Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young children? I have heard it said, but I cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age. An old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind, used to love to hear little nursery stories read over and over to him. One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of his life.
Whatever Lionel had said to his wife that evening she had found something to say to him: that Laura could see though not so much from any change in the simple expression of his little red face and in the vain bustle of his existence as from the grand manner in which Selina now carried herself. She was “smarter” than ever and her waist was smaller and her back straighter and the fall of her shoulders finer; her long eyes were more oddly charming and the extreme detachment of her elbows from her sides conduced still more to the exhibition of her beautiful arms.
At the moment when death so suddenly stayed his course the greatness of Henry the Fifth had reached its highest point. He had won the Church by his orthodoxy, the nobles by his warlike prowess, the whole people by his revival of the glories of Crecy and Poitiers. In France his cool policy had transformed him from a foreign conqueror into a legal heir to the crown; his title of Regent and of successor to the throne rested on the formal recognition of the estates of the realm; and his progress to the very moment of his death promised a speedy mastery of the whole country. But the glory of Agincourt and the genius of Henry the Fifth hardly veiled at the close of his reign the weakness and humiliation of the Crown when the succession passed to his infant son.
PEDAGOGICAL ASPECTS
From what has been stated, it must be clear that drills in fast time or slow time are useless and fraught with much danger of affectation. Any of us can read slowly or rapidly; that is merely a matter of mechanics. The object to be attained is the development of such power of discrimination in the child that the value of each phrase and sentence shall be carefully determined; and then the degree of extent, depth, sublimity or grandeur of the thought will determine the rate of movement. Training in Time for its own sake is valueless. From the very beginning, the teacher must use Time as a test, as a standard of criticism; and all corrections must be made with a clear perception on the part of the teacher of the psychology of Time. If a child read too rapidly, it is because his mind is not sufficiently occupied with the thought; if he read too slowly, it is because he does not get the words; or because he is temperamentally slow; or because, and this is the most likely explanation, he is making too much of a small idea.
The only excuse for drills in Time is when a pupil reads everything at about the same rate. In such a case, in the upper grades, the teacher may choose certain selections for the proper expression of which approximately fast or slow movement, as the case may be, would be required. Then let the teacher, through careful analysis and question, lead the child to understand the passages as the teacher understands them, and the proper rate of utterance will follow. This process may seem slow; but let us bear in mind that we are dealing with fundamental principles of thinking, and too much time cannot be spent in building our foundations strong and solid. Furthermore, if the rate of utterance is not the instinctive manifestation of the child’s thought measurement, it is nothing at all. To tell him to read fast or slowly is but to make him affected, and incidentally, even if unconsciously, to impress upon him that reading is a matter of mechanics and not of thought-getting and thought-giving.
In order to teach grouping, various rules have been laid down. Pupils have committed a long list of these without much practical benefit. A few of these rules are given to show the mechanical nature of such a method of teaching. “In every direct period, the principal pause comes at that part where the sense begins to form, or the expectation excited by the first member begins to be answered.” Or, “A loose sentence requires a longer pause between its first member (usually a period direct or inverted), and the additional member which does not modify it.” And, again, “Where the adjective follows the substantive or noun it modifies, and has modifiers of its own, constituting a descriptive phrase, it should be separated from its noun by a short pause.” Now, it may be quite true that these rules are valid, but is it not clear that the pedagogy which makes use of them in the earlier stages approaches the subject from the wrong side? It lays stress upon the objective rather than upon the subjective aspect.
The pause should never be taught merely as pause. If the principles herein discussed have any meaning, they must surely teach us that the pause must come spontaneously. The pedagogic point to be remembered is that the pupil must be trained to extract the thought piece by piece, and to express it. The pause will then appear without consciousness. The attempt to teach pauses as such must result in mechanical silences, during which the face of the pupil is a perfect blank, the indubitable sign of mental blankness.
It should certainly now be clear that it is wrong to draw the attention of the pupil to the pause as such, and that it is useless and often misleading to give him at the beginning rules of pausing. We must approach the printed page in the spirit with which we approach one who is speaking to us, and, having grasped the meaning, repeat the ideas. Then the pauses will come as the unconscious expression of certain definite mental action.
Perhaps there is no better way of bringing home to the reader the psychological action lying behind grouping and pausing than by calling his attention to a chapter from a brief but most attractive work by Ernest Legouvé, of the Conservatoire Française: