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done; and I very much regret that any critic can be found, as so many do, to deny this, without examining the facts. In education, as in politics, there is a lamentable habit of stating opinions as though they were facts, and very little desire to find out the truth. This levity in the use of words is not an English characteristic, and I believe it to be due largely to the disgraceful state of both elementary and secondary education, the effects of a generation of bad teaching. A generation, I say, because the methods and the curriculum which I deplore equally with Mr. Benson do not go farther back than the seventies, and they were only perfected as an engine of mischief within the memory of most of us.

I now proceed briefly to suggest a remedy for the defects which Mr. Benson has very properly pointed out. They are: a new modelling of the course of work, and a change of methods.

First, we must have a time-table in due proportion, so arranged that each important subject has its place, that each has time enough, and that none preponderates over the others. Secondly, we must have a succession of subjects, so as not to overload the learner. Thirdly, we must have better methods.

When, new subjects are introduced, we need a lesson a day, not less, and not much more, though at the first entry of a new language we may give extra lessons for a short time with advantage. I assume that our course covers the whole school life-a most important point, which is well brought out in the lately published Buff Book on the German Reformed Gymnasien. It is useless for the public school to try to educate boys, without regulating the course of the various preparatory schools that feed it. The entrance examination will do a great deal towards this; but because it is a fact generally

lost sight of, that the boy is made or marred as a rule before he gets to the public school (where his average stay is about four years), for that reason I wish to repeat, that all attempts at reforming public schools from the top are foredoomed to failure.

The general lines of our course I would suggest as follow. For the earliest years, up to nine or ten, no language but English would be taught or used. I ought to make it clear that these ages are those of the boy of average intelligence; they really mean stages, which clever boys pass through quicker and dull boys slower. This is the time when the mind is eager for new facts, and the imagination needs to be fed with stories, legends, and the wonders of nature. The use of the English language must be taught thoroughly, beginning with articulation, and including clear and expressive speech, reading aloud, and singing. At this stage books are less useful than ear and eye, and it is an age that delights in acting. The elements of grammar must be taught here; but composition should be synthetic rather than analytic. The hand needs also to be trained, by drawing, brushwork, modelling, basket-making, netting, and other such things, all which are delightful to the learner. He must do a great deal of mental arithmetic, and learn such mathematics as he can with the aid of models: fractions for example, weights. measures, coinage.

At nine or ten I would begin French, taught phonetically. Experiments have been made by our staff as to the age for beginning French, and we find no advantage in beginning earlier: those who began at seven or eight were in about the same stage at twelve as those who began at nine or ten.

We also tried Latin at this stage, taught on the same principle: we found that both Latin and French suffered. and we therefore dropped it. At twelve

I would begin Latin; from this time on there will be at least a lesson a day given to mathematical subjects, and two or three lessons a week to natural history, until the physics and chemistry begin. Of these subjects I shall say little more, but confine my attention chiefly to the languages. English subjects, it will be seen, still have more than twenty lessons (of three-quarters of an hour) a week, singing, drawing, and handiwork being continued as far as may be. By fourteen, the boy of average ability will be at about the same stage in Latin as in French, because, being more mature and trained, he gets on faster. Here the boy who is meant for business takes German: the boy who is meant for the university takes Greek. At sixteen the former class of boy may leave; the latter is ready for the sixth form, when he drops his French as a class subject, taking German instead, but keeping up French for his use and amusement by reading it; about two-thirds of his time is now given for three years to any special subject he may take up, and the literary or mathematical and scientific work to balance it may be arranged to suit each case. By nineteen he has had what I venture to think is a liberal education, and can enter the university without calling for Mr. Benson's criticism. He will not, I venture to maintain, write school jargon instead of English, nor will he lack in the power to arrange ideas and reason justly. The clever boy, who has arrived at the last stage by fifteen or even fourteen years of age, will compete (and does compete) with success for open scholarships in his own subject. And in winning his scholarship he will not have sacrificed his intellectual quality: he will have a thorough knowledge of English, French, and German, and. better still, he will have learnt how to learn.

Such a result, however, depends not a

little on the method. As I have already said, the direct method is the only one that can give first-rate results. That method does not, as our critics so often say, consist of nursery prattle. neglecting grammar or exact know!edge; on the contrary, it teaches grammar and scholarship by use, both in speech and in writing, and attains a very high standard of accuracy at every stage; this it is in brief-that each language is taught alone and through itself, translation from it into English and from English into each language being the final stage, and not the intermediate means.

I very much dislike saying so much of our own experience; but it cannot be helped, because when I do not refer to experience, but only state principles, I am told at once that it is easy to prophesy. One critic has gone so far as to say that no one would ever adopt such methods until they had been proved to be right, which is as much as to say no one would ever go into the water until he had learnt to swim. They have, however, now been found to be right, and there is no excuse for any one who refuses to examine the proofs. My own desire is solely to improve the conditions of education in England, and it would give me great pleasure if I could avoid mentioning my own school.

Here, then, you have an alternative to Humanism without Latin. On the one hand is negation and destruction; on the other hand is construction. Many points of difficulty still remain to be cleared up; faults in plenty remain, but there is no reason why they should not be cleared away by honest and persistent endeavors. We need more brains in the work, and first-rate brains; I will not say the brains of a cabinet minister, as men used to say, but the brains of a judge. If the able men in the scholastic profession would set their minds to it, instead of shut

ting their eyes to facts or indulging in complaints, it would not be long before the intrinsic merits of the classical The Cornhill Magazine.

training should become once more as clear as they were in the days of Pitt. W. H. D. Rouse.

THE MAGIC OF THE MOUNTAINS.*

Mr. Brett James's anthology, which comprises prose as well as verse, is a curiously and pleasantly miscellaneous compilation in which the modern jostles the medieval and the classical and the ephemeral stand side by side. Old Conrad Gesner, for example, is elbowed by Mr. A. E. W. Mason; Longfellow is sandwiched between Mr. Francis Gribble and Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson; Rousseau figures in close proximity to Miss Braddon; substantial slices from the works of John Ruskin are quickly succeeded by solid blocks of the eloquence of the Rev. G. B. Cheever, that most exuberant of American divines. The volume, in short, is one which may help us, though help from other sources may also be required, to form some idea of the circumstances in which poets and other emotional writers and men of taste came to reconsider their attitude towards mountain scenery. Of old they shrank from it as from something hideous and horrible; nowadays they gush over it. That is the well-established fact, stated as briefly as it may be; but when we look for the explanation of the fact we find many theories. According to some, it was the Romantic movement in literature that ushered in the change; others represent the new point of view as a by-product of the French Revolution; a third school, anticipating the advertisements of the tourist agencies, attributes it to the increased facilities of locomotion provided at the time

"The Charm of Switzerland." An Anthology compiled by Norman G. Brett James. (Methuen. 5s. net.)

when Napoleon made the Simplon and the Faucille roads.

The association of the love of mountains with Romanticism, simple and plausible as it sounds, derives curiously little support from either the proceedings or the enthusiasm of the most conspicuous writers of the Romantic school. The Romantics strictly socalled dwelt in cities, travelled little, and certainly did not climb. The Paris pavements rang under their heels for the greater part of their lives, and they thought it a long way from Paris to Berry or Fontainebleau. The writers whom one classes as their predecessors wandered further and more frequently, but did not, with the sole exception of Rousseau, feel or profess any enthusiasm for the mountain barrier which blocked the road to Italy. Mme. de Staël, when taken to Chamonix to see the glaciers, inquired what sin she had committed to merit the punishment of such a pilgrimage, and compared the Swiss mountains to the bars of a convent excluding her from the world. Chateaubriand, whose place in the Romantic movement is even more definite than hers, apologized for mountains. They are useful, he says, as "the sources of rivers, the last asylum of liberty in an age of slavery, and a barrier against the horrors of war"; but he protests that their utility does not make them any the more agreeable to look at, and specifically insists that they are no suitable resort for philosophers. How, he demands, can you philosophize where you cannot walk without fatigue, and where the fear of

falling down the hill monopolizes your attention? And he works up to this generalization:

There is only one circumstance in which it is true that the mountains inspire a disregard for the troubles of the earth; and that is when a man retires from the world to devote himself to the religious life. An anchorite who consecrates himself to the service of humanity, or a saint who wishes to meditate in silence upon the greatness of God, may find peace and joy in the midst of the rocky wilderness. But it is not the quiet of the wilderness that passes into the soul of the cremite. On the contrary, it is the souls of the saints that exhale serenity in the midst of storms.

There may be a certain advance here upon Goldsmith's complaint that in Scotland "hills and rocks intercept every prospect"; upon Dr. Johnson's pronouncement, after his tour in the Highlands, that "this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller"; upon Bishop Berkeley's confession that, when he crossed the Cenis, he was "put out of humor by the most horrible precipices"; upon Richardson's judgment, in "Sir Charles Grandison," that at Lans-le-bourg "every object which presents itself is excessively miserable"; or upon Burnet's description of the Alps and Apennines as "undigested heaps of stone" which "have neither form nor beauty, neither shape nor order, no more than the clouds in the air." The advance, however, is not very perceptible, and other writers, untouched by Romanticism, had anticipated Chateaubriand in making it. Saussure had done so, for Ramond de Carbonnière had done so for another; and Ramond's is the name to be invoked by those who wish to associate the love of mountain scenery with the French Revolution. He was really a climber-a practical man who invented a new kind of crampon, and a mountain gymnast who

one.

accomplished several first ascents. He wandered first in the Alps and subsequently in the Pyrenees in the years immediately preceding the Revolution. His head was effervescing with the ideas out of which the Revolution sprang; and in his "Alpine Book," published about the time of the fall of the Bastille, he wrote, as has been said, "as Rousseau might have written if Rousseau had been a mountaineer," inspired by what to Johnson was only "uniformity of barrenness" to enthusiasm for new hopes and high aspirations. In a very different spirit from the ordinary eighteenth century traveller, to whom mountains were only an obstruction to be overcome on the way to smiling plains, he wished that he could build himself a hut above the snow-line and so contemplate the forces of Nature during their hours of riot:

What a spectacle it would be [he writes] when the storms of autumn descended upon the place, as though it were their own peculiar domain; when the fleet izard and the mournful crow, sole dwellers in this wilderness, had fled before them from the heights; when the light and powdery snow, falling from slope to slope, and blown from rock to rock, had swamped the whole waste beneath its capricious billows: when the mountain peaks, wrapped in impenetrable mist, had disappeared from view! What battles then! What whirlwinds! .. And what a stillness when the skies no longer thundered, and winter victorious at last had no more battles to fight; when the pale sun only appeared in the dark heavens to throw a sidelong glance upon the frozen peaks, and in the long gloom of the nights the moon seemed to draw near to pour upon them, with its beams, the piercing cold of the skies, passing sorrowfully over their wildernesses, as though over the tomb of Nature, and sympathizing with places that lay tranquil with the peace of death.

That is the modern note, as modern as anything in John Addington Sy

monds, sounded, if not for the first time, at least more emphatically and definitely than ever before, in the year 1789, in the writings of a man imbued with the ideas of 1789, and shortly about to bear a hand in the translation of those ideas into practice. Enthusiasm for the ideas and for the scenery evidently had some common mainspring; and we may take it that Ramond, like some others-like Jean-André de Luc, the first climber of the Buet, for example-thought of the mountain fastnesses as the last fortress of simplicity and primitive virtue in a corrupt and decadent world. He took refuge in the mountains much in the spirit in which Elijah took refuge in the wilderness; and, like Elijah, he heard a still, small voice there bidding him to be of a good courage, and look forward hopefully to the time when "the great ones of the earth will need the support and the suffrages of the nation in order to be sure of their greatness."

He was only able to hear that voice, however, because he was a climber, sufficiently at home in the mountains to be able to attend to their message without being distracted by that "fear of falling down the hill" by which we have seen Chateaubriand haunted; and that fact brings us to our third and last point-that enthusiastic appreciation of mountain-scenery depends, in the last resort, upon the possibility of getting to it and moving about in it without excessive danger and discomfort. In recent times good roads and good hotels have brought this possibility within the reach of all. In the eighteenth century and earlier they were only within the reach of a few hardy individuals who had sturdy legs and the spirit of adventure, and did not mind getting cold and wet. The early travellers whose sneers at the mountains we have quoted were, for the most part, soft and luxurious persons who would never have gone

near the mountains at all if the mountains had not blocked the road to Italy; but they were not the only travellers of their time; and those of their contemporaries who ventured among the mountains in a more enterprising spirit, and were not perpetually troubled about their frozen toes, admired the prospects very much as we do to-day. The real contrast, in short, is not between the points of view of the romantic and the matter-of-fact, but between the appreciations of the men who were afraid of the mountains and the men who were not afraid of them. For instance:

I have been on the Mount of Jove; on the one hand looking up to the heavens of the mountains, on the other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feeling myself so much nearer heaven that I was sure that my prayer would be heard. "Lord," I said, "restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them that they come not to this place of torment." Place of torment, indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony ground is ice alone, and you cannot set your foot safely; where, strange to say, although it is so slippery that you cannot stand, the death into which there is every facility for a fall is certain death.

That is how Master John de Bremble, of Christ Church, Canterbury, writing to his sub-Prior, describes a passage of the Great Saint Bernard in the year 1188. He crossed it, as we see, in abject terror, and consequently had no eyes for the grim and savage beauty of his surroundings. Many other early mountaineers, however, being in less peril, or being less conscious of the perils that they were in, unmistakably anticipated the admiration commonly claimed as the characteristic of a later age. There was, for example, the Seigneur de Villamont, who toiled to the top of Roche Melon in 1588. "I forgot," he tells us, "all the labor I had undergone, and felt my soul filled with joy incredible." Then there was René

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