By the Christmas Fire Part 6

"And he pulled off one by one, deliberately, the worsted sun, moon, earth, and stars, and threw them into the work basket which Mary held.

Mary sighed, but Frank did not sigh. He was proud to give his father a proof of his resolution, and when he looked around he saw tears, but they were tears of pleasure, in his mother's eyes.

"'Are you sure yet that I can keep to my good resolution?'

"'I am not quite sure, but this is a good beginning,' said his father."

The aim of all this discipline was to make Frank just like his father.

Now I am not saying anything against Frank's father. He was a truly good man, and well-to-do. Still, there have always been so many just like him that it would not have done much harm if Frank had been allowed to be a little different.

I cannot help thinking how different was a contemporary of his, Michael Faraday. Faraday had not any one to look after him in his youth, and to keep him from making unnecessary experiments. When he felt like making an experiment he did so. There was no one to tell him how it would come out, so he had to wait to see how it did come out. In this way he wasted a good deal of time that might have been spent in learning the things that every educated Englishman was expected to know, and he found out a good many things that the educated Englishman did not know,--this caused him to be always a little out of the fas.h.i.+on.

He let curiosity get the better of him, and when he was quite well on in years he would try to do things with pith-b.a.l.l.s and electric currents, just as Frank tried to do things with worsted b.a.l.l.s before his father showed him the folly of it. Some of his experiments turned out to be very useful, but most of them did not. Some of them only proved that what people thought they knew was not so. Faraday seemed to be just as much interested in this kind as in the other. He never learned to mind only his own business, but was always childishly inquisitive, so he never was so sure of things as was Frank's father.

Still, it takes all sorts of people to make up a world, and if a person cannot be like Frank's father, it is not so bad to be like Faraday.

Frank's father would have been shocked at Faraday's first introduction to the problems of metaphysical speculation. "I remember," he says, "being a great questioner when young." And one of his first questions was in regard to the seat of the soul. The question was suggested in this way. Being a small boy, and seeing the bars of an iron railing, he felt called upon to try experimentally whether he could squeeze through.

The experiment was only a partial success. He got his head through, but he could not get it back. Then the physical difficulty suggested the great metaphysical question, "On which side of the fence am I?"

Frank's father would have said that that was neither the time nor the place for such speculation, and that the proper way to study philosophy was to wait till one could sit down in a chair and read it out of a book. But to Faraday the thoughts he got out of a book never seemed to be so interesting as those which came to him while he was stuck in the fence.

When Frank learned a few lines of poetry, he asked to be allowed to say them to his father.

"'I think,' said his mother, 'your father would like you to repeat them if you understand them all, but not otherwise.'"

Of course that was the end of any nonsense in that direction. If Frank was kept away from any poetry he could not altogether understand, he would soon be grown-up, so that he would not be tempted by any kind of poetry any more than his father was.

I am sure Frank's father would have disapproved of the way my Philosopher takes his poetry. His favorite poem is "A frog he would a-wooing go,"--especially the first quatrain. His a.n.a.lysis is very defective; he takes it as a whole. He likes the mystery of it, the quick action, the hearty, inconsequent refrain:--

A frog he would a-wooing go-- Heigh ho! says Rowley-- Whether his mother would let him or no-- With a rowly-powly, gammon and spinach.

Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.

This to him is poetry. Everything is lifted above the commonplace. The frog is no cousin to the vulgar hop-toad, whose presence in the garden, in spite of his usefulness, is an affront. He is a creature of romance; he is going a-wooing,--whatever that may be;--he only knows that it is something dangerous. And what a glorious line that is,--

Whether his mother would let him or no.

It thrills him like the sound of a trumpet. And great, glorious Anthony Rowley! It needs no footnote to tell about him. It is enough to know that Rowley is a great, jovial soul, who, when the poetry is going to his liking, cries, "Heigh ho!"--and when Rowley cries, "Heigh ho!" my Philosopher cries, "Heigh ho!" too, just to keep him company. And so the poem goes on "with a rowly-powly, gammon and spinach," and n.o.body knows what it means. That's the secret.

Now I should not wish my Philosopher always to look upon "A frog he would a-wooing go" as the high-water mark of poetical genius; but I should wish him to bring to better poetry the same hearty relish he brings to this. The rule should be,--

Now good digestion wait on appet.i.te, And health on both.

When I see persons who upon the altar of education have sacrificed digestion, appet.i.te, and health, I cannot but feel that something is wrong. I am reminded of an inscription which I found on a tombstone in a Vermont churchyard:--

Here lies cut down like unripe fruit The only son of Amos Toot.

Behold the amazing alteration Brought about by inoculation: The means employed his life to save Hurled him, untimely, to the grave.

Sometimes the good housewife has chosen carefully every ingredient for her cake, and has obeyed conscientiously the mandates of the cookbook.

She has with Pharisaic scrupulosity taken four eggs and no more, and two cups of sugar, and two teaspoonfuls of sifted flour, and a pinch of baking powder, and a small teacupful of hot water. She has beaten the eggs very light and stirred in the flour only a little at a time. She has beaten the dough and added granulated sugar with discretion. She has resisted the temptation to add more flour when she has been a.s.sured that it would not be good for the cake. And then she has placed the work of her hands in a moderately hot oven, after which she awaits the consummation of her hopes. In due time she looks into the moderately hot oven, and finds only a sodden ma.s.s. Something has happened to the cake.

Such accidents happen in the best of attempts at education. The outcome is disappointing. The ingredients of the educational cake are excellent, and an immense amount of faithful work has been put into it, but sometimes it does not rise. As the old-fas.h.i.+oned housekeeper would say, it looks "sad."

It is easier to find fault with the result than to point out the remedy; but so long as such results frequently happen, the business of the home and the school is full of fascinating and disconcerting uncertainty. One thing is obvious, and that is that it is no more safe for the teacher than for the preacher to "banish Nature from his plan." Of course the reason we tried to banish Nature in the first place was not because we bore her any ill-will, but only because she was all the time interfering with our plans.

The fact is that Nature is not very considerate of our grown-up prejudices. She does not set such store by our dearly bought acquirements as we do. She is more concerned about "the process of becoming" than about the thing which we have already become. She is quite capable of taking the finished product upon which we had prided ourselves and using it as the raw material out of which to make something else. Of course this tries our temper. We do not like to see our careful finis.h.i.+ng touches treated in that way.

Especially does Nature upset our adult notions about the relations between teaching and learning. We exalt the function of teaching, and seem to imagine that it might go on automatically. We sometimes think of the teacher as a lawgiver, and of the learner as one who with docility receives what is graciously given.

But the law to be understood and obeyed is the law of the learner's mind, and not that of the teacher's. The didactic method must be subordinated to the vital. Teaching may be developed into a very neat and orderly system, but learning is apt to be quite disorderly. It is likely to come by fits and starts, and when it does come it is very exciting.

Those who have had the good fortune in mature life to learn something have described the experience as being quite upsetting. They have found out something that they had never known before, and the discovery was so overpowering that they could not pay attention to what other people were telling them.

Kepler describes his sensations when he discovered the law of planetary motion. He could not keep still. He forgot that he was a sober, middle-aged person, and acted as if he were a small boy who had just got the answer to his sum in vulgar fractions. n.o.body had helped him; he had found it out for himself; and now he could go out and play. "Let nothing confine me: I will indulge my sacred ecstasy. I will triumph over mankind.... If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I cannot help it." In fact, Kepler didn't care whether school kept or not.

Now in the first years of our existence we are in the way of making first-rate discoveries every day. No wonder that we find it so hard to keep still and to listen respectfully to people whose knowledge is merely reminiscent. Above all, it is difficult for us to keep our attention fixed on their mental processes when our minds make forty revolutions to their one.

There, for instance, is the Alphabet. Because the teacher told us about it yesterday she is grieved that we do not remember what she said. But so many surprising things have happened since then that it takes a little time for us to make sure that it's the same old Alphabet this morning that we had the other day. She is the victim of preconceived ideas on the subject, but our minds are open to conviction. Most of the letters still look unfamiliar; but when we really do learn to recognize Big A and Round O, we are disposed to indulge our sacred ecstasy and to "triumph over mankind."

If the teacher be a sour person who has long ago completed her education, she will take this occasion to chide us for not paying attention to a new letter that is just swimming into our ken. If, however, she is fortunate enough to be one who keeps on learning, she will share the triumph of our achievement, for she knows how it feels.

There is coming to be a greater sympathy between teachers and learners, as there is a clearer knowledge of the way the mind grows. But even yet one may detect a certain note of condescension in the treatment of the characteristics of early childhood. The child, we say, has eager curiosity, a myth-making imagination, a sensitiveness to momentary impressions, a desire to make things and to destroy things, a tendency to imitate what he admires. His mind goes out not in one direction, but in many directions. Then we say, in our solemn, grown-up way: "Why, that is just like Primitive Man, and how unlike Us! It has taken a long time to transform Primitive Man into Us, but if we start soon enough we may eradicate the primitive things before they have done much harm."

What we persistently fail to understand is that in these primitive things are the potentialities of all the most lasting satisfactions of later life.

Browning tells us how the boy David felt when he watched his sheep:--

Then fancies grew rife Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep Fed in silence--above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep; And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie 'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky: And I laughed,--"Since my days are ordained to be pa.s.sed with my flocks, Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks, Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show Of mankind as they live in those fas.h.i.+ons I hardly shall know."

All this is natural enough, we say, in a mere boy,--but he will outgrow it. But now and then some one does not outgrow it. He has become a man, and yet in his mind fancies are still rife. They throng upon him and crave expression. The things he sees, the people he meets, are all symbols to him, just as the one eagle which "wheeled slow as in sleep"

was to the shepherd lad the symbol of a great unknown world. That which he sees of the actual world seems still to him only a strip "'twixt the hill and the sky,"--all the rest he imagines. He fills it with vivid color and absorbing life. He peoples it with his own thoughts.

We call such a person a poet; and if he is a very good poet, we call him a genius; and, in order to do him honor, we pretend that we cannot understand him, and we employ people to explain him to us. We treat his works as alcohol is treated in the arts. It is, as they say, "denaturized," that is, something is put into it that people don't like, so that they will not drink it "on the sly!"

Yet all the time the plain fact is that the poet is simply a person who is still in possession of all his early qualities. Wordsworth gave away the secret. He is a boy who keeps on growing. He is