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Title: Too Much College, or, Education Eating Up Life.
   With Kindred Essays in Education and Humour.
Author: Leacock, Stephen Butler (1869-1944)
Date of first publication: 1939
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Dodd, Mead, 1939
Date first posted: 24 August 2010
Date last updated: 24 August 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #601

This ebook was produced by: Al Haines

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

The printed edition used as the basis for this ebook
includes a frontispiece by Peggy Shaw.  We have
been unable to determine the life dates of Peggy
Shaw: as a result, the copyright status of the
frontispiece is uncertain, and we have not
included it in this digital edition.




Stephen Leacock



Too Much College

OR

Education Eating Up Life


  _With Kindred Essays in
  Education and Humour_




Dodd, Mead & Company

New York ------ 1939




COPYRIGHT, 1939,

BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.


  All rights reserved--no part of this book may be
  reproduced in any form without permission in
  writing from the publisher.




  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
  Quinn & Boden Company, Inc.
  BOOK MANUFACTURERS
  RAHWAY, NEW JERSEY




CONTENTS


PREFACE


TOO MUCH COLLEGE

CHAPTER

    I  EDUCATION EATING UP LIFE
   II  THE MACHINE AT WORK
  III  WHAT GOOD IS LATIN?
   IV  MATHEMATICS VERSUS PUZZLES
    V  PARLEZ-VOUS FRANAIS?
   VI  HAS ECONOMICS GONE TO SEED?
  VII  PSYCHOLOGY THE BLACK ART OF THE COLLEGE
 VIII  TEACHING THE UNTEACHABLE
   IX  RAH!  RAH!  COLLEGE!


KINDRED ESSAYS IN EDUCATION AND HUMOUR

  WHEN MEN RETIRE
  AS HISTORY GROWS DIM
  TWENTY CENTS' WORTH OF MURDER
  READER'S JUNK


LITTLE STORIES FOR GOOD LUCK

  THREE ON EACH
  NOTHING MISSING
  THINKING OF TOMORROW
  INFORMATION WHILE YOU DRINK
  NO PLACE FOR GENTLEMEN
  "WE HAVE WITH US TONIGHT"
  A HUMBLE LOVER
  THE MAGIC OF FINANCE
  HE GUESSED RIGHT
  ELECTRIC SERVICE
  OUR VANISHED INDUSTRIES
  COULDN'T SLEEP A WINK
  GO TO MOTHER
  FIVE DOLLARS, RIGHT NOW
  ARE PROFESSORS ABSENT-MINDED?
  WANTED: A GOLDFISH
  MUSHROOMS
  HELP WANTED
  ATMOSPHERE
  FREEDOM OF THOUGHT
  HIS BETTER SELF
  OH, SLEEP!  OH, GENTLE SLEEP!


EPILOGUE

BASS FISHING ON LAKE SIMCOE WITH JAKE GAUDAUR




PREFACE

This book is based on an experience of nearly twenty years of school
and college training, ten years of school-teaching, thirty-six years of
college lecturing, and three years of retirement, to think it over.
The opinion that I have reached is that education, in the narrow sense
of school and college attendance, is taking too heavy a toll of the
years of life and that the curriculum should be shortened.  But, in the
wider sense, what I want to advocate is not to make education shorter,
but to make it much longer--indeed to make it last as long as life
itself.

What I find wrong is the stark division now existing between the years
of formal education and entry into the work of life.  Education has
become to a great extent a mere acquirement of a legal qualification to
enter a closed profession, in place of being a process undertaken for
its own sake.  All that is best in education can only be acquired by
spontaneous interest; thus gained it lasts and goes on.  Education
merely imposed as a compulsory prerequisite to something else finishes
and withers when its task is done.  Real education should mean a
wonderful beginning, a marvellous initiation, a thorough "smattering,"
and life will carry it on.

A part of the present difficulty is that our school and college
curriculum in its one thousand years of development from the church
schools of the Middle Ages has taken on a mass of subject matter beyond
the range of any one mind.  We have not yet learned to condense to
useful essentials the things beyond study in detail.  The best part of
any subject is the general view, the thorough smattering just
mentioned, that carries to the individual the results for which others
have given the work of their lives.  The outline of the world's history
can occupy half an hour, or half a session, or half a century.

We have further encumbered the curriculum with the attempt to teach
things that cannot be imparted by classroom work--too practical for
anything but actual practice, or too vague and general for anything but
general reflection.

Nor is it only the subject matter of the curriculum that needs
reduction.  A saving of time perhaps equally important can be effected
by altering the form and method of its progress.  To a very great
extent all our school children and students in America and in England
move along in a system of one-year promotions, all advancing
together--or staying back to join the next consignment.

Thus, by the time the student has reached middle high school on his way
to college, he has already joined a sort of "convoy" that moves slowly
down the widening stream of education, always at the pace of the
slowest.  It sweeps along majestically, working puzzles, muttering
declensions, answering quizzes and translating "_parlez-vous_."

Any ordinary bright boy could strike out from the convoy, like a sloop
from a fleet, like a fast motor boat from among freighters, and
distance it by two years.  By the time the heavy convoy reached its
goal, he would have been there already for years, married, with one and
a half children, an established position, whiskers, debts, life.  He
would watch the convoy discharging its spectacled neophytes, thirty
years old, timid in the daylight, shuddering at life, having lived for
thirty years on other people's money.  That's a little exaggerated, but
it's good enough.

The practical person asks how we are supposed to bring about this
vastly altered program.  To abolish overnight our whole system of
examinations, promotions and graded classes moving all together would
leave our education a hopeless mess.  And to this the only answer is
that there is nothing that we can do about it, nothing particular and
all of a minute.

It is our current fault always to think in terms of deliberate
regulation and ordinance.  We seek to accomplish friendship with a
league, Mother's Day with a statute, welcome with a by-law and sobriety
with a code.  Without the spirit, all falls in a littered heap.  If
education is to change, there must first come the consciousness of the
need of change.


STEPHEN LEACOCK

  Professor Emeritus McGill
  University, B.A. (Toronto), Ph.D.
  (Chicago), Litt.D. (Brown,
  Dartmouth  and Toronto),
  LL.D. (Queen's and McGill),
  D.C.L. (Bishop's).

McGill University
  October 1, 1939




TOO MUCH COLLEGE


I

_Education Eating Up Life_



CHAPTER I

EDUCATION EATING UP LIFE

_Education longer and longer--Life ten years too late, and Death on
time--Where we got our Curriculum--Mediaeval Schools with Modern
Extension--A Scholar and a Gentleman, plus a Scientist and a Business
Man--The Straws on the Camel's Back_


In this discussion of education, I am addressing myself to plain
people.  By this I mean people who shudder at mathematics, go no
further in Latin than _E Pluribus Unum_ and take electricity as they
find it.  As opposed to these are the academic class who live in
colleges, or in the shadow of them, and claim education as their
province.  But the plain people are of necessity interested in
education because their sons and daughters go to college, or, more
important, can't go to college.

Now the plain people have noticed that education is getting longer and
longer.  Fifty years ago people learned to read out of a spelling-book
at six years old, went to high school at twelve, and taught school (for
money) on a third-class certificate at sixteen.  After that, two years
in a saw-mill and two at a medical school made them doctors, or one
year in a saw-mill and one in divinity fitted them for the church.  For
law they needed no college at all, just three summers on a farm and
three winters in an office.

All our great men in North America got this education.  Pragmatically,
it worked.  They began their real life still young.  With the money
they didn't spend they bought a wife.  By the age of thirty they had
got somewhere, or nowhere.  It is true that for five years of married
life, they carried, instead of a higher degree, bills for groceries,
coal, doctors and babies' medicine.  Then they broke out of the woods,
into the sunlight, established men--at an age when their successors are
still demonstrating, interning, or writing an advanced thesis on social
impetus.

Now it is all changed.  Children in school at six years old cut up
paper dolls and make patterns.  They are still in high school till
eighteen, learning civics and social statistics--studies for old men.
They enter college at about nineteen or twenty, take prerequisites and
post-requisites in various faculties for nearly ten years, then become
demonstrators, invigilators, researchers, or cling to a graduate
scholarship like a man on a raft.

At thirty they are just beginning, ten years too late.  They can't
marry till it's ten years too late; they have children ten years too
late, and die ten years too early.  They know nothing of the early life
of the man who worked in saw-mills, practiced medicine at twenty and
married six months later, with no other property than a stethoscope and
a horse and buggy; or of the young lawyer who married in debt, and
lived happy in it ever after.

"Safety first" has put its stamp on life.  Population begins to die at
the top.  And, all the time, education grows longer and longer.  This
does not deny that the average human life is now longer.  It means that
paternity is shorter.  People do not see enough of their
grandchildren--the sweetest prospect in the world.  Life has all too
little evening.  It has all run in arrears and never catches up.

All this, you will say, is exaggerated, is overcolored, is not truth.
Very likely.  But a half truth in argument, like a half brick, carries
better.  High colors show up where neutral tints blend to nothing.  Yet
the main truth gets over.  Education is eating up life.

In the above paragraphs I have formulated the plain man's accusations
against the continued lengthening of education; or, rather, I must not
say his accusation.  The poor fellow hasn't the spirit to accuse.  It
is not an accusation that he formulates or a grievance that he voices.
It is just a burden that he carries.

He carries it because of the prestige of education.  Round the idea of
education, as effort and opportunity, there have clustered centuries of
tradition and association.  These are stamped in such words and phrases
as "the little red schoolhouse," "the midnight oil," "the eager
student," "the kindly dominie," "the absent-minded professor."  With
this has grown up the notion--no doubt partly true--that the harder the
path of learning the higher the achievement.  "There is no royal road
to learning" still cheers those who are unaware that the public road
itself has become over-grown with a jungle of underbrush.

In other words, people don't complain.  On the contrary, they are often
proud of the burden that they carry.  Parents have no regrets for the
fifteen years of sacrifice that they made to give their children the
education they should have had in half the time.

It is a tradition with us that education opens opportunity.  To send a
boy to college is an ambition that wakes to life beside a cradle.  "How
is your son doing at school, Mr. McGregor?" I once asked of a Scotsman
of the traditional type.  "Fine!" he answered.  "If he keeps on as he
is, we'll have to put the college to him."

Even in the clutter and failure of youth's career among the blocked
avenues of our misfit world the college comes into its own as a sort of
refuge.  "My son," said another parent, "doesn't seem to have any
particular ability, so we think we'll have to send him to college.  He
seems no good for anything else."  The one anxiety of such parents is,
"Can he get in?"  Beyond that no need to look.  It's like being dipped
in the Jordan.

But even if the plain man were to raise his complaint against the
lengthening road and the increasing burden, he would be laughed out of
court by the academic class.  He would be told that our education is
all too short.  The teachers in the high schools would say that the
children come to them hopelessly unprepared and ought to stay a year
longer in public school.

Every professor will tell them that the first-year students at college
are simply hopeless and ought to have stayed at least a year, or call
it two, at high school.  The students in the second year ought never to
have left the first; the third-year men haven't the proper grounding
for their work; and the fourth-year are so rotten that they have to be
given degrees to get rid of them.  As for the graduate school, the
students in it should never have been admitted; they are not yet fit
for advanced work.  Their minds are immature.  And even when they do
get out of the graduate school, by sheer lapse of time, it seems
ridiculous to think of them as fit to teach, or do anything.  Oh, no;
they have to go to Germany for a year--anyway, to somewhere for a
year--and come back with whiskers and look like something.

I once put the question of shortening the college curriculum to my old
friend Dean Elderberry Foible, dean of the Faculty of Arts.  You didn't
know him, but there was a dean at your college just like him.
"Preposterous," he said, "preposterous!"  And that settled it.

If we turn from the general view to the particular subjects, the case
against any attempt to shorten the curriculum becomes simply
overwhelming--so much so that we are crushed and humbled in presenting
it.  Imagine trying to leave out mathematics--the queen of sciences; or
history--the very basis for understanding our modern life; or English
literature--our legacy common to England and America, dear as the very
hearthstones of our homes--who dares touch that?

Or who will dare disturb Latin, the bedrock of our culture; or foreign
languages, the amenity of polite life; or geology, deep as the caverns
of thought; biology, life's interpretation; or the social sciences, the
key to the padlock of happiness still closed.  Help!  Nothing but
pretentious ignorance could suggest leaving out anything.  As to any
shortening, ask again my friend Dean Elderberry Foible and he will tell
you that you can't.  "My dear sir, you may wish to, but you simply
can't"--with that academic finality with which professors dismiss the
ideas of students.

So it appears even to ourselves on a first survey.  Take mathematics.
How can you shorten the subject?  That stern struggle with the
multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can
you make it less?  Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a
pasture--nothing but years of effort can extract it.  You can't hurry
the process.

Or pass from arithmetic to algebra: you can't shoulder your way past
quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem.  Indeed,
the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace
slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with
the calculus in sight on the horizon.  So died, for each of us, still
bravely fighting, our mathematical training; except only for a set of
people called "mathematicians"--born so, like crooks.  Yet would we
leave mathematics out?  No, we hold our cross.

Latin too: do you want your son to grow up not knowing what a sine qua
non is, and who wrote Virgil's Aeneid?  Then he not only needs the
whole present curriculum but more!  At present the student learns just
enough Latin not to be able to read it; he stops short of the
saturation point--just gets wet with it and no more.

But why recite the entire list?  The same truth holds, for the academic
profession, of every one of the subjects of the school and college
course.  The student is not saturated, when he ought really to be
soaked.

A parallel resistance blocks the pathway leading to the professions.
The idea of any immediate entry into them, for a young man just out of
college is ridiculous.  A hundred years ago a man just out of college
looked as good as a coin fresh from the mint, a sickle from the
whetstone.  At twenty-seven he was a Member of Congress, had four or
five children, owned three or four thousand dollars' worth of property
in his own right--and owed five thousand dollars.  But nowadays!
Imagine trusting a serious case of illness to a young fellow of
twenty-seven barely out of college, and till yesterday an interne in a
hospital.  Out of the question!

And, later, when at last his turn comes, it is but a brief acme of
success, and then, all of a sudden, it seems people are saying, "He's
too old for the job, losing his grip--in fact, he's nearly fifty."
He's an "old doctor"--once a term of esteem and confidence but now
equivalent to an "old horse."

Thus in our ill-fit world youth and age jostle and hurry one another
together--too young and then too old.  Those who follow gardening know
that green peas are first too young to pick and then, overnight as it
seems, too old to eat.  So with our educated people.  Homer long ago
said, "As is the race of leaves, so is the race of men."  Make it
college graduates and garden peas and it still holds good.

How did all this come about?  Our system of education arose out of the
mediaeval Latin schools of the church.  It still carries, like a fossil
snake in a stone, the mark of its original structure.  Not that this
was the earliest kind of education.  But the others were different.
Greek education included music and dancing and what we call the arts.
It was supposed to fit people to live.  Mediaeval education was
supposed to fit people to die.  Any school-boy of today can still feel
the effect of it.

Greek education was free from the problems that have beset our own.  It
didn't include the teaching of languages, the Greeks despising all
foreigners as barbarians.  It avoided everything "practical" like the
plague, and would have regarded a professor of Engineering as a child
of the devil, misusing truth.  Mathematics, crippled by the want of
symbols, became a sort of dream--intense, difficult and proudly without
purpose.  Greek education carried with it no "exams" and "tests" for
entry to the professions.  A Greek dentist didn't have to pass in
Latin.  He used a hammer.

Thus philosophy, "the love of knowledge," came into its own, in talk as
endless as on the porch of a Kentucky country store.

"Scholars" would deny the truth of this summary and talk of Archimedes,
the world's first engineer, and Hippocrates, its earliest physician.
But the proof of what I say is that Archimedes found no followers and
Hippocrates waited five hundred years for Galen.  Scholars always see
exceptions where a plain man sees an even surface.  But even a billiard
ball, if you look close enough, is all covered with bumps.

Our education, then, comes down to us from the schools of the Middle
Ages.  These were organized by the church and the first aim was piety,
not competence; the goal was the reading of the Scriptures and by that
the salvation of the soul.  On this basis, Alfred the Great planned
schools for Saxon England.  So, too, in France did Charlemagne, who
couldn't read or write and felt a religious admiration for those who
could--the same as an oil magnate of today feels toward a university.

So presently the monastic schools arose, and from their oriel windows
came forth among the elm trees the sound of Latin chants intoned by
choristers; and in the silent scriptorium the light from a stained
window fell on the quiet "copyist" rewriting, letter by letter, in
pigment upon parchment, "In the beginning was the Word."  Thus passed
monastic life in its quiet transition to Eternity.

These were the earliest schools--secluded, scholarly--born ancient like
the "old-fashioned" children of aging parents.  For the date, place
them anywhere in the four hundred years from Alfred and Charlemagne to
the days of Oxford and Paris.

These later schools--Oxford, Paris, and such--came when study no longer
taught people how to die and keep out of hell, but how to live, as
lawyers--two ambitions with an obvious relationship.  Law hatched out
under the wings of the church, as a duck hatches under a hen, later to
horrify its parent.

Here again the vertebrate structure is still seen in the rock.
Lincoln's Inn and Grey's Inn were originally, in a sense, works of God,
the defunct Doctors Commons till its end a spirituality.  Law, in
England at least, struggled long before it shook off the hand of
ghostly guidance.  Even now the connection between law and religion
remains in the quantity of oaths by which the business of the law
secures its righteousness.

So there came, then, such schools as Oxford and Paris, which seem to
have been at first huge random gatherings of students--mediaeval
exaggeration puts 30,000 at Oxford in pre-record days.  They had,
before printing, hardly any books, and no examinations.  The curriculum
ran to endless discussion--more Kentucky.  These "disputations" begot
"tests" and awards (degrees) and brought into the world that child of
sin, the written examination.  A few odd people like Roger Bacon began
digging into black knowledge about gunpowder, and so forth, and got put
into jail for it.  The lamp of learning still fell only on the Kingdom
of Light, with lawyers dancing in the shadow.

The curriculum of these schools, the bedrock on which ours still rest,
was the famous trinity of study, the Trivium, which meant grammar,
rhetoric and logic; to this was supplemented the four further studies
called the Quadrivium--music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.  All
were based on the use of Latin; they comprehended the whole circuit of
human knowledge, and the supreme purpose of it all was salvation.  The
monk Alcuin, who was Charlemagne's "specialist" in education, has
described for us how he taught his students:


_To some I administer the honey of the sacred writings; others I try to
inebriate with the wine of the ancient classics.  I begin the
nourishment of some with the apples of grammatical subtlety.  I strive
to illuminate many by the arrangement of the stars, as from the painted
roof of a lofty palace._


The whole extent of human knowledge was still within human
comprehension.  In our own day we meet men who think they "know it
all."  In the Middle Ages there were men who were sure they did.  Of
course, where knowledge ended superstition began, and that was infinite.

It was this curriculum which in the course of centuries has been
expanded beyond recognition like the toad in Aesop that would be an ox.
And still it has not burst.  It drags along its huge amorphous outline,
flabby as a dinosaur, over fifteen years of life.

Here is what happened to expand it.  The revival of learning
resuscitated Greek, a study forgotten by all but the Arabs.  The rising
kingdoms that replaced feudalism brought national States and set people
to learning one another's languages.  The English, having forgotten
French, had to learn it again.  Italian became "polite."  Milton
suggested that one ought to learn it, "in an odd hour."  Modern
languages were still not a part of education, but a sort of annex; so
they remained till yesterday in England where all Englishmen were
supposed to "know French" from a governess and a copy of Ollendorff's
_Grammar_ and a trip to Boulogne.  But, till yesterday, Eton, Rugby and
Oxford never heard of it.

Printing, once in real use, expanded both opportunity and obligation.
Students henceforth had books.  Contacts with the Arabs revealed a
system of decimal notation that made arithmetic a reality and algebra a
power.  Mathematics in the time of the Stuarts, with logarithms and the
calculus, ceased to be a dream.  Physics converted Alcuin's wonder of
the sky into classroom formulae.

But even though mathematics in the sixteen hundreds, in the days of
Newton and Descartes, had become a real and intensive study--far
transcending in reach and in difficulty anything within the range of
the ordinary college man of today--it was still regarded rather as an
annex to learning than as learning itself.  The place of priority still
lay with classical study, with the literature of Greece and Rome.  In
this America was a faithful child of England.  Our earliest college
education was stamped with Roman letters, and its passion for the Bible
in the wilderness made it even revert somewhat to the mediaeval type.
The rules that were promulgated in 1642 for admission to Harvard
College lay down the qualification thus:--


_When any scholar is able to understand Tully or such like classical
Latin author extempore, and to make and speak true Latin in verse and
prose, suo ut aiunt Marte: and to decline perfectly the paradigms of
nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue: let him then and not before be
capable of admission into the college._


For readers whose Latinity has slipped away from them, let it be
explained that Tully is not Irish, but means Cicero.  Earlier
generations properly called Romans by their names, and not, as we have
come to do, with many of them, by their nicknames.  Tully was called
"Cicero" (or bean-head) as one of us might be called "Shorty."  Harvard
Latin in 1642 was still undefiled.

On the terms indicated few of us now would get into Harvard.  Fewer
still would get out, since, for that, every scholar had to be


"found able to read the originals of the Old and New Testaments into
the Latin tongue and to resolve them logically: withal being of godly
life and conversation."


On the outside edge or fringe of the classical studies, of which
mathematics and logic formed an adjunct, were such things as natural
philosophy, destined to vast and rapid expansion, but of which the
classical doctors of divinity remained ignorant.

By the time of Queen Anne, some scholars already admitted that they
didn't know everything--not many, though, or at least they qualified it
by saying that what they didn't know wasn't worth knowing.

What they referred to by this last phrase was this natural philosophy,
the new range of knowledge that the eighteenth century was gathering,
item by item, fact by fact.  These grew into the sciences of
life--botany and zoology, later to get their true name of biology.
Reverend classical scholars, full to the throat with declensions, set
them aside as a disturbance of the Book of Genesis.  But they wouldn't
down.

Beside them grew, equally despised by the classicists, the electric
science drawn by Franklin from the clouds, the oxygen distilled by
Priestley from water, the geology of Lyell, dug up from what was once
called Hades.  All the world knows the story.  Within another hundred
years a vast series of studies known as the natural sciences--at first
opposed, derided and left to mechanics and steam-engine drivers--broke
at last the barriers of the schools and flooded wide over the
curriculum.

But the barriers, in England at least, did not break until the waters
had risen high and the pressure had become overwhelming.  In the middle
nineteenth century, as Professor Huxley complained, the so-called
public schools had still a curriculum of the Middle Ages.


_Until a few years back [he wrote in 1893], a boy might have passed
through any one of the great public schools with the greatest
distinction and credit and might never so much as heard of modern
geography, modern history and modern literature,, of the English
language as a language, or of the whole circle of the sciences,
physical, moral and social; might never have heard that the earth goes
round the sun; that England underwent a great revolution in 1688 and
France another in 1789; that there once lived certain notable men
called Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller._


With this protest of common sense went a certain protest of spite--as
against aristocratic culture by those unable to share it.  Witness
Herbert Spencer's diatribe against "The Education of a Gentleman."


_Men dress their children's minds as they do their bodies in the
prevailing fashion.  As the Orinoco Indian puts on his paint before he
leaves his hut ... so a boy's drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted
on, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may not be
disgraced by being found ignorant of them--that he may have the
education of a gentleman._


But when at last the barriers broke, the new science came in a flood,
till every high school student, in America more even than in England,
turned alchemist, and every class-room sputtered with electricity.  And
with this, in the colleges first and spreading downwards to the
schools, came a still newer set of studies--the social studies,
economics and politics, the mingled brood of happiness and despair, of
progress and poverty that Mill and Spencer and such people let loose
upon the world.  So deeply have they spread that little children learn
"civics" first and find out what it means after; and so widely that the
Japanese have studied it from Europe and teach it to the Chinese.

And as if civics and social welfare were not enough for the already
overburdened curriculum, a chariot creaking up the rough slope of
Parnassus, "Business," in the form of schools of commerce, must needs
leap on top of the load.  It handed so heavy a tip to the driver that
it could not be put off, and more than that it began to demand that the
oldest and most respectable of the passengers be thrown out to make
room for it.

      *      *      *      *      *

So there we stand, or rather move slowly onward, the ascent of
Parnassus turned into a ten years' journey during which the passengers
must amuse themselves as best they may with the cards and dice of
college activities.

      *      *      *      *      *

Meantime it is only to be expected that the conditions of the journey
react upon the minds of the passengers.  In other words it is only
natural that this vast burden of an increasing curriculum sets up a
reaction in the minds of the pupil and the student.  From their
earliest years they become accustomed to reckon up the things that they
have done and finished with.  "We've finished Scripture," says a little
girl in a child's school; "we had it last year."  For her the mould of
religious thought is all set.  Don't ask her the names of the twelve
Apostles.  She's had them--last year.  She is not responsible for the
Apostles any more.  So does the high school student count up his years
still needed for matriculation as eagerly as a mariner measures his
distance to the shore.  The college student opens his career by
classing himself not according to the year in which he enters but
according to the year in which he hopes to get out.  The class
matriculating in 1940 call out in their infant breath, "Rah!  Rah!
Forty-four."

How strange it is, our little procession of life!  The child says,
"When I am a big boy."  But what is that?  The big boy says, "When I
grow up."  And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married."  But to
be married, what is that after all?  The thought changes to "When I'm
able to retire."  And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over
the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he
has missed it all, and it is gone.  Life, we learn too late, is in the
living, in the tissue of every day and hour.  So it should be with
education.

But so it is not; a false view discolours it all.  For the vastly great
part of it the student's one aim is to get done with it.  There comes a
glad time in his life when he has "finished" mathematics, a happy day
when he has done philosophy, an exhilarating hour when he realizes that
he is finished with "compulsory English."  Then at last his four years
are out, his sentence expired, and he steps out of college a free man,
without a stain on his character--and not much on his mind....  Later
on, he looks back wistfully and realizes how different it might have
been.

      *      *      *      *      *

It is the purpose of this book in the chapters that follow to discuss
this discrepancy between education and life.  The field of education
here discussed is that of "general education" and the liberal arts
which occupy about twenty years of the life of the great majority of
college students.  The work of technical and professional
schools--engineering, medicine and law--lies apart.  Here the
adaptation of the means to the end is sufficiently direct to lessen the
danger of wandering into the wilderness as liberal arts has done.

This wandering into the wilderness has made the journey of education
too long, too cumbersome and too expensive.  Worse still, at the end of
its wandering it comes to a full stop.  The road comes to an end just
when it ought to be getting somewhere.  The passengers alight, shaken
and weary, to begin, all over again, something else.




II

_The Machine At Work_



CHAPTER II

THE MACHINE AT WORK

_Strategic progress: no advance without security--Spelling costs two
years--Classes and credits; the moving convoy--The end of the pavement,
of examinations--History finds a magic mirror--Need of a thorough
smattering of science--And of a snug corner of ignorance_


I am a familiar guest in a household where there is a little girl, now
rapidly lengthening into a big girl, who is attending what is called a
ladies' school.  In return for help with Latin sentences and such
things, I get much casual information about what educationalists call
class method.  I said to this young scholar the other day, "I thought,
June, you were in the fifth declension?"

"We were before Xmas," June answered, "but _she's_ gone back to the
second.  We're reviewing."

_She_ is, of course, the teacher, and where she leads, June and her
associates follow.  I gather that their education in Latin takes the
form of a series of forward rushes, from which they fall back and
entrench themselves again on safe ground.  A year ago at Easter they
reached the passive voice, only to be beaten clear back out of it
again.  They are now reconsidering _amo_ and closing up the ranks for a
new attack.  But as the term ends there will be a regular _review_ in
which they will fall steadily back toward the beginning of the book.
Last year she gave them some prepositions, but there has since been a
retreat that has entrenched them behind the safe lines of _bonus_.

The same method, I gather from June, is pursued in algebra.  Last year
they got as far as equations, but the ground proved shaky under their
feet and _he_ (mathematics is masculine) took them back for a review of
factors and division.  They needed, he said, more drill.  They are
drilling now and getting ready for the big algebraical mid-term review
that will shove them clear backward out of the book--to re-form in the
shelter of arithmetic.

At the beginning of each new term, of course, there is full review of
last year's work--at the very time, perhaps, when the class below are
in a bold forward skirmish into next year's work.  Thus do June and her
companions drift back and forward, like a star cluster moving among the
constellations.  In the course of time they will fortuitously drift out
of the ladies' school into college--a sudden effort and over the top.
Meantime they seem to move around in a circle, like fish in a trap,
among quadratic equations and moods and tenses, going past the same
opening of salvation again and again and not seeing it.

It is their expectation that, when they get into the enchanted waters
called college, they will swim right on.  But not so.  Ask any
first-year student in Arts in the month of October what he is doing,
and he will say that they are not doing anything much yet.  The
professor is "revising."  After Xmas he will be "reviewing" and by
April they will pretty well be back to matriculation.  There will be no
advance without security.  The second year will then review the work of
the first, and so on.  In a graduate school the students revise their
undergraduate work, and admission to a Ph.D. degree, as I recall it,
involves a general review of everything since the cradle.

      *      *      *      *      *

Here then is the educational machine at work, grinding its way up the
long slope of Parnassus, from its first loading up its freight of
little children, all fluttering with kindergarten ribbons, till it
finally stops among the debris and slag piles marked END OF TRACK,
where it lets out its sad-eyed Ph.D.'s, looking for a job, five years
too late, and engaged to be married five years later.

      *      *      *      *      *

The first jolt in this upward ascent is when the children start to
learn to spell and strike our crazy alphabet.  Look what happens.

The eager child begins "N--O, no."  "S--O, so."  "All right so far,"
thinks the child--like the man who fell out of the high window.
Indeed, it's more than all right.  The thing is a pleasure.  "N--O,
no."  "S--O, so," with a good hiss on the letter S.  "It's a delight,"
says the child.  "Show me more of it."  In fact the logic of it has all
the appeal that goes with what is called "the inevitable" in art.

Then something happens.  "D--O, do," says the teacher, and a lifetime
of trouble begins.  Forty years later, the child, grown up but still
unable to spell, will be calling to his wife from his writing-desk:
"Mary, how do you spell 'dough'?  I mean what you make bread with."

But there, I refuse to discuss phonetic spelling.  It's too wearisome.
People get tired at the mention of it.  They themselves have learned to
spell, or pretty nearly, and look on spelling as part of the troubles
of childhood, like measles and Sunday school and having to obey father.
They don't suspect that there is coiled up in it the loss of perhaps
two years of human life.

If spelling were rational, universal and authoritative, an intelligent
child would, in a month, be able to read any word that it could say.
After that it would spell by reading.  Best of all, it would enter at
once into the magic garden that reading opens up.  When one realizes
the endless hours, the tears, the bad marks, the soiled, paper blotted
by little inky fingers, one might think it worth while to make the
effort.  But the effort would have to be great; a vast inertia would
have to be overcome in order to effect an international agreement for
uniform, simultaneous action.  Nothing else would do.  The Turks can do
that (they did it), because they are only Turks.  But we, Americans and
English, can't; and, if we could, the Irish wouldn't.  They'd demand
free spelling and die for it.

      *      *      *      *      *

We grown-up people are so habituated to our crazy alphabet that we do
not realize the full enormity of its imperfection.  When we learn that
a Chinaman must retain a recollection of five thousand distinct
picture-form-combinations before he can do advanced reading, we are
divided between amazement and pity.  In reality we are doing much the
same thing.  We have, for instance, to learn the thirteen different
ways of indicating, by our spelling, the sound of long _o_--the
simplest, the earliest, and the last of all our utterances.  We must
choose as among the following competitive methods represented by the
rival words: _note, boat, toe, yeoman, soul, row, sew, hautboy, beau,
owe, floor, oh, O,_--Very fittingly the list ends in _oh, O_!  Since
each of the thirteen words could have been spelt in any of twelve other
ways, the list alone involves 169 choices.  When we add to it all the
other words that have a long o sound, the choices will run into
thousands, and the educated persons must remember by sight every one of
them.  Conversely we have to remember by sight the varying
pronunciations attached to the combination _ough_, a thing which a
Chinaman, with only a few thousand pictures to recognize, thinks
atrocious.

These are not isolated vagaries, things of exception.  The confusion
and effort involved run all through our written language.  What we are
doing is in reality memorizing a vast multitude of picture forms.  The
Chinaman sooner or later learns to read.  So do we.  We can appreciate
his ghastly loss of time.  When we learn to spell we are too young to
understand about our own till the thing is done.

The trouble is all with the instrument--our wretched alphabet made
worse by our use of it, a deterioration spread over centuries that
multiplied its original faults by thousands.  The European peoples got
lost in the maze of their own phonetics--so many rival forms, so many
duplicate ways, so many alternate choices that spelling came to depend,
as Mr. Weller said, on the taste and fancy of the speller.

When the explorers of America tried to write down in European spelling
the Indian name now admitted to be Chicago, they wrote it in no less
than twenty-one different fashions.  Among these first prize may be
awarded to _Stktschagto_, with honorable mention for _Tschakko_.  A
Chinaman starting with the Indian meaning of the word and not the sound
would have made a little picture of a skunk, and scored one.  Yet the
alphabet, in its prime, was one of the great triumphs of the human
race.  It took its place beside the wheelbarrow, the dug-out canoe, and
the iron pot, the stone ax and the great achievements that foreshadowed
rotary motion, navigation, rum and conquest, and carried civilization
round the world.

The other inventions went on.  The wheelbarrow is an aeroplane and the
dug-out a _Queen Mary_.  The alphabet lagged behind.  Its youth was its
brightest period; the signs and the sounds probably fitted far better
for the Phoenicians than for us.  Our alphabet got into trouble.  As it
moved west and north it ran into new sounds and had no signs for them.
The northern barbarians had a sound that we mark _th_ which they got
perhaps from the whistle of the wind at sea.  Perhaps also they didn't.
They had no sign for it, so they marked it with a _t_ and an _h_,
neither of which had anything to do with it, which perplexes still
today the nascent minds of ten million children.  The Greeks had a sign
something like _th_, which probably sounded as something else, and that
made further confusion.

Other letters crowded in, not needed.  _Q_, with _u_ always in
attendance, stole the whole business that it gets from the letter _k_.
The letter _c_, a mere cuckoo in the nest, took right and left from
both _k_ and _s_.  In retaliation _x_ crashed in as a sort of
abbreviation that turned into a letter and fairly put _k_ out of
business, except that _x_ couldn't start anything.  _W_ arose as a
letter of despair: few people have a good enough sound-sense to hear
what it really is.  _P_ and _h_ joined in an illicit combination to
steal from _f_--so that nowadays such words as _filosofy_ look funny,
nearly as funny as _funny_ itself would if we spelt it _phunny_.

In other words our alphabet is a wreck.  We could reform it easily
enough if we were all of like mind and wanted to--easily enough, that
is to say, with a few years' effort traded for a millennium of ease.
But it would have to be done internationally, by authority, with
finality and at a stroke.  As it is, the way is blocked partly by the
cranks in the foreground, but more by inertia in the background.  Here
for instance is the crank who explains that the gradations of vowel
sounds are infinite and that no phonetic representation of them is
possible except with an alphabet or system of infinite complexity.  Of
course the gradations are infinite.  But so are the colours that run
across the spectrum; yet we talk of a blue hat and a green light
without any trouble.  Anyone with an ear and tongue for linguistic
phonetics can shade the broad sound of the letter _a_ all the way from
the parent called "father" at Oxford to the one called "fether" in
Inverness.  But a phonetic alphabet hits at a middle average which the
individual varies at will in reading.

More pretentious is the scholarly crank who complains that phonetic
spelling would hide the etymology of our language and draw a veil over
its history.  He likes the b in the word _debt_ to carry him back to
the dear old Latin _debitum_.  He would rather sing a _psalm_ in good
company, than a _sam_ with the ignorant.  A _fotograf_, so spelt, would
rob him of the Greek _Photos_, light, and _grapho_, I write, and make a
mystery of clarity itself.  But these objections rest on little more
than the pang of novelty.  We should all get as used to it in no time
as we do to false teeth.  In any case if one wants to play at
scholarship and make a row over it, our spelling very often misleads,
and hides the real origin of the word.  Who put the false _u_ in
_honour_ and the mistaken _s_ in _island_?  If the _g_ in _reign_
cheers us up by reminding us of _rego_, the _g_ in _sovereign_, a false
analogy, lets us down again.  But all of this can be left for the
scholars of the future to use in making theses.

A far more dangerous opponent is the advocate of "gradual spelling
reform," who spoils a cause by accepting half of it, as if one should
advocate being half drunk as a remedy for intemperance.  He would have
a thousand enthusiasts bind themselves together with a pledge to spell
_cat_ with a _k_.  He lacks the visual imagination to see what a
hopeless confusion gradual reform would introduce.  It would be mending
a coat of many colours with pieces from a patchwork quilt.

The only possible mode of introducing a new spelling of our common
English and American language is by international agreement,
authoritative and final, and done, after the ground is duly prepared
and the method accepted, at a single stroke.  Given ink enough and
authority enough, we could do it in a year.

It would mean, it might be said, scrapping our present books.  But we
do that anyway.  Few people, outside of college, read books more than
five years old.  All that are worth reading--the Macaulays and the
Emersons, the Dickenses and the Mark Twains--would be re-spelt and
re-printed.  As for journalism, even as it is, last week's paper looks
like ancient history.  The newspapers could change their type as easily
as they do their politics; and the machinery, as with politics,
wouldn't need to change at all.

But it's no use.  The dead weight of inertia puts it out of court.  The
change will only come as a side effect of some great issue which we
cannot foresee.  It took a whole world war to introduce
"daylight-saving time," a thing advocated for two generations and as
obvious as daylight itself.

      *      *      *      *      *

Our crazy spelling is at least free from one of the greater
obstructions on the road to Parnassus.  Each child learns to spell for
himself.  He is not held back to join a convoy of others for a joint
attack on the letter q.  And as soon as he can spell and read, the
magic world of books, the enchantment of stories, the fascination of
the past, are all open to him.  This, in the world in which we live--a
world of Sunday feature papers and cheap reprints and public
libraries--has become the heritage of all.  We are not like the
pioneers who treasured in their log cabins a few tattered volumes, and
whose children never saw a children's book.

And at this point education for oneself branches off from the beaten
path of compulsory school.  Arrived at this point a person of
sufficient energy and individuality has power to educate himself.  Even
a university, as Carlyle or somebody said, is only a set of books.
With sufficient interest and sufficient insight, a reasonable modicum
of time free from work, and such advice as one can gather by the way,
the path is open.  But for the generality of people the path, though
open, is too steep.  Such overtime training of the mind, such
individual effort and foresight are not for all.  Yet, even for the
laziest and the least gifted, at this point some measure of individual
interest and urge must supplement the school and college curriculum.
If not, the rest is vain.

But whether or not the average youthful scholar reads and studies for
himself, he still belongs in the great convoy that moves forward year
by year and class by class, in a measured phalanx of credits and units,
its ranks checked into alignment by the current drill of examinations.
It is difficult to see how it can be otherwise--for the education of
the mass of the nation.  We cannot afford a tutor for every child, and
in any case you cannot feed with a spoon forever.  But a realization of
the tedium and delay of class education and of the false perspective
given by examinations and credits will at least serve as a beginning
for better things.

Class and credit work makes for overslowness by the very attempt to be
"thorough," to cover every bit of ground before moving on to the next.
This attitude toward education, though the students don't know it,
comes to them as a legacy from the Jesuits in the opening period of
modern education.  Their maxim and practice of absolute thoroughness,
the building in of every brick so that the wall shall never fall, was
and is excellent within its scope; that is, when all else is
disregarded--time and preference and individuality.  It has in it all
the grim infallibility of a machine.

In this it contrasts with the spontaneity of natural self-education,
which stumbles eagerly forward, spells badly, but drives on to the hard
words with the easy ones only half learned; pushes its elementary
arithmetic on toward fractions with a shaky multiplication table
bending under its feet like a trestle bridge over a canyon; picks up
its history as a hen pecks for grain, its literature for the love of
it, its art for art's sake.

It is the difference between a spirit and a mechanism, a substance and
a shadow.  And in the long run there is no education worth while, none
with any meaning, except what we give ourselves or at least make our
own.  All that the best college can do is to offer opportunity and
inspiration.  I remember a bygone colleague of mine, a teacher of
literature, who used to say to his class every year (professors always
say everything once a year): "Gentlemen, I spread the banquet.  You can
take it or leave it as you like."  The banquet was his notes on
_Comparative Literature_ and looked a pretty lean diet, but at least
the idea was sound.

All that is best in what we call the liberal arts--all the flowers of
poetry and drama, literature and history, imagination and
inspiration--becomes distorted and disturbed by the system of
examinations and credits which deflect it from its proper semblance,
like the comic face seen in a convex mirror.  Literature looks in the
mirror and reflects back as a "credit"--a comic credit with a wide
grinning mouth, hair stuck out sideways and a brain-pan down to an inch
and a half.  But this Credit is the real master for the student,
controlling degrees, the entry to professions, jobs--all that he came
to college for.  No wonder the figure is grim--the joke on literature
is so rich.  The fellow is like those malicious evil spirits that carry
on our humour in the next world, as malevolent buffoonery.  He says to
the student, "Divide the beauty of poetry into six elements and say
them over to me, and I'll give you a degree as a horse-doctor."  Or he
says, "Name the six excellences of Shakespeare that your professor told
you out of his notes last October!"--and he roars with laughter.  "If
you can't," he says, "I won't let you out of college; you'll just stay
shut up there till you do.  No law for you!"

The key to salvation is found by admitting once and for all that a
large part of knowledge cannot be tested by written examinations,
except to its own harm.  Things that are matters of appreciation, of
feeling, of taste, can be discussed, encouraged--fostered like a plant
in the sunlight of good teaching and interesting reading.  But turn
them into examinations and you defeat your own end.

I would make the school and college program consist of a maximum of
stimulation and a minimum of examinations.  Reading aloud, discussion,
encouragement--something to kindle a flame, to light a lamp, to give
the opportunity and the desire to read more.  That is all that school
can accomplish.  To do this no great time is needed--not fifty per cent
of what we give now--but more reality of purpose; in other words, not
more quantity in the current of words, but a higher voltage in mental
interest.

If I say that I would "shorten English literature" it is not because I
would disparage a subject that has been for many years my life and
livelihood.  What I mean is that our teaching it is largely an attempt
to teach the unteachable, to substitute text knowledge for literary
appreciation, and the question-and-answer of a written examination for
that "reading-for-reading's-sake" which is the only literary training
worth talking about.

It is difficult to make one's meaning clear without slight or
disparagement toward the thousands of earnest teachers giving excellent
lessons and lectures on English literature.  But their efforts are
distorted out of their proper meaning by being set in a frame of
"exams," "promotions," "matriculations," "degrees" and entrances to the
"professions."  That is enough to poison the love of literature at the
root.

The teaching of literature should mean, at the beginning, reading of
worth-while books to little children who can't read.  Without false
sentiment, it may be said that most people carry as their chief
literary asset the remembrance of "What mother read aloud to them when
they were kids."  But then "mother" never held exams, or asked the
children to name the six chief beauties of Robinson Crusoe, or to give
parallel passages to Old Mother Hubbard and the Snow Queen.  The
reading was for reading's sake, and it led the child into the magic
garden to which presently, able to read, he could resort of himself;
out of the garden the school-teacher afterwards chased him with a
written exam.

This is the fact of the matter.  There is a certain utility and a
certain scope for written examinations.  But there is ground upon which
the written examination cannot touch without withering all that grows
on it.  At the beginning of learning, for the sake of its later love
and enjoyment, there are certain things that must be committed to
memory.  These things are not so much education as the frame in which
education is set.  Children must learn the multiplication table.
Medical students must learn the names of the three hundred odd bones of
the human body.  Not that the names in themselves are anything.  But
they are necessary for familiar reference.  One recalls the
enthusiastic young lady who said that the astronomers must be
wonderfully clever to have found out the names of the stars.  A medical
man must be at least as wonderful as that; and any kind of examination,
any "yes"-and-"no" test is in order so as to see if he really is.  So,
in history, examination is in order on lists of the dates of kings and
of battles.  These are not history but are the necessary pegs on which
to hang it.  The historical knowledge of many people is badly damaged
by not remembering whether the French Revolution or the American
Revolution came first, and just where Peter the Great came in and
whether he was Peter the Hermit.

It is the fashion today to discredit kings even as pegs.  We are told
to think of history as the movement of peoples; but it's hard to peg
history on that: "movement No. 1," "movement No. 2," "fine movement
about 1066," and so on.  The older method of treating the death of
Queen Anne as a landmark is far better.  But of course when all that is
done and learned, real history is yet to begin.

So with literature.  It is proper no doubt for pupils and even college
students to answer questions--straight "yes"-and-"no" as to who lived
when and who wrote what.  But the moment you go further and give
examination questions of the six chief beauties of Wordsworth, and the
six chief sillinesses of Milton, education has run to a dead end.  Much
of liberal arts in the best sense is not ground for written
examination.  We must alter the curriculum so that a lot of it is only
for students who want it.  The practical difficulty is obvious; since
mere attendance, and perhaps not even that, would be needed for a
credit.  But at least students could be encouraged to _write_, not on
examinations, but on what they thought about what they read; and their
work could be estimated from that.

But the main contention is that education in literature must, after its
first initiation, be self-prompted, that is must depend on individual
appreciation, or it is no good.  If it stops with college it should
never have begun.  It should grow into the student's life till it
becomes part of it and remains with him till old age, the period in
which people no longer read, but re-read what they have loved before.

Contrast with the dilemma thus offered, as between spontaneous interest
and mechanical drill, the fortunate position of history.  Here is a
subject which by happy circumstance is coming into its own.  The moving
picture has proved a fairy godmother, giving to each of us a magic
mirror to replace the dusty pages....  Look!  Here comes Charlemagne;
notice how he is dressed, see the queer twisted suit of iron made of
little chains! ... and the way the men wear their hair on their
shoulders and their long pointed spears!  And here's Henry VIII; of
course you recognize him; he was here last year as Charles Laughton.
Funny breeches they used to wear, eh? ... And so we sit under the
enchantment of half darkness, and before us a magic scroll unfolds and
the dead voices speak, and all the pageant of the past rolls down
before us.  Here, indeed, is America discovered!  See the Spanish
caravels tossing on the waves and the huge banners all purple, crimson
and gold ... and so on downward.  We are comrades in arms with
Washington ... we refight the battle of New Orleans ... and, far out on
the plains among the painted Shawnees and Cheyennes, we drive the last
golden spike of the railways that unite a continent.

No such page in education was ever turned.  It shows what all education
might be, if desire and opportunity ran thus together.  It has its
dangers.  One might have thought that the picture people would be too
careless of fact, too much like the Shakespearean "producer" who would
put up a board and mark it _Athens_.  There was indeed such a tendency
at first.  In a first picture of the battle of New Orleans of 1815, so
I have been told, an electric street car moved sedately through a
British regiment.  And I have it on the authority of Mr. Irvin Cobb
that an early New England village scene of the Revolutionary War had a
huge street sign in it: _Joe's Garage, Gasoline at All Hours_.

But the tendency turned the other way.  It seemed that the public
revelled in the new accuracy of history.  They liked to see
Charlemagne's hair and Napoleon's coat just as they were and watch
Talleyrand take snuff out of the very kind of box that Talleyrand used
to take snuff out of.  And the moving picture people, good fellows,
asked nothing better than to give the people what the people wanted and
gave it to them.

Historians whose turn for accuracy exceeds their limit of tolerance
have it the other way and tell us that the moving pictures are
distorting history.  One of Harvard's best tells us, for example, that
"the clownish posturing of film heroes has obscured the authentic
American cowboy."  It may be so--a little.  But the historian must
realize that there must be a little distortion in all art; the colours
must be a little heightened to make the object visible.  Dante had to
make hell a little more spiral than it really is; all heroines must be
too beautiful and all heroes a little overbrave.

The moving picture, so far, has not sinned beyond the legitimate
exaggeration of romantic art.  What it will do next, we don't know,
except that it will give the people what the people want.  If they tire
of accuracy and want Charlemagne to be a little more comic and wear a
tuxedo; or if, as is likely, they presently want the epochs mixed up,
so as to have Abraham Lincoln and Julius Caesar in the same film,
they'll get that also.

Meantime history has fallen heir to a wonderful legacy, to treasure or
to squander.  All the world is back at school, as it ought to be, for
school in the proper sense should last a lifetime.  People who had
"finished" history at high school are taking it up again in the dark,
at fifty cents per epoch.

      *      *      *      *      *

Natural science is almost as happily situated as history.  There is no
doubt about its place in the curriculum and no difficulty in awarding
it.  Every educated person needs a "thorough smattering" of science, a
little piece off the top, so to speak; and no one but a specialist can
hope for more.  The time for that is gone.  The last man who knew
everything died about the time of Professor Huxley.  As was said in an
earlier chapter, the learned men of the Middle Ages "knew it all."  The
scholars of the Renaissance knew it all and asked for more.  The
professors of the nineteenth century knew it all and could just hold
it.  In the twentieth, it ran over at the top.

At the present day the educated man must be content with that "outline"
of science which gives us the cream without our aspiring to milk the
cow.  The prevalence of popular "outlines," "digests" and "abstracts"
is evidence of a world seeking nature's remedy for the overcrowding of
the human mind.

But science is peculiar in that the top is the best of it, like the
rose which crowns the thorns or the South Sea island that rises in
beauty from the laborious coral below.  I know no better hours than
those that take flight into the majestic distances of astronomy, the
mysteries of four-dimensional space-time and the vast atom filled with
agitated nothingness.  "A tale, told by a scientist, full of sound and
fury and signifying nothing."  Here science fades away to mysticism,
and knowledge reverts to its second childhood and dies as ignorant as
at its birth.

In natural science--I like the old-fashioned term, no doubt quite
indefensible--I include, first, physics.  This in its plain sense of
motion and force, mass and momentum, can be taught without mysticism
and without reference to the later difficulties as to where is here,
and when is now, and what is action at a distance.  This newer
perplexity is not needed for the study of phenomena.  I understand that
the old-time physics of absolute space and time breaks if you stretch
it far enough.  Light, it seems, gets whisked round the edge of a
planet like a hat blown round a windy corner.  Isaac Newton didn't know
this, but students can still dream it off for a century or two and
still take their physics straight.  It is better for a pupil to learn
physics without afterthought as to absolute space and time, just as it
is better for a child always to think of its parents as happily
married, and not learn the truth till later.

This program of physics can be tucked in under mathematics and used as
material to make the kind of legitimate problems to which I referred
above.  It can serve, so to speak, as the handy man of mathematics.

Where physics branches off into the wave-world--electricity, light,
radio, and cosmic emanations--a special teaching is necessary.  But in
this the ordinary student can never go far.  The investigation is too
vast.  Yet a year of school and a year of college should keep him from
the ignorance that was, and should make of him and his fellows a sort
of seed-bed, a plot of selection, from which are chosen the real
scholars and physical scientists to whom we entrust our guidance in the
knowledge needed for our life and for the death of our enemies.

The ancient science of the rock is simple in its outline, but it makes
no demand on the curriculum that is not amply justified and it carries
with it as yet no fool appendages that need curtailing.  The science of
life--the whole "biology"--fills a larger field.  But it can be cut
loose from the additions that make it appear larger than it is, from
the "bogus" attempts to make science where none is--as with the
unsurveyed empire staked out by sociology, and the bottomless mine put
on the market by psychology.  Apart from these things, the outline of
biological science, vital as it is, puts no undue strain on education.

In the matter of physiology, the knowledge of the human body (for
people who are never to be students of medicine), I think I would go
slow.  I would be inclined to leave it out altogether.  This is a
heretical opinion, no doubt, and very different from the dogma, current
since Huxley, that the wise child must know its own body.  I doubt
whether it is good for society that the ordinary plain man should know
much of the details of how his body works.  The man who has learned to
think of his heart as a pump, with an intake in it as valves that get
out of order, is on the way toward having a weak one.  Better let him
think of it as the seat of love and generosity, and it will beat away
happily till it stops.  Let him think of his stomach as where he puts
his dinner, not as a fierce chemical furnace where acids are tearing up
tissues and sending up exhaust gases like the back end of a tannery.
Let him think of his bowels as the bowels of compassion, as gentle as
the New Testament, and his blood as part of his lineage, not as the
battleground of a myriad of good and evil corpuscles, some on his side
and some dead set against him.  Any man who has realized that he has in
him about twenty-five feet of colon and semi-colon--a sort of string of
sausages--can never think the same of himself again.

These little scraps of knowledge, you see, are of no practical use, and
the mental effect of them is to turn the man, in his own eyes, from the
vague image of God that he was to the dirty contraption full of mess
that one year's physiology makes of him.  There he sits on his bench in
the doctor's consulting room, full of rumblings and inward visions.
Cure him?  You can't.  That's just the trouble.  Ask any of your
medical friends.  The man is all in the wrong frame of mind to be
cured.  To cure him you have to revert to that image of God which, to
higher vision, turns out to be true after all, and which heals an
ailment with a thought.  This man can't.  He knows too much, or too
little.  His first-year physiology sends him to his death when a
peasant or a sailor or a child, being still an image of God, would go
on living.

It is easy for a student, as for anybody else, to learn the few simple
laws of health--to come in out of the wet, not to eat more than he can
pay for, to wear a hat in the sun and to sleep with his window open and
his mouth shut.  Public health, also--if you like, teach that in
college, even to ordinary students.  That sewers stink, phew! that
mosquitos carry yellow fever; that people died of the Great Plague
because of dirt, and that everybody needs fresh air every minute,
indoors and out--all of this you can study and feel all the brighter
and more wholesome for knowing it.  But this, or as much of this as
educated people need, a student, apart from a medical student, can
learn in a few afternoon lectures as a listener-in, and stay convinced
and be a clean, well-ventilated citizen ever afterward.

For physiology at large--as for certain other things that masquerade as
sex-education and which I leave out of this book as not fit to go into
it--I put in a plea for a snug corner of ignorance.  But the topic is
too large to treat here, and I leave it for a later opportunity.




III

_What Good Is Latin?_



CHAPTER III

WHAT GOOD IS LATIN?

_The vitamins of education--Latin the mainstay of the technical study
of language--Latin as ballast--Greek only for philologists and
Apostles--Latin composition for business correspondence--Mediaeval
versus stream-lined Latin--You can't read Latin?  Neither could the
Romans_


Our medical people of today talk much of vitamins.  Just what they are
I do not know, but they are subdivided and named, with the rich
imaginative fancy of the scientist, Vitamin A, Vitamin B, and so on as
discovered.  These I understand enter into our diet and have a peculiar
importance in it.  If we are misguided enough to stop eating any one of
these vitamins, it is all over with us.  When I first learned this, I
was inclined, if only for precaution's sake, to give up bacon and eggs
and roast beef and adopt an exclusive diet of vitamins as everywhere
freely advertised at a price equal merely to what we have got.  But I
have since been told by an eminent medical authority that it would be
very hard for an ordinary human being, fed in the ordinary way, to
avoid eating all the vitamins that there are; in fact, he can't help
eating them.  The good they do is so universal and so unobtrusive that
for thousands of years it was never analyzed and specified.

Now, I regard Latin as one of the vitamins of education.  If
mathematics is Vitamin A, and reading and writing is Vitamin B, Latin
can certainly get in somewhere not far down the alphabet.  The study of
Latin has in two thousand years so worked itself into the living tissue
of our education that we only realize on reflection the peculiar part
it plays.  It gives us our first real consciousness of what language
is.  We discover that language is not, as it must seem to savages,
"inevitable."  After its first twilight beginnings in onomatopoeia and
muscular grunts, it becomes a mere convention between sound and
significance.  Readers of Mark Twain will recall how Huck Finn and
Nigger Jim fell into a linguistic discussion as to whether or not it
was believable that a Frenchman didn't call a cow a "cow."  Jim easily
proved to Huck that, if he knew it was a cow he'd have to call it so.
The humour of the passage rests on the missing postulate as to what
language is.  Unconsciously students of elementary Latin acquire this
new detachment from words.  With it they begin to change from the
servants to the masters of language.  They can reset, remake it, and
turn it to new use.

And here in the technical study of language, with a view to improving
our mastery of our own, I find Latin of incomparable utility.  It is
sufficiently near and yet sufficiently far from our own idiom to turn
translation into an art, involving a nice sense of language meaning and
a nice ingenuity in handling language forms.  To translate back and
forward two kindred modern languages is of little linguistic value.  It
only occasionally involves translation in the higher sense.  It is
simply mere substitution.  On the other hand, as between our languages
and an agglutinative Asiatic speech, like Japanese, the distance is too
great for the form of exercise of which I speak.  I remember years and
years ago in teaching elementary French in school asking a pupil how
you say in French, "Give me some bread."  He answered, "You can't say
it; you have to say something else."  So it is with Japanese; you must
get the idea, start over again, and "say something else."

But with Latin the translator finds a phrase--let us take a simple one
such as "_Quae cum ita sint_," of which the meaning is clear and the
single words ridiculous--for our use.  He beats about the bush until he
finds at quite a distance in a different thicket such a phrase as "This
being the case."  Anyone not capable of a glow of intellectual pleasure
at such an achievement is not fit to study language.

Words, of course, are nothing as beside things.  The philologist and
the grammarian seem to their active brethren to be groping among the
dead.  Yet even for them there must be moments of exultation, of
despair, of triumph--as of Browning's dying grammarian who settled "the
enclitic _De_, dead from the waist down."  And I think, too, of the
wonderful work of King James' translators, balanced between literalism
and innovation, and often conveying truth at its best when furthest
from it in substance.  Consider the verse, as it was written in the
Greek, "O Death, where is thy sting, O Hades, where is thy victory?"
Literal translation becomes either irreverent or comic.  But how
wonderful when they wrote, "O Death, where is thy sting, O _Grave_, thy
victory?"

      *      *      *      *      *

So much for the value of Latin as a mainstay for the technical study of
language.  But, to my thinking, a further reason for retaining it as
the base of our education is because it can serve, so to speak, as
ballast.  It is the ballast in the hold of a ship, down in the dark and
unseen, which governs every graceful dip and dive of the flag at the
masthead and guarantees against disaster.  Or we may take another
metaphor from one of those odd little mantelpiece figures of mandarins
or patriarchs whose nodding head rocks back and forward but never falls
because of a controlling ball of lead suspended in his belly.  For
those of us trained in a classical education Latin is the ball of lead
in our bellies which keeps our eyes properly focused on the horizon.

What I mean is this.  We are in danger now, in our rushing mechanical
world, of rearing a generation with no backward outlook, living in two
dimensions only, without thought of the past.  For such people history
only goes back as far as the last presidential election, with dim
figures such as Grover Cleveland and Queen Victoria as a sort of
mythology.  Yet for all wise thinking, for all careful social control,
it is necessary to see things as they have grown, to look on our
institutions in the light of their past.  Such dim vision as we can
have of the future depends absolutely on this.  Cut off the human race
from the knowledge and comprehension of its history, and its government
will just turn into a monkey cage.  We need the guidance of history.
All our yesterdays it is true have only lighted fools the way to dusty
death.  But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and the list
of the fools.

Now a great deal of our necessary education of today consists of matter
that has nothing to do with the past.  Mathematics is eternal.
Astronomy runs eternity a close second.  Physics--dynamics, electricity
and all that--is as instantaneous as a flash of lightning.  These
things are taught as existing simply "here" and "now"; and even "here"
and "now," since Einstein, must hurry up to get over.  Other subjects
there are which are certainly historical and old but fail to serve the
purpose of a balanced outlook.  Geology is old, but it is too old.  Not
even an English conservative can take a geological view of politics.
Even the most cautious must move a little faster than palaeontology.

But ballast there must be.  If the "instantaneous" subjects are left
alone, the world of an intelligent school-boy becomes all _present_ and
no past, a huge shop window with no depth to it.  One recalls the story
of the man who knew himself to be addicted to boasting and exaggeration
and used therefore to check himself suddenly and correct his statement.
"My greenhouse," he said, "is twenty feet high and a hundred feet
long"; then he paused and added, "but it's only a foot wide."  Such in
aspect would be the kind of razzle-dazzle world of scarcely more than
two dimensions that our practical and scientific education must tend to
make.  The other dimension that must be added to it, the ballast that
must give it stability, is found in the historical subjects and in
Latin, as a sort of open door leading into the great world of the past.
Even the dullest draws his lesson from the millennium of its history.

It could be desired that every subject could be taught historically.
The student might learn his mathematics from the counting of fingers
and toes, that gave us our repeating ten, and our "score"; the "abacus"
and the "counter" of the mediaeval shop; the Hindu-Arabian decimal
system; Napier's bones and Descartes' co-ordinates and Newton's
calculus.  Still better, if physics could be learned step by step and
stage by stage as it was disclosed by the great minds that revealed it;
and so with all the rest.  Thus would the individual mind repeat the
intellectual evolution of the race, as the individual body does from
embryo to adult.  But time forbids.  _Ars longa_.

Yet within a possible degree the same effect on outlook may be produced
by ballasting our education with the past world and with Latin as its
representative tongue.  For Greek I hold no brief.  It is only for
philologists and Apostles.  It can no longer be a part of the education
of every college man.  Professors tell us that Greek literature is
vastly superior to Latin.  It may well be, without hurting itself,
since Latin literature, apart from its setting in history, amounts to
very little.  It is claimed that Greek philosophy and the Greek drama
are superior to modern.  There is no way to disprove this.  People who
have never learned Greek are outside of the discussion.  Those of us
who learned Greek and dissent from it are ruled out of the argument.
The dead judgment of authority rules.  Personally I only know one
department of literature in which I feel the full right to an opinion;
that of the literature of humour.  To my mind the wit of Aristophanes
is about as funny as the jokes of a village cut-up.  To name him in the
class with people like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and A. P. Herbert
and Bob Benchley and myself is just nonsense.  This statement is
absolute and without appeal.

But for the rest of Greek literature, let it pass.  The world has no
time for it, excepting only those, the fortunate few, who go to college
and stay there for ever, whose happy lot I eulogize in the concluding
chapter.  For them, the real scholars, trustees of the world's heritage
of learning, let there be Greek.  For them the six cases, and the three
numbers--you, and you two, and you all--and all the moods and voices
and tenses that fill a book as large as Goodwin's so full that no
student ever sees the last page.  For that, and for our heritage of the
New Testament, Greek must stay.  But for the ordinary scholar, none of
it.  You can't learn a little Greek; it won't divide; it's like a
billiard ball.  Half of it is no good.

      *      *      *      *      *

But even taking Latin on the terms of the plain business man, who wants
to see the dollars and cents in everything, there is a great deal to be
said for it.  I know no better asset for a young man entering business
life than the ability to express himself well in speech and in writing.
Anyone with enough of this ability and training need never wonder where
to find a living.  Not everybody can be a literary genius or an orator.
But everybody can learn to speak and to write to the full extent of his
natural endowment, just as everybody can learn to swim, and nobody can
swim without learning.  A course in Latin is about the best training in
this direction.  Boys learn to write good English sentences by writing
bad Latin ones.  The notion that there is a special technical language
for use in business correspondence is a myth sedulously fostered by
commercial colleges.  Technical business language consists of a few
such things, as "F.O.B.," "ex-dividend," "your Mr. Smith," "our Miss
McCarthy," "yours of the third ult. received and would say," etc., etc.
A Latin student could learn it all on one page.  As for writing, so for
speech.  Practice and opportunity are needed, but the basis is words.
Salesmanship, or the art of over-persuasion, can be learned as Latin
prose composition.

      *      *      *      *      *

But granting that we are to teach Latin in the schools and colleges and
make it in a way the bedrock basis of linguistic study, we have to try
to get rid of some of the dead weight that has carried down the ages.
Latin comes to us from earlier days when it was the one great study,
the very ground on which education stood.  So it was taught, as they
did everything in the Middle Ages, regardless of time and with one eye
on eternity.  In the Middle Ages when they built a wall they built it
as for five hundred years to come; and when they taught Latin, they did
it in the same way, with the foundations laid away down below ground,
and "underpinned," like the wall of a cathedral resting on a bed of
white oak.

That is to say, in the schools of the past, when they taught the third
declension, they taught it all; not the genitive and the gender of some
of the nouns but the genitive and the gender of all of the nouns.
There is something absolute and admirable in the very completeness of
it.  They did it with infinite repetition and with little rhymes and
tags, what they called memoria technica, such as:

  _Substantives in do and go
    Genus femininum show;
  But ligo, ordo, praedo, cardo,
    Are masculine, and common margo._

Such a system was all right for the people of the age.  It took an
infinity of time, but there was little else to learn.

People who underwent the same kind of training as I had fifty years ago
learned their Latin on this mediaeval system.  They came away from it
with the impression that they had nearly reached the promised land but
failed to get there, shipwrecked in sight of port.  A little more and
we would have "known Latin."  As it is, we only carry with us still a
lot of little tags and lists from which the meaning has gone but which
still keep their outline like the gossamer skeleton of a dead
dragon-fly.

  _A, ab, and absque, cum, coram, de,
  E or ex, prae, pro, tenus, sine--_


What about them?  I don't know.

_Die, due, fac, fur_--what's wrong with them?  Something crooked there,
I'm sure, but I forget it.

Now I think I could get all the result we want as mental and literary
training and cut out at least fifty per cent of Latin instruction.  I
would teach Latin grammar in a plain way with very little attention to
oddities and exceptions.  Let the pupils live and die without knowing
that _bobus_ can also be written as _bubus_; that the Latin for "liver"
is irregular and the verb "I drink" is peculiar in the past.  Let them
wait a while to learn that the dative plural of _dea_ is _deabus_; wait
till they meet goddesses in actual life.  People taught in this way
will be reading Caesar almost as soon as they begin the language and
writing plain Latin sentences as regular as a Roman wall.

I say that I think that I could get all the cultural result needed and
cut out fifty per cent of the time taken.  But I admit there's a
certain doubt about it; my friends who are today professors and
teachers of Latin tell me that the antiquated system of which I speak
has quite gone out.  It has been superseded by newer methods which some
of them like to call "stream-lined" Latin.  The phrase is typical of
our day; we all move in the mass, holding one idea at a time.  Because
the aeroplane had to be "stream-lined," on account of its excessive
speed, we stream-line everything, down to a hearse.  The metaphor
spreads like a ripple in a pond.  A professor teaches stream-lined
Latin to a class of stream-lined girls.  But let the phrase pass and
take it for what it means, Latin learned quickly.

Now in the first place I don't believe there's as much stream-lining in
the schools as its chief advocates believe.  There are many teachers
who by instinct value an exception more than a rule.  Hide the
exceptions at the back of the grammar, after the index, and they'll
find them as a cow finds water.  So with the examiners; they lived on a
diet of exceptions too long to swear off.  You never know when they may
break out into irregularities.  Better learn them.

In the second place stream-lining is apt to go so far that there's
nothing left.  You get the pupil so flattened out that he has become
caseless, voiceless, tenseless, and moodless.  For him there is no joy
in the ethical dative or the genitive of value or the accusative of
nearer definition.  They're all one to him.  He may be all right in an
aeroplane because there's no friction left in him.  But his "Latin" has
just turned into a bunch of "roots," like the language of pigeon
Chinese, or Pottawatamie English.  When a Chinaman speaking "pigeon"
(that is, _business_ language) wishes to indicate the Episcopal Bishop
of Hong Kong he calls him the "A.1. top-side, Heaven-pigeon man."  That
is exactly how Latin must look to the stream-lined student, just a
collection of chunks of language to be sorted out for significance.

Nor does ready-made translation help.  If we read Pliny in English and
Virgil in prose, that's English not Latin.  But never mind.  There must
be some way of compromise, to set us free from the dilemma, that steers
between the Scylla of too much and the Charybdis of too little.  The
problem is to preserve enough of the old rigid discipline of moods and
tenses, rules and exceptions to strengthen the mind without arresting
it.

      *      *      *      *      *

I revert again in conclusion to the objection that so many of us might
make that we learnt Latin for years in school and college and never got
anywhere with it, never got to be able to read it straight off.  Of
course we didn't.  Nobody ever does.  Not even the professors; no, nor
the Romans themselves, not in the way that we read English.  This is of
course a sort of official secret handed down for generations, and I am
really violating here the obligation of my profession by divulging it.
But perhaps the time has come to remove the veil.  Hitherto it has been
better for the world to pretend that at least somebody could "read
Latin straight off."  Now it is better to have the truth.  The Romans
themselves couldn't.

I am prepared to support this statement.  Written language in Roman
days, before printing and newspapers, was on a quite different footing
from what it is now.  There was the ordinary speech of ordinary people,
jabbering away all day, just as we do now, with fragments of sentences,
exclamations, phrases, false starts and short circuits.  Except on the
stage, conversation is never done out in full periods, unless by old
maids, professors, and garrulous village philosophers; and done thus it
is always either ludicrous or tiresome.  But we moderns have a written
language also of easy and rapid comprehension because we need it for
the daily news and the love romances and the crime stories of which the
Romans had no current supply.  For them one love story had to last a
thousand years, from Dido till the fall of Rome.  So when they _wrote_,
it was different.  They took up the pen as a man puts on his Sunday
clothes; they were not trying to be easily intelligible.  They wanted
to get the full effect, and expected it to take a few moments'
reflection to grasp it.  I am quite sure that if one read out an
oration of Cicero to a Roman who had never heard it he would soon get
mixed and interrupt to say, "Read that last paragraph again, will you?"
Just as you yourself would do, if someone read you a section of
Browning without fair warning.  The parallel is exact.  Browning and
Cicero were doing the same thing, proposing to sacrifice immediate
comprehension for the sake of deeper comprehension when comprehended.

But, you say, some of Cicero's writings were speeches made in court?
Not at all; in court they didn't sound like that, and they were
retouched afterwards.  A glance at the pages of the _Congressional
Record_ will show what is meant.

I remember once when I was a master at school giving a prize of a cake,
specially made, with all sorts of icing and emblems--a joy to look at.
The baker showed it to me and received my congratulations with obvious
pleasure.  But he was an honest man, and he said, "I'm not saying, sir,
that it will be much of a cake for eating."  I assured him that no one
would think of doing anything as brutal as that.  So with the Roman
writings--not much of writings for understanding.

All this I say by way of comforting those who, like myself, studied
Latin for years and never were able to read it--unless we had read it
already.




IV

_Mathematics Versus Puzzles_



CHAPTER IV

MATHEMATICS VERSUS PUZZLES

_Are mathematical judgments synthetically_ a priori_--The
multiplication table a fair hand-to-hand fight--Puzzles a fraud--Mr.
Brown and the equation--Mathematics and mystifications; Two gazinta
four--Can we improve our mathematical sense?_


I remember being taken as a boy of twelve years old to listen to a
"paper" at the University of Toronto Literary and Debating Society, on
the question, "Are mathematical judgments synthetically _a priori_?"
In those simple days before "pictures" and radio and motor-cars and
emancipated girls, to go and listen to a "paper" or to a debate between
two black-robed students, sipping water off a table, was presumed to be
first-class fun.  When they discussed mathematical judgments and
whether or not _a priori_, I felt that I didn't understand it, but that
I would when I grew up.  That's where I was wrong.

I am still very vague as to what mathematical judgments being
synthetically _a priori_ means.  I imagine it refers to the question
how do we know that one and one makes two, and if it does, what do we
mean by it?  But at any rate it bears witness to the profundity of
mathematics--I mean, its reach toward the infinite and the unknowable.

This element of fundamental mystery has been expanded in our own day by
the glorious confusion introduced by Professor Einstein into all our
notions of distance, time and magnitude.  How far is one thing from
another?  The question becomes unknowable.  It may be twice as far away
as something else is, or half as far; but, beyond the relative number,
there seems no such thing as solid distance.  What is a foot?  Twelve
inches.  What is an inch?  One twelfth of a foot.  Similarly where is
_here_?  And when is _now_?

I only refer to these mysteries in order to explain why I still have to
speak of mathematics in a reverential whisper, like a Christian
entering a Mohammedan mosque, in wicker slippers.  He knows it's a
reverend place though he doesn't understand it.

My attitude toward mathematics, indeed, is that of nine out of ten of
educated people--a sense of awe, something like horror, a gratitude for
escape but at times a wistful feeling of regret, a sense that there
might have been more made of it.  Everything, therefore, that I say
about mathematics is tempered by so great a humility as to rob it of
all controversial aspect.  But I do think that as far as a practical
school curriculum goes I could shorten it by at least one half.  What I
would do, to express it in a single phrase, would be to separate true
mathematics from mathematical puzzles.

If mathematics is for many students the dragon in the path, these
puzzles are the dragon's teeth.  Take them out and the dragon is as
easy to handle as a cow.  Children learn to count and add and multiply,
and feel that it is all plain and straightforward; the multiplication
table may be tricky, but it's fair.  Then presently comes a "puzzle"
problem.  "What number," says the teacher to the child, "is made up of
two figures, the second meaning twice as many as the first, and the two
adding up to nine?"

Now, this is not mathematics in the proper sense; this is a puzzle.
The only true mathematical operation here would be to set down all the
numbers of two digits, from 10 to 99 in turn, and see which one fitted
it.  But when it comes to guessing and choosing, to ingenuity, that's a
puzzle.  Half our school mathematics in algebra and geometry consist of
"puzzles," freak equations and inventive geometry.  Students are not
discoverers.  Pythagoras solved the problem of the squares on the
right-angled triangle.  I'm willing to "take it as read" and learn it
in ten minutes.

This puzzle "bunker" is built right across the mathematical fairway and
down the middle of it.  "Scholars" pound the sand in it and wonder why
they can't do mathematics.  True mathematics means a process learned
and used; hard to learn, but later, second nature.  Show me how to
extract a square root and I'll extract it as neatly as a dentist.  Tell
a ship's captain how to calculate the angle of the sun's declination
and show a broker's clerk how to use logarithms for compound interest.
But don't expect a student to be a discoverer, working out "problems"
which Isaac Newton or Copernicus might solve or miss.

Now at the present time all school-books on mathematics are mixtures of
what may be called "sums," "problems" and "mathematical puzzles."  A
sum is an operation dealing with numbers and following a definite and
known routine of calculation.  When a waiter adds up a restaurant
cheque he performs a sum.  A calculating machine can do a sum.  But it
can't do a problem.  For a problem is an operation involving a
selection of methods of calculation, of which only certain ones will
fit the case.  A school-boy calculating when the hour hand of a clock
will overtake the minute hand is working out a problem.  There are
plenty of wrong ways of working at it, as when Achilles tried to
overtake a tortoise, and kept the Greeks guessing for generations.  But
the school-boy soon finds that there are a whole lot of problems
dealing with motion and time which all fall into a definite and known
method of solution that becomes itself as familiar as the waiter's
addition table.  Now the extension of a problem in difficulty and
intricacy, to where only one method of many will bring a solution,
turns it, at some point, into a puzzle.

When Archimedes jumped out of his bath and shouted "Eureka," what he
had solved was not a problem but a puzzle.  He had been asked by some
king or other, had he not? how to tell whether a gold crown was really
a gold crown or was made of two metals melted together.  A modern
chemist would find this out with an acid.  But Archimedes found a way
without chemistry.  Yet a professor of mathematics might take a bath
every morning for years and never think of it.  Since there was no way
of forcing a solution by an inevitable method, the thing was not a
problem but a puzzle.

Such a puzzle is legitimate enough, though it is no true test of
mathematical knowledge.  But further out on the field are puzzles that
may be called illegitimate, since they present the added difficulty of
misleading or paradoxical language.  For the information and perhaps
the diversion of the reader, let me illustrate the difference.  Here is
a legitimate puzzle.  A man wishes to buy a piece of linoleum that is
to cover a space 12 feet by 12.  A dealer offers him a piece that is 9
feet by 16 feet.  Obviously each piece contains 144 square feet.  The
dealer tells the customer that all he needs to do is to cut the piece
that is 9 feet by 16 feet into two separate pieces that can then be
fitted together to cover 12 feet by 12 feet.  This of course--or rather
_not_ of course, for few people can do it--is done by drawing lines
across the 12x12 piece, 3 feet apart in one direction and 4 feet in the
other.  Start 9 feet east from the top north-west corner and cut along
the lines alternately south and west, and there you are.  But such a
puzzle does not belong in mathematical education although it
corresponds in nature to a lot of the things called "problems" that
wreck the lives of students.

Here however is a sample of an illegitimate puzzle.  A man has 17
camels.  He leaves them in his will to his three sons, 1/2 to the
eldest, 1/3 to the next and 1/9 to the youngest.  But these fractions
won't divide unless you cut up the camels themselves.  When the sons
are still in perplexity a Dervish happens to pass by, riding on a
camel.  Dervishes always ride by on camels at convenient moments in
these Arabian problems.  The sons tell him of their dilemma.  After
deep thought--Dervishes always think deeply--he says, "Let me lend you
my camel to make eighteen instead of seventeen.  Now take one half
which is nine, and one third which is six, and one ninth which is two,
and you each have your proper share.  And as _nine_ and _six_ and _two_
only add up to seventeen, you may kindly return my camel."  With which
the Dervish departed, and the sons no doubt told the story all the rest
of their lives.

Now this problem is of course as full of fallacies as a sieve is full
of holes.  In the first place the sons didn't get one half and one
third and one ninth of 17 but of something else: and when the father
left them these fractions, a little arithmetic--beyond them, no
doubt--would have shown that 1/2 and 1/3 and 1/9 of a thing don't add
up to the whole thing but only to 17/18 of it.  There was still 1/18 of
each camel coming to somebody.

Here is another type of puzzle problem turning on misleading
suggestion.  Three men at a summer hotel were going fishing and were
told they must pay 10 dollars each for a license.  They each put up 10
dollars and sent it by a hotel-boy to the inspector's office.  The boy
came back with 5 dollars and said that the inspector had made a rebate
of 5 dollars out of 30, because it was understood they were all one
party in the same boat.  The men, greatly pleased, gave the boy 2
dollars out of the 5 and kept one each.  One of them then said: "Look
here!  This is odd.  We expected our fishing to cost ten dollars each
(thirty dollars) and it has only cost us nine dollars each, and two to
the boy.  Three times nine is twenty-seven, and two makes twenty-nine;
where has the other dollar of the thirty gone?"

The reader no doubt sees the fallacy instantly; but some people
wouldn't.

Now I admit that text-books on mathematics never push the problems
quite as far as this on illegitimate puzzle ground--unless indeed they
do it on purpose, as in the book of _Mathematical Recreations_ once
compiled by the celebrated Professor Ball.  But what I claim is that
the element of the problem, and even of the puzzle, looms far too large
in mathematics as we have it.  Indeed for most people it overshadows
the subject and ends their advance.

The ordinary straight "discipline" of school mathematics should consist
of plain methods of calculation, like division, square root, highest
common factor and so on, or such problems as conform to a recognized
method of regular solution.  All that goes in arithmetic under the name
of the "unitary method" is of this class.  If A in one hour can do
twice as much work as B does in two hours, then--well, we know all
about them.  Yet few people realize that this beautiful and logical
unitary method is quite new--I mean belongs only in the last two
generations.  When I first learned arithmetic it was just emerging from
the "rule-of-three" in the dim light of which all such calculations
appeared something like puzzles.

In algebra also a vast part of the subject can be studied as regular
calculation, or at least as a problem of regular order, such as the
motion and time illustration mentioned above.  I gather, also, that
another large section of algebraical calculation, though capable of
being effected by short, ingenious, or individual methods, can always,
if need be, be submitted to a forced operation, clumsy but
inevitable--as if a person wanting to know how many squares there are
on a chess-board counted them one by one.

To illustrate what I mean, let me call back, from nearly sixty years
ago, the recollection of our Sixth Form class in mathematics at Upper
Canada College.  Our master, Mr. Brown, was a mathematician, the real
thing, with a gold medal in proof of it, and gold spectacles through
which he saw little but _x_ and _y_--gentle, simple and out of the
world.  The class had early discovered that Mr. Brown, with a long
equation on the black-board and his back to the class, would stay there
indefinitely, in his academic cap and gown, lost in a reverie in which
the bonds of discipline fell apart.  So the thing was to supply him
with a sufficiently tough equation.

This became the special business of the _farceur_ of the class, a large
and cheerful joker called Donald Armour, later on the staff of the Rush
Medical College and a distinguished Harley Street surgeon.  Armour
would approach Mr. Brown in the morning and say: "I was looking over
some Woolwich examination papers last night, Mr. Brown, and I found
this equation.  I can't make anything of it."  "Oh!" said Mr. Brown
with interest.  He accepted without question the idea that Armour spent
his evenings in mathematics.  "Let me look at it, Armour."  Then
another spirit in collusion would call out, "Won't you put it on the
board, Mr. Brown?"  And in a minute there it was, strung out along the
black-board, a tangled mass of _x's_ and _y's_ and squares and cubes,
with Mr. Brown in front of it, as still as Rodin's _penseur_.

Meanwhile the class relaxed into easy conversation, and Armour threw
paper darts with pins in the end to try and hit Mr. Brown in the yoke
of his gown.  Presently, without turning round, Mr. Brown spoke.  "Of
course, I could _force_ it..."

"Oh, please, Mr. Brown," pleaded Armour, "don't force it!" and there
came a chorus from the class, "Don't force it, Mr. Brown," and subdued
laughter, because we didn't know what forcing it was, anyway.  "I
assure you, gentlemen, I shall not force it until I have tried every
expedient."  A chorus of thanks and a renewed reverie.  Then presently
Mr. Brown would suddenly turn toward us and say excitedly:

"Did you try a function of _m_, Armour?"

"I never thought of it."

"It may resolve it."  And away rattled Mr. Brown's chalk, line upon
line, till there stretched the equation, solved!  To us it looked
bigger than ever.

I won't swear that it was a function of _m_ that did the trick.  It may
have been one of the other mystic agents such as a "coefficient of
_x_," or perhaps _pi_, a household word to us, as vague as it was
familiar.

But what I mean is that when Mr. Brown said he could "force" an
equation he referred to a definite mathematical process, as certain as
extracting a square root and needing only time and patience.

What I am saying, then, is that school mathematics, and college
mathematics as far as made compulsory, should be made up in great
proportion, in overwhelming proportion, of straight calculation.  I
admit that the element of ingenuity, of individual discovery, must also
count for something; but for most people even the plainest of plain
calculations contain something of it.  For many people the
multiplication table is still full of happy surprises: and a person not
mathematical but trained to calculate compound interest with a
logarithm can get as much fun out of it as Galileo could with the moon.

Now to many people, mathematicians by nature, all that I have said
about problems and puzzles is merely a revelation of ignorance.  These
things, they say, are the essence of mathematics.  The rest of it is as
wooden as a Chinese abacus.  They would tell me that I am substituting
a calculating machine for a calculating mind.  I admit it, in a degree.
But the reason for it is perhaps that that is all most of us are
capable of.  We have not been made "mathematically minded," and hence
the failure of our mathematics.

I am of course stepping out here on ground where wiser feet might
hesitate to tread.  But I think that for most of us something goes
wrong, very early in school, with our mathematical sense, our
mathematical conceptions--or rather with the conceptions that we fail
to get.  We get lost in the symbols of mathematics and can't visualize
the realities--visualize or dramatize, or whatever you do with them.
Mathematics is always, for most of us, a sort of mystery which we don't
even expect to understand.  Let me illustrate the attitude by recalling
a joke of a stage "review" of a few years ago.  Some boys are seen
coming out of school, comically overgrown and comically under-dressed,
grown too long and dressed too short, so as to make them look funny.

"Well, my little man," says a stock stage gentleman, in the stock voice
of a stage question, "and what are you learning at school?"

"Reading and writing," says one of the comedian boys, his immobile face
a marvel of wooden imbecility, blank as the alphabet.

"Reading and writing," repeats the stock gentleman, so as to let the
audience get it, "and anything else?"

The "boy" answers, with no facial movement, "We learn gazinta."

"You learn what?"

"Gazinta."

"But what is gazinta?"

"Why," explains the boy, "like 'two gazinta four' and 'five gazinta
ten.'"

The roar of the audience's laughter ends the mathematics.  They laugh
because in the contrast between the clarity of reading and writing and
the mystery of "gazinta" they see their own experience.  For them all
mathematics is, and always will be, "gazinta."

Here is a particular example, familiar to all school and college
people, of what I mean by our failure to get a proper grasp of
mathematical thought.  We all learn that the attraction of gravity
exercised on or by a body varies in direct proportion to its mass, and
inversely as the square of its distance.  The square?  That's the
sticker for most of us.  What's the square got to do with it?  We
understand, or we think we do, that of course the more "mass" a thing
has the more it pulls.  In reality this is the real philosophical
difficulty, since mass means power to "pull," and "pull" means having
mass.  But we don't look into it so far as that; the bigger the mass,
the bigger the pull, all right.  But the square of the distance we
accept, learn it by heart, use it, multiply it--in short, it becomes
"gazinta."  It seems an odd thing.  Why the square?  Why not the cube,
or the anything else?  We don't see, till we learn to get it straight,
that the thing is self-evident.

The pull varies with the amount of _surface_, a thing of two
dimensions, broad and long.  A tower at a certain distance (don't call
it _x_ or we'll get mixed) looks a certain height and looks a certain
breadth.  A tower twice as far away would have to be twice as high to
look level with it and twice as broad to look of the same breadth.  So
the far-away tower at twice the distance of the near one, in order to
look the same size, would have to be twice as high and twice as broad
and would present to the eye four square feet to one, in order to
present an apparently equal surface.  The attraction is in proportion
to the surface and gets less and less for any given size of surface as
you go further away.  And it doesn't matter if the surface is square or
round or triangular, or any other shape, since they are all
proportional.  Here I believe is where _pi_ comes in--but don't let us
go too far with it.

There are ever so many of these mathematical conceptions that turned
into mystification because we never got them right at the start.  The
trigonometrical ratios--sine, cosine, etc.--seemed just an arbitrary
iniquity.  If we had thought of them as moving arms, like traffic
signs, we would have felt them to be the natural and inevitable way of
measuring an angle.

      *      *      *      *      *

It seems to me therefore that something might be done, at the very
opening of education, to strengthen our grip on the mathematical idea.
This would bring us back, I presume, to those mathematical judgments
synthetically _a priori_ with which I started.  The question involved
is the nature of number and magnitude, and why does one and one make
two? and the consideration whether a statement of that sort is just a
fact or an inference from one judgment to another.  I imagine that if
we could see into one another's minds we should find a great difference
in our grasp on the sequence of numbers.  A hen, it is understood, can
distinguish two from one but is lost at three.  Primitive languages
count a little way and then say "a whole lot."  Here figures end and
lies begin.  Even the Greeks used to say "a myriad" to mean not an
exact number but ever so many.

We have fallen heirs to the wonderful ingenuity of what we call Arabic
notation.  In reality the Hindus started it, but the Arabs made it
plainer still by writing into it a "cipher" or "zero" to mark a blank
place.  We learn it so early in life and so artificially that we don't
appreciate it.  We think of ten as an arbitrary point, whereas the
shift to a new "place" could have been set anywhere, and would be
better if set at something more divisible than ten.  If the people on
Mars have brains as much better than ours as their planet is older,
they may use a set of numbers that would go thousands at a jump and
write the population of the United States in three figures.  We
couldn't of course do that.  The multiplication table used for it would
be beyond our learning.  But I am sure that we, the non-mathematical
people among whom I belong, would get a better grip on mathematics if
we had a better conception of the relationship of numbers and symbols.

I am aware of course that there are many recent books that attempt to
shed new light on mathematics.  But the light seems dim.  One or two
well-known "series" contain what are really admirable presentations of
the philosophy of mathematics.  But, for the ordinary person, to mix
philosophy with mathematics only makes it worse.  Other popular works
undertake to bring mathematics to the intelligence of the millions; it
would be invidious to name the books, but, apart from their optimistic
titles, I cannot see much success in them.

I am aware also that various new methods of teaching mathematics are
adopted, especially in teaching mathematics to beginners.  But in any
that I have seen there is little else than one more example of the
present tendency to turn children's education into fun.  Kindergarten
children waving little flags, forming themselves into squares and cubes
and separating themselves into fractions, may look very pretty, but
they are no nearer to the mysteries of number.  Singing the
multiplication table doesn't make it less relentless.

Here on my desk, for instance, is a widely known pretentious book of
"new method."  It undertakes to "individualize arithmetic" by teaching
the children what the author calls "number facts" by the use of
numbered cards.  "Cards," says this authority, "are invaluable for
learning number facts."  Many of us found this out long ago.  The
children "individualize" their arithmetic by sitting in a ring, dealing
out cards with numbers and pictures on them, and then seeing whose
"number facts" win out against their opponents.  The children might
learn poker from this but not mathematics.  What they are doing sounds
like a "show-down" of "cold hands," a process as old as California.

The basic idea of my discussion is that somehow we don't get our minds
mathematically adjusted as they might be.  I am aware that there are
great differences of natural aptitude.  We are told that Isaac Newton
when he was a boy took a look through Euclid's _Elements_ and said it
seemed a "trifling book."  That meant that, when Euclid said, "the
three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles,"
little Newton said, "Why, of course, obviously so."  Probably the
Pythagorean theorem about the squares on the sides of a right-angled
triangle only held him back a minute or two.  These things took the
rest of us a year of school.  But, all said and done, I think that it
is not only a matter of aptitude but of approach.  We don't "go at it"
right.

With that I leave the subject, with the hopes that at least it may be
stimulating to professors of mathematics.  A little stimulant won't
hurt them.




V

_Parlez-Vous Franais?_



CHAPTER V

PARLEZ-VOUS FRANAIS?

or

WHY CAN'T WE LEARN MODERN LANGUAGES?

_Sit down, Gentlemen--The annual mass attack on French and its
repulse--How to learn French: forget English--Never learn a rule: learn
to think subjunctively--Swallow the phrase whole--Read for reading's
sake--When you get it, it's like swimming_


I remember that when I was a student taking German at college, a
criticism reached the ears of our good old professor to the effect that
the students never spoke German and never heard it.  He was hurt at
this, and so at the end of that term he put on what was announced as an
oral examination.  We were directed, four at a time, into a little
room, where the professor and two "outside examiners" were sitting in
state as a board of examination.

I went in with three other students and we lined up across the room.

"_Setzen Sie sich, meine Herren_," said the professor, very
impressively.  This means, "Sit down, gentlemen."

We stood right there.

"_Meine Herren_," repeated the professor, as casually as he could,
"_nehmen Sie, bitte, Platz_."

No, sir; not us; we never budged.

"Sit down, gentlemen," said the professor curtly.

Down we sat, all together.

After that year there weren't any more oral examinations.

      *      *      *      *      *

The same thing could have happened in any North American university,
and could have been carried out in any of the modern languages--except
in French in French Canada.  Yet any of us, with the instruction we
received, could have translated ordinary German or French into English,
and even put English sentences into French or German by a process like
working with a hammer and saw.

I have selected French as the main object of discussion in this chapter
because I have had over sixty years of dealing with it and enjoy the
advantages for observation that go with residence in a bilingual
province.  But all that is said here about learning French could be
said about learning German, Spanish, Russian or Norwegian.

The fault with our teaching of modern languages is not so much that we
teach them wrongly as that we don't succeed in teaching them at all.
Ask anyone who "took" Freshman French at college, or learnt French in
high school.  Only don't ask him in French.

Every year in English-speaking North America a vast phalanx of high
school and college students, millions of them, gather for a mass attack
on French.  They come on against a heavy barrage of declensions,
conjugations and exceptions; they are beaten back, gather again and
re-form each year till their school-days end in defeat--as glorious and
as hopeless as Pickett's charge at Gettysburg.  Twenty-five years
later, when the pupils and students have grown up into adult life,
there will be practically nothing left of their French except a few
fragments and a little wistful regret and wonder.  Ask your friend, the
father of a family, what French he knows, and he will say that he knows
such things as, "_Donnez-moi un bock, s'il vous plat_" and "_Garon,
encore un bock_."  But he learned those on a trip to Paris, in the
proper way, by eating and drinking them in.

Let me speak here on my own experience, not from vanity over it or
egotism in telling it, but because I think it is typical of that of
thousands of others.  I learned, or mislearned, my French in the
English-speaking Province of Ontario; but what I say of Ontario, for
which I have nothing but affection, is not directed against it singly.
I am certain that its faults are shared by practically all our
English-speaking continent.  Of England I am not speaking for the
moment; over there the proximity of France and the fact that languages
were learned for generations before the schools spoiled the process
make things a little different.  But not altogether so.

Let me then explain about my experience in Ontario.  I am not offering
here any criticism against the efficiency and the industry of the many
hundred people who teach French in the schools of Ontario.  They do
what they are compelled to do to meet the strange and disastrous kind
of test applied to their pupils.  They have to prepare their pupils to
pass the matriculation examination of the universities; and they do so.
Some of their pupils even pass with distinction; others carry away what
is called honours, and are so badly damaged thereby for learning French
that a residence of ten years in Paris would hardly effect a complete
recovery of their native faculties.

And the amazing thing about the situation is that if Anatole France or
Victor Hugo had been sent up to write on an Ontario matriculation
examination in French there is not the slightest chance that either of
them would head the list; they would be beaten right and left by girls
from Seaford High School who never saw the red wings of the Moulin
Rouge, and by boys from the Hamilton Collegiate Institute who wouldn't
know enough real French to buy a boiled egg in the Caf de la Paix.
Indeed it is doubtful whether Anatole France and Victor Hugo would have
passed at all.  The whole examination being a test in English, they
would probably have been ploughed and have had to be put under the care
of an Ontario special teacher for six months to enable them to get
through.

The point that I am endeavoring to make and reinforce with all the
emphasis of which I am capable is this: the ability to translate French
into English in writing is not a knowledge of French.  More than this,
it is the very opposite of it.  It involves, if exercised persistently
and industriously, a complete inability ever to have a knowledge of
French.  The English gets in the way.  The French words are forever
prevented from acquiring a real meaning in connection with the objects
and actions indicated, because the mind has been trained always and for
ever and hopelessly to associate them with English words instead of
with things.  The process is fatal.  The whole system is not only
worthless but it is a fraud and an imposition practised upon all those
who learn French in such a school method; and the schools are driven to
use the method because the colleges impose a written examination of
translation and grammar as the criterion of a knowledge of French.  For
the proof of it I appeal to the candid confession of all those who were
trained in this machine.  I appeal to such people for corroboration of
what I say.  All that they learned was directed toward nailing the
English word so tight to the French one that nothing can ever prize
them apart.

I, myself, speak of what I know.  When I was a little boy in England I
learned to use a few small phrases in French, such as "_Bonjour,
Monsieur_" and "_Au revoir_," in the proper and real way; not
connecting them with any link to English words but letting them spring
out of the occasion.  Anybody who understands the matter will
understand what I mean.  Later on I learnt French in Ontario and
entered, traversed, and left the Provincial University with all sorts
of distinction in it.  Part of the teaching, like part of the curate's
egg at the Bishop's table, was excellent no doubt, but the base of it
was worthless; it had all been undermined and spoiled and forever
rendered futile by the unspeakable matriculation examination which
preceded it and which was a necessary preliminary to entrance to the
French classes.

I mean it literally and absolutely when I say that I knew more French
_in the real sense of knowing it_ when I was a child of six years in
England than when I was given first-class honours at graduation by the
University.  In the first case I knew a little; in the second case I
knew not a single word that was not damaged by false association and
contact.  All the energy and industry and determination that I had put
into my college work, all the interest and fascination that I felt for
the language, all the pride that I could have felt in really knowing
and using it--was dashed to pieces against the stone wall of the
barrier erected in my path.

When I graduated I could not use a single word of French without
thinking of English.  I had to begin painfully and wearily all over
again at the very bottom.  Somehow I had stumbled upon the secret of a
true beginning, and I began to try to collate in my mind the French
words and the objects and ideas and to exclude the English.  But it was
hard work.  The college had left its fatal mark deep stamped upon my
brain.  But at last, many years after my graduation, and with advantage
of residence in Montreal, the light began to break.

If I live long enough to forget a little more of what I learnt at
school I shall soon be able to speak French as well as a Montreal
cab-man talks English.  More than that I do not ask.  But for my
academic education I might have spoken French with the easy fluency
with which the girls behind the notion counters of the Montreal
department stores rip off their alternative languages.  For such higher
competence I can only have a despairing admiration.  It is not for me.
Yet let me speak as the cab-man and the car conductor speak, and I am
content to depart in peace.  For I shall know that if a French angel
(such is the kind I should prefer) opens the gate to me and says "_D'o
venez-vous?_" I shall answer "_Je viens de Montral_," without first
framing the thought in English.

Let us consider a little further the matter under discussion.  The
whole of the teaching of school French is directed toward passing the
matriculation examination of the colleges.  This examination is
conducted on paper in English.  It has therefore absolutely no
connection with the use of the ear as a means of hearing language.  In
fact, the language is regarded as a thing seen but not heard.  I am
told that people thus taught, when they land at Calais or Dieppe, are
often seen to grasp their ears at the first tingling of the new
sensation of hearing a language spoken.  Moreover, the examination in
question consists, entirely, or almost so, of writing out English
translations of French words and of translating written English words
into French ones.

The typical form of a French examination test is to hand out to the
candidate a rapid-fire series of silly-looking little grammatical
difficulties involving a queer sequence of pronouns or something of the
sort.  Some such exercise as this is given:

_Translate into French:_

_Speak to us of it.  Do not speak of it to them with me.  Let him have
some of it for them.  Lend it to us, but do not lend it to them.  Etc.,
etc., etc._


I should like to put Victor Hugo and a Montreal cab-man down in front
of this and see what utter hash they would make of it.  The truth is
that ability to do this kind of translation-gymnastics, this leaping in
and out in a kind of egg-shell dance among the pronouns, can only be
accomplished at a dreadful expense of damage in other directions.  The
wretched literalism involved is absolutely fatal.

I do not say that a person who really knew French and knew English
could not translate these things.  He might.  But the prospect would
make him tired.  And probably in about half a page of this stuff he
would make a slip or two in whichever language was not his mother
tongue.  But notice.  The highly trained girl from Seaforth High School
who has never seen the sails of the Moulin Rouge will make no slip at
all.  She will translate with absolute accuracy every last one of these
rotten-looking sentences.  Yet if the examiner said to her in French,
"My child, you have answered admirably, come and have lunch with me at
the Caf Americain," she would blush the ruby red of detected ignorance.

But this juggling with pronouns and idioms is only a part of the idiocy
of the school translation system.  There is plenty more of it.  The
pupil is not only taught to translate the ordinary common words that he
would really need if he were ever, poor soul, actually going to use
French, but he is taught right at the outset of his instruction a
string of words, or rather the translation of a string of words, that
he is never conceivably going to use at all.  Just because these words
have a peculiar plural they are dragged in at the very opening of the
pupil's acquaintance with the language.  Most of them he will never see
again, except of course on an Ontario examination paper.

_Bal, carnaval, chacal, nopal, regal, cal_, have, so it appears,
irregular plurals.  Who cares if they have?  The way to learn an
irregular plural is by happening to want to use the word often enough
to learn it.  That is the way in which an English child learns that the
plural of _foot_ is _feet_, and a French child that the plural of _bal_
is _bals_.  Similarly the words _bail, email, corail, soupirail,
vantail, vitrail_, have irregular plurals.  But what of that?  Wait
till one wants to use them or runs up against them in the course of
speaking or reading French.  It is awful, and it is futile, to learn
them in a list; and it is still more awful to parade the list on an
examination paper as if knowledge of it were a real test of the degree
of attainment of a person learning French.

But since the examination has to be faced and since the examination is
sure to contain some of these specimens as a test, the little books of
instruction carry exercises that run:--

_Have you the opals of the jackals?_

_No, but my father has the enamels of the leases._


This kind of thing used to give me the idea that French conversation
must be awfully silly.  The two Frenchmen who had just asked about
opals and jackals would suddenly break off in a terrible flurry to say:

"_Where are the stained glass windows?  Where are the folding doors?_"


Many school-boys must have thought the French a peculiarly unstable
people, incapable of fixed attention.

Or turn from nouns to verbs.  The school pupil learns these in a list.
The Montreal cab-man learns them by their use.  When the school pupil
proposes to say "We shall see" in French, he starts off from the
English "to see"--French _voir_; future, _je verrai, tu verras, il
verra_--Ha! ha!--he's getting near it now!  _Nous verrons_, "we shall
see"!  Triumph!  Now the cab-man (whether French by birth or English)
has learned that group of sounds, _nous verrons_, in a lump, associated
with the idea.  Or else he hasn't learned it at all.  But if he has, he
knows it and uses it in the real true sense of language.  The college
matriculant, wanting to use it, stands dumb with a perfect fury of
rapid conjugation boiling up in his mind till it boils over as _nous
verrons_--half a minute too late for use.

      *      *      *      *      *

It might of course be claimed that even this defective method of
teaching at least opens up the language as literature and leads the way
to the study of its history and philology.  People who never expect to
talk French may still, it is claimed, enjoy the pleasure of reading the
great masterpieces of French literature without a translation, and the
advantage of reading the French books and journals of the hour for
which there is no translation.  There is of course something in this
argument, but far less than one might suppose.  Experience shows that
people who have learned French without being able to pronounce it
decently, without any power of understanding it by the ear and without
the ability to read it without the English words showing through the
French print, seldom go on reading it at all.  For technical purposes
they may puzzle it out; in rare cases--I have known such--they make of
the unspoken, unheard language a sort of bridge to the literature of
the past; but in the vast majority of cases such French, as far as
culture goes, gets nowhere.  The appreciation of literature is too dim,
when the words are mere mechanical symbols lacking life; even
parchments of philology rustle dry when a living language is thus
numbered with the dead.

But let me turn from the negative to the positive.  Finding fault is
one thing, and improvement is another.  So far, I admit, I have merely
spoken of how not to learn a modern language.  But I am prepared to go
in the other direction and show how to learn it, with less difficulty,
ever so much more reality and far happier results.  I will undertake to
teach anybody any modern language perfectly in five minutes--not the
whole of it, which nobody ever knows, but just a little bit of it; and
with that beginning he can go on as far as he likes.  For example I
would take him out from my house where I write this book and have him
meet on the road an Ojibway Indian from the Reserve near by and call
out to him "_Aneen!  b'jou!_"  After he had said that quite a few times
to quite a few Indians it would begin to seem a natural thing to say to
an Indian when you met him.  After he had said it a year or two he
would go on saying it in his sleep.  But if he asked what do the words
_mean_, I would not tell him.  If he starts breaking them into
fractions of English, it's all over with Ojibway; all he needs to know
is that that is what you say when you say it.

The little bits of foreign language that we really make our own--such
as _carte blanche_ and _pt de foie gras_ and _eau de vie_--come to us
just that way.  English is shut out; we never think of "white card" or
of "pastry of fat liver."  Still less do we deliberately make _blanche_
feminine to fit with _carte_.  In fact we don't notice that it is
feminine.  A person fitting the genders together gets left behind in
conversation.  Gender forms are only things that you notice, and group
together perhaps, after you begin to acquire the language.  It is of no
help whatsoever to learn them in lists; each one must be _used_ with
any combination it comes into.  There is no royal road and no way of
shortening it.

I am not here merely advocating the use of what is often called the
"natural" method--the plan of learning languages by talking and hearing
them.  Few people ever have the opportunity to talk them enough and
hear them enough to go very far.  Few people can go to France and stay
there for ten years, and for people at home "conversation" lessons,
unsupported by any other form of effort and instruction, break down of
their own weight.  They begin in a burst of enthusiasm, gradually turn
into something like annoyance.  The teacher is so fluent, the pupil so
helpless, the sense of progress is soon changed for a sort of expanding
horizon of ignorance.  There comes a happy moment when the lessons are
dropped, and nothing remains but "_Bonjour, Monsieur_" and "_Oh, oui._"

Nor am I, for the present, trying to explain how the learning of
French, or any other foreign language, can be fitted in as a class
exercise in school or college.  What I am here talking of is how you
get it into your own head.  In this, as in the whole scope of
education, it is overwhelmingly your own effort, your own initiative
that counts.  What people learn best is what they teach themselves,
what they learn of their own prompting.

One recalls in the _Pickwick Papers_ the statement of Mr. Weller Senior
that he had taken a good deal o' pains with the education of his son by
letting him run in the streets when he was very young and shift for
himself.  It is the grain of truth in this that makes it funny, the
incongruity between what appears to be utter neglect but is described
as calculated foresight.  As usual the humour turns on the revelation
of truth by incongruous contrast.  If the little Weller had had no
native gift for seeing and learning, for storing up experience and
profiting by it, the whole opportunity of the streets would have been
wasted on him.  And if little Weller had attended a sociological class
on Life in the Street (half course, half term, one credit), he would
have been unfitted to live on them.

The beginning of learning is the urge to learn.  The teacher and the
class exercise are just a supplement and a help, but never can be the
motive power.  Wisdom cannot be poured into the pupil out of a jug.
What I have in mind is a process that supplements any conversation
method used, and any reading done--a process, carried on in one's own
mind, of excluding one's own native language, of setting up a direct
connection between the sound of the words and the things and actions
that they stand for.  A person trained in this way, if he cannot
express himself in the foreign language, can at least be _silent_ in
it; what is meant is that his own language, English let us say, will
not rise up in his mind and choke him.  That is why cab-men, hotel
waiters and ticket collectors seem to talk French so easily.  Nothing
else comes into their minds.  If they're stuck for a word or a phrase
they must find one; but at least no English will "butt in" as it would
with us.

But before developing this idea more fully I want first to indicate how
very great, in the learning of languages, are the limitations of what
can be accomplished by ordinary people in ordinary circumstances.  A
great deal of misunderstanding and myth and legend surround the
acquisition of foreign languages.  People of humble minds outside of
academic circles imagine that there are various other people who speak
half a dozen languages perfectly.  As a matter of fact there are none,
and never have been except on the plan explained above for the use of
the Ojibway language--perfect as far as it goes.

We read in history of the famous Scottish scholar, the "Admirable"
Crichton of three centuries ago, that he possessed twelve languages and
that once when journeying to Paris he invited "the university" to meet
him in disputation at nine o'clock on such and such a morning when he
would be ready to dispute in any one of them.  We are told by Milton
that a man may pick up the Italian tongue in an odd hour.  Similar
myths run all down our history and are matched by current references to
people who can speak three or four languages perfectly, and especially
to Russians to whom an extra language is an easier matter than an extra
suit of clothes.  I remember having been told of an official
interpreter in a magistrate's court in Toronto who had to deal with
nondescript Europeans of all sorts of languages.  He had such a gift
for languages that if a man turned up whose language he didn't know he
would ask the magistrate for a couple of days' delay and then go home
and learn the language.  It sounds easy, doesn't it?

Unfortunately the learning of a language is a much more arduous matter
than that.  It must begin in a humble way with nouns and phrases--never
with grammar and sentences.  And from the very beginning the learner,
and here everything depends on himself and not on the teacher, should
try to connect the foreign word (sound and letters) with the thing, the
idea, that it stands for and to break it away from what appears to be
its English equivalent.  As a matter of fact there are probably no two
words that are exact equivalents in two different languages.  A _house_
is not _une maison_ and a _hotel_ is not always _un htel_.  Drinks in
America are sometimes said to be "on the house"; they are never "_sur
la maison_."  A French duke, no matter how impoverished, always tries
to keep a hotel in the city.  An English duke, no matter how rich,
refuses to.

Words and phrases are the beginning.  But they must be carefully
divorced from grammar and grammatical rules about changes for the
plural and so on.  Those things come later on, as they did in learning
our own language in infancy.  Most of us can remember reading out of a
grammar that "oxen, children and brethren make the plural in n," and
thinking: "Why, so they do!  How interesting!"  Tables of verbs will
never teach a person to say _je viendrai_, and _je verrai_, and _je
voudrais_; you have to know them first, word by word, bit by bit, and
afterwards looking over a table of them helps to give them a sort of
consistency.

The case is still stronger with phrases.  To analyse them out and put
English to them spoils them as French.  In nearly all phrases there is
not one single English equivalent for the French or one single French
equivalent for the English.  Take the most overworked phrase in the
French language, that joy of the conversational tourist, "_a ne fait
rien_."  This means, word by word, "That doesn't make nothing," and by
sense, "That doesn't matter; that makes no difference; it's all the
same to me; not at all, my dear chap; that's all right"--and so on for
a page.  A person who has learned to say "_a ne fait rien_," as
arising from circumstances and not from translation, is already talking
French.

The most extreme case of the futility of translation methods is found
in the use of moods and tenses, as in the employment of the
subjunctive.  This, for us, is the most difficult thing in the grammar
of a foreign language because in English we have almost lost the
subjunctive--that is, almost forgotten how to _think_ in the
subjunctive.  Patriots are often trained to "think imperially."
Linguists have to be trained to "think subjunctively."  In English we
have drifted so far away from the use of the subjunctive that our sense
of its value has grown dim.  It is like a lost or decaying faculty, as
is the sense of smell in the human race.  In English we put everything
into the indicative mood as if it was a _fact_.  We write, "They say
that he is very rich"--whether we mean that he really is, or only that
people claim he is.  We say, "They charged against Socrates that he was
corrupting the youth of Athens."  A Greek or a Roman would interject,
"Do you mean that that is what they charged, or that that is what he
was really doing?"

In French the indicative has to some extent replaced the subjunctive
but scarcely at all as compared with English.  French people can still
_feel_ a subjunctive.  When they say, "_Il faut qu'il soit bien
mchant_," they are not saying that he is a bad lot, but only that he
would have to be to fulfill certain conditions.  English people in
talking French try to work out subjunctives from a rule, without ever
having really got the idea of them.  I remember hearing an English lady
at Calais request a customs official to let her pass with the words,
"_Permettez, monsieur, que je passasse_."  The polite Frenchman bowed
and said, "_Passassiez, Madame_."  The lady moved on with a gratified
feeling of bilingualism achieved.  A friend of mine once told me that
in leading up to a proposal to a very charming French girl, he asked
her if she would mind crossing the ocean.  She replied, "_Ah, non! si
j'tais avec quelqu'un qui me fit oublier les ennuis du voyage_."  His
astonishment and admiration of her use of the preterite subjunctive
struck him silent so long that he lost her.  Two lives went astray over
a lost mood.

English people can, with effort and difficulty, reacquire the
subjunctive sense.  But if not, the only thing to do is to go ahead
without it; trample it down and forget it.  After all no Frenchman, and
few Irishmen, can ever learn to use _shall_ and _will_.  The
subjunctive must either be used instinctively and through the sense of
it or left alone.  Seen in this light how terrible is such a thing as a
"grammatical exercise" beginning with the dictum, "In French, verbs of
_fearing, avoiding, denying, forbidding_, etc., etc. govern the
subjunctive.  _Ne_ is inserted before the verb in the subordinate
clause to indicate an affirmative conclusion; _ne pas_, to indicate a
negative."  Then follows an exercise.  Translate: "I am afraid he is
coming.  I am not afraid he is coming.  I am afraid he is not coming.
I am not afraid he is not coming."  Enough of that stuff puts a student
of languages beyond resuscitation.

The time comes presently when the pupil in learning French on a proper
method may begin to read it.  And here again the secret of learning is
to try to say good-bye to the English translation as rapidly as
possible.  "_Le Petit Chaperon Rouge_" is what the French call our
"Little Red Riding Hood."  But having said "Little Red Riding Hood"
once in this connection, never say it again.  Call up the vision of the
little girl picking flowers in the wood, her red cloak falling back
from her shoulders, and connect with the picture the words _Le Petit
Chaperon Rouge_.  Learn what a little bit of the French story means and
say it over and over again; get it away from the English and as you go
further on with reading never bother as to what a French word "means"
(in English) provided you can hit the general sense and go on.  Better
one half the sense in French than all of it in English.

When you read French in this way there will come a time when you find
that you can read it, more or less straight ahead, without thinking of
English.  It is like learning to swim.  It comes to you, after the hard
initial effort that made it possible, with a warm glow of
accomplishment.  After that the language is yours.  You have set up in
your mind a division into compartments in one of which is English, in
the other French.  Henceforth they will not interfere.  When you read
French in this way a lot of the words will carry vague meanings that
gradually clarify; but it doesn't matter much whether they do--just as,
in English, people go on reading sea stories all their lives without
knowing what the "lee-scuppers" are except that people fall into them,
or whether the "binnacle" is what the captain sits in or where the men
sleep.

The French speech of a person trained in this proper way and the French
writing of a person properly taught are necessarily for a long time
filled with inaccuracies; children in learning to talk English at first
are apt to run their words to a pattern, for example to make all the
verbs "weak"--to say, "I bited the apple," "He sawed me coming," and so
on.  This clears away of itself, not by learning rules but by
continuous and unconscious imitations.

But what is utterly unnatural is the false and overdone standard of
excellence of the student of French in a grammar class, writing out
twenty sentences of subjunctives without an error, finding feminines
for _blanc_, for _beau_, for _turc_, for _tourangeau_ and so forth, as
easily as picking flowers.  The method of teaching French here shares
in the fault that goes with all examination discipline--the pressure to
put on the last increment of excellence that only comes at an
inordinate cost, an inordinate sacrifice of other things.  A steamer
whose economic speed is sixteen knots can perhaps be forced up to
twenty at a double cost, and even beyond that, at an expense utterly
disproportionate.  A pupil who takes over ninety per cent in French
grammar is like a little tug raising enough steam to move a freighter,
at the expense of being all boiler and no cargo.

I admit the full difficulty of turning what is here said to its
practical application in re-forming the curriculum of a school.  But
just as the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, so a clear
sense of what is desired, of the goal to be achieved, will sooner or
later find the means of achievement.  But even without attempting in
any degree to lay down a school curriculum in French, one or two
generalities may at least be hazarded.  Students ought to begin with
nouns and names, learned off picture-placards by the oral method of
fifty years ago--spelling and sound together.  Follow these pictures by
phrases, and plenty of them, learned as far as possible without
connection with English: _Voici un hibou; Voil un cheval_....  Steal
from bygone Ollendorf one or two question-and-answer forms endlessly
repeated: _Voyez-vous le cheval!  Oui, je vois le cheval_....  Let at
least all class-room directions be in French: _Asseyez-vous....  Fermez
la porte....  coutez bien_....  And exhort the student at the start to
try to get away from his own language.

A little further on comes reading out loud by the teacher; here enters
such a story as _Le Petit Chaperon Rouge_--the English of it only
explained once, just as little as is necessary, and then endless
repetition of the reading.  Dictation of French, to be written and
spelled by the students as best they can and turned back and forward
into Ollendorf questions, is a true linguistic discipline, the best
there is, and the one, I imagine, the most nearly abandoned by our
colleges in their entrance tests.  And most of all it is necessary to
realize that a percentage examination, carried on in writing, and
calling for a false degree of excellence in detail, in this as in
nearly every other part of education, spells frustration and defeat.
But of that I speak in more general and fuller terms in another chapter.

In what I have said about the teaching of French I have been referring
to the situation in North America--the United States and Canada--where
it is probably the worst in the world.  The whole power of a vast,
expensive and enthusiastic public education is here directed along
false lines of effort.  In Liberia, where they make no effort at all, I
am sure they do it better.

In England for various reasons the situation is different from ours.
The proximity of France across the Channel, the fact that thousands of
people learn their French from actual contacts and the fact that
"native" teachers are everywhere available counts for much.  So too
does the fact that French was widely taught in England before the era
of modern "translation" text-books, before analytical
sentence-translation, and was taught largely in phrases and on a
"natural" method.  Even the earlier translation texts were not like
ours.  If anyone will glance at the famous Ollendorf of a hundred years
ago he will see that it aims at a constant repetition of similar French
forms by means of questions and answers.  "_Avez-vous le chapeau de mon
pre?_"  "_Non, Monsieur, je n'ai pas le chapeau de votre pre._"

Ollendorf seems to be wrong in admitting English as the medium.  But
the intention of his famous "method" was that the pupil would, by the
repetition system, jump out of English to French; each French sentence
would suggest a new one; each French thought would reproduce itself in
a slight variation.  "_Avez-vous mang votre djeuner?_"  "_Non,
Monsieur, je n'ai pas encore mang mon djeuner._"

It has been only more recently that up-to-date textbooks on the model
of their own begin to swamp out older and better methods.

Now the English are naturally the worst linguists in the world, but
they carry down from their insular history the remains of a contempt
for foreign nations, including foreign languages.  The Eskimos are
accustomed to call themselves "the people" and the English in many
things share the Eskimo attitude.  This sense of superiority, in point
of language, carries advantages and disadvantages.  English people are
apt to consider that they "know French" when they are able to pass a
few phrases back and forward across the lunch counter at Dieppe, or
call out in a confident voice, "_Garon, l'addition, s'il vous plat!_"
They are seldom interested in shades of pronunciation; they pronounce
_tenez_ and _savez_ as if written in English _tenny_ and _savvie_ (to
rhyme with "many" and "navvy"), and are willing to let it go at that.
On the other hand, use and custom have enabled them to grasp far more
easily than we do what a Frenchman is trying to say and to answer him
with some such apposite phrase as "_Trs bien, Monsieur_" or "_Cela ne
fait rien_."

I remember, as an illustration of this attitude, the visit to my
university, McGill, about forty years ago, of Andre Siegfried, then an
unknown and inquiring young Frenchman, since known to all the world.
He stood and talked in easy effortless French to one of my elderly
colleagues, an Englishman of the Oxford type.  As Siegfried talked my
colleague stood first on one foot and said, "_Oui--oui--oui--ah, oui,_"
and then on the other foot and said, "_Oh, non--non--non,_" and then
back to _oui_.  Afterwards I heard him telling of the interview:
"Delightful young man, speaks really excellent French.  We chatted away
for a long time--all in French, of course."

This easy unconsciousness of the very problem of language gives a sort
of reality to French in England, vastly different from the anxious,
pathetic failure of French in America.

As a matter of fact, a full mastery of even two languages is a very
rare thing.  It can only come as the result of a special environment,
the opportunity to talk both, the will to do so, and therewith a
certain aptitude.  What is ordinarily thought as bilingualism falls
away below this.

Compare, for example, the "bilingual" city of Montreal, of whose one
million people, some seven out of ten are French.  All the French
people of any education understand English, and all of them speak it in
a way to make themselves easily understood for business and for
ordinary conversation.  But with a very few exceptions their speech
falls far short of the range and power of people speaking their own
language.  They can say what they mean but they can neither adorn nor
embellish it.  Their pronunciation, of course, while pleasing enough,
is not the same as ours; it may be better but it is not the same.  Even
their understanding of English of necessity falls short in point of
appreciation of our literature; so much depends, especially in poetry
and in the drama, on the full connotation of the words, the shades of
meaning which they have taken on with us from infancy.

Can a foreigner fully distinguish the curfew "tolls the knell of
parting day" from "rings the six o'clock bell"?  Can he feel the appeal
of a tide that "drew from out the boundless deep" and "turns again
home"?  "In Flanders fields the poppies blow!"  Can any foreigner
appreciate the delicacy of _blow_?  We have no measure of the intimacy
of their comprehension, but it is not unfair to doubt it.

As to the bilingualism of the English people of Montreal there is
hardly any of it.  Most of them learn a little French in school,
recognize a lot of French words, especially those on sign-boards and
know that "Guy Street!" as called out by the bilingual car-conductor is
in French "Ghee!"  The exceptions are too few to matter.  Yet here is a
city where an unobservant visitor, haunted by a myth, would say, "In
Montreal, of course, everybody talks both English and French."

People who have devoted attention to the subject of foreign languages
may be inclined to differ from me as to their valuation of translation.
They may argue that translation represents as it were the last word,
the supreme exercise in language.  The extraordinary difficulty of
finding idiom for idiom, of carrying over from one language to the
other an absolute identity of meaning with an equal excellence of
diction, such difficulty is only matched by the attraction of doing it.

Now this is quite true.  But such translation comes at the end not at
the beginning of study.




VI

_Has Economics Gone to Seed?_



CHAPTER VI

HAS ECONOMICS GONE TO SEED?

_Economists end to end--Knowledge that falls asleep--Political Economy
as world gospel--The bottom falls out of it--The Spendthrift saves
society--Bad money saves national trade--The colleges meet the
situation--A catalogue of dead opinion--Economists dig in behind a
barrage of x and y--Economics joins the Chinese Classics_


Some years ago when I was the dinner guest of a famous club in Boston,
the chairman of the evening introduced me in the following words: "Our
guest to-night is an economist.  I need hardly remind you, gentlemen,
of the large part played in our life of today by our economists.
Indeed it has been calculated that if all the economists were laid out
in a line, end to end, starting at the Mexican border, they would
reach"--the orator paused impressively and added--"nowhere."

That, I say, was a few years ago.  What was a genial joke then is plain
fact now.  In my opinion that is exactly where college economics
stands.  At a time when the world is in danger of collapse from the
dilemma of wealth and want, the college economists can shed no
light--or rather only a multitude of cross lights that will not focus
to a single beam--in place of a lighthouse, wreckers' signals, or, at
best, fireworks, elaborate and meaningless.

The time has come to ask, has economics run to seed?  Consider what we
mean by the phrase.  There comes a time in the life of plants and
flowers, when bloom and freshness have passed away.  The blossoms are
gone, the green of bud and leaf has withered to a faded brown; on the
shrivelled stem once bright with bloom there remains nothing but the
ragged seed-pods, sear and unsightly.  In these, indeed, lies
resurrection, the hope of future life, but, for the moment, use,
purpose and beauty are gone.  Let the wind scatter the seed for a new
start on other ground.

So it is with the growth of human knowledge.  It rises in new force,
vigorous in life, brilliant in expression and beneficent in power.
Time passes.  New growth has stopped.  Knowledge, like a withering
stick, becomes rigid and formal.  Adaptability has gone.  Leaf has
become wood; speculation has turned to authority.  The doddering
thought has run to seed.  The hand that holds the pen is dead.

So it was vast centuries ago when the Chinese, a brilliant nation in
the sunrise of intellectual growth, invented a system of symbols, of
little pictures, that permitted the written communication of thought.
It was a marvellous advance.  But over these little pictures the
Chinese fell asleep for five thousand years, mumbling and reciting the
"sacred books," sacred only in their primitive simplicity, like an
idiot among savages.

The Babylonians measured out the sky and baked their knowledge on clay,
in wedge-shaped characters.  They moved, stopped--and then the Assyrian
came down like a wolf on the fold and Babylon was buried in the sand.

In Alexandria the new Greek science and medicine ran its course for
over five hundred years.  There the Ptolemies built a great library of
half a million books, a lighthouse four hundred feet high with beams
focused far out at sea, a wonder of the world.  Here were the triumphs
of Euclid, of Aristarchus and of Galen.  Then knowledge slowly
crystallized; life and inquiry died out of it; the great weight of
opinion of the dead suffocated the living.  The conquering Arab overran
it all, and the Caliph Omar burned its books in the name of a
Mohammedan God.

When Greece and Rome declined, the Barbarians came, but among them grew
up the schools of the Christian church, the schools of Alfred and
Charlemagne, like beautiful little plants in the forest.  These grew
into the cloistered learning of the monastery, copying its parchment
books in the quiet of a scriptorium, a sanctuary all still within,
noise and battle without.  Then the learning of the church,
over-weighted and encrusted with age, turned to scholasticism,
substituting words for things and grammar for thought, formal and
worthless.

The Renaissance swept all this away, to put in its place the
"humanities" and the classical scholarship which was the mainstay of
our learning and our literature in England and America for three
hundred years.  The education of a "gentleman" was based on
conjugations and declensions; young ladies' minds were sweetened and
enriched with Greek mythology, and America named its rising towns from
the Rome and Syracuse of antiquity.

As the modern world of industry and machinery and democracy grew up,
the world of classical education failed to notice that it was there and
dozed quietly to rest, murmuring Latin quotations in its sleep.

As it slept, there rose up beside it, alert and eager with life, the
new science of political economy.  This, as fashioned by Adam Smith and
Ricardo and their American disciples, seemed a wonderful dogma, fit to
rank with Galileo's telescope and Isaac Newton's apple.  It was so
simple that it could all be written in a few pages.  It told the poor
exactly why they were so.  Work, industry, liberty, free competition
and a police force were all that was needed for social welfare.  Every
man got what he was worth and was worth what he got, and the world went
of itself.

Not that this bright new dogma was taught in the colleges.  Gentlemen
didn't need it and the poor couldn't afford it.  But the Cobdens and
the Brights and the Manchester School put it round the world.  It
seemed like a gospel of light.  Russian nihilists in the Siberian mines
hid copies of John Stuart Mill under their shirts, like early
Christians with a gospel.

Of teaching, I say, there was little.  The East India Company first
taught political economy in their college at Haileybury.  Their cadets
were supposed to need it, to work it on the Hindu.  The first lecturer
was Malthus, the apostle of the empty cradle; but he had a hare-lip;
the students couldn't understand him; so no harm was done.  In Scotland
also political economy was taught in college before and after Adam
Smith; not under that name but as a branch of philosophy and the theory
of moral sentiments.  As such it turned into a sort of dream, like
philosophy itself, bankrupt since Plato but garrulous as an aged
patient in a workhouse ward.  When political economy joined it, that
made two.  But as far as political economy meant practical
precept--work, save and take what you can get--the Scotch didn't need
it in school.  They had it as home work.

With the modernization of our education which began about fifty years
ago, economics came sweeping in as a college-subject.  Students cried
for it.  Benefactors died for it.  It reached and swelled till it
filled a B.A. curriculum, turned into a graduate study and after that
students could go to Germany and get more of it, and keep on with it
until they died.

But even then, though no one realized it, the bottom was out of it.
Political economy had taken too much for granted.  Property, and above
all property in land.  Where did that come from? asked Henry George.
And inheritance?  Loosen the dead hand and let us see what it holds in
its fingers.  What?  Is that fair?  All that vast wealth!  And labor,
asked Karl Marx, does it get all it produces?  If so, why hire it?  And
competition, asked a thousand complaining voices, as the complexity of
our machine industry grew, why is competition fair, if the strong can
crush the weak and vested interest take its toll of necessity?

Even the theory of the matter turned upside down like a capsized boat.
Does cost of production really govern the value of a thing, or does the
value of a thing dictate its cost?  And with that the theorists were
off to a new start, perplexed as Milton's arguing devils, who "found no
end in wondering mazes lost."  Thus did the experts wrangle and jangle
in their own Paradise Lost.  With the new century, economics, with the
bottom knocked out of it, was carried forward floating on the mud, like
Stephenson's first railway.

As a result, economic science has got itself into the tangle in which
it is tied today.  Of all the "economic truths" of a hundred years ago,
I do not know of one--literally, not of one--that would pass
unchallenged.  Lord Bacon tells us that Pontius Pilate asked in jest,
"What is truth?" and "would not stay for an answer."  If he asked the
question of the economists of today and waited for an answer, he would
have to arrange his board for a long time in advance.

Nothing stands.  John Stuart Mill was convinced that "productive labor"
was the basis of social welfare--that and nothing else.  Labor spent on
producing mere luxuries was wasted.  The spendthrift was an enemy to
society.  What he did was to call for velvet clothes and champagne.
Mill was a simple man, and a velvet suit and a bottle of champagne
seemed to him the last word for a wild time.  We could show him
something now.  But the idea was that Mill's spendthrift, by calling
for workmen to make him his suit and fix his drink, diverted them from
producing real things that do not pass away--such as bridges, machines
and factories.  "A demand for commodities," said Mill, "is not a demand
for labor."  This he made one of his "four fundamental propositions"
that held up the whole structure like the pillars of the mediaeval
firmament.

But where is the argument today?  Smashed to fragments.  The loudest of
our complaints are the voices calling for more spending of money.
Anything to start it going.  Prime the pump.  Pension the old men.
Give everybody in Alberta $25 a month.  Don't produce, spend.  Cut
production down, limit it.  Let the hog die unborn and pay the farmer
for the corn he doesn't raise, on the sole condition that he will spend
the money and not save it.

There again, saving!  That, with all the economists from Adam Smith to
his latest imitator, was the prime force in progress.  There the
interest of the individual and of society focused to a single light.
If everybody worked hard and saved money, then everybody would get
rich, the future would be provided for, and rainy days be stalled off
till every place would be as good as Nevada.

They never stopped to ask what happens if everyone sells and nobody
buys--if we save enough to build so many machines that there's nothing
for them to do.  What if we do provide for the future?  It hasn't come
yet.  How are we to get along till it does?  Hence all the wrangle and
jangle over "technology," technological improvement and technological
unemployment, the waste of abundance and the superfluity of productive
power.

I am not proposing to unravel the tangle--only to indicate it, coiled
all over the ground on which we try to advance.  In fact, it begins to
look as if a "rainy day" were one of the best things in nature, and the
more sudden the shower the better.  Come on, loosen up and spend
something!  Have a cigarette.

So it seems that the bottom is out of the saving theory.  That
particular pillar is undermined and falling over.  You may for the
moment help yourself by saving money, but you're a poor pup in the
social sense if you do.  Go and buy a velvet suit and order a quart of
extra dry.

Saving money!  And there again the moment you say "money," off goes
another explosion and up into the air a whole new mass of charred
fragments.  Scarcely a sentence is left intact of the old monetary
theory that seemed as solid as bedrock.  There it lay, the basis of our
economic life and international trade--the doctrine of sound money.  It
seemed as if half the economic evils of the past had come about for
lack of the knowledge and practice of it.  Every student read in his
economic scriptures of the evil of the Continental Dollar, the madness
of the French Assignat and of how the Greenback was fought, slain and
redeemed, as the dragon was fought by St. George.

Where is all this theory now?  Nothing left, after the war explosion
that blew it up, nothing except fierce, hot blasts of contrary opinion
rushing into the vacuum.  Monetary theory, or at least monetary
practice, denounces solid, sound money, and calls for money at least as
bad as and if possible worse than that of other nations.  "If you
devalue your pound, remember we'll devalue our dollar.  You can't work
that stuff on us!"  To cling to sound money would be to become a
Christian all alone in the arena.

Of all these doctrines I am not attacking one.  Of all these problems I
am not solving any.  I am only drawing attention to the hopeless muddle
in which economic thought and practice has involved itself.  It has
become a mass of contradiction.  Every nation is calling in one breath
for freer trade and economic nationalism, for a sound currency as
debased as possible, for rigid economy with plenty of spending--in
other words, calling out, "High!" "Low!" "Up!" "Down!" "Begin!"
"Stop!"--till all is a mere babel of voices.

Perhaps the best index of what has happened to the science of economics
is what has happened to the teaching of it in our colleges.  The
colleges have a system for meeting such difficulties.

When opinion gets confused--living opinion--the colleges can always
fall back on the opinion of the dead.  If living men can't think, let's
have a catalogue of all that dead men ever thought, and the students
can learn that.  In fact, economics can be all dosed up with history,
as doctors dose a patient with iron.  And statistics.  If we don't
understand the industrial world, at least let us have statistics.  The
continental area of the United States is 3,026,789 square miles and the
number of spindles in Lowell, Mass., is 201,608 (or is it?)  That's the
stuff.  Make a four-year course and give a degree in it--a D.F.

And with that, of course, goes the familiar therapeutics of putting in
"qualifications," what is called the "relative" view--that a thing is
partly so and partly isn't so.  Any book of what is called "general
economics," after indicating the continental area of the United States
and the number of spindles in Lowell, Mass., proceeds to a series of
propositions as to why wages partly rise and partly don't, why prices
may fall, or perhaps leap up, proving that black is in a sense white,
except that where it is white it is partly black.  This course is
called Economics 1.  From it you get to first base.

And, most of all, if we can't understand it, let's at least see that
outsiders don't.  Let us dress economics up in esoteric language, give
it a jargon of its own, and break away from plain terms like labour and
profit and money and poverty.  Let's talk of "categories" and
"increments" and "margins" and "series."  Let's call our appetite for
breakfast our consumer's marginal demand.  That will fool them.  And if
I buy one cigar but won't buy two, call that my submarginal saturation
point for nicotine.

Above all, let us call in the help of the psychologist.  He's the
fellow with the technique.  Turn him onto the theory of value, and
grandfather Adam Smith won't know his own offspring.

Accordingly, the theorist of today, following in the tracks of the dead
scholasticism, the lost Babylonian and the Egyptian dozing in the dust
of the pyramids, runs his economics to finer and finer distinctions
that have lost all meaning for everyday life.  He can no longer talk of
our wants; he must have marginal wants, degrees of wants, increments of
satisfaction, curves of desire meeting in an equilibrium.  The
difference as between plain language and this jargon is as between
digestion and a stomach-ache.  To the college economist a boy standing
in front of a pastry shop represents a submarginal increment of
satisfaction.  Give him ten cents and he comes out with a consumer's
surplus in him.  You can see it sticking out.

If anyone thinks this argument overdone, this language strained, let
him open with me the latest of the books on pure economic theory, the
books that have such titles as the _Theory of Value, of Capital, of
Investment_, anything like that.  It would be invidious to name them
singly since this is an attack not on a man but on a method.

Here before me on my desk is one of the latest, a book that will be
pronounced by the reviewers as one of the really "big" things--an
"outstanding contribution," that's the phrase.  The ordinary person can
no more read it than he can read Chinese.  Here is a sample of how this
outstanding contribution stands out:

_The slope of the curve passing through any point _p_ has indeed a very
definite and important meaning.  It is the amount of _y_ which is
needed by the individual in order to compensate him for the loss of a
small unit of _x_.  Now the gain in utility got by gaining such an
amount of _y_ equals amount of _y_ gained multiplied by marginal
utility of _y_; the loss in utility got from losing the corresponding
amount of _x_ equals amount of _x_ lost multiplied by marginal utility
of _y_ (so long as the quantities are small).  Therefore, since the
gain equals the loss, the slope of the curve_

     _am't of _y_ gained    marg'l utility of _x
  == ------------------- == --------------------
     _am't of _x_ lost      marg'l utility of _y


The author navely adds:

"Have we any further information about the shapes of the curves?"

No, I hope not.

I was once the guest of that merry institution, the Savage Club of
London.  Among the mock stunts of the evening was a speech supposedly
in Chinese with an interpreter to explain it.  After the bogus Chinese
guest had spoken about half a dozen sentences, the chairman politely
interrupted, and asked of the interpreter, "Now, what has Mr. Woo-hoo
said?"  "Nothing, so far," said the interpreter.

The same is true of the quotation.  It only means that when you have
enough, you don't want any more.

A thousand chapters have been written similar to that sample.  Take
enough of that mystification and muddle, combine it with the
continental area of the United States, buttress it up on the side with
the history of dead opinion and dress it, as the chefs say, with sliced
history and green geography, and out of it you can make a doctor's
degree in economics.  I have one myself.




VII

_Psychology the Black Art of the College_



CHAPTER VII

PSYCHOLOGY THE BLACK ART OF THE COLLEGE

_The Black Art in all ages--Hypnotism enters college--Psychology's
department store--Deep Thought counter--Minds tested free--Psychology
and school education--Child expression by ink-throwing--The Psychology
of Salesmanship looks the Prospect in the eye--Intellectual test for
Willie Worm as a calliper_


Among the arts in every age there is one that is the Black
Art--mysterious, fearsome, a thing to dread.  The Black Art comes and
goes--now this, now that.  Savages have their Black Arts of
incantations, Voodoo rites and medicine men.  Earlier Christianity had
its attendant devils, its witches and its sorcerers.  Along the edges
of the light that it gave the world was a dark cloud of superstition,
fear, exorcism, persecution, terror.  The early learning had its
astrologer, in a cone-shaped cap and a gown figured with the Zodiac,
pointing with his finger at horoscopes and disasters.  But time turned
him into a professor of astronomical physics, quite harmless.  Beside
him was the alchemist, working with crucibles, to transform lead to
gold, and seeking the Elixir of Life.  He was an awesome being, but has
faded long since into a high school chemistry teacher, not so much
concerned with how to live forever, as with how to live next winter.
As Christianity dropped its devils and its daily miracles and its
exorcisms, it faded, for college purposes, into "comparative religion,"
a first-year subject, popular as a snap.  Students elect religion as
cheerfully as they did in Scotland three hundred years ago.  And it
never fails them.

But a Black Art there has to be.  Somewhere plain truth must fade to
mystery; somewhere life must meet its border line; somewhere mind and
matter present their irreconcilable contrast.  Where one art abandons
this shuddering mystery, another takes it up.  One can see the Black
Arts of the past and present moving and changing like the belts of
light and shadow in an electric sign.  Some day physics, that began in
the sunlight of the new solar system as the very embodiment of clarity
and fact and measured space and ponderated matter, may be the Black
Art.  For with the breaking of the atom, the disappearance of solidity,
the change of matter into force, the old mystery is all back again and
ready for a new astrologer.

But at the present hour and in the colleges all around us psychology
has turned into the Black Art.

Now when I was at college, fifty years ago, psychology was an entirely
innocuous subject.  It was taught by a venerable professor in a long
black gown--all senior professors at that date had to be venerable--and
he taught it as he had imported it in the wood straight from Scotland
thirty years or so before.  I didn't take the subject myself but those
of us outside of it understood that it dealt with such things as the
"association of ideas" and whether mind was just a form of matter or
matter merely a form of mind and how the mind "worked."  It seemed
quite harmless.  It ranked along with ethnology, and the brand-new
subject, just imported to Canada, political economy, as things by which
students could take honours without having had a long previous
training, like the five days a week in Greek for four years that made
us "honour matriculants" in classics, able to translate four or five
lines of Homer without stopping.  It never seemed then that the lean
kine of psychology and economics would one day eat up the fat, and pick
the dead bones of Greek.

But there existed then, outside of college, in the dark, a mysterious
and evil thing called "hypnotism."  This wasn't _taught_.  It was
practised by "professors," far from venerable, and exhibited at ten
cents a seat in third-rate public halls.  The "professor" invited
members of the audience to step up on the platform and be "hypnotized"
and put through various antics.  The audience didn't know whether it
was jest or earnest, all faked up, or all real, or partly both.
Certainly the exhibitions always contrived to have a certain amount of
buffoonery like the "comic relief" of our ten-twenty-thirty theatre.

I went one night with four or five fellow students to such an
exhibition.  The "professor" appeared on a stage, with a row of empty
chairs, and a background of ropes and pulleys and apparatus grimly
mediaeval.  He invited members of the audience to step up.  I asked my
fellow students if they would step up with me.  All but one refused.
They had a wholesome contempt for hypnotism and a secret fear of it.
Curley Wood, who went on the platform with me, was a nervous-looking
youth who lived on cigarettes.

We were given two end seats, and various other "subjects" came clumping
up onto the platform.  The "professor" then announced that he would
look into the eyes of each subject and decide whether he was
hypnotizable.  He began with me as end-man.  He stooped forward and
looked fixedly in my eyes.  I didn't like it.  I was sorry I had come
up.  I wanted to get out of it.  Then I remembered that in the Middle
Ages the devil couldn't reach you if you kept reciting the _pater
noster_ in Latin.  I didn't know that but I started reciting to myself
the 47th proposition of Euclid, about the square on the hypotenuse.
That beat the "professor."  "You can step down," he said.  I did, with
a great gladness.

He looked at Curley's eyes and Curley turned as pale as his own
cigarettes.  "You can stay," said the "professor."  He kept a few
others.  To judge by the absurd things he presently made them do--too
absurd for likelihood--I should imagine they were hand-picked.  But
Curley Wood wasn't; there was no collusion in his case.  Yet the
"professor" seemed able to take a mortgage on his will power.  "Tell
the audience your name," he said.  "Curley Wood," answered my fellow
student quite clearly.  "Now try to tell it to them again and _you
can't_," said the "professor" with a Rosicrucian gesture.  Curley
couldn't.  _Vox faucibus haesit_.

"Now I'll throw a rope round you and drag you to this side of the
stage.  Resist if you like, but you'll have to come." ... All that and
more, till at last he let Curley go and a tom-fool comic effect
replaced him.  I said nothing to Curley that night.  Later he said, "He
had me rattled."  He never gave any further explanation.

That kind of thing was outside of college.  With it there went
_sances_, and colloquies with the dead (such as there have been since
Adam died) and attempts at thought transference, with doses of Madame
Blavatsky and theosophy.  A new occult world was growing up like weeds
among the tombstones of dead superstitions.  _Naturam expellas furco,
tamen usque recurrit_.

Then came the Psychical Research Society and the attempt to reduce the
occult world to scientific experiment and demonstration.  And with that
opened new fields of medicine, mind-cure, therapeutics, as old as mind
itself but breaking to new life in our own century.  Physiology, now
better equipped with magnetism and electricity, moved on from Galvani's
dead frog with the salt on its leg to delicate experiments that called
aloud for new theories of mind and matter.  This new medical physiology
reached out its hand, and psychology took it, and the dusty old
professor in the long gown turned into Psyche the Soul.

      *      *      *      *      *

In other words psychology from being nothing in the curriculum but a
humble branch of metaphysics, itself a subdivision of philosophy at
large, expanded till it became a whole department, with all kinds of
affiliations and extensions, and broke outside the bounds of college to
invade life in the open.

      *      *      *      *      *

Psychology has overrun the curriculum by the sheer audacity of its
onslaught.  It has expanded in all directions at once.  It has taken
over the dream of the metaphysician and the micrometer of the
physiologist.  It's an art and it's a science.  It's a theory and it's
a practice.  It's an experiment and a dogma.  It is business.  It is
religion.  It has become a regular academic department store with a
_Deep Thought Counter, Practical Experiments_ in the basement and
_Minds Tested Free_ near the front door.

In the college which I know best, and, I am sure, in many others, if a
benefactor leaves money for a scholarship "in liberal arts," psychology
says: "Let me in on that.  I'm an art.  I'm the biggest dream you ever
saw.  I'm all thought."  If it's for science, psychology says: "Take me
in on this.  I'm science straight out; look at this testing machine.
Stick your brain under it."  And if it is a medical gift: "Count me in.
Therapeutics is my second name."  If it's for theology, psychology
slips on a white surplice and points to its courses on the psychology
of religion.

Audacity wins.  The other subjects stood meekly by and watched
psychology take over their fields.  To physiology it said: "You take
the knife and do the work and I'll make the talk."  To economics: "Give
me anything your students don't understand about value and demand and
I'll fix it so that they don't need to understand it."  And to the
college at large: "Hand me over the students and I'll test their
brains.  That's all you need." ... And it hinted behind its hand, "I
can test the professors, too, if you like," and in a lower voice, "What
about the President?"

Having conquered the college, psychology turned to business, set up
courses in the _Psychology of Business Relations_, and gave lectures at
luncheon clubs on the _Psychology of Advertising_.  It frightened the
business world into submission by threatening it with a course on the
_Analytical Measurement of Human Personality_, a thing no business man
would want done to himself, though he might like to have it worked on
his employees.  It let the business man know that it had its eye on him
by announcing courses on the _Observation of Social Behaviour_, and it
tempted his alliance by hinting at a course on leadership.  The
business man capitulated, had his employees measured on the _Analytical
Plan_, and young women applicants tested by the _Orthogenic Method_
instead of by being taken out to lunch.

Then psychology turned to administration and began testing soldiers by
asking them to multiply three by three and watching their "reaction" to
it.  It has invented for us a world of "reactions" and "complexes" and
"fixations" and "inhibitions."  It has its eye now on the criminal law,
for which it aspires to be the star witness, replacing the finger-print
expert and the toxicologist and the chemical-solution man by the
psychiatrist holding the scales of life and death on whether murder was
done as a "fun-impulse" or as part of an "inferiority complex."

      *      *      *      *      *

How much does this whole pretentious claim amount to, and what room is
there for psychology in sound education?  In my opinion, very little.
Put back all that is mere common sense; restore to medicine what is
medicine; leave business to business men, and psychology will be back
again with nothing but its original mystery and its black gown.

      *      *      *      *      *

Psychology "butts in" on our educational system at the very start.  It
begins to reduce the world, even of little children, to a maze of
"complexes" and "suggestions," "fixations" and "behaviours."  Plain
right and wrong, common sense, goodness and badness get mixed up in a
world that has a terrifying aspect of dark forces working through the
individual and not of him.  The psychology school child is possessed of
new devils, which are working through him to expression.  It is not he
who threw the ink at the teacher; it was a complex that had got inside
him.  The teacher is not faced with a case of discipline but with a
"behaviour problem."  She must wipe off the ink and think it out.

Let me quote from a recent educational book, one of a multiplying many:


_John F-- in school made life miserable for his teacher and also for
the other children.  He threw erasers across the room.  He threw
snowballs through the window.  He dumped the waste paper all over the
floor.  He erased all the things the teacher had on the board._

_The old-fashioned teacher _[_the author adds_]_ would say he needed a
good thrashing._


I must confess that it seems to me that the old-fashioned teacher would
not be far wrong.  In the days when I taught school, half a century
ago, I think I could have solved the John F-- problem to ten places of
decimals with three feet of bamboo.  But it appears from the text
before us that I would have been all wrong.  What John F-- needed, we
are told, is love.  It was the lack of this that made him throw the
erasers round.  He was "expressing himself."  What he was trying to put
across was "Love me, or I'll sock you with this eraser."  It is
somewhat the same idea as the Nazis have over in Central Europe.

Why did John F-- need love?  Because, apparently, he had picked up a
complex, a little sister complex.  At home his little sister Clara had
been the family pet and he hadn't.  Who wouldn't sling ink under
provocation like that?

Or consider the psychology of business.  This, with its sub-divisions
on salesmanship and such, fills many courses.  Is there any such thing?
No, of course not, or only in the sense in which there is a psychology
of conversation, or psychology of fishing, or of taking a motor ride,
or a psychology of silence.

And salesmanship!  Open any of the manuals on it (I admit they are
getting fewer; it has been a flop) and you will be introduced to a nut
called the Prospect.  This doesn't mean a landscape; it means the man
to whom you are going to sell something.  The nut called the Prospect
doesn't want it, but you are going to make him take it.  You do it
partly with your eye (the nut wilts when you look at him), partly by
"suggestion" and partly by "personality."  This last attribute will
sell anything, but to acquire it you need at least three hours a week
for half a year, and must put up about a hundred dollars.  This
salesmanship psychology has invaded our language; people talk now of
"selling an idea"--that is, making it popular.  If you want to get up a
club picnic you must get some live fellow to "sell fresh air"; if
you're going to help a church you'll have to have a group of canvassers
to go and sell religion.  The last stage is when you are so smart that
you can sell yourself.  They did it in the Middle Ages and the idea is
back again.

The psychology of politics--another piece of nonsense.  I knew once a
wealthy old Ontario lumber-man who said, "If any man can change his
politics after an election quicker than I can, I want to see him."  You
can, if you like, make a book of that sort of thing; but you don't need
four hours a week, four months a year (Mon., Tues., Thurs., Sat.) to
understand it.

      *      *      *      *      *

With that go the psychology tests and questionnaires:


_As our firm has an application from Mr. William Worm for a job as a
calliper, will you kindly give your (confidential) opinion as to his
_(_1_)_ Personality _(_2_)_ Malleability _(_3_)_ Obesity _(_4_)_
Mortality_....


In reply to which the Department of Psychology assigns to William Worm
his proper percentage in each.

      *      *      *      *      *

The psychologist, in other words, has managed so to impose himself on
the world that he is now "called in" in a difficulty, like an emergency
plumber.  When he takes the final step of being "Open Day and Night,"
his status will be complete.  Meantime, as far as we are concerned with
a curriculum for people who don't want to lose a year of life over the
futilities of behaviour and will take their chance on personality,
psychology should be put back to where it was.

But we're all afraid of it.  It might put a curse on us, or an
inhibition.




VIII

_Teaching the Unteachable_



CHAPTER VIII

TEACHING THE UNTEACHABLE

_The barnacles on the academic ship: Fake courses for the
feeble-minded: Clothing Analysis, Dry Skiing and the Theory of Girls'
Sports as College Courses; Pedagogy and a year's loss of life; Teaching
Business; the Lotus Land of Idle Talk_


In my opinion the great majority of the colleges of the United States
and Canada contain in their curriculums of liberal arts an accumulation
of courses which are little more than an attempt to teach the
unteachable; which substitute for the rigour of real study a
make-believe activity and a dilettante idleness; which try to make
theory out of the commonplace and to turn the obvious into the
intricate; which are as pretentious as they are futile and which in the
extreme cases are the mere bogus coin of academic currency.

These courses are carried along as a dead weight, like the barnacles
that gather on the bottom of a sailing ship.  The only purpose that
they serve is to enable young people to come to college who could never
have done so in the sterner days of the old-time curriculum--young men
who can study tap dancing and social behaviour but not Latin and
physics; young women who can't learn algebra but can manage archery;
and young people of both sexes whose minds are nicely fitted to a
course on the _Theory and Practice of Badminton_, or a course on
_Marriage_, open only to seniors and pursued intensively in the spring
quarter.

I cannot speak of what the situation is in Great Britain, but I am
inclined to think that at any rate the newer British colleges have to
some extent followed our false lead.  Nor am I speaking here of the
purely technical schools of medicine and applied science.  I am certain
that they have enough real subjects of study, of increasing interest
and intensity, to make it unnecessary to fake up false ones.  I am
talking here of the schools of liberal arts and the associated schools
of social science, commerce, education, journalism, and home economics
which have invaded and overrun its territory.

The result is deplorable.  Much of our study is turning to mere
wool-gathering, to pretentious nonsense.  The rigour of it is melting
away like butter.  A lot of it is so easy, so vague and so silly that
anything nicely above an anthropoid ape can get a degree in it.

What are we to say, for example, to a course on _Clothing Analysis_,
which the college curriculum says is "designed to create in the student
an enthusiasm for possessing individuality in clothes"?  What an
awakening of genius must this course occasion!  One imagines some young
inspired dreamer, waking in the night and leaping from his couch to
seize a piece of chalk and sketch out an idea for the shape of his
pants.  Graduates returning to the farm with a gold medal for
individuality in clothes would be pretty expensive to keep.  Yet the
course is given in a university with an honoured name and a hundred
years of history.

Let us set beside it, from the program of one of the largest of the
State universities, a course in _Kinesiology_.  What this is, I don't
know.  I never got as far as that in Greek.  But the context shows that
it is for men only, and the derivation seems to indicate that it is for
fast men, or perhaps for men who need speeding up.  They get it three
times a week--right after lunch.  It must be a great strain.

And here, taken from the curriculum of a great Pacific institution, but
findable in many other colleges, is an _Introduction to Religion_.
Most of us got that at our mother's knee.  But these people get it
every Tuesday and Thursday at eleven.  The danger would be that they
might go all to the devil by Monday night.

In the same college is a department of Physical Education for women
which has among other things a set of "activities" courses.  These
include _Dry Skiing_, which ought to call for a balancing course in
_Wet Golf_.  In the list also appears "life-saving," a thing which, in
my day, students left to the bartender at seven o'clock the next
morning.  But these people evidently have a good time all the time;
they do tennis, sailing, archery, tap dancing and wind up with
tumbling.  It is only fair to add that various colleges list tap
dancing and archery, and one has the hardihood to announce a course on
the _Fundamentals of Golf for Beginners_.  One can imagine the boy who
is taking the individual study in pants going out in plus fours to get
his fundament in golf.

Even there the academic sin is not so unpardonable as in the creation
of courses with made-up names that are a mere burlesque of scholarship
such as _Kinesiology_.  Put beside it, as drawing cards, taken from the
1939 calendars of various colleges, the courses in _Eurambics_, in
_Choric Speaking_, and _Human Ecology_!  This last sounds like being
sick.  But apparently there are students today prepared to take a
course on anything with a name with a proper sound, such as
_Rheumatics, Spondulics_ or _Peritonitis_.

The courses I have cited above are all actual.  Indeed, everything said
in this chapter about these newer studies is based on an examination of
the latest program of study issued by fifty American Universities,
selected among the best known, among the largest and the most
characteristic.  I did not include any institutions of a purely
freakish character.  The examples that I have cited can be duplicated
over and over again till even the fun squeezes dry out of them and
leaves nothing but the fraud and the shame.  Nor do I know of any
university in the United States or Canada entirely free from this
sloppy degeneration.  Seven of them, Toronto, Chicago, Brown,
Dartmouth, Queen's, Bishop's and McGill, I have the right to call my
Alma Mater--either a mother under whose care I studied or at least as
the wet-nurse of an honorary degree.  But not even my gratitude toward
these institutions can lead me to deny that they have gone astray in
the wilderness with their sister colleges.  Nor is this, I think, the
mere complaint of an old man--_Laudator temporis acti_--to whom the
grass was green and the sky blue fifty years ago.  Some things that old
men think might be true, even in this age of Youth.

      *      *      *      *      *

All this false attempt to teach the unteachable has grown up in the
last fifty years.  When faith in the older classical curriculum began
to weaken in a new world of science and industry, it seemed proper to
expand the studies of a college to meet the expanding needs of the
hour.  The original motive was at least sound and praiseworthy.  The
idea was to make the college _practical_, to harmonize it with a
practical world, to bring the college to the student and to teach him
the things on which his livelihood would depend.  A classical scholar
of the older type began to appear singularly inept.  He didn't know how
to drive a motor-car, or put a washer on a kitchen tap, or go down to
the cellar to replace an electric fuse.  For things like this you had
to get "a man."  The classical scholar couldn't go near the Stock
Exchange unless a trustee held him by the hand, couldn't read a balance
sheet and didn't know what F.O.B. meant.  A mathematician was about as
bad, useful to make insurance tables and the nautical almanac, but no
personality, no magnetism.  What the world began to need was "dynamos,"
"live-wires," "executives."

So a new stream of studies began to flow into liberal arts--at first as
a leak in the classical dam, then as a flood that swept the dam away
and left only a few fragments of it as islands in the new water.

Political economy came first, highly respectable, with credentials from
Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.  After it came sociology, a sort of
windy first cousin to religion, with a letter of recommendation from
Herbert Spencer.  Then came education, hitherto only practice but
turned now to a theory and a discipline, which not only invaded
college, but set up a college of its own.  Schools of commerce sprang
up and flourished on the aid of business men, flattered by being
automatically turned into a profession.  There was now the same fervour
to break away from Latin as with the Protestants to break away from
Rome.  With commerce came journalism and physical education, by which
high jumping and skinning-the-cat were turned into theory, and home
economics whereby such things as cooking, marketing and nursing the
baby were dressed up as college courses, as African natives dress up in
plug hats and soda water bottles on string.

In all these changes there is of course a certain modicum of reason, of
sensible adaptation of older study to newer life.  But the essential
point is that the practical goal which they propose to reach cannot be
reached by that road.  Education, in the sense of the power to teach,
is learned by becoming a teacher; commerce is learned in an office or a
warehouse, and banking in a bank.  Journalism is learned in a newspaper
office and nursing the baby is learned by getting married.

College is meant to train the mind, not the thumb.  A certain modicum
of discussion and attention can be given in pauses of the sterner
studies to such things as lectures on society at large (sociology) or
to the theory of how best to learn and to teach (education).  But these
things as they stand are exalted and expanded out of all proportion to
their usefulness.  When a student turns his whole course into
journalism it is as if he proposed to make his whole diet on sugar.  If
a student having had an _Introduction to Religion_ goes ahead and takes
ten more courses in it, I doubt if he is getting much nearer to the
Kingdom of Heaven.  If religion is what I think it is--a communing of
the spirit with the unseen, an imminent sense of life beyond death and
of duty laid upon us--I don't see how you can take a "course" in it,
unless you don't believe in it.  Human life itself is the only course
in religion.  What colleges call "comparative religion" would have
seemed, in an age of belief, rank blasphemy.

Consider education.  By this is meant not the body of knowledge itself,
but the manner and mechanism of imparting it.  Schools of education
constantly forget this little distinction, and keep themselves well
nourished by stealing over the fence.  Kept within its own fields, the
diet is pretty scanty.  The notion that a student must spend one fifth
of all his college life, one fifth of all his parents' college money in
learning how to teach the things he has learned already (four years
arts, one year pedagogy) is just a sham and a fraud.  If the idea is
only designed to help keep the teaching profession closed, to help keep
up the market, let us do it some other way, as they do in France with
the closed shop called the Aggregation.  But the pretence that
"pedagogy" is worth a year of life is wicked.

I have a certificate in the stuff dating back to 1888.  In those happy
days we escaped with a three months' sentence.  I put in my time, aged
eighteen, at the old Collegiate Institute of Strathroy, Ontario, and
had among the pupils on whom I practiced General Sir Arthur Currie,
then a boy of thirteen just entering high school.  We had to study a
book or two on the history of education, interesting enough, but as
easy as mud pie to anyone trained on Greek and mathematics.  We studied
also a text or two on the theory of education, all of it as obvious as
coming in out of the wet.  We were taught that education must proceed
from the concrete to the abstract, from the known to the unknown, and
so forth.

In later life, with forty-six years of teaching, I have realized that,
obvious as it is, a lot of this isn't so.  It is often very good
business as a short cut to begin with something abstract and unknown,
and for the moment unintelligible, and later come out into the sunlight
of understanding.  It is like going through a tunnel under a hill
instead of wandering miles round it.  All the side issues that are
taught in education courses, such as school ventilation and the care of
the teeth, should be left to a plumber or a doctor.  Beyond these again
are the excrescences, such things as a course on the list in front of
me, called _Field Practice in Guidance and Counselling_.  These are
just sin against the light.

Education, as theory in a general sense, is interesting to read about
and to think about.  Like sociology it is fit reading for old men.  But
it isn't a college course.  Education, as practice, begins when you
really start to teach, as I did in Uxbridge High School on a February
morning in 1889.  All that Strathroy had done for me was to break the
ice; the plunge had still to come.  A couple of months' initiation into
practical teaching, taken while still in the arts course, is all that
any teacher can ever need or benefit by.  To steal a year of youth is
robbery.  One recalls how Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case kept repeating
_J'accuse_!  That is how I feel.  _J'accuse_ Pedagogy.

Now hand me down commerce.  We'll take it on next.  It is wholly
impossible to teach "business" in a school or college.  You can teach
certain things useful as a training for an intelligent business man,
such as how to read and write well, and express himself properly.  In
this, Latin is excellent, and enough mathematics to heighten his power
of concentration.  And alongside of his real education you can, if he
wishes, give him a knowledge of book-keeping, though few business men
know anything about it; and company organization, which most people
leave to lawyers; and shorthand and typing, usually bought by the week.
But the main part of the education of a business man is not to fit him
for his business but to fit him to live.  If a boy is to be trained for
the coal and wood business, just for that, with no life apart from it
and no soul, then he needs no college and college has nothing for him.
Rub coal-dust on his face and put him to work at fourteen.  Don't cheat
him into taking a six months' credit on the _Theory of Nut Coal_.

The subject of journalism occupies an enormous space in the newer
college curriculum, especially in certain universities in the Middle
West.  In more than one of them the courses number as many as forty,
and would occupy, if taken as a total, several years of a student's
life.  They range from such obvious things as the _History of
Journalism_ to special courses on writing editorials, city reporting,
small town newspapers.  One large institution situated among the oil
wells offers a special course on reporting gas and oil, including, no
doubt, explosions, a subject needing apparently an intensive training
in lurid language.

Now anyone whose activity in life, in whole or in part, consists of
writing must feel a certain sympathy with the attempt to bring college
training to the aid of a prospective writer.  That the college can be
of enormous use to a young man who wants to be a journalist there is no
doubt.  But essentially what such a person needs is English--both
literature and composition--and history with a special view of our
contemporary era and our current government and a certain training in
one or more modern languages, with Latin always as the background.  In
science he needs what is elsewhere described in the book as a "thorough
smattering."  In other words a journalist must be a man with a wide
education and a ready knowledge of the world in which we live.  Such
subjects as proof-reading and make-up and the handling of dispatches
can be learned in a newspaper office, and can't be learned anywhere
else.

The notion that there is a special training in English needed for
writing editorials and another for writing obituaries and another for
writing up local items is not only erroneous but injurious.  A person
who writes for a newspaper very soon learns certain tricks of the
trade, arising out of necessity.  Thus he must learn to call a murderer
an alleged murderer, and the King of England the alleged King of
England.  This forestalls libel suits.  In writing up local events he
must learn to state what happened, the whole of it, in one long
breathless sentence, called a "lead," at the very start, so that the
reader need go no further.  He must learn to avoid personalities and
give the sources of his information as coming from "a leading oil
interest," or from "rubber circles," or "a reliable pulp and paper
source."  In this immaterialized world of oil and rubber and pulp there
is no fear of offence.  But even when a journalist has become familiar
with all these tricks and tags, the question still remains, can he
write?  And for this there is no royal academic road, and an alleged
training in alleged journalism, if it cuts the student out from a
proper share in wider, deeper culture, is dearly bought.

Other subjects again, such as sociology, are excellent things in their
way but have not sufficient body, definiteness or order in them to make
them a subject of curriculum study.  They represent reflection, not
training.  Take out of sociology all that is history or belongs with
such anterior studies as geology, palaeontology, and anthropology, and
what is left?  Nothing but general speculation that expresses itself in
the announced courses in such forms as "_Social Trends_, a study of the
factors and forces involved in the organization and continual
modification of society."  Now you can't take a boy off a farm and
teach him a social trend, at the rate of four hours of trend per week,
ending up with one credit in _Social Trends_.  A wise old man like
Plato or a wise young man like Herbert Spencer might muse on the topic
and write on it, and other wise people might read it and enjoy it and
profit by it.  But you can't _teach_ it.  It isn't college.

If all this pleasant dilettante discussion, this mimic make-belief
could be had for nothing, if it did not involve the loss of time and
money and opportunity, it would not matter.  In a world where it was
always afternoon young men and women might sit among the lotus leaves,
or in the shade of the catalpas and talk of "social trends" and
"personnel psychology" till they nodded off asleep.  In the world as it
is there is no room for such a slumber, for such a sleep, for such a
folding of the hands to sleep.  We have it on authority what may happen
next.




IX

_Rah!  Rah!  College!_



CHAPTER IX

RAH!  RAH!  COLLEGE!

_Niggers in a compound--The college that was; oatmeal and anatomy--The
college that is: Co-eds and snap courses--The charm of college
life--College activities--Pep Clubs and Poultry Clubs--Student
executives--The fortunate few--Education that never dies_


I remember noting, when I was in South Africa thirty years ago, how
certain great mines on the Rand were shut in as compounds with tall
metal fences, so that the Portuguese East African "niggers" working in
the mine might be persuaded to stay on the job.  When they came up from
under the earth, in the pauses of their labour, there arose in the
compound the sound of music and the banjo and the loud laughter that
marked the African's appreciation of the vaudeville troupe hired to
entertain him.  It was not philanthropy that led the mining companies
to entertain the niggers with vaudeville, and to drive away their
sorrows with the banjo.  Without that, the niggers wouldn't work, would
pine away and die.  It was hard enough to get them there anyway.
Nothing did it but the prospect of getting out a couple of years later,
with money enough to go home and buy two wives and a spy glass and a
case of gin.  That was their graduation day.

      *      *      *      *      *

The students in our colleges are the niggers in the compound.  From
inside the college fence rises the sound of "Rah!  Rah!  College!" as
they carry on their student activities which correspond to the nigger's
vaudeville!  Listen!  You can hear the Banjo and Mandolin Club
practising in Convocation Hall for the big show tomorrow night put on
by the United Sororities League in honour of the big victory at the big
game on Saturday.  Most of the profs have cancelled their lectures this
afternoon to get ready for the holiday tomorrow.  You can't hold a
class the day before a holiday.  A class is as delicate to "hold,"
anyway, as the bubble in a spirit level.  Listen again!  In the pauses
of the banjo and mandolin you can hear the Rooters' Club, away across
the campus in the gym practising their cheers for tomorrow.  "Prexy"
himself let them off classes today to practise, but he said he wanted
the cheers to be clean and spontaneous.  Well--as the Rooters' cheer
leader said--you can't get a spontaneous cheer without spade work.
That's it--spade work!  There's a lot of it going on all round, in the
buildings and in the campus.  Committees are meeting to do spade work
on the program of welcome, and inside groups are doing spade work to
get the committees into line.  Bright, busy--such a happy scene, all
autumn leaves and colour.

Such a happy place is college, made so by the college activities that
serve as the niggers' vaudeville of the students.  If it were not so,
how could the students reconcile themselves to the long ten years of
preparation for life that they must face in coming in, and pay off year
by year--in years counted out one by one--their promissory note
discounted on the future.

In earlier days this was not so.  College was short and stern; it was
like a prayer before a battle, in the days when one year in a saw-mill
and two years in a winter class made a doctor, there was not time for
college activities.  The banjo--or was it the bagpipes?--hung silent on
the student's wall.  The Edinburgh "medico" ate his oatmeal and counted
his anatomy bones, grim and determined.  But his eye was on the
promised land.

      *      *      *      *      *

Few people realize how agreeable is college life, how halcyon its days,
and how stern and rugged it has been elsewhere and in other days.  Not,
of course, always so; there have been times and places in the past
where college life meant little more than wine and cards, driving in
"drags" and having "rags" and keeping it up till one was sent down.
Here and there, undisturbed by the rags, classical dons annotated Greek
texts, or the individual studies of an Adam Smith or an Edward Gibbon
redeemed the torpor of the mass.

But in most places, sixty years or so ago, in Scotland and on this
continent at least, college life was stern, its studies a veritable
sentence to hard labour.  Take this for example, a reminiscence of the
late Sir James Barrie, as evidence of the student life in Edinburgh as
it once was.


"_I knew three undergraduates," said Barrie, "who lodged together in
one room in a dreary house at the top of a dreary street.  Two of them
used to study till two in the morning while the third slept.  When they
shut up their books they woke No. 3 who studied till breakfast time.
Among the advantages of the arrangement the chief was that, as they
were dreadfully poor, one bed did for three.  Two of them occupied it
at one time and one at another._"


There is nothing attractive in such a picture; little in it but a
shudder, with a certain admiration of the staying power that could
stick it out.  But it represents one extreme of which "college
activity" of today is the other.  The Scottish student overdid his
poverty.  He could have worked a year for wages--he had at least a year
of life to trade--and changed his penury to relative affluence.  Thus
have I seen students of the Middle West working their way through
college with long hours of menial labour as the price of study.  Their
case, in a way, is worse than the lot of the Scot, since our long
curriculum makes it hard to add on a year.  Nor could anyone wish
college life back to where it was, with so little diversion, so
rigorous in its work, so cut off from the society of the other sex,
life's solace and life's danger--cut off as a dead sea, stormless in a
chasm.

      *      *      *      *      *

All different is the picture of college life now.  Only those of us who
have lived in college--not merely studied there for four years; that's
nothing, but _lived_ there--can fully tell of the charm and amenity of
college life.  The college years pass by, from autumn leaves to autumn
leaves, in a measured cadence that substitutes the college calendar for
the Zodiac.  Here are the seasons all reversed and defied, where autumn
is springtime, bright and eager with the hopes of a new college year,
where December is the very noon-time of effort and activity, and so
onward, till the fading year melts into spring and vanishes with the
flowers of June.

Little do we note the flight of time, as the college, itself immortal,
drifts toward eternity.  What to us is weather or the storm?  We have
our lighted classroom, and the February snow outside the window can but
render it more inviting--the professor at his desk, expounding, for the
thirtieth winter, his notes on Kant's estimate of Aristotle's view of
Plato, and the class, their heads bent over their desks, writing it all
diligently down--as their fathers and mothers did thirty years ago,
when the prof was a sessional lecturer and wore a flower in his coat
and worked each night to have the next day's lecture ready, as busy as
a baker making bread.

That's the life, the college life, of the class-room, and of the
outside "college activities" for which the class-room serves as a
pleasant recuperation.

      *      *      *      *      *

I know no more attractive scene than the campus of a college on the
autumn day when the students gather for the new session--the
commencement of another academic year.  The sky is never so blue nor
the still, fleecy clouds so white, nor the autumn leaves so bright with
red and russet and yellow, as on that day.

Bright as they are their colours are dimmed beside the reds and whites
of the college blazers of the co-eds, grouped with their fellow
students in happy greetings and reunions under the trees, or moving
about as busy and as aimless as an ant-hill.  Here and there moves also
a "prof," a queer mixture of summer tan and academic dinginess, to lend
a contrast of age to this surrounding world of youth.

Inside the halls all is crowding and jostling, activity and eagerness
and laughter.  The students are trying to register and can't, and so
they stand waiting in long queues outside the offices of Deans and
Women's Supervisors.  No college ever manages a system of registration
that works; each _has_ one, a marvel of theory, invented by Professor
Angle (see under _Department of Psychology_) fifteen years ago and as
out of date as the professor himself.

But the students don't mind.  They wait endlessly, bandied about from
Dean to Dean, from Supervisor to Supervisor, or falling into talk and
breaking off to shout a greeting to Bill, the janitor of Liberal Arts,
the only efficient man in the university.

The students, of course, are concerned with their courses, their
"elections" and their "options"--what they are to take for the coming
session.  It's like the babble of a stock-market.  Professor Dim is
said to be offering a new course in _Greek Archaeology_; very few
takers; it's rumoured that he ploughed a student last year.  There's a
big rush for _English Seventeen_, the Drama, but the prof has a notice
up that he won't let in any more--still you might try to see him in his
office.  There's the usual mob for _Sociology One_, and there are three
students, so they say, in _Fourth Year Honour Mathematics_, where there
have been none for five years.

Here in one of the groups is a pretty girl in a college blazer,
cursing, with a happy oath that wouldn't take the skin off a peach, at
the Dean of Women, because the old cat won't let her elect _Religion_;
says she hasn't the prerequisite.  And she swears she has--really
swears.

Here are a couple of football men gravely discussing with a junior
prof, himself an ex-quarter-back, what they had better take.
_Archaeology_ looks likely, as the lecturer never takes the roll and no
one has failed in it within memory, but there's a new course on
_Delinquency_, under psychology, that is better, because it has no
prerequisite, no roll-call, attendance left to student's honour and the
credit is given on the professor's own say so.

      *      *      *      *      *

But of course more than all, most of all, the students are discussing
the clubs and societies and activities.  Who's to be editor of the
_Daily Hoot_?  What freshmen are being canvassed for the
fraternities--the _Oh, Few, Few_, and the _Mew, Mew Fie_ and so on.
There's a general notice of the first meeting of the Glee Club, all up!
and the organizing meeting of the Discussion Club, all up! and the
first lunch of the Dutch Treat (basement of the cafeteria), all down!

And so, endlessly and happily.  If life offers any collective thing
better than this day, which I have seen come and go more than forty
times, then I've missed it.

      *      *      *      *      *

Such is college activity.  But, as with all good things, the only
question is, how far do you go with it?  A wise old Greek once took as
his life motto, _Do nothing too much_; and I remember a similar case in
point when the town council of my home town, in pensioning an old
employee, made the pension "for life, but not more than five years."
So with the activities.  If education is eating up life is it not
possible that "activity" is eating up education?

The difficulty about the students' activities and the clubs and
societies under which they are organized is that every one of them--or
nearly every one of them--taken by itself, seems not only justifiable
but admirable.  A Literary and Debating Society--excellent!  What
college could be without it?  A Glee Club!  Why shouldn't a student
sing, just as why shouldn't a soldier drink?  A Dramatic Society, A
Cercle Franais to talk real French, a Deutscher Bund to eat pretzels!
Fine.

Even when the list gets a little doubtful we can perhaps turn an
indulgent eye, as upon a good idea gone astray.  Here, for example, is
a Pep Club--not in one college but in several.  The purpose of it is
defined by one of the colleges in its calendar by saying, "This club is
composed of young women who are associated for the purpose of
generating enthusiasm for inter-collegiate athletic contests."  One
thinks of Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships, and
shudders to think of the dangers into which the Pep Club may plunge the
fated boys.  In one college the Pep Club has an offshoot, the "Green
Peppers," under the supervision of the Pep Club.  This is composed of
"freshman girls," and is prepared to make trouble by generating
enthusiasm among school-boys....  Odd, isn't it, that the underlying
idea of so many of these societies is that you can't get enthusiasm
unless you generate it, can't hold, can't feel anything till you wave
your arms....  You must go into life body first and drag your head in
afterwards.  But perhaps it is only part of "mass method" on which we
now live....

Here is another college with a Poultry Club and a Dairy Club that sound
as warm and friendly as a barn-yard but are offset by a Cosmopolitan
Club that wouldn't know a cow from an antelope.  Compare with these
peaceful activities the Scabbard and Blade organization, an honorary
military fraternity of various colleges, prepared to demolish the
enemies of its country either seriatim or in the mass.  Put beside it
the Quadrangle Club, a "religious society" whose purpose is the
"development of the four-square man" or, so to say, the man of four
dimensions--"spiritual, mental, physical and social."  Presumably he is
hard to develop and needs isolation in a club, like a bacillus in a
culture.

The parent source of all was, I imagine, the old-time Literary and
Debating Society.  Pretty dim its meetings were.  In the one I remember
best the college rule forbade all debate that touched on religion,
politics or contemporary affairs.  The usual topic was one such as
"Resolved that the execution of Charles the First was justified."
Charles had his head resolved on and off him at a hundred college
sessions.

Beside this went the College Glee Club, as natural and as mournful as
lost Tasmanians singing on a rock.  On the side, of course, were the
Greek Letter Societies that are not under discussion here.  In colleges
without resident life they were one thing; in colleges equipped with
dormitories and furnished with three hundred social activities they are
another.

With the Debating Society and the Glee Club was the original College
Journal, appearing about once a month, more or less, in a sort of
arctic twilight, discussing "The Genius of Shakespeare," "An Autumn
Walk," with Latin verses, "_Tu, Tulle, tute meo_," etc.  No one
followed it further.

The change came in a rising tide that turned to a tidal wave.  The
newer subjects, political economy and such, started "clubs" which
compelled the old ones to break out in the same spot--the History Club,
the Philosophy Club, the Physics Club, right back to Bible Clubs and
Old Testament Societies that scored a bull's-eye on creation.  All, be
it noted, were excellent in idea.  Then the old _College Journal_
expanded into the new _College Daily_, with editorial rooms, reporters,
everything up to murder.  With it came subsidiary sheets and organs.
The Glee Club extended into musical societies, choral societies, folk
song societies, and, best of all, gave birth to the Dramatic Society,
the most justifiable of all college institutions, except of course the
Old Testament Club.  The work done by dramatic societies, making and
producing plays, is real education, with the true prompting of
spontaneous interest that is lost elsewhere.  It is not based on the
mere "camp-meeting" enthusiasm of the "Let's all shout" organizations.

Side by side with these grew up another set of organizations to remind
the student of his home--in the Eastern universities, Western Clubs and
in the Western universities, Eastern Clubs, and everywhere, in Canada
at least, Maritime Province Clubs, because everybody comes from the
Maritime Provinces, and nobody goes there.

      *      *      *      *      *

The names of the clubs and societies, if you put them all together, is
legion.  One of the largest of the State universities writes proudly of
itself, "Practically every type of American college student
organization is found among the three hundred clubs, societies and
associations represented upon the University campus."

      *      *      *      *      *

There would be no great harm done if each one student followed only one
activity; if he staggered home late from his chess club but was at his
books early in the morning; if he blew his whole face into his trombone
from four to six but was at his desk in the evening; if he wrote a
brilliant article on "The World's Awakening," in the _Student's Daily_
and then fell asleep over his trigonometry.

But it is not so.  Even the average student follows half a dozen
activities, and all the most efficient and capable are so immersed in
them that they turn into executives and committee men, with their day
full, no time to turn round.  Capable indeed they are--far quicker of
comprehension than real business men, with more enthusiasm and more
precision in their minds.  They need to have enthusiasm and energy,
too, for there are so many activities to be kept going that the leaders
must do a terrific lot of organizing, initiating, committee work, spade
work, to keep the others up to it.  All up! for this, and all up! for
that, till college life becomes a sort of permanent "resurrection day."
And for such a day, spade work is the first requisite.

One recalls how a famous French general looked on at the charge of the
Light Brigade at Balaclava and said, "It's magnificent but it isn't
war."  So with these student leaders--it's wonderful but it isn't
study.  It is making of them fine and efficient men and women.  But the
toll of years taken is too heavy, and the life of the college, as they
lead it, would never keep alight the lamp of learning.

      *      *      *      *      *

But there are those who trim it.

Here and there in this moving and happy world there are among the
students the few who leaven the lump, the few who really study.  You
remember how Edgar Allan Poe said, "And the people, ah, the people,
they that live up in the steeple."  Well, there are students up in the
steeple of the temple of learning, or higher still, up in the clouds.
These are the ones who come to college and never go away, whose lot it
is, thrice blessed, to stay at college all their lives--demonstrating
first, and then lecturing, and then moved up to be an associate, and
later on a professor, a real one.  Somewhere in such a professor's life
he has picked up, more or less unnoticed, a wife, as a beaver picks up
a mate away off in the woods.  Married or single it makes but little
difference; life flows on from session to session, smooth and unruffled
as seen by the outside eye, but, as seen from within, full of its eager
struggles, its triumphs and its landmarks.  Such is, for instance, the
occasion when the professor reads his first paper (all typed by his
wife) before the Palaeontological Society, or has his article on the
"Diphthongs in Chaucer" accepted by the _Philomathic Journal_.

For these people, study is study; its foundation is laid deep and its
crown is never set.  For their sake I gladly take back everything said
in this book, of shorter methods, fewer declensions and less
exceptions.  They need them all.  No "smattering" for them.  When they
tackle an author they dissect him from the head down and hang up the
skin.  They follow the tide of human thought from Plato downward till
they almost, never quite, reach yesterday.  Each carries with him his
life work, like that of Professor Dim with the _Odyssey_ described
elsewhere in this book.  And his life work--on the geography of Ninevah
or the place names of Yucatan or the coleoptera of the British
Isles--is seldom complete, usually but a fragment and often never
begun.  They need time, these men; they need eternity.  Collectively
they get it, and the college goes on, maintained, as far as its soul is
concerned, by the men who work in it, and not by the bricks and mortar
that house their labours.

I have written elsewhere that, with the right men and a few elm trees
and some books, one could have, at a generation's notice, the most
distinguished college in the world.  I repeat it here so that the
animating idea of this book may not be obscured.  This is not a plea
for cheaper, shorter education in the mean sense, but for education
that does not end with college and for learning that never dies.  Rah!
Rah!  College!  Let's go and see what's happening in the campus.




KINDRED ESSAYS IN EDUCATION AND HUMOUR



_When Men Retire_



WHEN MEN RETIRE

My old friend Mr. McPherson retired from the flour and feed
business--oh, quite a few years ago.  He said it was time to get out
and give young Charlie a chance--even then "young Charlie" was getting
near fifty.  Anyway old Mr. McPherson said he wasn't going to keep his
nose to the grindstone for ever.

I don't mean that he absolutely dropped out of the business; but, as he
himself said, he took it easy.  The McPhersons had a fine business, two
or three big mills and a central office in our home town.  Always,
before he retired, Mr. McPherson would be down at the office sharp at
eight--the flour and feed is an early business.  When he retired he
gave all that up.  He'd loaf in anywhere round ten minutes past, or
sometimes even twenty.  It was the same way after lunch--or at least I
mean after "dinner"; they don't have "lunch" in the flour and feed
business; they have dinner at noon.  After dinner if Mr. McPherson
didn't feel like getting up and walking to the office at one o'clock,
he'd drive down in a cab.  And at five o'clock, when the office closed,
if he didn't feel like going home right away, he'd stay for a while and
run over some of the day's invoices.  Or perhaps, if he felt like it,
he'd go over to the mill, because the mill didn't close till six, and
just fool around there a while helping the men bag up some of the
farmers' orders.

One thing, though, that Mr. McPherson insists on, now that he's
retired, is that, as he himself says, he never interferes.  The
business, as he explains, belongs now to the children.  That means
young Charlie and Lavinia--bless me!  Lavinia must be not far from
sixty; she keeps the house.  To those two and a married daughter in
Scotland.  The old man has never transferred the business in any legal
sense.  He says it isn't necessary as long as he's alive.  But it's
_theirs_ just the same, and he tells them so.  And, as I say, he
doesn't interfere; "young Charlie" is the general manager, and all his
father does is just to look over the contracts to see what's doing, and
keep an eye on the produce market to advise young Charlie when to
buy--but only, mind you, to advise.

What's more, as Mr. McPherson himself loves to explain, he's not like a
man who can't cut loose from business and enjoy himself.  Oh, my no!
Every year there's the St. Andrews dinner in the Odd Fellows' Hall,
regular as clock-work, and every year Burns' birthday, when a few of
them get together and have a big old time and read Burns out loud.  And
only four years ago Mr. McPherson took a trip to Scotland and saw his
married daughter and Burns' grave and the big flour mills at Dumbarton,
and paid for it all out of a commission on No. 1 wheat.  Oh, no, Mr.
McPherson says he never regrets his retirement: he can't think what it
would be like to be back in harness.

      *      *      *      *      *

My friend McAlpin was a banker--assistant general manager of a bank.
He retired in the natural, normal course of things in accordance with
the bank regulations.  He made no plan or preparation for retirement.
He said that it was enough for him to be rid of the strain of work.
He'd have his mind free.  So he would have had, if it hadn't happened
that, on his first morning of retirement, as he walked down town, he
felt a sort of wheeziness, a kind of, well, not exactly a pain, but a
sort of compression.  Anyway, a druggist gave him some bicarbonate of
bismuth--he's told me about it himself ever so many times--or was it
bisulphate of something?  Anyway it fixed McAlpin up all right but it
left him with a sort of feeling of flatulence, or flobbulence (he's
explained it to me) that bothered him all morning till a friend told
him to drink Vichy water, two or three quarts at a time.  Now as a
matter of fact you see, McAlpin had had that wheeziness every morning
for years back when he went to the bank.  But as soon as he opened the
mail and began dictating, the wheeziness vanished, and the flobbulence
never started.  But the moment he retired, the wheeziness brought on
the flobbulence; and Vichy water is all right, but there's so much
chalk in it that if you take it you must follow it with an anticalcide
of some sort.  I don't know the names, but McAlpin has told me about
them--bigusphate of carbon or any other antiscorbutic.

In fact, as McAlpin tells me, he has come to realize that his diet
while he was in the bank was all wrong.  He used to take bacon and eggs
for breakfast, whereas now that he has looked into things he finds that
bacon has no food value at all--contains no postulates.  Eggs would be
all right if taken with a germicide, but they lack vitamins.  So what
McAlpin eats now--he tells me this himself--is a proper balance of
protein and carbohydrates.

McAlpin spends a good deal of his time in the drug stores.  He says
those follows know a lot.  Do you realize that if you take a drink of
mineral water every half hour, with a touch of salt in it, it keeps
your sebaceous glands open?

When McAlpin takes a holiday he goes down to Nugget Springs where the
thermal baths are.  It's a new place and he says that they say that the
doctors say that the water has a lower alkali content than any other.
That's why he goes there, for the low alkali content.  You take a bath
every hour and in between you drink the water and the rest of the time
you sit in it.  McAlpin says that when he comes back he feels a hundred
per cent more crustaceous than he did before.  He attributes this to
phosphorus.

      *      *      *      *      *

My friend Tharpe, who was in Iron and Steel, retired to Paris.  He
retired at fifty-eight.  He said he wanted to retire while he was still
fresh enough to enjoy life--feel those muscles.  He wanted to have a
little fun in life, before he sank into old age.  So he went over to
Paris to have, as he himself so fervently put it, "a whale of a time."

I saw him there six months later, in a night-supper restaurant.  He had
with him something that looked like an odelisk--isn't that the
word?--anyway something Moorish with slanting eyes and a crescent
diadem.  Tharpe came over and spoke to me.  He looked like a boiled
lobster, all red and black.  He said he felt fine.  He said he was just
starting out for the evening.  He felt, he said, A.1.

I saw him in the hotel next morning.  He was in the barber shop.  The
barber was fixing him up.  He looked about four colors, mostly black
and yellow.  He said he felt great.  The barber was steaming him,
boiling him and squirting things over him.  Then he went up to the drug
store and the druggist "fixed him"--washed him right out--and then into
the bar and the bartender "fixed him"--toned him right up with a couple
of "eye-openers."  Then he started off.  He had on a pongee suit and a
panama hat and a French silk tie, and he looked pretty slick, but
battered.  He said he felt fine.  He said he was going out to play
baccarat with two men he met the night before--Russians--he couldn't
remember their names--Sonovitch or Dombroski or something.  Anyway one
of them was a cousin of the Czar.  He said he felt elegant.

Tharpe is in a home just now, in England--a rest home.  He's taking the
rest cure, and then he is to take the gold cure and after that a brain
cure.  A big English doctor took out part of his skull.  He says he
feels A.1.  He has lost most of his money and he's coming back to the
Iron and Steel business.  He says it beats Paris.

      *      *      *      *      *

A peculiarly interesting case of retirement has been that of my
long-time friend the Senior Professor of Greek at the college here.
When he retired the Chancellor of the University said at the
Convocation that our regret at Professor Dim's retirement was tempered
by the fact that we realized that he would now be able to complete the
studies on Homer's _Odyssey_ which had occupied him for so many years.
Notice, to _complete_.  The general supposition was that in all these
long years, in all the evenings of his spare time he'd been working on
Homer's _Odyssey_, and that now all that he needed was a little time
and breathing space and the brilliant studies would be consolidated
into a book.  To _complete_--and I was the only one who knew that he
hadn't even started.  He had begun, ever so many years ago, when we
were fellow juniors, talking of Homer's _Odyssey_.  There was something
he wanted to do about it--I forget just what; either to prove that
there was never any Homer or that there was never any Odyssey.  At any
rate it was one of those big academic problems that professors select
as a life work.  It began to be understood that he was "working on
Homer's _Odyssey_"; then that he was doing a book on Homer's _Odyssey_,
and then that he had nearly done it, and only needed time to _complete_
it.  And all the time he hadn't started.  Professors are like that.

      *      *      *      *      *

The years go by so easily--Commencement Day and a new session--you
can't begin anything then--mid-session, impossible--final exams and the
end of the session--out of the question to start anything then; a man
must rest sometime.  And you don't start Homer in the long vacation on
the coast of Maine.

So when Professor Dim retired, people on the street would stop him and
ask, "How's the book coming on?"  And he could only turn pink and
gurgle something.  I'm the only one who knows that he hasn't started
it.  He's been getting pretty frail the last two winters; some of his
old pupils sent him south last winter, so that he could finish his
book.  He didn't.  They gave him a trip up north last summer--but not
far enough.  They talk now of sending him to Greece where the _Odyssey_
began.  They're afraid, some of them--this, of course, they say very
gently and kindly--they're afraid that the old fellow may not live to
finish the book.  I know that he won't.  He hasn't started.

But as to this retirement business, let me give a word of advice to all
of you young fellows round fifty.  Some of you have been talking of it
and even looking forward to it.  Have nothing to do with it.  Listen;
it's like this.  Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the
closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that
the leaves have practically all gone?  You hadn't realized it.  And you
notice that the sun has set already, the day gone before you knew
it--and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape.  That's
retirement.


_As History Grows Dim_




AS HISTORY GROWS DIM

(_All that will be left of our Forgotten Worthies in a future
dictionary_)


GLADSTONE--a bag, travelling-bag with a specially wide mouth.

VICTORIA--low carriage, with a broad seat.

PRINCE ALBERT--a stuffed coat, very long, formal and never unbuttoned.

BISMARCK--a specially fat German rump steak, not popular now.

SALISBURY--another steak, English, made of what was left over from a
Bismarck.

CHATEAUBRIAND--a French beefsteak, made of something else.

GOETHE (pronounced goat-ee)--a form of chinbeard once worn in Arkansas.

LINCOLN--a kind of car, formerly very popular.

WELLINGTON--a long boot, high sole.

BLUCHER--short boot with a low sole.

CARDINAL WOLSEY--a brand of gents' underwear.

HENRY CLAY--a cigar.

JEFFERSON--a hotel, avenue, or post-office.

NAPOLEON, WASHINGTON, CAESAR, SAMSON--trade names used in the plumbing
business for bath-room fixtures.

MARIE ANTOINETTE, JOSEPHINE, MARIE LOUISE, EUGENIE--trade names used in
ladies' underwear.

KING EDWARD, BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE, CLAVERHOUSE, ROBERT
BRUCE--stallions with a pedigree.

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE & JOHN--side streets in Montreal.




_Twenty Cents' Worth of Murder_



TWENTY CENTS' WORTH OF MURDER

I am one of those who like each night, after the fret and worry of the
day, to enjoy about twenty cents' worth of murder before turning off
the light and going to sleep.  Twenty cents a night is about the cost
of this, for first-class murder by our best writers.  Ten-cent murder
is apt to be either stale or too suggestive of crime.  But I am sure
that I am only one of uncounted thousands of crime readers who feel
that the health and enjoyment gained is well worth the price, and share
my gratitude toward the brilliant galaxy of crime writers who supply
our needs.  I could name them if I wished to, but everyone knows them
so well that it is needless.

They will not therefore take it amiss if I offer them a few
suggestions, endorsed I am sure by the same thousands of readers, still
uncounted, as to what we want and what we don't want in our current
reading.

In the first place--if you don't mind--don't kill the victim too soon.
We like to get to know him a little first.  I mean, don't start with
his _body_.  Don't have Inspector Higginbottom summoned hastily in
paragraph 1 of page 1 to the Mansions Apartments because there's a dead
body just found upstairs.  The thrill is too short.  We lost interest.
Even when it turns out that there's been "foul play" it doesn't rouse
us; we expected it.  Nor even when it turns out that the dead man is a
leading member of the Stock Exchange; that's all right, we never heard
of him anyway.

Oh, no, give us a chance to learn to know the man a little, and like
him, and then his death is like that of a friend; or let him be such a
mean hound that we get to hate him; then when his body is found, who is
happier than we are?

Now another little point.  When you do find his body, don't have a
string of people, a houseful of them, who have to be under suspicion
one after the other, so that we can see it all coming--the butler, the
private secretary, the French maid, the handy man (too handy,
perhaps)--well, everybody knows the standing list.  All these people
commit murders.  To these are added the guests; after all, do we really
know them?  And, now we think of it, even the family lawyer there over
night--family lawyers are often crooked.  So every one of these has to
be "eliminated," one after another.  All right for the author at ten
cents a word for elimination, but poor stuff for us, even at a cent a
page.

And, oh, yes, with this, please cut out the diagram that goes with it,
called _Plan of Arundel House, Ground Floor, Upper Floor_.  It's a bum
drawing, anyway, done by the author, of course, to make it look
circumstantial.  But it's the same plan, as a matter of fact, that I've
seen for twenty-one years--Arundel House, or Wisteria Lodge, or No. 1
Jefferson Avenue.  It's all cut into little rooms with gaps for doors,
marked "study," "bedroom," "bath"--one bath for all those people--and
in one room is a little diagram like a sausage marked "body."  Well, I
can't study all that out; I have no time.  Never mind explaining what
window "gives" on the lawn and what other windows "give" on what;
windows always "give" in detective stories.  In real life they are made
to go up and down.  And the French windows on the ground floor of
Arundel House (Plan I), never mind explaining which side they're bolted
on; I can't follow it.

Oh, yes, and fingerprints.  Don't have any.  Really we're all tired of
them.  As a matter of fact I'm glad to notice that a good many of the
best people are cutting them out.  Inspector Higginbottom shakes his
head and murmurs "gloves."  It seems that practically all people who
are thinking of murder go round in gloves.  I've noticed them on the
street.

The same with footprints--though I am not so sure about them.  The old
footprints that Sherlock used to trace are, of course, clean out of
date.  But the new scheme of Sherlock's scientific successor--you all
know who it is I mean--the new scheme of blowing powder into a
footprint of mud, filling it up with cement and then taking out a
perfect overshoe; that's still good stuff.

Now as to your detective himself--but no, I almost despair of trying to
give advice.  All I can say, and I speak for all of us, is mostly
negative.  Don't, of course, make him long and thin; that's dead; but,
for Heaven's sake, not fat.  Don't have him go without sleep, or go
without food, often for three or four hours at a stretch.  Keep him
decently fed, and, for our sake, not for his, give him drinks, plenty
and often.  Do you remember how, under prohibition, all the sleuth
hounds had to begin to drink tea?  You remember how the great detective
would sit and think things out, "stirring his tea"!  I don't believe
you can do it.  Take some whisky and, my! you'll begin to think fast.

There's one standard English crime writer, to whom I can never be
sufficiently grateful, who makes a point, at every emergency in his
story, of giving his characters a "stiff whisky and soda."  Inspector
Higginbottom, as soon as he realizes that the body is that of Sir
Charles, goes to the sideboard and pours out a "stiff whisky and soda"
all round!  That's the stuff!  I can read that all night....  And the
criminals themselves get it even better.  The moment they feel
themselves in a corner--what's that word we use?  Oh, yes,
"trapped"--they pour out a drink, a whole tumblerful of neat brandy.
Then they don't feel "trapped" at all.  You can't trap a man full of
that.

Of course you would ask why just whisky and not champagne?  It's too
expensive.  There is, as everybody knows, one prince of mystery story
tellers who never conducts a crime without giving us at least half an
hour at Monte Carlo, with "frosted champagne cocktails" and a Rumanian
princess to look at!  But it feels extravagant, for anybody brought up
in a plain home with just whisky.

And yet such is the contrariety of things here in this author--I mean
the one with the whisky and soda (all my associated readers know
exactly who it is I mean) so fine about the drinks and yet falling into
another fault that always exasperates us--I mean filling his books with
descriptions and scenery.  He begins, practically always, with a
"market town"--Hellborough, or some such place, where they talk broad
something.  We can stand for a street or two, but when it comes to the
town hall, dating from Edward the Confessor, we pass.  Scenery we don't
need at all, except to take it fast, like a tourist in a picture
gallery.  You see, those of us who have read crime stories for twenty
or thirty years have got in our minds a collection of scenes like what
they call the "sets" in a ten-twenty-thirty theatre.  "Market town of
Hellborough"--correct, we have it; "purlieus of Chicago"--right, here
you are; "drawing-room of the rectory"--that's it--or not, not that,
that's a "bar-room in Denver."  But anyway we've got all our "sets" and
a collection of weather; it's odd the junk we carry in our minds as an
equipment for reading.  However, that's another topic.

      *      *      *      *      *

And there's this.  As you get nearer the end of the story, don't have
them all chase one another round.  I mean all the characters, bandits,
detectives, etc., in a sort of grand climax.  You know the kind of
thing I mean--in and out of cellars, down rat holes, out through
outhouses.  Poor old Edgar Wallace--there, I hadn't meant to mention
names, but never mind--could never get away from this: the sleuth
trapped by the bandit, thrown into a cellar, water turned on, reaches
his throat, dives out through a sewer, runs round in front, nails up
the door, bandit trapped, goes to the attic, detective follows,
detective trapped, bandit on roof, leaps into an aeroplane, detective
crawls through a fly-screen, leaps into another aeroplane--zoop!
They're both gone.  We have to begin over again.

And here's a point of importance for the conclusion itself.  Don't be
afraid to hang the criminal at the end.  Better lay the story, if you
can, in a jurisdiction where they hang them, because, to us readers,
the electric chair sounds too uncomfortable.  But hanging is old and
respectable, and if you like you can use such a phrase as "went to the
scaffold" or "went to the gallows."  That's as simple as Old Mother
Hubbard.  But I mean we want him _hanged_; don't let him fall into the
sea out of his aeroplane.  It's not good enough.  Hold him tight by the
pants, till you get him to the gallows.  And _don't_ let your criminal
get ill in prison, or get so badly wounded or so heavily poisoned that
he never gets tried because he is "summoned to a higher court."
Honestly, you can't _get_ a higher criminal court than the State Court
of Appeal.  There isn't one.

I'll stop there.  Other readers may have suggestions.




_Reader's Junk_



READER'S JUNK

In writing about detective stories as above, I stated that, for me, it
wasn't necessary for the writer of such a story to put into his book a
plan of the house that was the scene of the murder.  I said that I
carried in my head, from much reading of crime, a plan of the house
already made, cut up into bedrooms, with a passage-way, and one "bath"
(for everybody) and a shape like a sausage lying loose in one room and
marked "body."  Sometimes the house was called "Wisteria Lodge" and
sometimes "Arundel House" or No. 1 Jefferson Avenue.  It would do for
any of them.

I had no sooner written this than I realized that it was only one
sample of the quantity of junk which any reader carries round in his
mind, ready to use, like the "sets" of a repertory theatre.  In fact
everybody has picked up a whole lumber room of them--country houses
(for murder); shooting-lodges (for mystery); castles, for use in the
Middle Ages; and a collection of city sets, such as a "midnight
restaurant," an "Alhambra Grill," an "obscure tobacconist's," a "den of
vice," a "purlieus" (or do you have to have two of them?), the "left
side" of Paris, the West side of Chicago.  Everybody knows them and
keeps a collection of them.  Most of them no doubt are a long way off
reality.

A shooting-lodge, for instance--I've never seen one.  What do you shoot
in it?  And why lodge?  I always picture it made of cedar in the rough,
set up end on, with a lot of gable corners.  My shooting-lodge is
really a compound made of a half-and-half mixture of Old Vienna and a
Canadian lumber shanty.  A den of vice!  For that I use a lot of smoke,
a guttering candle, with plenty of grease; that makes it "murky."  Or
dear old Monte Carlo--I've never seen the place, but I have it there
all ready for use like slipping in a lantern slide.  There's the
Casino, come in.  I built it when I was about ten years old and had
never seen one; I can't ever get it straight; it's too much like a
barn.  They are playing "baccarat" in it, but I am afraid the baccarat
table is too much like a barn supper (I was brought up in the country).
All around Monte Carlo are a set of huge flowers that I keep--taken as
names years ago and never seen--such as hibiscus and climbing
rancenculus and flowering funeraria.  No doubt you have a lot of them
too.  The effect is vague but gorgeous.  The flowers and shrubs are
used to bury the bungalows, because from my earliest recollection
bungalows are always "buried in flowers."  My bungalows are a bum lot;
they were copied originally from summer cottages on Lake Simcoe, and
it's hard to get them plastered and put "plinths" on them and cornices.
No, they're all wrong.  I admit it.

But the point that I am groping toward is the inquiry as to the effect
on literature, I mean on the appreciation of it, of this accumulation
in the reader's mind of a set of preconceptions, pictures and
ready-made characters.  It seems to me that it must act on the mind as
hardening of the arteries does in the body.  Presently nothing can get
through.  What's the good of trying to tell a desert island story to a
reader like you or me, who has owned a desert island for fifty years,
yellow sand, a rivulet of pure water (that was a piece of luck) and a
banyan tree, a form of bread and of which the "fibres" can be used to
make fish lines.

It's the same with the characters.  We all have a stock of them ready
for use like marionettes in a child's theatre.  For example a
"benevolent old gentleman"--what a peach he seemed when we first read
of him at twelve; what a nut now.  You see no new benevolent old
gentleman can get a chance with us; the minute the author names him we
say "Right oh!" and substitute our own.  Personally I always, in
reading fiction, use my own benevolent old gentleman, my own family
lawyer, my own curate, my own ship's bosun and all the rest of them.  I
take them to each new book as people take their own food to a basket
picnic.

      *      *      *      *      *

If someone of a critical turn were to follow up this train of thought
perhaps it might prove interesting--help to explain why interest flags
in age, and why authors rise and fall.  This much is certain.  Whenever
we can get away from preconceptions and stock pictures and take our
fiction straight, as children do, it stands out with marvellous clarity
and interest.  I find an instance of this in the great vogue that the
"Western Picture" enjoys all over the world.  You will see an English
audience (right out of the purlieus, or of the bungalows) sit
enthralled as they watch the sheriff's posse chase through the sage
brush, see the desperado shoot up the saloon, and the real train fall
through the actual trestle bridge.

The reason is that it's all new, or still new enough.  It hasn't--not
yet, or only partly--been all raked over like a dust heap and used
again and again.  That's why, for the present, even for English
audiences, it beats things out of English history ten ways.  Don't show
me Queen Elizabeth getting into her barge off the stone steps beside
the Thames.  Bless me, I've seen the woman, and the same steps, since I
was eight.  And the courtiers, in the queer little puffed pants, why, I
keep a set of them given me by Alexander Dumas in the middle
eighties....  But the sheriff's daughter, shooting Lobscouse, the
Indian brave, with her father's derringer (18 inches long)!--ah!
There's a girl for you!

Of course it can't last.  Already the new generation are gathering up
their sets of scenery and their characters on strings.  The Sheriff of
Cheyenne, Wyoming, will soon be as dead flat as Henry of Navarre, and
Lobscouse the Indian will fall back into second class with Queen
Victoria, and Mollie of the Ranges (who shot him) will just look like
Charlotte Corday or Marie Antoinette.

And then, of course, something else will turn up, to catch again the
colours of the morning.  If it didn't, our literature would fall
asleep, like the dead classics of China; would turn into "sacred
books," read in the dust of pyramids.  But that time is not yet.  As a
civilization we are still only just past sunrise.




LITTLE STORIES FOR GOOD LUCK



THREE ON EACH

When I was teaching at Upper Canada College fifty years ago, we took
corporal punishment for granted.  I myself had been "licked" at school
and as a master I "licked" the boys without any compunction or
afterthought about it.  As a matter of fact corporal punishment, which
is after all the same thing as physical torture, can only exist on
those terms--that nobody thinks about it.

But even in those days there were some people who found the idea
revolting and couldn't bear to think of it.  One of my college friends
felt like this.  So I said to him one day, "Fred, if you'll come down
to Upper Canada College this afternoon at three o'clock when school
ends, I'll be certain to have two or three boys who have to take a
caning and you'll see how simple and normal it is."

But that day something seemed wrong in class.  Not a boy "did" anything
all day--just quiet ordinary behaviour and lessons all first rate.

It looked at three o'clock as if I would have no one to "lick."  But I
didn't want to disappoint my friend.  So I said to the "worst" boy in
the class, one of those fine young toughs who are really the _best_:

"Urquhart, you'll stay in after three when the class goes."

"Please, sir," he protested, "what's that for?"

"That'll be all, Urquhart," I answered, "don't be impertinent."

At that moment my friend arrived and I said to him very gravely: "I'm
afraid I have a delinquent boy to deal with here before I can go.  But
if you'll just sit down I won't be a minute."

"Please, sir," clamoured Urquhart as I got out the cane, "what's this
for?"

"Urquhart," I said, "please don't make things worse by lying about it.
You're to have three on each, or I must report you to the principal for
refusing to take a caning."

That was enough for a decent boy like Urquhart.  To refuse to take a
caning and go and blab to the principal was pretty low business for a
boy of his spirit.

He stood up and took his three on each, like the little man he was.

I would have felt pretty mean about it if it hadn't been that after he
had had his licking Urquhart said:

"I want to apologize, sir, for trying to lie out of it.  Only I didn't
see how you knew about it."

But I never knew what Urquhart had done: except that, as all
schoolmasters know, a high-spirited boy has always done _something_.



NOTHING MISSING

I was saying the other day how absent-minded professors are and how
simple-minded--I mean in the good sense of the term.  They have no
notion of the narrow exactness of business.

A case in point is that of my friend Cartwright-Trope who was a
lecturer in the University of Chicago at a time when I was a graduate
student there, many years ago.

Trope and his wife were going away for the summer and were moving their
furniture out of their flat into storage.  Trope came to me and asked
me if I would do him a favour and I said, certainly.

"We're going away by this evening's train," he said, "but the furniture
men don't come till tomorrow afternoon.  I was wondering if you would
mind"--here he produced a long paper with a list of things written on
it--"it's really a lot to ask--but would you, perhaps, go over to the
flat and just sit around while they move the things out--it's only two
loads--and just check them off on this list and then you could post the
list to me, and I'll know it's all right."

I said it was a mere nothing, and that I'd do it gladly and Trope went
away much relieved.

Next day I didn't bother to go near his flat.  I just took a blue
pencil and made a little mark against each item on the list, some
slanting one way and some another, and some a little light and some a
little heavy.  Then I posted the paper to Trope.

A month later in Toronto we met at an afternoon tea and Trope told of
how kind I'd been.  "Every item!" he said, "every item, and there must
have been a hundred--and every single one checked off!"

I've often wondered since what happened.



THINKING OF TOMORROW

I was grieved to see by the papers a few weeks ago that the world has
lost that kindly Irish poet, W. B. Yeats.  I knew him a little bit,
years ago.  Unlike most literary celebrities, he looked the part.  His
face would assume at times a look of far-away abstraction, such as only
a poet would wear.

One time when "Billy" Yeats was in Montreal lecturing, I gave a supper
party for him at the University Club--a large round table filled with
admiring women, and silent husbands.  There came a lull in the
conversation during which Yeats' face assumed the far-away look of
which I speak.  The ladies gazed at him in rapt admiration.  At last
one said:

"What are you thinking about, Mr. Yeats?"

"Thinking of tomorrow," he answered in his rich musical voice, "and
wondering!"

You could feel the ripple of sympathetic interest among the ladies: the
word "tomorrow" carries such infinite meaning.

"Wondering what?" someone ventured in a half whisper.

"Wondering," said Yeats, "if there is breakfast on the Boston train."

      *      *      *      *      *

After all, poets have to feed.



INFORMATION WHILE YOU DRINK

Among the figures of the vanished past whom I regret, is the old-time
bartender--I mean, the bartender at his best.

There he stood behind his bar, mopping up the foam, urbane, polite,
neat in his wicker sleeves and with his hair flattened with
oil--courteous, obliging, tireless.

He never drank.

"Have one on me, Billy?"

"Thanks, I'll take a cigar."

But his especial forte was information--the latest horse race, the
coming ball game, the time of all the "shows" and the "records" of the
sprinters and scullers--in short, all any "sport" could need.

Beyond that he handed out general information, and beyond that
conversation to order as desired.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson informs us somewhere that Eskimos always tell you
what they think you want to hear; they answer a question according to
what they think you'd like.

Well, the bartenders were like that.

"Fine day!  Billy."

"It sure is."

"Looks like rain, eh, Billy?"

"It certainly does."

But I am thinking here of a specially illustrative case of bartenders'
information that happened within my own experience.  It was in Montreal
away back in 1902 or 1901--at any rate in the year, whichever it was,
when mile Zola died.

I had gone into the bar of the old Prince of Wales Hotel to get a drink
before dinner, and stood reading the evening paper while I drank it.

My eye suddenly caught a news item and I looked up--forgetting in my
surprise just who I was talking to--and said to the bartender:

"Billy, you don't mean to tell me that mile Zola's dead?"

Billy shook his head sadly and went on wiping the bar with his cloth as
he said:

"I think he must be.  I ain't seen him round anyway for a week or more."



NO PLACE FOR GENTLEMEN

Everybody knows how hard it is in English to use the word "gentleman"
in any fixed meaning.  I have heard it defined by a Sunday School boy
as meaning "a man with a gold watch who loves Jesus."  But the test
seems a little too exacting.  On the other hand, I remember a bygone
citizen of my home town, an industrious man with a large family, who
used to say, "My motto is, no _gentleman_ in this family."

But the most definite beam of light I ever got on it reached me forty
years ago when I lived in Chicago as a student, and had the honor of
meeting a friend of my brother Jim, a Mr. Donnegan, who had just
finished three months in one of the state prisons in Illinois, for
failing to grasp the idea of the new pure food law.

Jim and I went into a bar to get a beer and Mr. Donnegan was standing
in the centre of a group of admirers.

He beckoned to Jim and we joined them and Jim said proudly, "Stephen,
meet Mr. Donnegan.  He's just come back from three months in Joliet."

Mr. Donnegan shook hands, but he said: "Not in Joliet, though, Jimmy.
No thank you; I was in Elgin."

"All right," Jim said, "but I don't see that it makes much difference."

"All the difference in the world, Jimmy," said Mr. Donnegan.  "I don't
want to knock any place or any crowd; but I'll just tell you the
fellows in Elgin, Jimmy, are a set of gentlemen.  I won't say that for
Joliet."

The lapse of forty years has prevented me from being sure as to which
is this.  But the warning stands that one of these two is no place for
a gentleman.



"WE HAVE WITH US TONIGHT"

Public speaking is more or less of an ordeal even for those who have to
undertake it constantly.  Worse than all is speaking at a dinner,
because you have to wait your turn and feel it coming for hours.  Next
time you are at a public dinner notice the men at the head table who
sit and eat celery by the bunch and never stop.  Those are the men who
are going to speak.

I don't say that trained speakers are nervous.  No.  They wish the
chairman would announce that the rest of the meeting is cancelled
because of smallpox, or that the hotel would catch fire, or that there
would be an earthquake.  But they're not nervous.

But if speaking is an ordeal to _them_, what it is to those who have
never spoken.  Some men go through life and never have to speak; they
rise to wealth and standing with the fear of it in the
background--fear, with an element of temptation.

Such a one was my senior acquaintance of long ago, Mr. Gritterly--no
harm to name him--general manager of one of the Toronto banks.  He had
just retired, without ever speaking in public, when a Bankers' Three
Days Convention came to town and they invited Mr. Gritterly to speak at
the dinner.

He accepted, hung in the wind, flew round the flame--and finally, on
the opening day, sent a note that he was called out of town for the
evening.

I saw him round the hotel next morning.  He was telling me how sorry he
was to have missed the opportunity.  He told me a lot of things he
could have said about branch banking.  He said, too, that he would like
to have had a sly joke, very good-natured of course, about the American
Treasury system.  It was too bad, he said, he'd been called out of
town.  He had even intended, just in an offhand way, to get off one or
two quotations from Shakespeare (he had them in his pocket).  One
read--"I know a bank whereon a wild thyme grows--"  Gritterly thought
that would get a laugh, eh?  Too bad, he said, that he couldn't get
that off.

"But, Mr. Gritterly," I said, "you're making a mistake.  They didn't
have the dinner last night.  The trains were so late they only had the
inaugural address.  The dinner's tonight.  You'll probably get an
invitation--"

And as I spoke a boy brought it to him on a tray.

"So you see you'll be able to tell them about branch banking."

"Yes," said Mr. Gritterly, "yes."

"And the jokes about the U. S. Treasury."

"Yes," said Mr. Gritterly, "quite so."

All day Gritterly was round the hotel pulling the little bits of
Shakespeare out of his pocket.

But the thing beat him.

In due course at the dinner the chairman announced: "I regret very much
that Mr. Gritterly will not be able to speak.  His speech, of which he
gave me an outline, would have been a great treat.  Unfortunately he
had to leave tonight"--the chairman consulted his notes--"for Japan.
With your permission I will take on myself to cable our representatives
and I am sure they'll be glad to get up a dinner for Mr. Gritterly at
Tokio."

Gritterly got the invitation on board ship and went right on to Hong
Kong.  The bankers there received a cable and organized a lunch.
Gritterly had gone on to Singapore but the bankers followed him up, and
he left for Calcutta.  They lost him somewhere in Thibet.  He may have
entered the monastery there.  For many people that would be preferable
to speaking.



A HUMBLE LOVER

Have you ever noticed how much attracted we all are by humility?  From
vainglorious people, conscious of talent, of power, we turn aside.  Let
them have success if they will.  It's theirs for the asking.  But
appeal they cannot have; that is for the meek, for the failures, for
the people who might have been but never were.

This is especially true of love.  The humble lover, aware of his own
nothingness, goes to our hearts.  The pathos of unrequited love,
devotion without return, is among the oldest of human stories.

One such humble lover I knew and here chronicle.  I set him down as he
was.  Judge him for yourself.

He had reached the age when he felt that it was time to get married.
Other fellers did.  Joe--that was his name--was close to thirty.

He said to me one night, "I think I'd like to get married."  Then he
said nothing for quite a time and presently: "There's a girl on the
next street--"

That was as far as he could get for a while, but no doubt it meant a
lot.  It has, to many of us--"a girl on the next street."

So I asked:

"Do you know her, Joe?"

"Mother does," he answered.  "She belongs to mother's morning musical
club and mother often invites some of the girls to play music at the
house."

"And you haven't met her?"

"Yes, I have in a way.  The other afternoon she left her guitar here by
accident and mother asked me to take it home to her; so I took it round
to her house and a maid came to the door and I said 'This is Miss
Carson's guitar,' and she said 'Thank you.  Do you want to see Miss
Carson?' and I said 'No.'"

"And that's all you've seen of her?"

"No," Joe said, "the other day when she came to the house I was just
outside and she said to me: 'How do you do?  It's a lovely day, isn't
it?'  And I said, 'It sure is!'--just like that--'It sure is.'  And she
went in and I went on out."

From then on my friend gave me details of his humble courtship.

Miss Carson, it seems, left her rubbers at the house and Joe fetched
them home and gave them to her father.  Her father said, "It's a nice
night, isn't it?"  So that would seem to mean that he looked on things
pretty favourably, eh?

I asked Joe, a little later in his courtship, if he had spoken yet to
Miss Carson about marriage.  He said no, but he had discussed it with
his mother.  His mother was all for it.  He was going to wait awhile
and then talk to his father.  If his father was for it and his mother
and if I was for it, that made three.  He told me that the other
morning he had ridden down town in the same street car as Miss Carson
and she said, "Isn't it a lovely morning?" and he said, "It sure
is"--just as easy as that.  Too bad, he had to get off the next street
after she got on.

Soon after that Joe read me a letter of proposal that he had prepared.
It began: "It is no longer possible for me to restrain the expression
of the sentiments with which our intercourse has inspired me--"  "Fine,
isn't it," he said.  "I got it out of a book.  I'll start it again.
It's good...."

I was not surprised when Joe sent me word a day or two later that he
wanted to see me.

"Did you get an answer from Miss Carson?" I asked him.

"Fine!" he said.  "A dandy letter.  Everything's O.K.  It seems that
she isn't thinking of getting married, so it's all right; and she
thanked me for writing to her and said my letter was swell."

My heart began to sink with sympathy.

"Too bad, Joe," I said.

"I'm not so sure," he answered.  "I find there's another girl on the
same street, two houses nearer, that perhaps I can get.  I've talked
with mother about it; she's all for it."

      *      *      *      *      *

After Joe's case, I have never felt quite so sure about the humble and
the meek.  Perhaps they're just slow, eh?--



THE MAGIC OF FINANCE

I have an artist friend who is the best portrait painter in Canada.
This will at once identify him to himself.  But as it will also
identify about a dozen others to themselves, I will simply call him
Jares and let it go at that.

Jares told me this story about the beginning of his making his fortune.

The time came in his upward rise when he got several hundred dollars
for each portrait, then passed into the thousands and presently he got
his first real order--a commission to paint the portrait of a New York
millionaire stock-broker for five thousand dollars.

The "sittings" in New York went along very pleasantly and
satisfactorily.  The millionaire stock-broker evidently took a fancy to
the rising young genius.

When the last sitting came he said to the artist:

"Mr. Jares, I must see about having your cheque made out.  But, tell me
first, what are you going to do now for the next two or three months?"

Jares said that he was going to take a holiday in Brittany.

"Good," said the broker.  "I have a proposal to make.  Suppose you
leave this money with us and see what we can do with it while you're
away.  Mind," he added as a caution, "I don't say we're wizards you
know; people get exaggerated ideas.  But suppose you just leave it and
see?"

Jares assented with delight.

He went away to Brittany, had a three months' holiday and returned to
New York.

He went round to the broker's office and sent in his card.  The
millionaire, after a moment's hesitation, received him most cordially.

"Mr. Jares!" he said.  "Why, yes, of course!  You left five thousand in
an open account with us--of course, of course!"

He pushed a bell button and gave a few words of instructions to a lady
secretary.  "Just ask them," he said, "to send a memorandum."

In a few minutes the lady secretary returned and gave a paper to the
broker with a few words in a low voice.

"Well, well," said the millionaire, "is that so!  Mr. Jares, this is
very interesting.  We lost that five thousand--it seems.  That's the
way things go, you know.  It's lost--very interesting.  Well, well--I
mustn't keep you.  Drop in some time when you're in New York again."

Jares left--he had seen what they could do with it.



HE GUESSED RIGHT

There is a certain line of anecdote which often goes under the name of
"grim humour."  This means humour that turns on actual injury or death.
Personally I've always felt doubtful about it.

To explain what is meant, here is a story, actually true, of a
happening in Toronto at the old Rossin House, long ago.  The baggage
man who was putting trunks into the elevator (from the service chute)
was called away from his job and didn't realize in the poor light that
the elevator had gone up a couple of stories and was above him.  He
swung the door open, called in a cheery voice, "All right, Bill, down
she does," jumped in--and broke his leg two stories below.

In this kind of "grim humour," as I say, I find little attraction.  Yet
the Scotch seem to like it--they love the familiar stories of Scotchmen
at their wives' funerals, or the story of the Scotch judge who
sentenced to death a man he used to play chess with, and said--"And
that's checkmate for you, Andrew."

But one such story I can quote from memory, not actually of my own but
of my brother George.  It concerns the death of a man in the
power-house of a western Ontario town (I'll name it no closer than
that) where George was working, installing electrical equipment.  In
those days electricity was new and consequently dangerous.

One morning the assistant man of the power-house came running to the
workers on the line to say that his boss had been killed.

They went down with the chief of police to the power-house and there
was the unhappy man, dead, laid out flat on the cement floor, his arms
extended.

They looked at him in horror.

"How do you suppose it happened, Joe?" asked the chief of police.

"Why, I can't see how it could," said the assistant--"the only possible
way it seems to me is that he may have picked up this terminal with one
hand"--as he said it, Joe picked up the terminal--"and then put his
other out in contact with--"

Bing!  And the second man was laid out beside the first.  Joe had
guessed right.

      *      *      *      *      *

Now as a matter of fact I am glad to record that the second man, though
knocked unconscious, was not really killed.

But when my brother George, who is a real story-teller, tells this
story, he not only kills the second man but the chief of police--who
undertook to explain it to the mayor of the town, and then the mayor
and half of the town council.

Nothing like Art for Art's sake.



ELECTRIC SERVICE

I was talking the other day about "grim humour," and told the story of
the man who was killed in the Ontario power-house.

I afterwards remembered another example of grim humour that is recalled
from the days when I used to go on lecture trips in the United States.

I was to lecture in an Ohio city and a local lawyer kindly met me at
the train and drove me to my hotel.  On the day he indicated points of
interest.

"That's our jail," he said, stopping the car for a minute beside a grim
building that walled one side of the street and he added, "I had a
queer experience with a man in there a month or two back."

"What was that?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "this feller was in there under sentence of
electrocution, and our firm got a letter from a law firm in Chicago
which read:

"'We understand that Mr. Joseph Smith is a client of yours, in which
case please inform him that if he does not pay the account for $18.50
on which we have been suing him, we must proceed to more drastic
measures.'

"We wrote back in answer," continued the lawyer--"'You are correct in
supposing that Mr. Joseph Smith is a client of ours.  He is at present
in the jail here awaiting electrocution, but if you can think of
anything more drastic, please proceed to it right away.'"

      *      *      *      *      *

The lawyer, having told his story, proceeded, after the American
fashion, to hang another piece onto it.

"Yes, sir," he continued, "that feller was up in that corner cell, and
I went to see him--when we knew he'd no chance--and asked him if there
was anything we could do for him."

"'Yes,' says he, 'there is; I don't exactly like that electric sign I
see across the street every time I go to the window.'"

The lawyer stopped speaking and began to start his car.

"And what was the sign?" I asked.

"It's still there," he said.  "You can read it."

He pointed, and I looked up and saw a sign that read, _Something in
Electricity for Everybody_.



OUR VANISHED INDUSTRIES

Most of us, I think, admit that in their way the Maritime Provinces are
the finest part of Canada.  I don't mean by reason of their resources,
but on account of the inhabitants themselves.  You get there that fine,
sturdy type of people from the British Isles--a type that was rather
than is--honorable, courageous, content with little, and valuing
intellectual and moral life rather than material.  Indeed the making of
men and the "export of brains" has always seemed a leading industry of
the Maritimes.

I had a very special opportunity to learn this when I was invited there
for a week's lecture tour after I had been appointed to my chair at
McGill.  I not only had occasion to appreciate the type of men bred in
that environment, but to form some idea of the process and method of
making them.

At my first lecture I was the guest of a bank manager in Moncton, and
at the close of the evening we sat together over a pipe in his
comfortable study, and we fell to talking of his earlier days.

"... And how did you get your bank training?" I asked him.

"I learned it," he answered, "as a boy on a Nova Scotia schooner of the
old days.  Every time I was told to do anything I had to do it right
off and without any question or I got a swift kick in the backside.
That's the training that fitted me later for a bank."

The next day when I had moved on to another town, I was talking with
the mayor of the town about his life and career.  "Yes," he said, "I'm
a self-made man and I'm not ashamed of it: or rather I won't say I'm a
self-made man--I'll say that the beginning of my success was made for
me as a boy working on a Nova Scotia schooner."

"How was that?" I asked.

"Well," said the mayor, "if I was told to do something I had to hop to
it and do it or I got a swift kick in the backside."

As I went on through the Maritime Provinces I began to realize that
this early start in life had been shared by most of the leading men.
One of the judges had, according to his own statement, got his first
grasp on the principles of law by getting a swift kick in the backside.
The same treatment had started men in medicine, education, and public
life, and for business it was universal.

I struck only one doubtful case.  I had met a most cultivated man, well
up in years, a professor of divinity in a church university.  He talked
to me modestly of his early struggles.

"Life was for me," he said, "a very arduous path.  I doubt if I could
have walked it if I had not had--I hope you won't think my reasoning
absurd--"

"I know," I interrupted, "you had a swift kick in the backside on a
Nova Scotia schooner."

The old man looked at me calmly.

"No," he said quietly, "I was going to say, a belief in the efficacy of
prayer..."

I felt that I had got in wrong and was humiliated.  But it was all
right.  The old man was silent for a moment and then he said:

"The other may have helped, too."

You see they can't tell a lie in the Maritimes even if they try to.

So I've been thinking about this treatment; perhaps there's something
in it.  So many of our public men are accused of inefficiency and
indifference.  Couldn't we try the idea--eh?



COULDN'T SLEEP A WINK

I often think that all this "insomnia" business is about ninety per
cent nonsense; I mean--the people who come down in the morning and tell
you they "couldn't sleep a wink," "never closed an eye," and all that.
They may think so but as a matter of fact they probably had their eyes
closed up for hours at a stretch.

Years ago when I was a young man in a boarding-house in Toronto, my
brother George came down to stay the night.  There was no spare room in
the boarding-house, and, what was worse, only one bed--although it was
a double one--in mine.  But the trouble was that we both hated
"sleeping double" and knew that there was mighty little chance of
getting a decent night's rest that way.

However, we took it in good part, went to bed, and decided just to lie
there, sleepless, and let it go at that.

In the morning, after it got to be real daylight, I spoke and said to
George, "Did you get much sleep?"  "Not a damn minute," he said.
"Neither could I," I answered, "so I just lay here; I could hear every
sound all night."  "So could I," George said.

Then we put our heads up from the bed-clothes and noticed for the first
time that the bed was covered about two inches deep with plaster.  The
ceiling had fallen on us in the night.

But we hadn't noticed it.  We had "insomnia."



GO TO MOTHER

Many years ago, when I was teaching at Upper Canada College and was
still young enough to go to the races and that sort of thing, I struck
a holiday and started off for the Woodbine Races.

When I got to the place just north of Toronto where the cars branched
in different ways, whom should I meet but my old friend Canon Drone,
waiting for a car.

He stopped me with a pleasant inquiry of where I was heading for.

"Why, Canon Drone," I said, "I was just going to make up my mind
whether I'd go out to the Woodbine Races or take the Radial Railway and
go up to Sutton and spend the day with mother."

I hadn't had the least intention of going up to see mother.  But it
sounded a good thing to work off on a clergyman--like handing him
something.

But the old Canon took it up too seriously.

"Stephen," he said, lifting his hand in the air and speaking in his
best pulpit voice, "Go-to-_mother_!"

You know what a quiver a really good clergyman can put into the word
"mother!"

"Resist temptation," said the Canon; "get on that car--that's the
one--and go to mother."

He had me beaten.  I saw no way round it.  He wasn't going to move, so
I ended by getting on the car and going up to Sutton to spend the day
with mother.  That is--I spent it in painting the garden fence.  Mother
never wasted a visitor.

That evening when I got back to the city I met a friend of mine at the
car junction.

"You weren't at the races?" he said.

"No, I spent the day up at Sutton with mother."

"Too bad," he said; "you missed a big day.  By the way, I saw your old
friend Canon Drone out there having a whale of a time.  He's a great
old sport.  He told me he'd made twenty dollars."



FIVE DOLLARS, RIGHT NOW

Some time ago, quite a few years back, we had an "old home week" in my
town of Orillia.  Among those who came back was Eddie Foote who had
been away at Napanee, or somewhere, for about twenty years.

Like all people who come back for home week, he was just brim-full of
interest in all old acquaintances.

He stopped me on the street and shook hands enthusiastically, and began
asking about my brothers and where they all were.  I happen to have a
lot of brothers--we were six at the start--and, like all large
families, we scattered all over.  Some of my brothers went west and
some to the States; I was the only one who didn't go far.

So Eddie began, "Where's your brother Charlie, now?"

I said, "Oh, Charlie went out to B. C. about four years ago and--"

"Is that so?" Eddie cut in.  "Good old Charlie.  Say!  I'd give five
dollars to see Charlie right now.  And where's Teddy?"

"Teddy lives in Calgary."

"You don't say!  Good old Ted!  I'd give five dollars to see Teddy
right now."

I realized that Eddie Foote had only one formula for the language of
delight; for all earthly joys of reunion he'd pay five dollars right
now.  He went right on and put another five dollars on my brother Jim
in Chicago.  Then he said:

"And where's your brother George?  I'd give five dollars right now to
see old George again."

"This is George," I answered, "coming up the street; and that's Jim
with Teddy coming up behind him.  That's fifteen dollars for the three,
Eddie, and Charlie's coming in on the afternoon train; that'll be
twenty.  They're all back for the home week."

Eddie didn't pay up.  He laughed it off; but he took the story back
with him to Napanee, or wherever it is, and tells it as one on himself.
I understand that he adds that he'd give five dollars to see Steve
right now!  He'd better watch out.



ARE PROFESSORS ABSENT-MINDED?

Years ago when I lived on the Cte des Neiges Road, in Montreal, I used
often to have a little group of my fellow professors up to dinner.
Sometimes their conversation in the study upstairs after dinner was
really good.

I recall one evening when we fell to discussing the old question, are
professors really absent-minded.  All the men present, alert,
intelligent men of today, utterly ridiculed the idea.  They admitted
that the professors of a generation back--the old fellows under whom
they had studied--were ludicrously absent-minded, but claimed that the
professor of today is another kind of man.  One of them told an amusing
story of his old professor at Edinburgh, an old man who never, never
went out in the evening but had been persuaded to break the rule and go
to a big evening reception.

He arrived at the house about eight-thirty--the first guest, nearly
half an hour ahead of fashionable time--and was shown up into a
bedroom.  He didn't come down for so long that the hostess sent up to
look for him.  He'd gone to bed and was asleep.

Another professor told of an old Oxford don who was out for the evening
and was given a bundle of letters--about a dozen of them--to post on
his way home.  He forgot them, went away to Iceland on a geological
trip for six months, then found the letters and posted them.  Inside
the letters were invitations to dinner "the day after tomorrow."

The professors laughed at the stories but said that the idea was
nonsense.

Yet next morning my telephone was kept busy for half an hour.  Two of
the professors had got the wrong overshoes, one had two walking-sticks
and my little terrier had eaten a lecture on Cicero.



WANTED: A GOLD-FISH

I told a story in this series about absent-minded professors.  But
here's a true one that I can vouch for out of my own experience at
McGill.

One of our professors of physiology was out visiting one winter night,
and the people at the house showed him a gold-fish that had died
because the water that it was in had got frozen.  The professor looked
at the fish and said, "Let me take it home and I think that tomorrow I
can treat it in the laboratory and revive it."

So when he started for home they wrapped the goldfish in a bit of
tissue paper and Professor Floyd put it in his overcoat pocket.  It was
a cold night, very late and with lots of deep snow along the street.
On the way home Floyd put his hand into his coat pocket and accidently
flipped out the gold-fish and it fell into the snow.

Floyd knelt down to pick it up, but he couldn't find it and stayed
there on his knees groping for it.  Just then a policeman came along on
his beat and stopped and said, "What are you doing there?"

Professors hate to be questioned.  Floyd just looked over his shoulder
and said, "I am trying to find a goldfish."

The policeman then understood that he was dealing with a mental case,
and he said, coaxingly, "Now you just come along with me and I'll take
you to a place where we've a whole lot of gold-fish--all you want."

"All right," Floyd said, "only just help me to get this one first."

To humour him the policeman knelt down and began groping in the snow
and, first thing he knew, out came a gold-fish!  He was absolutely
flabbergasted.

"Great heavens!" he said.  "Are there any more?"

"Maybe a whole lot," Floyd said.  As the professor started off for home
again, the policeman was still on his knees looking for gold-fish.



MUSHROOMS

I am very fond of mushrooms.  Often I go out from my home town to where
there are some big open pastures on the third concession and gather up
a whole basketful, carry them part of the way home, and then--throw
them away.

Sometimes I carry them only as far as the pasture fence and throw them
away there; at other times I take them part of the way home and throw
them away beside the road or in a culvert.  Sometimes I go alone, or
sometimes with another man--someone also keen on mushrooms--and then we
perhaps carry them further and don't throw them away until we are
nearly back to town.

Your trouble is, you see, are the darned things mushrooms?  You feel
all right about it when you pick them, and then later, perhaps quite
suddenly, the doubt comes--are they really mushrooms, or are they that
deadly thing, what's it called, the _culex americanus_? or the _codex
siniaticus_?--anyhow the kind that poisons you in less than five
minutes.

Yet it seems such a shame to throw away beautiful mushrooms, without at
least trying them out, that at times I carry my mushrooms right into
town and give them away to any friends I meet.

And that reminds me of the day I gave the mushrooms to Arthur Hart, or
rather, to use the name that he gave himself, Art 'Art.  Art was a
little Cockney Englishman.  He was a friendly little fellow as all
Cockneys are, and liked to be called by his Christian name, Art, rather
than by his surname 'Art.

As soon as he felt that he had made an acquaintance he would say, "I
sy, don't call me 'Art; just call me Art; that's good enough, ain't it?"

Then he would explain himself in more detail.  "I down't like
formality.  When people start, 'Art this and 'Art that, I always sy,
'Look 'ere, ole chap, never mind that 'Art business, just call me Art.'"

Well, I was coming back one day from getting mushrooms and had just
thrown my basketful into a culvert outside the town when I met my
friend Webber on the street, and he gave me another basketful.  I
couldn't throw them away while Webber was in sight, and I was still
carrying them when I met Art.

"My 'at," he said, "those are fine mushrooms!"

I realized that there are a lot of Englishmen who know all about
mushrooms.  So I said, "Take them, Art, I have some at home already."

"I certainly will," Art said readily and away he went with the
mushrooms.

And the next day, first thing I knew, somebody said to me on the street:

"Did you hear about Arthur Hart?  They don't think he'll live."

"Great Caesar!" I said.  "What's the matter?"--though I felt I knew.

"Poisoned, so the doctors say; something he must have eaten, only
Arthur says he didn't eat anything in particular at all."

It occurred to me that if Art was going to say nothing about the
mushrooms, I wouldn't mention them either, not even later on.  Life has
to carry these buried recollections.

However, Art got better.  I saw him on the street a few days later and
I said, "Art, I'm terribly sorry about giving you those mushrooms that
poisoned you, and it was fine of you to say nothing about it."

"Ho, no!" Art said, "I didn't eat the mushrooms.  I threw them away as
soon as you were out of sight.  I always do."

"But what poisoned you, Art?" I asked.

Art looked all around and put his hand to the side of his mouth and
said in a low voice:

"'Ootch!"

      *      *      *      *      *

Funny, isn't it?  We all throw away mushrooms, because a chance of one
in a hundred, and take a chance (or used to in the days of which I
speak) on "hootch," with the odds a hundred to one against us.  There
seems a sort of moral to this, but it might work the wrong way.  I
won't try to draw it: I'll leave the cork in it.



HELP WANTED

Very many women can't listen.  And least of all, pretty women.  In a
way they don't need to.  They can get along without.

I am not thinking here of women who talk all the time.  There are lots
of those.  They don't listen because they never stop talking.  But I
refer to the class of charming women, in society, who don't listen,
especially when they are hostesses, partly because they would find it a
little hard to follow, and partly because their minds are on other
things.

Your delightful hostess beside you, while you tell her about your trip
to Czechoslovakia, is looking you in the face with every appearance of
interest.  In reality she is wondering why the maid hasn't started to
pass the second vegetable, or whether you know that the olives are
beside you within easy reach.

No harm is done as a rule by these charming lapses of attention.  Just
now and again something happens.  As in the following case.

I was at a supper party in Toronto--it's a good while ago--and our
young hostess was so pretty that she didn't need to be anything else,
and so modest that she thought everybody wonderful, and seemed to be
listening when she wasn't.

The guest of the evening was a large-scale Englishman just back from
West Africa.  He sat on his hostess's right and presently began telling
of what must have been, I am sure, a terrific adventure in the great
forest of the Congo.

When he had suggested telling of his experience, our hostess had said,
"Oh, do, Mr. Rawlinson!" and as he told it she had sat gazing into his
face with every sign of rapt attention.  She seemed to be hanging on
every word.

So she was--in a way.  In her right hand she had a spoon ready to help
a silver dish of trifle, and she wanted to be quite sure when Rawlinson
had done, so as to give him a spoonful.  The little flashes of
animation that he saw pass across her features were merely false starts
that meant that once or twice she had thought he was through and he
wasn't.

With such encouragement Rawlinson carried his story toward its climax
with increasing dramatic effect, so much so that the rest of us at the
supper table were all listening to him.  He was telling how he himself
and a single companion were hopelessly lost, at midnight, in the great
woods of the Congo, shuddering under the dripping forest, when--so
related Rawlinson--"All of a sudden, as we sat there, we heard the most
piercing shriek for 'help' echoing through the woods."

Rawlinson paused, and sat back to enjoy the dramatic effect.

Our pretty hostess reached out and helped him to a spoonful of trifle,
and said very quietly and comfortably, as if carrying on the topic
still further:

"Of course when we go to the woods we always take our own help."

At which, whether it was good manners or not, we all burst out
laughing, so much so that our hostess looked across to her husband in
charming perplexity and asked:

"Now, what have I said?"

There was something childishly appealing in the confession, but as her
husband just went on laughing, I explained to her:

"You said nothing.  Rawlinson's lost in the woods on the Congo, but let
him stay there.  Go on with the trifle."



ATMOSPHERE

Hotel keeping, I can assure you, is a highly specialized art.  Not
every man can do it.  You have, in a way, to be born to it.  It is a
matter of character, and atmosphere.  You either have it, or you don't.

Many Montrealers of the older generation will recall the memory of the
genial Mr. Klick, the manager of one of our most select hotels.  It was
Mr. Klick's standing illusion that the "guests" were _his_ guests, in
the personal sense.  "We had your brother George with us again last
week," he would say to me.  "It was a great pleasure to have him."  To
Mr. Klick, George's visit was directed personally toward himself, and
the illusion--since life is built up on such--created a certain
atmosphere of reality.

Another such I knew for whom a similar illusion was extended even to
the creature comforts that he dispensed.  The old-fashioned bar of the
Somerset House in Toronto, where he presided--a bar glistening with
mahogany and redolent of lemon and spices--was for him not a hired
place of commercial entertainment but a sort of sanctuary where the
connoisseur was met and matched by an art equal to the measure of his
appreciation.

"I hear you have some new ale out from England, Mr. Hopkins," I once
said to him.  "May I have a glass of it?"

"Sorry, Mr. Leacock," he said, "I can't serve it to you--not for
another three weeks--not fair to the ale, sir, not fair to the ale."

To Mr. Hopkins, ale was a living, breathing creature, with rights and
sentiments of its own.

Knowing this of hotel atmosphere, I was interested in being able to
witness, a couple of summers ago, the very process by which such an
atmosphere is brought into being.

I entered the "rotunda" of one of those pleasant little frame hotels,
newly built, that dot the inner channel of the Georgian Bay.  When I
had duly registered, I said to the proprietor, who seemed to be the
only person around:

"You have a charming spot here.  Do you get a nice class of people?"

"Very nice class of people," he assured me.  "Mostly professional men
up from Toronto, men like Judge Barracot who is with us just now."

"Have you good fishing?" I asked.

"Very good, indeed; our guests generally take a guide and go up toward
Parry Sound.  Judge Barracot was out this morning."

"Do they get many?"

"Generally get a very fair catch.  Judge Barracot was saying he got a
dozen bass this morning."

From which the proprietor went on to talk of golf and said that the
improvised course of nine holes seemed to give excellent satisfaction.
Someone, he thought it was Judge Barracot, had gone round yesterday
under fifty.

"Will it be possible to get a game of bridge in the evening?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't think that will be any trouble.  One of our guests, Judge
Barracot, was talking this morning of getting up a table."

"Perhaps," I said, "as I've an hour or so before supper, you might
introduce me to one or two of the guests, if you don't mind."

"Why, yes, certainly.  Now let me see, I wonder who you'd like to meet.
Come with me to the lounge."

He led me from the rotunda into a side room, where an elderly man was
seated reading a paper.

"Judge Barracot," he said, "I want you to meet Professor Leacock...."

"You've been here often before?" I asked the Judge.

"No," he said.  "I just came up from Toronto yesterday.  As far as I
know you and I are the only guests; the hotel only opened on Monday."

      *      *      *      *      *

But at any rate we were not left long as the only guests.  Even while
we were talking I was aware of the entry of a new guest into the
rotunda, and through the open door I could hear our host say:

"Oh, yes; our guests are very largely professional men and college men.
We have men like Judge Barracot and men like Professor Leacock..."

Now don't ask me the nearer address of this little hotel.  It would be
not good if you did, for it's all booked for summer, as it deserves to
be.  Atmosphere has settled on it.



FREEDOM OF THOUGHT

In these days when there is so much discussion of dictatorship and the
suppression of free thought, it is well to get any light one can on
what free thought and free speech should properly mean.

Now it is generally understood that the people of the Southern States,
especially the generation of "the war," whatever their faults may have
been, were at least conspicuous for their chivalrous sense of honour
and fair play.  So I am glad to be able to contribute to the vexed
discussion of free thought a personal testimony as to how they look on
it in Arkansas.

There came from that State, to spend the summer in my home town, a
gallant old Southerner, at that time Attorney General of Arkansas, and
a veteran--an ex-general--of the Confederate Army.  It was in my
earlier days at McGill and I was lecturing on American history, and,
when I met General Morsy, it seemed wonderful to me to talk with a man
to whom the Civil War was a vivid personal recollection, and who bore
the marks of it, in his stilted walk and his stiffened arm.

I took the General out sailing on Lake Couchiching, and the old man sat
on the gunwale of the boat, as easily as on a gun-wagon, but he never
saw the waves, and he never felt the wind nor noticed the blue of the
cloudless sky, for he was talking of the battle of Shiloh and was
telling how Albert Sydney Johnston died.  I took him out for a
drive--there were no motors then--and he never saw the woods nor
noticed the ripening fields of grain, for his talk was of Pemberton's
stand at Vicksburg, and before his eyes, as he spoke, the Mississippi
rolled below the bluff.

Now it so happened that that summer I received a suggestion about an
appointment to the University of Arkansas--one of those tentative
half-offers that whisper in the ears of young college lecturers.
Naturally I wanted to know about the place, and whether my opinions, as
an economist, would be free, would be my own.  So I asked General Morsy
about it.

"Sir," he said, "if you come to our State, as I hope you may, you will
find with us the most complete academic freedom.  We make it a point of
honour.  You can think and talk entirely as you like."

The General paused, and, after a minute's reflection, he added:

"We shall, of course, take it for granted, sir, that you believe in
free silver."

      *      *      *      *      *

Simple, isn't it?  Solves the whole problem.  After all, if a man's
salary is good enough, surely he can believe in anything.



HIS BETTER SELF

It is strange the devious ways in which drink affects different men.
Some grow quarrelsome, others optimistic and merry, and others again
sentimental and reminiscent.

But the oddest form of "bats" or "jags" I ever knew or heard of were
those of my old Toronto classmate, Walter McLellan, whose drunks
brought on an access of morality.

I was reading the other night in a book on psychology about what is
called the "super-consciousness" or the "super-self."  It is held that
in moments of danger, of emergency, some people rise to another and
higher self that never comes to the surface in their daily life.  It is
argued that drink, too, may at times exercise this effect.

This "super-self" must have been what was wrong with Walter.

I would come at times into his office in the morning--Walter had
finished Varsity and was trying to practise law--to find him with his
head in his hands in a fit of depression.

"I feel awful," Walter said.  "I went into the Dog and Duck last night
and had four or five drinks and it started me off."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I took mother up to the Church of the Redeemer to the choir practice;
I was full as a fly--"

"And where did you go after the choir practice?"

"Into the rectory with mother for supper," said Walter with a groan.

"And after supper?"

"Played chess with the rector--full as a bug."

That was the peculiar nature of Walter's outbreaks.  He took it all in
one load, like a camel, and lived on it all evening, without any
outward sign at all.  He never talked much anyway.  He himself knew he
was "plastered," but the rector didn't.

I remember another afternoon on which Walter went on a terrible bat and
took his aunt to the art gallery: and another day when there came to
his office a card of invitation from the college to a lecture on
palaeontology, and Walter got so full that he went and listened to it.

Xmas always hit him hard.  "I made a perfect darn fool of myself with
drink yesterday," he said, in telling me about it the day after.

"What did you do, Walter?" I asked.

"I got an awful skate on quite early in the morning over at Clancy's."

"Yes, and what then?"

"I went up to my married sister's house and went to morning service
with her and the children--I certainly was soused--and what did I do
but give the three children twenty-five dollars each!"

"That's all right, Walter," I said; "it's fine for them."

"Oh, I know," Walter said, "but that wasn't the whole of it.  I signed
a subscription for a hundred dollars to rebuild the darn chancel."

      *      *      *      *      *

Of course if a man goes downhill like that it can't last forever.
Walter's law business was getting all shot to pieces with choir
practice and taking his aunt to lectures and his mother to the Church
of the Redeemer.

It was clear that his "super-self" was driving Walter to ruin.

His last outbreak practically cleaned him out.  He was full all day--at
a church committee meeting and with his mother at a lecture and ended
by giving his sister a cheque to pay the eldest boy's fees for a year
at college.

That ended Walter.  He quit his practice and started off for the Yukon
in the gold rush of 1898.

Walter got to the Yukon, by the Edmonton trail, safe enough, and within
a year we'd heard in Toronto that he had struck it rich and was
cleaning up a fortune.  But right on the heels of this intelligence
came the news that Walter had gone on a terrible bat in Dawson City and
lost practically everything in a gift to start a Church of England
mission.

After that I heard no more of him.  They said he had moved to Colorado
or some other mining place.

But in the last number of the magazine of my old college, I saw that
under the will of somebody whose name seemed meant for his, the College
received a gift of a hundred thousand dollars.

So Walter must have drunk himself to death somewhere.



OH, SLEEP!  OH, GENTLE SLEEP!

Sleep is a great thing, there's no doubt of it.  And it's always at its
best when you take it at an improper time, as forbidden fruit.  That is
why sleep is so beautiful during a sermon, and why college students
crowd into classes on philosophy.

Sleep is also partly a natural gift.

The most naturally gifted sleeper I ever knew was my classmate of long
ago at Toronto, Walter Allen.  Walter had such a bright mind that he
could sleep for sixteen hours a day and still have mind enough for
everything.  He took a double course in Greek and metaphysics,
impossible for a light sleeper.  Later on he rose to eminence on the
bench and bar of Illinois.  The Americans admired his power of sifting
evidence in court with his eyes shut.

But I'm telling now about how Walter went from Toronto to New York for
the Yacht Race--the American Cup Race--between the _Defender_ and the
_Valkyrie_.  That must have been back in the nineties.

To save money--we were all hard up in the nineties--Walter took no
Pullman but sat up awake all night, a thing he hadn't done since he was
born.  This economic travel brought him among the first on the tugboat
that you took to see the race.  It was not to start for an hour, a
breezy morn of wind and sun, with sleep in every breath of it.  Walter
found a huge coil of rope in a sheltered corner astern; just the place
for a snooze; time enough to get a good place at the bow later on.

He lay down.  Sleep breathed upon him.  He had a confused idea of
motion, of sea breezes, of trampling feet--and then a man, a deck hand,
bent over him and shook him and said:

"You'll have to get up, please, sir.  We're back at the dock in New
York."

Next morning when he reached Toronto someone asked:

"Who won the Yacht Race, Walter?  I forgot to look in the paper."

"So did I," said Walter.




EPILOGUE



_Bass Fishing on Lake Simcoe with Jake Gaudaur_

(_It ought to be the privilege of an author to reserve some part of his
book as his own, and to put into it whatever he likes.  Especially in
the present volume, of which the earlier part contains so much that is
controversial and might arouse anger and disagreement, is it fitting to
end with a discourse on fishing where no anger is and where
disagreement is only on the surface--which in fishing is of no account.
S.L._)



BASS FISHING ON LAKE SIMCOE WITH JAKE GAUDAUR

Among the pleasant memories of my life is the recollection of my
fishing days on Ontario's Lake Simcoe with Jake Gaudaur--little
excursions that extended over twenty or twenty-five years.  If you
don't know the name of Jake Gaudaur it only means that you were born
fifty years too late.  Half a century ago Jake was for several years
the champion oarsman of the world--a title won on the Thames at Henley.
In those days, before motor-cars and aeroplanes, rowing was one of the
big interests of the nations, and Jake Gaudaur was a hero to millions
who had never seen him.  The fact that his name was pronounced exactly
as Good-Oar helped to keep it easily in mind.

Jake was of mixed French and Indian descent but belonged in the Lake
Simcoe country and English had always been his language--the kind we
use up there, not the kind that they use at Oxford.  I can talk both,
but the Lake Simcoe kind is easier and, for fishing, far better.  It
cuts out social distinction.  Jake was a magnificent figure of a man;
he stood nicely over six feet in his stocking feet--the only way we
ever measure people up there.  He was broad in the shoulders, straight
as a lath, and till the time when he died, just short of eighty, he
could pick up the twenty-pound anchor of his motor boat and throw it
round like a tack-hammer.  Jake--standing erect in the bow of his motor
boat and looking out to the horizon, his eyes shaded with his
hand--might have stood for the figure of Oshkosh, war chief of the
Wisconsin Indians.

When Jake's championship days were over he came back to Canada and
"kept hotel" in Sudbury.  That was the thing for champions to do; in
the unregenerate days of the old bar, thousands of people spent five
cents on a drink just to say they had talked with Jake Gaudaur.  I wish
that retired professors could open up a bar.  It must be a great thing
to be an ex-champion, or a quintuplet, and never have to work.

So Jake made his modest pile and then came back to our part of the
country, the Lake Simcoe district, and set up at the Narrows, at the
top end of the lake, as a professional fisherman, taking out parties on
the lake for bass fishing.

Now, who hasn't seen Lake Simcoe has never seen a lake at all.  Lake
Simcoe on a July morning--the water, ruffled in wavelets of a blue and
green and silver, as clear as never was: the sky of the purest blue
with great clouds white and woolly floating in it!  Just the day for
fishing!--every day is, for the enthusiast.

The lake is just right in size to be what a lake ought to be--twenty to
thirty miles across in any direction--so that there's always a part of
the horizon open where you can't see the land.  The shore is all
irregular with bays and "points" and islands and shoals, so that any
roads thereabouts are away back from the water, and the shore line of
trees and sand and stone looks much as Champlain saw it three hundred
years ago.

Over it in the summer air of July there hovers an atmosphere of
unbroken peace.  When I think of it I cannot but contrast it with the
curse that lies over Europe where mountain lakes are scarped and
galleried for guns, and every church steeple on their shores a range
and target.  I wish I could take Hitler and Mussolini out bass fishing
on Lake Simcoe.  They'd come back better men--or they'd never come back.

      *      *      *      *      *

So here we are at ten o'clock in the morning helping Jake load the
stuff out of our car into his motor boat!  Notice that--ten o'clock.
None of that fool stuff about starting off at daylight.  You get over
that by the time you're forty.  The right time to start off bass
fishing is when you're good and ready to.  And when I say ten o'clock,
I really mean about ten-thirty.  We just call it ten o'clock and when
you look at your watch after you're actually started, it's always
ten-thirty, or not much past it.  Anyway there's no finer time in the
day on the water than ten-thirty--still all the freshness of the
morning and all the day in front of you--half way between windy and
calm with little ruffled waves in the sunlight, and a cool breeze,
partly made by the boat itself.

As for the bass, they bite as well at any one time as at any other.
The idea that they bite at daylight and don't bite after lunch is just
a myth.  They bite when they're ready to; the only reason they don't
bite after lunch is that the fishermen are asleep till three.

Jake's boat is no "power" boat, to hit up twenty-five miles an hour.
That fool stuff came to our lakes later and is out of keeping with bass
fishing.  Jake's is a big roomy open boat with a front part for Jake
and a big open part at the back where we sit--a broad stern seat with
leather cushions and wicker arm-chairs on a linoleum floor.  Solid
comfort.  No rough stuff for us: we're not sailors.  And no cover to
keep off the sun; who cares a darn about the sun when you're fishing;
and nothing to keep off the wind--let it come; and no protection
against the rain.  It won't rain.  Any man who thinks it's going to
rain shouldn't go fishing.

"Will it rain, Jake?"

"I don't think so, Professor; not with that sky."

We've gone through that little opening dialogue, I suppose, a hundred
times.  That's the beauty of bass fishing: always doing the same things
in the same way, with the same old jokes and the same conversation.

"I was thinking we might go out and try the big rock at McCrae's point
first, Professor," says Jake.

Seeing that we've never done anything else in twenty years, it seems a
likely thing to do.

This gives us two miles to go--down from the Narrows to the open lake
and then sideways across to the first point.  For me this is always the
best part of the day--the cool fresh air, the anticipation better than
reality, the settling into our wicker chairs and lighting up our pipes,
with the stuff all properly stowed around us, the fishing-gear, the
lunch and the box with the soda on ice.  Not that we take a drink at
this time of the day.  Oh, no!  We're all agreed that you don't need a
drink on a beautiful fine morning at ten-thirty--unless perhaps just as
an exception today because it's such a damn fine day that you feel so
good you'd like a drink.  There are two reasons for taking a drink when
you're out bass fishing--one, because you feel so good, and the
other--because you don't feel so good.  So perhaps this morning, "Eh
what?"

"Well, just a starter."

"Jake, can I pass you along a horn?"

"Thanks, Professor, I don't mind."

There are four of us, mostly, apart from Jake, so it takes most of the
time of the run to mix up and serve the drinks.  I am thinking here
especially of one party, though really it was just like all the others.
There was my brother George and George Rapley, the bank manager (a tear
to his kind memory), and Charlie Janes, the railroad man of a Lake
Simcoe town.  George Rapley always came because he could fish, and
Charlie Janes because he _couldn't_.  You may have noticed that bank
managers are always good fishermen; it's something in their profession,
I think, a kind of courtesy, that gets the fish.  And I am sure that
everybody who goes bass fishing will agree that to make the party right
you need one fellow who _can't_ fish.  In fact in any bass fishing
party of friends who go out often together, there is always one who is
cast for the part of not knowing how to fish.  No matter how often he's
been out, he's not supposed to know anything about fishing and he
good-naturedly accepts the role.  If he loses a fish, that's supposed
to be because he didn't know how to land it; if _we_ lose a fish it's
supposed to be because it was _impossible_ to land it.  It's these
little mutual understandings that fit life together.

      *      *      *      *      *

So almost before the "horn" is finished, here we are bearing down on
the big rock off McCrae's point.  It's nearly a quarter of a mile from
shore and six feet under water, but Jake steers to it like a taxi to a
hotel door.  The anchor goes down with a splash, our swing on it timed
to throw us right over the rock!  There it is!  See it--big as a
wagon!--and in another minute down go the baited lines trailing to go
under the edge of the great rock.

This is the great moment of fishing, the first minute with the lines
down--tense, exhilarating.  It's always the same way--either something
big happens, or nothing.  Perhaps--bing! the lines are no sooner down
than a bass is hooked--by Charlie Janes, of course--just like the luck
of the darned fool!  And while he's still hauling on it--biff! there's
another one--and Jake, it seems, has quietly landed a third one when
the other two were plunging round.  With which there's such a period of
excitement and expectation that it's nearly three quarters of an hour
before you realize that those three fish are all there are--or rather
_two_ fish: George Rapley lost his--too bad! he was playing it so
beautifully.  Charlie Janes, the darned old fool, flung his over the
side of the boat, right slap into the ice-box.

Or else--the other alternative--the lines go down and nothing happens.

In either case we fish on and on under the rock till excitement fades
into dullness, and dullness into dead certainty.  That's all.  At last
someone says, "I guess they ain't biting here any more."  Notice
"_They're not biting_"; we never say, "_they're not here_."  Any man
who says, as I have heard some of our odd guests say, "Oh, hell, there
are no fish here," is not fit to be brought again.  The only theory on
which bass fishing can be maintained as a rational pastime is that the
bass are _everywhere_--all the time.  But they won't bite.  The wind
may be wrong, or the air just too damp, or too dry, or too much sun, or
not enough--it's amazing how little will start a bass not biting.  But
the cause must always be one that can change in five minutes, or with a
move of five yards.  These beliefs are to a fisherman what faith is to
a Christian.

"We might try out past Strawberry Island," says Jake.  This means a
change farther out, right out in the open water of the lake with the
whole horizon of wind and wave and sun open for twenty miles all around
to the south.  This is not exactly a shoal.  The bottom of the lake
drops here from twelve feet to thirty feet of water--like the side of a
hill.  Jake explains it all fresh every time, and he makes each new
spot seem so different and so likely that we go at each with new hope
eternal.  If we don't get any fish as each half hour stop goes by, Jake
tells the story of how he and I fished once and never had a bite till
after sundown and then caught thirty-three bass in half an hour off
McGinnis's reef.  "You mind that evening, Professor?" he says (to
"mind" a thing is to remember it).  "It was thirty-three, wasn't it?"

"Thirty-four I think, Jake," I answer, and he says, "Well, mebbee it
was."  We've brought those fish up a little every year.

Or else Jake tells the story of the young girl from Toledo who came up
with her father and had never been fishing before and never even in a
motor boat, and it was a caution how many she caught.  This story, of
course, conveys the idea that if inexperienced fishers, like the young
lady from Toledo, can catch fish, experienced people like ourselves
could hardly expect to.

      *      *      *      *      *

Then all of a sudden as it always seems, comes the idea of lunch--all
of a sudden everybody hungry and ready for it.  And does ever food
taste better than out in the wind and sun in a motor boat?--salmon
sandwiches, cold chicken in a salad, chunks of home-made bread, mustard
pickles; all eaten partly off a plate and partly with your fingers and
with bottled ale to wash it down.

People who go fishing but are not real fishermen land on shore for
lunch, light a fire and, I believe, even cook the fish caught.  Some of
them go so far as to have a game of poker or, in extreme cases of
mental derangement, go for a swim.  All of this to a proper fisherman
is just deplorable, just lunacy.  The true fisherman eats right in the
boat with the lines still hanging in the water.  There seems to be a
sort of truce during lunch time; I never knew a bass to touch a hook
till it's over.  But lunch on the other hand isn't hurried.  It's just
eaten in the natural way.  You put into your mouth all it will hold;
then eat it; then start again.  Eating in the open air knows no
satiety, no indigestion.

The whole point is that the longest day is all too short for fishing,
and no one who really loves bass fishing can bear the thought of
knocking off from it even for an hour.  As a matter of fact, we _do_
take time off but we never admit it.  For there also came in our
fishing with Jake a drowsy part of the day when we took a sleep.  Not
that we ever called it that deliberately.  The sleep was just a sort of
accident.  A little while after we'd eaten all the lunch we could hold
Jake would say: "I thought we might go and try for a spell down round
the corner of that shoal--just off that way apiece.  You mind we was
there before?"

"Yes, sure, I remember it, Jake."

The place is a sort of convenient little nook among the shoals--nothing
showing on top of the water.  We always reckoned as if the bottom were
in sight.  It had the advantage that the waves couldn't reach it,
because of the shallows, and it was always quiet, and no fish ever came
there.  Jake could anchor the boat where there were just enough waves
to rock the boat gently and just enough light breeze to murmur a
lullaby--and with the two-o'clock sun to make you pull your straw
panama away over your eyes, a man seated like that in a wicker chair,
with two pounds of sandwiches and six ounces of whisky in him, is as
drowsy as a flower nodding on its stem, and asleep in five minutes.
The lines dangle in the water; there is no conversation, no sound but
the breeze and the lapping of the little waves.  Up in front we could
see only Jake's broad back, but there was slumber in every line of it.

It didn't matter who woke first.  After about an hour anybody could
straighten up and say: "By Jove, I believe I was almost asleep.  Were
you?"  And the others would answer, "Darn near!"  And then Jake would
say, as if he'd never stopped talking, "I was thinking we might go out
and try the dry shoal."

This rouses us to a new search for bass, hither and thither half a
mile, a mile, at a time.  Even then we are only covering one corner of
Lake Simcoe.  The lake is just big enough to seem illimitable.

Bass fishing on Lake Simcoe is not like the bass fishing you can get a
hundred miles north of it, on the rivers in the bush, out of easy
reach.  Up there it's no come-and-go business in a day; you must stay
at least two nights.  You catch one hundred bass in the first day and
the next day you don't even keep them; you throw them back.  The third
day you hate the stinking things; a bass two days dead, with its skin
discoloured, would sicken even a cannibal.

Not so Lake Simcoe.  There are just not enough bass, just never too
many--some dead, dull days without any--they're there, but they won't
bite.  But even on the deadest, dullest day, always the hope of a
strike.

You might wonder, if you don't know the life, why the afternoon never
gets dreary, what there can be to talk about--especially among men
often and always out together on the same ground.  That's just
ignorance.  In bass fishing there are vast unsettled problems, to be
discussed forever.  For example, do you need to "play" a bass, or is
that just a piece of damn nonsense imitated out of salmon fishing?  The
school to which I belong holds that "playing" a bass is just a way of
losing it.  What you need is a steel rod with the last section taken
out and an "emergency tip" put in--making a short firm rod about six
feet long.  When the bass nibbles, _wait_--then wait some more--then
strike--with such power as to drive the hook right through his
head--then shorten the line--not with a reel; that's too slow--haul it
in beside the reel with your left hand and hold it firm with your
right--shove the rod close to the water, if need be _under_ the
water--by that means the bass _can't_ jump out of the water, there
isn't line enough--drag him against his will till someone else holds
the net--and in he comes.

Contrast this with the artistic "playing" of fish that _looks_ so
skilful--paying out line--the fish leaping in the air thirty feet from
the boat--and all that show stuff--only good for a picture book!

Now can't you see that the discussion of that point alone can fill an
afternoon?

Personally I am always an extremist for a short rod and rapid
action--the bass right in the boat in twenty seconds.  I think that in
his heart Jake Gaudaur agreed with this.  It's the way all Indians fish
and always have.  But Jake's calling demanded compromise.  He favored
both sides.  Rapley, like all bankers, played a fish as they play a
customer with a loan, taking it in gradually.

      *      *      *      *      *

We always knew that the afternoon was closing to evening when Jake said:

"Suppose we go out and try that big rock inside McGinnis's reef.  You
mind, Professor?  The place where you caught all them bass, that night;
thirty-four, wasn't it?"

"Yes, or thirty-five, Jake.  I'm not sure.  Let's try it."

This sunken rock is the triumph of Jake's navigation of the lake.  It's
a mile from even the nearest point of land, and sunk six feet down.
Beside it the big rock at McCrae's is child's play.  That one you can
find if you keep on looking for it.  This one, never.  It's all very
well to say that you can do it with "bearings"; any amateur yachtsman
that ever wore Panama pants will tell you that.  But try it.  Try to
get bearings that are good at all hours and all lights and shadows on
the shores, good in rain and good in mist, and you soon see where you
are--or are not.

Jake, erect at the bow as he steers, is as straight as Oshkosh; the
boat gathers speed in a curve that picks up one of the bearings and
then straight as a pencil line over the water for a mile--then a stop
with a reversed engine, without a turn, or the bearings would be lost,
and there we are--right over the rock.  In a clear light it's as plain
as day, but on a dull day you can just make it out, a great rock sunk
in a wide basin of water for the bass to get in.

Here we try our final luck.  We can't leave.  If the bass are there (I
mean if they are biting) it's too good to leave.  If we don't get a
bite, we just _can't_ leave.

We haven't realized it, but the afternoon has all gone.  The sun is
setting behind the hills on the west side of the lake.  Just before it
goes its beams light up for a moment the windows of unseen farm-houses
ten miles the other side of us--and then, before we know it, the sun is
gone.  But we can't leave.  It's still broad daylight yet.

"There's two or three hours good fishing yet, Jake, eh?"

"All of that, Professor."

Somehow it seems as if the day were suddenly all gone.  "Have another
horn, Jake?"  Surely that'll hold the daylight a little, giving Jake a
horn.  Anyway we can't leave.  The light is fading a little.  A cold
wind begins to move across the lake; the water seems to blacken under
its touch as the boat swings to it.

"The wind's kind o' gone round," says Jake.  "I thought it would."
It's not surprising.  The wind has gone round and the air turned chill
after sundown every evening of the sixty years I've known Lake Simcoe.
But we can't leave.  Charlie Janes has had a bite--or says he has.  We
never take Charlie's word, of course, as really good; he may have
caught in a crack of rock.  But Rapley thinks he had a nibble.  That's
better evidence.  So we stay on--and on--till the dark has fallen, the
shores have all grown dim and then vanished and the north-west wind is
beginning to thump the waves on the bow of the anchored boat.

"I guess, gentlemen, it's about time to pull up," says Jake.  If we had
caught fifteen or twenty bass he'd have said, "Boys, I guess it's about
time to quit."  But "gentlemen" brings us back to the cold cruel
reality.

So the anchor is up and the motor boat at its full power set for home.
It's quite rough on the water now; the boat slaps into the waves and
sends the spray flying clear astern to where we have our chairs huddled
together, back to the wind.  It's dark too.  You have to use a
flash-light to open the soda for the "consolation drinks" that mark the
end of the fishing.

"Have a horn, Jake?"

"Thanks, Professor."

Jake, with his oil clothes on, can't leave the wheel now; he sits there
all in the spray with one hand for steering and one for the drink.

      *      *      *      *      *

It's amazing how a lake like Lake Simcoe can change--a few hours ago a
halcyon paradise, still and calm--and now with the night and the wind
gathering over it--

"Oh, well, Jake knows the way," and anyway it's only three miles till
we'll be in shelter of the Narrows!--Whew! that was a corker, that
wave!  "Here, put these newspapers behind your back, Charlie, they'll
keep off the spray."

Just enough of this to give one a slight feeling of night and mimic
danger--and then, in no great time, for the distance is short, we round
into the shelter of the Narrows with just a mile of water, smoother and
smoother, to run.

All different it looks from the morning; what you see now is just
lights--a perplexing galaxy of lights, white and green and red here and
there on the unseen shore--and great flares of moving white light that
must be the motors on the highway.

"What's the red light away up, Jake?"

"That's the one above the railway bridge."  We always ask Jake this and
when he answers we know we are close in.  The water suddenly is quite
smooth, a current running with us--the summer cottages and docks come
in sight, with "young fellers" and girls in canoes and the sound of a
radio somewhere discussing war in Europe.

We're back in the world again, landed at Jake's dock with a little
crowd of loafers and boys standing round to see "how many fish Jake
got"--not us, _Jake_.  We unload the boat and take a look at the string
of fish.  "Let's see that big one that Rapley caught, eh?"  But where
is it?  Surely it can't be this small dirty-looking flabby thing--I'm
afraid it is.

We divide the fish.  Jake won't take any.  We try to work them off on
one another.  Fishermen want _fishing_, never fish--and end by slinging
them into the car all in one box.  "Well, we certainly had a fine day;
good night, Jake."  And another fishing day has gone--now never to
return.

I can only repeat, in tribute to a fine memory, "Good night, Jake."




FINIS




[End of _Too Much College_ by Stephen Leacock]
