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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031422888 
 
ON THE TEACHING 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 IN 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE. 
 
fLnnSon: C. J. CLAY AND SONS, 
 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, 
 
 AVE MARIA LANE. 
 
 ffistniirilrgj } DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO. 
 ILcijjis: F. A. BROCKHAUS. 
 
ON THE TEACHING ■ 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 IN 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE. 
 
 TWO LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CAMBRIDGE IN THE LENT TERM, 1887. 
 
 BY 
 
 C. COLBECK, M.A. 
 
 ASSISTANT MASTER IN HARROW SCHOOL : LATE FELLOW OF 
 TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1887 
 
 [All Rights resei"ved.\ 
 
@am<itit)ge : 
 
 PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. & SONS, 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THESE Lectures were written at the request of 
 the Teachers' Training Syndicate. The second 
 appears in a slightly altered form. As delivered it 
 consisted largely of oral illustrations and comments, 
 only a portion of which is now printed, while some 
 parts have been expanded. There seems to be at last 
 a disposition to regard seriously the pretensions of 
 Modern Languages to a larger place in Education, 
 and I am not therefore without hope that the First 
 Lecture, if only by the criticism which it evokes, may 
 in some way serve to promote their claim, and 
 especially their claim as Literature, to a fair hearing. 
 Teachers generally find details concerning the 
 practice of other teachers interesting, but I can not 
 flatter myself that any one else will read the Second 
 Lecture to the end. ' 
 
 My grateful acknowledgments are due to 
 Mr R. H. Quick for help and counsel in old days 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 and again upon this occasion, and to my colleague 
 Mr W. G. Guillemard, to whom I owe in particular 
 the piece of German Prose given as a model in 
 the Second Lecture and who generously placed his 
 note-books at my disposal. 
 
 C.C. 
 
 Harrow, May, 1887. 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
ON THE TEACHING OF MODERN 
 LANGUAGES. 
 
 I. 
 
 I MUST begin by stating that Modern Languages in 
 these lectures mean the languages and literatures of 
 France and Germany. Not that I am so rash or so wholly 
 ignorant as to think that no other modern language has a 
 claim to rank beside these, or that I wish to be so rigidly 
 practical that I would exclude all considerations of what, 
 not is, but ought to be the actual state of the case ; but 
 because whatever I may have to say from my own experience 
 and knowledge necessarily applies to these two alone, for 
 I know no others — and have taught no others. Nor do 
 I include English, for the teaching of the mother tongue, 
 though the reasons for it are in many cases the same, is in 
 practice so different from the teaching of a foreign language 
 that the two cannot profitably be considered together. 
 
 Nor again, except incidentally, do I. intend to put forward 
 any opinions upon the kind of teaching which will be proper 
 for your Professors of Modern Languages when you possess 
 them, nor upon your happily inaugurated Modern Languages 
 
 c. L. I 
 
2 THE CLAIMS 
 
 Tripos, though this latter bears most materially upon the 
 school teaching of the future and cannot therefore be wholly 
 excluded. 
 
 If I begin then, as I shall, by asking " Why do we teach 
 French and German at all?" it is because upon our answer 
 will depend the method upon which we proceed in teaching 
 them. Or rather the method should depend upon this ; 
 but alas ! method is apt to be merely traditional ; and 
 Societies and Syndicates for the training of Teachers have 
 done no service more real in the cause of education than 
 by impressing even upon the unwilling minds of those who 
 believe that there is no science of education at all, but 
 only at most an art, and that an art without a theory, the 
 necessity of considering what portion of their daily practice 
 really serves the end which they are seeking. 
 
 Why then do we teach Modern Languages ? 
 
 Essentially because they are so supremely useful. Let 
 us not be ashamed to say this. The advance in the teaching 
 of them has kept pace and will continue to keep pace with 
 the advanee of utilitarianism in education; nay the very 
 doctrine on which their claims are based was formulated 
 just about the time when French first obtained a place in 
 the regular course of instruction in our English pubhc 
 schools, Sixty years ago, I do not believe that any public 
 school taught French except as an extra, like drawing and 
 dancing, and I do not believe that any taught German 
 at all. A liberal education was an education for a class 
 born into a world of already secured positions, a world of 
 sinecurists and courtiers, of place-holders and pluralists, of 
 broad acres and fat livings, a world therefore for which the 
 traditionary classics were all-sufficient, and whose ideal, no 
 ignoble one withal, — for I do not mean, or think or allege 
 
OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 3 
 
 that the education was a bad one, I only say that it made 
 no provision for a work-a-day world,^ — whose ideal was 
 summed up in the time-honoured phrase " a scholar and a 
 gentleman". But the world outside the schools was widening. 
 Science was already knocking at their doors. Commerce 
 and industry, travel and geography, the inclusion in the 
 public school system of the middle classes, the increase of 
 population, the reform of the public services, competitive 
 examinations, the Napoleonic wars, the writings of Goethe 
 and Schiller, a German Prince Consort, international exhibi- 
 tions, international trade, the struggle for existence and 
 survival of the fittest, these and all that they implied' 
 combined to raise the study of modern languages from the 
 status of an accompUshment, or a commercial art, on a 
 level let us say with book-keeping, to rank as an integral 
 portion of a liberal education. Those who had to devise 
 examinations for the public services could not but con- 
 sider the matter from the utilitarian stand-point, though 
 deference to tradition — and especially to the tradition of 
 fashion, that worst of all traditions, in as much as it sub- 
 stitutes servility for veneration — largely interfered with' 
 their work. Still we can see that at the basis of our 
 competitive examinations is the one principle which can 
 never lead us astray ; that education means the training of 
 a man to bear himself worthily, and to perform ably his 
 share of the world's work; and that while much of education- 
 will therefore be common to all, just as the qualities which 
 make up the worthy and able man in whatever capacity are 
 largely the same, yet a considerable portion of the training 
 of the man must depend upon the nature of the post he is 
 intended to occupy. And it is one not the least of the 
 honours of Cambridge that it has recognised that whatever 
 
4 THE CLAIMS 
 
 Study the world needs a University should teach in all its 
 breadth and fulness. 
 
 All studies are good for man, some more some less, some 
 for this man some for that, and the more widely and more 
 deeply a study is pursued, the better for the world; this it is 
 that our Alma Mater has proclaimed aloud by her new 
 Triposes, and nothing less than this is the true conception 
 of a Universitas Studiorum. There is some trace still of 
 the old mistrust, I fear I must say of the old contempt. 
 The living languages, we have been told, are too trivial to be 
 scholarly, too easy to be learned, too useful to be dignified. 
 There is no language like a dead one I suppose, all else 
 is dialect And on the principle that to rail is not 
 only easier than to reason, but far more attractive and 
 persuasive to those whose interests are feeble, and who 
 love to have their opinions formed for them, a Modem 
 Languages Tripos was dubbed a "Courier" Tripos, the 
 Antiquarians triumphed, and what Cambridge possesses at 
 the present moment would more properly be styled the 
 Mediaeval and Modern Languages Tripos. Now there is 
 everything to be said for a Mediaeval Languages Tripos in 
 itself, though the arguments for it are not of precisely the 
 same kind as those which make for the Modern Languages ; 
 but I venture to think that there is very little to be said for 
 and very much to be said against this Unking of the two, and 
 in the interests of Uterature in general I hope that they may 
 soon be dissociated. But I will come back to my immediate 
 topic. 
 
 We teach Modern Languages, firstly because they are so 
 supremely useful. If I spend a few moments in stating 
 fully in what various ways they are so, it is because each 
 use they serve bears upon the methods of their study. 
 
OF MODERN LANGUAGES. S 
 
 1. Consider how a knowledge of French and German 
 doubles and trebles, and more, the library whence knowledge 
 may be drawn. How much of history and philosophy, of 
 geography and travel is written in French ; how much of 
 history, of philosophy, of science, of mathematics, of 
 geography in German ! Nor can we accept the reply that 
 all that is worth reading either has been or can be translated, 
 for not only will translations not pay for much that is most 
 deserving of perusal, but also translations cannot keep pace 
 with the ever increasing mass of literature ; and even if it 
 could, it is a wasteful process, wasting in sheer superfluity 
 the capital and labour of translator and publisher. And 
 even so again we need a large army of translators, and these 
 must be well trained. 
 
 2. They are useful and indispensable to the passing 
 traveller, that is to everyone now-a-days. 
 
 3. All Europe and the coasts of the Mediterranean are 
 no longer strange places, but a home to the resident abroad 
 who is armed with one or both of these languages. 
 
 4. Commerce needs them at home. What proportion 
 of corresponding clerks in our City houses are English at 
 this present moment? How gladly and profitably would 
 nine-tenths of our middle classes exchange their little Latin 
 and less Greek for a passable knowledge of even one 
 Modern Language ! How laboriously do they acquire them 
 in later life after business hours, with jaded minds and at a 
 belated age ! 
 
 5. French is still the language of diplomacy. We have 
 all read in a recent book at what disadvantage the late Earl 
 Russell found himself for want of an adequate knowledge of 
 it. Some of us know that the proficiency even now of the 
 
6 THE CLASSICS AND 
 
 clerks of the Foreign Office leaves much to be desired — but 
 I need not continue. 
 
 Secondly, we teach Modem Languages because they are, 
 by comparison, so easy that our teacmng does not run to 
 waste. 
 
 We teach boys Greek, and we have so far advanced in 
 honesty, or frankness, that we own that nine-tenths of them 
 learn little, forget that little soon, and never touch a Greek 
 book when once they leave school. We defend the practice 
 by saying that we have been "training faculty". If we told 
 the real truth we should say that we do it for three reasons. 
 I. Because we know some Greek and can teach it. 2. Be- 
 cause fashion demands it. 3. Because we really do want to 
 teach it to one-tenth of our boys who will do some good 
 with it. Now so soon as we adopt a reasonable practice 
 and take for all boys Latin, if possible, and one or more 
 living languages for that linguistic training which I believe 
 •we are all agreed is an essential part of a complete education 
 1 (besides being the cheapest and for most boys the most 
 human and exhilarating and stimulating), then and not till 
 then we shall find that we are training faculty in reality Iq 
 the nine-tenths as well as the one-tenth ; and also that what-., 
 ever portion our pupils have grasped of vocabulary, grammar, 
 and literature is a possession of which they will really make 
 use, which they will really extend, which they do really 
 appreciate, which will bear real fruit. In other words we 
 shall have emerged from darkness to light, from the cloud- 
 land of fancy to the terra firma of fact. Surely it is not too 
 much to say that before we teagh any subject merely to 
 "train faculty" we ought at least to have made the circuit of 
 all other possible subjects of study to see if we cannot find 
 
MODERN LANGUAGES. 7 
 
 one, in which we may combine some actual knowledge with 
 the bare power to know. 
 
 Thirdly, we teach Modem Languages for the sake of the 
 culture which they afford. 
 
 Having put first the bread and cheese principle of real 
 material utility, we need not nevertheless fear to claim for 
 living tongues a potency in kindling the imagination, 
 ennobling thought, inspiring right feeling and worthy action, 
 charming the ear by beauty of sound and rhythm, and the 
 reason by force or grace, or stateliness of expression, enliven- 
 ing by the brilliancy of wit and the glow of humour. We 
 need not care to dispute as to their place and precedence in 
 these respects ; I will only venture just to express my own 
 conviction, that while I should place Greek far above 
 French or German, I should place Latin below either. 
 That is not the point. If the " Humanities " are contained ' 
 in French and German, then there are so many other 
 reasons for seeking our training in the "Humanities" from 
 them that we shall be right in so doing for the majority of 
 the young. 
 
 It often seems to me strange, when the "Classics" in the 
 narrow sense of the word are placed educationally so far 
 above Modern Languages, that no offset is made for the 
 very important fact that while the masterpieces of ancient 
 literature are essentially pagan, modern literature is, not 
 indeed essentially, but in colour and setting. Christian. I 
 know that it may be said that the very greatest names in 
 Literature, old or new, are neither Pagan nor Christian, but 
 purely human, and that for the poets Great Pan did not 
 die as Thamus was bidden to proclaim. I know that there 
 is nothing nobler in any literature than much of Aeschylus, 
 
8 THE CLASSICS AND 
 
 of Sophocles, of Plato, of Lucretius ; I admit that if the old 
 world was sensual and coarse the new is sensuous and 
 sensual. That is one of the sad facts of the world, that the 
 introduction to what is most beautiful of human work is also 
 an introduction to what is most perilous; and I will not say 
 that the "poisonous honey" of France is not of all that is 
 perilous the most to be dreaded. But I do say that, while 
 barely one escapes some taint of soul from his schoolboy 
 classics, it is possible that in all his schoolboy reading in 
 Modern Languages he may, (and we teachers ought to see 
 that he does), escape the introduction to anything that can 
 fairly be called demoralizing. The knowledge of evil is 
 inevitable — the virtue of the modern world is like Milton's 
 not "fugitive or cloistered". But at least the atmosphere of 
 modern literature is full of the ideas that the world owes to 
 Christianity. Do you know the lines of a poet who was no 
 saint and no preacher ajid would have solved the riddle of 
 existence .without revelation if he could ? I mean Alfred de 
 Musset. They are from a remarkable poem entitled ' Espoir 
 en Dieu '. He says 
 
 " Une immense esperance a traverse la terre ; 
 Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux," 
 
 and Horace and Epicurus discourse to us in vain. 
 
 Therefore I say, Teach a boy Greek if you can ; and if 
 yoii cannot, give him, in a good translation, Homer and 
 the Prometheus Vinctus, and the Oedipus at Colonus 
 . and the Antigone, and the end of the Phaedo, the 
 Apology and the Crito. Their thoughts are part of his 
 inheritance, and he must enter into possession. But give 
 him also, because you can, without over-taxing even feeble 
 powers or using hours that ought not to be spared, give 
 
MODERN LANGUAGES. 9 
 
 him the power to read in the original such works as Faust, 
 in which all the bitter-sweet of emotion and intellect 
 finds manifold expression, as Wallenstein and Don Carlos, 
 as Hermann and Dorothea, and Reineke Fuchs, as 
 Barfiissele, most charming of a thousand charming idylls; 
 and in French such works as the Tartuffe and a hundred 
 more plays, as Notre Dame de Paris, as La Mare au Diable, 
 and Consuelo, and as that most touching, to my mind, of 
 all poems that are, because it is instinct with the wonders 
 and terrors of the sea, with the courage and devotion that 
 consecrate human labour, and with the pitying love that 
 transmutes misfortune and misery into precious jewels — ^I 
 mean that poem of the L^gendes des Siecles entitled "Les 
 Pauvres Gens ". 
 
 Fourthly, we teach Modern Languages as a branch of 
 science and research. I shall have a good deal to say 
 presently as to the limitations which are advisable and 
 necessary in this direction at school, but considering them 
 as learned languages and considering them apart, the scholar 
 who sets himself to learn historically the grammar, phono- 
 logy, and literature of France or Germany will find as 
 deep an interest and as wide a field as he can desire. Now 
 the true relation of the teaching of the young to research 
 and speciality is this — that our teaching should lead them a 
 little way in these directions, should give to all a conception 
 of what has been done for them in the past, of what still 
 needs doing and how well worth the doing it is ; to give to 
 'Can few some small equipment for their quest. 
 
 To carry out this in German and above all in French is 
 a useful and pleasant task. 
 
 For use in life then, for linguistic training of the mind, 
 as culture, as science, we claim for Modern Languages the 
 
lo MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 right to stand in no rank below the first, and if weighed 
 against other subjects, to be declared of more value be- 
 cause of the manifold nature of the education which they 
 can bestow. 
 
 Let me now try to state in what way the method which 
 we shall adopt will depend upon the use which we intend to 
 make of the languages. 
 
 For use in actual life, we all wish to be able to read 
 them. I put that clearly first. If the two powers could be 
 entirely separated, and we were given the choice of the 
 power to read French or of the power to converse in it, or 
 of the power to correspond in it, I cannot doubt that we 
 should choose the first; though we should all gladly be able 
 also to converse in it, and we should many of us be very 
 glad if we could correspond in it and translate from English 
 prose into it in good style. Fortunately, if I am right in 
 placing our wants in that order, that is precisely the order in 
 which they are the easiest to satisfy, and the vanity and 
 inordinateness of human wishes for once fail to find an 
 illustration. But it is not the order in which our knowledge 
 naturally developes : the reading and the power of composition 
 are linked more or less closely together, while the power to 
 converse (easily acquired under certain conditions presently 
 to be considered) stands apart and presents some peculiari- 
 ties. Now, if reading is the most important and universal 
 need, it follows that we shall attend to this first (unless there 
 be some reason to suppose that conversation must be learnt 
 very early or not at all), and we shall not therefore be as 
 anxious as some teachers are to begin in the nursery, and 
 to provide for all children the Swiss bilingual bonne. I 
 should not for my own part place the study of any language 
 but its own very early in a child's training. Observation 
 
IN THE NURSERY. £l 
 
 of the world, geography, history, the elementary notions 
 of number, form, and space, the intelligent reading and 
 learning of the mother tongue all seem to me to have a 
 prior claim. If our children begin at nine or ten they will go 
 far enough before they leave school, if justice is done them. 
 Not that if opportunity occurs for Modern Languages 
 I regard them as harmful, or that if boys arrived at Harrow 
 having already like M. Jourdain spoken French prose 
 all their life without knowing it, I should wish for the 
 mere pleasure or profit of teaching them to proceed to 
 change the unconscious into conscious knowledge; but I do 
 mean that the usual school method of beginning by setting 
 a boy to learn his grammar and as soon as may be to read 
 a book, is only so far wrong that T would begin by helping 
 him to read a book and letting him as soon as may be learn 
 his grammar. 
 
 And here, " impar congressus Achilli ", I must perforce 
 break a lance with the Master of Balliol even at the risk of 
 extermination without being allowed appeal k misdricorde. 
 You have all seen at least a brief report of his charming 
 speech in welcome to the Professeurs de Frangais at Oxford, 
 and I hope you have all seen it reported at length. He 
 places the Modern Languages as high as I would; he 
 expresses with force and grace all the dignity of the litera- 
 ture of France ; he rises high, as one would expect, above 
 the fetish worship of the Classics, and h"e would insist on a 
 knowledge of a Modern Language as a necessary and 
 indispensable qualification for admission to a University. 
 But he thinks Modem Languages can be taught between 
 the ages of six and ten, and not one language only but two, 
 and even a third! and he thinks the linguistic faculty is 
 strongest at ten and extinct at twenty. 
 
12 MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 "The first step towards a more successful study of Modern 
 Languages is to teach them in the order and manner which 
 nature indicates. We observe that while the powers of the 
 mind usually strengthen as years advance, at least until the 
 end of middle life, the faculty of learning a new language 
 decays almost in an inverse ratio. A very few only retain 
 this, as well as some other gifts of childhood, throughout 
 life. But, in general, the power of acquiring languages is 
 soon lost. It is stronger before than after ten years of age, 
 before twenty than after twenty, and so on in the successive 
 stages of life. The infant learns his own language in a 
 manner which is almost mysterious to us. He makes and 
 understands signs. He wants to speak and to be spoken 
 to. He uses gestures to help out his own inarticulateness. 
 The fountain of speech is rising to the surface, and he soon 
 breaks out into words and phrases. He is always repeating 
 the names of things and persons which he knows, and the 
 more he can babble the better he is pleased. At five or six 
 years of age he has a stock of at least 400 or 500 words, 
 and a grammar of his own, which is nearly perfect, and 
 which he rarely, if ever, violates. But the faculty of speech 
 is not yet exhausted. If, at the age of five or six years, 
 he is transplanted into another country, and hears French 
 or some other language everywhere spoken, he will acquire 
 the new language much in the same, manner as he acquired 
 the old, and with nearly equal facility; the power of imita- 
 tion is alive in him still. The short period of six months is 
 said to be enough to perfect a clever child in a new 
 language, that is to say, within the limits of his own narrow 
 circle of wants and ideas. The familiarity which he has 
 thus acquired in the use and pronunciation of a language 
 may be forgotten in after life, but is easily recovered, and 
 
IN THE NURSERY. 13 
 
 he will always possess a great advantage over another, whose 
 knowledge of French and German is acquired by reading 
 only. To a second language, if his surroundings are again 
 changed, the child may even add a third, which he learns 
 in the same childish fashion. It is to be observed that he 
 rarely confuses different languages. If the weight becomes 
 too great for his memory, one drives out the other. They 
 are learned as a whole and they are forgotten as a whole. 
 But the forgotten language is still latent in his mind, and 
 may be easily recovered — not at once, but in a very few 
 days or weeks when the sounds which he has heard so often 
 in childhood once more catch his ear." 
 
 The paragraph is delightful, and with much I cordially 
 and from experience agree, but as for the linguistic 
 power dying at twenty and decaying at ten, I can honestly 
 say that one of the pleasantest recollections I have of 
 much teaching of easy German is the rapidity with which an 
 older boy, say of sixteen (suddenly transferred to the Modern 
 Side), gallops through the elements and takes his place 
 shortly with the best. I am convinced that the more lan- 
 guages a man learns the more easily each is acquired, and 
 that age is no impediment until indeed all the faculties 
 begin to wane together; and if you ask me how long a grown 
 man would take to learn what the child learns in six months, 
 I should say (under conditions as favourable) one month. 
 Again, and this is an essential point. Professor Jowett says 
 that nature bids us begin by conversation, begin by the gate 
 of the ear. I really think that this is a fallacy which can be 
 demonstrated. I submit that for all, young or old, the eye 
 is incomparably the swifter gate to knowledge, and that so 
 soon as we can use, we do use it and rightly use it in 
 preference to, though of course not to the exclusion of, the 
 
14 MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 ear. No doubt, until the child has" learnt the use of that 
 greatest of all human inventions, the written alphabet and 
 written speech, we must perforce proceed orally.j The use 
 of the eye in language is an artificial and laborious 
 acquisition, but once acquired it can be applied to all lan- 
 guages, and it is the only means of rapidly acquiring 
 accuracy. Nor do I mean accuracy of an intricate kind 
 only; if I did I should be liable to the objection that this is 
 just the part of language-teaching which we schoolmasters 
 insist upon overmuch, as no doubt we may. It is open to 
 a ready test by all. Take a child who has acquired good 
 nursery French, ask him to write down a sentence, or if you 
 think that unfair, yourself write down exactly what falls 
 from his lips — you will find no discrimination of -ez -er -'e 
 -ais -at -ait. Now count the number of times these termina- 
 tions occur in a page of conversation and you can form 
 some estimate (though far below the reality) of the extent to 
 which he is liable to error, and how many mistakes he will 
 make in translating and in understanding what is said or 
 read to him, so soon as he steps beyond the very meagre and 
 not very useful range of the sentences which, learnt by ear, 
 are to him intelligible only as wholes. I know too well 
 how irksome is the task of eradicating these inaccuracies, 
 how it hurts the child's pride and chafes his patience. And 
 if you look into the matter you will see that it is a real in- 
 accuracy of thought which bars the way to any intelligent 
 writing of the language at all. If, on the contraiy, the lan- 
 guage is learnt when the child can read, if the new words 
 are first sounded to him, then written for him, then seen by 
 him in print, then written by him, then reproduced by ear 
 and eye, you will find that progress is faster, and retentive- 
 ness greater, and that what is known is known accurately. 
 
IN THE NURSERY. 15 
 
 It is said again that if children acquire two or more lan- 
 guages orally in infancy they do not mix them. That is, I 
 believe, not the case, and if it is not, the objection to a 
 polyglot mayonnaise of words is real though perhaps not 
 very serious. I can however agree heartily in the statement 
 that a language once learnt conversationally at any age, so 
 as to be a real instrument of thought, within a certain range 
 is never really forgotten. It may be overlaid by other lan- 
 guages or other knowledges, but the palimpsest is easily re- 
 vived ; the birds are still in the aviary of the mind and can 
 be recaptured; and though I cannot see in this any argument 
 for learning a language in childhood (unless in childhood 
 there is nothing better to be done), it is no doubt a very 
 important and a very comforting thought for those whose 
 visits to foreign lands have become less frequent and whose 
 French and German have grown rusty. I would ask 
 you who hear me whether this, or something like this, 
 is not the process of revival. At first neither words nor 
 sentences will come, and we say despairingly it is gone 
 past recall; but as the old familiar sounds surround us 
 and we pick up again first one and then another idiom, the 
 mind regains its ready utterance, and one long bout of 
 foreign talk, or even of reading, sends us to bed once more 
 to find that even in our dreams our thoughts frame them- 
 selves not in English but in the foreign tongue, and we feel 
 that we resume our progress almost at the point where we 
 left off. 
 
 But it will be urged, the true accent is never acquired 
 in later years, the tongue and throat are less supple, the ear 
 less quick tO'-rtfote the true sounds. Now it would be 
 strange if it were so, for in music the childish ear is less 
 quick than in the stage of maturity, and the mother-tongue 
 
l6 PRONUNCIATION. 
 
 is not best spoken between the ages of six and eight, indeed 
 some sounds are then impossibilities to many children. Nor 
 is it my experience that pronunciation cannot be learned 
 by a boy of fifteen or a man of twenty or thirty. The 
 reason of the extremely faulty pronunciation of all school- 
 boys and of most of their teachers is not that they cannot be 
 taught it, but that for various reasons they are not. I shall 
 have something to say on this later. I will only say now that 
 as I would rather occupy the years from six to nine or ten 
 with other teaching than Modern Languages, so I would rather 
 teach a child articulation, tone, and power of sustained 
 speech and recitation through the mother tongue ; and I 
 would give a great deal of time to this much neglected side 
 of education. There are few sounds in other languages which 
 require the organs of speech to be used in a way in which 
 they are not used in English. There are fewer still which 
 are difficult of acquirement. The difficulty is not that the 
 sound cannot be imitated, but that it is not aimed at. We 
 visualize the letters and give them unconsciously their 
 English force, and hence nine-tenths of our blunders. 
 
 My conclusion is therefore that the power of conversing 
 in a foreign language can be acquired at least as easily late 
 as early; that it is much less important than translation, and 
 less important than composition, and that in learning it at 
 whatever age we waste power if we proceed by ear only. 
 
 I do not wish to be misunderstood as holding that many 
 children do not converse better than their elders. I do 
 assert that when this is the case the children have, as a 
 matter of fact, given to the acquisition of this power more 
 time and pains than their elders would have to bestow in 
 order to rival them, and that it would be a great pity to 
 endeavour so to lay out a scheme of education as to bring 
 
MEMOSY. 17 
 
 in conversational Modern Languages at an early date. If 
 any one doubts this let him try to estimate (i) the number 
 of hours daily which a child living with foreigners is talking 
 or being talked to in a foreign language, (2) the number 
 of distinct separate efforts which have been made by the 
 child, (3) the number of distinct instructional efforts be- 
 stowed upon the child by an individual with no one else to 
 attend to ; and then sum up the number of similar advan- 
 tages which their elders with whom they are compared, as I 
 hold so unfairly, have enjoyed during their term of learning. 
 Of course if the child lives abroad, or the mother or nurse 
 can teach this well and not the other subjects (in short if 
 the case be special), I do not say the balance of gain would 
 not be on the side of so teaching. There remains the 
 objection often urged that memory is strongest in the child 
 of all the faculties, and that therefore conversation, which 
 depends chiefly on memory, can only be acquired young. 
 But again I would answer, granting as I do grant that it 
 depends on memory, and that memory is strong at an early 
 age — I do not believe that it is stronger in childhood than 
 in mature age, which is the only assumption that can justify 
 the inference that is drawn. Memory is always, it seems to 
 me, quite as strong as is needed, generally too strong, 
 certainly too much insisted on, and of all the faculties the 
 least noble. It should be the merest handmaid and severely 
 subordinated. It is early developed, and we should be 
 wrong to appeal too soon to reason, but with so much upon 
 which we can exercise memory usefully let us at least make 
 a careful selection of the tasks which we will set it. I 
 would use it to give the child an ample store of the simpler 
 poems of its own language, of the treasures in prose of its 
 English Bible, of the names of the flowers of the field, of 
 
 c. L. 2 
 
1 8 MR PRENDERGAST'S SYSTEM. 
 
 the birds of the air, and the Hving creatures of the world 
 about it ; I would make memory the handmaid of the equally 
 early developed power of observation, from which so much 
 more delight and more real mental development may be 
 derived. I have not mentioned the difficulty of procuring 
 good teaching for children, nor the expense, which would 
 prevent the system ever extending below the wealthy classes 
 and even the very wealthy classes; yet it is not for the 
 wealthy that education will be or ought to be mainly 
 organized. 
 
 But if I have maintained the paramount supremacy of 
 the eye in learning, do not let me be thought to under- 
 value the ear. Whenever we desire to gain the power to 
 converse, we must diligently use the ear and learn phrases 
 and sentences as wholes. And it is by basing his teaching 
 , and handbooks upon the clear perception of this that 
 Mr Prendergast has done a real service to language teach- 
 ing. 
 
 I think he carries his theory much too far; under-esti- 
 mates by far the amount of claim which his system makes 
 upon time and energy, to say nothing of patience and 
 interest : that he over-estimates the actual result, and still 
 more the value of the result. But I would always speak 
 with the greatest respect of his enthusiasm and industry, and 
 of the value of what he happily terms "mastery of sentences,'' 
 and of the development by his " variations " of the full use 
 to which each type of sentence when mastered can be made 
 to serve. 
 
 His system deserves to be studied in the book which he 
 has devoted to it, "The Mastery of Languages", but most of 
 you probably know one or more of his handbooks in which 
 the system has been applied to French, German, Italian, 
 
MJ{ PRENDERGASTS SYSTEM. "' 19 
 
 Spanish and Latin. It consists in brief of a few carefully 
 chosen sentences taken up piece by piece, and on each 
 fragment of each sentence are rung all the linguistic changes 
 which the words will bear, the literal English being placed 
 opposite to each foreign sentence. L By the time the 
 hundredth page is reached, out of fifteen sentences, each of 
 some fifteen or twenty words, there have been formed some 
 fifteen hundred sentences interrogative, negative, affirmative, 
 etc., etc. All must be mastered, all must be kept up as you 
 go forward; no other French words are to be looked at 
 during the process. Lessons are to last ten minutes, to be 
 not less than three per diem; the master's function is to 
 hear and to give the right intonation and pronunciation. 
 Then come, and not till then, tables of French inflexions 
 and a system of "variations" which is really ingenious, 
 and which I have had printed for the purpose of this 
 lecture. 
 
 Diversifying Table showing the commonest English Words 
 grouped so as to facilitate the making of Variations, to be 
 used as Exercises in vivA voce composition in any language, 
 'whether ancient or modem. 
 
 A. unless, if, whether, although, yet, but, besides, 
 except, during, whilst, because, for, as, whereas, since, after, 
 before, instead of, that, lest, until, upon, whenever, there- 
 fore, in, from, without, before, else, and, or. 
 
 B. I, thou, he, she, it, we, you, they ; my, thy, his, her, 
 its, our, your, their. 
 
 C. am, \art, are; be; do, does, did; have, has, had; 
 is, was, wast, were, wert ; will, would, shall, should ; can, 
 could ; may, might ; must ; ought, let. 
 
 2 — 2 
 
20 MR PRENDERGASTS SYSTEM. 
 
 D. being, been; bought, buying; brought, brings; calls, 
 called; comes, came; doing, done; find, found; gave, given ; 
 going, gone ; having ; meets, met ; makes, made ; put ; saw, 
 seen; sell, sold; sends, sent; showed; stopped; taken, took; 
 telling, told ; wanted ; went ; procured. 
 
 E. me, thee, him, her, it, self, us, you, them, selves ; 
 my, his, her, its, our, your, their; mine, thine, hers, ours, 
 yours, theirs ; a, an, the. 
 
 F. which, who, whom ; how much, how many ; why ; 
 when ; whither, whence, where ; whose, what, how. 
 
 G. a, an, the; this, more, such, that, any, every, an- 
 other, several, those, most, these, other, either, neither, some, 
 many, few, rest ; one, first, two, second, &c. 
 
 H. on, into, of, instead of, between, out of, about, 
 beyond, over, through, near, among, below, under, towards, 
 in, down, to, at, behind, beside, with, from, without, con- 
 cerning, before, after. 
 
 I. together, often ; to-day, yesterday, to-morrow ; here, 
 there; better, best; yes, no, not; back, very, next, first, 
 away, soon, afterwards, well, ago, than. 
 
 Directions. — Take any sentence, being an English 
 version of a foreign one already committed to memory, and 
 interchange the words, one at a time, with those in the 
 groups to which they severally belong. 
 
 When the words in this list have all been mastered, 
 proceed to diversify the sentences as in Examples I. and II. 
 Substitute nouns for pronouns, and pronouns for nouns, at 
 pleasure. 
 
 The auxiliary verbs ought frequently to be massed thus : 
 might have been, &c. 
 
MR PRENDERGASVS SYSTEM. 
 
 DIVERSIFIED SENTENCES. 
 
 rbce dgd hgg 
 
 I. Can you let me have a sitting-room on the first floor 
 t g 
 
 for three days ? 
 
 cbcedg d hgg 
 
 Will you let me take a sitting-room on the third floor 
 h g" 
 ioxfour days ? 
 
 abcide he be 
 
 II. If I had not met your servant in the street, I should 
 
 ic d abc d h 
 
 not have known that you had returned from Spain. 
 
 abde he be 
 
 Although we saw her child near their house, we could 
 
 id abei dh 
 
 not believe that they had not started for Portugal. 
 
 Any one who knows how defective is the ordinary voca- 
 bulary in the matter of conjunctions, adverbs and prepo- 
 sitions, especially compound prepositions, will see the value 
 of a means so simple of bringing the attention to bear upon 
 them grouped separately and exhibiting each member in 
 actual use. It is an ingenious, practical, labour-saving in- 
 strument, and as such should be known to every teacher and 
 learner. Mr Prendergast has in fact called attention to the 
 important difference between matter and form, and by en- 
 abling the learner to acquire certain " cadres " and shewing 
 him how to import new matter into them he has done good 
 work. Again, his method sets the mind at ease : it makes a 
 certg,in part of the operation of speech mechanical, transfers 
 the labour from the central conscious organ to a sub- 
 
22 OBJECTIONS. 
 
 sidiary unconscious automatic ganglion, and thus facilitates 
 learning. 
 
 Now for my objections to his system. 
 
 I. The results are not commensurate with the pains 
 required. The pupil is not qualified to converse at the end. 
 The book forms a useful series of repetition lessons nicely 
 graduated and is a good subsidiary. But this is rank heresy 
 according to Mr Prendergast, who will be loved " all in all 
 or not at all ". I am myself a corpus vile on which experi- 
 ment has been mada I have heard the French book once 
 a week for fifteen years, and have gone as near to mastering 
 it as any one ever has, I verily believe ; but if I depended 
 upon it for my power of making my wants known abroad, I 
 should get a smaller percentage of them satisfied than I do 
 now, which would be a serious matter. I admit however 
 that not unfrequently in earlier days, with an inward 
 chuckle, I used to frame my remarks into one of the 
 well-known tags and sail away glibly to the end of my 
 sentence, to the mingled pleasure and astonishment of 
 my interlocutor at my sudden access of fluency and ac- 
 curacy, who regarded me as Balaam may have regarded his 
 ass on a celebrated occasion. I once quite cowed a 
 German official at a post office into obsequiousness with a 
 round shot from Prendergast. 
 
 II. The process is deadly dull, and of methods it may 
 surely be said that none is wholly wrong but the dull 
 one. 
 
 III. Idioms are far more isolated than Mr Prendergast 
 will admit. You cannot pass from one to another by nice 
 gradations. The result is that much of Mr Prendergast's 
 French is poor and flabby. 
 
 IV. The vocabulary is very small, and Mr Prendergast 
 
AS CHAM. 23 
 
 sets himself sternly against increasing it by reading a 
 book. 
 
 V. It is illiterate, or at best unliterary. 
 
 VI. Following upon this, it afTords no training in 
 English as translation does. When you translate you are 
 learning two languages at once. 
 
 VII. It is very hard to adapt to class teaching (except 
 in the way I use it), yet our education must assume class 
 teaching as its basis. 
 
 VIII. The teacher's power is wasted; his part is a poor 
 one at best, and he cannot diverge from the dull track 
 assigned to him. Yet the manifold influence of the teacher 
 upon his class can hardly be set too high as a factor in the 
 development of the young. 
 
 For these reasons we must reject Mr Prendergast's 
 system when it claims to be a sole exclusive method. 
 
 Then there is the system of Ascham — the retranslation 
 system — in which the whole analysis of the language is given 
 by oral teaching upon a short carefully chosen model, and 
 is followed up at once by the corresponding synthesis, which 
 consists in the pupil turning his translation back into the 
 original. Clearly Ascham and Mr Prendergast are at issue 
 in that the one says, analyse each word first, and the other 
 says, learn phrases as wholes and let the meaning of the 
 parts be gradually driven home by the variations of the 
 phrase. But both go slowly and insist on mastery. I do 
 not doubt that pupils taught upon Ascham's system would 
 have a very thorough knowledge in the end. No one has a 
 more firm belief in the use of retranslation and of the pen 
 in general than I have. I believe many a German has 
 acquired the very full knowledge of English which the 
 
24 HAMILTONIAN SYSTEM. 
 
 Germans commonly possess by Aschamizing the "Vicar of 
 Wakefield". For a long while too the whole of one sex and 
 a large proportion of the other learnt their French from 
 "T^lemaque", and perhaps this may spare me further words, 
 for you all know or have heard how dull the process was. 
 I must pass on more quickly or these Lectures will grow 
 into a book, and I will therefore only say that this system 
 is not very well adapted for classes, because the pace of 
 progress varies so greatly with the individual and that 
 it is tedious if made the exclusive system; but that I do 
 believe that both the performance of the dictionary and 
 grammar part by the teacher orally, with the consequent 
 avoidance of desperation on the one hand and misconcep- 
 tion on the other, and the rule of thorough translation upon 
 paper, besides the leading and original feature of the 
 retranslation, are altogether sound and right and that a 
 considerable part of our time should be given to teaching of 
 this kind. 
 
 Akin to this is the HamUtonian system of an interlinear 
 translation for beginners, which has the merit of making 
 something like Ascham's method possible while leaving the 
 class to prepare alone (no small gain), and of relieving the 
 tedium of dwelling on so minute a fragment of a book, by 
 making rapid advance possible. A book based on this 
 system is almost a necessary for beginners, in my opinion, 
 though one test of their advance will be the time they take 
 to reach a stage at which they can do without it. 
 
 What is called the Roiertsonian method' carries this still 
 further, adding to interlinear translation paraphrase, and to 
 
 ' Boltz, "Conversation Grammar of the German Language". 
 Asher and Co. 
 
EARLY TEACHING IN FRENCH. 25 
 
 paraphrase parallel columns, and to parallel columns an 
 elaborate commentary on the history and affinities of the 
 words — this last so exhaustive that the pupil's feeling is that 
 he understands the text very well and hopes in time to 
 understand the explanations also. I do not know that more 
 is given than a teacher may give viva voce, but just here 
 lies the mistake : you cannot stereotype the living voice. 
 
 If I mention Mr Ollendorff it is only to say that his 
 system is open to nearly all the objections that I have brought 
 against the others, and that it furthermore makes no attempt 
 to stint or enliven its cumbersome dulness. I know well 
 that those who survive a course of it are very well equipped, 
 and I admit that many of its principles are sound, but what 
 we really want in a book is that it shall by all possible 
 artifices lighten and vary the strain, and by all possible care 
 lift the beggarly elements into the higher region of style and 
 grace. "Balbus was building a wall" and his weary train 
 must disappear from our books to be replaced by the art 
 (which can be applied to all languages) that is shewn in Mr 
 Sidgwick's introduction to Greek prose, and by the style 
 shewn in M. Jules Bu6's "Comparative Idioms". 
 
 It will have become evident that I am an eclectic as 
 regards method, or at any rate as regards the methods as 
 actually worked out in published books. Let me now try 
 to sum up my own conclusions as to the method of beginning 
 to teach a language. What I say will be based upon the 
 supposition that our teaching is class teaching. But I would 
 not modify it materially for individual instruction. Clever 
 pupils can be taught by any method if taught individually, 
 stupid or reluctant pupils present in their single selves many 
 of the difficulties of a class (attention weak, retention ditto, 
 interest flagging, variety necessary). 
 
26 ON TEACHING- THE ELEMENTS 
 
 I would always begin with a book — even if my first 
 lesson were conducted with the book shut, still I would give 
 my pupil one. He can read an English book and likes it — 
 sometimes. There is a foreign one and he is going to read 
 that, it will be interesting too — in its way (I have said 
 that I do not care that any child should begin to learn a 
 foreign language before it can read). In French one or two 
 lessons will teach the power of the letters, which should be 
 made clear to the eye by phonetic English equivalents (as 
 is indeed always done though for the alphabet alone). 
 
 In German there is no greater difficulty if the Roman 
 alphabet be adopted, as it surely should be for beginners 
 and more than beginners. The letters known (not mastered 
 however as yet), the book can be begun, and with the book 
 I would teach not the declensions, nor the article, but a 
 verb first, and this verb or verbs "to have", "to be", and "to 
 see" or "to do", or some simple transitive verb. These should 
 be represented also phonetically (in brackets after each 
 word). Only so does the eye help the ear instead of fore- 
 stalling or misleading it. This can be done and is done 
 [Blackboard, Sind = Z'mt], but it is not done enough. The 
 liaison in French can be so exhibited, and the pupil should 
 have a page or two of these phrases written as in use, and 
 phonetically, in columns for practice. You cannot teach 
 intonation or rhythm so (or at least not fully, though you 
 can indicate accent), but I have been astonished more 
 than once at the correct English pronunciation of a German 
 who had literally learnt it from a pronouncing dictionary. 
 The reason for learning the verb is this, that then, from the 
 very first, synthesis can accompany analysis, and by this 
 double process only is command of speed combined with 
 accuracy and intelligence, and intellectual as opposed to 
 
OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 27 
 
 memory training. And let the verbs be learnt as in Mr 
 Quick's "Essentials of German", i.e. the simple tj^t. printed 
 but the verb always said as a sentence meaning something, 
 in collocation, in situ, alive not dead. 
 
 e.g. J'ai un cheval, tu as un cheval etc., 
 Ich habe es etc., 
 Das bin ich, etc., 
 
 Je le suis etc. (only don't too early point out that 
 le is invariable, but remember that " tout vient k 
 qui sait attendre"). 
 
 That is the beginning of grammar. You may have it 
 printed in a text-book or chromographed, or write or print 
 it on the black board and let your boys copy it. That is 
 detail — not altogether unimportant but of minor importance, 
 and I pass on. As for your book or books (for I lay it 
 down as essential that while you insist on and linger over 
 small portions you also do something rapidly; take the 
 mind on a tour of observation in this strange world and let 
 it see what it has to learn), you will at first read much to 
 them and they will read a little to you, and so you will feel 
 your way to the simple declensions, the article, and the 
 pronouns and the adjectives. If you ask what book shall 
 you take, I answer, it hardly matters. The best is the most 
 interesting, and the best is the most simple, and the best is 
 the one you know best. 
 
 Fables are excellent if they do iiot obtrude their moral ; 
 prose is better than poetry, though poetry should be read 
 too and some at least should be learned. 
 
 I have said that I would have an interlinear translation, 
 and there is a little book which I have much used in 
 beginning German called " Apel's German Stories ", which 
 gives this translation at the end, so that the boys can learn 
 
28 NATIVE OR ENGLISH TEACHERS. 
 
 a lesson from it, and then say from the text. It is some 
 years now since I have taught German to absolute beginners, 
 but I do not desire a better book, and I make no doubt 
 there is something similar in French. If not, publishers are 
 enterprising and there would soon be twenty well printed, 
 well chosen, probably well illustrated, and certainly cheap j 
 for either modern language books pay whether good or bad, 
 or publishers are content to labour for the public good 
 gratuitously to the utmost extent that can be desired. 
 There is a good collection of German stories by M. Wittich 
 published by WilUams and Norgate, but it is too expensive. 
 I do not intend however, at any rate in this lecture, to 
 mention books except incidentally — I wish to make clear 
 my position as to method. And here probably I may best 
 discuss a question which cannot be avoided — Should the 
 teaching be mainly by English or native teachers ? I will 
 say at once that it is in my opinion a question of pros and 
 cons, though I have also a clear opinion as to which way the 
 balance inclines. I think that English teachers produce 
 considerably the best results. "Vous etes orffevre, M. 
 Josse" is of course an obvious retort, and I am willing 
 that the Soci'et'e des Frofesseurs de Fran^ais should make a 
 full deduction on this score : but I will try to state fairly 
 the two sides. 
 
 I. The native teacher makes no mistakes and we 
 EngUsh teachers make scores, 
 
 II. We do not like to go beyond our book ; nay some 
 of us cannot go beyond our Key! We therefore cannot 
 improvise, do not carry on the lesson in French or 
 German, are shy of reading to our pupils, more shy still of 
 conversing. 
 
NATIVE OR ENGLISH TEACHERS. 29 
 
 III. We do not inspire confidence of our knowledge in 
 pupils, and they are apt to grow beyond us. 
 
 I admit therefore that we teach some things that are 
 wrong and very many things not at all — sins of commission 
 and of omission. On the other hand, 
 
 I. The native teacher is at best as weak in his EngUsh 
 as we are in our French or German, and (even for con- 
 versational French) it is at least as important that the 
 English should be correct as the French or German; and for 
 translation it is more important, for there is the good French 
 in the book, while the English has to be produced by master 
 and scholar. If the master cannot provide the good English 
 assuredly his boys will not. 
 
 IJ. The native teacher is not understood by his pupils, 
 and he does not understand them, verbally I mean. 
 
 III. The native teacher, if he is to have the same 
 command over, respect from, liking for and by his class, 
 must be a man of superior calibre to an English teacher. 
 It is not very hard for an average Englishman to learn to 
 keep order in an average Form. It is very hard for an 
 average native. But there is no reason to suppose that the 
 average native teacher will be in these respects superior to 
 the average Englishman. I here purposely understate my 
 case. We all know it to be a fact that the temptation for 
 an inferior man to try his hand at teaching his native tongue 
 to foreigners is great : it is as true of Englishmen abroad as 
 of foreigners in England. 
 
 IV. As a matter of fact the English teacher, if he takes 
 any trouble to qualify himself for his task, finds no difficulty 
 in bringing his pupils up to his own level of knowledge. 
 Give him time enough and he will teach them all he knows 
 
3° NATIVE OR 
 
 himself and he will assuredly know more than the practical 
 conditions permit of his pupils learning, i.e. he will always 
 be well in advance of his boys and in no danger of losing 
 self-respect. 
 
 V. The EngUshman knows his boys' difficulties. He 
 knows what not to teach : he knows what to begin by teach- 
 ing and he knows where to lay stress. He looks at the task 
 from the same side as his pupils. The native runs into 
 details and cannot understand certain difficulties. 
 
 VI. With EngUsh teachers the Form master can take his 
 Form (very often if not always) in their Modern Languages, 
 and this advantage must rank very high for those of us who 
 value most highly the unity of the Form, its social influences, 
 the shepherding which one man can do if he sees the same 
 boys together often ; while we recognise also the injustice for 
 the sake of this unity of making Latin and Greek the staple 
 of Form teaching whether best for the members of it or no. 
 
 VII. I do not value the power to conduct the lesson 
 in the foreign tongue very highly. The round of remarks 
 which it involves is very limited ; Lisez, traduisez, asseyez- 
 vous, continuez, qu'est-ce qu'il a dit, r^pdtez, a-t-il raison, 
 vous avez tort; Aufgepasst, sprechen Sie deutlich, kein^ 
 dummes Zeug soon degenerate into jargon. While as to 
 the confidence of the Form, unless the English teacher is 
 really incompetent, in which case we need not pity him, I 
 think he will always be sure of quite as much of it as is good 
 for him or necessary for them. I would not, if I could, play 
 pope in my school room, and always speak ex cathedra. 
 Wounded vanity often makes a boy question his teacher's 
 judgment no doubt, but you will find that he will back 
 his teacher's opinion against that of all the rest of his 
 companions together if not against his own, and that is I 
 
ENGLISH TEACHERS. 31 
 
 think a moderately fair test. Nor do you lose by admitting 
 your own blunders with due contrition. We all point our 
 teaching often by the blunders in the notes, why not by our 
 own now and then ? The boys will at least have a feUow- 
 feeUng for you and let you off easily as a lesson to you in 
 the proper treatment of their own cases. 
 
 But I do not mean for a moment that I would have no 
 native teacher on my staff. For the few really advanced 
 scholars he is invaluable ; he bathes them in the language 
 and opens up its vistas as we cannot hope to do. And 
 you want them as custodes custodum, as the teachers of your 
 teachers. I of all men should be ungrateful to forget the 
 ready ample help I have derived from my colleagues in 
 this respect, and there is not one of us who would not say 
 the same. "I do not know, I will ask M. Masson", is my 
 formula. 
 
 Nor does what I have said apply to those native teachers 
 whose knowledge of English rivals their knowledge of their 
 own tongue, and whose knowledge of English boys rivals 
 their knowledge of English literature. I should be sorry to 
 teach a set of boys in competition with Professor Buchheim, 
 but I think the Professor would acknowledge that there are 
 not very many like himself. We are not alone in England 
 in thinking this. In Germany English is taught by German 
 teachers, and in France the teaching of English is gradually 
 passing into the hands of Frenchmen, and so in my opinion 
 this important question will be permanently and satisfactorily 
 settled. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 C. L. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 I WISH my second Lecture to be a practical exposition of 
 the actual methods and difficulties of teaching French 
 and German, but I must ask you first to give me a few 
 moments of your patience, while I try to clear up my 
 position in regard to what is rather theory than practice. 
 
 I have declared for a system in the main of English 
 teachers for English boys, for plunging into a book, i.e. into 
 actual life, as soon as possible, for not thinking too highly of 
 conversation, for Grammar teaching with caution, and, for 
 the linking from the first of synthesis, or use of knowledge, 
 with analysis, or the discovery of it. The teacher must also 
 make up his mind as to the minimum and maximum of time 
 which he wiU claim for his subject, as to the order in which 
 he will teach the facts, as to the extent to which he will use 
 pure memory. 
 
 I. Time. The actual minimum in our Public Schools 
 is two hours weekly, and these are naturally assigned to one 
 Modern Language only at a time. Now I say plainly, that 
 is not enough ; and, if any of you are asked to undertake to 
 teach Modern Languages on this basis to half a school of 
 four-hundred boys, I counsel you in all earnestness to 
 dedine. 
 
 I have seen another great subject — Natural Science — 
 discredited by a system which imposed a similar task upon. 
 
 3—2 
 
36 'on the teaching 
 
 teachers who could have produced good results with fair 
 opportunities. Multiplicity of subjects is a serious danger 
 to Public School education, and we should set our face 
 agaipst ornamental time-tables which seem to promise 
 omniscience. But if to two full schools with preparation 
 can be added an evening's exercise or an hour and a half in 
 school for Composition, then with one language, much good 
 can be done. You will still mainly aim at giving the power 
 to read with ease and to write tant Men que mal and be 
 content to prepare your boys to learn to speak rather than 
 dream that you can teach them actually to do so; but 
 this can be done, and this is much. And for keeping up a 
 knowledge of one language far less will suffice— a single 
 school weekly, or a book read out of school, or a weekly 
 prose, so that if boys come to us at fourteen knowing French 
 fairly we may well start the best of them at seventeen or 
 earlier upon German, and in two years give them some 
 facility in reading it. By those who do not learn Greek 
 more time can be given, and both French and German can 
 be commenced from the first. In any case you will try to 
 secure as frequent lessons as possible. Two hours a day for 
 five days in the week, and one or one and a half of pre- 
 paration is not too much, remembering that for Upper 
 boys your French, if not your German, will largely mean 
 history. 
 
 For instance, a time-table of lo or 12 hours Modern 
 Languages, 8 or 9 Mathematics, 3 or 4 Latin, i Literature, 
 2 Natural Science, i Divinity, 2 History, is' a reasonable 
 arrangement, where Modern Languages and Mathematics 
 are the staple, though I am by no means an advocate of 
 a rigid time-table, but of free specializing of individual 
 boys. 
 
OF MODERN LANGUAGES. 37 
 
 II. Order. In the first place language is not as 
 Euclid, a series of propositions each assuming and depend- 
 ing on the preceding, it is not a skein which can only be 
 unwound from one end. You may attack it from many sides 
 at once, and it consists to a very great extent of isolated 
 words and facts. Much is purely accidental, not logical, and 
 has either no known explanation or only an historical one. 
 Arrangement is therefore only a practical art, not a science, 
 and beyond the obvious principle that the simple must 
 precede the complex, and that you must group and arrange 
 in order to grasp and remember, I do not think there is 
 any rigid principle at all. But as a matter of practice it is 
 so much easier to learn all kindred things in similar ways, 
 that, where languages are taught systematically, it is very 
 important to assimilate nomenclature, order of grouping, 
 and system of analysis in syntax. As, therefore, Latin 
 Grammar is almost universally taught, I would so far as 
 possible call things in French Grammar by the terms used 
 in Latin. Nominative, Accusative and Dative are not 
 perhaps in themselves so good as Subject, Direct Regimen, 
 Indirect Regimen, but I am sure we gain by adopting them. 
 Subject and Object I may say by the way are confusing 
 words to minds both young and old. I heartily agree too 
 with a proposal made lately in the Journal of Education to 
 call the tenses by the same name as far as possible in all 
 languages, and though Final and Consecutive are not ideal 
 names, I would certainly adopt them for French Syntax as 
 well as Latin, and in German similarly use the term Oratio 
 Obliqua or " Indirect Speech ". 
 
 III. Memory. There are two typical ways of using 
 the memory which are both in their way necessary. . 
 
38 OAT THE USE OP MEMORY. 
 
 There lie between them numerous other memorial pro- 
 cesses and artifices which are interesting and serviceable. Of 
 the two which stand in contrast I will speak now. The first 
 is the purely mechanical memory acquired by sheer repeti- 
 tion, with I think hardly a trace of reflection in it. We use 
 it for instance for the multiplication table, we add by it, we 
 know our alphabet so (though I am not sure that we need 
 so learn it). Its nature indicates its function; we use it 
 where, if we could, we would use an extraneous machine. 
 Minds differ much in this capacity but all possess it. 
 
 The other type is shown in the power we have of quoting 
 from an author whom we have often read but not learnt j of 
 giving an abstract of a book lately read, etc. It depends upon 
 the intelligence brought to bear and the interest excited 
 and upon a special capacity in which minds differ greatly, 
 and which seems in some to be almost absent. We generally 
 call the first parrot memory, though I do not use the term 
 reproachfully. It learns more than it wants, for future 
 mechanical use. The other reproduces such of its impres- 
 sions as are so vivid as to be always in the mind — it 
 illustrates the law of the survival of the fittest. 
 
 How will you use them ? Which will you rely on most ? 
 If you rely on the first, you will give the child the grammar 
 and make him learn all the verbs, declensions, genders, 
 straight on end, and drive hard until all is known. Your 
 pupil will be well adapted to floor grammar papers, and will 
 be a pest to all his masters by the possession of a hole and 
 corner knowledge which he cannot apply. If you simply 
 rely upon familiarity and recurrence you will find your pupil 
 somewhat abroad without his book, and possessed of a 
 great deal more knowledge than he can state clearly, whereas 
 the other was possessed of much that he could state clearly 
 
NATURAL MEMORY. 39 
 
 but could not use. And your second pupil will pass 
 examinations ill, even if examinations are framed as they 
 ought to be (and for the most now are) to test real usable 
 knowledge and not reproduction of lists. Now examinations 
 of some sort, if an evil, are still a necessary evil. You must 
 therefore combine the two. You will give as little as you 
 can to be learnt multiplication-table-wise, and you will find 
 that you can save much by grouping your syntax teaching ; 
 making your pupil know his way about his books well; 
 making him do plenty of exercises, and every now and 
 then by a sacrifice of inteUigence and advance, devoting 
 some lessons to sheer memory practice. Perhaps the mini- 
 mum of such work in Grammar is a type of each declension, 
 of each conjugation, a few rules, a few jingles, a few very 
 short lists of exceptions and the like. I do not include in 
 this category the main rules of syntax because as I shall 
 state at length, though the memory must be brought to bear 
 upon them, they must not be learnt as so many pages of 
 repetition. And for the sake of saving time from work of 
 this kind for work that is really intellectual, I would keep 
 much in the background in grammar, e.g. in beginning 
 German never mention a strong plural feminine for some 
 weeks nor a subjunctive mood for a quarter. If some crop 
 up in your lessons translate them and pass on or hush them 
 up. After a while another step may be taken : — you go 
 back to your strong plurals, exhibit the type to which they 
 conform and add that too to your stock of things that must 
 be absolutely known. In this way the grammar slowly 
 becomes an intelligible possession, the parts of which are 
 known in proportion as they are of frequent occurrence or 
 of importance otherwise. It can, if necessary, be worked up 
 to a specious (I had almost said spurious) degree of accuracy 
 
40 ARTIFICIAL MEMORY. 
 
 for examination purposes — meanwhile it is commensurate 
 with the pupils' progress. 
 
 Shall we admit Memoria Technica ? I think not except 
 to a very limited extent. For instance I always teach the 
 inseparable prefixes in German in a rhyme 
 
 Be ge ent emp er and ver 
 Miss vol! hinter wider zer 
 
 and we all find the use of a few such forms, but used syste- 
 matically in my opinion it is a dangerous and undignified 
 method. I know that anything can be got into a rigmarole 
 from the Old Testament History to the genders of Latin 
 substantives, but I believe its efficacy to depend chiefly 
 upon bad examining. There is something degrading to 
 learning in the fact that the scholar must travel through 
 twenty lines of gibberish to run down the gender of one 
 poor word. While he was learning the lines he might have 
 learnt, by the proper method of using the words in composi- 
 tion, and by reading them several times in a book, a good 
 proportion of the list in his rigmarole, and have been 
 spared the danger of believing that salvation for the linguist 
 lies in gender-dodging. We have given up thinking that 
 strings of dates are history, and we should also give up 
 thinking that language consists of lists of irregularities. But 
 if the teacher improvises little harmless modes of exhibiting 
 rules to the eye, if too much is not made of them, I should 
 be almost inclined to say, so long as they are not in print, 
 they may be regarded as allowable devices or relaxations. 
 And the same applies to. grotesque and comic examples. 
 We must not be forbidden to speak truth jestingly, but we 
 should not think of giving our pupils the Comic History of 
 England for their text book. However, in the privacy of this 
 
MEMORIA TECHNrCA. 41 
 
 Lecture Room I may be perhaps allowed to give to a few 
 the ephemeral publicity of the black board. 
 
 You find stupid boys more stupid than usual over the Past 
 Participle rule perhaps : — write up on your black board, 
 
 with/(f SU£f the Participle agrees with the %\ibject 
 withy'A/ „ „ „ „ hccusative 
 
 if the accusative has preceded ; and you will find it a useful 
 prophylactic against the blunders which have been vexing 
 you. 
 
 And this ingenious device, for which I am indebted 
 to a colleague to whom I owe much else, is tjrpical of the 
 proper function of such devices. It is best that a boy should 
 understand the reason why the Participle with Ure agrees 
 with the subject, and only use his memory to tell him the 
 less intelligible fact that with avoir it agrees with the object 
 only if the object has preceded it, but it is better that your 
 device should make him follow the rale than that his 
 incapacity should continue to let him break it. 
 
 Here is another supplied by the same colleague. Your 
 grammar gives you correctly the Relative and Interrogative 
 Pronouns and shews clearly the distinction between Persons 
 and Things. But que means so much in French that even 
 intelligent boys go wrong. Shew the pronoun thus 
 
 Relative. 
 
 
 Persons 
 
 Things 
 
 Nominative 
 
 Qui 
 
 Qui 
 
 Accusative 
 
 
 Que 
 
 Genitive 
 
 ', 
 
 Dont 
 
 Dative 
 
 k qui 
 
 borrows from lequel. 
 [i.e. borrows a disjunctive form.] 
 
42 MEMORIA TECHNICA. 
 
 Interrogative. 
 
 Persons Things 
 
 Nom. and Ace. Qui QuE. 
 
 Genitive and Dative borrow the Disjunctive form, 
 ,de qui de quoi 
 
 k qui \ quoi 
 
 A boy never forgets ' Relative Qui Qui for persons and things, 
 IntErrogative Qui QuE' and avoids the most frequent slip of 
 ce que for ce qui, and quoi for que in questions, and various 
 other solecisms known only to those who teach the elements 
 of French. 
 
 Again in German boys confuse in exercises, and mis- 
 translate in reading vor and seit used of time. You can 
 settle the matter and teach them auf, used of time, also by 
 the following diagram. 
 
 auf 
 
 o 
 
 vor 
 
 seit 
 
 
 
 
 Previous Time. 
 
 Ti 
 of 
 Main 
 
 me 
 the 
 Verb. 
 
 Subsequent Time. 
 
 Vor is used of a definite point in past time, seit carries 
 you from a definite point of past time down to the time of 
 which you speak (these govern the Dative), auf takes you 
 from the time of which you speak to a definite point in the 
 future and it governs the Accusative. 
 
 You may add as an instance — Die Abhandlungen waren 
 vor einem Jahre in vollem Gangs„ dber seit den letzten Monaten 
 sind Hindemisse eingetreten, und daher ist alles aufs folgende 
 Jahr aufgeschoben. ■ 
 
MEMORIA TECHNICA. 43 
 
 Mr Phillpotts' has even tried to settle the difficult 
 declensions of German substantives by a set of stories in 
 each of which all the substantives have the same irregularity 
 of declension and in each of which the list is exhaustive. 
 As tours de force they are wonderful and one is almost 
 literature. I will read it to you. "The great guilds had 
 commanded, in order to secure their revenues, that the poor 
 bride should spend the whole night on a bench in the 
 horrible cleft — a veritable grave. Here she was to sew 
 with fettered hands a seam of such length, as no two 
 maid-servants of the town could manage. If she could 
 not finish it, she was to be killed with the axe. There she 
 sat in great anguish, as no escape was- to be seen, and she 
 beat her breast with her fists till she tore off the skin. 
 Soon she saw passing by a cow, to which she made 
 known her distress, but the cow shewed no desire to help 
 her. The same happened with a goose and a sow which 
 were eating nuts and fruits close by the bride. ' May they 
 turn to sausages,' she exclaimed, 'since they will employ 
 for me neither their strength nor their arts.' The last 
 meeting she had was with a little mouse which had 
 crept forth out of the wall. 'My power is insignificant,' 
 said the mouse, ' but I can gnaw through the strings.' 
 That she really did, and the bride stepped out into the open 
 air." 
 
 I have dictated that one to a set of boys and made 
 them leam both English and German ; there are some 
 useful prepositions and verbs and phrases in it, so that the 
 process was not roerely the acquisition of one particular list 
 of nouns. On the whole I^as pleased with the result, but 
 
 * German Grammar, Phillpotts and Gliinicke. Rivingtons. 
 
44 FRENCH ACCIDENCE. 
 
 it took longer to get the story really known than I had 
 expected, and I doubt the wisdom of trying to use all the 
 stories with the chance of getting them mixed. 
 
 So with regard to all memoria technica, comic or 
 serious, I would advise you to feel your way and make your 
 own selection. As teachers you will be glad to know most 
 devices, but you will not discharge your whole bag of 
 tricks. 
 
 I will now take the accidence of French and German 
 Grammar in the order in which it is generally presented, and 
 endeavour to distinguish between what we should teach by 
 sheer memory at the outset and what should be left to be 
 merely referred to or perhaps read through and acquired 
 gradually as our pupils advance in the languages. 
 
 The first chapter of your French Grammar deals with the 
 alphabet, accents, stops, et cetera. I would teach the 
 alphabet and the three accents, explaining that accent does 
 not mean stress but only a difference of sound, but not 
 saying anything about their history; I would teach the cedilla, 
 the trtma and no more, and I would only expect a boy to say 
 'that is accent aigu,' 'that vowel has the trema,' etc., and not 
 to say 'There are three accents in French, etc. etc' I would 
 leave stops alone for the present; when a boy does dictation 
 he at once learns them. There are other facts in this 
 chapter such as elisions, the trait cP union, capital letters, etc. 
 These also I would leave alone. A clever boy will probably 
 read the rest of the chapter for himself and remember a 
 good deal of it, and I think this is wholly good. To leave 
 an unknown something at every turn, which you say will be 
 intelligible and useful when he knows more, stimulates him 
 to rise to the higher level of which he hears, and leads him 
 to learn for himself and by himself and to ask questions — a 
 
FRENCH ARTICLE. 45 
 
 quite inestimable advantage. Some Grammars distinguish 
 the necessary portion from this fuller exposition by printing 
 the latter in small print ; a useful device open only to the 
 objection that from fear of the critics too much is generally 
 classed as necessary. Some again print the two portions on 
 opposite pages, and this is even better in my opinion, though 
 liable to the same danger. 
 
 ' Next come the Articles, which of course we teach fr.om 
 the first, and you will find /' = both le and la, and the forms 
 au, aux need special emphasis. The only point of controversy 
 is. Shall we recognise the so-called Partitive Article or not ? 
 I say 'Yes' with some confidence. It is logically if not 
 liistorically an Article; but the paramount reason for so 
 classing it and teaching it from the first, is that it makes the 
 Syntax of the Article very much easier when your pupil gets 
 so far. And the Syntax of the Article is indisputably hard. 
 If under the head of Partitive Article your Grammar gives 
 you besides the history of it so much the better. If your 
 pupil has an opinion of his own as to whether du is an 
 article or not he is in a fair way to become a scholar, and 
 the teacher always has it in his power to prevent him from 
 also becoming a prig. 
 
 When a child reaches the next section which deals with 
 the Nouns Substantive and Adjective he very commonly 
 and justifiably conceives a disgust for a language so full 
 of foolish rules, and of exceptions with whose perversity he 
 would sympathize if he did not have to learn them. Well, 
 say boldly 'I will not compel my pupil to learn them 
 at all.' Tell him that the French plural is formed by 
 adding s, but that -au, -eu, -ceu, add x not s, and that -al 
 becomes -aux as in the article, and that -s, -x, -z do not 
 change. 
 
46 FRENCH ADJECTIVE. 
 
 Then, since the words are of very frequent occurrence, 
 you may require the following list to be learnt : 
 bal makes bals, 
 travail ,, travaux, 
 bijou „ bijoux, 
 genou „ genoux, 
 ciel „ cieux, 
 
 ceil „ yeux,. 
 
 making your pupil say an instance of each, e.g. Les yeux 
 bleus vont aux cieux which contains three exceptional words 
 yeux, bleus, cieux; but observe that you must have the 
 sentence written by your pupil, or you cannot be sure that 
 he is sound. 
 
 Why should you teach more? There are other exceptions 
 you will say in the grammar, and as you come across the 
 words you will note them. What is the worst that can 
 happen ? The child writes caillous and you correct it and 
 in time it learns the right plural. As to adjectives, you will 
 simply say they make their plurals like nouns but bleu makes 
 bleus. 
 
 Feminines, you will say, add e, and 
 
 -er makes -fere, 
 -f „ -ve, 
 -eux „ -ease, 
 
 and there are other very special rules, so that whenever you 
 come across an adjective you should say the feminine just 
 as you should always say the article with a noun for the 
 sake of marking the gender. But do not use the hsts in 
 your grammar for repetition lessons : use them for reference. 
 For genders of nouns you give as rules to be learnt by 
 heart that -ie, -ion, -fon, -son are feminine and that other 
 
FRENCH SUBSTANTIVES. 47 
 
 consonant endings axe mostly masculine. If you try to do 
 more you have a term's work before you, and confiision at 
 the end. Let the gender be learned with the words by 
 means of the article, trust to time and tell your pupil to refer 
 to his lists. There exists a card for French Genders drawn 
 up in dictionary shape which is not a bad companion for 
 writing exercises, but we must not multiply books, and a 
 good grammar and dictionary should be all that we allow. 
 
 Plurals of Compound Nouns. 
 
 This section is an instrument of torture which should be 
 relegated to the Museum together with the rack, the thumb- 
 screws and the boot, and a record inserted in Haydn's 
 Dictionary of the date when it was last used. 
 
 You must have nothing learnt here ; but you may point 
 out that common sense settles most of the cases already, and 
 that it will probably in time settle all. The Academy now 
 allows the form autodafes. 
 
 Comparison of Adjectives. 
 The accidence is simple, though the syntax is not 
 altogether so. But you must spend some time in insisting 
 upon the difference between meilleur and mieux 
 
 pire „ pis, 
 
 moindre „ mains, 
 for confusion is easy and the words are of very frequent 
 occurrence. 
 
 Pronouns. 
 
 If you have begun by teaching a simple verb by having 
 
 its tenses said in little sentences, as I suggested in my 
 
 last lecture, and have followed up this by other easy 
 
 sentences and some written exercises, the pronouns will have 
 
48 FRENCH SUBSTANTIVES. 
 
 learnt themselves by dint of frequent recurrence. You are 
 now however in teaching grammar teaching your pupU to 
 analyse and to recognise the different cases and persons by 
 name. You will therefore be right in making him say the 
 
 N. A. D. N. 
 
 personal pronouns separately Sing. Je, me, me, Plur. nous, 
 
 A. D. 
 
 nous, nous, etc. and you will find that the 3rd person needs 
 
 some care with its confusing lui. By all means also classify 
 
 these into conjunctive and disjunctive : the names are well 
 
 chosen and the distinction real and practical. Let the 
 
 il 
 reflexive pronouns be said thus : Je me, tu te, ., se, nous 
 
 Us 
 nous, vous vous, „ se, and point out that soi is the disjunctive 
 
 form of se. 
 
 You will find no trouble with the possessive pronouns : 
 son for sa before a vowel and h mute and leur not leure for 
 the feminine are the only difficulties. 
 
 The predicate forms le mien, etc. must of course be learnt 
 and one would expect that they would be wrongly used ; but 
 as a matter of experience, while reflexives and personal 
 pronouns are perplexing, I do not find that the possessives 
 are so, and such mistakes as les nos for les ndtres are very 
 rare. 
 
 The demonstrative ce, invariable, should be passed over 
 in my opinion in learning accidence. When you come to 
 the sjTitax of the pronouns you may call attention to it, 
 taking care that it has previously been used freely in the 
 sentences which you have learnt. 
 
 So again if you will use a table of variations, such as 
 that given on p. 19, you will teach «/«/ easily and you need 
 not trouble about rules for it. 
 
FRENCH VERBS. 49 
 
 I would deal with the relatives also synthetically, i. e. by 
 sentences and tables of variations at first. I have already 
 given an ingenious device for saving the confusion which 
 naturally arises from the great similarity of forms. As to 
 lequel and its uses as relative and interrogative the diffi- 
 culties belong not to accidence but to syntax. The declen- 
 sion is simple. 
 
 Regular Verbs. 
 
 A 
 
 I need not stop long over the regular verbs. Efre and 
 avoir are known, we assume, from the first. The four types 
 of conjugation must be learnt also. Some grammars give 
 two types for the second, finir and dormir. I cannot agree 
 with this : I am quite sure that it is better to class the few 
 verbs which follow dormir as irregular. 
 
 So soon as the four types are learnt, teach also the 
 formation of tenses. It should be given in all grammars in 
 a way that is clear to the eye. 
 
 (i) From the present participle are formed the plurals 
 of the present indicative and the present subjunctive and 
 the imperfect indicative (with a special note on the 3rd 
 conjugation where this requires a slight modification for the 
 3rd plural pres. ind. and the sing, and 3rd plural of the 
 subjunctive). 
 
 (2) From the infinitive are formed the future and 
 conditional. 
 
 (3) From the 2nd pers. sing, of the preterite is formed 
 the imperfect subjunctive. 
 
 Any deviation from these rules or from the four types of 
 the conjugations should be treated as irregular. 
 
 c. L. 4 
 
so FRENCH VERBS. 
 
 Irregular Verbs. 
 
 Have a list with full statement of them. 
 
 Shall you group it by the conjugations? No, I think 
 not. You want it above all things to be easy of reference ; 
 and though this plan may be more scientific, the alpha- 
 betical is far more serviceable. But because it is to be for 
 reference, see that the verb is stated aXfull length, as clearly 
 to the eye as can be. Now do not set this list to be learned, 
 but as each irregular verb occurs, refer to the list and have 
 that one learned— or rather do not have a verb learned until 
 you have come across it three times in your construing. In 
 this way, you will learn first what comes oftenest, and remem- 
 ber that by a special providence irregular verbs occur very 
 frequently. When — which will not be soon — you have come 
 across nearly all your list, the boy may learn them, and 
 irregular verbs may form a repetition lesson (or lessons) to 
 be kept up each term. 
 
 But of all irregular verbs, the French are the worst — 
 they are irregular in such outrageous ways ; how are they to 
 be remembered but by sheer repetition ? If, however, you 
 will adopt the plan that I have given you, you will get them 
 known long before the pupil has his other knowledge on 
 the same level and you will get them learned without tears. 
 Do you remember Heine's sentence about irregular verbs ? 
 " The irregular verbs," he says, " are distinguished from the 
 regular verbs in that they entail more floggings." If we 
 cannot alter that state of things we had better not teach 
 them at all. 
 
 Adverbs. 
 
 I^eave them at first to take care of themselves. Very 
 soon the observation that ^ment' is the regular adverb 
 
FRENCH ADVERB AND CONJUNCTION. Si 
 
 formation obtrudes itself. There is also the curious change 
 -amment -emment from -ant -eni. So soon as this has been 
 noticed by your pupil, or a good opportunity occurs for 
 calling his attention to it, you may tell him — ^because it is 
 interesting, and good training — the origin of the French 
 adverb. It is admirably done, as indeed is all work of this 
 kind, in Brachet's Public School French Grammar, a book 
 which no teacher has ever taken an advanced pupil through 
 at a rapid rate without being sensible of the flood of light 
 that it throws upon dark corners, of the new aids to memory 
 which it gives, and of the real introduction which it is to 
 French etymology. But I reserve my remarks upon this 
 point — only saying that the reason why the feminine 
 adjective is used to form the adverb once grasped, further 
 small rules for its formation are very soon correctly got by 
 heart 
 
 Conjunctions. 
 
 If you will use Prendergast's list of variations, either with 
 his own sentences or better still with those of your making, 
 you will as a matter of fact get the conjunctions known. 
 And here as in all cases, if they are known in two ways, you 
 are very wrong to wish them to be known in a third. If the 
 boy knows the English when he sees them, and if he knows 
 the French for them when he sees the English, which the 
 variation will enable him to do, why in the name of common 
 sense should you want him also to rattle off the conjunc- 
 tions in an alphabetical and comparatively useless list? That 
 is the sort of learning that was once so rife, and so detrimental 
 to all progress. It is possible that he may not think more 
 about the one than about the other, but the first two processes 
 are the only processes used in translating and composing : 
 
52 GERMAN ACCIDENCE. 
 
 the other can only be useful for the one man in a million 
 who may have to teach grammar out of his head without a 
 book, or for the examinations in grammar, framed for those 
 who have learned grammar in this way, which are happily 
 becoming almost extinct. I have nothing more to say 
 about French accidence, but if it is dealt with in this way 
 the child (for it is chiefly children who will deal with French 
 accidence, inasmuch as this will be almost always the earliest 
 foreign language taught) will not have been confused; he 
 will have been made to observe, and to learn by observing 
 and by familiarity, and by making his own hsts, and will 
 not have found the process dull. When you have gone 
 through the accidence in this way, you may keep it up as 
 you please. Probably then you will simply have it learned 
 from the book; but even then I hope that the lists of excep- 
 tions will not be overmuch insisted upon. 
 
 German accidence. 
 Inasmuch as there are three genders, as many declensions 
 as you like to make, each with an attendant train of excep- 
 tions — if you like to make them— there is no doubt that the 
 beginnings of German accidence are more formidable than 
 the beginnings of French. The battle of the declensions is 
 not yet over. New systems for arranging them appear I 
 really believe at the rate of one a week — the reason for this 
 being that when each teacher has mastered them, dropped 
 into his own system, and has found, as we all find, that we 
 can teach them upon any system, he is brought to think that 
 his system is the best. Certainly, I am no exception to this 
 rule. I am quite convinced that mine is the best. The only 
 reason I can give you for agreeing with me, is certainly not 
 that I can teach by that method better than any other ; but 
 
GERMAN DECLENSIONS. S3 
 
 that I have found some people, whose opinion you and I 
 would respect, to agree with me : — that it has been worked 
 for some years, and that we have seen no reason to change 
 it. The battle of course centres round this point. Will you 
 try so to group your varieties as to make your lists of excep- 
 tions few, or will you try to make as few declensions as possible, 
 and- relegate all the exceptions to lists which are not more 
 numerous than those of the other system, but certainly each 
 contain more words ? If you belong to the first side, you will 
 have at least five declensions : if you belong to the second, 
 you will recognise only two, the strong and the weak ; and 
 indeed you will recognise only one — the strong. Though I 
 am quite aware that philology is not sure that the weak is 
 not the older of the two, still the strong is obviously the 
 real declension ; the weak may be treated as a mere termi- 
 nation. Indeed I do not think that from the very first it is 
 a bad thing to reason about it, and to say that the termina- 
 tion '««' is simply put on as a sign that the word is to be 
 declined somehow — as a mark that it is not in the nominative 
 case. And it is used in the same way in the adjectives, 
 whenever you have already marked the case by a strong 
 termination preceding ; and it is probably the origin of that 
 curious use of the infinitive in place of the past participle, in 
 compound tenses. The root plus 'i?«' is an apology for, is 
 the ghost of an inflection. That may or may not be true, 
 but at least it has the merit, which is all that many scientific 
 hypotheses can boast of, that it is a very good thread to 
 string your facts on; and that it more or less strikes the 
 imagination. I know no book more interesting in this 
 way than Mr Keane's True Theory of German Declension 
 and Conjugation. 
 
 I believe then in teaching, as the one German declen- 
 
54 GERMAN DECLENSIONS. 
 
 sion, the strong type. You will exhibit this to the eye. For 
 some time I used to like to have the terminations only given 
 as the type, until I was wholly convinced, by others' evidence 
 as well as my own, that it was better to take a word. Let 
 us take Hut: Singular Hut, Hut, Hutes, Hute — ^that is all; 
 Plural Hiite, Hiite, Hiite, Huten — that is all. The only 
 change in the plural is the umlaut and the dative. All 
 datives end in en, but they don't add an extra one if the word 
 already ends with it — that is the strong declension. Some 
 words are weak — they add en to all cases singular and 
 plural. Feminine words are undeclined in the singular. 
 Their plurals are weak. Then follow simple rules, soon 
 learned, as to which words are strong and which weak; 
 and then sundry lists. These lists take the place of the 
 multitudinous declensions of other grammars. The diffi- 
 culty, and you do not blink the difficulty, lies in the German 
 plural. Monosyllables, you teach, if masculine modify 
 the root vowel in the Plural, other words do not. List i. 
 contains the few words that are weak because they are, not 
 because they come under your already given rule. List ii. 
 the feminines which, in spite of the rule you have given, 
 make a strong plural. List iii. the words that add er in 
 the plural, and these you point out all modify. List iv. 
 (a long one) — the words that do not modify in the 
 plural, being otherwise regular. List v. dissyllables which 
 do modify, in spite of your rule. Lists vi. and vii. the 
 mixed declension, i.e. the words of which the first group 
 make -ens in the genitive, and the rest weak, while the latter 
 with a strong singular have a weak plural. The separate 
 declension usually given for words in -el -en -er, is simply 
 a rule of euphony and you teach it as such : the e of the in- 
 flection is dropped because it is easier to pronounce the 
 
GERMAN GENDERS. 55 
 
 word without it. Now of course, if you try to learn these 
 lists, the task would be harder than an elaborate system 
 of declensions, but you need not and ought not You 
 learn the first, that is the general rules and the type of the 
 strong declension, and the lists you treat as a dictionary 
 to be referred to, to lie open whilst all exercises are being 
 done, to be learned very gradually and never to be said 
 by heart at all. I have already given you the ingenious 
 plan by which these lists have been made easy to remember 
 (if you must remember them) by placing the words of each 
 in a specially written story, and I have told you why upon 
 the whole I do not think that it is quite worth the doing. 
 But I do not feel sure that my opinion will not change, and 
 I should like to know the experience of actual teachers. 
 The book has not been out long, and I have given you all 
 the means of testing it for yourselves. 
 
 Genders. 
 
 By all means give your pupils if they are not in their 
 grammars, and if they are there make them learn, the fol- 
 lowing rules, the exceptions are so few. 
 
 Masc. terminations : -el, -en, -er, -ling. 
 
 Fem. ,, -e, -ei, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -ung, 
 
 -in, -inn. 
 Neuter „ -sal, -sel, -thum. 
 
 Neuter are also words with prefix '■ge', infinitives used as 
 substantives, and diminutives, that is the terminations -chen 
 and -kin. If that is known, or even before it is known — if 
 it is open to the eye, you need not concern yourselves 
 very seriously about the genders to begin with. As 
 in French, in speaking of words always say them with 
 
$6 GERMAN ADJECTIVES. 
 
 the article prefixed, and then the gender is gradually 
 acquired ; and in writing exercises where the discovery 
 of the gender is often a serious trouble, involving refer- 
 ence to the dictionary, try if a plan which I always adopt 
 is not a good expedient. The words which follow these 
 rules the pupils are expected to know; those that break 
 them are very numerous, but they are also very common 
 words — the feature of exceptions in general. I indicate these 
 by placing one dot under them for masculines, two for 
 feminines, and three for neuter. I am supposing that you 
 use exercises (as I think undoubtedly you ought for begin- 
 ners) which supply all the German words, only leaving the 
 pupil to inflect them and place them in order. The only 
 book of any length that I know which does this is MuUins' 
 Exercises', and I wish that that book were longer. I must 
 also say that I wish the English were a little more attrac- 
 tive. But if you have in your room a large blackboard, and 
 all school-rooms should have one, you will find that it does 
 not take long to write on it every word that your pupils want 
 for doing their German Prose, and then you can indicate 
 the gender in the way I have suggested. 
 
 Adjective rule. 
 
 If declension and gender are hard, adjectives are hardly 
 less so — there is no doubt about that. I have mentioned Mr 
 Keane's interesting theory, but one must say plainly that the 
 theory will not do to teach as the elementary instruction in 
 the German adjective. The teachers with whom I work 
 have a concordat on adjective rule. We all used to teach 
 
 ^ Easy German Exercises. D. Nutt. 
 
GERMAN ADJECTIVES. S7 
 
 it differently, but at last we compromised the matter. The 
 result has been satisfactory, and here is the rule if you care 
 to have it. 
 
 1. Adjectives used as Predicates are undeclined. 
 
 2. „ „ „ Attributes without Article are de- 
 
 clined strong, i.e. like der etc. 
 
 3. „ „ „ Attributes with Article end in 
 -en, except the Five (Le. the Nominatives and Fern, and 
 Neut. Ace. of the Singular). These five after der etc. end 
 in e, after ein etc. are strong. 
 
 You explain that der etc., means dieser, j'ener, and all 
 the words which, are so declined, and ein etc. means ein, 
 kein and the Possessive Pronouns. This rule, which you 
 will admit is soon learnt, has now to become instinctive. 
 You will find boys learn it at various paces, and you will find 
 them forget it in exactly the inverse ratio to the pace at 
 which they have learned it. But you can soon get it picked 
 up again, and you ought never to start in any term upon 
 exercises, until it is fairly well known. One page of sen- 
 tences framed to show it in all its glory with the undeclined 
 German words opposite, will serve you as practice ground for 
 all time. So soon as your pupil makes a mistake, send him 
 back. If he is an older pupil send him into the furthest 
 comer of the room to do elementary adjective sentences in 
 disgrace, until he knows better. You may get some fun out 
 of it by bantering your boys on their slips, and if you 
 like by pitting them one against the other and having a 
 Form match. I must however say that personally I do not 
 like the latter way of getting a stimulus. While you are 
 teaching this you will also have made them familiar with the 
 cases of the article, and of the nouns themselves, and that 
 
S8 ANALYTIC LANGUAGES. 
 
 is a considerable advantage in a language that has so many- 
 terminations still extant, as the German. Has it ever 
 occurred to you, to digress for a moment, what a blessing the 
 Norman Conquest proved to our mother tongue ? You may 
 or you may not think an inflectional language a more 
 beautiful instrument of speech than an analytical one like 
 the EngUsh of the present day, but you must admit that one 
 which is almost wholly analytical is much better than one 
 that gives you all the trouble of learning terminations, and 
 yet treats speech mainly analytically, as the German does. 
 Now at the time of the Norman Conquest the English 
 tongue went underground so to speak for some two hundred 
 years — and became literally the vernacular. 
 
 It was not spoken in any courts of Law, nor in Church, 
 nor by anyone of gentle birth. It was spoken chiefly by the 
 serfs, and it was hardly written at all. As a result it dropped 
 its terminations with very great rapidity. When it emerged 
 again into literature with the revivified feeling of nationality 
 at the beginning of the Hundred Years War it had lost the 
 greater part of its terminations, and it has now nearly lost 
 them all. If only we had adopted or could adopt a system of 
 phonetic spelling, the English Language would be the easiest 
 to learn in the whole world. It is destined probably — ^if any 
 language is — to be the universal language of mankind, and 
 though thij is not the subject of my lecture, I cannot 
 forbear to say that it is for you who belong to the younger 
 generation to consider whether you will not make the 
 sacrifice — a great one I admit — involved in the adoption of a 
 phonetic system, for the sake of adding at least one whole 
 year of intellectual work to the school time of all the 
 children in all .the 'Board Schools in England, or if you 
 decide that that year is not wanted, for the sake of letting 
 
GERMAN PREPOSITIONS. 59 
 
 them start " in their career of bread-winning ope year 
 earlier. But that is by the way. Meantime there is 
 German with all its inflections waiting to be learned. 
 
 Prepositions. 
 
 Prepositions cannot but be as troublesome as genders. 
 You have not only three cases that they may govern, but 
 some of them govern two each, and some are placed after 
 their case. I recommend a clearly printed list in your 
 grammar and that this list be referred to, and the preposi- 
 tions learnt gradually by exercises and above all by the 
 proverbs and examples which you wiU have committed to 
 memory. But this is not all. There is the syntax of the 
 prepositions, and you may treat this from the German side, 
 or you may group the prepositions by their Enghsh use, 
 which has its advantages for composition. A complete 
 grammar must certainly contain a syntax from the German 
 side, that your pupil may know where to find his information \ 
 but the other arrangement is so useful, that you will probably 
 use both plans. They are extremely well done in at least 
 half a dozen grammars. You clearly do not want boys to- 
 learn all this by heart, but it is pleasant reading for your 
 elder boys. They see at once how useful it is; it lends- 
 itself to questions ; and the examples, if well chosen, will 
 illustrate much else besides the use of the prepositions, 
 and form a substantial part of your teaching. If you 
 have a boy with a quick memory, and a turn for poetry, 
 you may show him two stanzas of four lines each in which 
 some ingenious German has grouped all the commoner 
 prepositions — 
 
6o GERMAN VERBS. 
 
 Philemon an seinen Freund. 
 
 Durch dich ist die Welt mir schon, ohne dkh wUrde ich sie hassen ; 
 Fiir dich lebe ich ganz allein, um dich will ich gem erblassen ; 
 Gegen dich soil kein Verleumder ungestraft sich je vergeh'n, 
 Wider dich kein Feind sich waffnen ; ich will dir zur Seite steh'n. 
 
 Daphnis an die Quelle, 
 
 Nach dir schmachte ich, zu dir eile ich, du geliebte Quelle du ! 
 Aus dir schopfe ich, bei dir ruhe ich, sehe dem Spiel der Wellen zu. 
 Mit dir scherze ich, von dir lerne ich heiter durch das Leben wallen, 
 Angelacht von Friihlingsblumen und begriisst von Nachtigallen. 
 
 Irregular Verbs. 
 
 The strong verbs are now quite rightly not called 
 irregular, but they must be placed in alphabetical order in 
 the grammar, and, as in French, you will find that alphabeti- 
 cal order is better than the grouping by similar sound- 
 changes. And you will not find them a serious difficulty. 
 The verbs themselves come extremely often in ordinary 
 speech and writing : they learn themselves if you give three 
 minutes in your construing lesson to running through the 
 principal parts of them. The really irregular verbs in 
 German are few, and they also are common. 
 
 The passive verb in German must take a little longer 
 than in French because of its peculiar use of werden. 
 Tell an intelligent boy that where we use 'to be' the 
 German says 'to become', and that he must say warden 
 not geworden ; and he will work them out correctly. But 
 you will probably find it best to have the tenses said rather 
 often in the form of easy sentences so that they may become 
 familiar. Similarly with the subjunctive, point out to a 
 clever boy the difference between one present subjunctive 
 
SYNTAX. 6 1 
 
 and its present indicative, and for him the subject is practi- 
 cally at an end, except indeed for the verbs, which will be in 
 his list, which modify. And the past subjunctive is easier 
 still ; you simply tell him that the strong verb modifies if it 
 can, and that others do not. As in French, the short form 
 of the Compound Conditional must be dwelt upon and 
 taught by instances. Just because it is short you will find 
 boys pick it up readily. There remains the formation of 
 words in German both by suffix and prefix. This will form 
 a chapter in your grammar, that will be set to be read, 
 then questioned on. If well treated, it is extremely in- 
 teresting, and every teacher will have a pet selection of 
 instances, especially of such very idiomatic prefixes as er- 
 ver- ent-. 
 
 Syntax. 
 
 Before running through the chief points in the syntax of 
 the two languages, it is worth while to say that here you 
 will only use the second kind of memory and not the first — 
 that is to say, you will have the rules read and expounded and 
 attended to, the examples translated and dissected, small ex- 
 ercises set on them, and all this enforced by each construing 
 lesson. By this backward and forward process, this analysis 
 and synthesis, you will gradually work up to the fullest 
 amount of knowledge that the time and the pupils' brains 
 will admit of. Above all things remember that the rule is 
 only useful as a clear statement — as a clear grouping of facts ; 
 that the instance is more valuable than the rule, and that 
 the power to apply the instance to make fresh examples is 
 the test of real and fruitful knowledge. That process if any 
 may be fitly called the 'training faculty'. Never be a slave 
 
•62 SYNTAX. 
 
 to your rules, and you must take great care that your pupils 
 ■do not become slaves. 
 
 Do you know the story of Jean Paul Richter's quarrel 
 with his teacher? "Why is that so?" said the teacher. 
 No answer. "You have a splendid memory and I know 
 you can tell me — why don't you do so ?" No answer. And 
 as Heine says, Es regnete Prugel. 
 
 When the storm was over and the head boy had been in 
 disgrace for the whole day, he confessed why he had not 
 answered. " He wanted me to say ' because the rule is so 
 and so', and it is not because the rule says so, it is 
 so because it is, and the rule only states the fact." Now 
 remember that the boy was right, wholly right, and if for 
 ■shortness' sake you may say "because the rule says so", do 
 not forget that it is only for shortness' sake. Every now 
 and then you must make your pupils talk rationally about 
 the rules. I have been so much impressed by the necessity 
 of this as a part of the intellectual training, that I have long 
 had drawn up a set of grammar questions of an easy kind 
 which lead up to the well-known rules in a slightly different 
 way, and which I expect my boys to be able to talk about 
 reasonably. I make them pass an examination in this kind 
 of syntax once a term, and there is no doubt that this 
 important part of the language, when you really are begin- 
 ning to use it as a conscious instrument of speech, needs 
 the teacher's personal and so far as possible individual 
 attention more than any other. Boys, even clever boys, 
 will not learn for themselves. True, you may set them the 
 exercises on the syntax in a good exercise book based on a 
 good grammar, but you must well talk about them first and 
 you must go over this process again and again. All teachers 
 know how at the beginning of each term they feel as if 
 
COMPOSITION SCHOOLS. 63 
 
 their boys had forgotten all they ever knew. If your teach- 
 ing is systematized and your divisions are well graded one 
 into the other, you will have an agreement as to the 
 amount which is expected to be known in each division — 
 the minimum I mean, not the maximum, though you will 
 find that the minimum is the maximum. These s)fntax 
 schools, or prose schools as they are called, are based by most 
 of us upon the plan long adopted in teaching the classics, 
 and in my opinion, quite rightly. Have your boys in during 
 the whole time; do not set them anything to prepare. 
 Thus you have an hour and a half or two hours for continu- 
 ous work. A piece of prose or a long exercise is the main 
 work, but you want every moment of your time as teacher 
 to be employed to the very best advantage. I suggest to 
 you the following plan as being found in practice to be a 
 great deal the most useful. Begin, the boys having their 
 books open probably before them, though this is not 
 essential, by calling their attention to the points which you 
 are going to teach them as a fresh lesson or to take them over 
 again. Illustrate orally as well as you. can — then probably 
 you will give them two or three minutes to look at the book 
 now explained and at the examples. Then set them not 
 less than three nor more than six well chosen sentences, and 
 make your own. You will be surprised and pleased to find 
 how good you become at inserting into the example 
 which just hits off the new knowledge, one or two points 
 that involve last week's or last fortnight's or last month's 
 or last term's teaching ; and so you keep your knowledge 
 together. Most of us who have taught for any time have a 
 large selection of MS. sentences of this kind which we are 
 always adding to and improving. Let these sentences be 
 done with all books closed. Give orally what help you 
 
^4 COMPOSITION SCHOOLS. 
 
 judge fit; — in this way you will avoid what is a serious 
 danger, that of having your class fairly capable of working a 
 thing out with dictionary and grammar, but very unready when 
 they do not possess these helps. Then collect these sentences, 
 and while the boys are doing the bulk of their work call 
 them up individually and look them over. Here again you will 
 find your pace as an overlooker increases very much with 
 practice. Any of you who happen to have done corrections 
 for the press well know how the eye and the hand become, 
 the one accurate, the other quick, and you will be surprised to 
 find how much looking over, correcting, and recorrecting you 
 can get done in the hour and a half. Of course make the 
 pupil correct as much as you can, but remember above all 
 things that he must not feel helpless. Have them written 
 out again once at the very least. If you have time the best 
 form of fair copy is to have the whole thing done again. 
 This is true of all written work whatsoever, and the only 
 limitations, though they are serious ones, are those of time 
 and of your boys' patience, for it must be owned that the 
 process may soon become wearisome. _,,,---'''^^ 
 
 In French Syntax you will certainly begin with the 
 article. Almost all grammars, and there are many good 
 ones, group this section in much the same way. There 
 is a good deal of logical training in it, and in French it is 
 undoubtedly hard. Next to the article, perhaps even before 
 it, you may place in French the personal pronouns (conjunc- 
 tive and disjunctive) and their relative positions, and here 
 as a matter of practice you will find that you will be driven 
 to give a rule that must be learnt by heart. The following, 
 adopted by many grammars, is much the shortest and most 
 usable form : 
 
FRENCH SYNTAX. 65 
 
 All governed Pronouns precede the verb. 
 
 Me, te, s€, nous, votis precede all others, 
 
 Le, la. Us precede lui, leur, y, en, 
 
 Lui, leur precede y, en, 
 
 y precedes en. 
 You will observe that if the first two lines are known the 
 rest cannot be forgotten. 
 
 Then you have to deal with the Pronouns after Imper- 
 atives. Here are four more lines which settle them : 
 
 All Pronouns follow the Imperative Affirmative, 
 
 Use moi, tot, in place of me, te. 
 
 Accusative precedes Dative, but 
 
 y precedes moi, tot, le, la. 
 Va-t-en, Donnez m'en, Frappez-moi mats m'icoutez, serve 
 to illustrate the exceptions to these rules and you teach 
 them as an appendix. 
 
 The Syntax of the Adjective is difficult in French because 
 of the intricacy of the rules for its position and the numerous 
 anomalies such as the gender of gefis, the agreement of 
 nu, demi and others. You will be wise to leave the full 
 acquisition of the whole of this section until a very late 
 stage, giving at most the rule that adjectives expressing 
 taste, colour, form, follow the noun; and a select number 
 of sentences illustrating the use of demi, nu, grand, neuf, 
 sage, dernier, a number which you may continually enlarge. 
 But do not set the long lists, which are very properly given 
 in your grammar, to be learnt by heart. A sentence is 
 alive, a list is a dead thing. I believe that sentences alone 
 will serve our purpose, but there is no objection to a set of 
 exercises done first with grammar open and then with 
 grammar closed. 
 
 The Relative Pronouns must be done by exercises and 
 c. L. 5 
 
66 FRENCH SYNTAX. 
 
 sentences thoroughly well worked. The distinction between 
 conjunctives and disjunctives should be worked here as 
 well as with personal pronouns. Then in order of import- 
 ance come the past participles. You will first explain the 
 common sense of the rule, for it is largely a common sense 
 one, and then give a short statement to aid the memory; 
 for although it is right to appeal to the reason, it must be 
 remembered that in speech you do not reason out every- 
 thing that you say, nor will you go too deep at first into 
 this : you will leave the difficult cases with infinitive moods 
 to be learnt much later. The subjunctive in French is 
 distinctly difficult. 1 do not think that an exposition such 
 as alone would satisfy a scholar is feasible for teaching 
 boys. Perhaps Professor Jowett's suggestion that the finer 
 sense of idiom may take the place of rules is true here if 
 anywhere. I am inclined to think that instances are the 
 best way of teaching the elements of it, and a careful 
 analysis of the subjunctives in your construing lessons the 
 best way of teaching it fully. One or two things you will 
 of course work hard, such as the subjunctive with the 
 superlative. There remain the redundant ne and the 
 infinitive mood ; its absolute use, its use with prepositions, 
 the use of the active infinitive where we use the passive, 
 and lastly what is of such common occurrence in French 
 and really so very hard to grasp — the use of fairc with the 
 infinitive. Discussing the other day with a colleague the 
 conditions of teaching French syntax, I came to the 
 conclusion that to get this known thoroughly was perhaps 
 the most difficult task of all. As it comes so often, my own 
 opinion is in favour of stating it very fully, and of making 
 the pupil grasp the principle of it, namely that the subject 
 of the infinitive dependent on faire, what would be the 
 
FRENCH SYNTAX. 67 
 
 nominative to the sentence if faire were removed and the 
 infinitive turned into the indicative mood, becomes the 
 dative instead of the accusative if the infinitive is transitive 
 — the reason being probably to avoid the coUision of two 
 accusatives, e.g., 
 
 Je le ferai venir, 'I will send for him '. 
 
 Je le lui ferai envoyer, 'I will make him send it'. 
 
 You must also point out that the latter may also mean, 
 'I will have it sent to him', and that in fact the construction, 
 common as it is in French, is an ambiguous and faulty one. 
 
 The use of it in writing French is not so important as 
 the need of avoiding the errors arising from it in translating. 
 The following form of it in a long sentence is particularly 
 misleading — 
 
 Je lui ferai dire ce qu'il a fait, 
 
 and it is only by pointing out that il me dira ce qu'il a fait 
 is the equivalent of it that a boy sees that the analysis of 
 it is the same as that of the simpler case with which he is 
 more familiar. 
 
 Then there are the innumerable constructions of que: 
 As it represents at least nine Latin words they may well be 
 innumerable. A page or so devoted to it in your grammar, 
 and some time spent in illustrating the instances there 
 and in your construing lessons, is all that you can hope 
 to do for them. You will find the inversion of verb and 
 nominative after the relative que especially troublesome to 
 aU careless pupils. 
 
 As to exercises, you want one book of them set upon your 
 grammar. This will be used out of school. There are many 
 good ones, and more are always appearing, but as; in common 
 with many teachers, I think that the grammar of Eve and'de 
 
 s— 2 
 
68 CORRECTION 
 
 Baudiss is considerably the best, I am glad that at last there is 
 a full set of exercises as a companion to it. But if all exercise 
 books call attention to the rules on which they are chiefly set, 
 you may adopt any one of them as supplementary books for 
 viva voce or for rapid work in school, or for special fragments 
 of classes, keeping the main book for your weekly or 
 bi-weekly exercises. 
 
 A few words as to the correction of exercises. . 1 
 will tell you how you may really lighten this distasteful la- 
 bour. If you are examining, arrange your papers roughly 
 so that you will look over the best first. Why? Because 
 you will then get to know the full capabilities of the 
 paper. You will mark better, and in examining the 
 mark is the first and almost the only object, and you will 
 look over the best work when your mind is freshest. As you 
 get tired it will be a real relief to come to papers that can be 
 run through with very much greater rapidity. I have found 
 the gain of doing this very great. But in looking over your 
 weekly exercises do exactly the contrary. — Why ? Because 
 now you want to correct and to teach, and to find at once all 
 the mistakes for which your eye must be on the look-out. 
 Therefore take the worst boy first. You will have to give him 
 a great deal of time and to re-write a good deal for him, but 
 by the time you have done two of the worst you really know 
 all about the piece ; also, you have probably done nearly half 
 your writing. The rest will get better and better till your 
 best boys will need no corrections, but only a few red marks 
 and lines ; for you will lay it down as a rule that you will 
 never put more than a mark where that is enough to indicate 
 the necessary correction. By all means have a code of 
 symbols for your corrections. Here is one which my 
 colleagues and I have used for some time — it works very well 
 
OF EXERCISES. 69 
 
 though I can conceive a better. This at least has the merit 
 of not being very elaborate. 
 
 mistake. 
 
 ^^= bad mistake. 
 r wrong order. 
 
 A omission. 
 
 I wrong accent. 
 
 I place the word at the end of the clause. 
 find a better word. 
 
 Can you have exercises looked over vicariously ? I fear 
 the answer must be 'no'. You want to know what points 
 you must insist on because your boys are weak on them. 
 You cannot get this knowledge from looking rapidly over 
 exercises upon which others have done the real work. Again, 
 your exercises give you a series of questions which you fire 
 oflf in the next few days at the right persons. Always have fair 
 copies done, or at any rate adopt some plan which will make 
 your boys attend to the corrections which you have made. I 
 remember the indignation with which a colleague once told 
 another, who was noted for the elaborate care with which he 
 corrected the Vlth Form Latin verses, how he had seen one 
 of the leading boys of the school drop the carefully red- 
 inked exercise in the mud as soon as he was outside the 
 master's door. It was very bad — but it was human nature, and 
 it is with human nature that we have to deal. For reasons of 
 the same kind do not have exercises looked over by the boys 
 themselves. If you have got your boys together in class there 
 are twenty things that you can do with them which are better. 
 You must do the work out of school yourselves. It is sad 
 drudgery, but you will be repaid, and you will be surprised 
 to find how rapidly in time you will come to do it. 
 
7° GERMAN SYNTAX. 
 
 In German Syntax you will again begin with the article, 
 but by calling attention to its likeness to English or to 
 French, you will find that your task is here comparatively 
 light. As German is always the second language learnt, if 
 not the third, you will find throughout that the knowledge of 
 one language is of great help to the acquisition of a second 
 or third. Next to the article will come the order of words. 
 Most grammars, with German thoroughness, give a rather 
 elaborate table.. My own belief is that the three following 
 rules are all that need be learnt, and they are at least short. 
 
 (i) If the nominative does not begin the sentence, 
 the nominative and verb are inverted, except after 
 und, aber, denn, sondern, allein. 
 
 (2) With a compound tense place the auxiliary as in 
 
 English and the rest of the verb at the end of 
 the clause in the reverse of the English order. 
 
 (3) In all dependent sentences place the whole verb at 
 
 the end in the reverse of the English order. 
 
 If you add to this that the dative precedes the accusative 
 except with personal pronouns, and a statement of what 
 may be called the elegant order where three or more verbs 
 come together at the end of a sentence, which may come 
 much later in your teaching, you may leave the rest, and 
 the rest is really not much, to be acquired by observation 
 and the ear. 
 
 Indeed you will have done a good deal before you teach 
 these rules. You will have accustomed your pupils to put 
 simple sentences in their German order, and let them be 
 half conscious of what is right before you give them the 
 explicit statement. One teacher taking a low division 
 always has his German construed in German order, and 
 
GERMAN SYNTAX. 7^ 
 
 now and then gives a piece of newspaper to be put into this 
 German order, and not into German words. That is not a 
 bad plan. Most grammars again give special rules as to the 
 position of the separable prefix. You will find if you look 
 into the matter carefully, that these are really covered by 
 my three rules given above. You must of course make your 
 boys familiar with thera by a good deal of practice in easy 
 sentences. It is a real exercise of the mind in logic which 
 German children have to be taught as much as English. 
 
 Then you will come to the Relatives. These are fairly 
 easy with the exception of wer and of the Genitives dessen, 
 deren, dessen^ where the English tendency is to insert the 
 article afterwards, and to say for instance, 'Ein Zimmer 
 dessen die Wainde ' etc. I always go very fully into the 
 syntax of wer, but I find that it takes a long while to 
 eradicate such blunders as 'Der alte Mann, wer indessen 
 sich umgesehen hatte '. Indeed my experience is that even 
 boys who have been in Germany, and talk German, make a 
 good many slips of the kind. The Syntax of German 
 adjectives is comparatively easy. You must have your lists 
 of those which demand special prepositions, but you must 
 not teach these by memory. You will probably insist at 
 some length on some few, such as viel, halt and perhaps all. 
 
 You will pass on next to the verbs of mood, to the 
 delicate subtlety of which Professor Earle has rendered a 
 due tribute of admiration in his interesting ' Philology of the 
 English Tongue '. As he rightly says, if these modal verbs 
 had the good fortune to belong to a dead language scholars 
 would be loud in praise of their dainty differences. And if 
 this is true of English, where half the power of them has 
 been lost by our unfortunate use of ' might ', ' could ', and 
 ' would ' as present tenses, it is much more true of German, 
 
72 GERMAN SYNTAX. 
 
 where the study of them seems to lead into the very arcana 
 of speech. Also, as in French, the difference between ' I 
 ought to have done it' and its kindred forms is most 
 important and can hardly be too much insisted upon. 
 These must be worked until they are instinctive. Here 
 again you will find your Prendergastian table of variations 
 useful. 
 
 Then come Infinitives — their use as substantives ; their 
 use with and without zu ; their use where the English uses 
 the verbal ' ing ' ; the curious substitution already mentioned 
 of an infinitive for a past participle in such a sentence as 
 'ich hatte es thun woUen', and, following the infinitives, the 
 use of the participles. 
 
 The German Subjunctive can be clearly classified as 
 Potential Optative Conditional and the Subjunctive oi Indirect 
 Speech. The latter use will already have been a good deal 
 talked about in construing. Now you will explain it fully 
 and work it by exercises. 
 
 I think you will agree that in the points which I have thus 
 briefly run through there is ainple ground for some years of 
 training, and that much that I have said must be and can be 
 taught only to fairly advanced pupils. This is quite true, 
 but it is because this teaching is so useful and so necessary 
 that I have said that you cannot teach French and German 
 successfully without more time than is usually given to 
 them. 
 
 Some books which are extremely good take the form 
 of a course, ist, and, 3rd, 4th, sth, 6th Term, and so on. 
 I cannot think that this is a good plan (though no doubt 
 it is good for the private tuition of individual boys). 
 Your boys advance at such very different rates that you 
 cannot work such a book successfully with a Form or Divi- 
 
A SPECIMEN OF GERMAN PROSE. 73 
 
 sion ; nor is such a book good for reference however full 
 its index ; nor again can this method avoid a good deal of 
 repetition. 
 
 But I do think that as soon as you begin to teach 
 French and German Prose seriously you want not only a 
 full Accidence and Syntax with an ample index, too often 
 lacking in otherwise good grammars, but also a book deal- 
 ing with most of the constructions from the English side. 
 This need not be' separate from the Prose Book itself, but 
 might well form an introduction to it on the model of 
 Mr Sidgwick's Greek Prose Composition. Such a book is 
 much needed, and none of the existing attempts satisfy me, 
 though many are excellent for certain portions of the 
 Syntax. Messrs Cassal and Karcher's ' French Prose Com- 
 position' comes nearest to what I desiderate as regards 
 completeness. But it assumes the form of a dictionary, and 
 I prefer the form of a continuous treatise, though the diction- 
 ary has this advantage that it is its own index. As an 
 elementary book Mr Storr's ' Hints on French Syntax ' with 
 its excellent series of examples is the best I know. 
 
 I will now take as illustrations of how such a system as 
 I have been describing actually works in practice, first a 
 piece of German Prose and then a page of French Constru- 
 ing. 
 
 1. I was shown the room des- i. Dann zeigte man mir das 
 tined for me. filr mich bestimmte Zimmer. 
 
 2, You deserve to have a sta- i. Sie verdienen, dass man 
 tue erected in your honour. Ihnen zu Ehre eine BLldsaule 
 
 errichte. 
 
 3. You will dine with us to- 3. Sie werden heute bei uns 
 
 day, won't you ? zu Mittag essen ? nicht wahr ? 
 
 In the Rue Blanche there is a In der Rue Blanche giebt es 
 
 butcher who sells dogs, cats, and einen Fleischer, welcher Hunde, 
 
74 
 
 A SPECIMEN 
 
 rats. He has many customers, 
 but it is amusing to see them 
 sneak^ into the shop, after care- 
 fully looking round to make sure 
 that none of their acquaintances 
 are near. I really think that dogs 
 have some means of communi- 
 cating with each other, and have 
 discovered that their old friends 
 are seeking^ after their lives to 
 devour them, for the humblest of 
 street-curs^ growls when anyone 
 merely looks at him. Figaro has 
 a story that a man was followed 
 for a mile by a party* of dogs 
 fiercely barking at his heels. At 
 first he could not understand to 
 what their attentions were due, 
 till he remembered that he had 
 eaten a rat for his breakfast. The 
 friend of another journalist, who 
 ate a dog called Fox, says that 
 whenever anyone calls out ' Fox' 
 he feels an irresistible impulse 
 which forces him to jump up. As 
 every Christmas a number of books 
 are published containing stories 
 about dogs as remarkable as they 
 are stale, I recommend to the 
 notice of their authors these two 
 veracious tales. 
 
 * verstohlen schleichen. 
 
 2 trachten. 
 
 3 GassenkOter. 
 
 * Meute. 
 
 Katzen und Ratten verkauft. Er 
 hat viel Kunden, es ist aber doch 
 kbstlich zu sehen, wie sie sich 
 verstohlen in seinen Laden schlei- 
 chen, nachdem sie sich sorgfaltig 
 umgeschaut, um sich zu iiberzeu- 
 gen, dass Niemand von ihren 
 Bekannten in der Nahe ist. Ich 
 glaube wirklich die Hunde haben 
 eine Methode, sich miteinander zu 
 verstandigen, und haben entdeckt, 
 dass ihre alten Freunde ihnen 
 nach dem Leben trachten, um 
 sie zu verzehren. Der elendste 
 Gassenkoter knurrt, wenn man 
 ihn nur ansieht. Der Figaro 
 erzahlt, ein Mann sei eine halbe 
 Stunde von einer Meute Hunde 
 verfolgt worden, welche wiithend 
 hinter ihm hergebellt hatten. 
 Anfangs konnt« er sich nicht 
 erklaren, welchem Umstande er 
 diese Aufmerksamkeit verdankte, 
 bis ihm einfiel, dass er eine Ratte 
 zum Friihstiick verzehrt hatte. 
 Der Freund eines anderen Journal- 
 isten hatte einen Hund verzehrt, 
 welcher Fuchs hiess, und sagt, so 
 oft jemand Fuchs rufe, fiihle er 
 einen unwiderstehlichen Trieb, der 
 ihn nothige, aufzuspringen. Da 
 jede Weihnachten eine Anzahl 
 solcher Biicher erscheinen, welche 
 ebenso vranderbare als abgedro- 
 schene Hundegeschichten enthal- 
 ten, so mache ich die Verfasser 
 solcher Biicher auf diese beiden 
 Geschichten aufmerksam. 
 
OF GERMAN PROSE. 75 
 
 The three sentences are done by your class in a quarter 
 of an hour, after ten minutes or so of talk about some of 
 the constructions, conducted with or without reference to 
 their grammars. The first two sentences are hard, and unless 
 your pupils are good you will probably allow them the 
 dictionary, but you do not allow the grammar. Then you 
 start them upon their prose and call them up individually to 
 have their sentences corrected. This is what you may 
 expect. Half your boys only thought of showing that they 
 must write wurde not war, and give you Dann wurde ich 
 gezeigt, forgetting that zeigen requires the dative and that you 
 must use man in German. A stray denn for dann calls forth 
 a rating, but there is only one, you are glad to find. Next 
 two-thirds have written das Zimmer, welches fur mich be- 
 stimmt war, which you stigmatize as correct but dull and 
 unidiomatic, and when you find how many have missed this 
 point you stop the prose and call the general attention to it, 
 reminding them how you told them only yesterday that not 
 only did the German affect the form of expression illustrated 
 by 'the never too much to be regretted Mr Smith' but that 
 they even preferred the expanded form ' the never too much 
 to be regretted and always with respect to be remembered 
 Mr Smith'. A was for welches sends the offender back 
 to his seat to do a small exercise on wer and welcher 
 until he is wiser as well as sadder. Or perhaps you spare 
 him seeing the genuine vexation his blunder causes him, 
 for coming to close quarters and striking while the iron 
 is hot you will find, to your surprise perhaps if you 
 have an impression that a schoolboy is a careless crea- 
 ture who has no wish to learn, not that your red ink and 
 verbal ratings produce no effect, but that they are apt 
 to produce too much, and that therefore you should always 
 
76 A SPECIMEN 
 
 have one easier sentence to encourage and restore self- 
 respect. 
 
 In sentence (2) the first boy probably shows you up 
 Sie verdienen eine Statue sick in Ehre errichtet zu haben, which 
 sends a complex shudder through you. You set in Ehre 
 right at once, and then descend upon sich and lastly on 
 the Infinitive mood which you point out cannot stand 
 because of the change of subject. You do not explain 
 the Subj. errichte to this boy; he is on too low a level; 
 but you do to the next who is correct but writes errichten 
 sollte, which you accept but make him note the terser form 
 errichte. 
 
 In sentence (3) most give you bei uns correctly and 
 nicht wahr, but they all miss the werden for wollen express- 
 ing the assumed certainty in the speaker's mind which leaves 
 the other no phoice. 
 
 In the next week's sentences you take care to bring in at 
 least one of the constructions most generally missed ; for 
 instance you set ' A man so popular could not be refused his 
 request ', or ' They insisted on going home : I insisted on 
 their staying'. Each boy when he goes down to his seat 
 writes out a fair copy of his sentences, but it is better, if you 
 have time, to make all of them do them again without any 
 help at all during the last five minutes of the lesson. If 
 any boys do really well you may set them instead of this to 
 make six sentences of the same model, a form of exercise at 
 which you will not find that they excel. 
 
 The prose you take home and correct out of school, 
 giving it back and talking it over as soon as you can, and 
 exacting a fair copy except where you remit this, or part of 
 it, as a reward for merit. If you are very sumptuous you 
 may chromograph your fair copy and set it to be learnt, not 
 
OF GERMAN PROSE, 77 
 
 exactly by heart, but so that it can be reproduced from the 
 English. Though all this takes time yet it is valuable. You 
 will be surprised to find upon scrutiny how frequently the 
 constructions and vocabulary of one piece of prose can be 
 employed for the next, and the limits of patience and 
 interest are reached much sooner than the limit of usefulness. 
 And therefore you cannot be too careful in selecting your 
 piece. I venture to say of this piece, because it is iiot my 
 own, that anyone, who should be set down to do it, would 
 feel that he would like to be able to do it well, and derive 
 some stimulus from the vivacity of the original, and you 
 will all own that the version is admirable, especially in the 
 last two sentences. It would take too long to point out all 
 the constructions which are illustrated by it. You can see 
 them for yourselves. 
 
 To be able to render such a piece as this fairly correctly 
 and without missing some of the opportunities for style is 
 the highest level to which we as a matter of fact bring our 
 boys. If they all did as well as the best, it would, I think, 
 be admitted that the level is a fairly high one. Moreover, as 
 the schools are constituted at present, our highest German 
 sets are mostly on the Modern Side where there are not 
 many who are specially gifted in languages or specially 
 interested in pursuing their study, and they only give three 
 schools a week to German. 
 
 Still if the top half of this highest set can be transplanted 
 for six weeks to a spot where they will hear and read and talk 
 nothing but German and will set to work in Prendergastian 
 fashion, I maintain that they will return able to converse, 
 within limits, fluently and accurately and able to read a 
 book with pleasure; and to have brought them within so 
 measurable a distance as six weeks from such a result does, 
 
78 A PAGE OF 
 
 I think, go far to establish the claim which, I last week made 
 for the Modern Languages. 
 
 In French the high-water mark is higher. The same 
 system of sentences done without help and of continuous 
 Prose is the most successful. There are endless good books 
 of Prose Selections. As in Construing Books, the best are 
 those whose subject-matter is the best chosen ; the notes are 
 a matter of less importance. 
 
 I should like now to show you some portion of the 
 teaching which can be got out of each page of your constru- 
 ing lessons. I will give you as a preliminary one golden 
 rule. 
 
 Always prepare, howeyer well you may know the 
 language in general and the book which you are doing in 
 particular. Only so will you make the most of your lesson 
 and temper discursiveness with variety and compactness. 
 
 Now let me ask you to read through the following 
 passage : 
 
 Mais comment arriver au Capitole tant que les ennemis 
 occuperaient la ville ? — Pontius Cominius s'oflfrit pour cette 
 mission pdrilleuse. Ce jeune Romain, h, force de prudence 
 et d'dnergie, parvint k tromper la vigilance des ennemis, et 
 fut assez heureux pour rapporter la nomination de Camille 
 comme dictateur. Mais Pontius, qui ayait du gravir un rocher 
 trfes-escarpd, avait laissd des traces de son passage. Les 
 herbes couchdes et la terre dboulde en plusieurs endroits 
 montrferent aux Gaulois qu'il y avait un chemin accessible 
 pour conduire au Capitole. lis se mirent en devoir, au 
 milieu de la nuit, de profiter de cette d^couverte. lis 
 dtaient sur le point de se rendre maitres des retranchements, 
 car personne ne les avait entendusj lorsque les oies sacr^es 
 que Ton entretenait dans le Capitole, prfes du temple de 
 Junon, coururent aux Gaulois avec de grands cris et en un 
 instant rdveillferent. tous Ips Romains. — Plutarque fait 
 
FRENCH CONSTRUING. 79 
 
 remarquer que les oles ont I'ouie trfes-fine, que celles du 
 Capitole ^taient assez mal nourries depuis le sidge, et 
 qu'elles s'efFrayferent d'autant plus facilement \ I'approche des 
 Gaulois, que la faim les tenait dveilldes. 
 
 It is taken almost at random from a book with which I am 
 better pleased each time I use it, ' Les Petites Ignorances de la 
 Conversation', by M. Rozan. .It has no notes but it is full of 
 history as well as of stray information, it is witty, it is written 
 in good style, and it has just a sufficient number of quotations 
 from older authors to make it serve for you to give a good 
 deal of the history of the language if you care to do so. 
 Also, and this is a merit which all teachers will welcome, it is 
 sufficiently difficult to make exposure probable for the idle 
 boy who, knowing a good deal of French, presumes to neglect 
 his lesson, and to make such exposure certain if you begin by 
 a few questions on the subject-matter. After the translation 
 of each paragraph or sentence you ask questions on the 
 grammar. "Arriver is Infinitive : with what exact meaning?" 
 "What instance does your grammar give.'" "Dire que cela est 
 vrai! is that a similar infinitive?" " Has the English language 
 a similar use?" " Has the German ? " "Has the Latin?" Occu- 
 peraient : "We translate by the English imperfect ' were in pos- 
 session of, but it is Conditional. Which is the more accurate 
 logically?" " Give another instance where French pays more 
 attention to tense than English." Vi/Ze gives you an oppor- 
 tunity for a remark on the pronunciation of //. Jeune Romain 
 suggests the question why i?^»«a/« is here written with a capital 
 letter. A force de you call attention to as a turn to be noted, 
 illustrating by the English 'by dint of, and you will ask 
 this next lesson to see who has stored it up, or next minute 
 of the idler in the far corner, or of the eager but inattentive 
 boy who turned on to a new page when you paused to 
 
8o A PAGE OF FRENCH CONSTRUING. 
 
 question, /"^m^^a/ "Couldyousayalsor&jwV^J?" "Yes." 
 "Could you say i'Wiyi^^a i?" "No." "Then why did you write 
 sucdderlox 'to succeed in an undertaking' in your last exercise, 
 which you will receive back shortly duly underlined, and 
 what does succider h, mean?" Ennemi: Note the spelling 
 and the pronunciation, and per contra ennui. 
 
 Pour rapporter is also noted. Avait dH introduces the 
 whole subject of the compound tenses of the verbs of mood 
 and the' special distinction between English on the one hand 
 and French, German, Latin, on the other ; and you ask your 
 pet sentences with varied success. 
 
 Endroits suggests a caution as to the use of the Prench 
 place which had proved a pitfall in your last exercise. 
 Gaulois is distinguished from Gallois ; profiter de is noted for 
 vocabulary, as are mirent en devoir and eboulee. Retranchement 
 = ' entrenchment ' suggests a few other instances of words 
 which are like yet different in French and English, e.g. explica- 
 tion = 'explanation '. Les avail entendus gives opportunity if 
 the Form need it for drill in the- participle rules, and de grands, 
 cris similarly brings up the syntax of the article, and._/fezV 
 remarquer leads up to a question or two on the construction 
 ■m\hfaire. "Why has Fouie the definite article?" "And can 
 you give me the names of the four other senses ?" Thisyou 
 make a general question and suggest that they write in their 
 note-books in parallel columns the senses in French and Latin 
 and German, pointing out that the French words are directly 
 derived from the Latin. Little natural groupings of words such 
 as this are easily remembered. Celles enables you to enforce 
 the con struction of celui on the backward boys ; mal similarly 
 reminds them of pis and moins, and other traps for the un- 
 wary. Uautant...que is a useful construction, often miscon- 
 strued, and you are glad to have an instance of it, and the 
 
PHILOLOGY. 8i 
 
 lesson ends with an article which calls for comment, and 
 another past participle. You do not of course dwell at 
 length on all of these points, which are of very various im- 
 portance and various level : you make your selection. But 
 what I have said may serve to convince you that so far 
 from your French construing books being deficient in matter 
 for teaching, they are too full. 
 
 One more hint and I will pass on. You will find in 
 French almost inevitably that for some of your boys the 
 lesson is too easy. You can employ their time to good 
 purpose by exacting from them a written list of idioms 
 from the lesson, or properly classified examples of certain 
 syntax rules, and so show them that there is more to be 
 learnt from a few pages of French than is involved in the 
 rapid acquisition of their meaning. You can also, if you 
 prefer it, make them do a Philological exercise on a portion 
 of the lesson; and this brings us to the consideration of the 
 place which the Historical Study of Modern Languages 
 should occupy. I have not time to discuss the question as 
 fully as its importance deserves, and I must be content to 
 do little more than state my own conclusions. In the first 
 place let me remind you that philology, though as a science 
 .it is advancing, is also becoming much more difficult, so 
 much so that many good teachers are beginning to doubt 
 the wisdom of teaching it in the schools at all. In the next 
 place, I would insist upon the importance of distinguishing 
 between Mediaeval and Modern Languages, and of recog- 
 nising that if your time is limited, what is given to philology 
 is lost to literature. On the other hand, the development 
 of French, so far as derived firom Latin, is so clear, and the 
 sound-changes so certainly traceable through the various 
 stages of the literature, and the sound-changes also exhibited 
 by German and English so obvious within certain limits, and 
 
 6 
 
82 PHILOLOGY. 
 
 the whole subject of derivations so interesting as an acces- 
 sory of language lessons, that I hope we shall always find 
 time for a certain amount of philology. Again, if more of 
 our classical scholars study French and German seriously, for 
 them philology is more natural and useful, nor is it a slight 
 gain if we can show to all boys how language, treated thus, 
 affords evidence to the student of the history of primitive ages, 
 and takes up the tale where written records begin to fail. 
 
 I would not forego the chance of inspiring even one 
 pupil to take up as his life-work the science of language. 
 By these considerations on the one side and the other, I 
 would have you steer your course in this matter. But I 
 would warn you that it is your duty to consider what it is 
 that your pupils want most, and that if the choice lies 
 between Mediaeval French and a third Modern Language, 
 say Italian or Spanish, for nine-tenths of them you ought in 
 all probability to choose the Modem Language, and if your 
 pupils do not learn Latin, you had better leave philology 
 alone. 
 
 As a matter of practice I do personally always introduce 
 a little philology into my French ItessonSj and as an intro- 
 duction to the subject I say to them, ,' French is only bad 
 Latin badly pronounced', and point out by the way what a 
 wonderful thing human speech must be, since by so bar- 
 barous a process has been perfected an instrument so 
 delicate and beautiful as French is in the hands of a great 
 writer. And I always use an illustration which I owe to 
 Professor Freeman in order to drive this nail home. I 
 write up on the board these three sentences : 
 Habeo bonum equum. 
 Ego habeo unum bellum caballum. 
 J'ai un beau cheval. 
 
VERSE AND METRE. 83 
 
 The first is what Cicero said, the second is what his groom 
 said, and the third is elegant modern French. If you 
 seriously teach the subject, what book can be more delight- 
 ful than ' Brachet's Historical Grammar ' ? Even if you do 
 not teach it seriously, you can teach orally and illustrate the 
 three main principles, (i) the persistence of the Latin 
 accent, (2) the elision of the medial consonant, (3) the 
 elision of the short medial vowel ; and for the rest you will 
 choose in each lesson a few words illustrating the phonetic 
 changes. If you have a list of these properly grouped, your 
 pupils soon begin to detect derivations for themselves, and 
 then you may, if you please, give them Grimm's Law, which 
 is generally, as I think most mistakenly, placed in the fore- 
 front of the subject. The small print in Messrs Hachette's 
 ' Public School French Grammar ' is perhaps even better 
 than the book mentioned above. Brachet's Etymological 
 French Dictionary you will of course possess. 
 
 Verse and Metre. 
 
 In German this is so like English that you only need 
 good reading to accustom the ear to detect the rhythm. In 
 French it is otherwise, but I am quite sure that it is worth 
 while to give all boys the elements, because without them 
 French poetry has to English ears no beauty of sound at 
 all. The subject has been done and, it seems to me, done 
 once for all, by Mr Gossett in his 'Manual of French 
 Prosody', a scholarly and excellent book that cannot be 
 praised too highly. Teach your boys how to scan a French 
 Alexandrian — point out to them the metre of a few lyrics,, 
 and you will have changed the whole aspect of poetry for 
 
84 DICTATION. 
 
 them. They may then be in a fair way to appreciate the 
 master-pieces of so marvellous a poet, considered merely as 
 a metrist, as Victor Hugo. 
 
 Dictation and Audition. 
 
 I regard dictation as very useful from the first. Consider 
 this point only — there is no form of lesson in which it is so 
 easy to keep the attention of eyery boy continuously at full 
 stretch. You must not of course make your dictation too hard. 
 Five minutes at the end of a school, and three minutes for 
 your boys to correct it — for you will generally take a piece of 
 the book the boys are doing in order that they may turn at 
 once and see what is right — will give you as much practice 
 as you will probably find time for. But it teaches them a 
 great deal. There is a good collection used by French 
 teachers called 'Dictdes de I'Hotel de Ville'. Do not be 
 afraid that your own imperfect pronunciation will spoil the 
 lesson. It might be better, no doubt; but you will find as a 
 matter of fact that the boys who know French fairly well 
 and have heard it spoken will follow you most easily, and 
 that all will steadily improve. 
 
 Audition is distinct from this. You can teach it by 
 simply reading over a piece and making your boys give you 
 either viva voce or on paper the meaning of it. This also is 
 very valuable. If you have the luck to have a boy who can 
 really pronounce well, set him to read part of the lesson out 
 to your Form — this will be the best way of teaching 
 pronunciation. I promised to say a few more words about 
 this subject. I have said that I think we ought to use 
 phonetic spellings of French words much more than we do, 
 and I think we ought to make a careful selection of the 
 
PRONUNCIATION. 85 
 
 words which are really hard to pronounce. Spend a great 
 deal of time over a few sounds, and you will find that if you 
 can get them really well reproduced — whether in French 
 or German — you have almost done all you want. I 
 have often thought too that it would be possible for a teacher 
 with a good ear to teach pronunciation as a music master 
 teaches singing. Let your boys altogether, or half the class 
 together, declaim a piece of repetition and trust to your 
 power of picking out those boys who are not saying it as 
 they ought. If this could be done the gain would be very 
 great. The objection that we all make, and quite rightly, 
 to pronunciation and elocution lessons is this, that while 
 you are attending to the one boy in teaching him, the others 
 naturally cannot attend ; it is too dull. This is not true of 
 construing, but it is true of pronunciation lessons. There is 
 something to be said however for the opinion of Mr Julian 
 Hawthorne expressed in his 'Saxon Studies', when he says 
 that he does not desire to speak German like a native. He 
 could do so, but he will not. He desires to speak it like an 
 EngUshman who can use the German instrument of speech. 
 This is not a counsel of perfection, but it will be admitted 
 that it saves a good deal of trouble. Frenchmen smile if 
 you ask them whether so and so does not speak almost 
 like a native, but they always add that good English-French 
 is not displeasing to them. French is however certainly 
 harder than German, and I have known not a few English- 
 men to whom the flattering question has been addressed, 
 "Aus welchem Theil Deutschlands sind Sie, mein Herr"? 
 But as for the great majority of us, if we are ever mistaken 
 for Frenchmen or Germans at all, it is by our more igno- 
 rant fellow-countrymen ! 
 
 I have left untouched the question how far a knowledge 
 
86 EXAMINATIONS. 
 
 of Latin can be made to help the study of French, and how 
 far German can be taught by means of the study of the 
 correspondences and differences between it and English. 
 A good knowledge of Latin is a very great aid indeed not 
 only to the acquisition of the meaning of words in French, 
 but also to a thorough knowledge of the grammar. But 
 the kind of knowledge of Latin possessed by the ordinary 
 French pupil is chiefly useful as affording variety and 
 interest to your comments and illustrations, and because 
 in learning Latin grammar boys learn something of gram- 
 matical analysis, even if, as is too often the case, they know 
 little more than the nomenclature. I believe myself that this 
 initiation into Grammar would be best done by sensible 
 teaching of English grammar at a somewhat early age, and 
 that the teaching of Latin, French, and all languages would 
 gain if this method were adopted ; but the question is too 
 long for me to enter upon now. 
 
 Nor have I said anything about Examinations except 
 to acknowledge that they are necessary evils. In the later 
 years of a boy's school Hfe the orderly progress of his study 
 is apt to be exchanged for a hasty attempt to bring his 
 knowledge up to a forced level. Ragged knowledge is 
 dealt with severely by all systems of numerical marking, and 
 yet such raggedness is the natural condition of progress 
 unless we proceed by the most rigorous memory methods. 
 But when you are thus compelled to frame your teaching so 
 as to enable your boys to answer as many as possible of the 
 questions which are likely to be set, I advise you not to 
 iinake them learn lists of exceptions and vocabwlaries but to 
 run them through and through carefeHy'^t papers which 
 you will look G(ver carefully and make them correct by 
 reference to a large grammar, and to let them do a great deal 
 
CONCLUSION. 87 
 
 of paper work in general. And here, though I have said 
 more than once that to discuss text-books would need 
 another lecture, I may be allowed to commend the series 
 of Unseen Passages in French and German and the Sets 
 of Examination Papers lately published by Messrs Riving- 
 tons. I do not desire anything better, and we who have 
 long had to print, chromograph, lithograph or dictate our 
 answers and our papers, may well envy the younger genera- 
 tion of teachers who find all this done for them cheaply and 
 thoroughly. 
 
 And here I must stop. I warned you that I was going 
 to plunge into detail, and I fear that I have made the 
 subject seem very dull. But it is not dull. The fault is 
 mine. I have tried to teach a good many subjects, like 
 most of my kind, but the teaching which upon the whole 
 I enjoy most is that of Modern Languages. We need 
 teachers of Modern Languages in the Public Schools, and I 
 believe that the demand will increase. We need especially 
 teachers who to proficiency in Mathematics or Science have 
 added a sound knowledge of one or two Modern Languages. 
 For Mathematical and Science teachers the Schools have 
 long looked to Cambridge ; why should they not seek 
 thence their Modern Language Teachers also ? 
 
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