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Until lately I thought that drill was unnecessary for rural bairns. It was the chief inspector of the district who converted me. He pointed out that country children are clumsy and slack. "A countryman can heave a sack of potatoes on his back," he said, "but he has no agility, no grace of movement."
I agree with him now. I find that drill makes my bairns more graceful. But I am far from being pleased with any system that I know. I don't really care tuppence whether they are physically alert or not, but I want them to be graceful, if only from an artistic point of view. The system I really want to know is Eurhythmics. I recently read an illustrated article by (or on?) Jacques Dalcroze, the inventor of the method, and the founder of the Eurhythmics School near Dresden. The system is drill combined with music. The pupils walk and dance, and I expect, sit to music. The photographs were beautiful studies in grace; the school appears to be full of Pavlovas. I think I shall try to found a Eurhythmics system on the photographs. I cannot surely invent anything more graceless than "'Shun!"
Grace is almost totally absent from rural dances. The ploughman takes off his jacket, and sweats his roaring way through "The Flowers o' Edinburgh"; but the waltz has no attraction for him. Waltzing is a necessity in a rural scheme of education ... and, incidentally, in a Mayfair scheme of education, now that the "Bunny Hug" and the "Turkey Trot" and the "Tango" have come to these isles.
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Robert Campbell left the school to-day. He had reached the age limit. He begins work tomorrow morning as a ploughman. And yesterday I wrote about introducing Eurhythmics! Robert's leaving brings me to earth with a flop. I am forced to look a grim fact in the face. Truly it is like a death; I stand by a new made grave, and I have no hope of a resurrection. Robert is dead.
Pessimism has hold of me to-night. I have tried to point the way to what I think best in life, tried to give Robert an ideal. Tomorrow he will be gathered to his fathers. He will take up the attitude of his neighbours: he will go to church, he will vote Radical or Tory, he will elect a farmer to the School Board, he will marry and live in a hovel. His master said to me recently: "Bairns are gettin' ower muckle eddication noo-a-days. What eddication does a laddie need to herd kye?"
Yes, I am as pessimistic as any Schopenhauer to-night, I cannot see the sun.
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