Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “Poor boy!” said Ole Bull, compassionately, when one sought to push a schoolboy from the steps of an omnibus, where he was getting a surreptitious ride. “Poor boy! let him stay. Who knows his trials? Perhaps he studies Latin!”

  The witty Heinrich Heine says, in bitter remembrance of his early sufferings,—”The Romans would never have conquered the world if they had had to learn their own language. They had leisure, because they were born with the knowledge of what nouns form their accusatives in im.”

  Now we are not among those who decry the Greek and Latin classics. We think it a glorious privilege to read both those grand old tongues, and that an intelligent, cultivated man who is shut out from the converse of the splendid minds of those olden times, loses a part of his birthright; and therefore it is that we mourn that but one dry, hard, technical path, one sharp, straight, narrow way, is allowed into so goodly a land of knowledge. We think there is no need that the study of Greek and Latin should be made such a horror. There is many a man without a verbal memory, who could neither recite in order the paradigms of the Greek verbs, nor repeat the lists of nouns that form their accusative in one termination or another, who, nevertheless, by the exercise of his faculties of comparison and reasoning, could learn to read the Greek and Latin classics so as to take their sense and enjoy their spirit; and that is all that they are worth caring for. We have known one young scholar, who could not by any possibility repeat the lists of exceptions to the rules in the Latin Grammar, who yet delightedly filled his private note-book with quotations from the “Æneid,” and was making extracts of literary gems from his Greek Reader, at the same time that he was every day “screwed” by his tutor upon some technical point of the language.

  Is there not many a master of English, many a writer and orator, who could not repeat from memory the list of nouns ending in y that form their plural in ies, with the exceptions under it? How many of us could do this? Would it help a good writer and fluent speaker to know the whole of Murray’s Grammar by heart, or does real knowledge of a language ever come in this way?

  At present the rich stores of ancient literature are kept like the savory stew which poor Dominie Sampson heard simmering in the witch’s kettle. One may have much appetite, but there is but one way of getting it. The Meg Merrilies of our educational system, with her harsh voice, and her “Gape, sinner, and swallow,” is the only introduction, — and so, many a one turns and runs frightened from the feast.

  This intolerant mode of teaching the classical languages is peculiar to them alone. Multitudes of girls and boys are learning to read and to speak German, French, and Italian, and to feel all the delights of expatiating in the literature of a new language, purely because of a simpler, more natural, less pedantic mode of teaching these languages.

  Intolerance in the established system of education works misery in families, because family pride decrees that every boy of. good status in society — will he, nill he — shall go through college, or he almost forfeits his position as a gentleman.

  “Not go to Cambridge!” says Scholasticus to his first-born. “Why, I went there, — and my father, and his father, and his father before him. Look at the Cambridge Catalogue and you will see the names of our family ever since the college was founded!”

  “But I can’t learn Latin and Greek,” says young Scholasticus. “I can’t remember all those rules and exceptions. I’ve tried and I can’t. If you could only know how my head feels when I try! And I won’t be at the foot of the class all the time, if I have to get my living by digging.”

  Suppose, now, the boy is pushed on at the point of the bayonet to a kind of knowledge in which he has no interest, communicated in a way that requires faculties which Nature has not given him, — what occurs?

  He goes through his course, either shamming, shirking, parrying, all the while consciously discredited and dishonoured, — or else putting forth an effort that is a draft on all his nervous energy, he makes merely a decent scholar, and loses his health for life.

  Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education, — if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, — if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon, — all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.

  “But,” say the advocates of the present system, “it is good mental discipline.”

  I doubt it. It is mere waste of time.

  When a boy has learned that in the genitive plural of the first declension of Greek nouns the final syllable is circumflexed, but to this there are the following exceptions: 1. That feminine adjectives and participles in -ος, -η, -ον are accented like the genitive masculine, but other feminine adjectives and participles are perispomena in the genitive plural; 2. That the substantives chrestes, apkue, etesiai, and chlounes in the genitive plural remain paroxytones (Kühner’s Elementary Greek Grammar, ), — I say, when a boy has learned this and twenty other things just like it, his mind has not been one whit more disciplined than if he had learned the list of the old thirteen States, the number and names of the newly-adopted ones, the times of their adoption, and the population, commerce, mineral and agricultural wealth of each. These, too, are merely exercises of memory, but they are exercises in what is of some interest and some use.

  The particulars above cited are of so little use in understanding the Greek classics that I will venture to say that there are intelligent English scholars who have never read anything but Bohn’s translations, who have more genuine knowledge of the spirit of the Greek mind, and the peculiar idioms of the language, and more enthusiasm for it, than many a poor fellow who has stumbled blindly through the originals with the bayonet of the tutor at his heels, and his eyes and ears full of the Scotch snuff of the Greek Grammar.

  What then? Shall we not learn these ancient tongues? By all means. “So many times as I learn a language, so many times I become a man,” said Charles V.; and he said rightly. Latin and Greek are foully belied by the prejudices created by this technical, pedantic mode of teaching them, which makes one ragged, prickly bundle of all the dry facts of the language, and insists upon it that the boy shall not see one glimpse of its beauty, glory, or interest, till he has swallowed and digested the whole mass. Many die in this wilderness, with their shoes worn out before reaching the Promised Land of Plato and the Tragedians.

  “But,” say our college authorities, “look at England. An English school-boy learns three times the Latin and Greek that our boys learn, and has them well drubbed in.”

  And English boys have three times more beef and pudding in their constitution than American boys have, and three times less of nerves. The difference of nature must be considered here; and the constant influence flowing from English schools and universities must be tempered by considering who we are, what sort of boys we have to deal with, what treatment they can bear, and what, are the needs of our growing American society.

  The demands of actual life, the living, visible facts of practical science, in so large and new a country as ours, require that the ideas of the ancients should be given us in the shortest and most economical way possible, and that scholastic technicalities should be reserved to those whom Nature made with especial reference to their preservation.

  On no subject is there more intolerant judgment, and more suffering from such intolerance, than on the much mooted one of the education of children.

  Treatises on education require altogether too much of parents, and impose burdens of responsibility on tender spirits which crush the life and strength out of them. Parents have been talked to as if each child came to them a soft, pulpy mass, which they were to pinch and pull and pat and stroke into shape quite at their leisure, — and a good pattern being placed there before them, they were to proceed immediately to set
up and construct a good human being in conformity therewith.

  It is strange that believers in the divine inspiration of the Bible should have entertained this idea, overlooking the constant and affecting declaration of the great Heavenly Father that He has nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against Him, together with His constant appeals,—”What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?” If even God — wiser, better, purer, more loving — admits Himself baffled in this great work, is it expedient to say to human beings that the forming power, the deciding force, of a child’s character is in their hands?

  Many a poor feeble woman’s health has been strained to breaking, and her life darkened, by the laying on her shoulders of a burden of responsibility that never ought to have been placed there; and many a mother has been hindered from using such powers as God has given her, because some preconceived mode of operation has been set up before her which she could no more make effectual than David could wear the armour of Saul.

  A gentle, loving, fragile creature marries a strong-willed, energetic man, and, by the laws of natural descent, has a boy given to her of twice her amount of will and energy. She is just as helpless, in the mere struggle of will and authority, with such a child, as she would be in a physical wrestle with a six-foot man.

  What then? Has Nature left her helpless for her duties? Not if she understands her nature, and acts in the line of it. She has no power of command, but she has power of persuasion. She can neither bend nor break the boy’s iron will, but she can melt it. She has tack to avoid the conflict in which she would be worsted. She can charm, amuse, please, and make willing; and her fine and subtile influences, weaving themselves about him day after day, become more and more powerful. Let her alone, and she will have her boy yet.

  But now some bustling mother-in-law or other privileged expounder says to her, —

  “My dear, it’s your solemn duty to break that boy’s will. I broke my boy’s will short off. Keep your whip in sight, meet him at every turn, fight him whenever he crosses you, never let him get one victory, and finally his will will be wholly subdued.”

  Such advice is mischievous, because what it proposes is as utter an impossibility to the woman’s nature as for a cow to scratch up worms for her calf, or for a hen to suckle her chickens.

  There are men and women of strong, resolute will who are gifted with the power of governing the wills of others. Such persons can govern in this way, — and their government, being in the line of their nature, acting strongly, consistently, naturally, makes everything move harmoniously. Let them be content with their own success, but let them not set up as general education-doctors, or apply their experience to all possible cases.

  Again, there are others, and among them some of the loveliest and purest natures, who have no power of command. They have sufficient tenacity of will as respects their own course, but have no compulsory power over the wills of others. Many such women have been most successful mothers, when they followed the line of their own natures, and did not undertake what they never could do.

  Influence is a slower acting force than authority. It seems weaker, but in the long run it often effects more. It always does better than mere force and authority without its gentle modifying power.

  If a mother is high-principled, religious, affectionate, if she never uses craft or deception, if she governs her temper and sets a good example, let her hold on in good hope, though she cannot produce the discipline of a man-of-war in her noisy little flock, or make all move as smoothly as some other women to whom God has given another and different talent; and let her not be discouraged, if she seem often to accomplish but little in that great work of forming human character, wherein the great Creator of the world has declared Himself at times baffled.

  Family tolerance must take great account of the stages and periods of development and growth in children.

  The passage of a human being from one stage of development to another, like the sun’s passage across the equator, frequently has its storms and tempests. The change to manhood and womanhood often involves brain, nerves, body, and soul in confusion; the child sometimes seems lost to himself and his parents, — his very nature changing. In this sensitive state come restless desires, unreasonable longings, unsettled purposes; and the fatal habit of indulgence in deadly stimulants, ruining all the life, often springs from the cravings of this transition period.

  Here must come in the patience of the saints. The restlessness must be soothed, the family hearth must be tolerant enough to keep there the boy, whom Satan will receive and cherish if his mother does not. The male element sometimes pours into a boy, like the tides in the Bay of Fundy, with tumult and tossing. He is noisy, vociferous, uproarious, and seems bent only on disturbance; he despises conventionalities, he hates parlours, he longs for the woods, the sea, the converse of rough men, and kicks at constraint of all kinds. Have patience now, let love have its perfect work, and in a year or two, if no deadly physical habits set in, a quiet, well-mannered gentleman will be evolved. Meanwhile, if he does not wipe his shoes, and if he will fling his hat upon the floor, and tear his clothes, and bang and hammer and shout, and cause general confusion in his belongings, do not despair; if you only get your son, the hat and clothes and shoes and noise and confusion do not matter. Any amount of toleration that keeps a boy contented at home is treasure well expended at this time of life.

  One thing not enough reflected on is, that in this transition period between childhood and maturity the heaviest draft and strain of school education occurs. The boy is fitting for the university, the girl going through the studies of the college senior year, and the brain-power, which is working almost to the breaking-point to perfect the physical change, has the additional labour of all the drill and discipline of school.

  The girl is growing into a tall and shapely woman, and the poor brain is put to it to find enough phosphate of lime, carbon, and other what not to build her fair edifice. The bills flow in upon her thick and fast; she pays out hand over hand: if she had only her woman to build, she might get along, but now come in demands for algebra, geometry, music, language, and the poor brain-bank stops payment; some part of the work is shabbily done, and a crooked spine or weakened lungs are the result.

  Boarding-schools, both for boys and girls, are for the most part composed of young people in this most delicate, critical portion of their physical, mental, and moral development, whose teachers are expected to put them through one straight, severe course of drill, without the slightest allowance for the great physical facts of their being. No wonder they are difficult to manage, and that so many of them drop, physically, mentally, and morally halt and maimed. It is not the teacher’s fault; he but fulfils the parent’s requisition, which dooms his child without appeal to a certain course, simply because others have gone through it.

  Finally, as my sermon is too long already, let me end with a single reflection. Every human being has some handle by which he may be lifted, some groove in which he was meant to run; and the great work of life, as far as our relations with each other are concerned, is to lift each one by his own proper handle, and run each one in his own proper groove.

  VI. DISCOURTEOUSNESS.

  “FOR my part,” said my wife, “I think one of the greatest destroyers of domestic peace is Discourtesy. People neglect, with their nearest friends, those refinements and civilities which they practise with strangers.”

  “My dear Madam, I am of another opinion,” said Bob Stephens. “The restraints of etiquette, the formalities of ceremony, are beauteous enough in out-door life; but when a man comes home, he wants leave to take off his tight boots and gloves, wear the gown and slippers, and speak his mind freely without troubling his head where it hits. Home life should be the communion of people who have learned to understand each other, who allow each other a generous latitude and freedom. One wants one place where
he may feel at liberty to be tired or dull or disagreeable without ruining his character. Home’ is the place where we should expect to live somewhat on the credit which a full knowledge of each other’s goodness and worth inspires; and it is not necessary for intimate friends to go every day through those civilities and attentions which they practise with strangers, any more than it is necessary, among literary people, to repeat the alphabet over every day before one begins to read.”

  “Yes,” said Jennie, “when a young gentleman is paying his addresses, he helps a young lady out of a carriage so tenderly, and holds back her dress so adroitly, that not a particle of mud gets on it from the wheels; but when the mutual understanding is complete, and the affection perfect, and she is his wife, he sits still and holds the horse, and lets her climb out alone. To be sure, when pretty Miss Titmouse is visiting them, he still shows himself gallant, flies from the carriage, and holds back her dress: that’s because he doesn’t love her nor she him, and they are not on the ground of mutual affection. When a gentleman is only engaged, or a friend, if you hem him a cravat, or mend his gloves, he thanks you in the blandest manner; but when you are once sure of his affection, he only says, ‘Very well; now I wish you would look over my shirts, and mend that rip in my coat, — and be sure you don’t forget it, as you did yesterday.’ For all which reasons,” said Miss Jennie, with a toss of her pretty head, “I mean to put off marrying as long as possible, because I think it far more agreeable to have gentlemen friends with whom I stand on the ground of ceremony and politeness than to be restricted to one who is living on the credit of his affection. I don’t want a man who gapes in my face, reads a newspaper all breakfast-time while I want somebody to talk to, smokes cigars all the evening, or reads to himself when I should like him to be entertaining, and considers his affection for me as his right and title to make himself generally disagreeable. If he has a bright face, and pleasant, entertaining, gallant Ways, I like to be among the ladies who may have the benefit of them, and should take care how I lost my title to it by coming with him on the ground of domestic affection.”