Diderot and the Encyclopaedists Volume II Part 17

_He._--Uncommonly clever; oh no! For my trade, I know it decently, and that is more than one wants; for in this country is one obliged to know all that one shows?

_I._--No more than to know all that one teaches.

_He._--That is true, most thoroughly true. Now, sir philosopher, your hand on your conscience, speak the truth; there was a time when you were not a man of such substance as you are to-day.

_I._--I am not so very substantial even now.

_He._--But you would not go now to the Luxembourg in summer-time.... You remember?

_I._--No more of that. Yes, I do remember.

_He._--In an overcoat of gray s.h.a.g?

_I._--Ay, ay.

_He._--Terribly worn at one side, with one of the sleeves torn; and black woollen stockings mended at the back with white thread.

_I._--Yes, anything you like.

_He._--What were you doing in the alley of Sighs?

_I._--Cutting a shabby figure enough, I daresay.

_He._--You used to give lessons in mathematics?

_I._--Without knowing a word about them. Is not that what you want to come to?

_He._--Exactly so.

_I._--I learnt by teaching others, and I turned out some good pupils.

_He_--That may be; but music is not like algebra or geometry. Now that you are a substantial personage....

_I._--Not so substantial, I tell you.

_He._--And have a good lining to your purse....

_I._--Not so good.

_He._--Let your daughter have masters.

_I._--Not yet; it is her mother who looks to her education, for one must have peace in one's house.

_He._--Peace in one's house? You have only that, when you are either master or servant, and it should be master. I had a wife--may heaven bless her soul--but when it happened sometimes that she played malapert, I used to mount the high horse, and bring out my thunder. I used to say like the Creator: Let there be light, and there was light. So for four years we had not ten times in all one word higher than another. How old is your child?

_I._--That has nothing to do with the matter.

_He._--How old is your child, I say?

_I._--The devil take you, leave my child and her age alone, and return to the master she is to have.

_He._--I know nothing so pig-headed as a philosopher. In all humility and supplication, might one not know from his highness the philosopher, about what age her ladyship, his daughter, may be?

_I._--I suppose she is eight.

_He._--Eight! Then four years ago she ought to have had her fingers on the keys.

_I._--But perhaps I have no fancy for including in the scheme of her education a study that takes so much time and is good for so little.

_He._--And what will you teach her, if you please?

_I._--To reason justly, if I can; a thing so uncommon among men, and more uncommon still among women.

_He._--Oh, let her reason as ill as she chooses, if she is only pretty, amusing, and coquettish.

_I._--As nature has been unkind enough to give her a delicate organisation with a very sensitive soul, and to expose her to the same troubles in life as if she had a strong organisation and a heart of bronze, I will teach her, if I can, to bear them courageously.

_He._--Let her weep and give herself airs, and have nerves all on edge like the rest, if only she is pretty, amusing, and coquettish.

What, is she to learn no dancing nor deportment?

_I._--Yes, just enough to make a curtsey, to have a good carriage, to enter a room gracefully, and to know how to walk.

_He._--No singing?

_I._--Just enough to p.r.o.nounce her words well.

_He._--No music?

_I._--If there were a good teacher of harmony, I would gladly entrust her to him two hours a day for two or three years, not any more.

_He._--And instead of the essential things that you are going to suppress?...

_I._--I place grammar, fables, history, geography, a little drawing, and a great deal of morality.

_He._--How easy it would be for me to prove to you the uselessness of all such knowledge in a world like ours? Uselessness, do I say?

Perhaps even the danger! But I will for the moment ask you a single question, will she not require one or two masters?

_I._--No doubt.

_He._--And you hope that these masters will know the grammar, the fables, the history, the geography, the morality, in which they will give her lessons? Moonshine, my dear mentor, sheer moonshine!

If they knew these things well enough to teach them to other people, they never would teach them?

_I._--And why?

_He._--Because they would have spent all their lives in studying them. It is necessary to be profound in art and science, to know its elements thoroughly. Cla.s.sical books can only be well done by those who have grown gray in harness; it is the middle and the end which light up the darkness of the beginning. Ask your friend D'Alembert, the coryphaeus of mathematics, if he thinks himself too good to write about the elements. It was not till after thirty or forty years of practice that my uncle got a glimpse of the profundities and the first rays of light in musical theory.

_I._--O madman, arch-madman, I cried, how comes it that in thine evil head such just ideas go pell-mell with such a ma.s.s of extravagances?

_He._--Who on earth can find that out? 'Tis chance that flings them to you, and they remain. If you do not know the whole of a thing, you know none of it well; you do not know whither one thing leads, nor whence another has come, where this and that should be placed, which ought to pa.s.s the first, and where the second would be best.