THE REVIVAL OF OLLENDORFF.
From the memories of my mid-Victorian childhood, before the instruction of a governess had reached a point at which the plunge was made into a preparatory school, three names emerge with remarkable distinctness. "Little Arthur," from whom I derived my earliest knowledge of the History of England; "Henry," by whom I was grounded in the rudiments of the dead Latin tongue (but who must be carefully distinguished from James Henry, the Virgilian, who in turn had nothing whatever to do with Henry James the novelist), and Ollendorff, the illustrious author of a series of manuals for the teaching of living foreign languages.
Ollendorff, I fear, is not even the shadow of a name to the present generation. There is no mention of him in The Encyclopædia Britannica or in Chambers. Even in his own country he seems to have lapsed into obscurity, and in Mendel’s voluminous Conversations-Lexikon there is only a brief reference to the Ollendorffian method, but no account of the man or his history.
Yet he must have existed; Ollendorff cannot have been a mere symbol. And as students of Shakspeare have endeavoured to reconstruct the man from his plays so I feel sure that the character of Ollendorff, his interests and politics, might very well be reconstructed from a study of his dialogues. One must admit that his Teutonic patronymic is an obstacle to his revival, but that difficulty can be surmounted by the adoption of an alias. For example, by the omission of one of the "f’s" and the transposition of one other letter his name, read backwards, becomes Frondello, which is at once euphonious and void of all racial offence.
The Ollendorffian method, it may be noted for the benefit of the ignorant, did not merely depend on the employment of question and answer; it aimed at conveying information drawn from the homely affairs of daily life and the relations between persons belonging to different trades and occupations. "Have you," Ollendorff would ask, "the hat of the gardener’s son?" And when this had been duly and correctly translated into German or French the pupil proceeded to the answer, "No, but I have the boots of the grocer’s brother-in-law."
I think Ollendorff built better than he knew; or perhaps he did know. A strong vein of Socialism runs through all his examples, which seem to show a lively appreciation of the Communistic principle. To him there was nothing wrong or dangerous in this mutual interchange and enjoyment of property. He drew no hard-and-fast lines between meum and tuum. We cannot help thinking that, at a time when so much depends on the fusion of classes, a new edition of these immortal dialogues, brought up to date so as to meet the exigencies of the new poor, the new rich, the old aristocracy and the new plutocracy, would be fraught with the most salutary results.
The following are some crude suggestions of the lines on which the revision might be carried out:—
"Have you the leathern waistcoat of the taxi-driver?—""No, but I have the reach-me-down trousers of an inferior quality to those worn by the village postman."
"Have you the smooth-running automobile of the prosperous grocer?"—"No, but I have the loan of the push-bicycle of my former under-gardener’s uncle."
"Are you going to marry the beautiful daughter of the shoemaker?"—"Yes, and her brother has just become engaged to the widow of my cousin the marquis."