October 28th—Tom once said to me that reasoning is often a bad guide for us, and that loyalty to the silent Leader is true wisdom. Wesley, when he was in trouble, asked himself “whether he should fight against it by thinking, or by not thinking of it,” and a wise man told him “to be still and go on.” A certain blind instinct seems to carry me forward. What is it? an indication of a purpose I do not comprehend? an order given by the Commander-in-Chief which is to be obeyed although the strategy is not understood?
November 3rd.—Palmer, my maid, who has been with me ever since I began to keep house, was very good-looking at one-and-twenty. When she had been engaged to be married about a twelvemonth, she burned her face and the burn left a bad scar. Her lover found excuses for breaking off the engagement. He must have been a scoundrel, and I should like to have had him whipped with wire. She was very fond of him. She had an offer of marriage ten years afterwards, but she refused. I believe she feared lest the scar, seen every day, would make her husband loathe her. Her case is worse than mine, for she never knew such delights as mine. She has subsisted on mere friendliness and civility. “Oh,” it is suggested at once to me, “you are more sensitive than she is.” How dare I say that? How hateful is the assumption of superior sensitiveness as an excuse for want of endurance!
November 4th.—Ellen Charteris, my husband’s cousin, belongs to a Roman Catholic branch of the family, and is an abbess. I remember saying to her that I wondered that she and her nuns could spend such useless lives. She replied that although she and all good Catholics believe in the atonement of Christ, they also believe that works of piety in excess of what may be demanded of us, even if they are done in secret, are a set-off against the sins of the world. In this form the doctrine has not much to commend itself to me, and it is assumed that the nuns’ works are pious. But in a sense it is true. “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” The fall of a grain of dust is recorded.
November 7th—A kind of peace occasionally visits me. It is not the indifference begotten of time, for my husband and my child are nearer and dearer than ever to me. I care not to analyse it. I return to my patriarch. With Joseph before him, the father, who had refused to be comforted when he thought his son was dead, gathered up his feet into the bed and slept.
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN GEORGE LUCY M.A., AND HIS GODCHILD, HERMIONE RUSSELL, B.A.
My dear Hermione,—I have sent you my little volume of verse translations into English, and you will find appended a few attempts at Latin and Greek renderings of favourite English poems. You must tell me what you think of them, and you must not spare a single blunder or inelegance. I do not expect any reviews, and if there should be none it will not matter, for I proposed to myself nothing more than my own amusement and that of my friends. I would rather have thoroughly good criticism from you than a notice, even if it were laudatory, from a magazine or a newspaper. You have worked hard at your Latin and Greek since we read Homer and Virgil, and you have had better instruction than I had at Winchester. These trifles were published about three months ago, but I purposely did not send you a copy then. You are enjoying your holiday deep in the country, and may be inclined to pardon that incurable old idler, your godfather and former tutor, for a waste of time which perhaps you would not forgive when you are teaching in London. Verse-making is out of fashion now. Goodbye. I should like to spend a week with you wandering through those Devonshire lanes if I could carry my two rooms with me and stick them in a field.
Affectionately,
G. L.
My dear Godfather,—The little Musæ came safely. My love to you for them, and for the pretty inscription. I positively refuse to say a single syllable on your scholarship. I have deserted my Latin and Greek, and they were never good enough to justify me in criticising yours. I have latterly turned my attention to Logic, History, and Moral Philosophy, and with the help of my degree I have obtained a situation as teacher of these sciences. I confess I do not regret the change. They are certainly of supreme importance. There is something to be learned about them from Latin and Greek authors, but this can be obtained more easily from modern writers or translations than by the laborious study of the originals. Do not suppose I am no longer sensible to the charm of classical art. It is wonderful, but I have come to the conclusion that the time spent on the classics, both here and in Germany, is mostly thrown away. Take even Homer. I admit the greatness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but do tell me, my dear godfather, whether in this nineteenth century, when scores of urgent social problems are pressing for solution, our young people ought to give themselves up to a study of ancient legends? What, however, are Horace, Catullus, and Ovid compared with Homer? Much in them is pernicious, and there is hardly anything in them which helps us to live. Besides, we have surely enough in Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, to say nothing of the poets of this century, to satisfy the imagination of anybody. Boys spend years over the Metamorphoses or the story of the wars of Æneas, and enter life with no knowledge of the simplest facts of psychology. I look forward to a time not far distant, I hope, when our whole pædagogic system will be remodelled. Greek and Latin will then occupy the place which Assyrian or Egyptian hieroglyphic occupies now, and children will be directly prepared for the duties which await them.
I have in preparation a book which I expect soon to publish, entitled Positive Education. It will appear anonymously, for society being constituted as it is, I am afraid that my name on the title-page would prevent me from finding employment. My object is to show how the moral fabric can be built up without the aid of theology or metaphysics. I profess no hostility to either, but as educational instruments I believe them to be useless. I begin with Logic as the foundation of all science, and then advance by easy steps (a) to the laws of external nature commencing with number, and (b) to the rules of conduct, reasons being given for them, with History and Biography as illustrations. One modern foreign language, to be learned as thoroughly as it is possible to learn it in this country, will be included. I desire to banish all magic in school training. Everything taught shall be understood. It is easier, and in some respects more advantageous, not to explain, but the mischief of habituating children to bow to the unmeaning is so great that I would face any inconvenience in order to get rid of it. All kinds of objections, some of them of great weight, may be urged against me, but the question is on which side do they preponderate? Is it no objection to our present system that the simple laws most necessary to society should be grounded on something which is unintelligible, that we should be brought up in ignorance of any valid obligation to obey moral precepts, that we should be unable to give any account of the commonest physical phenomena, that we should never even notice them, that we should be unaware, for example, of the nightly change in the position of planets and stars, and that we should nevertheless busy ourselves with niceties of expression in a dead tongue, and with tales about Jupiter and Juno? For what glorious results may we not look when children from their earliest years learn that which is essential, but which now, alas! is picked up unmethodically and by chance? I cannot help saying all this to you, for your Musæ arrived just as my youngest brother came home from Winchester. He was delighted with it, for he is able to write very fair Latin and Greek. That boy is nearly eighteen. He does not know why the tides rise and fall, and has never heard that there has been any controversy as to the basis of ethics.
Your affectionate godchild,
Hermione.