Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 350
But what is utterly unnatural is the false and overdone standard of excellence of the student of French in a grammar class, writing out twenty sentences of subjunctives without an error, finding feminines for blanc, for beau, for turc, for tourangeau and so forth, as easily as picking flowers. The method of teaching French here shares in the fault that goes with all examination discipline — the pressure to put on the last increment of excellence that only comes at an inordinate cost, an inordinate sacrifice of other things. A steamer whose economic speed is sixteen knots can perhaps be forced up to twenty at a double cost, and even beyond that, at an expense utterly disproportionate. A pupil who takes over ninety per cent in French grammar is like a little tug raising enough steam to move a freighter, at the expense of being all boiler and no cargo.
I admit the full difficulty of turning what is here said to its practical application in re-forming the curriculum of a school. But just as the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, so a clear sense of what is desired, of the goal to be achieved, will sooner or later find the means of achievement. But even without attempting in any degree to lay down a school curriculum in French, one or two generalities may at least be hazarded. Students ought to begin with nouns and names, learned off picture-placards by the oral method of fifty years ago — spelling and sound together. Follow these pictures by phrases, and plenty of them, learned as far as possible without connection with English: Voici un hibou; Voilà un cheval.... Steal from bygone Ollendorf one or two question-and-answer forms endlessly repeated: Voyez-vous le cheval! Oui, je vois le cheval.... Let at least all class-room directions be in French: Asseyez-vous.... Fermez la porte.... Écoutez bien.... And exhort the student at the start to try to get away from his own language.
A little further on comes reading out loud by the teacher; here enters such a story as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge — the English of it only explained once, just as little as is necessary, and then endless repetition of the reading. Dictation of French, to be written and spelled by the students as best they can and turned back and forward into Ollendorf questions, is a true linguistic discipline, the best there is, and the one, I imagine, the most nearly abandoned by our colleges in their entrance tests. And most of all it is necessary to realize that a percentage examination, carried on in writing, and calling for a false degree of excellence in detail, in this as in nearly every other part of education, spells frustration and defeat. But of that I speak in more general and fuller terms in another chapter.
In what I have said about the teaching of French I have been referring to the situation in North America — the United States and Canada — where it is probably the worst in the world. The whole power of a vast, expensive and enthusiastic public education is here directed along false lines of effort. In Liberia, where they make no effort at all, I am sure they do it better.
In England for various reasons the situation is different from ours. The proximity of France across the Channel, the fact that thousands of people learn their French from actual contacts and the fact that “native” teachers are everywhere available counts for much. So too does the fact that French was widely taught in England before the era of modern “translation” text-books, before analytical sentence-translation, and was taught largely in phrases and on a “natural” method. Even the earlier translation texts were not like ours. If anyone will glance at the famous Ollendorf of a hundred years ago he will see that it aims at a constant repetition of similar French forms by means of questions and answers. “Avez-vous le chapeau de mon père?” “Non, Monsieur, je n’ai pas le chapeau de votre père.”
Ollendorf seems to be wrong in admitting English as the medium. But the intention of his famous “method” was that the pupil would, by the repetition system, jump out of English to French; each French sentence would suggest a new one; each French thought would reproduce itself in a slight variation. “Avez-vous mangé votre déjeuner?” “Non, Monsieur, je n’ai pas encore mangé mon déjeuner.”
It has been only more recently that up-to-date textbooks on the model of their own begin to swamp out older and better methods.
Now the English are naturally the worst linguists in the world, but they carry down from their insular history the remains of a contempt for foreign nations, including foreign languages. The Eskimos are accustomed to call themselves “the people” and the English in many things share the Eskimo attitude. This sense of superiority, in point of language, carries advantages and disadvantages. English people are apt to consider that they “know French” when they are able to pass a few phrases back and forward across the lunch counter at Dieppe, or call out in a confident voice, “Garçon, l’addition, s’il vous plaît!” They are seldom interested in shades of pronunciation; they pronounce tenez and savez as if written in English tenny and savvie (to rhyme with “many” and “navvy”), and are willing to let it go at that. On the other hand, use and custom have enabled them to grasp far more easily than we do what a Frenchman is trying to say and to answer him with some such apposite phrase as “Très bien, Monsieur” or “Cela ne fait rien.”
I remember, as an illustration of this attitude, the visit to my university, McGill, about forty years ago, of Andre Siegfried, then an unknown and inquiring young Frenchman, since known to all the world. He stood and talked in easy effortless French to one of my elderly colleagues, an Englishman of the Oxford type. As Siegfried talked my colleague stood first on one foot and said, “Oui — oui — oui — ah, oui,” and then on the other foot and said, “Oh, non — non — non,” and then back to oui. Afterwards I heard him telling of the interview: “Delightful young man, speaks really excellent French. We chatted away for a long time — all in French, of course.”
This easy unconsciousness of the very problem of language gives a sort of reality to French in England, vastly different from the anxious, pathetic failure of French in America.
As a matter of fact, a full mastery of even two languages is a very rare thing. It can only come as the result of a special environment, the opportunity to talk both, the will to do so, and therewith a certain aptitude. What is ordinarily thought as bilingualism falls away below this.
Compare, for example, the “bilingual” city of Montreal, of whose one million people, some seven out of ten are French. All the French people of any education understand English, and all of them speak it in a way to make themselves easily understood for business and for ordinary conversation. But with a very few exceptions their speech falls far short of the range and power of people speaking their own language. They can say what they mean but they can neither adorn nor embellish it. Their pronunciation, of course, while pleasing enough, is not the same as ours; it may be better but it is not the same. Even their understanding of English of necessity falls short in point of appreciation of our literature; so much depends, especially in poetry and in the drama, on the full connotation of the words, the shades of meaning which they have taken on with us from infancy.
Can a foreigner fully distinguish the curfew “tolls the knell of parting day” from “rings the six o’clock bell”? Can he feel the appeal of a tide that “drew from out the boundless deep” and “turns again home”? “In Flanders fields the poppies blow!” Can any foreigner appreciate the delicacy of blow? We have no measure of the intimacy of their comprehension, but it is not unfair to doubt it.
As to the bilingualism of the English people of Montreal there is hardly any of it. Most of them learn a little French in school, recognize a lot of French words, especially those on sign-boards and know that “Guy Street!” as called out by the bilingual car-conductor is in French “Ghee!” The exceptions are too few to matter. Yet here is a city where an unobservant visitor, haunted by a myth, would say, “In Montreal, of course, everybody talks both English and French.”
People who have devoted attention to the subject of foreign languages may be inclined to differ from me as to their valuation of translation. They may argue that translation represents as it were the last word, the supreme exercise in language. The extraordinary difficulty of finding idiom for idiom, of carrying over from one language to the other an absolute identity of meaning with an equal excellence of diction, such difficulty is only matched by the attraction of doing it.
Now this is quite true. But such translation comes at the end not at the beginning of study.
CHAPTER VI. HAS ECONOMICS GONE TO SEED?
ECONOMISTS END TO end — Knowledge that falls asleep — Political Economy as world gospel — The bottom falls out of it — The Spendthrift saves society — Bad money saves national trade — The colleges meet the situation — A catalogue of dead opinion — Economists dig in behind a barrage of x and y — Economics joins the Chinese Classics
Some years ago when I was the dinner guest of a famous club in Boston, the chairman of the evening introduced me in the following words: “Our guest to-night is an economist. I need hardly remind you, gentlemen, of the large part played in our life of today by our economists. Indeed it has been calculated that if all the economists were laid out in a line, end to end, starting at the Mexican border, they would reach” — the orator paused impressively and added— “nowhere.”
That, I say, was a few years ago. What was a genial joke then is plain fact now. In my opinion that is exactly where college economics stands. At a time when the world is in danger of collapse from the dilemma of wealth and want, the college economists can shed no light — or rather only a multitude of cross lights that will not focus to a single beam — in place of a lighthouse, wreckers’ signals, or, at best, fireworks, elaborate and meaningless.
The time has come to ask, has economics run to seed? Consider what we mean by the phrase. There comes a time in the life of plants and flowers, when bloom and freshness have passed away. The blossoms are gone, the green of bud and leaf has withered to a faded brown; on the shrivelled stem once bright with bloom there remains nothing but the ragged seed-pods, sear and unsightly. In these, indeed, lies resurrection, the hope of future life, but, for the moment, use, purpose and beauty are gone. Let the wind scatter the seed for a new start on other ground.
So it is with the growth of human knowledge. It rises in new force, vigorous in life, brilliant in expression and beneficent in power. Time passes. New growth has stopped. Knowledge, like a withering stick, becomes rigid and formal. Adaptability has gone. Leaf has become wood; speculation has turned to authority. The doddering thought has run to seed. The hand that holds the pen is dead.
So it was vast centuries ago when the Chinese, a brilliant nation in the sunrise of intellectual growth, invented a system of symbols, of little pictures, that permitted the written communication of thought. It was a marvellous advance. But over these little pictures the Chinese fell asleep for five thousand years, mumbling and reciting the “sacred books,” sacred only in their primitive simplicity, like an idiot among savages.
The Babylonians measured out the sky and baked their knowledge on clay, in wedge-shaped characters. They moved, stopped — and then the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold and Babylon was buried in the sand.
In Alexandria the new Greek science and medicine ran its course for over five hundred years. There the Ptolemies built a great library of half a million books, a lighthouse four hundred feet high with beams focused far out at sea, a wonder of the world. Here were the triumphs of Euclid, of Aristarchus and of Galen. Then knowledge slowly crystallized; life and inquiry died out of it; the great weight of opinion of the dead suffocated the living. The conquering Arab overran it all, and the Caliph Omar burned its books in the name of a Mohammedan God.
When Greece and Rome declined, the Barbarians came, but among them grew up the schools of the Christian church, the schools of Alfred and Charlemagne, like beautiful little plants in the forest. These grew into the cloistered learning of the monastery, copying its parchment books in the quiet of a scriptorium, a sanctuary all still within, noise and battle without. Then the learning of the church, over-weighted and encrusted with age, turned to scholasticism, substituting words for things and grammar for thought, formal and worthless.
The Renaissance swept all this away, to put in its place the “humanities” and the classical scholarship which was the mainstay of our learning and our literature in England and America for three hundred years. The education of a “gentleman” was based on conjugations and declensions; young ladies’ minds were sweetened and enriched with Greek mythology, and America named its rising towns from the Rome and Syracuse of antiquity.
As the modern world of industry and machinery and democracy grew up, the world of classical education failed to notice that it was there and dozed quietly to rest, murmuring Latin quotations in its sleep.
As it slept, there rose up beside it, alert and eager with life, the new science of political economy. This, as fashioned by Adam Smith and Ricardo and their American disciples, seemed a wonderful dogma, fit to rank with Galileo’s telescope and Isaac Newton’s apple. It was so simple that it could all be written in a few pages. It told the poor exactly why they were so. Work, industry, liberty, free competition and a police force were all that was needed for social welfare. Every man got what he was worth and was worth what he got, and the world went of itself.
Not that this bright new dogma was taught in the colleges. Gentlemen didn’t need it and the poor couldn’t afford it. But the Cobdens and the Brights and the Manchester School put it round the world. It seemed like a gospel of light. Russian nihilists in the Siberian mines hid copies of John Stuart Mill under their shirts, like early Christians with a gospel.
Of teaching, I say, there was little. The East India Company first taught political economy in their college at Haileybury. Their cadets were supposed to need it, to work it on the Hindu. The first lecturer was Malthus, the apostle of the empty cradle; but he had a hare-lip; the students couldn’t understand him; so no harm was done. In Scotland also political economy was taught in college before and after Adam Smith; not under that name but as a branch of philosophy and the theory of moral sentiments. As such it turned into a sort of dream, like philosophy itself, bankrupt since Plato but garrulous as an aged patient in a workhouse ward. When political economy joined it, that made two. But as far as political economy meant practical precept — work, save and take what you can get — the Scotch didn’t need it in school. They had it as home work.
With the modernization of our education which began about fifty years ago, economics came sweeping in as a college-subject. Students cried for it. Benefactors died for it. It reached and swelled till it filled a B.A. curriculum, turned into a graduate study and after that students could go to Germany and get more of it, and keep on with it until they died.
But even then, though no one realized it, the bottom was out of it. Political economy had taken too much for granted. Property, and above all property in land. Where did that come from? asked Henry George. And inheritance? Loosen the dead hand and let us see what it holds in its fingers. What? Is that fair? All that vast wealth! And labor, asked Karl Marx, does it get all it produces? If so, why hire it? And competition, asked a thousand complaining voices, as the complexity of our machine industry grew, why is competition fair, if the strong can crush the weak and vested interest take its toll of necessity?
Even the theory of the matter turned upside down like a capsized boat. Does cost of production really govern the value of a thing, or does the value of a thing dictate its cost? And with that the theorists were off to a new start, perplexed as Milton’s arguing devils, who “found no end in wondering mazes lost.” Thus did the experts wrangle and jangle in their own Paradise Lost. With the new century, economics, with the bottom knocked out of it, was carried forward floating on the mud, like Stephenson’s first railway.
As a result, economic science has got itself into the tangle in which it is tied today. Of all the “economic truths” of a hundred years ago, I do not know of one — literally, not of one — that would pass unchallenged. Lord Bacon tells us that Pontius Pilate asked in jest, “What is truth?” and “would not stay for an answer.” If he asked the question of the economists of today and waited for an answer, he would have to arrange his board for a long time in advance.
Nothing stands. John Stuart Mill was convinced that “productive labor” was the basis of social welfare — that and nothing else. Labor spent on producing mere luxuries was wasted. The spendthrift was an enemy to society. What he did was to call for velvet clothes and champagne. Mill was a simple man, and a velvet suit and a bottle of champagne seemed to him the last word for a wild time. We could show him something now. But the idea was that Mill’s spendthrift, by calling for workmen to make him his suit and fix his drink, diverted them from producing real things that do not pass away — such as bridges, machines and factories. “A demand for commodities,” said Mill, “is not a demand for labor.” This he made one of his “four fundamental propositions” that held up the whole structure like the pillars of the mediaeval firmament.
But where is the argument today? Smashed to fragments. The loudest of our complaints are the voices calling for more spending of money. Anything to start it going. Prime the pump. Pension the old men. Give everybody in Alberta $25 a month. Don’t produce, spend. Cut production down, limit it. Let the hog die unborn and pay the farmer for the corn he doesn’t raise, on the sole condition that he will spend the money and not save it.
There again, saving! That, with all the economists from Adam Smith to his latest imitator, was the prime force in progress. There the interest of the individual and of society focused to a single light. If everybody worked hard and saved money, then everybody would get rich, the future would be provided for, and rainy days be stalled off till every place would be as good as Nevada.
They never stopped to ask what happens if everyone sells and nobody buys — if we save enough to build so many machines that there’s nothing for them to do. What if we do provide for the future? It hasn’t come yet. How are we to get along till it does? Hence all the wrangle and jangle over “technology,” technological improvement and technological unemployment, the waste of abundance and the superfluity of productive power.
