A heated discussion after dinner with Mr. R.—one of our usual ones—as to the right meaning of the English words “still” and “yet” which, like “anybody” or “somebody,” he refuses to distinguish from each other. On such occasions, he complains of the needless ambiguity and prolixity of my language; I retort by some civil remark about the deplorable poverty of his own. I should explain that I hold certificates as teacher of French and English, and am in possession of an infallible coaching method (a family secret) for backward or forward pupils; and that this is not the first time I have endeavored to instill a little knowledge of English into the head of Mr. R. who, for all his faults, is a companionable young fellow with certain brigand-strains in his ancestry that go well with those in mine (vide Peter Hinedo’s “Genealogy of the most Ancient and most Noble Family of the Brigantes, or Douglas,” London, 1754).

That astonishing French education.... What is one to do with people, future candidates for government posts, who cannot tell the difference between an adverb and a conjunction, who, if you ask them to define a reflexive verb, gaze at you with an air of injured innocence, almost as if you had asked them to say what is the capital of China, the position of their own colony of Obok, and whether Chili belongs to Germany or to Austria? They learn none of these things at school; or if they do, it is in some infant class where they are forgotten again, promptly and forever. Instead of this, they are crammed with microscopic details, under the name of “Littérature,” concerning the lives of all French writers that ever breathed the air of Heaven, and with a bewildering mass of worthless physical formulæ, enough to daze the brain of a Gauss. What Mr. R. does not know about convex lenses and declination needles and such-like balderdash is not worth knowing; his acquaintance with every aspect of Molière’s life and works is devastating in its completeness, and makes me feel positively uncomfortable. Now Molière was doubtless a fine fellow, but no youngster has any right to know so much about him. I only wish they had taught him a few elements of grammar instead.[2]

It is too late now. He laughs at grammar—a frank, derisory laugh. In other words, my task is rendered none the easier by his serene self-confidence. He does not share my view that his English is still rudimentary, though he admits that it may require “a little polish here and there.” Everything in the nature of a difficulty or exception to the rules is an idiom—not worth bothering about. He conjugates our few irregular verbs as if they were regular; go, go’ed, go’ed; find, finded, finded; and gets in a towering passion, not with me but with the language, whenever I have to set him right. Their mellow auxiliaries of “should” and “can” and all the rest of them, so useful, so reputable, so characteristic of the versatile genius of England, are treated as a perennial joke; indeed, it is a wretched idiosyncrasy of his to discover fun in the most abstruse and recondite material. (He nearly died of laughing the other day, because I told him that the Neanderthal race of man was less hairy than the Pithecanthropus erectus of Java; and failed to explain why such a bald scientific statement of fact should provoke even a smile.) Simple phrases like “Est-ce que l’enfant n’aurait pas dû acheter le chapeau?” give birth to English renderings that would send any less patient tutor into convulsions; renderings such as you might expect from the average Englishman when asked to put into French “If I had not noticed it, you would not have noticed it either (using s’en apercevoir).”

To all my suggestions that it might be well to study this or that more conscientiously, I receive the stereotyped reply “I know my vocables”; as if the possession of an English vocabulary were synonymous with the possession of English speech. It is perfectly true; he has a fair stock of words, and nobody would believe what can be done with our language until he hears it handled by a person who knows his vocables (and nothing else) after the manner of my pupil; I often tell him that he could make his fortune in England, on the music-hall stage, with that outfit alone. Nevertheless, strange to say, he was nearly always the first in his English class at school. Vainly one conjectures what may have been the attainments of the rest of them or, for that matter, of their teachers.

So he studies two hours a day with me and two hours alone, preparing for an examination in October; and that is his raison d’être in this country. He has just given me, to correct, a translation from a book full of “thèmes et versions,” all of which are too difficult for him; this one is his English rendering of a stiff piece that describes P. L. Courier’s disgust at the French Court. It is a noteworthy specimen of my pupil’s command of vocables and of nothing else; a document which I should not hesitate to set down here, in full, could I persuade anybody into the belief that it was authentic. That is out of the question. People would say I had wasted a good week of my life, trying to manufacture something comical.

Instead of this “anglais au baccalauréat” we have lately begun a course of Grimm’s Fairy Tales which are nearer to his level, and I am realizing once more what this stuff, so-called folk-lore, is worth. A desert! For downright intellectual nothingness, for misery of invention and tawdriness of thought, a round half dozen of these tales are not to be surpassed on earth. They mark the lowest ebb of literature; even the brothers Grimm, Germans though they were, must have suffered a spasm or two before allowing them to be printed. Fortunately Mr. R.’s versions of this drivel are far, far superior to the original; they beat it on its own ground of sheer inanity; and I am carefully collecting them to be made up, at some future period, into an attractive little volume for the linguistic amateur.

THE BRUNNENMACHER

The Brunnenmacher