Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/239

Rh to questions requiring this, that, or the other part of speech, they would acquire the distinctions between the different parts of the proposition and the different parts of speech.

They did acquire them, but it became a bore to them, and they in their heart of hearts asked themselves "Why?" and I was obliged to ask myself the same question, and could find no answer.

Never, without a struggle, will man or child give up their living speech to mechanical analyses and dissection. There is an instinct of self-protection in this living speech. If it is to develop, then it endeavors to develop spontaneously, and only in conformity with all vital conditions. As soon as you try to catch this word, to fasten it into a vise, to tear it limb from limb, to give it ornaments which seem to you necessary, how this word with its living idea and significance contracts and vanishes away, and all you have left in your hands is the mere shell on which you can work your own artifices, not harming and not helping the word which you want to form. Up till the present time the scholars of the second class continue syntactical and grammatical analysis and the practice of amplifying sentences, but it drags, and I suspect it will soon stop of itself. Moreover, as an exercise in language, though it is thoroughly ungrammatical, we do as follows:—

(1) From given words we have the pupils compare sentences. For example we write Nikolaï, wood, to learn, and one writes: "If Nikolaï had not been cutting wood, he would have come to learn;" another: "Nikolaï cuts the wood well; you must learn of him," and so on.

(2) We compose verses on a given model, and this exercise, more than all the rest, occupies the older pupils. The verses are made like the following:—

(3) An exercise which has great success in the lowest class: Some word is given—first a substantive, then an