M. J. RBNDALL, ESQ., M.A., ON THK TEACHEli's VOCATION. 91 



Accepting a recent analysis of the ultimate end of life as 

 consisting of virtue, knowledge and beauty, let us consider the 

 teacher's attitude to knowledge and beauty. 



It is a platitude to say that he should be a student and a 

 lover of knowledge ; it is a commonplace to assert, as Dr. Mercier 

 does, that the schoolmaster knows and teaches nothing but words. 

 Perhaps we misunderstand the issue. Let us define it further. 

 What is required in a teacher is not so much a compendious store 

 of facts, well digested and neatly arranged in the treasure-house 

 of his brain, but an enthusiasm for some branches of knowledge 

 and an adequate grasp of others ; he needs the multa and the 

 multum ; and I inchne to lay more stress upon the latter. After 

 all, many facts are so much lumber in the mind, impediments 

 rather than aids to its growth. Living encyclopaBdias may be 

 indifferent educators. On the other hand, the man who is 

 possessed by a worthy and broad intellectual hobby, so that 

 each new fact falls into its due place and makes part of an organic 

 whole, is a true lover of knowledge : his enthusiasm is con- 

 tagious, and will kindle responsive fires in a younger mind. 

 In this field it is the attitude that matters : clearness of mind, 

 width of grasp, power of criticism are all desirable gifts, but, 

 to give a new application to famiHar words, greater than all these 

 is love. It will often happen that a man's most valuable work 

 is done outside the curriculum. I like the picture of that stern 

 and saintly Harrow Master, John Smith, whose humility forbade 

 him ever to take any but the lowest division in the School, 

 feeding the hungry bellies of two or three boys with the treasures 

 of Wordsworth and Tennyson, as they trotted across the fields 

 to a belated breakfast at his country cottage. That was more 

 than a generation ago ; but the moral is unchanged. The 

 teacher's vocation calls upon him to be perpetually storing his 

 mind with something which he loves, that he may have riches 

 to impart to others, that they may feel his ardour and catch its 

 flame. These hobbies will cover many centuries and many 

 countries. One man knows all there is to be known about 

 Waterloo ; another holds all the threads of the French 

 Revolution in his mind ; with another it is geology or 

 geography. I have found myself that the hobby of the Itahan 

 Renaissance, especially its pictures and buildings, makes an 

 unfailing appeal to the young. The heroic figures, the spirit of 

 youth, the sheer joy of hving, the infectious enthusiasm among 

 which men hved, above all their vivid sense of beauty, with its 



