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THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

ON PRESERVING OUR BALANCE

'THE great art,' said the White Knight when he was sticking 'headdownwards' in a ditch, 'is to preserve your balance properly.' One hears much nowadays, especially in Europe, of a trait known as 'American getthere ability.' No two people define this quality alike; yet a general opinion seems to have obtained that as a nation we have a characteristic facility for seizing upon new ideas and turning them into immediate and practical use. But as a matter of fact we don't 'get there' to stay, if in our haste we lose our power of wise discrimination. In this country we are far from being 'headdownwards' on the subject of child-psychology. On the contrary, with shoulders thrown back and colors flying, we have mounted our hobbies and are off and away! Before our children draw their first breath we start closing in upon them with every kind of theory. Theories to the right of them, theories to the left of them, they are often victims, as really as were the immortal Six Hundred, to the fact that 'Some one has blundered.' In taking our children conscientiously, why must we let our idea of duty ride rough-shod over common sense?

One wishes we would pause long enough to think things out for ourselves and so instill into the situation a saner judgment and possibly some humor. For over-seriousness imposed on a child may prove a veritable boomerang. A friend of mine, meeting a little girl at Christmas time, said to her, 'What did Santa Claus bring you for Christmas?' To which the child replied, 'My father

and my mother gave me a desk built on hygienic principles.' There is an old French saying from the Roman de Renard, 'D'on fust c'on kint souvent eston battu.'-'By his own stick the prudent one is often beaten.'

We have made such undeniable progress in our methods of education that it seems all the more pity we have not stopped long enough here to differentiate between an experiment and a conclusion. Are we not in danger of forcing what is really worth while in our knowledge to such extremes that it defeats its own ends? The old saying that if you go too far east you will find yourself going west is applicable here. Often in listening to teachers of young children one gets a little worn with the superlative praise which attends their pupils' efforts, and one wonders if the pupils will always have to be surrounded by such an atmosphere to succeed in the struggle of life. The key is pitched too high; and every endeavor, good, bad, and indifferent, is attuned to it. I know a little boy who came home from kindergarten one day with something he had made, so indefinite in shape that his mother, not quite sure what she must praise, asked him what it was. He answered her from the depth of his instinctive wisdom, 'She [the teacher] talled it a dallant' ip (gallant ship] but me knows it's dus a boat.' I wish I could duplicate the scorn and disgust of his baby tone.

We all know how far the idea of Mother Goose as an unmoral book has obtained. In one modern abridged edition, 'There was an old woman who lived in a shoe' ends, 'She gave them some broth and plenty of bread, And

kissed them all fondly and sent them to bed.' Why should the modern child be brought up with the wholly unnatural situation of the heavily burdened mother who behaves exactly as if nothing unusual had occurred? Their literary taste will be ruined if pursued on these lines. 'Spanked them all soundly and sent them to bed' is the only possible, logical course for a desperateminded woman who 'didn't know what to do.'

One delightful child I know protests against the new version. 'Oh, please don't read it that way; I like the old way best.' 'Why?'

'Oh, it's so much jollier that way.' 'More jolly having broth without any bread, and getting a spanking besides?'

'Well, there were such lots and lots of them, it could n't have been a hard spanking, you know, but the kind of a one when some one chases you with a stick and even if you do get a whack on the legs you don't stop to think how much it hurts, you just run and run. It sounds so jolly, all of them together.' 'But,' I object, it says "spanked them all soundly." That sounds like real spanking.'

'I like the old way best anyway,' he affirms stoutly. 'Real spankings are very nice in the morning.'

'In the morning?' I ask mystified. 'I always like the morning after I am spanked the best of all.'

Little philosopher of life, I call him, with a nice literary instinct!

There is a reading book which takes for its theme Mother Goose characters. Old friends, dear to every normal child's heart, are dragged from between their comfortable covers and made to do duty in a reading book, as even more insufferable prigs than was the Rollo of my own early reading days. Then we knew instinctively that Rollo was a

prig, and having put him in his proper place we wrested what wild enjoyment we could from him. But it is distressing to see 'Jack and Jill,' 'Mary, Mary,' and 'Little Miss Muffet' taken from their own vignetted setting of four or five lines and stretched out painfully through as many pages of utter twaddle. It is unfair to attack our children in such a way.

In a spelling book in use now in some of our public schools there are quotations from Alice in Wonderland at the head of several of the lessons. For instance, the lesson containing the words addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, is headed with:

""I took only the regular course, said the Mock Turtle.

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"What was that?" inquired Alice. ""Reeling and writhing, of course; to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied, "and then the different branches of Arithmetic: Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."' This is followed by the words, 'Make a list of your school studies which correspond to the Mock Turtle's subjects.' I wondered, when I saw it, how much these few lines, isolated and dislocated from a classic, would add either to the clearer understanding or to the culture of the Roumanians, Slavs, Italians, and the rest, who throng our public schools.

There is a volume of poetry selected for children which also illustrates what I have in mind. The poems are well chosen and the introduction to the work is good, but the whole book is marred by the explanatory notes with which each poem is prefaced. In the notes the idea of giving the children what is best in the thought of the poem has led to ludicrous misrepresentations. In each one the moral side has been the main, and in some, the only interpretation of them. As well stand before one of Monet's subtle interpretations of water and look for the moral effect of it! It is

such distortions as this which cripple the æsthetic value of certain things in education.

Why should we blunder by over-emphasizing the moral of a thing when its real value is preeminently an æsthetic one? It is as bad as playing an exquisite piece of music with a wrong and false accent all through. It is not reading it truthfully. It is artificial.

How Thackeray would have laughed (a laugh with some resentment in it, too) to have his ballad of 'Little Billee' introduced to the readers with the following words: 'It carries a good lesson good-naturedly rendered.' I cannot for the life of me find the 'good lesson' in it. I have tried to turn and twist every part of it into a lesson, but it still evades me. The nearest I can get to it is when 'little Billee,' about to be eaten by 'gorging Jack' and 'guzzling Jimmie,' marks time by asking if he may climb to the top-gallant mast-head' and say 'the catechism which my poor mammy taught to me.' But even then his mind could not have been upon his devotions with one eye carefully peeled for land ahead.

Again take the introduction to 'Little Orphant Annie.' It tells us 'how truly a little child may be overtaxed and yet preserve a brave spirit and keen imagination'! This certainly has the advantage of being able to give Mr. James Whitcomb Riley a totally new point of view.

To 'The Noble Nature' of Ben Jonson is appended, 'Small virtue well polished is better than none.' The comment on Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner' is, 'The lesson of this masterpiece is insensibility to crime.'

Truly the American conscience has run amuck here! The rainbow-colored bubble of one's imagination has been pricked with a pen!

There seems to be among these unbalanced faddists an anxiety to inter

pret for the child. They lead him carefully along lest he miss something that would add to his more perfect development. Poor little bound-in feet that were made to fare forth joyously on their voyage of discovery! Cannot these people understand that they are insulting his common sense, that his intuitive perception will by itself lead him close to the spirit of the thing? It is the part of wisdom to lend a hand only when we find him going as far astray as a little boy of six who was reciting 'Barbara Frietchie' to me. After reciting the lines,

'Who touches a hair of yon gray head

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HOUSEKEEPING FOR MEN

THERE was a time when I believed that women had no intrinsic talent for housekeeping. Since trying a few weeks of it, I am convinced that men have absolutely none either. As a sociologist, I shall devote myself to the question how the race ever overcame the frightful technical difficulties and rose to even its present low position.

My friend Achates and myself, set unbefriended in a summer cottage, found ourselves taking three hours to prepare and dispose of our first breakfast. When the last plate had been thoughtfully put away, we sat down and computed. Three meals a day at three hours per meal was nine hours a day devoted to the mere primitive act of supporting existence. Achates had hoped to practice four hours a day; I

to write. I tried to cheer him up by pointing out that if we slept a decent eight hours a day, we should still have three full hours for pure recreation. But he refused to be comforted. He was for fleeing at once to effete and servile civilization. The urgency of the situation required an immediate application of the steeliest intelligence to this immemorial profession of womankind. We telescoped the advance of the centuries into ten minutes. Our first act was to abolish the hot lunch. Instead of building our roaring wood-fire, we regaled ourselves with sardines, cheese, sandwiches, and milk. For breakfast I constructed an unalterable and stereotyped form of bacon and eggs, triscuit, and chocolate, and to it applied the most recent principles of scientific management. Every utensil, every motion, every process, was carefully regulated. Each morning the meal was put through in the same order of twentysix moves, and I soon felt the fierce joy of efficiency in following my incomparable ritual. In the course of a week I had reduced my working-time sixty per cent, and on those mornings when Achates happened to get the wood placed right in the stove, we would attain a maximum and inclusive speed of less than an hour.

Our only remaining problem then was dinner, and in the solution of this we called in social adaptation. We could think of no better technique than to make ourselves so popular in the community that we should be constantly invited out. But there were nights when we were not popular, and then our technique was strained to the breaking-point. I felt a naïve gratitude toward cans, until Achates began talking about benzoates and things. When the butcher deigned to drop in on us, we had meat, and I got many novel cannibalistic pleasures from the lurid sizzling of chops over the fire.

If it was I who supplied the technical ingenuity, it was Achates who gave the really creative color to our work. He early came into possession of the cookbook of the Village Ladies' Social Circle, and into its mysteries we adventured far. Achates had a weakness for muffins, and one evening, having selected that recipe which appealed most to his sense of form and balance, we went to bed in a deeply solemn mood. When I came down next morning, I found Achates in the act of pouring out a golden mass into a pan. The pan was flat, and when I asked with my quick technical intuition how this mass proposed to biscuitize itself, he assured me that this was the way his mother always did it, for he had often watched her. In the process of baking, he said, each little muffin differentiated itself out from the golden mass, and stood gloriously by itself. When the pan should come on the table, he assured me, there would be a golden cluster of nicely intelligible muffins. Something told me that the dough was much more likely to flow evenly into one large muffin, but Achates said darkly that there was something mystical about it all. He could n't explain how it happened, but he just knew it did.

Far from being unsound, my prophecy had not been pessimistic enough. When we took our pan from the oven there was not even one muffin. That lovely golden mass, mixed after the most orthodox rules of the Ladies' Social Circle, had merely flowed silently in a thin sheet over the pan. The laws of gravity had done their deadly work and only a thin crust remained. The discouraged dough had not even had the energy to 'rise.' The whole mass had acted in the most unfeeling and unmuffinlike way. We ate our breakfast in depressed mood. We were now willing to ascribe to woman not only talent, but genius in housekeeping. And

not only genius, but a truly magical command over the forces of Nature, the character of which, not having the divine afflatus, we could only dimly surmise.

FADED ENTHUSIASMS

IN Mr. Scudder's biography of Lowell there is a curious reminder of the change that overcomes us all, earlier or later as the case may be, in reaching what Dr. Holmes calls the table-land of life. The biographer says of Lowell that 'upon writing of Carlyle when he himself was nearing the line of fifty, there was an undercurrent of reminiscence of his own callowness. He remembered his devotion to the Carlyle of the Miscellanies, and was more or less conscious that he had outlived his first enthusiasm.'

This passage was forcibly brought home to me the other day when I took down from its shelf an old volume of the French dramatist, Sardou, whose lightest line I loved once to the point of adoration, and was impressed less by its supreme cleverness than by its theatrical artificiality. My own marginal notes, made at the time the original players were still performing in Paris, touched me no longer. Even the masterpiece, Patrie, the only play of all Sardou taken over to the Théâtre Français by right of eminent domain, seemed to me but fairly good melodrama, its hero long-winded and tiresome and something of a poseur. I doubt if I could sit through to the end of him even in the theatre now!

Here is a change, indeed! How queerly we are all made up! Do we outgrow things thus every year or two, I wonder, and wake up to find them tedious and unprofitable? Do we live a while with

our Carlyles, only to throw them over? Is mortal man so fickle that nothing of all he has done may grow familiar, nothing bear the test of repetition? Will the utterance of genius, some day, fail to stir him? The great lines of Othello and Hamlet, for instance, grow feeble and pall?

If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have wakened
death,

And let the laboring bark climb hills of seas,
Olympus-high; and duck again as low
As hell's from heaven!

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

No! Those lines will live as long as there are tongues to speak and ears to hear them. We read them at all times and seasons, and they grow in beauty. They defy analysis, like the note of the nightingale.

The enthusiasms of the day and hour I suppose to be merely temperamental. They are signs of an active mind, and we should be grateful for them rather than otherwise, whether swiftly outgrown or not. For they are but surfaceeddies of the current, and have but the slightest relation to the depth below. Even if some of them endure to the point of permanence, they are more likely than not to hold their proper place, and do no harm. The effervescence of youth is an excellent thing, and the more of it we keep in middle age or later life, the better. Contrariwise, if, one by one, our images totter, fall, and break, no matter. We can sit in serene contemplation of their fragments. "Through plot and counterplot,' through all time and change, the Nightingale in the Study' will still sing on.

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