The "Goldfish" Part 9

In point of fact I loafed delightfully for four years and let my mind run absolutely to seed, while I smoked pipe after pipe under the elms, watching the squirrels and dreaming dreams. I selected elementary--almost childlike--courses in a large variety of subjects; and as soon as I had progressed sufficiently to find them difficult I cast about for other snaps to take their places. My bookcase exhibited a collection of primers on botany, zoology and geology, the fine arts, music, elementary French and German, philosophy, ethics, methaphysics, architecture, English composition, Shakspere, the English poets and novelists, oral debating and modern history.

I took nothing that was not easy and about which I did not already know a little something. I attended the minimum number of lectures required, did the smallest amount of reading possible and, by cramming vigorously for three weeks at the end of the year, managed to pa.s.s all examinations creditably. I averaged, I suppose, outside of the lecture room, about a single hour's desultory work a day. I really need not have done that.

When, for example, it came time to take the examination in French composition I discovered that I had read but two out of the fifteen plays and novels required, the plots of any one of which I might be asked to give on my paper. Rather than read these various volumes, I prepared a skeleton digest in French, sufficiently vague, which could by slight transpositions be made to do service in every case. I committed it to memory. It ran somewhat as follows:

"The play"--or novel--"ent.i.tled ---- is generally conceded to be one of the most carefully constructed and artistically developed of all ----'s"--here insert name of author--"many masterly productions. The genius of the author has enabled him skilfully to portray the atmosphere and characters of the period. The scene is laid in ---- and the time roughly is that of the --th century. The hero is ----; the heroine, ----; and after numerous obstacles and ingenious complications they eventually marry. The character of the old ----"--here insert father, mother, uncle or grandparent, gardener or family servant--"is delightfully whimsical and humorous, and full of subtle touches. The tragic element is furnished by ----, the ----. The author touches with keen satire on the follies and vices of the time, while the interest in the princ.i.p.al love affair is sustained until the final denouement. Altogether it would be difficult to imagine a more brilliant example of dramatic--or literary--art."

I give this rather shocking example of soph.o.m.oric shiftlessness for the purpose of ill.u.s.trating my att.i.tude toward my educational opportunities and what was possible in the way of dexterously avoiding them. All I had to do was to learn the names of the chief characters in the various plays and novels prescribed. If I could acquire a brief scenario of each so much the better. Invariably they had heroes and heroines, good old servants or grandparents, and merry jesters. At the examination I successfully simulated familiarity with a book I had never read and received a commendatory mark.

This happy-go-lucky frame of mind was by no means peculiar to myself.

Indeed I believe it to have been shared by the great majority of my cla.s.smates. The result was that we were sent forth into the world without having mastered any subject whatsoever, or even followed it for a sufficient length of time to become sincerely interested in it. The only study I pursued more than one year was English composition, which came easily to me, and which in one form or another I followed throughout my course. Had I adopted the same tactics with any other of the various branches open to me, such as history, chemistry or languages, I should not be what I am to-day--a hopelessly superficial man.

Mind you, I do not mean to a.s.sert that I got nothing out of it at all.

Undoubtedly I absorbed a smattering of a variety of subjects that might on a pinch pa.s.s for education. I observed how men with greater social advantages than myself brushed their hair, wore their clothes and took off their hats to their women friends. Frankly that was about everything I took away with me. I was a victim of that liberality of opportunity which may be a heavenly gift to a post-graduate in a university, but which is intellectual d.a.m.nation to an undergraduate collegian.

The chief fault that I have to find with my own education, however, is that at no time was I encouraged to think for myself. No older man ever invited me to his study, there quietly and frankly to discuss the problems of human existence. I was left entirely vague as to what it was all about, and the relative values of things were never indicated. The same emphasis was placed on everything--whether it happened to be the Darwinian Theory, the Fall of Jerusalem or the character of Ophelia.

I had no philosophy, no theory of morals, and no one ever even attempted to explain to me what religion or the religious instinct was supposed to be. I was like a child trying to build a house and gathering materials of any substance, shape or color without regard to the character of the intended edifice. I was like a man trying to get somewhere and taking whatever paths suited his fancy--first one and then another, irrespective of where they led. The Why and the Wherefore were unknown questions to me, and I left the university without any idea as to how I came to be in the world or what my duties toward my fellowmen might be.

In a word the two chief factors in education pa.s.sed me by entirely--(a) my mind received no discipline; (b) and the fundamental propositions of natural philosophy were neither brought to my attention nor explained to me. These deficiencies have never been made up. Indeed, as to the first, my mind, instead of being developed by my going to college, was seriously injured. My memory has never been good since and my methods of reading and thinking are hurried and slipshod, but this is a small thing compared with the lack of any philosophy of life. I acquired none as a youth and I have never had any since. For fifty years I have existed without any guiding purpose except blindly to get ahead--without any religion, either natural or dogmatic. I am one of a type--a pretty good, perfectly aimless man, without any principles at all.

They tell me that things have changed at the universities since my day and that the elective system is no longer in favor. Judging by my own case, the sooner it is abolished entirely, the better for the undergraduate. I should, however, suggest one important qualification--namely, that a boy be given the choice in his Freshman year of three or four general subjects, such as philosophy, art, history, music, science, languages or literature, and that he should be compelled to follow the subjects he elects throughout his course.

In addition I believe the relation of every study to the whole realm of knowledge should be carefully explained. Art cannot be taught apart from history; history cannot be grasped independently of literature.

Religion, ethics, science and philosophy are inextricably involved one with another.

But mere learning or culture, a knowledge of facts or of arts, is unimportant as compared with a realization of the significance of life.

The one is superficial--the other is fundamental; the one is temporal--the other is spiritual. There is no more wretched human being than a highly trained but utterly purposeless man--which, after all, is only saying that there is no use in having an education without a religion; that unless someone is going to live in the house there is not much use in elaborately furnishing it.

I am not attempting to write a treatise on pedagogy; but, when all is said, I am inclined to the belief that my unfortunate present condition, whatever my material success may have been, is due to lack of education--in philosophy in its broadest sense; in mental discipline; and in actual acquirement.

It is in this last field that my deficiencies and those of my cla.s.s are superficially most apparent. A wide fund of information may be less important than a knowledge of general principles, but it is none the less valuable; and all of us ought to be equipped with the kind of education that will enable us to understand the world of men as well as the world of nature.

It is, of course, essential for us to realize that the physical characteristics of a continent may have more influence on the history of nations than mere wars or battles, however far-reaching the foreign policies of their rulers; but, in addition to an appreciation of this and similar underlying propositions governing the development of civilization, the educated man who desires to study the problems of his own time and country, to follow the progress of science and philosophy, and to enjoy music, literature and art, must have a certain elementary equipment of mere facts.

The Oriental att.i.tude of mind that enabled the Shah of Persia calmly to decline the invitation of the Prince of Wales to attend the Derby, on the ground that "he knew one horse could run faster than another," is foreign to that of Western civilization. The Battle of Waterloo is a flyspeck in importance contrasted with the problem of future existence; but the man who never heard of Napoleon would make a dull companion in this world or the next.

We live in direct proportion to the keenness of our interest in life; and the wider and broader this interest is, the richer and happier we are. A man is as big as his sympathies, as small as his selfishness. The yokel thinks only of his dinner and his snooze under the hedge, but the man of education rejoices in every new production of the human brain.

Advantageous intercourse between civilized human beings requires a working knowledge of the elementary facts of history, of the achievements in art, music and letters, as well as of the principles of science and philosophy. When people go to quarreling over the importance of a particular phase of knowledge or education they are apt to forget that, after all, it is a purely relative matter, and that no one can reasonably belittle the value of any sort of information. But furious arguments arise over the question as to how history should be taught, and "whether a boy's head should be crammed full of dates." n.o.body in his senses would want a boy's head crammed full of dates any more than he would wish his stomach stuffed with bananas; but both the head and the stomach need some nourishment--better dates than nothing.

If a knowledge of a certain historical event is of any value whatsoever, the greater and more detailed our knowledge the better--including perhaps, but not necessarily, its date. The question is not essentially whether the dates are of value, but how much emphasis should be placed on them to the exclusion of other facts of history.

"There is no use trying to remember dates," is a familiar cry. There is about as much sense in such a statement as the announcement: "There is no use trying to remember who wrote Henry Esmond, composed the Fifth Symphony, or painted the Last Supper." There is a lot of use in trying to remember anything. The people who argue to the contrary are too lazy to try.

I suppose it may be conceded, for the sake of argument, that every American, educated or not, should know the date of the Declaration of Independence, and have some sort of acquaintance with the character and deeds of Washington. If we add to this the date of the discovery of America and the first English settlement; the inauguration of the first president; the Louisiana Purchase; the Naval War with England; the War with Mexico; the Missouri Compromise, and the firing on Fort Sumter, we cannot be accused of pedantry. It certainly could not do any one of us harm to know these dates or a little about the events themselves.

This is equally true, only in a lesser degree, in regard to the history of foreign nations. Any accurate knowledge is worth while. It is harder, in the long run, to remember a date slightly wrong than with accuracy.

The dateless man, who is as vague as I am about the League of Cambray or Philip II, will loudly a.s.sert that the trouble incident to remembering a date in history is a pure waste of time. He will allege that "a general idea"--a very favorite phrase--is all that is necessary. In the case of such a person you can safely gamble that his so-called "general idea" is no idea at all. Pin him down and he will not be able to tell you within _five hundred years_ the dates of some of the cardinal events of European history--the invasion of Europe by the Huns, for instance. Was it before or after Christ? He might just as well try to tell you that it was quite enough to know that our Civil War occurred somewhere in the nineteenth century.

I have personally no hesitation in advancing the claim that there are a few elementary principles and fundamental facts in all departments of human knowledge which every person who expects to derive any advantage from intelligent society should not only once learn but should forever remember. Not to know them is practically the same thing as being without ordinary means of communication. One may not find it necessary to remember the binomial theorem or the algebraic formula for the contents of a circle, but he should at least have a formal acquaintance with Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Charlemagne, Martin Luther, Francis I, Queen Elizabeth, Louis XIV, Napoleon I--and a dozen or so others. An educated man must speak the language of educated men.

I do not think it too much to demand that in history he should have in mind, at least approximately, one important date in each century in the chronicles of France, England, Italy and Germany. That is not much, but it is a good start. And shall we say ten dates in American history? He should, in addition, have a rough working knowledge of the chief personages who lived in these centuries and were famous in war, diplomacy, art, religion and literature. His one little date will at least give him some notion of the relation the events in one country bore to those in another.

I boldly a.s.sert that in a half hour you can learn by heart all the essential dates in American history. I a.s.sume that you once knew, and perhaps still know, something about the events themselves with which they are connected. Ten minutes a day for the rest of the week and you will have them at your fingers' ends. It is no trick at all. It is as easy as learning the names of the more important parts of the mechanism of your motor. There is nothing impossible or difficult, or even tedious, about it; but it seems Herculean because you have never taken the trouble to try to remember anything. It is the same att.i.tude that renders it almost physically painful for one of us to read over the scenario of an opera or a column biography of its composer before hearing a performance at the Metropolitan. Yet fifteen minutes or half an hour invested in this way pays about five hundred per cent.

And the main thing, after you have learned anything, is not to forget it. Knowledge forgotten is no knowledge at all. That is the trouble with the elective system as usually administered in our universities. At the end of the college year the student tosses aside his Elements of Geology and forgets everything between its covers. What he has learned should be made the basis for other and more detailed knowledge. The instructor should go on building a superstructure on the foundation he has laid, and at the end of his course the aspirant for a diploma should be required to pa.s.s an examination on his entire college work. Had I been compelled to do that, I should probably be able to tell now--what I do not know--whether Melancthon was a painter, a warrior, a diplomat, a theologian or a dramatic poet.

I have instanced the study of dates because they are apt to be the storm center of discussions concerning education. It is fashionable to scoff at them in a superior manner. We all of us loathe them; yet they are as indispensable--a certain number of them--as the bones of a body. They make up the skeleton of history. They are the orderly pegs on which we can hang later acquired information. If the pegs are not there the information will fall to the ground.

For example, our entire conception of the Reformation, or of any intellectual or religious movement, might easily turn on whether it preceded or followed the discovery of printing; and our mental picture of any great battle, as well as our opinion of the strategy of the opposing armies, would depend on whether or not gunpowder had been invented at the time. Hence the importance of a knowledge of the dates of the invention of printing and of gunpowder in Europe.

It is ridiculous to allege that there is no minimum of education, to say nothing of culture, which should be required of every intelligent human being if he is to be but a journeyman in society. In an unconvincing defense of our own ignorance we loudly insist that detailed knowledge of any subject is mere pedagogy, a hindrance to clear thinking, a superfluity. We do not say so, to be sure, with respect to knowledge in general; but that is our att.i.tude in regard to any particular subject that may be brought up. Yet to deny the value of special information is tantamount to an a.s.sertion of the desirability of general ignorance. It is only the politician who can afford to say: "Wide knowledge is a fatal handicap to forcible expression."

This is not true of the older countries. In Germany, for instance, a knowledge of natural philosophy, languages and history is insisted on.

To the German schoolboy, George Washington is almost as familiar a character as Columbus; but how many American children know anything of Bismarck? The ordinary educated foreigner speaks at least two languages and usually three, is fairly well grounded in science, and is perfectly familiar with ancient and modern history. The American college graduate seems like a child beside him so far as these things are concerned.

We are content to live a hand-to-mouth mental existence on a haphazard diet of newspapers and the lightest novels. We are too lazy to take the trouble either to discipline our minds or to acquire, as adults, the elementary knowledge necessary to enable us to read intelligently even rather superficial books on important questions vitally affecting our own social, physical intellectual or moral existences.

If somebody refers to Huss or Wyclif ten to one we do not know of whom he is talking; the same thing is apt to be true about the draft of the hot-water furnace or the ball and c.o.c.k of the tank in the bathroom.

Inertia and ignorance are the handmaidens of futility. Heaven forbid that we should let anybody discover this aridity of our minds!

My wife admits privately that she has forgotten all the French she ever knew--could not even order a meal from a _carte de jour_; yet she is a never-failing source of revenue to the counts and marquises who yearly rush over to New York to replenish their bank accounts by giving parlor lectures in their native tongue on _Le XIIIme Siecle_ or Madame Lebrun.

No one would ever guess that she understands no more than one word out of twenty and that she has no idea whether Talleyrand lived in the fifteenth or the eighteenth century, or whether Calvin was a Frenchman or a Scotchman.

Our clever people are content merely with being clever. They will talk Tolstoi or Turgenieff with you, but they are quite vague about Catherine II or Peter the Great. They are up on D'Annunczio, but not on Garibaldi or Cavour. Our ladies wear a false front of culture, but they are quite bald underneath.

Being educated, however, does not consist, by any means, in knowing who fought and won certain battles or who wrote the Novum Organum. It lies rather in a knowledge of life based on the experience of mankind. Hence our study of history. But a study of history in the abstract is valueless. It must be concrete, real and living to have any significance for us. The schoolboy who learns by rote imagines the Greeks as outline figures of one dimension, clad in helmets and tunics, and brandishing little swords. That is like thinking of Jeanne d'Arc as a suit of armor or of Theodore Roosevelt as a pair of spectacles.

If the boy is to gain anything by his acquaintance with the Greeks he must know what they ate and drank, how they amused themselves, what they talked about, and what they believed as to the nature and origin of the universe and the probability of a future life. I hold that it is as important to know how the Romans told time as that Nero fiddled while his capital was burning. William the Silent was once just as much alive as P.T. Barnum, and a great deal more worth while. It is fatal to regard historical personages as lay figures and not as human beings.

We are equally vague with respect to the ordinary processes of our daily lives. I have not the remotest idea of how to make a cup of coffee or disconnect the gas or water mains in my own house. If my sliding door sticks I send for the carpenter, and if water trickles in the tank I telephone for the plumber. I am a helpless infant in the stable and my motor is the creation of a Frankenstein that has me at its mercy. My wife may recall something of cookery--which she would not admit, of course, before the butler--but my daughters have never been inside a kitchen. None of my family knows anything about housekeeping or the prices of foodstuffs or house-furnishings. My coal and wood are delivered and paid for without my inquiring as to the correctness of the bills, and I offer the same temptations to dishonest tradesmen that a drunken man does to pickpockets. Yet I complain of the high cost of living!

My family has never had the slightest training in practical affairs. If we were cast away on a fertile tropical island we should be forced to subsist on bananas and clams, and clothe ourselves with leaves,--provided the foliage was ready made and came in regulation sizes.

These things are vastly more important from an educational point of view than a knowledge of the relationship of Mary Stuart to the Duke of Guise, however interesting that may be to a reader of French history of the sixteenth century. A knowledge of the composition of gunpowder is more valuable than of Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot. If we know nothing about household economies we can hardly be expected to take an interest in the problems of the proletariat. If we are ignorant of the fundamental data of sociology and politics we can have no real opinions on questions affecting the welfare of the people.

The cla.s.sic phrase "The public be d.a.m.ned!" expresses our true feeling about the matter. We cannot become excited about the wrongs and hardships of the working cla.s.s when we do not know and do not care how they live. One of my daughters--aged seven--once essayed a short story, of which the heroine was an orphan child in direst want. It began: "Corrine was starving. 'Alas! What shall we do for food?' she asked her French nurse as they entered the carriage for their afternoon drive in the park." I have no doubt that even to-day this same young lady supposes that there are porcelain baths in every tenement house.

I myself have no explanation as to why I pay eighty dollars for a business suit any my bookkeepers seems to be equally well turned out for eighteen dollars and fifty cents. That is essentially why the people have an honest and well-founded distrust of those enthusiastic society ladies who rush into charity and frantically engage in the elevation of the ma.s.ses. The poor working girl is apt to know a good deal more about her own affairs than the Fifth Avenue matron with an annual income of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

If I were doing it all over again--and how I wish I could!--I should insist on my girls being taught not only music and languages but cooking, sewing, household economy and stenography. They should at least be able to clothe and feed themselves and their children if somebody supplied them with the materials, and to earn a living if the time came when they had to do it. They have now no conception of the relative values of even material things, what the things are made of or how they are put together. For them hats, shoes, French novels and roast chicken can be picked off the trees.