To Catholics even work in the wilderness and life in the backwoods are not dissociated from the most spiritual ideals. The pioneers of the Church, St. Benedict's monks, have gone before in the very same labour of civilization when Europe was to a great extent still in backwoods. And, when they sanctified their days in prayer and hard labour, poetry did not forsake them, and learning even took refuge with them in their solitude to wait for better times. It was religion which attracted both. Without their daily service of prayer, the Opus Dei, and the assiduous copying of books, and the desire to build worthy churches for the worship of God, arts and learning would not have followed the monks into the wilderness, but their life would have dropped to the dead level of the squatter's existence. In the same way family life, if toilsome, either at home or in a new country, may be inspired by the example of the Holy Family in Nazareth; and in lonely and hard conditions, as well as in the stress of our crowded ways of living, the influence of that ideal reaches down to the foundations and transfigures the very humblest service of the household.
These primitive services which are at the foundation of all home life are in themselves the same in all places and times. There is in them something almost sacred; they are sane, wholesome, stable, amid the weary perpetual change of artificial additions which add much to the cares but little to the joys of life. There is a long distance between the labours of Benedictine monks and the domestic work possible for school girls, but the principles fundamental to both are the same—happiness in willing work, honour to manual labour, service of God in humble offices. The work of lay-sisters in some religious houses, where they understand the happiness of their lot, links the two extremes together across the centuries. The jubilant onset of their company in some laborious work is like an anthem rising to God, bearing witness to the happiness of labour where it is part of His service. They are the envy of the choir religious, and in the precincts of such religious houses children unconsciously learn the dignity of manual labour, and feel themselves honoured by having any share in it. Such labour can be had for love, but not for money.
One word must be added before leaving the subject of the realities of life. Worn time to time a rather emphatic school lifts up its voice in the name of plain speaking and asks for something beyond reality—for realism, for anticipated instruction on the duties and especially on the dangers of grown-up life. It will be sufficient to suggest three points for consideration in this matter: (1) That these demands are not made by fathers and mothers, but appear to come from those whose interest in children is indirect and not immediately or personally responsible. This may be supposed from the fact that they find fault with what is omitted, but do not give their personal experience of how the want may be supplied. (2) Those priests who have made a special study of children do not seem to favour the view, or to urge that any change should be made in the direction of plain speaking. (3) The answer given by a great educational authority, Miss Dorothea Beale, the late Principal of Cheltenham College, may appeal to those who are struck by the theory if they do not advocate it in practice. When this difficulty was laid before her she was not in favour of departing from the usual course, or insisting on the knowledge of grown-up life before its time, and she pointed out that in case of accidents or surgical operations it was not the doctors nor the nurses actively engaged who turned faint and sick, but those who had nothing to do, and in the same way she thought that such instruction, cut off from the duties and needs of the present, was not likely to be of any real benefit, but rather to be harmful. Considering how wide was her experience of educational work this opinion carries great weight.
CHAPTER VI.
LESSONS AND PLAY.
"What think we of thy soul?
* * * *
"Born of full stature, lineal to control;
And yet a pigmy's yoke must undergo.
Yet must keep pace and tarry, patient, kind,
With its unwilling scholar, the dull, tardy mind;
Must be obsequious to the body's powers,
Whose low hands mete its paths, set ope and close its ways,
Must do obeisance to the days,
And wait the little pleasure of the hours;
Yea, ripe for kingship, yet must be
Captive in statuted minority!"
"Sister Songs," by FRANCIS THOMPSON.
Lessons and play used to be as clearly marked off one from the other as land and water on the older maps. Now we see some contour maps in which the land below so many feet and the sea within so many fathoms' depth are represented by the same marking, or left blank. In the same way the tendency in education at present is almost to obliterate the line of demarcation, at least for younger children, so that lessons become a particular form of play, "with a purpose," and play becomes a sublimated form of lessons, as the druggists used to say, "an elegant preparation" of something bitter. If the Board of Education were to name a commission composed of children, and require it to look into the system, it is doubtful whether they would give a completely satisfactory report. They would probably judge it to be too uniform in tone, poor in colour and contrast, deficient in sparkle. They like the exhilaration of bright colour, and the crispness of contrast. Of course they would judge it from the standpoint of play, not of lessons. But play which is not quite play, coming after something which has been not quite lessons, loses the tingling delight of contrast. The funereal tolling of a bell for real lessons made a dark background against which the rapture of release for real play shone out with a brilliancy which more than made up for it. At home, the system of ten minutes' lessons at short intervals seems to answer well for young children; it exerts just enough pressure to give rebound in the intervals of play. Of course this is not possible at school.
But the illusion that lessons are play cannot be indefinitely kept up, or if the illusion remains it is fraught with trouble. Duty and endurance, the power to go through drudgery, the strength of mind to persist in taking trouble, even where no interest is felt, the satisfaction of holding on to the end in doing something arduous, these things must be learned at some time during the years of education. If they are not learned then, in all probability they will never be acquired at all; examples to prove the contrary are rare. The question is how—and when. If pressed too soon with obligations of lessons, especially with prolonged attention, little anxious faces and round shoulders protest. If too long delayed the discovery comes as a shock, and the less energetic fall out at once and declare that they "can't learn"—"never could."