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LABOUR, SLEEP, THOUGHT, LABOUR AGAIN, seems to me to be the right
order with those who, earning their bread by the sweat of the brow,
would yet remember that man shall not live by bread alone. Were it
possible that our mechanics could attend the institutions called by
their name in the morning instead of the evening, perhaps we should
not find them so ready to degenerate into places of mere amusement.
I am not objecting to the amusement; only to cease to educate in
order to amuse is to degenerate. Amusement is a good and sacred
thing; but it is not on a par with education; and, indeed, if it
does not in any way further the growth of the higher nature, it
cannot be called good at all.
Having exercised him in the analysis of some of the best portions of
our home literature,--I mean helped him to take them to pieces,
that, putting them together again, he might see what kind of things
they were--for who could understand a new machine, or find out what
it was meant for, without either actually or in his mind taking it
to pieces? (which pieces, however, let me remind my reader, are
utterly useless, except in their relation to the whole)--I resolved
to try something fresh with him.
At this point I had intended to give my readers a theory of mine
about the teaching and learning of a language; and tell them how I
had found the trial of it succeed in the case of Tom Weir. But I
think this would be too much of a digression from the course of my
narrative, and would, besides, be interesting to those only who had
given a good deal of thought to subjects belonging to education. I
will only say, therefore, that, by the end of three months, my
pupil, without knowing any other Latin author, was able to read any
part of the first book of the AEneid--to read it tolerably in
measure, and to enjoy the poetry of it--and this not without a
knowledge of the declensions and conjugations. As to the syntax, I
made the sentences themselves teach him that. Now I know that, as an
end, all this was of no great value; but as a beginning, it was
invaluable, for it made and KEPT him hungry for more; whereas, in
most modes of teaching, the beginnings are such that without the
pressure of circumstances, no boy, especially after an interval of
cessation, will return to them. Such is not Nature's mode, for the
beginnings with her are as pleasant as the fruition, and that
without being less thorough than they can be. The knowledge a child
gains of the external world is the foundation upon which all his
future philosophy is built. Every discovery he makes is fraught with
pleasure--that is the secret of his progress, and the essence of my
theory: that learning should, in each individual case, as in the
first case, be DISCOVERY--bringing its own pleasure with it. Nor is
this to be confounded with turning study into play. It is upon the
moon itself that the infant speculates, after the moon itself--that
he stretches out his eager hands--to find in after years that he
still wants her, but that in science and poetry he has her a
thousand-fold more than if she had been handed him down to suck.
So, after all, I have bored my reader with a shadow of my theory,
instead of a description. After all, again, the description would
have plagued him more, and that must be both his and my comfort.
So through the whole of that summer and the following winter, I went
on teaching Tom Weir. He was a lad of uncommon ability, else he
could not have effected what I say he had within his first three
months of Latin, let my theory be not only perfect in itself, but
true as well--true to human nature, I mean. And his father, though
his own book-learning was but small, had enough of insight to
perceive that his son was something out of the common, and that any
possible advantage he might lose by remaining in Marshmallows was
considerably more than counterbalanced by the instruction he got
from the vicar. Hence, I believe, it was that not a word was said
about another situation for Tom. And I was glad of it; for it seemed
to me that the lad had abilities equal to any profession whatever.
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