;-ii ■,!]«■ •}■:■>'< :>\".-'"ft !•»! : > •i:ii, > \'\m i'li-l,,! ;■!•■ "iH \v -m • lifi •.,;'! >.v.;:x,- y •:"! h • iiji'i x^v ,i; si i ■ i. i'lMi'ii iij ■'"' Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027198211 Cornell University Library PN 4155.L22 Expression in speech and writini 3 1924 027 198 211 EXPRESSION IN Speech and Writing BY E. A. GREENING LAMBORN HEAD MASTER OF EAST OXFORD SCHOOL OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS MDCCCCXXII OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai HUMPHREY MILFORD Publisher to the University PREFACE These chapters, being an account of some experiments in the attempt to develop the powers of self-expression in our children of the East Oxford School, contain the substance of lectures delivered at various times during the past three years to the Oxford Branch of the English Association and to Summer Schools at Oxford, Cam- bridge, and Bangor. My thanks are due to Mr. P. E. Matheson for help in revising the proofs. Ce n'est point assez d'avoir un front qui pense, un ceil qui voit : il faut encore avoir una main qui parle. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. On Oral Composition 7 II, On Written Composition. • 31 III. On Verse-making . . . • • 57 IV. On Original Music . • 77 V. On the Rendering of Poetry . 88 Appendix no CHAPTER I ON ORAL CX)MPOSITION The wotM h»th net Hit li^.»vy yoke Up»n th« iitr>-bi^eepers, vritii^raac^ iheES Gsefbl to tfaesr employeis. But it was not recogmzed that, even firom tins lower, Qtilitaiian p«nt of Tiev, iU-edocated labooi^ I&£ aizfe- laboor, was vastefol and nnecoooonc: Hat has now- dawned en ovrenqdoyingdasses.and die present ednca- tional actiiity is the resnll. SdL less was it imdeistDod diat ^leed. tidimiig e the reaifiest means to wiitiBg; and least of all ±at ■±s detdapiBeBt of peaonalily is the most impoctant object of edncatian. It has been assmned that the infividnal exists ibr the state: «e need to recognize that the state exists ibr the imSvidaal to fulfil iumsdf m it. One of the fiist duties of tibe state is to eqnaEze oppoctonify for all its membeis to reafize themsehes. This means that the less cnltnred the p h uents , the more coltnFed must be the teachers of any chfld, and the greater is the importance of speedi-tiaining in itsednca- t:r<:2. Age fcx age, diildren of the co mfta ta ble classes acquire at h::~.e a ^ licfaer vocabolaiy, a &r wider lai^e of ideas, and a more varied mode of expresso^ Aem than the ctLcsea of the poor; diey even .speak with a diUerent voice, so ti^t dass-conscioosDess is k^it ever awake among ns : fcx- people wbo qieak dffiereiri: t ongnes can nemer properly onderstand one anodier. TIk lenie^ for this social danger is to make up in d^ school the deficiencies of the home. On Oral Composition I say ' in the school ' ; but, just as home means much more than the house, so school ought to mean much more than the class-rooms. The first need, alike of science and literature — the two great activities of the mind — is the thing with its name and adjectives. To see things, and learn the words that recall them to the imagination, as it was the first recorded exercise of the human mind, so it is the first stage in the education of the individual ; and that cannot be done within four walls. The object- lesson in the class-room is a miserably inadequate substi- tute for the school walk, both as science and speech training. I have heard lessons in botany given to children who did not know the names of the commonest flowers outside the school, and I have heard an inspector examine on the functions of roots who did not know a mangold wurzel from a swede. The official recom- mendations suggest pictures as the subjects of conversa- tion lessons; but actual things are perhaps even more stimulating, and a great part of the early training in speech should be by questions and discussions about things seen in the neighbourhood, of the school — people and their occupations, animals and their habits, foods and uses, carts and their contents, churches and chapels, rivers and streams, the hills that can be seen afar off, roads and the villages to which they lead, the common plants of the neighbourhood, and the birds — all these things should be used to enlarge the child's store alike of images and words. Then it will cease to be true that we have 'robbed the child of the earth to teach him geography ', as we have robbed him of romance to teach him history. And this need to ensure that words have a solid back- lo On Oral Composition ing of things behind them does not cease, but rather grows, as the child gets older. No one more than the teacher needs to bear in mind the sage remark of Hobbes that ' words are wise men's counters : they do but reckon with them. But they are the money of fools.' Just as children in the past have worked sums in acres and hectares and cube roots that were names of unvisualized things, so there is now a danger lest they should talk glibly with no real knowledge of the things of which they speak. There is, for example, the boy who was called upon to recite some stanzas he had learned from the ' Ancient Mariner '. He came to the lines that describe one of its most striking pictures : Day after day, day after day. The bloody sun at noon, Right up above the mast did stand^ there he faltered, and after hesitating for a moment, supplied : ' So did the bloody moon '. Now the words he had learned evidently conveyed no reality to that boy : there was no picture of actual things in them ; for it is impossible to visualize the moon and sun superimposed upon one another in the sky. One may laugh at his blunder, but the tragedy is that he will grow up to use other- words without referring them to reality: to speak and think of labour and capital, for example, as if they were both groups of people, never realizing that one means actual men and women, the other merely machineiy and commodities ; or to suppose that wealth means money, or that patriot- ism means dislike of foreigners. ' It is the first distemper of learning ', said Bacon, ' when On Oral Composition " men study words and not things.' This danger besets also a great deal of the written work in schools. But of that I shall speak in my next chapter. I do not propose to discuss the oral exercises of the infants' school except to say that they represent the greatest reform that has ever been made in education. A hundred years ago Blake could write with truth that To go to school on a summer morn, O it drives all joy away, Under a cruel eye outworn The little ones spend the day In silence and dismay. Freedom of speech is the sign and test of liberal government, and is the best training in responsibility and in that self-discipline which is the only discipline worth anything. And in this the infants' schools have set the example to the rest of us. I would say to any one who wishes to be convinced of the value of free talk in educa- tion : spend a day or two, or a week or two, in a good infants' school and observe its effect on the relationship between teacher and taught and on the children's attitude towards their school and their school tasks. It has been said that the child comes to school ignorant, but curious ; and that he leaves it still ignorant, but no longer curious. That is not true of the infants' schools ; and if it is true of the senior departments it is because the child is no longer encouraged in the spontaneous expression of his preferences, but becomes the passive receiver of informa- tion that is supposed to be useful to him. In this way, too, the teacher is deprived of the valuable guidance afforded by the child's expression of his instinctive likes 12 On Oral Composition and dislikes and natural interests, and so he often works against the grain without knowing why. Discontinuity between the infant and senior depart- ments is still one of our greatest handicaps in education, and it is seen at its worst in the restraint put upon speech and in the limiting of opportunities for free conversation. And even in schools where the importance of continu- ity is realized there is often an abandonment of oral exercises at the top of the school. Oral composition may appear on the time-table for the lower forms, but is entirely superseded by written exercises in the higher classes. I suppose that I shall be accused of exaggera- tion if I suggest that up to the very last year of school life oral exercises are much more important than written ones. But I will go further and say that they are still the best means of getting good written results. Writing is at best a slow and laborious process ; and while a boy is writing one sentence he could say a dozen, and so get a correspondingly greater practice in expressing his ideas. Then good writing depends very largely on a good stock of ideas and a good vocabulary ; and oral exercises, being a public matter, contribute many stores of both to a common fund to which is applicable the great social ideal : ' From every one according to his ability, to every one according to his needs.' The abler boys and those more fortunate in their home environment thus unconsciously help and teach, while the others unconsciously learn and improve their own powers through the imitativeness which is one of the great factors in early education. Again, though this is quite against tradition In the schools, good writing is simply more carefully considered speech. There is great need to get back into written On Oral Composition 13 exercises the easy, natural fluency and simplicity of speech instead of the stilted, conventional phrases that a shallow and pretentious system has made customary in the schools. I remember, a year or two ago, cycling into the suburbs of Leeds one evening after a long day's ride and wondering where I should put up. I saw a lamplighter going his rounds, and asked him if he could direct me to an hotel. He replied, ' Do you require temporary re- freshment or are you desirous of domiciliary accommoda- tion ? ' I said I wanted supper and a bed, and asked him where he had learned such eloquent discourse. He answered, ' Sir, I was educated at a higher-grade school in this city.' His teachers had evidently not realized that pompous phrases are more objectionable than dialect or even slang, and that speech should improve writing, not writing deprave speech. A good style is above all things idiomatic, racy. It must be built up, as Dr. Johnson said that Shakespeare's dialogue was, by diligent selection out of the common conversation of men ; this is not to say it must reproduce the common conversation (which is the mistake of the realist in fiction), but it must be a selection from the language actually used by men, and not a separate jargon like the phrases of ' business correspondence '. ' Re your communication of yesterday's date ' : that is a tongue spoken of no man; and it ought not to be written. We need to get nearer to Bunyan and Latimer, and further from Johnson and Gibbon. And to do that we must get plenty of practice in free speaking. There are still hundreds, perhaps thousands, of schools in which almost the only opportunity given to the children for 14 On Oral Composition speaking is in answer to a question by the teacher in the course of a so-called oral lesson. There the natural common.sense answer is usually a single word or phrase ; but, since ev&ty one nowadays has heard that children ought to be trained to speak, the teacher frequently insists on the answer being a complete sentence, as if that were likely to do something towards self-expression. That is a very good example of the unnatural and arti- ficial practices which have made the school a pedantic society divorced from the real world of men, with customs and codes and rules unknown in the larger life. It is a great and unmitigated evil. It, more than anj^hing else, justifies the old gibe at the schoolmaster as a man among children and a child among men. The school- master, more than all others, should be a man of the world, in the best sense of the term, and he should try to make the world of school as much like the real world of men as it can be made. The speech that develops power and personality is not that which is the result of another's direction, but the spontaneous utterance that springs from one's own initi- ative. It is better, as Socrates knew, to ask questions than to answer them. And the practice of putting up the hand acts as a check upon spontaneity and initiative. How many of ourselves would be ready to speak if we were obliged to draw attention upon ourselves by putting up our hands ? And if any one says, ' Yes, but we are not children ', I counsel him to examine very carefully his attitude towards his pupils and to consider whether he is not in danger of regarding them as.say, Charles I regarded a subject race rather than as an elderly man regards young ones, which is the nearer analogy. On Oral Composition 35 And even when, as^he Board suggests, the catechetical method is supplemented by the practice of requiring individual children to give a consecutive account of the subject-matter of a lesson, we are still far from the speech training that prepares for the real intercourse of men ; and we are still perilously near the pedantry which assumes that the only thing worth hearing is what we ourselves have said. The problem of speech training is the problem of spontaneous utterance and initiative, the expression of personality and its development by means of that ex- pression. It may be helpful if I give some account of my own experiments in reducing this theory to practice. The exercise I have found most valuable of all is one which occupies the hour from ten to eleven on Monday morning, when every one is supposed to have observed during the week-end some matter of interest on which he would like to give or receive information. It is conducted in this way : a boy stands up in his place and says : ' Gentlemen, I should like to pro- pose that Mr. So-and-so takes the chair this morning. He has not yet taken his turn ' — or, ' He was a very success- ful chairman last time he took the chair ' — or some other reason may be given. Then some one else gets up and seconds the nomination, and perhaps another rises to propose another name. If so, the chairman is elected by a show of hands, takes the chair, and calls upon the secretary to read the minutes of the last meeting. Per- haps the best way of describing the whole procedure will be for me to quote extracts from a typical set of minutes before I go any further with my explanation. 1 6 On Oral Composition The last meeting was held on July 13. Mr. Berfield took the chair. When the minutes were read, Mr. Thomson com- plained that his question about seed potatoes had not been recorded.' This question was added, and the minutes were passed. On questions arising out of the minutes Mr. Trodd asked if Mr. Jacks had found out for him the meaning of the letters G.B, on a plate on a motor-car. Mr. Jacks said that he had asked his brother, who was a taxicab driver, and he told him that the letters stood for Great Britain, and were fixed on a car when it was taken abroad. Mr. Simms asked Mr. Redknap why he had not brought the book 'on butterflies he had promised to lend him. Mr. Redknap said his mother would not let him. Mr. Smart pointed out that there was a large book on butterflies in the Reference Room at the Public Library. In matters of public interest : Mr. Pulker said that Mr. Lam- born had called him ' a barbarous Hun ' on Friday, and he did not think a schoolmaster ought to say such things. Mr. Lam- born explained that the honourable member had murdered and mangled a beautiful stanza by reading it worse than any foreigner, and that he thought his expression was justified. Mr. Pulker said he was not satisfied. Mr. Rose showed a Skull-cap, a piece of Figwort, and the red Bartsia he had found at IfHey on Sunday, and said that Mr. Quelch [a local farmer] had threatened to throw him in the river. Mr. MuUis described how Mr. Quelch had once tried to catch him in his copse. Mr. Gardner said his uncle had just been demobilized, and his employer had tried to get him to work for a lower wage. Mr. Morris said his father's employer had done the same. The Chairman suggested that this matter might be brought up in next week's debate. ' Every member must provide himself with pencil and paper to take note of any objection he may wish to raise. On Oral Composition 17 Mr. Morris said that he would move that in the opinion of this house war profiteers should be shot by military law. The matter was left to the debate committee. [Various other matters of public interest, ranging from the results of local cricket matches to the arrest of a drunken sailor, are here omitted.] In question-time Mr. Pulker asked why Lt. Small wore green tabs. Mr. Burness said he was in the Intelligence Corps. Mr. Castle : the meaning of C.I.D. in a book he had been reading. Mr. Tebby said Criminal Investigation Department. Mr. Bestley : why the north doorway in Sandford Church was blocked up. Mr. Lamborn said that the north door in most churches was blocked up after the Reformation because it was called the devil's door, and people were superstitious. {That minute does not record a very adequate explanation. I ex- plained the matter a little more fully, but one has to be very careful to resist the temptation to say all one could, for the object is not to give information, but to teach children how to ask for it and how to impart it — which are two very important powers both for the individual and the community. I very rarely intervene unless a questioner directly appeals and says, 'Has Mr. Lamborn any answer to my question?'], Mr. Rose asked what bird laid the egg he had brought. Mr. Bestley advised him to look in a book at the Public Library. [The minute should have given the name of the book : Mr. Bestley also explained on what shelf in the Library the book was to be found.] Mr. Simms asked why strawberries were called strawberries. Mr. Nutt said because straw was laid round them. Mr. James said they were called strawberries because of the runners. Mr. Manby said if Mr. Simms had looked in his dictionary he would have found they were strawberries because they strewed themselves with their runners. 5G51 -B 1 8 On Oral Composition Mr. Bestley, junior, asked the meaning of cui bono in a book he was reading. No answer was given. Mr. Saxton asked why stablemen made a hissing noise. Mr. Redknap said it was to keep the horses quiet. Mr. Saxton was not satisfied. Mr. Tuckwell said he would ask his father. Mr. Smith asked how rainbows were made. No answer was given. Mr. Pulker asked if Mr. Owens would give a lesson on rainbows in the science lesson. Mr. Owens said he would. Mr. Bestley asked about a certain building at Ascot Park. Mr. Lamborn said it was the blacksmith's shop of the old manor when all the work was done on the estate. Mr. Willingale said he had read a book about Ascot called Fairleigh Hall. Mr. Bestley asked if the Private Study class could have a school walk to Ascot. [I replied to that that if the class could find the field paths, using the Ordnance map without help from me, we would go to Ascot the following week. We got about half-way, and then the class lost itself because the paths had fallen out of use and they did not know how to recover the line by means of the map and the disused stiles. And so we ignominiously returned home.] Various other questions were asked on all kinds of subjects. I think these extracts from the secretary's minutes make it unnecessary to give any further ex- planation of the procedure of the lesson — I say lesson, but, of course, the essential thing is that the class is really running itself : it has its own elected secretary to record and read the minutes ; it elects its own chairman ; it allows any of its members to raise any matter of public interest, or to ask any question of personal interest ; and it places the common stock of information at the service of the questioner. The teacher's business is not to direct or control, but to take private note of his own shortcomings and mis- On Oral Composition 19 doings, of subjects on which lessons might be given with interest and profit, and of serious errors of phrase or grammar which pass unnoticed and uncorrected by the chairman or the class, and which need to be dealt with in a more formal manner in a special English lesson. He must learn, like the Psalmist, to refrain even from good words, though at first it be pain and grief to him not to be teaching and correcting at every other minute. But interest and freedom of utterance are much more important at this stage and in this kind of exercise than accuracy of grammar and even of fact. Matters that really call for correction he must make note of and deal with in more formal lessons. Even in the subjects which the master himself organ- izes and teaches, such as geography, history, or science, even arithmetic, a certain number of periods should be provided in which the information given is not pre- arranged but is given as the result of questions put by members of the class. They should understand that when a certain history hour, for example, comes round, any one who has any question of historical interest to ask may put it, and that teacher and class between them will answer and discuss it. There is far too much in- formation forced upon children without any initiative on their part ; and such opportunities as I am suggesting will not only give scope for free talk but will ensure that the subjects which really interest boys are taught, and will also give the teacher an indication as to what those matters are. This spontaneous discussion of subjects that are matters of public interest among boys has been introduced into the Perse School by Mr. Caldwell Cook, as may be read B a 20 On Oral Composition in his account of ' Littieman Lectures ' in TAe Play Way. A boy prepares a little lecture on some subject of boyish interest upon which he is an authority (for every boy is an authority on something), such as rabbit-keeping, or brass-rubbing, or Sherlock Holmes, or ghosts, and this is followed by questions and comments, and additional con- tributions from members of the class. A boy of thirteen will easily lecture for three-quarters of an hour on fret- work, showing and explaining the tools used and the articles made, or on printing, illustrated by specimens from the paternal printing works, or on birds' eggs, illustrated by the speaker's own collection. This is the natural line of development from the less formal raising of public matters in the kind of session I have been describing. And even among younger children something of the kind may be done by setting a class to read quickly, taking notes as they read, and then asking an individual to give an account of the chapter or passage from his notes, and asking others to supplement or correct his account from their own recol- lection or notes. I have found it both interesting and profitable alike to senior and junior boys to develop this practice still further by taking advantage of the ' keeping school ' instinct that makes teaching a popular game among children, and allowing elder boys to prepare lectures and give them to junior classes. It makes a senior boy study with interest and industry and, above all, with a sense of purpose, if he knows that his work is being done with the object of teaching younger boys ; it makes his notes, for example, of direct and obvious value, whereas note-taking is often a wearisome and apparently On Oral Composition 21 purposeless task for boys. Moreover, as a wise man has said, you never truly possess a thing until you have im- parted it. The importance and value of the power to make your- self clearly intelligible to your fellows can be, and should be, brought home even to the very young children. I have sometimes done this by sending a child to wait outside the room and then, in the hearing of the class, charged another boy with a message to deliver to him, instructing him, say, to go to the cupboard for coloured chalks, and to draw on the blackboard a man with red trousers, a blue coat with brass buttons, a white hat, and a pointed white beard. Then, if a mistake is made, the class, by questions, finds out whether the listener or the messenger was to blame. Or I have sent a boy to tell another which key I had touched of all those on a large bunch ; and' again the class has been made to realize the importance alike of accurate observation and clear description. In the Minutes of the Morning Talk from which I quoted, reference was made to a suggestion that the Debates Committee should take note of a certain matter. School debates are now a fairly common practice, but they too often are show affairs, like school concerts, in which the children express not themselves but their teachers : the results look very well — like drawing results when the work is done bit by bit from the blackboard, and finished off or touched up by the professor of drawing — but really the children are no more acting spontaneously than so many performing dogs or the ventriloquist's puppets. I know more than one schoor where people are invited to listen to debates which are all rehearsed beforehand 3^ On Oral Composition under the direction of the teacher who chooses the subject and puts up on the blackboard the arguments for and against it from a book for debaters called Pros and Cons, and tells off certain boys to get up certain points. Now all that, to put it frankly, is humbug. Debates, to be really valuable, must not be controlled or even dictated by the teacher, but must be managed by the class acting as a democracy : that means they must be managed through a committee elected by the class, and on lines laid down in rules established by the class. The rules in my own school provide for a committee of six who shall choose a weekly motion from among those handed in, one by each member of the class ; shall secure a proposer, seconder, and two opposers ; shall post up a notice of the motion; and shall inspect the notes prepared by every member, and report to the house any member who has neglected to prepare any. They have power to co-opt (not more than three) ex- members, because the debates are held on early closing day in order that ex-members who are at work may have an opportunity of keeping in touch with the school, and particularly with this part of its work. I should like to emphasize very strongly the importance of taking every advantage of the opportunities offered by debates of bringing the outside world into contact with the school. It is good for the school in every way, wherever it can be done, and it can be done not only through debates: we get people to come in and sing and play to the children in singing time, to recite or read to them in English lessons, and to lecture to them in history or geography ; we have lately had a lecture on brasses from Mr. Beaumont, and one on New Zealand On Oral Composition 23 from an Anzac sergeant, and I remember one of absorb- ing interest on Central Europe, given by Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher to the senior boys. It is mere trade-unionism of the narrowest kind to suppose that nobody can teach in school but a schoolmaster. Even from an examina- tion point of view this going outside the syllabus will be found to ' pay ' by its stimulus to the general intelligence of the children. But it pays best in debates, by giving the boys models to imitate. Our circumstances are specially favourable, but any school can find some one who can be pressed into useful service. The secretary of Debates is elected for the term, but the chairman is elected at each session, and is sometimes a visitor, rarely a teacher, often an ex-scholar, and most frequently a boy. He has an agenda paper provided beforehand, and he calls on the secretary to read the minutes ; asks for objections, if any ; signs the minutes ; asks for questions arising out of them ; asks for questions addressed to the officers arising out of the discharge of their official duties; next asks if there are any more matters of private business — sometimes it will be a new minute book needed, and the house will vote a levy of a halfpenny a head ; sometimes negligent members will be discovered and dealt with, a proposal for their punishment being moved, seconded, discussed, and carried or rejected by a show of hands. Lastly, the chairman says : ' The house will proceed to public business, when the motion before it is "thatin theopinion of this house too much time is devoted to arithmetic in this school " ' ; or ' that the Oxford Corporation is inefficient ' ; or ' that con- scription should be abolished ' ; or ' that a bill to punish profiteers is necessary ' ; or whatever else the committee 2+ On Oral Composition has chosen — * proposed by Mr. Black, seconded by Mr. Brown; Mr. White will oppose and Mr. Grey speak fourth.' Then, when these four members have spoken alternately, the motion is declared open to public ddiate, and any one who wi^es to qieak stands Dp, and the chairman calls on the first who catches his eye. All the usual forms of debate are preserved — every term, by the way, we manage to find some one to take the committee of the day to the Oxford Union det»tes, so that some of the hoys at least may see the real thii^ — and at the end the mover is allowed to refer to pcnnts raised by the opposition, and then the motion is put from the chair. Debates so conducted prepare boys for the life of the world not merely by stimulatii^ intelligence and expresave power, not merely by introdudi^ matters of general public interest, but by giving them some practical foretaste and experience of self-government in ^diich the rules and subjects and forms, and even the penalties for anti-social conduct, are not those prescribed by an auto- crat but those chosen by the community. The apparent results may not look as well as those secured by rehearsed debates : there will be more feeble speeches and more nonsense talked — ^thoi^^ not so much as at an average political meetii^ — and the teadier will be constantly itchii^ to get up and correct mistakes of statement or procedure. But the only sound road for debates as for democracy is that of experiment and experience. When the teacher feels he must get up, let him get up— and go out. He will find that if the class really needs his help they will send for him and ask for it. On Oral Composition 25 There are other oral exercises that not merely prepare boys for social life in the scholastic sense by making them ready of wit and tongue, but by making them familiar with social institutions. One that I have tried with senior boys is a rehearsal of police-court procedure. The simplest form to begin with is the hearing of a case in the magistrates' court. The natural advance from that is the trial of a prisoner committed to the assizes. You will find all the necessary information as to proce- dure in one of the 'Cambridge Manuals', or in Mr. Brown- ing's little book on citizenship. The first time we attempted a mock trial some of us — six senior boys and I — went to a trial conducted by the Y.M.C.A. And that brings me to exercises which, like those in real life, are partly oral and partly a matter of writing. Now, though I am dividing the subject into chapters on oral and written composition, the truth is that the two things are not really separable. For example, in Morning Talk a boy will often come provided with a written question; or a boy will come with some information he has promised to obtain written down from the book to which he has referred. And in debate every boy has to prepare written notes of points he has thought of for himself or gathered from his parents, or gained from newspapers or books. And then there are some exercises in which both writing and speech must be employed. One of them, of great practical and utilitarian value, is, the rehearsed interview. The class writes an advertisement, say, for a junior clerk, or an apprentice, or a gardener's boy ; they are then set to write a letter of application in answer to it ; next they discuss the letters so produced, or some 26 On Oral Composition of them, and select by vote the best three. Then they write letters inviting these selected candidates to an interview with the imaginary employer. At this mock interview two or more boys impersonate the heads of the firm and interview the candidates in succession, asking them questions about their qualifications for the post. Lastly, the class discusses the manner in which the candidates acquitted themselves, and choose by vote that one who did best. I regard it as very important that boys should be taken into the teacher's confidence and shown frankly his reasons for setting any exercise, or, indeed, for teaching any subject ; that children should not be driven in blinkers more or less blindly to some end which only the teacher sees. Of course, this means that the teacher himself has to think, which is always troublesome for most people ; but Mr. Holmes's question, ' What is all this doing for the child ? ' is one to which every teacher must have his answer clearly thought out and stated both to himself and his pupils. Now this last exercise is one where the purpose and value is clearly seen, and so the boys will be ready to co-operate and do their best. Moreover, and this again is an important matter, the teacher is not the sole arbiter ; his approval is not the sole criterion of success ; the boy knows that his work and himself will be judged by the ' verdict of his peers. And while a boy is sometimes in- different to his teacher's single opinion, he is rarely indifferent to the voice of his equals. Another exercise of this mixed kind is the mock elec- tion, e. g. of a person to serve on the parish council. The class begins by writing a specimen address to the On Oral Composition 27 voters. Then it resolves itself into a parish meeting, elects a chairman, and proceeds to hear addresses from two or more boys who are first proposed and seconded in short speeches by others. The candidates expound their policy and make their promises of what they will do for the parish if they are elected, and then they are subjected to questions from members of the audience which they are expected to answer. Lastly, the parish rehearses the procedure of the ballot box and voting paper, and sees how its recorded votes are counted and checked. The numbers of spoilt voting papers rejected at our general and municipal elections suggest how necessary and valuable such prac- tice may be. So, too, the blunders made in filling up the numerous ' forms ' brought into existence by the war suggest the advisability in the schools of exercises such as the following : Copy and fill up this Form. Full name (surname first) Age, years months. Date of birth, day month year. Father's occupation Religious denomination Schools previously attended (give dates) . . . Then there is an exercise with pictures which lends itself equally well to written or to oral composition. Such a picture as Millais' ' Boyhood of Raleigh ' — I mention that one because it has been reproduced in such numbers that nearly every schoolboy knows it — you can hang it in front of the class and select three boys to represent the persons in it and to reproduce their 28 On Oral Composition conversation — the questions of the boys and the answers of the sailor, and the comments. Or you can ask the class to translate the picture into written language, describing all that the picture shows to the eye, and adding that which no picture can express to the ear. And, as a model, either before or after, you might read the passage in Westward Ho! which shows how Kingsley did the same thing. Another picture which will provide a more difificult exercise of the same kind is Mr. Yeames's ' When did you last see your father ? ' This will employ ten or eleven children to represent the characters in the scene, and will provide an exercise that will lead naturally from oral composition to dramatiza- tion. But of that I do not propose to speak. Or it will provide a written exercise in the attempt to convey the scene by means of words, and one might read as a model Cromwell's examination of Sir Henry Lee's household in Woodstock. I have only time to suggest in outline three or four similar exercises with pictures and literary models, and I have not time to do more than suggest to you the im- portance of such aids both to the imagination and to the expressive powers — for you cannot make bricks without straw, and a boy cannot write well on a subject of which he has neither ideas nor vocabulary — that is why, when you ask him to write on 'Punctuality', or ' Honesty is the best policy ', or ' A stitch in time saves nine ', you usually have to provide him first with your own ideas on these subjects. But the true purpose of composition is to help him, not to your own ideas, but to the clear and fine ex- pression of his own. And pictures and poetry will both On Oral Composition 29 stimulate his imagination and suggest adequate means of expression as only genius is able to do. Here are some bare suggestions for exercises. Show Leighton's picture of the ' Phoenician Traders '. Read Mr, Fletcher's imaginative presentment in his Introductory History of a scene on the British coast in 100 K.C., and the last two stanzas of Matthew Arnold's ' Scholar Gipsy '. And then ask the class to give an account of a Phoeni- cian trader's visit as a Briton might have told it. Show Sir William Richardson's picture of ' Napoleon on the Bellerophon '. Read Kipling's ' St. Helena Lullaby' and a good newspaper article on the death or the centen- ary of a great man — such an article as the Telegraph lately published on Kingsley or The Times on Addison — and ask the class to write an obituary notice of Napoleon as a contemporary might have done it. Or show the picture of Charles I on his way to execu- tion, and read Marvell's stanzas, and Carlyle or Belloc on the death of Marie Antoinette, and let them try to write as a soldier guarding the scaffold might have described what he saw. Or show a picture of Waterloo. Read Fletcher's imaginary letters from the young cornet of Tubney and his batman, and Byron's ' Eve of Waterloo ' ; and then ask them to write a soldier's letter home after any other battle of which they have heard or read. Or show the picture ' After Culloden ', read Macaulay's ' Jacobite's Epitaph ' and some selected passages from Kidnapped; and ask the children to tell a tale as a man who had harboured a fugitive. All this may be done either in speech or writing. 3° On Oral Composition Indeed, it may be done in both ways simultaneously by different sections of the class. This plan will ensure that time is found for both functions, and will enable the teacher to give more attention to individuals and in- dividuals to have more chance of speaking — a very important consideration where classes are large. Moreover, it will lessen the great heap of exercise books to be corrected after the writing is done. CHAPTER II ON WRITTEN COMPOSITION I NOTICED lately in the newspapers that a Croydon inspector had been speaking of the danger lest the fashionable craze for imaginative exercises should lead to the neglect of the power to describe accurately the actual things and places of every day. I think he had some reason for so speaking, though he probably forgot that crazes are almost always due to rabid inspectors, who run about the schools snapping at all the teachers in a district. But there is a real danger just now of forgetting the importance of being able to describe what is actually seen as well as what is imagined, and of forget- ting, moreover, that the power to describe imaginary things depends entirely on practice in describing actual things. This, again, is an exercise in which a boy can measure his own success independent of the teacher's mark. If he is asked to write a picture of some place or person or building, he can judge the result by the number of his class-mates who recognize the subject from his description. Or again, he may attempt the more difficult but also the more interesting thing of writing a character sketch of some person known to the class. Such an exercise is best written under the title of ' Who is it ? ' or ' Where is it ? ' as the case may be, because that title will keep the requirements of the description before the eye and 32 On Written Composition mind. It is a good plan also to ask the writers to invent a descriptive or suggestive name or their subject, in the manner of Bunyan's characters. This kind of exercise has a good deal in common with the drawing lesson : its object is to teach children to observe and to express what they see, and above all to select significant detail, which is the first step in art. The most important and valuable exercise with the pencil is memory drawing ; and memory drawing is an almost equally valuable exercise for the pen. The method is the same as in drawing ; you show an object, say an umbrella or knife or a handbag or a bicycle, for a few seconds, then withdraw it and ask the class to write a description, perhaps in the form of an advertisement for lost property. When they have done so, the article is again produced, and you call attention to its details and give marks for the inclusion of each. Perhaps a better plan is to credit each child with a maximum of marks, say twenty, and deduct a mark or marks for each detail omitted in the description. Here, again, literary models may be used to show how the thing has been done by artists. I remember once asking a boy to turn out his pockets for the class to write a memory sketch of what they saw, and I afterwards read to them Coventry Patmore's 'The Toys', and Stevenson's ' Child's Play'. When children have learned to describe things accu- rately they may go on to describe pictures from memory, and so at last come to write of imaginary scenes in fairyland or Utopia ; but I think the inspector's protest was just, that if a Croydon boy is not able to send a picture of Croydon to an Australian cousin he needs On PVrtiien Composition 33 more fact and less fiction in his composition exercises. He will write a very unconvincing description of the New Jerusalem if he cannot write a direction of the way from school to recreation ground, mentioning, e.g., the various turns and distances and the most striking buildings on the route. This may be brought home to a class by setting them some such exercise as the following : you have seen a motorist run over a man and drive away. Write a description of the car which will help the police to trace it. Or : you have seen two cyclists collide. Write an account of the accident which will show clearly who was in fault. So the importance of explicit instructions in letter-writing may be impressed upon children by means of some such test as this : Paddington dep. 4.45 p.m., 6. 11 p.m. Oxford arr. 6.3 p.m., 7.4a p.m. Buses for Littlemore leave Carfax at ten minutes past the hour. You live at Rose Hill. Write a letter to your aunt in London explaining how to reach your house ; or, making it clear how she is to meet and recognize you at the station. (See also Note on p. 56.) I hope no one is imagining so vain a thing as that I am depreciating the value of imaginative exercises. On the contrary, I regard the child always as a poet, of imagination all compact. But the function of imagina- tion is not to create the non-existent, but to see real things more clearly than the realist. It is not to produce fiction but to reveal the truth. And so I would have children write imaginatively about real things. And again, though imagination is the natural sphere of childhood, the child has to prepare for other spheres SMI ^ 34 On Written Composition and must be led to expect other qualities than purely imaginative ones in his work. One of these is logic, the proper organization of his subject-matter. The need for this, and its great importance in making things clear, can be brought home to a class if a jumble of statements, such as a man might gather by overhear- ing various groups of people talking about an accident, is written on the blackboard. The children will realize the need for rearranging the facts, not in the order in which they were heard, but in the order in which they occurred ; and they may be set to do it so as to make the whole thing clear to a person who previously knew nothing about it. Here again they will be writing with a sense of purpose which is only too rare in the ordinaiy school themes. For the average child, as Dr. Ballard reminds us, ' never tries to amuse the teacher, or to tell him something he did not know before, or to convince him of the error of his ways ', which last especially is one of the most potent of stimuli to forcible prose. He writes because he has to say something, and not because he has something that he wishes to say. A good exercise to secure practice in arranging state- ments in logical order is the writing a description of a process, say, making a pudding, or mending a puncture, or rubbing a brass, or harnessing a horse, or christening a baby. Here the natural sequence of statements is determined by the order of the events described, and the children are led to realize that a proper sequence of ideas does exist and must be expressed in their writing. Then they may be led further to see that these ideas fall naturally into groups which need to be distinguished from one another by the use of paragraphs. On IVritten Composition 35 In my experience this necessary organization of subject-matter in paragraphs is either neglected or very imperfectly taught, so that many exercises are written in solid blocks,and many more are divided into so-called para- graphs, which are really only arranged on a mechanical system of writing three or four sentences and then beginning on a fresh line. Biographies afford another exercise that lends itself to practice in the use of paragraphs, because the different stages in the life of a man or a boot provide the natural subject-matter of paragraphs. So geographical subjects naturally divide themselves into sections and so are helpful in training boys to organize their essays in paragraphs. For example, they can be led to see that in an essay on Ireland, position and size demand one paragraph, physical features another, climate a third, productions can be deduced as a fourth, and industries and distribution of population from what has gone before. My own practice has been to vary theme writing by asking for three or four such outline schemes instead of a fully written exercise, e.g., give outline schemes of an essay on ' My Bicycle ', ' Fishing ', ' My Favourite Writer ', and 'Our Baby'. But, of course, the subject that essentially provides training in logical expression is mathematics, and in particular, for most children, arithmetic. I am convinced that we are not getting anything like the full educational — or, indeed, any other — value from the time devoted to arithmetic in our schools. Above all, I am convinced that the value of arithmetic as an influence on English is hardly even dreamed of. And yet arithmetic artistically c a 36 On Written Composition taught may afTord examples of that perfect expression which is to be found elsewhere in poetry alone. And so it will affect composition as the teaching of grammar can never do. I suppose that statement will sound surprisii^. What to me is surprising is that arithmetical expression should never have been r^[arded as a very important part of composition. Let me give an example. A school in- spector recently set some senior boys the followii^ problem. A pedlar buys 2i dozen yards of calico at £<) laj. per gross yards and sells it in dress lengths of 3 J yards at 6s. ^d. each. What did he gain on the sale? When the boys had finished he worked his sum on the blackboard. First, in one comer of the board he put down 21 yards, and multiplied it by la. Then he divided the result by 144, long division. Then in another comer he multiplied ;^9 its. by the number he had obtained. Then in another place he divided the 252 by 3f. Then he made another ' little sum', as he called it, by multiply- ing 6s. 3d. by the result of his division. Lastly, in the middle of the blackboard, he set down the two sums of money, subtracted, and triumphantly wrote 'Answer' in front of the result. The answer was wrong as it happened, because he had made a slip in his division. But that does not matter : what does matter, it seems to me, is the utter absence of expressed consecutive reason- ing in such a method of proceeding. To any one who had seen the blackboard without hearing the explanation there was nothing but a disconnected series of separate calculations, out of which 'answer' emerged at the bottom. Now if I had been marking that problem I should not On Written Composition 37 have troubled to consider whether the answer were right or wrong: I should simply have disqualified the per- formance on the grounds of form and expression. The first essential in written arithmetic is not the correct numerical result, but the clear expression of the process of thought. You can no more judge the merit of the solution of an arithmetical problem by looking at the last line of it than you can judge a problem of Euclid by reading the last line of that. First of all, one might suppose it would strike any one but an examiner that ans^ver implies question : that if it is important to state clearly an answer at the end of a sum it is equally important to state clearly a question at the beginning. Well b^un is half done, and I have found by consistent experience that training children to make a habit of being perfectly clear as to the question and of writing it down before writing anything else is almost as important as explaining the method of solving it. It used to be quite a common thing, and I daresay it still is, to find boys presenting an answer in £ s. d. to a sum which asked for yards, feet, and inches. To set down the question first is to avoid the possibility of such muddled thinking as that implies. But there is a much more important reason for doing so. That sum of the inspector's is in principle simply this : if I buy cloth for so much and sell it for so much, what do I gain ? The answer to it and to an infinity of such questions is the general statement ' Gain is Selling Price minus Buying Price'. Children who have once understood this idea of gain and seen its application to this particular sum would begin by writing the question Gain? 38 On Written Composition and answering it in general terms G = SP - BP. That statement rather than the final result is the real answer to the question of the sum : that is what involves the use of the reasoning powers. The rest is merely the substitution of the particular values of a particular in- stance. In this case 6s. 3^. X 12 yds. x 21 : 3I yds. — ;£'9 I2J. X 11 yds. X 21 : 144 yds. = 6j. <3,d. X 12 X 6—£() I2S. X if. = £3 i5-f-x6-(;^9 i'is. + £4 16s. + £2, 8s.) = ;^32 lOJ.— ;^l6 16s. = £5 14J. That series of logical statements can and should be read exactly like a composition exercise or a problem of Euclid. I would insist that every written solution of an arithmetical problem should be arranged in such a way that it can be read as a piece of consecutive reasoning. Problems should be regarded less as sums than as syllo- gisms, and the solutions should not consist of detached groups of figures but of a series of statements, each naturally following from the one preceding as do the inferences from the stated premisses in a geometrical proposition. This means that every solution begins by stating the question to be answered ; should state the answer first in general terms ; and should next substitute the particular figures of the particular instance. To illustrate by examples : How many a^d. pencils can I buy with 2j. 6d. ? If 18 sheep cost £37 16s., how many will 10 guineas buy? On Written Composition 39 How many hens' eggs at 15 a shilling must be given for a score of ducks' eggs at \s, gd. a dozen ? How much stock at 97J can be purchased by the sale of ;^78o Consols at 5a ? The answer in each case depends upon the general truth that money spent measured by price of article gives the number purchased. Thus in question i : Number of pencils ? = Money to spend : Price of a pencil. = aj. 6d. : ajrf. = la. And a: Number of sheep ? = Money to spend : Price of a sheep. = ^Tio loj. : '^^' o — . *" 18 = ^lo 10s. : £z is. = 5- And 3: Number of eggs ? = Value spent : price of an egg. IS. od. I ad. = — ^— X ao : — — • la 15 = ifrf. X 5 : 1^/. = 43l or 44- And 4: Number of shares ? = Value of stock : Price of stock./ = £5^ X 78 : £975- = 4'i6 or £416 stock. 40 On Written Composition Further illustrations would overweight the chapter. But the value of arithmetic as a training in the expres- sion of the process of reasoning is so little appreciated that I have decided to develbp the matter in an Appen- dix which will be found at the end of the book. Speaking of logical expression reminds me that I shall perhaps be expected to say something of grammar. What I have to say may be summed up in a sentence of Hazlitt : 'We understand the grammar of a foreign language best though we do not speak it so well ' ; or, if I may adapt a couplet from Hudibras, All a dull" grammarian's rules Teach nothing but to name his tools. I am not going to deny the value of grammatical study, but I am going to assert that that value must not be looked for in a more efficient or even in a more accurate use of language. The theory that parsing and analysis are a means of improving composition is as dead as the books in which it is propounded. I am not going to argue the question on a priori grounds. To modify what Dr. Johnson said about free- will, ' All theory is for it, but all experience is against it'. Experience has shown conclusively that a child can write well who has never learned to decline his noun and his verb — who has never heard the names of those parts of speech ; and, conversely, that children may spend hours over the study of grammar without learning to write correctly, far less fluently and expressively. Formal grammar no more produces a good style than a know- ledge of theology results in. pious living. There are, On Written Composition 41 however, signs of a reaction against the abolition of grammar lessons in the primary school, and some teachers may dissent from my last statement. All the a priori arguments in favour of grammar have been disposed of for me by my experience in the last year or two of the work of children who took refuge in Oxford during the air-raid migration from London. I found that most of them had had systematic instruction in grammar in the London County Council schools — some as many as three lessons a week. Yet their exercises in composition could not compare with those of the Oxford children, whether in amount, in readableness, or even in accuracy. They were by comparison stiff, awkward, and short. But what surprised me even more was the equal rapidity with which these children forgot their grammar and improved their style under a grammarless system. In six months not a single boy could name with any certainty the parts of speech in a sentence. They were like a man who has been taken once or twice into a factory and told the names of technical tools and machines and has straightway forgotten all about them. It may be said, and I think with some justice, that this is because the grammar had been badly taught. For grammar is really a highly philosophical matter; and, even if children were naturally fitted to learn it, it is certain that few schoolmasters are well enough instructed to be fitted to teach it. Those who are readiest to attempt it are generally those who know least about it — for fools rush in where angels fear to tread — people whose logical faculty is so little developed that they suppose they have explained a thing when they have merely 42 On Written Composition described it in technical terminology, who cannot dis- tinguish between a grammatical ' rule ' and a law of nature, who suppose that such a phrase as ' that 's him ' must be wrong because it cannot be squared with what they have learned of the nominative case. There may be a case for the teaching of grammar to adult students : there is none for teaching it to children under fourteen. When the question is argued it will usually be found that while the teacher of English is inclined to accept this position, he fears the reproaches of his colleagues who teach foreign languages and who assert that a know- ledge of English grammar is an essential groundwork for their activities. Really, of course, the converse is true : the easiest approach to English grammar is through the grammar of a foreign tongue; and the teacher of English should look to his colleagues taking French or Latin to introduce his pupils to grammatical termino- logy. Moreover, as the work of Dr. Rouse has proved, the most natural, and so the most successful method of teaching a foreign language is to teach it as a ' mother tongue', leaving the grammar to be picked up inciden- tally and almost unconsciously. It has been well said that if the Romans had been obliged to learn the Latin grammar they would have had no time to conquer the world. For those who are seeking a method of introducing the study of grammar to senior children I may describe an experiment in the use of symbolical forms. I began by recalling to my class the steps by which children gain possession of language. They begin by learning the sounds that indicate persons and things, which sounds On Written Composition 43 or words are called nouns ; next, they learn to use sounds that cause people to do things for them, words that make things happen, which are called verbs; then, almost simultaneously, they begin to use words that describe things, adjectives, and short words like he and it that save the trouble of repeating names, pronouns. Then they go on to appreciate and use the words that indicate the position of one thing in relation to another, prepositions like in, under, on. And lastly, they learn to distinguish between the adjective which describes a thing and the adverb which describes how an action is done. Then I went on to show that in order to make himself intelligible a child must have something to speak of, and something to say about it, i.e. a subject and a predi- cate. I drew a circle and a square on the blackboard, and wrote in the one the subjects, and in the other the predicates of various sentences, e.g. Then I pointed out that the essential word in the subject was dog, in the predicate, hit. So I added to the circle an ellipse to contain the adjectives that formed the enlargement of the subject, and to the square a series of rectilinear figures thus : 44 On Written Composition The object or completion of the predicate was placed in the oblong (which is nearest in position and shape to the square) ; the enlargement of the object was repre- sented by the rhombus above the oblong, and the extensions of the predicate, of time, manner, place, &c. by the equilateral triangles. The small scalene triangle adjoining the space for the object and its enlargement was used for the indirect object when it occurred. Another very closely related matter is that of spelling, which has wasted almost as much time as grammar, and done even more to hinder progress in composition. There is not space to discuss it at any length, but no chapter on written composition ought to conclude without a kick at the spelling fetish. The plain truth is that children cannot, ought not, and never have been taught to spell : they teach themselves by reading and writing ; and if the time now given to spelling were added to those subjects not merely would reading and writing be improved but spelling also would be infinitely better. Here again, the a priori arguments are disproved in practice. I have fought this question with old-fashioned inspectors. They used to look at the time-table and discover with the utmost horror that spelling did not appear on it. Then they would discover, this time with joy, that there were large numbers of words misspelt in the composition exercises of the younger boys and they would triumphantly produce these as evidence for the necessity of spelling lessons. I had always one answer for them : go and examine the spelling of the boys of leaving age and then come back, and I will explain your fallacy. The number of spelling mistakes made by the younger On Written Composition 45 boys is explained not by their spelling worse than most children of their age, but by their writing more. It is a wise proverb which says 'who makes no mistakes makes nothing ' : nothing paralyses effort like the fear of making a mistake, and little children should understand that mistakes in spelling are inevitable, and in no way to be blamed. The way to avoid them is the way we ourselves avoid them — by turning up in a dictionary any word of whose spelling we are uncertain. And that method, too, gives us the one safe rule in our anomalous English spelling, that words from the same root are usually spelled alike : to remember the root is the best way to remember the spelling. Every child, therefore, should have a dictionary, and should be accustomed to refer to it before writing an unfamiliar word, and in revising any exercise written. They very soon become expert in turning up words with- out waste of time, and the power to do so is one of the marks of an educated person. A man is known by the dictionary he keeps. For very young children the teacher must be the dictionary, and he should invite the children to apply to him for any word they wish to use, but cannot spell. And yet it must needs be that offences come if children are encouraged, as they should be encouraged, to write freely and copiously. How are mistakes to be dealt with so that progress may be made, for of course children must learn to spell, and if they do not leave school able to do so they have not been properly edu- cated. Bad spelling marks the illiterate man, but the illiterate man is not one who has never been taught to 46 On Written Composition spell : he is the man who has never learned to read, for people who read can always spell. Spelling is merely the hall-mark, and to gain it, even if it were possible, without the habit of reading, is to produce a counterfeit and a fraud. The one rule in my own practice is always to call indi- vidual attention to any spelling mistake made, and to require a record to be kept of the word misspelled. Each boy thus makes a little dictionary of words he has found a difificulty in spelling, and so his attention is focused upon them and the likelihood of his repeating his mistake is lessened. But good spelling is the insensible but sure concomi- tant of plentiful practice in reading and writing, and there is no other road to it. Young children never will spell accurately, no matter what methods are inflicted upon them. And the first necessity is to recognize the fact and not to worry about it. ' Modem psychological research has shown that in learning to spell maturity is the leading factor. Method plays a very subordinate part, and the same level of spelling is reached in the end regardless of the time given to it in the lower forms. It has been found that any increase of time beyond a certain maximum is only thrown away, and is not rewarded by an increased ability to spell.' That sentence from Mr. Rice's book Scientific Management in Edtication sums up the whole question. These references to spelling are not really a digression from my main subject because mistaken ideas about, spelling are one of the greatest hindrances to progress in composition. Moreover, if one pleads for more composi- tion in schools one is always met by the question, How On Written Composition 47 can time be found ? and the answer, or part of it, is by abolishing spelling lessons as useless and unnecessary. But mention of spelling tempts me to stray for a moment from the road to mention another very valuable exercise that has been ruined by its association with spelling; I mean dictation,. which has become a mere spelling test, and so has fallen into discredit with the more progressive teachers. The real value of dictation is its use in training the mind in habits of attention and concentration. There is no better test of the tone of a class than the dictation of a fairly long sentence, or list of items, or a short stanza, or a simple recipe, and requiring the children to repro- duce it correctly. An inattentive class, indifferent to their work, will never pass the test, but will ask for the words to be repeated, and even then will fail to reproduce them accurately. A well-trained class will be able to write down, say, my last sentence without any difficulty after hearing it once, or an ordinary twelve-word telegram, including the address, or a couplet of Pope, or a joke out of Punch, or a grocer's order, say, for J lb. of Lyons' tea, 3 lb. of streaky bacon, a 6d. tin of baking powder, and a stone of Spratt's dog biscuits, to be sent to a certain customer at a stated time. Such a power of concentration is even practically of great value, but it is even more important as a mark of good mental habits which will affect the work in all other subjects. To listen with attention and to remem- ber and reproduce what one hears are functions of an educated mind, and are far more valuable results of the dictation exercise than any accuracy in spelling. 48 On Written Composition Now all of us, I suppose, were taught grammar and spelling rules as children, and all of us, even if we do not teach these things as we were taught them, consider it very important that our children should learn to write grammatically and spell correctly. These things are important, but we are liable to forget that after all they are only conventions that are right to-day and may be wrong to-morrow ; and that style is dependent upon more important and deeper things. Most of us, I expect, were taught that if we write grammatically and logically we have done all. ' Mark- ing composition ' for most of our teachers meant, as it still means, correcting faults of syntax, spelling, and logical arrangement. But how many of us ever learned from our schoolmasters to criticize our sentences for their musical sound, and to revise our work so as to im- prove it in that respect ? To listen for our cadences, to feel after rhythmic movement, to avoid jingles and harsh- ness and awkward combinations of sounds ? I certainly was never taught, either at school or collie, to watch the sound as I wrote ; but when I had learned for myself to love good writing and so came to study its technique I realized that to listen for music in literature was the first step in criticism, and that to consider and criticize the sound of one's writing is the first step in literary composition. And this euphony, which is the essential element in style, is not, like grammar and spelling, a temporary and conventional thing : it is a natural charm which gratifies a deep and permanent instinct in man, an appetite of the ear. The importance of criticizing the sound of one's writing On Written Composition 49 no less than its grammar is still unrealized in the schools. For example, a few weeks ago I got a letter from a schoolmaster to whom I had written for the key of a local workshop ; this is how the letter begins : ' Dear Sir : Your note received re key of the East Oxford workshop . . .' The meaning is clear enough, and the merely practical people may see nothing to object to ; ihey may say it is a pl«?n str«?ght-forward communication. But a man who could allow his meaning to take such a form as that ought not to be teaching English composition. For in children personality has not yet atrophied away to mere intellectual and physical skin and bone ; expression for them should be beautiful in form as well as clear in meaning. For them, at least, the poet's words are true that ' Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' The example I gave from the schoolmaster's letter was, of course, an extreme one, but you will find plenty more for yourselves when you have once learned to look for them. I picked up the books nearest my hand when I was preparing this chapter, and the first I took up gave me an example on its title-page : it was Dr. Hayward's The Lesson in^ Appreciation, which, with all but one of its vowels closed, and its excess of j's, and its repeti- tion of ' on ' at the end of each word, is not a happy- sounding title. But the sub-title is ' An Essay on the Pedagogics of Beauty ', which is as unpleasing in sound as in idea. I opened it and found that among ' the possibilities of pedagogy, it is plain that pedagogy can positively create aesthetic pleasure. . . .' anil D 5° On Wntten Composition As the book is very useful from a practical prfnt of view I put it down and sought more game elsewhere. I opened Conui Doyle's Return of Sherloci Holmes, and came at once upon the phrase * successful voyages in succession '. And then I remembered that the writo's of that most useful bode. The Kin^ s English^hsA saved me the trouble cA loddng for examples, and I turned up some that they had collected in a clmfiet on 'jinxes '. Sensatkm is the dir^ e3ai of the uk^de of motioa of the sensmium. Those r^hts of liber^and proper/y upon which the safe^ of socie(F depends. He served his appreatkxsAip to statestnansA^. I awaited a belated train. Hand them on silver salves to the server. The foundation of all die oigaoization needed for the fto- motion of edocation. The diildren are fimctionally moitalljr defectiva The policy of En^aM towards A^^ianistan is as formalj entiidy fnendljr. These jingoes remind me that i1i3rmes out of place are an offence instead of a ddigfat : tiiey are out of place in verse, for example, when they do not fit into the rhythm ; and they are always out rf place in prose. There is an entry in Macavlzys Journal in which occurs the sentence: ' In this way I passed the day, greatly excited and delighted ', and here is a sentence I noted yesteiday m a d^y paper : ' He sees his opportunity and is reaiy to seize it.' So cheap and easy head-thyme or alliteration is to be avoided because it has a fia^y eflfect on the sound of our sentences : I should say, it makes meretricioas maac On IVritten Composition 51 Here is an example quoted in The King's English from The Times : ' It shall be lawful to picket premises for the purpose of peacefully persuading any person . . .' And just as rhymes are out of place in prose, so is verse rhythm. It was the besetting sin of Dickens, and there are several examples of it quoted in The King's English ; so there is no need for me to discuss it further. Neither will I stay now to consider the unmelodious effects of such faults as repetition (except for emphasis) of the same word in the same sentence, or misplaced accent, or top-heavy sentences, or overgrown clauses. You will find all these discussed in a chapter on euphony in The King's English, which every teacher of English ought to have. I will content myself with quoting and endorsing the advice there given, p. 396 : ' It is only necessary to read aloud any one of the sentences quoted to perceive at once that there is something wrong with its accentuation. To lay down rules on this point would be superfluous, even if it were practicable; for in all doubtful cases the ear must decide. A writer who cannot trust himself to balance his sentences properly should read aloud all that he writes.' That applies to most of our children, and therefore it is most important that their exercises should be read aloud, and that they should write with the test of the ear in mind. This question of euphony in writing leads naturally to the subject of my next chapter— Verse-making, which I shall try to show is the best of all training for prose composition. The need for inversion, for example, in the interests of rhythm, will reveal the value of inversion in obtaining balance and cadence in prose. 'Great is ■ Diana of the Ephesians ' is not merely more emphatic, D a 52 On Written Composition but is a finer sounding sentence than the more obvious order of the words. The subject of written composition is so wide that I have had a difficulty in deciding what points to select and touch upon. There is, for example, the method of correcting the exercises when written, which might be usefully considered : it is one of those matters over which a great deal of the teacher's time and effort is spent, not always with proportionate benefit to the pupils. I would insist that the actual correction should always be the pupil's labour, and not the teacher's ; I have seen exercises in which all the mistakes have been laboriously re-written by the teacher. That is not merely overworking oneself: it is doing work which the children would benefit by doing for themselves. One should indicate that a mistake has been made, and leave the child to find out his error and to set it right. I always distir^uish a mistake in spelling from one of syntax by indicating the one by a vertical stroke through the offending letter, and the other by underlining the word or phrase that is wrong. If it is a spelling mistake he has his dictionary to refer to, and if it is a mistake in style, or grammar, or punctuation, he should consider it himself first, and only bring it to his teacher for discussion if he is at a loss. ' Heaven helps those who help themselves ' is a truth of very varied applications. There will, of course, be some mistakes which a child could not reasonably be expected to put right unaided. For these, and for others which raise points that might usefully be discussed in class, I have a special mark which means ' See me about this '. Then when the time for class discussion comes, any boy who has this mark On Written Composition 53 stands up, and his mistake is explained, either individually or to the class as a whole. I would strongly recommend that a certain period, preferably the last hour in every week, should be used for revision, so that every mistake made that week in any written exercise is corrected before the child goes home for the week-end. It is a good moral discipline to have a regular clearing up, and a fresh, clean start. Progress depends very largely on correcting and dis- posing of mistakes as they occur, and on the wise choice of typical errors for class discussion. There should be a regular period, about once a month, in which a selection of errors is set for correction. They should not, like the usual examination, paper, be ex- clusively grammatical, but should include, for example, ambiguities due to punctuation — 'He said, saddle me, the ass, and they saddled him ' — and faults of diction, such as inflated phrases and cacophonous sentences and ill-rejated clauses — here is one from a teacher's report on a child, ' A backward boy, due to carelessness.' Some of them should be taken from the teacher's note-book of common class mistakes, but others may be selected from various sources. The columns of provincial newspapers, particularly the correspondence pages, are a rich hunting ground. It is an excellent exercise to re-write in good English a typical letter from an indignant or prosy cor- respondent to a local paper. So, too, the jargon of business letters may be translated into English — ^"Re your communication of yesterday's date we regret error in goods sent you. May we ask you to kindly return same when we will put the matter in order.' But howlers to be used as horrid warnings and as 54 On Written Composition subjects for correction can often be found in more im- portant writings. Richard Jefferies will furnish one or more on almost any page you open — certainly on any page of The Amateur Poacher. ' Thrust ignobly into a sack he shoulders the fox and marches ofT.' Who was in the sack ? ' Looking cautiously over the hedge there was a large bull.' Whose is the caution ? ' The sharp hoofs of the swimming pigs struck their fat jowls at every stroke till they cut into the artery and so bled to death.' Those are the kinds of errors that cannot be cured by a little knowledge of grammar. Jefferies knew his grammar well enough, but the truth is that grammar does not help much with the real difficulties. How are you going to explain grammatically Jefferies' blunder in such a sentence as this : * The plan requires that the fish should be visible, and if stationary is more easily practised ' ? Then there is the exercise involved in re-writing the prose of an older day in modern form. That, like paraphrasing, is a matter fraught with grave danger. — I cannot let the opportunity pass without denouncing the most vicious and pestilent heresy that fine poetry can ever be a fit subject for paraphrase. A person who thinks so is no more fit to teach children than Mr. Wells's intoxicated butcher to operate for appendicitis. — But some of the long, involved sentences of seventeenth-century prose may with advantage be punctuated or recast. Pepys, for example (like Mr. Jingle), will afford many amusing passages for this purpose. Or some of the over-Latinized paragraphs of the eighteenth century may be expressed in the more concrete Saxon — On Written Composition 55 Dr. Johnson himself has given us an example of how it may be done. In one of his letters from the Hebrides he describes an incident that happened one evening on his arrival at his sleeping place : ' A dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie.' But, when he came to write his adventures for publi- cation, this same incident is described with typical Johnsonian dignity: ' Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge.' But, of course, good literature is more helpful for its examples than for its warnings. I have already suggested some ways in which it may be used as a model. Another that I have practised is to read, or let the class read, part of a passage, and ask them to finish it in the same style. For example, you might read the story of David and Goliath up to the words, ' So the Philistine came on and drew near unto David |, and then require the class to complete the tale in Bible language. By the way, it is a good imaginative exercise to complete a story from the opening sentence : ' I had been working late that night, and it was nearly one when I got into bed. I was just falling into a doze when I heard . . .' then the class can go on and finish the tale according to their imagination. Or you can give them the end of a story : ' They dragged the river and found a single shoe, but no other trace of the victim was ever discovered ' — and the class can write the earlier incidents. 56 On Written Composition That reminds me of another exercise in filling in an hiatus— the supplying of missing epithets. If you put on a blackboard such a stanza as this, for example, from Mr. Kipling's ' Sussex', leaving blanks for the epithets: No garden crowns, No woods adorn, Out ' downs But and thorn; ■ slopes where shadows skim And, through the gaps revealed, Rank upon rank the — goodness of the Weald — you will not only cause the children to examine their vocabulary thoroughly so as to select the right word, but you will help them to realize and appreciate the genius of the poet and his wonderful choice of words when they compare his effort with their own. Well, that again raises the question of the value of verse-making, and for that I shall reserve anything else that I have to say about written composition. Note to p. 33. — Letter-writing is such an obvionsly purposefnl exercise that it should not be confined, as too often it is, to the senior classes. The younger the scholar the more anxious he is to ' write a real letter '. Unfortu- nately, school letters are often unreal, the child being asked, for example, to write a letter to his teacher in that teacher's presence. If the teacher wants letters written to him he should ask the boys to write as from their parents letters of excuse or complaint. The following are suggestions for real letters : to a neighbour, begging him not to prosecute yon for breaking his window, or asking him to keep his cat or his fowls out of your garden ; to the landlord, asking for repairs ; to the doctor, asking him to call to see the baby; to the police, complaining of the carol-singers ; to the butcher, about the meat ; to Gamage's, for an article in their catalogue. CHAPTER III ON VERSE-MAKING What was said about euphony in writing leads natu- rally to the subject of verse-nnaking ; for the origin and object of verse is the endeavour to produce through the ear a sensuous gratification. Except a poet make music he makes nothing. And therefore verse-making is the best kind of training to secure that euphony in writing which I have said is as important as it is commonly neglected. Incidentally it is also a most valuable train- ing in what the practical people will consider more important, grammatical accuracy ; for the inversions and unaccustomed constructions in verse make it necessary for a writer to study carefully the syntax of his sentences — to make sure, for example, that if he uses the unfamiliar second person singular, the number and person of his verb agree with the subject. But the theoretical basis of verse exercises lies much deeper than this. It lies in that instinct for rhythmic movement which is at the very root of organic life and, as Bergson has shown, of all growth. In rhythmic movement we are born ; by rhythmic movement in the oesophagus we swallow our food, and by similar move- ments in the intestines we digest it; we breathe by rhythm and our blood flows in rhythmic beats; and when rhythm ceases in us we die. 58 On Verse-making And so it is with all living movement, from the crawl- ing of the worm in the earth, to the swimming of the fish in the water and the flight of the bird in the air. Rhythm is one of the fundamentals of life. Every one has observed that children find a natural delight in feeling rhythm, and in making rhythmical movements. Long before a child can make musical sounds — even at the age when its principal occupation is making unmusical sounds — it will move its trunk and limbs in response to a musical stimulus. , Now the first of the ' new ' theories in education, as in cultural medicine, is that the natural instincts of the child are the true guides for those who have the care of it. Just as a modern physician knows that a child's repugnance to fat and his liking for sugar means that he cannot assimilate the one and needs the other for his growth, so the teacher knows, or ought to know, that a child's delight in rhythm and his dislike of formal drill means that his development will be encouraged by the one and not by the other. The formal drill of the Board's Model Course was vitiated by the ancient heresy of teachers that the child ought to have what tkey think is good for him, instead of what his instinct demands for himself. His instinct stimulates him to use rhythmic movement as a means of self-expression, which means self-development ; but the drill experts of the Board insisted that he should reproduce the movements dictated to him from without. The new culture called eurhythmies is based on the realization that rhythmic movement is a primitive means of self-expression and so of development. ' This ', in Professor Findlay's words, ' is the function of eurhythmies On Verse-making 59 as concerned with body : it gives the useful stimulus to blood, nerve, muscle, which the physical specialist demands, but it does this while the focus of attention is centred on something which concerns the higher life, on emotion and intelligence.' Now just as the teacher of eurhythmies knows that bodily development will come incidentally and uncon- sciously through the child's efforts after something different and higher, so the modern teacher of English centres the child's attention on self-expression and leaves handwriting, grammar, and spelling to improve incidentally and unconsciously. But only a few, even of the more progressive teachers, have yet realized that the child's method of self-expres- sion through language is not the method of the adult, any more than the formal drill which trains and develops soldiers is suitable for childish development. The Frenchman after all was wrong when he discovered he had been speaking prose all his life. Prose is the self- expression of the adult, and M. Jourdain as a child, like all children, must have used another medium. We adults forget that the child's world is a world of emotions : he does not so much think as feel, and there- fore his language is largely concerned with the expres- sion of his feelings. Now all emotional utterance tends to be markedly rhythmical — 'O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! ' or ' Intreat me not to leave thee, or to refrain from following after thee '. So the child, who lives in that world for which Keats sighed in one of his letters, the world of sensations rather than of thoughts, tends naturally to express himself by 6o On Verse-making means of language that has a stronger and more marked rhythm than the prose of the adult. You will appreciate this better if you listen to a child talking to herself or to her doll. You will hear this kind of thing Naughty dolly: go to sleep. Now don't you move : now don't you move ! O dear, O dear: what have you done? I think, too, that a child's tendency to avoid mono- syllables, to say Auntie and Tommy and Daddy instead of Aunt and Tom and Dad, may be a part of his instinct for rhythmic expression ; and so, too, may be his, to us, tedious iteration of phrases. In children's writing this tendency is not so clearly seen, partly because by the time a child comes to write he has too often begun to lose his originality through being taught in large masses, partly because the conventions of school style are forced upon him, but most of all because his written exercises are seldom self-expression at all. He has to write either what the teacher tells him or, more commonly nowadays, what he thinks the teacher would like. Moreover, the subjects usually set him are connected with the world of thought — the teacher's world — rather than with his own natural world of the feelings. And so you will not expect to find him expressing himself naturally. But when he does express himself freely and naturally, his utterance tends to be rh}^hmical. It tends also, like all poetry, to be pictorial. Only the other day, a young graduate practising in my school, who was revising some exercises written for him by Standard III, showed me a sentence in one of them : ' The dizzy swifts skid down the sky.' He asked, ' What On Verse-making 6i shall I do with ' skid ' ? 1 said, ' Go and imitate it — if you can.' He thought it was ' unconventional ' — and of course it is, as all genius is unconventional : it is the perfect epithet that would only come to a poet or a child. No other word will give you the picture of that bird's flight. I made my pupil see it by asking him to substitute words of his own, like ' fly ' or ' rush ' or * sweep ' or ' dash '. (Cf. the exercise with a Kipling stanza in the previous chapter.) Then, too, children tend naturally to use the great poetic instruments of the figures of speech. Every one will have noticed, for example, the childish instinct for hyperbole — the hundred cats in the back garden which were really only our cat and another, and the natural fondness for similes which is shared by all primitive minds; and the tendency to personify things, which is another primitive instinct. All these tendencies show that verse-making is a natural exercise for children. The most important thing I have to suggest in these chapters is this : that as Dalcroze believes rhythmic movement of the large muscles in trunk and limbs to be an earlier mode of emotional expression than sounds, so I believe that rhythmic language, which we call verse, is a more natural medium than prose at the stage of school life. But that as the child will not evolve for itself a scheme or language of bodily movement without the help of a teacher of eurhythmies, so it also needs the help of a teacher to develop its natural tendency to express itself in verse. I have been astonished and puzzled time after time to find that boys who were hopeless dunces at everything 62 On Verse-making else could produce quite passable verse. I don't mean congenital idiots, of course, but the kind of boy you find in every school who makes one uneasy about one's methods, because he is sensible enough out of school, but seems unable to derive much benefit from his work in it. I find that boys who can do nothing else can write verse — of course, the best boys usually produce the best verse, but even the dullest can produce much better verse than prose. And, what is more, they prefer writfng verse. Last week I offered my senior class this choice : to write on the drought in prose, either a simple description or a conversation or an impersonation, or to write verses on the drought. Thirty-five of forty- eight chose verse as their medium of expression, and only two chose the prosaic alternative of direct descrip- tion. Now, how can children be helped to express them- selves in their natural medium of rhythmical language ? First of all they must have plenty of models, must hear rhythmical speech, so that their natural sense of rhythm may be developed and cultivated. That means, of course, they must hear plenty of poetry, far more than most children ever hear at present, because most children pay for five minutes of the poet with fifty minutes of the teacher's explanations and annotations. These may often be useful enough, and will sometimes help the child towards appreciation of- the poet. But a great part of the poetry heard by the child should be accom- panied by absolutely no explanations or notes except such as the children themselves ask for. Its aim should be simply to please by its sound, and by its images and sensations, just as music does. There is, of course. On Verse-making 63 much more that it can do, but all that will come later. When the child has come to love poetry for its music, he will find in it other and perhaps higher excellences, but he will never do so until he has first loved it for its melody. The essential element in the music of verse being rhythm, the first step in helping children either to appreciate verse or to write it is to make them feel its rhythm. To be felt it must be heard, and to be heard it must be clearly marked by the voice. Of that I have to speak in my last chapter. When children have learned to feel the rhythm of verse and to mark it for themselves, the first step in writing it is to make picture-forms of the rhythm of various lines and stanzas. You might begin with the famous lines on the star. Recite the first line, clearly marking the fall of the beats : ' Twinkle, twinkle, little star.' Then let the class repeat it, beating out the rhythm lightly on their hands or the desks. Then let them repeat it again, stamping the stresses lightly with their feet. Then once again, swaying their bodies to the rhythmic movement. This bodily move- ment to the rhythm appears to be very important in helping children to get the feel of it, for we have to remember that verse originated in dance. Next, make a rhythm picture by making a pattern on the blackboard of strokes for the stresses and dots for the unstressed syllables : | . [ . | . | Then proceed in the same way with the second line, endingwith the picture-pattern of its rhythm: | . | . | . | 64 On Verse-making Call attention to the rhyme at the ends of the lines, and suggest that the rhyming stress should be a little more strongly emphasized than the others. This can be ex- pressed in the picture-form by thickening the last stroke. Lastly, you might show how the pattern for the couplet may be mathematically expressed by putting a figure for the number of the stresses and a letter for the rhyming sounds. In this case the form will be ^ . 4a When the class has become proficient in this kind of exercise they can go on to make stanzas for themselves. This should at first be done co-operatively, and the couplet is the simplest approach. Ask for a volunteer to suggest a line that will beat — tell them that it may be either a sentence or simply a jingle of syllables, like ' Eeny meeny miny me '. Let the boy who suggests a line prove that it beats by marking its rhythm on the desk. Let the class also test it in this way, and then put it and its picture on the blackboard. Now ask for other lines that have the same rhythm, making each volunteer, and the class, test them in the same way, by repeating it and moving to its rhythm. Next go a step farther, by asking for lines that match the first in rhyme as well as in rhythm. So you get a simple couplet to serve as a stanza or unit ; and this in turn will serve as a model for the next stage, the children being now asked to offer suggestions for couplets of similar form. They need not have any connexion with the first one except that of form, and each one should be tested both by its author and by the class by beating out its rhythm so as to prove that it corresponds with the pattern. On Verse-making 65 After this the children may be set to write couplets individually, either at school or at home. In a second lesson the class might be asked to suggest lines containing a stated number of stresses, four, five, six, and seven. Or they can begin with a line of four or five stresses and add extra syllables to it, until it becomes a line of seven beats. Nonsense syllables will do quite well for the purpose, and each line should be proved by movement to correspond with the stated picture-form. When lines to rhyme and beat with these have been suggested it may be pointed out to the class that you cannot go on adding stresses to a line because the black- board is not wide enough. After a certain number of stresses you must start a new line — turn back — which is what • verse ' means. Then they will see that the lines of a long couplet of seven stresses in each line may be broken and written as 4i 3 ; 4> 3. ^^^ so you get a four-line stanza which is much more convenient to write than a long couplet. That is, you get the common ballad stanza, the simplest of all verse forms because it needs a minimum of rhymes. Children learn to use it with very little practice, and after that verse-making is all plain sailing. The next step would be to show the improvement in sound which results from filling the blank endings of the first and third lines with rhyming words, making the rhyming form a'b a b. Then you can ask for a couplet to add to a quatrain, so producing a six-line stanza. Or you can produce a six-line form in another way by splitting one couplet between two others, and so getting a stanza rhyming a ab c c b. 66 On Verse-making The class has now got a fair variety of musical instru- ments to play upon, and can be left to experiment with them. At first I would not prescribe either the forms or the subjects of their verses. Simply say, ' Write me twelve lines of verse on anything you like.' Some will write six couplets, some three quatrains, and some two stanzas of six lines each. It is very important that they should draw the picture of each stanza so as to be certain that they correspond. Otherwise you will certainly find boys writing their first stanza of one form, say a b ab, and their second -a-a or atba; or they will vary the number of stresses or syllables in different stanzas, having four stresses in the first line of one, and five in the corresponding line in the next. I had a good deal of trouble in this way until I hit on the plan of rhythm pictures. Then the eye could be used to convict the ear, for the five stresses are as plainly seen in the picture as five legs would be in the drawing of a cow. When they have acquired some mastery over the new instrument, you can begin to prescribe subjects and suggest more complex forms. But you will probably find the boys themselves experimenting in verse forms. One experiment that will probably need discussing is a quatrain of the form a- a -. The class will easily see, or rather feel, that a blank line at the end is a blemish. The ear demands a rhyme to conclude upon. A large variety of forms is possible, even with simple rhyme plans, by varying the number of stresses. Here, for example, is a boy's experiment with couplets : The days of June are long. And the song Of bird and blithesome bee Happy and free. On Verse-making 67 The brooklets ripple by, And the cry Of a startled bird Can be heard. And the thirsty sheep Are all asleep In among the grass In a m^ss. Near the mid of night, In moonlight, Couples to and fro Homeward go. At the break of day Shadows play; In the dusty road Crawls a toad. And here is a more elaborate one, discovered, or re- discovered, by a boy of twelve : O winter, thou art here at last With icicle-bearded chin, With screeching and chilly blast. And haggard face and thin; Thou peerest in the village inn. Wetting its thatched roof with rain. And breathing on the window pane. This is a still more intricate and varied form invented for a stanza on an air raid : We hear a buzzing in the sky, 4« Bright lights flash, 2 b Airmen dash, 2l> E a 68 On Verse-making And searchlights make a pretty sight: 4^ O brave men, go 2 «f And fight the foe ; 2d Let them but see you coming nigh 4 a And danger's over for to-night. 4^ You notice the variety both of stresses and rhyme arrangement. To get children to write simple verse is extremely easy when once they have learned to feel rhythm; but progress to more artistic and complex forms depends upon the study of plenty of good models. The study of stanza form has been very much neglected even by literary people, so that few realize either the importance of a fine form in music-making, or the progress that has been made. It is not too much to say that Swinburne and Mr. Bridges have provided poetry with new instruments of music in the stanzas they have invented. We owe to Swinburne in particular the discovery of the feminine rhyme as a new note in stanza-melody. All poets, of course, have used feminine rhymes on occasion indifferently with male rhymes, but Swinburne, I believe, was the first to work them into a rhyming pattern. All his finest lyrics depend for their melody in part on a regular chime of female rhymes alternating with male ones in fixed pattern. The most beautiful poem of Mr. Bridges, the ' Elegy on a Young Lady ', also depends for its charm very largely on its stanza form, which skilfully combines the two kinds of rhymes in a regular pattern. I have found it a useful exercise to take an intricate stanza form and write it out as prose, and then require the class to rebuild it. If you set them Herrick's ' Daffodils ', for example, many of them will write it in On Verse-making 69 four lines, two very long couplets. Very few indeed, unless they happen to know the poem, will discover its intricate rhyme plan. If now you write the correct form beside the long couplets, the class will be able to compare visually the gi'eat, solid block of the four lines with the light, airy appearance of Herrick's short, danc- ing lines, and will fealize that even to the eye his form is far more suited to its subject — even though, remember, the words in each are the same. That will make you and them appreciate the importance of form in poetry. Some such analysis and study of stanza form is necessary not merely to appreciation, but to provide the children with models, for imitation, in order that progress may be made. I would say this particularly to those who have made a beginning with work in original verse. I .found by experience, that while children easily begin to write verse, they do not improve beyond a certain point unless they are stimulated to try more and more complicated and beautiful forms. The teacher should aim at the sonnet as the crown of his work. I cannot say that I have ever succeeded in getting boys to produce really tolerable sonnets, but I still hope and expect to do so. Triolets boys manage easily and seem to enjoy. They are not nearly so difficult as they look. Here are three examples, the first of which was written impromptu in ten minutes by a child of twelve : The grass is emerald green, The birds are singing, Flowers can be seen. The grass is emerald green; ^o On Verse-making Only man is mean, Joy bells are ringing, The grass is emerald green, The birds are singing. A stormy June, a June of rain, A ruined countryside. The oak shoots 'fore the ash in vain, A stormy June, a June of rain. The river's in the field and lane — The floods destroy from Thames to Clyde; A stormy June, a June of rain, A ruined countryside. See the soldiers come along With screaming fife and rolling drum, They pass away the time in song ; See the soldiers come along And with the fifes they go ding dong. Though cannons roar and air-planes hum; See the soldiers come along With screaming fife and rolling drum. In order to secure progress I have found it advisable to prohibit, as a rule, the simpler stanzas when once proficiency has been achieved, and to demand the inven- tion or imitation of more elaborate models. Rhythm- pictures should be made of the longer and more compli- cated stanzas of Swinburne or Mr. Bridges, and then, conversely, boys should be asked to write a stanza corre- sponding to a rhythm-picture placed on the blackboard. Here, for example, is the rhythm-picture of Mr. Bridges' ' Elegy ' : On Verse-making 71 a b a b b c a and this is the verse written to it by a boy of eleven : Spring The spring hath come and with it flow'rs and trees, .The birds are flying to their homes again, And now the crocus flutters in the breeze,. So happy that the gentle spring doth reign; Birds twitter in the lane Just by the shallow rippling river. The lambs do roll and romp about at ease Near where the slender rushes dance and quiver. An advance upon this exercise is to give a model stanza for imitation ; this requires the boy first to make his own rhythm-picture, and then to write lines corre- sponding to it. I have found it interesting to give a pictorial stanza and request the class to add to it others of similar form to complete the picture. This is an example of last autumn : When the beechwood flares in one red fire And the cherry wears her pink attire, And the limes are faint and pale; When maples show more hues than roses, <-Then men may know that Autumn closes. For mists, at evening, hide the vale. 72 On Verse-making You will notice the device of internal rhyming, which is another very beautiful modern development in verse- music, but which adds considerably to the difficulty of the art. And these- are the stanzas added to it by one of the class : Leaves are falling thick and fast, Robins are calling their note at last. Autumn now is here; Trees are losing leaves so gay, Birds are choosing homes away, For winter now is very near. The pine tree tall is always green. Its cones do fall and now are seen Underneath the tree. The chestnuts wide their leaves do shed, And nuts inside their downy bed Are open now for us to see. Another form of this exercise is to compose a stanza giving one scene in a story and ask the children to complete the story by other similar stanzas. This is one I set last term : My horse's head was at his girth, And now it reached his knee. Sure such a race, in such a place, No man did ever see. And this is an example of a boy's attempt to complete the story : A Story Away by canyon, ridge and slope. Away our horses raced. In front of me, rode bold and free. The outlaw we had chased. On Verse-making 73 I singled my opponent out, And spurred my horse still more. And on again with might and main, Across the plain we tore. His horse's mouth was foaming white, He lashed its sides again. I heard its laboured breathing, as We rushed across the plain. 'My horse's head was at his girth. And now it reached his knee. Sure such a race, in such a place, No man did ever see.' When all at once he turned about, And tried to knife me dead. But 'twas too late, he met his fate, For I shot him through the head. Those who find a difficulty in composing stanzas for these exercises might select stanzas from poems to be used in the same way. I have suggested, for example, in my exercises on Longfellow, that the class might be asked to write additional stanzas to his 'Ropewalk', giving further scenes ' of the many left untold '. But I would earnestly recommend that those who teach verse should also practise it, and that they should join in the exercises of the boys — I don't think I need argue that : the eflTect on the children, to say nothing of the teacher, will be obvious. A similar kind of exercise is the writing of parodies — not, of course, of fine poetry, but imitations of nursery rhymes for the sake of technical practice combined with amusement. 74 On Verse-making 'Old Daddy Darrel went to the Barrel To draw his old woman some porter; But in going down there he slipped on the stair, And so the old lady had water.' 'Hee-haw, the donkey's jaw. Thinks he can sing like his master; Give him a whack on the end of his back, But you won't make him run any faster.' 'It's a long way to get to Berlin, It's a long way to go; It's a long way to get to Berlin, To capture Bill & Co. But, by George, when they're captured And the fighting's done, they'll find It's a long long way to get to Berlin, When they're all left behind.' Original rhyming epitaphs, too, afford both amusemei and useful exercise, and sometimes produce not mere good verse but that rarest of qualities in schoolboy good wit. The same is true of rhyming descriptions persons, another exercise that children enjoy. I w quote an example, though such verses obviously depei for their success on familiarity with the person referred t 'An Epitaph P. C. Hooper's dust lies here. Over which I shed a tear. No more we hear his heavy feet Stamping past while on his beat, No more he'll hunt the little boys And for his children seize their toys. For in his clayey hole so deep Our famous 'special' lies asleep. On Verse-making 75 At Christmas time the writing of carols will afford interesting practice. The special value of carols for our purpose is that they introduce children to the use and importance of the refrain and lead to discussion of the relative merits of refrains — why some are good and others indifferent. For instance, in the example here quoted, it was pointed out that the refrain was good because it repeated, and so emphasized, the essential ideas associated with the Christmas season, and because the hushed effect of its alliterative j's reinforced the sense of the words. A Carol , Remember Christ is born to-day, The wise men far upon their way, The snow around is very deep, Amidst it all the plants do sleep ; Softly, softly snowflakes fall, While Christ is born in a bare, rude stall. While Mary watches o'er her child The wise men watch her face so mild, They bow before the stall so rude In happy, goodly, loving mood; Softly, softly snowflakes fall. While Christ is born in a bare, rude stall. Then there is the exercise of which Rossetti was fond, making verses to set rhymes. Here are two examples to show how different personalities can express them- selves variously and characteristically even when limited to the same set rhymes, in this instance, greens, beans, so, grow, see, me : Bouts-rim£s (i) In my garden I have greens, Also many peas and beans; Many other seeds I sow, I love to see the flowers grow. My garden you would like to see, It is the pride of life to me. J. W. B., age 12. Bouts-rim£s (2). Among the garden cabbage greens, And among the kidney beans. Runs the runner bean, and so I chased it where the potatoes grow, Where all the people then did see The runner beans a-running me. C. H., age 13. To write blank verse successfully is perhaps the rarest }f human accomplishments. It is an impossible taek for ;hildren. On the other hand, the alliterative verse of 3ur early poets seems to have a natural attraction for :hem, and they quickly learn to imitate it — thoroughly ansacking their vocabulary in the process. Pulker the policeman and a pair of his fellows Hurrying up High Street heard a commotion; Out of Queen's College came the porter running To tell them a terrible tale of disaster . . . CHAPTER IV ON ORIGINAL MUSIC Our experiments in verse-making led naturally at last to attempts to interest children in musical expression and to encourage them to compose little melodies to marry to the verses they had made, I suppose I ought to begin by saying something in excuse or explanation of such an apparently useless exercise; for there are two very obvious objections always made a priori: (i) that elementary children can- not do these things, and (a) that they ought to be better employed than in doing them. Now a very little experiment will show that the first objection is quite mistaken. I have proved, and any one can quite easily discover, that the average child naturally and readily writes good rhythmic verse, and sings it to his own tune if he is encouraged to do so, and given a little stimulus and help. That verse is a natural medium for childish expression there is no longer any question at all. Experiments all over the country are proving it — and not only in this country : I am constantly getting speci- mens of children's verse sent me from America, from Australia, and even from Scotland. It is not often poetry, any more than songs and hymns and nursery rhymes are often poetry, but it is always rhythmical and metrical. The evidence for a similar natural aptitude in children to make tunes is still largely to seek because few people 78 On Original Music have made the experiment. My own experience has been that children do the one as naturally and easily as the other, and that the results — the immediate and obvi- ous results I mean — are about on a par with each other. They are no indication of genius, but simply the mani- festation of the average artistic power which we all possess, but which few of us nowadays ever get a chance to develop. For the second objection there is much more to be said. Children come to school to learn things that will help them on in life — at least, they think so, and their parents think so, and most of their teachers think so. Well, time spent in making tunes will not help them on — in the sense of helping them on to somebody else's back, which is what the expression ' getting on in life ' really means. It will not help them to escape what some one has called — Carlyle, I think — the hell of the Englishman — that he do not make money and advance himself. And it will not help them to pass examinations and win scholarships. And it will not provide the local shopkeepers with a supply of ready-made boy clerks and shorthand typists. Then again it will be asked : Is it right to awake in children appetites that cannot be gratified in existing social conditions ? Is it not, as has been suggested, the most exquisite form of cruelty to develop a taste for art in children who must live in city slums or country hovels, and who will perhaps never earn enough even for their material needs ? If civilization is, as Matthew Arnold said, ' the humani- zation of man in society so that every member shall live the full life of a human'being ', then civilization has never On Original Music 79 yet been realized. It has always depended upon the existence of a working class of inferior men whose labour set free the privileged few to develop the liberal life ot full self-realization through games and art and science. In no other way could civilization, even such as it is, have become possible. It has always been so, and, as many think, it always must be so, because there will never be enough wealth produced to give every one the means and the leisure to live the liberal life. Thus the Education Committee of the Federation of British .Industries, representing the employing class, recently passed unanimously a resolu- tion that 'no child should be taught things unsuited to his station in life ', i. e. children of poor people ought not to be allowed to develop artistic or intellectual cravings. But there is, of course, another side to this question. The natural instincts have to be reckoned with ; if they are not developed in a right direction they will take a wrong one ; if man cannot escape from the routine exist- ence of the workaday world by means of art he will do so by means of drink. For man by his nature cannot rest in reality : he strives continually, as Bacon said, to submit the shows of things to the desires of the mind ; he is not content with the here and now, but looks before and after, and longs for what is not, but might be ; and so he both seeks to create an ideal world in his own imagi- nation, and to enter into the world created by the artist. And that is why, whein man made God in his own image he made him a creator, for he felt instinctively that his own creative power was his supreme characteristic. Now our educational system has almost entirely neglected this fundamental aspect of man. It has been 8o On Original Music concerned with facts, with the imparting of knowledge. But as Ruskin so truly said, ' You do not educate a man by telling him what he knows not, but by making him what he was not.' Bacon knew more facts than any man of his age ; but that did not save him from the reproach of being the meanest of mankind. You do not change a man by putting a fact into his mind, but by using that fact to stir his emotions. Men knew well enough, a hundred years ago, that women were being sweated and children were being ill-treated ; they had the facts before them in Government Reports. But when art in the form of the ' Song of the Shirt ' and Dotheboys Hall presented the facts so as to make them felt, when the truth was carried alive into their hearts by passion, then they were changed men and they changed the conditions that were felt to be evil. The failure of free ediication is largely due to the mis- taken idea, represented by Herbert Spencer, that know- ledge alone will make men better, that science alone will make a better world. That idea not only belittled the value of art in human life just at the time when machinery was driving it out of the daily work of men, but it encouraged false ideas of the value of art by seeking to make poetry and painting a medium for imparting information. So poetry has been taught as if it were a lesson (and a bad lesson) in geography or history. ' Where is the Mincius, and Vallona's Hold ? ', ' Who instituted the Curfew ? ', ' Where and why were fought the battles of Blenheim and Hohenlinden ? ' Or it has been paraphrased as if its substance were the precious part of it, to be extracted from the verbiage of the poet and re-expressed in the language of ordinary fact. On Original Music 8i It was forgotten that poetry is addressed primarily to the emotions, and that when it is translated into logical statements it ceases to be poetry any longer. It is not ideas that make poetry, but images; and not merely visual but auditory images. There is no poetry that is not heard, and poetry has the power to suggest images by its very sound, apart from the visual images corre- sponding to its woi-ds. It was this discovery that led me from experiments in children's poetic powers to experiments in their musical aptitudes. I found that if you recited passages of Greek or French or Latin poetry to children who did not know those languages they listened with delight and seemed to get images and emotional excitement from the sound alone. What is more, these images and emotions were often surprisingly appropriate to the actual meaning of the passages read. I found, conversely, that they were instinctively quick to observe in English poetry the correspondence between the thing described and the words used to present it ; they would see and point out instantly how the long, slow lines of the ' Elegy ' correspond to and suggest its melan- choly, reflective ideas and images, and, on the other hand, how the rapid motion of ' Young Lochinvar ' agrees with the action in the poem. I found, too, that they were quick not only to observe these correspondences, but also to detect and explain the method by which they were accomplished ; to note, for example, the effect of the choice of long vowels or of liquid consonants or of sibilants. Then one day it occurred to me to try some similar 82 On Original Music experiments with music, I got a friend to select for me a short passage from Beethoven's lath Sonata, and I told the class that it would be played over to them twice or thrice, and that I should then ask them to write down answers to any or all of the following questions — which I wrote on the blackboard : What feeling does it give you ? Of what does it remind you ? What pictures does it make you see ? What does it make you want to do ? What was the mood in which it was written ? What story does it suggest to you ? What poetry or piece of literature is suggested by it ? We got some interesting answers to each of these questions, and the discussion of these answers by the class showed that the boys felt the questions to be natural and reasonable, i.e. they instinctively realized the sugges- tive power of music. We tried the same experiment with Mendelssohn's ' Spring Song ', the ' Dead March in Saul \ the ' Bees' Wedding', and other passages; and then I went on to ask them to write words corresponding in their suggestion to certain themes in music — a phrase of per- haps three or four bars, with a sentence suggested by it. I remeniber that for the opening bars of the 'Dead March ' one boy suggested the line Down, down, down to the depths of the sea. That led me to ask for original verse exercises supply- ing suitable words to music played to the class. We got a book of sixteenth-century songs and played over an air until the boys had got it into their heads and could On Original Music 83 sing it to la, and then they put words to it, and each sang his verse in turn while the rest listened and after- wards discussed the merits of the attempt — particularly as to whether or not the subject and atmosphere of the words corresponded to the tone and mood of the music. Then it occurred to me to reverse the process, and to ask for original music to fit certain lines of verse. I remember I began with the line, ' The woods decay, the woods decay and fall ', and asked for some one to sing a tune that would suit the picture in the verse ; and another line I gave was : Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king; and another : Hark to the merry birds how they sing! I found that almost invariably the music suggested corresponded with the words, and always the class were quick to criticize if this correspondence was imperfect. Lastly, I set them to compose both words and music for songs, carols, and hymns. It is difficult to record these results because they are almost entirely oral, so far as the notes are concerned : the words, of course, are written down. Some of the musical scores I have printed were written down by the boys who composed them — they could play the piano or violin. The rest were ' caught ', as they were sung, by a musical member of my staff, and were afterwards played by ear on the piano and the notes written down. But the mere keeping a record of what is done does not affect the value of the exercise, except to a certain type of school inspector. The value is not in the written record, but in the oral effort. F a I |a:r|ia^Jsnn|d:r|r-.inlf:s|d:-l-:r|»l|l:d|d:rtmrf|l:sld:r|iii:-+-:< NflCDtsthedagef maijiii^ Tnoi at die cnil^ this bright fiax 1^ busy bus do hum, l^ioj hanenard plod Bxtr an^ Whilst ddllnn go a-gatlimng Aad.tiitaigaictto&aiLcfbou> "fhejloaosasibe^eoioc. 1^ spent that hapigdaj ■ :mHii;dj/.simL|r:-|d:in|l;S|r:-y:d|iii:l|/:r|in:dj-.t|t:l|s:dh.-| 'HKjtdaMts and trees are noo) sooai^ In the numlfa of May, The birds do siog oh cvTi} bou^ And ih< janncrs plaaoii. 8 jUj I j j jJIjr j U Jj^ lj. r i rTr ^^ Sipot Spring is here at last; She makes Ibe sua tocast- His rags upon each living tinmr. She malus die buds to^oo ^ach idle stream toJioiD And all the birds their sooffc dosing. Tncsnoco's comij No sheiterisJbunZ in the trees Tne hips and the hams are aU^ne And the poor little biidies aiUfreen On Original Music 8s Our sailors iaa, are on Qu sea,, LMoedliaa&thea mdlmaiJ be. Whoi ukW in bed so smu and iDann WUb ^ps dim luep oar aors from harm . We pFau the ecd. uriU soon be lun Aiuimi^uoiiaQah^ipQ noDVpiT And Eoe at home our dian must do, Ues! boos and oiris like me and una. Our monoi and &ad loe an most sate 1o help wrexmtig^ moi so biave. Vfe pcm the end mill soon be here And o^ uou all a l^pg nem uiar Christmas has cone (sithootgsoddieer rartoar's been mith us aU Sie uean We cant be glad dis flirisiinas mom Our faeails mitfanie^ and pain are torn. We prw the end iDiU soon be here Andn^sJi uoa all a h^ipu nets uesR Oor&thers, brctluTS, Jine and tall. Arcfi^ding noco to save us all And manu, many their lives cnill pau Vfe mounifer all this Shitstmas dau We pr^ the end (olll soon be here And uii^ qoa all a harau nets ixsir ' Well,' some readers may be asking, ' what are the practical results of all this ? ' One is that children learn to take pleasure in taking pains, and that, as Carlyle told us, is how the best work of the world gets done. They enjoy these exercises, and so they work hard at them, which is a very important practical result. Then they learn the first lesson in style, which most people never learn at all, that there are many ways of sajnng a thing, but only one best way ; for they are obliged by the restraints of verse-form to consider and examine the many various ways in which a thing may be expressed and to choose the most suitable in the conditions. Then, as I have said, they learn that writing must pass the test of the ear, that speech must be melodious no less than grammatical — that, indeed, the one great 86 On Original Music rule of grammar is that ' if it sounds right it probably is right '. To make the world, or our own little corner of it, more musical is a matter of great practical importance in these days of explosive engines and cheap gramo- phones and cheaper laughter. The world is becoming noisier, and the evil effect upon human nerves is already visible, and will become more pronounced and more disastrous unless some effort is made in the schools to refine the ear and the voice, and to cultivate a love for musical utterance and a dislike of noise and raucous speech. The popular catch-word that ' what the world needs is peace ' expresses a truth far more profound than those who use it understand. We need the peace of quiet places for the good of our souls ; we need the revelation that inspired Wordsworth to speak of ' beauty born of murmuring sound '. And that revelation will best come to us through music and poetry. Again, in the practice of writing poems and songs children are forced to use the full resources of their vocabulary, which most of us never do. We all possess some knowledge of far more words than we ever use, and the practice of verse-making will cause us to examine our unused stores, and see what there is fit for our purpose. For it is not until we have used a word that we really appreciate it and fully possess it. I always notice more boys referring to their dictionaries when verse-writing than when reading. So, too, we all meet in our reading with many con- structions and turns of phrases which we never use, and verse-making induces us to select and employ them, and therefore it makes our reading more profitable to us. On Original Music 87 Good verse has all the qualities of good prose, and I am sure that the best of^ all ways of learning to write prose is to practise writing verse. But all the practical results of verse-making and tune-making, valuable though they are, are of quite secondary importance. The real, important result is the increase in the power and pleasure in appreciation of good literature and music. You never really appre- ciate skill in anything until you have attempted the thing for yourself. A mollycoddle may stare with wonder and envy at a fine swimmer, or batsman, or tennis player, but i( needs a swimmer or a cricketer really to appreciate their science and skill. And so it is in literature : the good critics have always been skilful writers, and the best of all have been poets. Imitation, says the proverb, is the sincerest form of flattery, and flattery is an effort at appreciation. The effort to write melodiously not merely improves your style, but reveals to you the sweetness of the poets' music. The attempt at pictorial effect leads you to compare the posts' epithets with your own, and so to appreciate their wonderful fitness. The best reason for teaching boys to write is not that they may become authors, or even clerks, but that they may love good writing ; and the best reason for teaching them to make tunes and sing them is that they may know good music from bad. The singing lesson that aims merely at making singers (resembling, very often, a badly conducted choir- practice) has little more educational value than the lesson in shorthand or book-keeping. CHAPTER V ON THE RENDERING OF POETRY Readers of Woodstock will remember a scene in which Markham Everard recites to Sir Henry Lee some lines of the then unknown Milton, of which he says: ' These verses flow sweetly and sound in my ears like the well-touched warbling of a lute. Repeat me these verses again, slowly and deliberately ; for I always love to hear poetry twice, the first time for sound and the latter time for sense.' Sir Walter had edited Dryden and the Ballads, and had recovered from them the truth the eighteenth century had almost lost, that poetry, like music, is a sensuous delight, that to be appreciated it must be heard, and that at first the attention of its hearers should be concentrated on its sound. The poets themselves have always known that. Wherever we have record of a poet's rendering his own verse, we learn that the sound of it was his first care. Chaucer's friar makes his English sweet upon the tongue, his scholar goes sounding on his way, for to Chaucer, as Mr. Coulton reminds us, there was no meaning in the written word : it had to be sounded before its sense could be understood. In Shakespeare's time this was probably still true ; there was no such thing as 'silent reading'. One of the most interesting discoveries of contemporary English scholar- ships is Mr. Simpson's discovery that early punctuation was intended to guide the voice in reading rather than to On the Rendering of Poetry 89 mark, like our modern stopping, the logical meaning. The eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare, forgetting this, and observing that the punctuation of the early editors did not correspond with the logical divisions, supposed that the printers had made mistakes, and proceeded to alter the stopping. In this they disregarded Shakespeare's express instructions to ' speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you — trippingly on the tongue '. Even in the eighteenth century the greater men had not quite forgotten that poetry is a form of music. Miss Seward, writing to Gary, the translator of Dante, says that Scott's recitation resembled Dr. Johnson's. It seems to have been what Mr. Masefield, in Captain Margaret, has happily called ' a passionate monotone '. Miss Seward, like some of our modern teachers, thought that poetry should be read ' with expression '. So Sir Hall Caine records, almost apologetically, of Rossetti's reading that 'there seemed to be so much insistence on the rhythm and so prolonged a tension of the rhyme sounds as would run the risk of a charge of monotony if falling on ears less concerned with metrical beauty than with fundamental substance '. Hazlitt tells us that 'there is a chant in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth which acts as a spell upon the hearer and disarms the judgement'; and he again, like a doubting Didymus, suggests that ' perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment'. Like many disciples, he thought himself wiser than his lord, and his particular heresy is what I want to combat in this chapter. Professor Dixon, for example, actually suggests that 90 On the Rendering of Poetry evidence of his favourite Browning's supeiiority to Tennyson may be found in their rendering of their own work. Tennyson's was a ' sort of chant guided by the music of the verse rather than by the sense of the words '. Browning's 'stress of voice was not intended to be musical, but indicative of the meaning '. Professor Dixon rightly says the contrast is significant of opposite views on art. It is even more significant that Browning, alone of all the poets so far as we know, did not intend his recitation to be musical. Fortunately, whether he himself chose to render it or not, much of his verse has music in it, or else we should have to put him with Walt Whitman outside the pale of poets altogether. To say that, of course, is to throw down the gauntlet, but it is necessary to do so because the worshippers of Browning and Whitman must be made to shift their ground : they are blocking the way to other shrines ; they are standing at the wrong view-point, and their example leads others to do the same. They are looking at literature not as a work of art, but as a work of science — the highest science, if you like, the knowledge of man in his spiritual relations. No one had a more profound insight into those relations than Browning. But that knowledge does not make a poet. Browning is a great psychologist, a great theologian, a great teacher, but he is not therefore a great poet ; and those who try to make his poetry the touchstone of taste are preventing poetry from making its true appeal. Some people will think that what I have said of Browning applies equally to Whitman. I don't think so myself, for I have never been able to see that Whitman is intellectually above the level of, say, On the Rendering of Poetry 91 Mr. Jefferson Brick.^ But, at any rate, he has himself asserted the most definite reasons why we cannot regard him as a poet. In his Backward glance o'er travelled roads he says of his own work : ' Plenty of songs have been sung, beautiful matchless songs adjusted [that is his word] to other lands than these, another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put in, quite solely with reference to America and to-day. Modern science and democracy seemed to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements [again I would ask you to note the word statements^ in contradiction to the songs and myths of the poet. I have taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements. ' For grounds for Leaves of Grass as a poem I abandoned the conventional themes, which do not appear in it : none of the stock ornamentation, nothing for beauty's sake. ' No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such, or as aiming mainly towards art or aestheticism.' That is a piece of very ordinary prose, but it is a very complete exposition of what is not poetry, of the anti- thesis of poetry. ^Nothing for beauty's sake. No aiming mainly at art ', says Walt Whitman. ' Everything for beauty's sake ', ' Poetry is first of all artistic form ', says the poet. All Whitman's talk of changing times and diverging nations, of modern science and worn-out themes, reveals an utter misconception of the nature of poetry. Philo- sophies change; systems of thought wax old like a garment ; men change their ideas like a vesture. But of poetry, as of God, it may be said, ' thou art the same 1 ' There are flowery components, Sir, in the language of my friend.' ^ On the Rendering of Poetry and thy years shall not fail'. As somebody has well put it, ' The head learns new things, but the heart for evermore practises old experiments.' It is with the heart and its age-long experience that poetry is concerned. The melancholy of Omar in the twelfth century was the melancholy of Fitzgerald in the nineteenth ; Lancelot and Guenevere are but new names for David and Bath- sheba. And David's grief for his child finds a voice in Hawker's ' Cornish Mother '. You may be thinking that my mention of Browning's recitation has led me into a long digression, which has taken us far away from our proper subject. It is not so. As Professor Dixon says, Browning's and Tennyson's rendering of their poetry depended on their conceptions of the nature of poetry. If you agree, as most people agree, with Browning, that the value of poetry lies in its intellectual content, then, of course, your rendering will seek, like his, not to be musical but to be indicative of the meaning. If your ears, as Sir Hall Caine says, are less concerned with metrical beauty than with fundamental substance, you will avoid the incantation that • casts a spell on the hearer and disarms the judge- ment ' ; you will fear to be deceived by this ' ambiguous accompaniment ', as Hazlitt called it. And so you will read it as you might read, say. Sir Oliver Lodge's last book on spiritism, to study its theories and judge their truth. But there are one or two questions that never appear to occur to people who approach poetry from this stand- point : if comprehension of the subject is the main end, why read aloud at all? Modern men, unlike those of Chaucer's age, grasp the meaning better by the sight of On the Rendering of Poetry 93 words than by the sound of them. If any one reads us a letter or document, for example, we instinctively say, ' Let me look at it ', before we are satisfied of its meaning. But above all if, like Browning, we are to stress the meaning, to read with expression, as the old Code used to say, what becomes of rhyme and metre? Where is the justification for all the labour their production involves ? Whitman appears to have asked that question and decided, very logically, to throw them on the scrap-heap. The astonishing thing is that Hazlitt and Browning, to say nothing of so many others, should not have seen this ; should not have wondered why metre and rhyme should be used at all if they were not to be marked in the rendering. Wordsworth and Coleridge stress the rhythm, and Hazlitt wonders, not why rhythm is tkere, which is the real problem, but why the poets mark it when it is there, which ought to have been obvious on the face of it. This is the misunderstanding we, have to clear up before we decide how poetry should be rendered. But ' so to interpose a little ease ' let me insert a practical example amid all this theory. To illustrate this in practice I should choose Mr. Belloc's poem, ' I shall go without companions ', and read it first in a conversational tone, stressing the words for their meaning, in the Browning manner, which is almost uni- versal in schools. So read, its effect is to invite the comment ' there 's nothing in it ', which is the Philistine's opinion of all poetry. And indeed, so read, there is nothing in it ; it is a series of statements (in Walt Whitman's phrase) that have no intellectual value whatever. Moreover, and 94 On the Rendering of Poetry this is most important, it is not poetry : so read it is no more poetry than the rh3rthm of the ' Dead March ' tapped out on a table is music. It has the potentiality of poetry, but to exist cis poetry it must be rendered so as to make its appeal, not to the intellect, but to the emotions, that is, not by its meaning, but through its music, by the effect of its rhythm on the nervous system. It must be * chanted ' in Mr. Masefield's ' passionate monotone ', not ' spoken ' in the tone of one announcing his intention to go away for a holiday. Then the hearers will not be left thinking ' What's the good of simple stuff like that ? ' They will not be think- ing of its mere intellectual significance at all, but they will be thinking of it as one thinks of a piece of music, as a beautiful experience; and they will be feeling that little thrill of the nerves or the heart which poetry exists first of all to communicate. The truth is that mood in poetry is a far more im- portant matter than meaning. The aim of art, as Wilde said, is to create a mood. And in poetry the mood is created by musical sound. The meaning in poetry is not so much expressed as suggested, and the suggestion comes mainly through the music. For example : One red leaf, the last of its clan That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light and hanging so high On the topmost bough that looks up at the sky. The meaning of that is conveyed even more by the sound than by the visual image in the meaning of the On the Rendering of Poetry 95 words. By reading for the rhythmic sound you actually enforce the sense. In my experience this is a new revelation for children. The few fortunate people who went to the public schools and heard the battle-music in Homer or the hoof-beats in Virgil will perhaps find it hard to realize that the vast mass of our people never dream of poetry as suggestive sound. They never hear, e.g., the Rain : How it clatters along the roofs Like the tramp of hoofs. How it gushes and struggles out From the throat of the overflowing spout . . . But there is one thing worse than reading poetry ' with expression ' : it is reading poetry dramatically. Sir Walter Raleigh once said to me that there be nine-and- thirty ways of reciting poets' lays — and the dramatic method is the worst of them. The dramatic method is an attempt to express your own feelings. But your proper business, like that of the musician, is to render the poet's music, to treat his verse exactly as a player treats a musical score. It is his music more than his meaning that you are concerned with, for the truth is that the meaning can only come through the music, and that if the music is lost the major part of the meaning vanishes with it. Again, if you aim at a dramatic rendering you will tend to reproduce the original emotion that is behind the poetry. But poetry, as Wordsworth said, is emojtion recollected in tranquillity, as emotional effect expressing itself in music. Crude physical emotion does not express 96 On the Rendering of Poetry itself in music, and if you attempt, for instance, to repro- duce Lear's screams as you imagine he uttered them you will not make music of them even though you use Shakespeare's words. What we have to aim at is rendering, not the emotion itself, but the music into which the poet has translated it. Dramatic rendering is an effort after the real. But poetry is not concerned with reality. Its function is to take us away from fact and show us truth : it reveals, not the commonplace, but the lovely aspect of things. ' First for the sound,' said Sir Walter. It is true that in poetry there is usually something valid for the in- tellect, which is why Sir Walter added 'a second time for the sense '. But that intellectual content is not the essential part. ' Sir,' said the bearded man in James Stephens's Crocli of Gold^ ' your words thrill in my heart like music, but my head does not understand them.' ' I have learned ', answered the philosopher, ' that the head does not hear anything till the heart has listened, and that what the heart knows to-day the head will understand to-morrow.' The Crock of Gold is one of the signs in popular litera- ture that mark the reaction in philosophy from the attempt of the last century to find a purely intellectual explanation of things. Spencer and Haeckel, for ex- ample, would never have admitted that there were things in heaven and earth which their philosophy could not grasp ; and though they were not great thinkers, they had great influence on the thought of their age and of our own. They were the typical representatives of an Age of Reason. That was the age which classified man On the Rendering of Poetry 97 as homo sapiens^ the reasoning being, though all his social and economic arrangements made the definition ridicu- lous, and all his instincts proved it untrue. The poets, of course, and the Catholic Church, always knew better. For them A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered ' I have felt '- They knew, as De Quincey said, ' never to pay any attention to the understanding when it stands in opposi- tion to any other faculty of the mind. The mere under- standing, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.' They knew that Deeper than our speech and thought Beyond our reason's sway are spiritual intuitions that are far surer, as they are far older guides than the intellect— that muddling intellect, as Wordsworth called it, which distorts our view of things, misshapes their beauteous forms. That is the first thing to get hold of in the approach to poetry ; and for the second let me quote Mr. Belloc, ' Then indeedT understood how truly there are special words of witchcraft and how they bind and loose material things '. When you have understood that, you will see why the chant of Wordsworth and Coleridge is not, as Hazlitt thought, ' an ambiguous accompaniment ', but is the very form of poetry made manifest. You will know that poetry is an incantation, and that to cast a spell upon the hearer is its essential power and JB21 G gS On the Rendering of Poetry purpose. You will understand with Swinburne that the poet's function is to make Spells And mouthings of magic for charm. Like Sir Walter Scott, you will value poetry as you value music, ' first for sound '• There is no fine poetry without fine music; all but the extreme Browningites will perhaps agree with that. But the converse also is true. Where you have fine music you have fine poetry, even though its content may seem to have little for the intellect to approve. I believe it to be profoundly true, as Sir Henry Taylor said, that in all great art the intellect is present in its strength as well as in its ardours, that no poetry was ever produced by an inspired idiot, and that nothing which is clearly nonsense can ever be either poetical or truly musical ; but I am sure also that nothing that is purely intellectjial or that can be completely understood by the intellect is poetry either. And in this religion is at one with art. There is a little poem of Walter De la Mare's that shows how by means of music The simplest and the most familiar things Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them. It is called ' All That 's Past '. He would be a very misguided man who attempted to explain or assess the intellectual value of those lines. It were as wise, as Shelley said, to cast a violet into a crucible; But he would be a very unfortunate man who could not feel the thrill of their beauty. The same may be said of O'Shaughnessy's 'Fountain of On the Rendering of Poetry 99 Tears '. Read with expression and judged merely by its meaning for the intellect, that is merely a piece of geogra- phical nonsense. We have grown so accustomed to regard our poets as preachers and moralists that many of us, I am sure, will think their music a bad exchange for their moral lessons. Well, Carlyle was a moralist if ever there was one, and this is what he says about that, quoting an even greater man than himself: ' Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere.' I believe that to be so true that you will not get even the full sense-value except through the music. Every one knows — I say every one, but I am afraid that is very much exaggerated — wisely instructed readers know, that much poetry clearly suggests its meaning by its sound alone, suggests it, I mean, even to the intellect. What is much more important is that all poetry suggests, using the word in its scientific psychological sense, suggests its mood by its sound — which means again that poetry is an incantation. The obvious intellectual correspondence between sound and sense should, of course, always be brought out in our rendering of poetry. One boy goes galloping over the moorland Wild with delight of the sunshine and speed, Blithe as a bird on his bleak bright foreland, Glad as the wind or his own glad steed. G 2 loo On the Rendering of Poetry One, with darkness and toil fast bound, Bound in misery and iron fast, Drags his nakedness underground, Sees the mine as the world at last. Even as a piece of sociology those verses of Swinburne depend for their full effect on the contrast in time and musical tone between the two stanzas. So in rendering, for example, Mr. Masefield's Cargoes the contrast between the spirit of the days when every shipowner was a merchant adventurer, and the etude materialism of our business men before the War — that contrast is fully felt only when the change in the music from rich and full to thin and flat is heard in the rendering. But, after all, the best in this, kind are but shadows : their effect is sometimes a cheap one, as in Southey's ' Waters of Lodore '. The real correspondence is not the clear logical one .: it is, as Carlyle or Coleridge said, ' deep and good '. We should seek not so much to re- inforce the apparent sense by the sound as to attain a fully musical rendering in the belief that the sense will then take care of itself. This means that we should concentrate our attention not, as commonly, on the substance so as to read with expression, as it is called, but on the musical value of the form. For, as Dr. Mackail says, the music of poets not only corresponds to, but interprets and makes incarnate to, the senses inner qualities of substance equally incom- parable. The essence of music is rhythm, and so our first endeavour must be to produce a well-marked rhythmical effect. Misguided efforts after ' expression ' ruin most of On the Rendering of Poetry loi the recitation in our schools. And not merely in our schools, I have heard lecturers in English quote poetry in such a way that if I had not known the lines I could not have told, by any change in the lecturer's delivery, where he broke into poetry or resumed his own prosing. But the rhythm of the poetry should be so marked as to make the difference unmistakable. How little the importance of rhythmic rendering is realized will be clear if you consider the usual manner of quoting our older poets. I opened my Chaucer at random, and happened on ' Fortune '. That, as commonly rendered, would begin : This wretched world's transmutation, As weal or woe, now poor and now honour, Withouten order or wise discretion Governed is by Fortune's error. But that is not Chaucer at all. He would never recognize • it as his own offspring. To get anywhere near his music you have to arrange the fall of the accents and the number of syllables according to the old, not the modern, usage : This wretched world^s transmutacl-dn, As wele or woe, now poor and now honoiir, Withouten drdre or wise discreci-dn Governed is by Fortunes errdr. That happens to be clear, and also penetratingly true as to meaning. But apart from that it has a haunting music that has a fascination and a power to delight even if its meaning were not completely obvious. Shakespeare's rhythm, too, frequently suffers violence I02 On the Rendering of Poetry because his words are read in their modern form. We disobey his injunction to Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you. So you get, to quote only the everyday lines : Then lend the eye a terrible aspect — which is simply a prose rhythm ; and Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean, which, rendered so, loses not merely its rhythm, but two of those open vowels, in ' ocd an ', which give it a great part of its tempestuous force. Then ' tion ' in Shakespeare is always two syllables, but how often do we hear the thin, flat ' resolution ', instead of the sonorous ' resolution ' ? Even since the eighteenth century changes of accent have tended to introduce dis- cord into the music of our poets ; Cowper's ' balcony ', for example, had its accent on the second syllable, and in Burns's line, Do ye envy the city gent? the accent should still be placed on the second syllable of 'envy'. It not infrequently happens that the true rhythm ejudes a first reading, which is one reason why we cannot do justice to the music of a poem until we have pondered over it. I suppose that instances vary with different persons. I remember, in my own case, that the right rhythm of a line in Lycidas eluded me for a long time. I used to say : Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, and I always felt that there was something faulty with the line, until it broke upon me that it should be : Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more. On the Rendering of Poetry 103 Another line that used to puzzle me is : But what has been has been, and I've had my hour. I tried it over and over, and at last discovered that it should be: But what has been has been, and — I've had my hour. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch quotes a line of Donne : Blasted with sighs and surrounded with tears, and shows that if you render it ' conversationally ', as if you were ordering Bacon and eggs and a half-pint of beer; or if you read it with a mechanical emphasis on the verse-rhythm, you will find no music in it. But ' if you read: Bldsted with sighs, and silr-rounded with tedrs, Hither I come to seek the spring, letting the voice linger on " sur-round ", the line becomes exquisite '. The importance of clearly marking rhyme so as to render the full musical value of verse seems to be very seldom insisted upon as it ought to be. It is quite forgotten that rhymes do not mark themselves, par- ticularly when poetry is read for expression. By stressing words for their meaning the attention is actually diverted from their chiming combinations, and so the ear, the physical sense, which all art exists to gratify, is denied its proper pleasure in order that the intellect may have, I will not say an illegitimate one, but certainly one to which it has only a secondary claim. Regard for punctuation should never be allowed to override the claims of rhyme, yet how often does one hear teachers correcting— I ought to have said misdirect- I04 On the Rendering of Poetry ing — their pupils when they dwell on the unstopped line- ending. ' There is no stop there,' says the teacher ; ' keep your voice up and run on.' And then for pattern reading you get this kind of thing : With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow, And many a fairy foreland, Set with willow-weed and mallow. Now that is not Tennyson's form at all. That is a stanza rhyming — a — a, while his is the more richly rhymed ab a b. The poem, perhaps, that suffers most by being read with expression is Herrick's ' Daffodils ', which is commonly rendered as a prose paragraph. That reading entirely obscures the intricate and delightful rhyming plan. One of the compensations for the quantities of Whit- man easy verse turned out to-day is to be found in the beautiful rhyming schemes of some of our living poets. But we lose that delight unless we are careful to mark the rhymes, and make them tell. A good deal of modern verse contains hidden internal rhymes that give a special pleasure by their unexpectedness when they are discovered, but which too often waste their sweetness on deaf ears. (I need not remind you that agreeable surprise is one of the essential elements in all art.) I have suggested that we ought to use the original pronunciation in rendering our older rhythms ; and I think the same principle applies to rhyme. Pope's famous couplet : Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tay. On the Rendering of Poetry 105 is completely spoilt when the modern ' tea ' is substituted. So Shakespeare's pun, ' Though raisins were plenty as blackberries, I would not give you a reason on com- pulsion ', has no point at all unless we remember that in his day reason still kept its French form. So I would suggest that when a poet has seen fit to allow himself a licence in the use of words, it is not for us little people to give our version, but to try to render his. When Mr. Kipling, for example, speaks of The mere uncounted folk Of whose life and death i^ none Report or lamentati(7«, we should render the rhythm and the rhyme as he pronounced it to us. And when William Morris wrote : Kiss me, love, for who know-eth What thing cometh after death? he meant us to modify the accent in ' knoweth ' so as to make 'eth' rhyme with 'death'. And whether he meant it or not, we ought also to slur over the other ' eth ' in ' cometh ' so as to avoid a clash with the rhyming sounds. Turn that couplet into prose : Kiss me, love — for who knoweth what thing cometh after death ? You realize that the mere words do not constitute poetry ; for poetry is musical sound. Even when a weak poet has employed a forced rhyme I think we ought to follow him if we choose to read his work. We may agree with Poe that words ending in • y ' ought not to be forced to rhyme with ' i '. But good poets have so used them, and our business is to render io6 On the Rendering of Poetry the poet's intention. The noble lord who wrote the famous patriotic couplet : Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility, intended a rhyme, and, such as it is, he ought to have it. Matthew Arnold makes ' fritillaries ' rhyme with ' tribu- taries '. Obviously it will not do so unless the ordinary pronunciation is modified. Then we should render it : I know what white, what purple fritillaries The grassy harvest of the river fields Above by Ensham, down by Sandford yields, And what sedged brooks are Thames's tributaries. So, again, where poets have taken, not licence, but advantage of an optional pronunciation in the case of words not yet completely fixed by custom, we should always be careful to choose the form that the rhyme requires. You often hear it asserted that ' wind ' is * wind ' in poetry, but the truth is it should be ' wind ' or ' wind ' according to the word it rhymes with. So the word ' again ' is properly called ' agen ' in ordinary speecH, but in poetry it ought sometimes to rhyme with ' men ' and sometimes with ' main '. The poets have always spoken of their mission as ' song ', and of themselves as singers ; and, as we have seen, with a single exception to prove the rule, in ren- dering their verse, they have been more solicitous for the music than for the logical expression. It might sound impertinent to suggest that they were right were it not that common practice and professors imply that they were wrong. Common practice assumes, as Mr. Wells says, that poetry is merely pedagogy in fancy dress ; that a poet is a On the Rendering of Poetry 107 speaker rather than a singer \ and that our main object in rendering his verse should be to make his meaning clear. I know many people who would be simply bewildered at the suggestion that this is not the main object. All that great majority of teachers, inspectors, and examiners who suppose that poetry can be paraphrased, for example, must evidently think so. They murder to dissect, and never realize that the secret of life is not to be found in dead matter. And yet Shelley has told us that we might as well cast a violet into a crucible and expect to discover its elements of beauty; and a greater than Shelley has declared that ' Every one should know that nothing harmonized by musical enchantment can be ti-ansmuted from one tongue to another without breaking all its sweetness and harmony '. Musical enchantment. That in two words is the secret of poetry. The two fundamental truths about poetry are that it is magic and that it is music. And they are the very truths that most of us never appreciate ; for we were called upon as children to explain the meaning of what, being magic, is essentially unexplainable ; and we were taught to read in a speaking tone what is really intended as much as any musical score to be rendered into musical sound. People who think it can be paraphrased are like the man in the Arabian Nights who tried to enter the en- chanted cave with other words than the magic ' Sesame '. They cannot understand why wheat or barley will not do as well. If they were right there would be no essential difference between poetry and prose. But there is an essential difference, and it is this — that prose com- municates ideas and poetry communicates emotions ; that io8 On the Rendering of Poetry prose acts through the nervous system and poetry acts tipon it ; that prose addresses itself to the intellect and poetry to the heart. I can imagine a disembodied intelligence, but I cannot imagine poetry existing apart from a physical thrill. If heaven, as we used to be taught, is full of music, I think we shall have to carry there some sort of nervous susceptibility. Emotion, as lovers of babies and animals know, is communicated not by sense but by sound. No English translation of the meaning of the ' Marseillaise ' could stir an English child as the intellectually meaningless sound of the original has power to do. No words that foolish men have read into Mendelssohn's songs have power to communicate the emotion of his music. Surely this fundamental difference between poetry and prose should, a priori, be made manifest in our reading, even if we did not know the practice of the poets. The natural instinct of children is to adopt a singing tone for poetry, but that, of course, for some people is evidence for the prosecution. They take the attitude of the parent who said, ' Sally, go and see what Baby's doing— and tell him not to do it '. I believe the child's instinct and the poet's practice to be right, and that the singer is a better guide than the speaker. I think, for example, that poetry, like singing, demands a precision in enunciation that would be exaggerated and pedantic in rendering prose. Perhaps Mr. Masefield's ' Beauty ' will illustrate what I mean : I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills. Coming in solemn beauty, like slow, old tunes of Spain; I have seen the Lady April bringing the daffodils. Bringing the springing grass and soft, warm, April rain. On the Rendering of Poetry 109 I have heard the song of the blossoms and the old chant of the sea, And seen strange lands from under the arched, white sails of ships j But the loveliest things of beauty God ever hath shewed to me Are her voice, and her hair, and her eyes, and the dear, red curve of her lips. The deliberateness of utterance that is necessary for the music of those lines to make its full appeal to the emotions would be simply irritating if they were in- tended to be addressed to the intellect, Swinburne's music, of course, depends in a very high degree on careful articulation, so that every syllable shall have its full musical value. In fact, as these enchanted words are not like ordinary words, they must not be spoken like ordinary words; they are a kind of incantation, and they must be spoken like a charm. If you use them in an ordinary way of talking, as if you were asking the butcher about the meat, the spell will not work. And that is why so few people feel the enchantment and realize the wonder of poetiy. We ought really to think of poetry as like music, as sweet sounds that have power to send us into a kind of dream in which we do not think in the ordinary sense, but rather see visions. Now it may be objected that in all this I have for- gotten that while Sir Walter Scott said ' the first time for sound', he also said 'the latter time for sense'. There is no danger of any one forgetting that— until the last compiler of annotated editions is strangled in the bowels of the last examiner, APPENDIX ON THE EXPRESSION OF ARITHMETICAL REASONING ' Success in science has always been due to the substitution of analysis and reasoned planning for trial and rule of thumb.' — H. G. Wells. Most of our text-books on arithmetic make the subject almost as difficult as Chinese by giving the pupil the notion that he must learn in succession an indefinite number of ' rules '. Thus he is introduced to ' simple ' rules, ' com- pound' rules, rule of three, chain rule, interest, percentage, stocks and shares, square and cube root, averages, and dis- count, as if all these matters involved distinct arithmetical principles. The effect too often is that the only rule he learns to apply to any arithmetical operation is rule of thumb. Children should be led to understand that all operations with numbers fall into a very few groups. The answer to any 'sum' in arithmetic is obtained ultimately (i) by finding a total, either through addition of unequal amounts or through multiplication of equal units, or (2) by finding the difference between two quantities, or (3) by finding the value of a share when a given quantity is divided by a certain number, or (4) by finding how many times one quantity is contained in another. It always amazes me to observe that the very books which fail to generalize arithmetical operations under these few types fail also to distinguish the fundamental' difference between the results obtained by the two operations last mentioned: they treat of ' division ' as if it were a single fundamental process ; whereas it really involves one or other of two distinct opera- tions — finding the value of a share, i. e. ' sharing ', or finding the ratio which one quantity bears to another, i.e. ' measuring' If arithmetic is regarded, as I regard it, as primarily a training in reasoning and in the clear expression of the process of Arithmetical Reasoning m reasoning, the distinction between the two operations commonly confused under the term division must be clear alike in the mind of the pupil and in the symbols he employs to express the particular mental operation he has performed. The sign -i- usually employed is not really a mathematical symbol at all, but is a printer's device to indicate, without resort to small type, that the number preceding it should be in the position of the upper dot and the number following it in that of the lower. Such a relationship of position really indicates that the upper quantity is to be shared by the lower number. The process of measuring ought to be distinguished by the sign of ratio : A printer's mark which combines the ' sharing ' line with the ' measuring ' dots ought certainly not to be employed by children, at least until they have learned to distinguish clearly between the two operations. And even then the use of it will involve ambiguity in expression. There is similar Confusion of thought as to the nature of another of the fundamental operations in arithmetic: few children, and perhaps not many more teachers, realize that the difference between two quantities may be regarded from two opposite points of view and may be evaluated by means of two differing processes. The method of the home and the shop is to regard difference as the amount that must be added to the smaller quantity to make it equal to the larger, and to arrive at it by means of ' complementary addition ' ; the school, on the Other hand, usually explains it as the amount left when the smaller value is subtracted from the larger : but it is too often forgotten that a minus sign does not necessarily connote sub- traction. It will be found that in most schools the problems that children commonly fail to solve are those involving a knowledge of division and difference, the reason being that these two elementary principles are seldom properly understood. How- ever, my present business is not to explain the ' five processes 112 Appendix but to illustrate a method of written arithmetic by which all ' sums ' are classified and stated as ' cases ' of one or other of them. Every arithmetical problem includes a statement or hypo- thesis and a question. The first step towards its solution is to isolate the question from the data. When the question has been ' dissected out ' and stated, an attempt should be made to answer it in general terms as involv- ing primarily one or other of the ' five processes '. Thus, if the question is 'Average weight of the men?', the answer, in general terms, to all such questions is ' Total weight shared by the number of men ' ; or if the question is ■ Value of all the cows ? ', the answer in general terms is ' Value of one cow multiplied by the number of cows '. The ability to form general ideas is one of the marks of a trained and developed mind ; in primitive peoples such ideas are few and vague, and the power to form them is rudimentary. It is so in the child, but it is capable of rapid development ; and its development is one of the most important functions of education. For without general ideas, reasoning, in any advanced sense, is impossible. Arithmetic intelligently taught is one of our most valuable instruments for this purpose ; but presented, as it usually is, as a chaos of disconnected ' rules ' in which no unity or general principle is manifest, it utterly fails to educate the pupil, though it provides him with as many tricks as a fox. We often fail in arithmetic to distinguish between reasoning and reckoning. It is in the formulation of the general state- ment of a problem that reasoning is involved ; when that has been done the rest is merely reckoning : the particular numbers or quantities of a particular instance are substituted for the general terms, and the sum is worked out without any further necessity for reasoning. Instead of dashing into writing at the outset, the pupil should be required before putting pen to paper Arithmetical Reasoning 113 to ' think through ' the problem to the end, disregarding entirely the particular numbers involved: he will need the written symbols in his calculation, but his reasoning must be done ' in his head '. So the mental energy at the pupil's disposal is concentrated singly and successively first upon the reasoning and then upon the reckoning ; thus the logic of the solution is not hampered by purely numerical difficulties, nor the reckon- ing complicated by the intrusion of non-numerical ideas. For when once a proper general statement has been evolved no further words are necessary to the intelligibility of the solu- tion. And in logic, as in literature, ' brevity is the soul of wit '. The illustrations now given will make clear without further explanation how questions of various types common in schools may be thus treated as cases of one or another of the five processes. Addition. A farmer buys 32 sheep at £4 12^. 6d. each. He pays a man 5X. to drive them home. If it costs him 2s. ^d. each per week to keep them, what will he have expended on them at the end of a month ? Total expenditure ? = Cost of sheep -{- Drover's pay -f Cost of keep = £4 12s. 6d. X 32 -t- 55. -I- 2s. j,d. X 32 X 4 = £i28-)-£i6-f-£4-|-5f.-|-£i4 8j. = £162 1T,S. What will £15 amount to in 2\ years' at 5 per cent, simple interest ? Amount ? = Principal -h Interest = £x5+^iof£x5^ = £15-1-7^. 6^. X5 = £i5-|-£i 175. f>d. = £16 i7f. dd. ' For 'Interest = a fraction of the Principal x tlie number of years ' 9R!t1 H 114 Appendix A man leaves his house at 8.45 a.m. to walk to a place 12 J miles away. If he walks at 3 miles per hour, at what time will he arrive ? Time of arrival ? = Time of starting + Time taken on walk = 8.4s a.m. + (i2^ : 3) hours ' = 8.45 a.m. + 41^ hours = 12.55 P-m- A house is rented at ry. 6d. per week. It is assessed for rating purposes at £28 per annum. If rates are is. 2d. in the £, what does his house cost the tenant yearly ? Annual cost of house ? = Rent + Rates = 131. 6^. X 5 2 + 8f. 2^. X 28 ' = £26 + £8 13J. 4//. + 8J. 8^.+£7 + £4 /[s. + /^. Sd. = £46 I OS. 8(/. Difference. Which is the better investment : the 3^ per cent. Loan at 80J or a 2| per cent, stock at 59^ ? Better investment ? = Yield of first stock— Yield of second ,1 zl = ;f^, of capital -, of capital _ 14 II ""321 238 = 043-046,(01^-^) i. e. Second is better. If I sell out £900 in the 4^ per cents, at 90 and invest the 1 Number of hours = Distance : Rate per hour. Arithmetical Reasoning "5 proceeds in the 4 per cents, at 7 5, what will be the change in my income ? Difference in income ? = First income — Second income = £4|x9-£4X9oX9 : 75 = £40 loj. — £4X 18 X 9 : 15 = £40 loj. — £4x54 : 5 = £40 I05. — £4X lof = £40 lOf. — £43 4J. = £2 i4i'. more. One boy's step measures 2-4 feet, another's 2-5 feet. How many more steps to the mile will the first boy take ? Extra steps per mile ? = First boy's steps— Second boy's steps = 1760x3 : 2'4— 1760x3 : 2-5 = 220x3 : -3-352X3 : S = 220X I : -r— 1056 : -5 = 2200 — 2112 = 88. A contractor agrees to complete a piece of work in 28 days. He engages 12 men, but finds at the end of 20 days that only I of the work has been done. How many more men must he employ in order to get the job finished in the time agreed upon? Number of extra men ? = Number of men at end * — Number of men at beginning — _ :( — of — of -X — )— 12 3 Vio 12 3 I '' = - : (- of - of -)— 12 3 ^S 3 y I I = - : 12 3 45 = 15-12 = 3- 1 From previous lessons it will be understood that this number equals ' work to be done : work of i man '. ii6 Appendix MrvrtpucArvam. If 35 siieep cost £100, what vOl 56 sheep cost : Cost of 56 sheep ? = Cost of I sbeqi xTbt nundjer of dieep £icc - X 56 35 £20 xs-S* = £zox8 = £160. What viD be the cost of £725 Coosols at 49I ? Cast of stock? = Price pa £icc x Nticib« of £100 =^ £49 zr. 6ii£. x 7i = £343 17*, 6d.'t-£i2 5:. 7|<^. = £356 3*- 1|^- Find the area of a tectai^nlar plot of land 37^ figet loag b)r 10 yards h.rc&.c. Area of pk*? = Square feet in : ro» x Kamber of r-.,*i = 37f sqnaie feetxicx3 = 375 square feetX3 := 125 square jaidsi. AnoD-stop tcain leaves Stoke at i.;2 and readies Wick at 11.13. traTeZix-k' at an ares^e qieed of 48 nSes per hoar. What is the tfaini-ciass feie at i^. per mile? Fare? = Rateper mile xNmnber of miles =■ it.gd.'x. ^K 2^ = M. 9/. X 5ff = 15*. 9^+S|^ = i6s. 5|^ or i6c 6d. < Tlie rtaAa H omled to refcr lo iE>e M. E. D^ to liia Jin iIk iaage Arithmetical Reasoning n? Sharing. Twenty-four boxes, each containing three and a half gross of screws, weigh three-quarters of a ton. What is the weight of a screw ? Weight of I screw ? _ Total weight of screws ~ Number of screws _ iSX II2X i6 oz. ~i2X 12x3^x24 S X 112 X 16 oz. "■4x12x3-1x24 5 X 14 X 16 oz. "4x12x34x3 5 X4X 16 oz. 4x12x3 20 oz. 9 = 2-2 oz. A man bought a ham weighing 16 lb. at 2s. ^d. a pound. It lost 2^ lb. in cooking, and he sold the cooked ham at a profit of 9i. I id. What price per lb. did he charge for it ? Selling price per lb. ? _ Total money obtain ed ~ Number of lb. sold 2S. ^d.y. i6 + <)s. lid. l6-2i 37^. ^. + qs. lid. i3i 27 3 originally suggested by the word ' cancel ', and to consider the following definition of it : ' to substitute for a complex and difficult calculation a sipiple and easy one giving the same result '. Here, for the sake of clearness, the cancelling strokes have been dispensed with and the new statement has been given a new line, which in ordinary practice might be saved. "8 Appendix A man sold 42 sheep for £177 9^. at a profit of 30 per cent. What had each sheep cost him to buy ? Cost price of i sheep ? Cost of all sheep Number of sheep _iiof£i779f- 42 _ £177 gj. X 10 ~ 13x42 £25 js. X 10 — 13x6 £1 igs. X 10 = 6s. 6d. X 10 — ^3 5*- If John has 8s. 6d., and Tom has 25. 4/f., how much must John give Tom so that both may have the same amount ? Money for Tom ? _ The difference Number of boys 85. 6d. — 2s. 4d. 2 6s. 2d. = 35. xd. Measuring. If £15 is spent on eggs at 50J. per gross, how many boxes will be required to pack them supposing that a box contains 3^ dozen ? Number of boxes ? = Eggs in all : E^s in i box = i44X(£i5 : £2 los.) : 3^x 12 = 144x6 :3|xi2 = 12x6 :3| = 144 : 7 = 20^, i.e. 21 boxes. Arithmetical Reasoning irg In what time will £i8o amount to £zio at 4 per cent, simple interest ? Number of years ? = Total interest : Interest per annum = £30 : j^-Q of £180 = 300 : 18 X4 1^:50 : 12 = 4^, or 4 years 2 months. If an article bought for 15J. is sold for 16^. ^d., what is the gain per cent. ? Gain per cent. ? = Gain in hundredths of cost price = ij. 3(/. : 15^. in hundredths = r-oo : 12 == 8J per cent. A tank has three taps, the first of which will fill it in 30 minutes, the second in 24 minutes, and the third can empty it in 20 minutes. If all the taps are turned on together, in what time will the tank be full ? Number of minutes required to fill tank ? = Whole of tank .: fraction filled per minute = 120 : (4 + S-6) = 120 : 3 = 40. A rectangular field has an area of 7 acres. If its length is 80 yards, what is its breadth ? Number of yards in breadth ? = Area of field : Area in i strip = 4840 X 7 : 80 = 6o|x7:i =423i I20 Appendix When the 3 J per cent. War Loan is at 91, what percentage shall I get on money invested in it ? Rate per cent. ? =si Yield in hundredths of my money = si : 91 '*! hundredths = 7-00 : 91 X 2 = I'Oo : 26 = 3tJ per cent. One consequence of treating a ' sum ' as a piece of composi- tion is that the examiner has to read through the whole instead of merely comparing the last line with his printed ' answer ' ; moreover, instead ^f simply giving no marks at all when the last line fails to correspond, he will have to devise some system of marks that will give credit for soundness of reasoning and for brevity in calculation as well as for accuracy in reckoning. My own plan is to apportion twelve marks as follows : five for the first line of the solution, the general statement ; four for the last line — which has no more claim than the rest to be called the answer; and the remaining three among the other lines. But, as boys taught to reason in this way soon develop the power to work such problems as the foregoing at the rate of twelve to twenty per hour, the marking makes great demands on the teacher. The remedy is to reduce the time given to written arithmetic to a maximum of two hours weekly for the abler boys and three hours for the slower. Printed in England at the Oxford University Press. BOOKS ON EDUCATION August 1 92 1 THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS. A Lecture delivered in the Hall of Queen's College on October 22, 1919, by F. J. R. Hendy. 1920. 8to (9J x 6), pp. 28. Paper cover, IS. 6d. net. FR.OM A MODERN UNIVERSITY: Some Aims and Aspirations of Science, by Arthur Smithells. 1921. 8vo (9x6), pp. 124. 12s. 6d. net. 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THTT PP F P A R ATiniVr OF T T-T IT r T-I T T n T?nR BY F. S. MARVIN THE LIVING PAST, a Sketch of Western Progress. F. S. Marvin. Fouith edition, 1920, 6s. 6d. net. Contents : — Looking backward. Childhood of the Race. Early Empires. The Greeks (100 A.D.). The Romans (400 A.D.). The Middle Ages. The Renascence. Rise of Modern Science. Industrial Revolution. Political Revolution. Progress after Revolution. Looking Forward. Time Charts. Appendix on Books. Index. ' An extraordinarily brilliant sketch. Historians nowadays tend to excessive specialization. Mr. Marvin supplies a wholesome and valuable corrective in this wonderful sketch of European history. . . . It is a notable achievement.' University Extension Bulletin, THE CENTURY OF HOPE, a Sketch of Western Pro- gress from 1815 to the Great War, by F. S. Marvin. Second edition, 1920. Crown 8vo, pp. viii + 358. 6s. ret. Contents : — The Legacy of the Revolution ; The Political Revival ; The New Spirit in Literature; The Birth of Socialism; Mechanical Science and Invention ; Biology and Evolution ; Nationality and Imperialism ; Schools for All; Religious Growth; New Knowledge on Old Foundations; The Expansion of the West ; Social Progress ; Intr.rnational Progress ; Time Chart; Appendix on Books. Index. ' Mr. Marvin's previous book, T/ie Living Fast, has qualified him in ah exceptional degree for this difficult study of contemporary, or almost con- temporary, history. He has extraordinarily wide knowledge, a judicial temper, a. power of generalization, and, perhaps more important than all, a clear and consistent conception of human history.'— Tzmfi Literary Sufplement. The Unity Series THE UNITY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. Essays collected by F. S. Marvin. 1915. 8vo (9 x 6), pp. 316. 7s. 6d. net. Grounds of Unity, F. S. Marvin. Unity in Prehistoric Times, J. L. Myres. Contribution of Greece and Rome, ]. 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