January 10, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



61 



every modern source, beginning with the 

 newspapers and ending with Colonel Bryan 

 and Sarah Orne Jewett. A few have made 

 some additions to the original theory. They 

 undertake to show a logical subdivision of the 

 plans on which paragraphs may be built up. 

 Beyond this there is little difference. The 

 principles of composition, no matter who ex- 

 pounds them, still bear the hall-mark of their 

 origin. They are all dilute and popular. 

 They all present vague, sweeping precepts 

 which relate to criticism, and not at all to the 

 art of writing. These are so abstract that 

 special exercises must be invented to illus- 

 trate them, and so lacking in specific help- 

 fulness that any attempt seriously to fix the 

 student's' attention upon them quickly kills 

 his desire to write. Between students who 

 find them incomprehensible and those who 

 think them obvious and silly, there is only a 

 small middle class. It consists of those 

 adapted by nature to take orders and obey 

 with mechanical faithfulness. 



Some ten years ago these words might prop- 

 erly have been regarded as destructive criti- 

 cism. At present they can not, for there i3 

 little now left to destroy. Few successful 

 teachers of composition now pay much atten- 

 tion to text-book work. Individual confer- 

 ences with students have partly replaced it. 

 These, however, are now taken for granted, 

 and we no longer write to the papers about 

 them. A newer device, and one even more 

 welcome, because it occupies class-room hours, 

 is " oral composition." Though burdened at 

 the start with the most unattractive name 

 that could have been chosen, " oral composi- 

 tion " has been an enormous success. More 

 than one high-school teacher of English has 

 seen it double the interest in his work. No 

 wonder. It gives the student, what the text- 

 book never furnished, a rational ideal and 

 an intelligible standard by which to judge 

 success. 



The principles of English composition, while 

 they lasted, were hardest on us teachers. We, 

 at least, were forced to take them seriously. 

 The burden of illustrating these mechanical 

 rules fell on us. Now a great musician, one 



imagines, may go through his five-finger exer- 

 cises, or what not, and by and by assimilate 

 his technique and perform with the regulated 

 freedom of genius. Whether it can be so 

 with a writer will perhaps never be known. 

 Certainly it can not be proved by us teachers 

 of composition, for none of us was a genius 

 to begin with. We arrive at a state of 

 mechanical perfection in technique, and there 

 we stick. I look back, in my own case, upon 

 the ruin of a promising and individual, 

 though not a solid or brilliant, style. Now-a- 

 days I write with the mechanical regularity 

 of one pumping into a bucket. I have been a 

 faithful disciple of Professor Wendell, and I 

 can now vn-ite a paragraph as " theoretically 

 perfect in mass " as anything to be found in 

 the Nation. I can write a paragraph explain- 

 ing what a paragraph should be, and at the 

 same time explaining that the paragraph I am 

 writing illustrates what a paragTaph should 

 be ; and I can bring both ideas together at the 

 end into the same summary! But suppose 

 me very angry, or very serious about my 

 subject, so much disturbed, in fact, that I was 

 beside myself, and forgot the principles of 

 English composition. Coiild I then write any 

 paragraph at all? Probably not. No more 

 than a bricklayer could lay a brick without 

 his trowel. Almost the only thing of which 

 I am any longer capable is what Professor 

 Wendell calls " a piece of style." 



There should be comfort in the fact that I 

 am not alone. Most of the brotherhood of 

 English teachers is in the same state. If a 

 man has taught composition any time these 

 twenty years, he is marked. Tou recognize 

 his method as far away as you can read his 

 work. To conclude a paragraph with a sum- 

 mary is for him as unavoidable as to expel 

 breath after inhaling. His style crawls over 

 the page like an inch-worm, constantly meas- 

 uring its heels up to its chin. I think of 

 these things, and I wish I were upon the hill 

 of Basan, to outroar the horned herd ! 



The possibility of slighting the text-book 

 work is, of course, entirely agreeable to many 

 teachers of English. They find it in keeping 

 with modern methods in education. School 



