timately the hearth-stone and market-place habit of thought and expression of a people. They pervade, too, like an undertone the current of the best literary style and defy the efforts of the interpreter, whose chief reliance is upon grammar and dictionary. By continuous use of the spoken word from the outset the student acquires slowly but surely an instinctive feeling for a multitude of nice distinctions that elude all attempts at formal definition, and give him that sense of at-home-ness in the language which is indispensable for intelligent appreciation and criticism. To neglect this surest means of reaching the desired goal, in favor of so-called "rapid translation," is to condemn the pupil to perpetual ignorance of the inmost spirit of the language. To expect from students so trained a fine feeling for the niceties of syntax and style is to exhibit singular credulity as to cause and effect.

The college and the university aim to prepare teachers of modern languages for their work. We must recognize, to an extent greater than ever before, in the modern-language preparation of the average candidate for entrance to college a reflection through his teacher of our own ideals and practice in college and university. Our frequent complaint against the lifeless, ineffective teaching of language in secondary schools is too often a boomerang that smites the man who hurls it. For how shall the comparative stranger to the spirit of a language inspire others with that spirit? Are even well-chosen facts of linguistic and literary history an acceptable substitute in the teacher for that intimate knowledge of the use of language which alone lends such facts their true significance? The absurdity of an affirmative reply to these questions is manifest.

The investigator is not less important than the teacher. Those students who choose modern languages as a field

for the research of a lifetime look rightly to the university for such training as will contribute most surely to their success. Numberless problems of interpretation, syntax, and style can be profitably undertaken only by those whose reading has been stimulated and guided by an instinctive feeling for linguistic form, obtainable solely through contact with the spoken word.

Without mentioning in detail the other classes of learners whose work is seriously impaired by neglect of this element of instruction, we pass to a brief mention of the kindred neglect of real prose composition. Excessive devotion to reading and translation is a common occasion of both defects. We follow slavishly the dictum ascribed to Horace Greeley: "The only way to learn to read is to read." This truth is but a half-truth. It is certainly true that reading maketh a full man; but mere fulness is a doubtful virtue. Eating beyond the power of digestion is sheer gluttony. Now, eating is to digestion what composition is to reading in the economy of language learning. For a progressive course in prose composition means constant discipline in actively examining and estimating the elements of the language successively passed in review, and in their practical use as an expression of the learner's own thought. It is vastly important as the chief means of giving the pupil that active grasp of the new vocabulary that transforms seeing "through a glass darkly" into "face to face" vision. This is true of real composition in the language to be learned, not of mere translation from the student's vernacular into that language. While the latter may be necessary at first, it can shortly be supplanted with great advantage by variant reproduction of material read or listened to by the student, within clearly indicated lines of inflection, syntax, and style. For translation, when fairly adequate, implies an almost equal command

of the two languages involved. This is, of course, beyond the present reach of the learner, and his very familiarity with the forms of his mother-tongue contrasts to his mental distress with his comparative ignorance of the foreign syntax. Whatever progress he may make in the latter by industrious "upsetting" of the vernacular is quite insufficient entirely to remove this distress. He is constantly hampered by the fetters of the familiar speechforms. Nothing else can take the place of extended elementary, intermediate, and advanced theme-writing in the language to be acquired.

Another defect is the untimeliness of some of our work. Our ambition to acquaint our pupils with a wide range of literary development is the occasion of much premature discussion of literary facts, in place of reading and interpreting literary monuments. We repeat the common mistake of those who but yesterday taught literature by means of a convenient manual, illustrated by a minimum of reading from an equally convenient anthology. Our brave array of names, dates, and rival schools becomes sometimes the trees that hide the woods. The young sailor has little use for a chart of all the seas, before he has learned to row a boat or rig a sail. Good manuals and seasonable discussions are excellent, when used to broaden and clarify the knowledge gained by first-hand study of literature. When substituted for such study they defeat their own purpose.

What seems to me a false application of the Sauere Wochen, Frohe Feste principle often introduces the student to a nominal study of literature rendered comparatively fruitless by unfamiliarity with the language in which it is expressed. All attempts to enjoy the classics of any people undertaken during the period of linguistic grouping are doubly disadvantageous to the student.

First, they discourage him, by impressing him with the magnitude of the task and the apparent worthlessness of the results; and secondly, they consume much time, which employment in wisely directed study of the language would equip the learner for real appreciation and enjoyment of the literature, for which he now acquires a positive distaste.

Acquaintance with and appreciation of good literature are one thing; knowledge of genetical, chronological, biographical, and other critical details is quite another. All students of modern languages need the former as an important element of a liberal education. This is a corollary of the fact that literature is one of the most significant expressions of the mind of civilized man in all ages and in all lands. But literature should not be confused with the history of literature. Discriminating love of the form, color, and odor of flowers is quite independent of systematic botany, even though study of the latter may sometimes quicken the former. Each is good and desirable in its own way. The same is true of literary appreciation, on the one hand, and the facts of literary history, on the other. Our educational blunder at this point consists in neglecting the one or the other through carelessly regarding them as interchangeable.

Similar to this is the common mistake of neglecting to instruct students in language through misplaced zeal in imparting to them the facts of language history. Morphological history is as distinct from organic function in the field of language as in that of zoology or botany. Some teachers seem to labor under the honest delusion that the form and spirit of a language can be most effectively acquired by strict attention to the salient features of its historical development. Evidence of this are those dictionaries and grammars intended for the use of beginners,

which devote much space and attention to etymologies and genetical discussions of modern forms. When duly subordinated to direct oral and written drill, historical instruction of this sort may with some pupils facilitate the acquisition of a foreign tongue, or of an older dialect of the vernacular. When not thus subordinated, however, it prevents the acquisition of either the language or its history. Other teachers frankly disregard the student's ignorance of the language as a vehicle of thought, and resolutely attempt to ingraft upon this ignorance such scientific knowledge of language and literary history as seems to them alone consistent with the supposed dignity of college and university instruction. They are reluctant to recognize in their practice that mastery of the inflectional, syntactical, and stylistic elements of a language is for the learner primarily an art to be acquired rather than a science to be comprehended. Such a recognition seems to them a deplorable concession to the unscientific spirit of the Sprachmeister. They prefer to play the ostrich, by denying the student's need of instruction in the art of speech-usage and by hurrying him at once into courses intended to prepare him for investigative work. And yet even a bright pupil thus unfamiliar with the idiomatic niceties and with the musical values of the language must remain a mere bungler in all questions of interpretation, phonology, morphology, syntax, prosody, and style. Warning examples of this are furnished annually by the score in the crude studies of these subjects offered to university faculties for the doctorate. What these students. of the earlier English, German, and Romance dialects need more than lectures upon historical grammar is intimate acquaintance with the syntax, style, and vocabulary of the dialects in question, based upon wide inductive reading of numerous authors of the period chosen for