Delphi complete works of.., p.659
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 659
There is, I believe, one school of theologians which has pictured human fate from its earliest times as being the prey sought for by two spirits, the one of light, the other of darkness, fighting over humanity as the Greeks and Trojans fought over the body of the dead Patroclus. And if that is true in one form or another, there was never a better illustration of it than in these anxious and critical times in which we are living, in which the bygone forces that made the nations may still drag us into war, in spite of the fact that a Frenchman is not a Frenchman, that he is a man, and an Englishman is a man, and an Irishman a man and a half.
The unity of mankind has powerful allies. Science calls for it. Men of science are compelled to move together. Invention cannot be separated. And behind those forces there goes, in the good sense, athletics — all of that defies national boundaries and tries to build up for us a different kind of world.
Which is going to succeed I do not know, but I do know the duty that is laid upon every one of us to do what best he can to mould opinion, to shape destiny, to be, within our little sphere, blameless for these awful things which still might happen. It almost looks as if we could see over in Europe the handwriting on the wall that means coming disaster. Please Heaven, not. But every step that is taken by the major governments shows how close they know the crisis may perhaps be.
There are no people more sane and steady than those who govern England. With them government is not and never has been a matter of the collective votes of the majority of the people. That sounds a strange statement. That sounds contrary to the plain fact of parliamentary elections. But I repeat it. In England government has never merely represented the majority vote of the people. It has represented something hard to define without being lost in the mazes of philosophy — but a kind of collective wisdom, collective loyalty of a governing class. Those are brutal words, easy to misuse, hard to understand properly — not a tyrant class, but a class of people like Stanley Baldwin, with an infinite sense of responsibility, people to whom office and opposition are all one, and both mean service. It has been my privilege to know some of those men who in the last thirty years have governed England, and I am convinced that there is not in the heart of any one of them any other motive than that of the welfare of all mankind, of Europe and of England. When you see the steps that are being taken even by such a government as that, the fortification of what was once a self-protected island, the air that hums with danger, the sleep that may be broken at any moment, then such a situation calls aloud for sympathy.
Do not think that we can escape it here. Do not think that we can shelter ourselves behind the ocean and look upon this wreckage as destined only to blot the continent of Europe and never to matter to America. If it comes it will spread like a plague, driving across the continents with all the evil winds of disaster behind it. We are as much interested as they. ‘Hodie mihi, cras tibi,’ so wrote the mediaeval monks on the stone coffins of their dead. ‘Mine to-day, yours to-morrow.’ ‘Your fate will be mine and your salvation shall be mine.’
So we must plead unceasingly for an earnest sympathy with Europe, wiping out all the angers of the past, wiping out all the questions of whose are the honour and whose the guilt of the late war, remembering not the brutality, but only the bright pages of the heroism, the golden pages that open in either direction, pages that open as well for our so-called enemies as for ourselves.
We must remember that there are no people better situated than you in the United States and we in Canada. We can show an example of what is to be done for salvation. We do not need for our friendship a pen and ink, a contract, a document, a scrap of paper. We do not need that. We are bound by our hearts. We have long since decided that politically our ways lie separate, but the very fixity of that resolve makes it easier and better and finer for us to let our ways mingle as closely as ever they possibly can. At times the English get worried about the so-called ‘Americanization’ of Canada. They don’t realize that that is the best thing that ever happened for Canada, for the States, for the Empire, for the world at large. It gives us the aspect of one single continent, from the frozen sea to the Rio Grande, bound together as we are by friendship only, mutual agreement and co-operation, and relying only upon the path of peace.
I tell you this: If the world is to be saved, that is the path of salvation in Europe. They may take it; they may not. The sky is heavy with a lurid light threatening to break from the clouds. There is the cool fresh air blowing above. Which can conquer? We don’t know. You and I and all of us if we live a few years will know of wonderful happenings in the world, for the path has got to be made straight or the path will lead over the abyss. The problem cannot wait. It has grown too acute. The world has no time for bungling, or muddling through. That was good enough for the older civilization, but not for us now.
What I have been trying to say is that there is a responsibility, not only on them, but on us, on you in the States and on us in Canada. All the nobler assets of youth and courage and optimism are needed in the struggle. There is room for every one of us to take our part in this coming struggle over the fate of mankind.
MUTUAL ESTEEM
When I was lecturing at Victoria, B.C., I went into the hotel barber shop to get my hair cut. The barber passed his comb back and forward through my hair and said:
‘Well, sir, if I had a head of hair like yours, I’d make an awful lot of money selling hair tonic.’
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘and if I was as bald as you are, I could double my fees as a humorist.’
We parted with expressions of mutual esteem.
I told the story that night to my audience. But he’s still telling it to his.
II. RECOVERY AFTER GRADUATION. or. LOOKING BACK ON COLLEGE
I AM TO address to-night this large and enthusiastic college audience on ‘Recovery After Graduation’ and whether it is possible. Some of you, I see, looking around at your professoriate on this platform, shake your heads. You feel that recovery is not possible. But you must not misunderstand my meaning. I am not speaking of complete recovery, which, I quite agree, is out of the question, but of partial recovery. I shall try to show you to-night that, while in some ways the effects of education are irreparable, it is yet possible in later life so to correct the mistakes of college training that one can preserve one’s education as a reductio ad absurdum for old age.
In this task let me explain my qualifications. I come before you as what is called a ripe classical scholar — you know them — they get so ripe that they fall off the stem like pumpkins. I have spent all my life, over sixty years, in school and classrooms; I began at four years old and only stopped when they made me. If I am not educated, I don’t know who is. I must be, and yet I confess that when I try to gather together what is left of my education there seems little of it except wreckage. There’s a lot of it, but it hardly seems more than a set of disconnected fragments.
Take Latin. What have I left of it after an intense study of ten years? Well, mainly such things as this, that ad, ante, con, in and inter, ob, post, pro, sub and super — govern something. But what they govern I don’t recall. Then there’s another crowd — glis, lis, vas, nix, mas, mus, faux, strix — I know that they are irregular, highly irregular (They certainly look it), but I forget what their particular line of irregularity is.
Or take Geometry — what we used to call Euclid because we had to learn it just as he wrote it. I know a lot of it still, but the vital parts have dropped out. For instance, I know that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, and if the equal sides are produced — something terrific happens! But what, I can’t recall.
In short, the more I look at my education the more there seems to be about it something purposeless, something that could vanish and leave no trace, having no real meaning or inspiration.
So I turn to ask where I got it.
I began my education in England at the age of four in what was then called a Dame’s School. I can still recall the misery of standing up with a little class in front of a big map and raising my hands up and down with the others and choking down my tears as I repeated: ‘The top of the map is always north, the bottom south, the right hand east, the left hand west.’ In spite of my tears I had a bright intelligence, and it seemed to me that if the map was turned upside down this would be the other way. But in the little Dame’s School nothing was ever explained. You had to learn it just as it stood.
In the same way, when the geography class was done, we learned by heart, out of a little book called Grammar, the statement that ‘There are eight parts of speech, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection.’ It was just a mass of words. We hadn’t the least idea of what a part of speech meant.
This was my first introduction to that central problem in education, whether to teach by explanation or teach by beginning without any. All modern theories and all modern schools make much of the idea of teaching by what explains itself, by ‘proceeding from the known to the unknown,’ and from the concrete to the abstract. But there’s something in the Dame School method after all. You get there. And yet I don’t know — I realize that that top-of-the-map stuff has given me a false conception of the physical world ever since. The South Pole really seems to me to be down under somewhere. If the teacher had had a modern method and stood us on our heads — ah, then we would have grasped it.
From the Dame’s School I passed to other institutions. It was my lot in life to come out to Canada at the age of six and to settle too far away from towns or railways to admit of regular schooling. Even the nearest little red school of the township was too far away for us to walk to. So for a year or so we were taught, my brothers and I, at home. There were in those days a number of little manuals that were specially prepared to meet such cases. Affectionate mothers in exile, whose own education had lapsed, could gather their little flock round their knees and teach out of the manuals prepared by Mrs. Magnall and Mrs. Marcett and Peter Parley. These were wonderful little books all composed in question and answer. As most of the questions were what lawyers call ‘leading questions’ — suggesting their own answer — the method was what might be described as a cinch. I have written a whole essay on it, in one of my books, to which I refer you for it in detail (And see that you go to it), but I can only give you an odd sample of it here. Mrs. Magnall, for example, had a compendium of general history in which she would ask:
Did not the Rowans claim to be descended from Romulus and Remus? And the answer (written in the book as Ans) echoed back: They did.
Was not the first Roman King of whom we have any authentic account Numa Pompilius? The answer satisfied all doubt: He was.
Progress under this system was rapid beyond anything in our present colleges. An intelligent child could scoop up the whole of Assyrian history in half an hour.
Was not the Assyrian King Ashur-ban-ipal called by the Romans Sandanapalus?
Ans: He was. Think of the accuracy and the profundity of it!
There is something appealing in the naïveté of the yes-and-no system.
Did not the ancient Britons stain themselves with woad?
Ans: They did.
No court of law would admit the validity of this as evidence. Any judge would rule it out as a leading question. But the devoted mothers were not a court of law. If there was anything wrong with Mrs. Magnall’s method, they never saw it. Indeed, at times the situation was reversed and the pupil in the dialogue, having been content with Yes, Yes, Yes, for a whole series of questions, suddenly broke out with a perfect coruscation of brilliance, erupting dates, names, and facts with an effulgence that would have dazzled Macaulay.
Mrs. Magnall: What great event happened next in Greece?
Ans: The Peloponnesian War, in which Athens, together with Attica, Bœotia, Locris, Doris, Phocis, Ætolia, and Acharnania, was leagued against Sparta, Megara, Corinth, together with the Islands of Chios, Lemnos and Samos.
Was the war of long duration?
Ans: This internecine struggle lasted from 431 B.C. till 404 B.C. and witnessed a carnage second only to that of the ravages of the Persians in Cappadocia. In Corinth no less than 2,882 houses, 4 temples, and 17 stadii, or open playgrounds of the discolobi, were destroyed, in one single assault of the Bœotians.
Name some of the chief figures of the contest.
Ans: Pericles, Praxiteles, Proxenes, Lysander, Anaximander, Timocles, Themistocles.
After which Mrs. Magnall, completely knocked out, says: You answered well. That concludes the history of Greece.
It ought to.
With the question book and the Peter Parley there went another queer sort of book long out of use, called a Chronology. It was for learning dates. The one I remember was Slater’s Chronology. It started with the idea that you had to know the date of everything, and it took it for granted that no one could remember dates without artificial aid. This was before the days of telephone numbers, which have trained the human mind to think in figures. Anyone who can remember the number of a farmer’s party line on a suburban exchange, with supplementary rings to it, will have no trouble with the Norman Conquest. But Slater felt that the race needed help and he gave it. He invented a set of key sentences, easily remembered, the letters of which most ingeniously indicated the date of the event talked about. Most ingenious, as long as you remembered the key. For example, the book began with the date of the creation of the world — a point of nice importance — I wish I knew it. The secret lies somewhere in the key sentence ‘Read of Adam’s Sin and Sore Repentance.’ But for me the secret has been lost. Slater knew when the world was created; so did I, as a child. Now it is gone.
But from this kind of home teaching I passed on, at twelve years old, to a real school, a typical classical school on the English model, Upper Canada College. There, and during a course at the University of Toronto which followed, I received an old-fashioned training in the classics and humanities. I am still wondering whether the whole thing was ridiculous or marvellous. I have no prejudices in the matter and I don’t know which it was. So I can give offence to no one in speaking of it. Under that system of education we learned nothing of science — no geology or physics or biology or chemistry — nothing of all those things that give us, as far as we have it, our explanation of the world we live in — as far, that is, as up to where it vanishes in ignorance and mystery. We had nothing of all that. We had nothing of commerce, economics, and what is vaingloriously called social science. Of that I am glad. I have no doubt where those subjects belong. We had nothing of modern history, since the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria, and nothing of modern international relations. What we did have was English, Latin, and Greek — and, when we had grazed off the surface, we dug down into the roots. We learned by heart such things as the allies in the Peloponnesian War (See above, where quite a few are probably correct), the route perhaps followed by Ulysses, and perhaps not, in the Ægean Sea, or the names of the nine Muses, with assorted Gods, Goddesses, and Devils. We attached an inordinate importance to saying ‘Sophocles’ instead of ‘Sophōkels.’ We turned incomprehensible Latin into worse English and turned beautiful English poetry into Latin verse that sounded as harsh as the back-fire of a gasoline truck.
On the face of it, it all seems crazy. Yet sometimes I am haunted with the idea that the system turned out singularly cultivated men. I remember the case of an English Bishop, whom I have elsewhere quoted, as defending the classics by saying, ‘After all, Greek made me what I am.’ In his case of course it sounded ridiculous, but in my own, I am not sure.
The truth is perhaps that a classical education in attempting one thing effects another. In trying to get you imbued with the language and literature of the ancient world (both of them, as I see it now, things of no consequence except as history), it trains your mind with a hard discipline that fits it for modern life. The best way to learn business correspondence is to try to translate Latin prose. The silly instruction of a commercial school teaches business correspondence by explaining that F.O.B. means ‘free on board,’ and that letters should begin, ‘Yours of the 4th ult. in re Smith to hand and in reply would say — —’ But the F.O.B. stuff can be learned by a classical boy in an hour (literally so, all of its forty or fifty abbreviations) and the ‘reply-would-say’ stuff is just rotten English. Any boy who could write the clear, regular sentences that I and my fellows learned to write at seventeen would be a shining light in a business office.
So there it is. Education can only succeed in being practical by not trying to be so. Just as happiness never comes when called but only at back rounds when disregarded in favour of duty. And as to the ancient world and the Peloponnesian War and the wanderings of Ulysses — well, the very distance of it all, the unworldliness of it, opens as it were another door out of our daily life, leading to the magic garden of imagination. I doubt if you can open it as well with studies of the trade routes of to-day and statistics of the Panama Canal. Perhaps it is better to hear in school of tumults long since hushed in silence and of battles long ago, over which time’s hand has long since obliterated pain — better for those at school, these Peloponnesian allies in tall helmets and tossing plumes, massed into phalanxes, than the recital of the daily agony of a tortured Spain.
So perhaps the old education was best. Yet it did carry the fault that a lot of it was terribly artificial. It was all so full of learning by heart, of lists and tricks and devices as to how to remember things, that it seemed, much of it, mere mechanics. I remember that even in such mechanics I and my fellows acquired a very high ingenuity. We became experts at passing examinations, just as burglars are experts at picking locks. This of course could chiefly be done in the classics. In mathematics it was hard to ‘get by.’ Yet I remember inventing a system for the solution of equations by writing down one of the expressions concerned at the top left corner and the other at the bottom right and then filling in under one and above the other anything and everything that seemed equal to either of them. When these met in the middle the thing was done. Since all equals are equal, it was all correct. It meant, of course, that in the middle was a brilliant piece of synthesis in piecing the equality terms in the centre. This, the examiner, being himself a mathematician, would admire and envy.
