Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/733

Rh The difficulty is not to get work to overtake, but to overtake much of the work that waits for us.

2. It may he said that studies of this kind are mere elegant trifling. Admitted that classical studies are of no practical value except for discipline: admitted that these English studies contain all the elements of discipline; the one is as useless subsequently as the other; there is no reason for substituting the one for the other. I say that English studies have at least the advantage of keeping the pupil occupied with the words and correct usages of his own language, and that this, were there nothing else, is sufficient cause for change. But I say, further, that these studies can be so directed as to cultivate clearness and force of expression. Perhaps you deny this: you hold that clearness and force are natural gifts. That clearness and force are natural gifts, and that a teacher cannot communicate brains, nobody will care to dispute; but, that the devices and appliances for giving clearness and force to what they say can be communicated to boys of natural aptitude by a skilled teacher, I hold to be beyond question. All would not learn to compose English well, any more than all learn to compose Latin well; but some would learn; and no more can be said for any system of instruction.

3. It may be said that, granting careful tuition a help to acquiring clearness and force of expression, a good style can be formed only by familiarity with the best writers. I answer that this is no objection to the scheme we have considered. We made provision for the analytical as well as the synthetical study of English, rhetorical parsing as well as rhetorical practice. What I insist upon is, that we must have principles of good and bad in expression drilled into our boys, principles to be borne in mind both in analysis and in synthesis, in reading authors as well as in our own composition. Otherwise, how are we to know what to adopt and what to reject in an author, what to imitate and what to avoid; and how shall we escape the errors of Latinists that worship the conceits of Cicero, and adore the Patavinities of Livy? I quote from Dryden a striking confirmation: "Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discern, not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him. And for want of all these requisites, or the greatest part of them, most of our ingenious young men take up some cried-up English poet for their model; adore him and imitate him, as they think, without knowing wherein he is defective, where he is boyish and trifling, wherein either his thoughts are improper to his subject, or his expressions unworthy of his thoughts, or the turn of both is inharmonious."

4. It may be said that, granting the necessity of reading admired authors critically, that is, upon principles of good and bad, there are no good authors in English, and that the pupil should go with his