“Little singing, dancing elf,
Singing, dancing by itself.”
Catch, if your dim orbs are sharp enough, those cloudless blue eyes looking straight into yours, and hear the laugh which only means the best of all possible jokes, “I am so happy!” Then go to your stupid desk, and calculate algebraically what amount of classics and mathematics are equivalent to that ecstasy of young existence, wherein
“Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live,
Is worth the best joy which life elsewhere can give.”
The pagan Irish believed in a paradise for the virtuous dead, and called it “Innis-na-n’Oge,” the “Island of the Young.” We all live there the first dozen years of mortality; and, unless we prove unusually excellent, I fear it may be long before we arrive at a better place.
But hitherto we have taken for granted that the little prisoners of the school-room are all sure to live and come into their fortunes of erudition, earned with so many tear-blisters on their lesson-books. Of course, however, this is far from being the true state of the case. The poor little child, whose happiness—innocent, certain, and immediate happiness—is bartered so ruthlessly for the remote and contingent benefit of his later years, may very probably never see those years at all; nay, in a fixed average number of cases, it is absolutely certain that he will not grow into a man. Can anything be much more sad than such an abortive sacrifice? Who does not remember Walter Scott’s “Pet Marjory,” with her infantine delight in her visits to the country, and the calves and the geese, and the “bubbly-jocks”; and how she wrote down in her private journal that she was learning the multiplication table, and that seven times seven was a “divlish thing,” and quite impossible to acquire; and how, when somehow at last even the still more dreadful “eight times eight” had been lodged in her poor little brains, there came a day when she cried suddenly to her mother, “Oh, my head! my head!” and then in a few brief hours there was an end of lessons and their advantages for Marjory forever?
And yet again, when some ardent lad has passed through school and college, foregoing all the sports of his age, and receiving prizes and honors, till he stands a first-class man of Oxford or Cambridge, and his father’s sacrifices and his mother’s yearnings and all his own gallant and self-denying labors seem on the point of reaping their reward, how often does it come to pass that with the close of the struggle come the reaction, the decline, the hasty journey abroad, the hoping against hope, and then—death!
Thirdly. There is the waste of Eyesight in education. It is understood, when we see a young man with the “light of the body” dimmed behind glass spectacles, that he has hurt his eyes by poring over books. A farmer, a sportsman, or a soldier, purblind at twenty-five or thirty, is a rare thing to see. It is the scholar, lawyer, or divine who has paid the penalty of seeing God’s beautiful world evermore through those abominable bits of glass. And for what mighty advantage? Again I say, it ought to be something excessively valuable for which a man will exchange the apple of his eye. Suppose Bell Taylor were to ask a blind gentleman a fee of a thousand pounds to give him his sight as he has given it to more than one born blind. The blind man, if he possessed the money, would doubtless pour it out like water to obtain the priceless boon of vision. And this is the gift which our boys exchange for a moderate acquaintance with the Greek language, to be forgotten in a few years after they leave school!
Half the vast Teutonic nation beholds the universe from behind spectacles; owing, no doubt, to their vaunted compulsory education, aided by their truculent black types. And we open-eyed Britons are exhorted, forsooth, to admire and follow in the steps of those barnacled Prussians!