It is usually assumed that, the sooner we get at books, the sooner we shall become educated. I think it a pale assumption. The order might more happily be reversed. I am convinced that it was mainly by my reading of these men and women, with whom the world of my childhood was peopled and whom the gracious habit of visiting brought within my ken, that I came later to recognize and enjoy the best authors and the best literature. I had known Lear and Othello and Hamlet in my own circle, though without Shakespearean dramatization or language. I have already told you how well I knew "Rose-in-Bloom," so much better than the "Arabian Nights" could ever tell me of her. "The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling" was familiar enough to me. I had had it rolled on me by the author of "Herod and Mariamne." I was continually recognizing in books fragments of life, but glorified by the art of phrase or symbol. When I came one day upon the incomparable scene in Capulet's orchard, and those lines,—
"By yonder blessed moon I swear,
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops,"
was I, do you think, a stranger to it? Had I not in real life heard Miss Lou Brooks sing with a full heart and a quivering voice,—
"The stars shine o'er his pathway!"
It will, without doubt, be objected that my childhood was an exceptional one, even for my day; that the average child of the present would certainly have no such characters and types from which to draw knowledge. But this is, I am sure, a false premise. Humanity is a very ancient stuff, and human beings are to be found to-day quite as interesting and vivid as ever human beings were. But there lacks to the modern child the quiet opportunity for knowing and studying humanity at first-hand. In place of long and comfortable and constant visits, we have a kind of motion-picture hospitality soon over, a film on a roll soon spun out; and instead of life with its slower actions and reactions, a startling mere picture of life flashing by.
A short time ago I watched a party of married people and children receive an automobileful of guests at a country house. The guests remained something over twelve hours, which is a long visit in these days.
When they came, it was explained by them how many miles they had come that day and over what roads. An hour was now devoted to getting the dust off and to a change of clothes. After this there was much chatter among host and guests, talk of mutual friends, and much detail as to journeying; what roads had been found good, what ones uncomfortable for speeding, with a comparing of road-maps among the men. Then there was luncheon; after that, siestas; after these, a spin to the polo grounds in the host's "auto"; after this, tea on the country-club veranda, and another spin home. Another half-hour was now again given to the removal of dust, then an hour to an exceptionally well-served supper; more chatter, with rather high laughter; then the summoning of the original "auto"; good-byes, some waving of hands, a little preliminary chugging of the machine; then a speeding away, a vanished thing. Gone in a flash! A clean sheet once more! The moving-picture visit was over; the host and hostess returned to the chairs on their own veranda; the handsome, long-legged bronzed children looked bored; and the lares and penates inside, if there were any, shivered, I am sure, with what "freezings" in the midst of "old December's bareness everywhere."
"And yet this time removed was summer's time." There were in that flashing speeding automobile six people: there was an old gentleman (very trig and alert) who had hunted tigers in India and had buried three wives; there was a woman who was one of the most proud and vain women in the world, as well as one of the most beautiful; there was a man who had carried through a great panic in Wall Street, and who wore an invisible halo of prayers of widows and orphans; there was a middle-aged woman with a broken heart, whose lover had been buried at sea; there was a fresh-looking young girl chained to the rock of modern conventions, and a square-jawed handsome young Perseus, who was in love with her and determined to rescue her and carry her away to dwell with poverty and himself on a claim in eastern Idaho.
Flash, flash! They are moving pictures, they are gone! What might they not have been, what might they not have contributed, very especially to the host's children, in the way of lessons and knowledge and education, had they remained long enough to be guests! What? Education? But the children all go to school, and to the best to be had; and the little one there is just starting in under the Montessori method. You should see how amazingly, from fifty-seven varieties, she can select and grade the different shades and colors.
Madame Montessori recommends that children be under the care of a "directress" (note the name) in the "Houses of Childhood," each day, the day to begin at eight and to last until six, in a schoolroom where the Montessori "method" is practised by means, mainly, of the "didactic material"! The thing revolts me. I do not say, "What time for arithmetic and geography, and the sterner realities of schooling?" No, nor do I complain as does Sir Walter Scott when he touches on Waverley's education, you remember, that "the history of England is now reduced to a game at cards." I say to myself more solemnly, "But what time is left for life? What time for guests?"