Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/489

Rh rules of grammar. They give some exceptions, but few in comparison to the whole number. The verb faire, to make, for example, is translated into English in more than a thousand different ways, in as many idiomatic forms of expression. Frequent intercourse with foreigners, or else assiduous reading of good writers, can alone make these expressions familiar. Besides, it is contrary to reason to oblige children to compose in a language they will never, perhaps, have occasion to write, when comparatively so little effort is made to acquire the talent in their own language where it is so useful in every moment of life.

Sources of error and ennui as are these sterile tasks, they seem calculated to mislead, rather than to form, the judgment. Like most routine processes, they appear to have been invented to give masters business in correcting errors that would have been impossible by processes conformed to reason.

Themes are condemned by all writers upon linguistic study. Rollin, timid as he was in reforms of teaching, said: "To compose well in Latin, one must know the turn, the phrases, the rules of that language, and have accumulated a considerable number of words, the force of which he feels, and of which he can make a proper application. All this can be done only in translating authors who are living dictionaries and speaking grammars; by which he learns the force and true use of words, of phrases, and of rules of syntax. To do this, themes must be absolutely discarded, as they only torment children by painful and useless labor, and give them disgust for a study which brings them only reprimands and punishments." The intimate relation between thought and style, in composition, exercises the highest reason only when the language is the direct and spontaneous expression of ideas, as it is in the mother-tongue; but, in writing a theme, the student is not occupied by the thought; his attention is only directed to the words—their orthography, their concordance, and their arrangement, conformably to the rules he has under his eyes, or that he has previously studied. However, the university makes the knowledge of a language consist in the art of writing it, the least useful part, the least interesting, and the least calculated to exercise the intelligence under the conditions in which it is done. The translation of a native author into a foreign language, which is frequently imposed upon beginners, surpasses in absurdity the method of syntactic themes. It demands of the inventive faculties that which depends solely on imitation. How, without having heard a language, or read it much, without knowing the true value of its words, without knowing what approved usage allows or condemns, and in complete ignorance of its idiomatic forms of expression—how, I say, can a pupil form correct phrases? Knowing neither the different acceptation of words, nor the shades of meaning which distinguish synonymous words, nor the constructions peculiar to the genius of the language, the student never