WHY TEACH MODERN LANGUAGES? 21 



still developing from indigenous materials, suggesting laws of evolu- 

 tion that invite study. 



Translation is a great incentive to literary activity. The history 

 of the new nations begins with translation, usually of the Bible. 

 Then someone tries to express native thought in the vernacular. 

 This importance of translation holds not only for national literatures 

 but also for individuals; as Chaucer's first work of any extent was 

 a translation of The Romance of the Rose. A good piece of work in 

 a foreign tongue incites to art performance: it supplies subject- 

 matter and suggests studies in accent, rhythm, tone-color — the 

 mechanism of verse. Prose comes later than verse; is more formless; 

 its articulations and movements are more elusive. The mastery of 

 prose is hastened by a study of great works in a foreign tongue; 

 simplicity, transparency of style elude the admiration of the pupil 

 trained only in the vernacular, but he may appreciate them in a 

 text that he has to translate. 



If a chief value of a foreign language is to produce a kind of shock 

 in the pupil, to make him suddenly aware of basic elements about 

 which he has not reasoned in his own language ; if it is by its strange- 

 ness to charge his brain with new ambitions, new potencies; if it is 

 to make a distinct change setting the gold free! — then the modern 

 language should not be introduced too soon. The last one or two 

 years of the high school is early enough. To put foreign languages 

 in the grades, to try to make German, for instance, a second mother- 

 tongue, to produce a boy who can ask in German for a piece of bread 

 and butter almost as well as a man, to whom German will be as 

 commonplace as English, may be done at the cost of other things of 

 more worth to the pupil; and this very intimacy cuts him off later 

 from a chief advantage of language-study — the reaction from a fresh 

 subject. If it is defensible to try to make German a second mother- 

 tongue to the child, it is much more defensible to do the same for 

 French — a language whose pronunciation is so difficult to acquire, a 

 language holding a more important literature, a language that as a 

 means of communication is world-wide. And where shall we end? 

 Our case is somewhat different from that of the Germans; they 



