field
 
 SCHOOL 153 
 
 of learning, a terra incognita which the elders have never 
 had leisure or inclination to cultivate. 
 
 Turn about is fair play. The time came when I was the 
 observant foreigner, examining education in France. To 
 tell the truth, I was not a stranger to it, having lived in 
 France as a child and again as a youth. I may say in pass- 
 ing that if education be measured by variety of scholastic 
 opportunity, I am the most highly educated person of my 
 acquaintance. In my boyhood I attended eight different 
 schools, seven public and one endowed; later I was a stu- 
 dent at three universities, situated respectively in America, 
 France, and Germany. During seven subsequent years my 
 business was inspecting schools. For the sake of a complete 
 record let me add that I have been a university teacher both 
 in America and in France. These statements I put forward 
 by way of credentials for a comparison which I purpose to 
 make. Now, the first thing that strikes an American on 
 entering a French school is the bleakness of its atmosphere. 
 Handsome though many of the structures be, there is scant 
 suggestion of comfort within. Bare and chilly, the rooms 
 offer no invitation to luxurious ease. The second impres- 
 sion that one gets if one wait for a second is an im- 
 pression of intense mental activity. There is none of the 
 somnolence and little of the inattention that pervade an 
 American classroom. The teacher is really teaching, not 
 merely " hearing lessons "; and the learners are really learn- 
 ing. Moreover, they are learning things which, from our 
 point of view, are far beyond their years. This estimate is cor- 
 roborated by further inquiry. As we follow the course of a 
 French child's education, as we watch what he does in school 
 and at home, as we converse with him and discover his 
 modes of thought, we are forced to conclude that from start 
 to finish he is forging so rapidly ahead of the American boy
 
 154 OLD 
 
 that on graduation from the lycee, at seventeen, he will be 
 almost if not quite the equal of the American A.B. of two- 
 and-twenty. When I call him " the equal," I mean that he 
 has as plentiful a supply of knowledge, as ready and accurate 
 a judgment, as mature an understanding, as great a power 
 of application. Intellectually, then, the French lad is some 
 five years ahead of our sons. Physically, he compares 
 pretty well with an American of his own age. He has worked 
 hard, but he has lived wholesomely and has enjoyed a fair 
 allowance of play. Sports, while yonder they do not take 
 precedence of study, are nevertheless pursued with keen 
 zest; indeed, if I am not mistaken, they are today in France 
 almost as varied as they are in our country, and widely dis- 
 tributed, participants being more numerous than " rooters." 
 Besides, the French boy gets healthy recreation from amuse- 
 ments which would seem trivial and childish to his less 
 philosophical American coeval, and can thus obtain quick 
 relaxation at odd moments, without the complex mechanism 
 of organized athletics. 
 
 If wishes were hobby horses, an enlightened pedagogical 
 petitioner would ride a span: scholastic efficiency would 
 trot side by side with civic centrism; the pupil would at the 
 same time learn his lessons and love his school. Is such a 
 consummation impossible ? Of course, as long as we Ameri- 
 cans were brought into competition only with one another, 
 it mattered little whether we were educated or not, because 
 we were all in the same class. But now that we are a " world 
 power," and have to race with sprinters trained to win, we 
 too must submit to training or we shall be left behind. On 
 the other hand, we hate to give up our pleasant old happy- 
 go-lucky ways, in school and elsewhere. It is doubtful, 
 however, whether we could have kept them long, even if we 
 had no foreign rivals. Our country is filling up, our fluid
 
 SCHOOL 155 
 
 society is solidifying, there is no longer an overflowing abun- 
 dance for all, idle and industrious, unskilled and skilled 
 alike. The time has gone by when the ideal American type 
 is the unlettered barefoot boy who arrives in town with two 
 cents in his pocket and promptly becomes a multimillionaire. 
 We no longer assume, in defiance of the proverb, that Jack 
 is good at all trades. Soon there will be no place for the in- 
 competent, and the seat of the half-competent will be hard. 
 Fierce internal competition must continually raise the 
 standard of acceptibility, as it has been raised in France. 
 Painless pedagogy will soon be a thing of the past. 
 
 After all, I may be exaggerating the sacrifice. Even our 
 present easy-going methods are not altogether painless. 
 Our children do not seek school of their own volition nor do 
 they remain there willingly. Compulsion and repression are 
 the chief of our scholastic diet even now. Love of school is 
 not contemporaneous with residence therein; it is an after- 
 product. In spite of all that is done to amuse, the pain out- 
 weighs the pleasure as long as schooldays last; only in 
 recollection does the pleasure outbalance the pain. While 
 some teachers are more bearable than others, even the best 
 of pupils could without bereavement forego the society of the 
 whole lot. In order to accomplish never so little, our boys 
 and girls must sit for hours at their desks and must keep 
 their minds on one thing for an appreciable lapse of time; 
 and children hate to apply themselves consecutively or to 
 sit still. Even at its easiest, education is a bore. Otherwise 
 it would not require such a vast amount of machinery. And 
 this cumbrous mechanism is constantly increasing in rigidity 
 and complexity! Should an efficiency expert from Mars 
 attempt to tabulate the various official activities of an 
 American college or of one of our large, up-to-date schools, 
 he would reach this result: administration, 55 per cent;
 
 156 OLD AND NEW 
 
 teaching, 35; study, 10. It is just conceivable that if our 
 scholars had to dig deep enough to unearth the significance 
 of the things they are studying, the interest thus aroused 
 would make their task lighter; it is possible that real work 
 would seem preferable to the cheap imitation. If idle hands 
 and idle minds were less exposed to Satanic influence, ad- 
 ministration could without danger dwindle correspondingly. 
 However this may be, what we should like to discover is a 
 way of uniting the effectiveness of the French school with 
 the comparatively homelike atmosphere of the American. 
 One step in that direction would be a better classification of 
 pupils, to the end that each family be neither too big nor 
 too heterogeneous. Tests will avail nothing unless school 
 authorities are prepared to take account of the mental and 
 moral differences they reveal. Present pedagogical fashion 
 demands that in a public institution no inmate, however 
 hopeless, be cast out nay, further, that all pupils be pro- 
 moted, even those who have conclusively proved their in- 
 ability to proceed. To say that a school intended for all and 
 supported by all should care for all is reasonable; to plead 
 that even the most backward child should not be deserted, 
 but should be developed according to its capacity, is hu- 
 mane; but neither reasonable nor humane is the policy of 
 shoving all along together, expecting some unfortunate 
 woman to instruct simultaneously a crowd of fifty urchins of 
 all degrees of ignorance and stupidity. In such a case the 
 teacher can do no more than go through the motions of 
 teaching, while restraining her charges, as far as possible, 
 from overt acts of violence. The dullards become more 
 stultified than ever, the naturally capable have no chance 
 to put their faculty to use, the teacher loses all vitality; Sa- 
 tan alone is benefited. If the community wishes its children 
 to be educated, the community must provide a sufficient
 
 SCHOOL 157 
 
 number of classes; if the community wants its defectives to 
 be cared for, it must furnish special instruction adapted to 
 their needs. It is not right, it is not patriotic to sacrifice the 
 competent to the incompetent, to neglect those who will 
 have to do society's work for the sake of those who can 
 never be aught but a burden to society. What opportunity 
 is there for the growth of leaders, or even of intelligent fol- 
 lowers, when the scholastic standard is the poorest per- 
 formance of the poorest pupil ? 
 
 In Erewhon, not so many years ago, a new Superintendent 
 dawned upon the schools, heralded by a crimson aurora of 
 praise from pedagogical authorities. He was, indeed, a fa- 
 mous statistician, and he knew the latest approved theories 
 of education from A to Izzard. Pupils and teachers were to 
 him but pawns in a great game of tabulation; as human 
 beings they had no interest, and he avoided contact with 
 them. His dream for he was an idealist in his way 
 was to stand up in a national meeting of Superintendents 
 and display tables transcending those of any other city. 
 One of his first measures was the promulgation of a decree 
 that henceforth the rating of every teacher should depend 
 on the proportion of pupils promoted by her. A perfect 
 teacher was to be one who pushed along 100 per cent. One 
 who declared only 80 per cent of her miscellaneous charges 
 to be fit for advancement was in danger of being cast into 
 outer darkness or, in plain parlance, of losing her job. 
 Great was the alarm among the skillful, conscientious 
 schoolmistresses whose lives were spent in trying to incul- 
 cate real knowledge and in maintaining respect for serious 
 effort and attainment. Great was the joy among the 
 comparatively few incapable and unscrupulous instructors, 
 who, unable to impart information or to keep their idle 
 classes in decent order, knowing that they were held in scant
 
 158 OLD AND NEW 
 
 esteem and suspecting that their tenure of office was pre- 
 carious, sought to curry favor with children and parents by 
 giving everyone a high mark. These became the elect of the 
 new administration : they were held up as models for the real 
 teachers; they were commanded, in fact, to spy upon the 
 latter and to report at headquarters any expression of dis- 
 affection. A reign of terror ensued on this realm of topsy- 
 turvydom. After some disastrous experiences, the honest 
 teachers were afraid to breathe; a word of complaint, a 
 whispered revelation of the truth invited capital punish- 
 ment. For the Superintendent, like most tyrants, was a 
 rancorous man, as petty and cruel as he was dictatorial. 
 Furthermore, the decree having come to the knowledge of 
 the children, word went abroad through the schools that 
 under the new dispensation nobody needed to work, inas- 
 much as all were to be promoted and receive diplomas 
 whether they studied or not. The consequence can be im- 
 agined. " Redeunt Saturnia regna ": the Golden Age was 
 renewed. The coming generation in Erewhon seemed 
 destined to realize Rousseau's fanciful image of primitive 
 man, uncontaminated by science or art, undepraved by 
 thought. But ere this result was consummated, the Super- 
 intendent, in recognition of his splendid service in Erewhon, 
 was offered in Erewhemos a more lucrative post, which he 
 promptly accepted; and the schools of Erewhon were left to 
 flounder back into civilization as best they could. 
 
 Promiscuous promotion is a phase of what is called " de- 
 mocracy." If we give a diploma to the boy who has done 
 something and withhold it from him who has never even 
 tried to do anything, we are making invidious discrimina- 
 tions and introducing the spirit of competition, which, 
 according to Rousseau, was one of the earliest of the malign 
 fruits of awakening intelligence. It should be remembered,
 
 SCHOOL 159 
 
 however, that Rousseau's virtuous savages were so scattered 
 through the primeval forest that they scarcely ever met; 
 when one did encounter another, it may be presumed that 
 he unhesitatingly brained the stranger, unless he happened 
 to recall opportunely that he was endowed with " natural 
 pity." It will scarcely be maintained that natural pity is 
 characteristic of schoolboys; nor can they be kept so far 
 asunder that Patsy's doings shall be hidden from Ikey and 
 Angelo. If Ikey and Angelo study and Patsy loafs, these 
 facts are known to all three. We therefore confront this 
 dilemma: either we must recognize the difference and refuse 
 Patsy regardless of his lacerated feelings and the unholy 
 glee of his mates the certificate awarded to Ikey and 
 Angelo; or we must boldly declare that diplomas, like the 
 gentle rain from Heaven, descend equally on the just and the 
 unjust. In the latter case, of course, the diploma ceases to 
 confer any more distinction than is bestowed by a shower: 
 graduation means no more than getting wet. 
 
 When everybody's somebodee, 
 Then nobody's anybody. 
 
 In the tolerably numerous schools and colleges in which this 
 equation has been approximately worked out, it has justified 
 itself by an equalization of effort on the part of the pupils. 
 The value of the diploma being zero, this is the exact amount 
 paid for it, in scholarship, by each and every purchaser. It 
 has been observed that sane persons, who by chance or by 
 evil design have been confined in a lunatic asylum, have be- 
 come, after a few years, as mad as their merry companions. 
 Thus a lad of promise, whom an accident of residence has 
 consigned to a " democratized " school, little by little loses 
 his ambition, his intellectual curiosity that precious 
 " desire to know " which in Aristotle's opinion is common 
 to all mankind and at the end of his education is not a
 
 160 OLD AND NEW 
 
 bit less ignorant and indifferent than the primitive beings 
 who have shared his experience. 
 
 A demagogue is a demagogue, whether he be political or 
 pedagogical. He appeals to the meanest of passions 
 envy. Why should some people be quicker and better in- 
 formed than others ? If all cannot have brains, no one shall 
 have any. The demagogical equalization is always a lev- 
 eling downwards. When education in America began, it 
 was intended for the fit and was designed to produce a 
 choice type. With the extension of opportunity to a rapidly 
 broadening and deteriorating constituency, the educational 
 demagogue has progressively striven, not to uplift the 
 quality of this constituency by encouraging it to its utmost 
 endeavor, but to bring down both the subject matter and 
 the standard of instruction to a level within Caliban's easy 
 reach. " Give the poor boy a chance! " has been so con- 
 stantly the cry that there seems to be no chance left for the 
 poor little rich boy. And the riches and poverty whereof I 
 speak are riches and poverty, not of the pocket, but of the 
 mind. This present era of efficiency ought, more than any 
 other, to avoid the waste of ability. Every type of talent 
 should be fostered and cultivated, every superior intelli- 
 gence should be given meat worthy of its appetite. Democ- 
 racy is not one dead level of stupidity; if it were, it could 
 not long survive. The sharp-sighted and swift must guide 
 the slow, else there can be no advance; and where there is 
 no advance, there is decay To be fit to direct, to know 
 enough about roads to take the right one, the quick and clear- 
 eyed must be taught according to their quickness; they 
 must have free play to develop their aptitudes. If they 
 shall be sacrificed to the inept, the curse of the impious 
 offering will fall, not upon them alone, but upon all their 
 weaker fellows.
 
 SCHOOL l6l 
 
 The moral of all this is that if we are to diminish the 
 French boy's five years' lead, if we are really to take a 
 respectable place among educated nations, we must pay 
 the bill. We must have classes small enough to enable the 
 teacher to differentiate the strong and the willing from the 
 sluggards; we must have frequent promotions according to 
 individual progress; we must have instruction graded to 
 suit the recipients; while granting every help and every 
 incentive to the backward, we must not neglect the leaders 
 nor forget that they are the ones naturally called to deter- 
 mine the fate of their generation. It so happens that for the 
 last two years I have been observing the conduct of a large 
 business school. This enterprise lays no claim to idealism or 
 philanthropy; it is simply a money-making institution, a 
 factory but a factory which guarantees its output and 
 always finds a market for it. Now this school has a number 
 of features which I should like to commend to more pre- 
 tentious halls of learning. For instance, the newcomer is 
 greeted by the officials with a welcoming smile, his needs are 
 promptly ascertained, and he is fully launched on his career 
 within an hour or two of his arrival. I need not dwell upon 
 the contrast between this introduction and the lingering, 
 often forbidding initiation elsewhere. More important, 
 however, is the policy of unswerving insistence on adequate 
 performance. In each course the student has a chance of 
 promotion every week or every fortnight, but only on con- 
 dition of attaining a grade not far from perfection. On the 
 other hand, until he reaches this standard, he is kept at the 
 old task, always under stimulating guidance, as long as his 
 life and purse shall endure. The tuition fee being fairly high, 
 he has a powerful motive to accelerate his pace; and his 
 speed cannot be increased without the habit of accuracy. 
 During our war with Spain, when the unfortunate Spanish
 
 1 62 OLD AND NEW 
 
 ships went down helplessly before our guns, a friend of mine, 
 a practical man, observed : " What a penalty people have to 
 pay for not doing things right! " Now, in our familiar edu- 
 cational order, a pupil may proceed from the bottom of the 
 primary school to the college degree without ever in his life 
 having done anything right. A feeble approximation is 
 accepted, all along the line, in lieu of the real article not, 
 in most cases, because the learner is congenitally incapable 
 of right-doing, but because experience indicates to him that 
 for scholastic purposes the easy substitute is just as good. 
 When he issues forth from the protecting college haven to 
 the battle of adult life, the penalty awaits him. Our usual 
 collegiate prescription amounts to this: the student, to 
 obtain regular promotion, must do about two-thirds of his 
 work two-thirds right. Imagine this standard applied to 
 a bank cashier, a bookkeeper, or even an elevator boy. A 
 bill clerk who should succeed, on four days of the week, in 
 making two-thirds of his bills tally with the accounts would 
 have to be a son of the senior partner to get much credit for 
 good intentions. Another maxim, then, is that we must not 
 rest content with anything short of the best that each pupil 
 can do; and the things he has to do must be such that his 
 best shall have a genuine value. 
 
 What shall these things be ? Here is the hardest problem 
 of all. Its difficulty has been multiplied manifold by the 
 bewildering expansion of science during the last century; it 
 has been heightened also, in America, by the influx of for- 
 eigners. We have not only Percy to educate, but Patsy and 
 Ikey and Angelo. We have to consider the demands of vo- 
 cational training. We must admit the claims of science, but, 
 if possible, without letting them override our judgment. 
 We are confronted, furthermore, with a mass of freshly 
 developed educational theory, with certain doctrines based
 
 SCHOOL 163 
 
 on recent pedagogical experiments. Not many years ago, 
 we used to be told, on the best authority, that education, 
 coming from educo, " I draw out," means the drawing out, 
 or development, of innate faculties. Today the innate 
 faculties seem unwilling to be drawn from their hiding 
 place; and a Latinist whom I have anxiously consulted in- 
 forms me that educare does not mean " to draw out." Thus 
 fashions change. When the eductive style was at its height, 
 and I was on the threshold of my career as a teacher, I deter- 
 mined to try the method as I had seen it used, apparently 
 with success, by a brilliantly eductile professor. It was a 
 French class, and in the front row sat a stupid, well-meaning 
 boy, who was staring at me with fixed, glassy eyes, seemingly 
 hypnotized. " Just speak," I cried, " just open your lips 
 and let the words come out! You can if you only will. Let 
 out what is in you. Now speak! " Brighter gleamed the 
 glare in the glassy eyes; slowly the great mouth opened, and 
 there came forth a confused, inarticulate roar, such as once 
 issued from the brazen jaws of the bull of Phalaris. Then 
 and there I made up my mind that it is useless to draw out 
 what is not in; then for the first tune I appreciated the 
 vastness of the vacancy to be filled. " A vacuum," once 
 wrote a student in an examination in physics, " is a great 
 vacant space where the Pope lives all alone." Alas! the 
 mental vacuum of studenthood houses no infallible mentor. 
 To put nutritive stores into an empty granary that is 
 the first and perhaps the chief task of education. But if the 
 granary be not tight, the grain will leak out almost as fast as 
 it is shoveled in. " Understanding without remembering," 
 says Dante, " does not make knowledge." Memory must 
 be constantly stimulated and helped. Today's pedagogical 
 theory asserts that memory cannot be cultivated: it is in- 
 born, full-grown at the start, and not susceptible of increase.
 
 1 64 OLD AND NEW 
 
 To the theorist it matters not that his view runs counter to 
 the general experience of mankind. That a seasoned actor 
 can learn a part ten times as fast as a novice is for him an 
 irrelevant detail. However, let us distinguish. The the- 
 orist's theory may have been deduced from some compre- 
 hensive guess concerning the faculties of the human mind, 
 or it may have developed from a generalization of the results 
 of certain specific experiments. In the first case, he will be 
 impervious to argument or evidence; in the second, his 
 opinions may perhaps be modified by demonstration. Pos- 
 sibly he will be content to restrict the scope of his assertion, 
 affirming merely that, while practice in learning one par- 
 ticular kind of thing may heighten one's speed and effective- 
 ness hi that same pursuit, it will not help us to acquire a 
 different kind of thing quicker or better. Even this proposi- 
 tion will be hard for the observant teacher to swallow; for 
 he will have noted that the pupil who has long been in the 
 habit of learning and remembering can catch and hold a fact 
 at one presentation, whereas the previously idle new convert 
 cannot grasp it without considerable repetition. Further- 
 more, if the observant teacher has been teaching and observ- 
 ing for thirty years, he will have remarked that the power 
 of retaining information has rapidly declined since modern 
 educational theorizing began to influence practice. An ever- 
 increasing proportion of students, with the best of good- 
 will, simply cannot carry a thing over from Monday to 
 Wednesday or from Wednesday to Friday; from Friday to 
 Monday is seldom attempted. As a child, I was inordinately 
 fond of grasshoppers not as an accompaniment to wild 
 honey, but as playmates. For one of these creatures, which I 
 had found incapacitated, by the loss of a limb, for a nomadic 
 existence, I constructed a lovely bower, furnished with 
 every comfort that a grasshopper could desire not only
 
 SCHOOL 165 
 
 grass, which was plainly indicated by etymology, but ferns, 
 a tiny cave or two, a little pool of fresh water. I even ob- 
 tained from my father, and tucked away discreetly in a 
 corner, a wad of tobacco, conceiving that possibly this mate- 
 rial might be needed for the secretion of that dark brownish 
 liquid known to children as " molasses " or " tobacco juice." 
 It appeared to me that the invalid appreciated these atten- 
 tions and returned in some measure the affection I spent on 
 him. To beguile his enforced leisure, I tried to teach him 
 sundry little tricks, such as lay well within the limits of his 
 diminished crural activity; and in the course of a morning, 
 unless I deceived myself, my patience and loving kindness 
 would be rewarded by at least a partial performance of the 
 mild acrobatic feats suggested to him. But on the morrow 
 everything had to be started afresh; the previous day's 
 training had left not a trace. Often, of late, I have seemed to 
 be teaching a class of grasshoppers, whose lives began anew 
 every day. 
 
 We ought to be able to derive from our own mnemonic 
 experience some ideas about the utilization of children's 
 memories. Now, we know that the things which have 
 stayed on our mental tablets are those which have made a 
 clean mark. In babyhood, starting with a bare slate, I sup- 
 pose we record everything we perceive. The advancing 
 child, who still has abundant room on his page, registers 
 most of his perceptions, although some of the impressions 
 begin to overlap and blur. As we go on, the writing becomes 
 less and less legible, and, as a rule, only those things stand 
 out which are strikingly different from anything written 
 before. Edinburgh, which I saw once as a little boy, is so 
 clear that I know I could find my way about if I went there 
 again; so it is with Lewiston, Me., and Chester, Pa., pro- 
 vided they have not grown beyond recognition. On the
 
 1 66 OLD AND NEW 
 
 other hand, Columbus and Nashville and Los Angeles, seen 
 once in mature years, have left a picture that is pleasant but 
 almost wholly indistinct. Not so Carcassonne, which is 
 anything but a normal specimen of the genus Urbs. Unlike 
 the man in the poem, I did contrive to see Carcassonne 
 before dying, though well after the middle of life; and every 
 detail of it is indelible. When I recall London, Paris, Rome, 
 or Philadelphia, which I have visited at intervals since small 
 boyhood, the image that first presents itself is the earliest 
 one, more or less dimmed by the superposition of later im- 
 pressions. With the places known to my somewhat migra- 
 tory childhood I associate the books I read in those several 
 spots. The mention of Dorchester brings back to me Pil- 
 grim's Progress and Barnaby Rudge, there perused when I 
 was six or seven. A certain hill in Worcester, where I dwelt 
 at the age of nine, means Adam Bede. I have forgotten the 
 very name of the little village in Vermont that witnessed my 
 participation in the Struggles and Triumphs of P. T. Bar- 
 num. From the Avenue de Villiers in Paris I journeyed to 
 the moon with Jules Verne. And these first literary excur- 
 sions are the ones whose impress remains; the personages 
 and the events therein encountered are more real to me than 
 any flesh-and-blood people I have ever met. Of the works 
 read since I reached thirty barring those few which de- 
 part widely from the usual type little or nothing stays by 
 me. Even in the case of stories, such as Adam Bede, reread 
 in later years, my present recollection comprises only what 
 lingers from the first reading; the second perusal has only 
 made some of the figures a bit misty. I daresay we live the 
 greater part of our lives before we are fifteen, no matter 
 what age we eventually attain. From these considerations 
 we may infer that the sooner a child learns things, the better, 
 especially the things that matter most. Furthermore, if we
 
 SCHOOL 167 
 
 want to make a lasting mark, we must try to find a clean 
 spot on the slate, or else draw a line so heavy that it will 
 stick out from all the rest. Then we must be sure to make 
 our first record a correct one as far as it goes, for the first im- 
 pression, right or wrong, is the one that will endure; and we 
 must be careful lest subsequent incongruous images blur the 
 original. 
 
 The criticism oftenest launched at our schools is that they 
 stuff the child with facts, instead of developing his powers. 
 This taunt, which regularly accompanies the educo theory of 
 education, was perhaps justified at a period not long before 
 my birth. When I was a schoolboy, the fact-stuffing pro- 
 pensity had considerably abated, and now, judging from 
 results, it has subsided altogether. The latter-day freshman 
 is served up to us with so little stuffing of any kind that it 
 would puzzle a pedagogical epicure to name the ingredients. 
 The phrase, however, is continually repeated from force of 
 habit, being handed on by one generation to another, es- 
 teemed for its antiquity, like a superannuated piece of 
 furniture. Presumably there was an epoch when pupils 
 spent their time learning by heart a lot of things which they 
 did not understand. I wish they learned more things now. 
 What the American people needs more than anything else is 
 plain knowledge; for we are a woefully ignorant nation. Of 
 course, children should be led to think, but how can they 
 think if they have nothing to think about ? We already 
 have too much ratiocination in vactw, too much logic with- 
 out premises. Descartes was of the opinion that reason is 
 pretty evenly distributed among human beings. Some can 
 use it, because they have the stuff to operate with; others, 
 having no material, cannot. Knowledge is the gasoline that 
 feeds the engine. To be told where to find it is not enough. 
 When I want to use the product of 8 X 9, it is cold comfort to
 
 168 OLD AND NEW 
 
 be informed that the multiplication table is to be consulted 
 in a book called Arithmetic, on the left end of the top shelf. 
 I once knew a man of broad and fruitful scholarship, who, 
 as he approached middle life, began to construct a card 
 catalogue. He often spoke of it with glowing pride in 
 fact, he seldom spoke of anything else; and whenever he 
 could catch a couple of unwary friends, he would lead them 
 to inspect its portentous and eternally crescent dimensions. 
 But he never wrote anything after that. He had no time for 
 study or meditation; the catalogue absorbed his life. It 
 goes without saying that all of us must keep some sort of 
 register of things we may need to look up, or hope to read; 
 but an ounce of present information is worth several tons of 
 the futurity of a card catalogue. 
 
 " I see in the papers," said the Young Lady Across the 
 Way, " that the French have taken three hundred metres 
 from the Germans. Now I hope that will put a stop to those 
 horrid gas attacks." I like to quote the Young Lady Across 
 the Way, because she is such a characteristic product of 
 modern education. It will be noted that her logical process 
 is impeccable. She has Ppwer, but is not stuffed with facts. 
 Had she been ever so slightly acquainted with the metric 
 system and the methods of warfare, not only would she have 
 escaped her erroneous inference, she would also have been 
 able to conjure up some picture of the event. Facts have a 
 double value: they give us wherewithal to think straight and 
 they stimulate the imagination; for imagination, like rea- 
 son, cannot run without the gasoline of knowledge. And 
 these two things, judgment and imagination, are, with 
 knowledge itself, the most precious results of well directed 
 schooling. The cause that lies behind the preposterous 
 things our politicians say is not, in general, stupidity nor 
 dishonesty: it is an unjudicial and unimaginative ignorance.
 
 SCHOOL 169 
 
 Their utterances are more or less seriously taken because the 
 public, equally ignorant, is just as blank and undiscriminat- 
 ing. The same public, for the same reason, is ready to gobble 
 up the bait of any pseudo-religious or pseudo-scientific 
 hoax. Destitute of data, it cannot check up an account; 
 nor can it construct an image of things as they are, revealing 
 the absurdity of things that aren't and can't be. Hence the 
 peril of pseudo-educators. 
 
 Appeal to the imagination is the real educator's most 
 potent resource. On the one hand, the well informed and 
 therefore thoughtful pupil has vision to comprehend the 
 ultimate profit of his study; thus he finds an adequate mo- 
 tive for his labor, foreseeing the contingencies in which it 
 will bear fruit. Whatever is done without a purpose is ill 
 done, and the purpose of study is beyond the horizon of the 
 short-sighted. On the other hand, imagination invests study 
 itself with charm. It means sympathy, understanding; it 
 means originality and progress. Never can we improve if we 
 conceive of nothing better than we are. If the late war 
 showed indubitably that college-bred youths are more 
 adaptable, more quickly trained than others, and far more 
 resourceful, it is because the liberal arts are most conducive 
 to creative imagining. Given an unprecedented situation, 
 an unexpected need, the man of routine is helpless, and the 
 only saviour is the man accustomed to look beyond. Re- 
 forms, discoveries, inventions (unless they spring from ac- 
 cident) are made, not by the plodder in a vocational rut, but 
 by the seer who penetrates the underlying principles of men 
 and things. An engineer of high rank, who during the war 
 was entrusted by the government with the charge of select- 
 ing leaders in various branches of production, assured me 
 that for almost every line of industry he had to choose as 
 director someone who hitherto had not been identified with
 
 170 OLD AND NEW 
 
 that particular kind of enterprise. The specialist, exercised 
 from the beginning in unimaginative handiwork, always 
 bent on concrete detail, has no eye for the abstract, no 
 ability or willingness to see further than the visible. Every 
 suggestion of fundamental innovation seems to him absurd, 
 impossible, and arouses either his amusement or his hostility. 
 This, I am told, is the great defect of our American scientific 
 colleges: they turn out graduates who are machine-made 
 and machine-like, good for one thing only. They are like 
 our " practical politicians " who " run with the old ma- 
 chine." And this same mechanistic type of training is now, 
 in our ordinary public schools, rapidly encroaching on the 
 humanistic education which at its best has proved its power 
 to broaden understanding and awaken inventiveness. 
 
 How far it is the business of the state to carry on voca- 
 tional training is a political question, whose answer is in- 
 volved in the general problem of socialism. For my own 
 part, I believe that preparation for specific trades may ad- 
 vantageously be undertaken by public authorities, if it be 
 done adequately and frankly that is, if the instruction 
 really transform, in a shorter time than is now required, an 
 unproductive into a productive member of the community, 
 or give the recipient a higher degree of productiveness than 
 he could otherwise attain; and if this course be taken for 
 what it really is, an apprenticeship, and not regarded as a 
 substitute for the traditional studies of school. Mistaken is 
 the attempt to disguise this apprenticeship as scholastic 
 education, in a forlorn hope of killing two birds with one 
 stone. The outcome of this compromise, as far as I have 
 had opportunity to observe, is a hybrid which is neither art 
 nor craft nor good red study, a thing too indefinite to possess 
 a cash value and too mechanical to meet the greater needs of 
 the mind. Nevertheless, it may have considerable utility
 
 SCHOOL 171 
 
 as play. Of course, we must not keep the child everlastingly 
 at the books or too long in the realm of the abstract. He 
 must use his hands and senses, must have practice in dealing 
 accurately with concrete things. Such practice the boy of 
 the past and the fortunate boy of the present have got from 
 their play their games, their tools, their printing presses, 
 their carpenter shops, their laboratories, their wireless 
 telegraphy, their bicycles, their boats, their automobiles. 
 Country boys have, in addition, the varied experience of the 
 farm. Girls have had their sewing and housework, and now- 
 adays they have most of the boys' resources as well or 
 instead. These boys and these girls, however, are not the 
 only ones we have to educate; they no longer even form a 
 majority of our school public. We must reach the children 
 of the congested ward, who have no space for games and to 
 whom tools and bicycles are as strange as Euclid. Wood- 
 work and ironwork and other kinds of handiwork have be- 
 come, then, a necessary adjunct to school. But they replace 
 sport, not study; they should be treated as recreation; and 
 the time for them should be taken, not from learning, but 
 from idleness. On this footing, with games and gymnastics, 
 they can well occupy a good slice of the day. They need not 
 and should not be permitted to crowd the already inade- 
 quate hours reserved for the " academic subjects " that 
 is, for the " three R's," the humanities, and the principles of 
 science. How scant these hours are is not generally ap- 
 preciated: on an average throughout the year, they are not 
 more than two out of the twenty-four. 
 
 Knowledge, roughly speaking, consists of two branches: 
 men and things. Of men, our knowledge has not percep- 
 tibly improved since the time of the ancient Greeks; of 
 things, our knowledge and our control have grown at a 
 breathless rate, especially in the last hundred years, and are
 
 172 OLD AND NEW 
 
 growing still. It is natural, then, that while the study of 
 man should remain relatively stable, the study of things 
 should be in a state of flux and expansion. We cannot ex- 
 pand the day, although, by avoiding waste, we can put more 
 into it. How shall we apportion the allotment of time to the 
 two branches ? Education ought to prepare the educated, 
 not only for the competent performance of their special 
 tasks, but for citizenship, for companionship, for full human 
 life, for leisure. The " laboring classes " those whose 
 labor is concerned exclusively with concrete things are 
 about to have far more leisure than they have had in the 
 past, and the way in which they shall enjoy it cannot fail to 
 affect the general intelligence and morals of society. If we 
 are to avoid the danger of so shaping them that they shall be 
 mere mechanisms in working hours and mere wastrels in the 
 rest, we must give them an insight into better possibilities. 
 We must teach them the knowledge of man what man- 
 kind, throughout the world, is doing and thinking, what 
 mankind, through the ages, has thought and done and been. 
 We must awaken interest in the great problems of humanity, 
 we must stir the imagination. Imagination of one kind 
 the sense of wonder is aroused by the pursuit of the ele- 
 ments of natural science; and it is desirable, for obvious 
 reasons, that men should have an idea of the physical uni- 
 verse in which they dwell. Judgment is exercised by applied 
 science, and, even if it were not, applied science has assumed 
 in modern life such enormous importance that it cannot be 
 neglected. For applied science, one needs mathematics, 
 which in itself is a wholesome discipline because it requires 
 a high degree of concentration and because it shows so 
 inexorably the difference between right and wrong. But 
 more essential than all these for rich manhood or woman- 
 hood is the study of man. From our human standpoint,
 
 SCHOOL 173 
 
 man is the center of the universe, and things exist merely 
 with reference to him. To appreciate our neighbors, to un- 
 derstand the events of our age and to play well our modest 
 part in them, to fill our minds with thoughts that shall befit 
 our human dignity, we must possess the judgment and the 
 imagination which come only from the contemplation of 
 human nature, human deeds, human institutions, human 
 intelligence, human aspirations. Excessive devotion to 
 things has plunged the world into the black and bloody 
 horror from which (perhaps) we have just emerged. With 
 but scanty science of things, the Greeks of old maintained 
 for centuries a civilization that has been the envy of nations 
 ever since. 
 
 In history man is to be found, and better still in literature. 
 As it is now taught, history seems to have lost much of its 
 native charm. One can understand that the professional 
 historian, whose aim is exact truth, should brush aside the 
 glittering accretions of fiction that have encrusted it; but 
 truth, thus stripped, is often shockingly bare. A boy who 
 has to compass in a year the events of the earth from Adam 
 to Charlemagne, with all the interesting features left out, is 
 not thereby encouraged to further reading. Would he not get 
 a clearer idea of how the world wags if he spent that time on 
 one period or one country, and would he not be likelier to 
 ask for more ? Children are, and ought to be, romantic. 
 Why should not their love of romance be at once gratified 
 and utilized ? History, for them, at least, ought to be 
 romantic, and so it used to be. William Tell with his apple 
 is not only more seductive than the economic condition of 
 Switzerland under the administration of Gessler, he is more 
 historical; for he has been during the centuries a part of 
 the consciousness of Europe and America, influencing the 
 emotions of men and the current of events, whereas the
 
 174 OLD AND NEW 
 
 economic condition of Switzerland under Gessler has never 
 influenced anything or moved anybody since his remote 
 time. What really matters is the enduring and widespread 
 belief that such and such things happened, and the ex- 
 pression of that belief in word or deed through all the gen- 
 erations. Of course I do not mean that fable should be 
 presented as fact, but when fable is more important than fact, 
 it should be presented in some fashion, as a significant por- 
 tion of our human heritage. We must not let die the stories 
 that have lived so long; we must not cast them out to make 
 room for expositions which, creating no reaction save weari- 
 ness, can hardly make a lasting impression. 
 
 In Anatole France's charming autobiographical sketch, 
 Le petit Pierre, a certain M. Dubois, after listening to a 
 couple of rather high-flown stories of contemporary youth- 
 ful heroism, is impelled to discourse as follows: " All these 
 noble incidents, all these glorious speeches are nothing but 
 fables and empty rumors. When it is impossible to report 
 accurately what is said and done in a quiet, attentive com- 
 pany, what probability is there, my dear lady, that a gesture 
 or a word can be caught amidst the tumult of battle ? I do 
 not criticize your two anecdotes, gentlemen, for being im- 
 aginary and having no foundation in fact, but for being 
 inartistically and unnaturally conceived, devoid of that fair 
 simplicity which is the only passport through the ages. 
 That is why it is best to leave them to moulder in the al- 
 manacs. Historical truth has nothing to do with the noble 
 examples of heroism which fly from century to century on 
 the lips of men: their only basis is art and poetry. I do 
 not know whether young Bara, when the Chouans promised 
 to spare him if he would cry ' Vive le roi,' really responded 
 ' Vive la Republique ' and fell pierced by twenty bayonet 
 wounds. I do not know, and never can know. But I do
 
 SCHOOL 175 
 
 know that the image of this boy, who offered up to freedom 
 his life still in the flower, brings tears to the eyes and makes 
 the heart burn, and that no better symbol of sacrifice can be 
 conceived. I know also I know it best of all that 
 when the sculptor David shows me this child, in his pure, 
 lovely nakedness, surrendering himself to death with the 
 serenity of the wounded Amazon in the Vatican, pressing his 
 cockade to his heart and clutching in his cold hand the drum- 
 stick with which he led the attack, the miracle is performed, 
 the young hero is created, Bara lives, Bara will never die." 
 
 Perhaps these tales, after all, find their most appropriate 
 place in literature, the great storehouse of man-lore. More 
 living than any who figure in official history are the char- 
 acters we meet in fiction and biography. These have been 
 understood, through and through, by their authors, who 
 make us in turn understand them better indeed than we 
 understand most of the people who constantly surround us. 
 I am speaking, naturally, of the great works of literature, 
 the works of masters, which have survived the test of time. 
 In them we must seek the real types of our kind. With the 
 exception of near relatives and a dozen friends, how shadowy 
 are the men and women of our real lives, compared to the 
 memory of those with whom we have lived in books, the 
 books of our youthful reading! I am not a recluse. I have 
 moved about a good bit and have always been interested in 
 my human environment; but my material specimens have 
 never displayed themselves with such rich variety as my 
 bookish ones, never let me read their minds so explicitly, 
 never put themselves into such illustrative situations, never 
 grouped themselves so contrastingly, never been so con- 
 secutively on exhibition. 
 
 Literature is not only a fund of information and delight, 
 it is a bond. It links us to all the people, the world over,
 
 176 OLD AND NEW 
 
 who have read the same books. We are like strangers who 
 have a lot of common friends. Thus it promotes compre- 
 hension and fellowship, if not from China to Peru, at least 
 from London to San Francisco and further, if we are 
 multilingual. Hence the value of foreign languages, which 
 provide us, into the bargain, with a fresh set of types and a 
 broader outlook on humanity. Once on a French steamer, 
 during a particularly stormy and perilous winter voyage, I 
 met a Greek who, as I accidentally discovered, had read The 
 MUl on the Floss; and forthwith we were countrymen. But 
 one may claim as literary companions not the living alone, 
 but the dead. We may consort with Milton's first readers, 
 we may mingle with Shakespeare's first auditors, or, if we 
 know Latin and Greek, we may hobnob with those beings of 
 old who listened to Cicero and Demosthenes. The art 
 museums are peopled with them, white, silent, majestic. 
 What an impression they made on a certain small boy, in 
 the Louvre and the Vatican; how he longed to be taken into 
 their company and transported to their glorious age! Yes, 
 surely, the ancients after all are the most romantic of peoples, 
 and their languages the most alluring. When I conjured up 
 the forms of those stern patriots of whom I read in Viri 
 Roma, I used to be all eagerness to learn how they looked 
 and lived, and how they talked. It has been a mystery to 
 me that children can find Latin uninteresting; some Educa- 
 cational Expert must have put them up to it. Perhaps, 
 though, they begin reading too late; I remember I started 
 before I had finished the declensions. Perhaps they have 
 not been exposed to the spell of story and picture. In a 
 school I visited last year, the lowest class was using as one of 
 its text-books in English a fascinating little history of Greece, 
 full of beautiful illustrations a proper stimulus to classic 
 studies in a subsequent year.
 
 SCHOOL 177 
 
 I cannot close without another quotation from Le petit 
 Pierre, whose feelings, on his introduction to that world of 
 enchantment, were so similar to mine. By mistake, when he 
 first was sent to school, he was put into a Latin reading class, 
 although he had never studied grammar of any kind and 
 knew not a word of Latin. " M. Grepinet was a very kind 
 man, unless I am greatly mistaken, and a good teacher. It 
 is not his fault if I got little profit from his lessons. At the 
 sound of his voice I saw entrancing scenes issuing as if by 
 magic from a book that was more illegible for me than the 
 most illegible of scrawls, the De Viris. A shepherd is dis- 
 covering amid the Tiber's rushes two new-born children 
 nursed by a she-wolf. He takes them home to his cabin, 
 where his wife cares for them and brings them up as trades- 
 men, not knowing that these twins are of the blood of kings 
 and gods. I could see them, while the master's voice evoked 
 them from the darkness of the text, the heroes of this won- 
 derful story, Numitor and Amulius, kings of Alba Longa, 
 Rhea Silvia, Faustulus, Acca Laurentia, Remus and Rom- 
 ulus. Their adventures absorbed all the faculties of my 
 soul; the very beauty of their names made them seem more 
 beautiful to me. When Justine came to take me home, I 
 described to her the two twins and the she-wolf that nursed 
 them, and finally told her the whole story I had just learned, 
 a story to which she would have paid more attention, had 
 she been less excited over a counterfeit two-franc piece which 
 the coal-man had passed of! on her that very day." It is the 
 fate of William Tell all over again, economics intruding on 
 romance.
 
 PRINTED AT 
 
 THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A.
 
 A 000 981 786 7