My wife admits privately that she has forgotten all the French she ever knew—­could not even order a meal from a carte de jour; yet she is a never-failing source of revenue to the counts and marquises who yearly rush over to New York to replenish their bank accounts by giving parlor lectures in their native tongue on Le XIIIme Siecle or Madame Lebrun.  No one would ever guess that she understands no more than one word out of twenty and that she has no idea whether Talleyrand lived in the fifteenth or the eighteenth century, or whether Calvin was a Frenchman or a Scotchman.

Our clever people are content merely with being clever.  They will talk Tolstoi or Turgenieff with you, but they are quite vague about Catherine II or Peter the Great.  They are up on D’Annunczio, but not on Garibaldi or Cavour.  Our ladies wear a false front of culture, but they are quite bald underneath.

* * * * *

Being educated, however, does not consist, by any means, in knowing who fought and won certain battles or who wrote the Novum Organum.  It lies rather in a knowledge of life based on the experience of mankind.  Hence our study of history.  But a study of history in the abstract is valueless.  It must be concrete, real and living to have any significance for us.  The schoolboy who learns by rote imagines the Greeks as outline figures of one dimension, clad in helmets and tunics, and brandishing little swords.  That is like thinking of Jeanne d’Arc as a suit of armor or of Theodore Roosevelt as a pair of spectacles.

If the boy is to gain anything by his acquaintance with the Greeks he must know what they ate and drank, how they amused themselves, what they talked about, and what they believed as to the nature and origin of the universe and the probability of a future life.  I hold that it is as important to know how the Romans told time as that Nero fiddled while his capital was burning.  William the Silent was once just as much alive as P.T.  Barnum, and a great deal more worth while.  It is fatal to regard historical personages as lay figures and not as human beings.

We are equally vague with respect to the ordinary processes of our daily lives.  I have not the remotest idea of how to make a cup of coffee or disconnect the gas or water mains in my own house.  If my sliding door sticks I send for the carpenter, and if water trickles in the tank I telephone for the plumber.  I am a helpless infant in the stable and my motor is the creation of a Frankenstein that has me at its mercy.  My wife may recall something of cookery—­which she would not admit, of course, before the butler—­but my daughters have never been inside a kitchen.  None of my family knows anything about housekeeping or the prices of foodstuffs or house-furnishings.  My coal and wood are delivered and paid for without my inquiring as to the correctness of the bills, and I offer the same temptations to dishonest tradesmen that a drunken man does to pickpockets.  Yet I complain of the high cost of living!