hauling down the British flag to renounce the long-drawn English “A-o-o.”  And, curiously, at the other extreme, the slightest tinge of an English accent is rather liked in Paris, perhaps only among those touched with Anglomania.  But now we ought to be able to acquire whatever accent we choose, even when living far away from every instructor, having the gramophone to repeat to us untiringly the true Spanish “manana” and the French “ennui.”  And the study of phonetics, so much developed within the last few years, makes it unpardonable for teachers of modern languages to let the old English faults prevail.

We have had our succession of methods too.  The old method of learning French, with a bonne in the nursery first, and then a severely academic governess or tutor, produced French of unsurpassed quality-But it belonged to home education, it required a great deal of leisure, it did not adapt itself to school curricula in which each child, to use the expressive American phrase, “carries” so many subjects that the hours and minutes for each have to be jealously counted out.  There have been a series of methods succeeding one another which can scarcely be called more than quack methods of learning languages, claiming to be the natural method, the maternal method, the only rational method, etc.  Educational advertisements of these have been magnificent in their promise, but opinions are not entirely at one as to the results.

The conclusions which suggest themselves after seeing several of these methods at work are:—­

1.  That good teachers can make use of almost any method with excellent results but that they generally evolve one of their own.

2.  That if the teachers and the children take a great deal of trouble the progress will be very remarkable, whatever method is employed, and that without this both the classical and the “natural” methods can accomplish very little.

3.  That teachers with fixed ideas about children and about methods arrest development.

4.  That the self-instruction courses which “work out at a penny a lesson” (the lesson lasts ten minutes and is especially recommended for use in trams), and the gramophone with the most elaborate records, still bear witness to the old doctrine that there is no royal road to the learning of languages, and that it is not cheap in the end.  In proportion to the value we set upon perfect acquirement of them will be our willingness to spend much labour upon foundations.  By this road we arrive again at the fundamentals of an educator’s calling, love and labour.

The value to the mind of acquiring languages is so great that all our trouble is repaid.  It is not utilitarian value:  what is merely for usefulness can be easily acquired, it has very little beauty.  It is not for the sake of that commonplace usefulness that we should care to spend trouble upon permanent foundations in any tongue.  The mind is satisfied only by the genius of the language, its choicest forms, its characteristic movement, and, most of all, the possession of its literature from within, that is to say of the spirit as it speaks to its own, and in which the language is most completely itself.