LANGUAGE STUDY AND LANGUAGE PSYCHOLOGY 371 



lish, even, in any way worthy the name. But school systems are not 

 devised for such as these. Speaking generally, the English stylists have 

 caught their trick from their classical studies, as Calverley's matchless 

 versification has been attributed to his rigid training in classical verse- 

 making. On the other hand, the lucidity of French prose, the stylistic 

 excellence of which none but the French ever seem disposed to question, 

 is supposed to be due to the direct study of their native tongue. A 

 writer in The Athenmim, 1 put it this way: 



As our best English writers have learned how to write clear and accurate 

 English from their long training in the subtleties of Greek and Latin grammar, 

 so the French have attained their skill through the scientific teaching of their 

 native tongue. 



Certainly there can be small question that Quintilian's system of 

 teaching, which laid stress on the mother tongue, failed not to teach 

 the art of clear writing. But, given a method so thorough and detailed, 

 one can not imagine his pupils to have saved any time as compared 

 with Cicero, who attributed his attainment of style to his translations 

 from and into Greek. Still, the Greeks, like the French, learned to 

 write by studying their own language — which proves nothing against 

 the value of discipline in a foreign language, for they also got their 

 education without any substantial drill in mathematics. 



Yet, after conceding much of what is claimed for the possible suffi- 

 ciency of a modern language or the native tongue to meet the boy's need 

 of language drill, it remains an open question whether, in giving up the 

 classics, the loss in thoroughness and in interest might not exceed the 

 supposed gain in time. There are two points we must not overlook, the 

 value of the finger in the dictionary — twice emphasized by Professor 

 Hill — and the great syntactical variety of the classics. These values, 

 and particularly the first, can hardly be overestimated. In seeking to 

 realize their peculiar part in classical study, we can do no better than 

 begin with Professor Hill's own happy figure in which the Greek 

 chorus is represented as a puzzle which the student has to rearrange into 

 English. This accords with a favorite illustration of my own, which I 

 point with Lewis Carroll's familiar line : 



He set them conundrums to guess. 



In the puzzle lies a strong element of human interest. In my 

 boyhood I used to notice how some puzzle of fox and goose and corn 

 would set half a village to work to get them carried by twos across a 

 stream — so stringless is puzzleland — without one animal or the other 

 being left free to devour its natural food. A simple arithmetical catch 

 would exercise the idlers at a cross-roads store for hours. Let us insist 

 upon the human interest and the educational value of the puzzle and 

 the riddle, and if my simple illustrations drawn from modern experience 

 do not suffice to carry conviction, a pretty paper on " Riddles " in 



1 October 13, 1900, p. 473. 



