What Is Man? and Other Essays
sense, reduce them to statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous
prose translation which shall tell you at a glance what the poet was
trying to get at. One sample will do. Here is a stanza from “The Lady
of the Lake,” followed by the pupil’s impressive explanation of it:
Alone, but with unbated zeal, The horseman plied with scourge and
steel; For jaded now and spent with toil, Embossed with foam and dark
with soil, While every gasp with sobs he drew, The laboring stag
strained full in view.
The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made
of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from
the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with
weariness, while every breath for labor he drew with cries full of
sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in
sight.
I see, now, that I never understood that poem before. I have had
glimpses of its meaning, in moments when I was not as ignorant with
weariness as usual, but this is the first time the whole spacious idea
of it ever filtered in sight. If I were a public-school pupil I would
put those other studies aside and stick to analysis; for, after all, it
is the thing to spread your mind.
We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might say.
As one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth to which one date
has been driven into the American child’s head—1492. The date is there,
and it is there to stay. And it is always at hand, always deliverable
at a moment’s notice. But the Fact that belongs with it? That is quite
another matter. Only the date itself is familiar and sure: its vast
Fact has failed of lodgment. It would appear that whenever you ask a
public-school pupil when a thing—anything, no matter what—happened, and
he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492. He applies it to
everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of the
horse-car. Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it is right
enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach our children to
honor it:
George Washington was born in 1492.
Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.
St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.
The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius
Caesar.
The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.
To proceed with “History”
Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.
Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so
that Columbus could discover America.
The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.
The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then
scalping them.
Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life
was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.
The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.
The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should
be null and void.
Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken
to the cathedral in Havana.
Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.
John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get fugitives slaves
into Virginia. He captured all the inhabitants, but was finally
conquered and condemned to his death. The confederasy was formed by the
fugitive slaves.
Alfred the Great reigned 872 years. He was distinguished for letting
some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.
Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing lost several
wives.
Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded after a few
days.
John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.
Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.
The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.
Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many thousand years
ago. His birthday was November 1883. He was once a Pope. He lived at
the time of the Rebellion of Worms.
Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I came I saw I
conquered.
Julius Caesar was really a very great man. He was a very great soldier
and wrote a book for beginners in the Latin.
Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she dissolved in a
wine cup.
The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.
The Persian war lasted about 500 years.
Greece had only 7 wise men.
Socrates... destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.
Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with such
ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey
misinformation every time it is uncarefully read:
By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could occupy the
throne.
To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious and
diligent boosting in the public school, we select the following mosaic:
Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.
In the chapter headed “Intellectual” I find a great number of most
interesting statements. A sample or two may be found not amiss:
Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.
Snow Bound was written by Peter Cooper.
The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.
Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.
Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and wrote
histories.
Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.
Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.
In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on his way to
the shrine of Thomas Bucket.
Chaucer was the father of English pottery.
Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.
Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American Writer. His
writings were chiefly prose and nearly one hundred years elapsed.
Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St. James because
he did it.
In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of information
concerning Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s works, and those of Bacon,
Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De
Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon,
Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer,
Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which
shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is
shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic
literature, and the same is there digested and disposed of in a most
successful and characteristic and gratifying public-school way. I have
space for but a trifling few of the results:
Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.
Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.
Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy. This was original.
George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his
genius.
George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest
female poet unless George Sands is made an exception of.
Bulwell is considered a good writer.
Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson were the
first great novelists.
Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law, he
was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557 and died in 1776.
Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value, if
taken in moderation:
Homer’s writings are Homer’s Essays Virgil the Aenid and Paradise lost
some people say that these poems were not written by Homer but by
another man of the same name.
A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant’s poems.
Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.
When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political features of
the Great Republic, they throw him sometimes:
A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.
The three departments of the government is the President rules the
world, the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.
The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.
The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure
domestic hostility.
Truth crushed to earth will rise again. As follows:
The Constitution of the United States is that part of the book at the
end which nobody reads.
And here she rises once more and untimely. There should be a limit to
public-school instruction; it cannot be wise or well to let the young
find out everything:
Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.
Here are some results of study in music and oratory:
An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from one piano to
the next.
A rest means you are not to sing it.
Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.
The chapter on “Physiology” contains much that ought not to be lost to
science:
Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.
Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid gas which is
impure blood.
We have an upper and lower skin. The lower skin moves all the time and
the upper skin moves when we do.
The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is avaricious
tissue.
The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.
The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.
The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart
where it meets the oxygen and is purified.
The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.
In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane sugar to sugar
cane.
The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is developed
into the special sense of hearing.
The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to
the stomach.
If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train would
deafen our ears so that we couldn’t see to get off the track.
If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added flavor to the
Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this article, let us make another
attempt:
The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light of nature
originated from St. John’s interpretation of a passage in the Gospel of
Plato.
The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of known lead with
that of a mass of unknown lead.
To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree on a
meridian and multiply by 62 1/2 pounds.
The spheres are to each other as the squares of their homologous sides.
A body will go just as far in the first second as the body will go plus
the force of gravity and that’s equal to twice what the body will go.
Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an equal volume
of or that is the weight of a body compared with the weight of an equal
volume.
The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of organized
bodies by the form of attraction and the number increased will be the
form.
Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it cannot change
its own condition of rest or motion. In other words it is the negative
quality of passiveness either in recoverable latency or insipient
latescence.
If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the
unintelligent teacher—or rather the unintelligent Boards, Committees,
and Trustees—are the proper target for it. All through this little book
one detects the signs of a certain probable fact—that a large part of
the pupil’s “instruction” consists in cramming him with obscure and
wordy “rules” which he does not understand and has no time to
understand. It would be as useful to cram him with brickbats; they
would at least stay. In a town in the interior of New York, a few years
ago, a gentleman set forth a mathematical problem and proposed to give
a prize to every public-school pupil who should furnish the correct
solution of it. Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public schools
entered the contest. The problem was not a very difficult one for