Counter-Currents. Agnes Repplier

long ago. All knowledge, we are told, can be made so ​attractive that school-children will absorb it with delight. If they are not absorbing it, the teacher is to blame. Professor Wiener tells us that when his precocious little son failed to acquire the multiplication tables, he took him away from school, and let him study advanced mathematics. Whereupon the child discovered the tables for himself. Mrs. John Macy, well known to the community as the friend and instructor of Miss Helen Keller, has informed a listening world that she does not see why a child should study anything in which he is not interested. "It is a waste of energy."

      Naturally, it is hard to convince parents—who have the illusions common to their estate—that while exceptional methods may answer for exceptional cases (little William Pitt, for instance, was trained from early boyhood to be a prime minister), common methods have their value for the rank and file. It is harder still to make them understand ​that enjoyment cannot with safety be accepted as a determining factor in education, and that the mental and moral discipline which comes of hard and perhaps unwilling study is worth a mine of pleasantly acquired information. It is not, after all, a smattering of chemistry, or an acquaintance with the habits of bees, which will carry our children through life; but a capacity for doing what they do not want to do, if it be a thing which needs to be done. They will have to do many things they do not want to do later on, if their lives are going to be worth the living, and the sooner they learn to stand to their guns, the better for them, and for all those whose welfare will lie in their hands.

      The assumption that children should never be coerced into self-control, and never confronted with difficulties, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that young people should never be burdened with responsibilities, and never, under ​any stress of circumstances, be deprived of the pleasures which are no longer a privilege, but their sacred and inalienable right, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that married women are justified in abandoning their domestic duties, because they cannot stand the strain of home-life and housekeeping, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that invalids must yield to invalidism, must isolate themselves from common currents of life, and from strong and stern incentives to recovery, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that religion should content itself with persuasiveness, and that morality should be sparing in its demands, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that a denial of civic rights constitutes a release from moral obligations makes for such a shattering failure of nerve that it brings insanity in its wake. And the assumption that poverty justifies prostitution, or exonerates the prostitute, lets down the last ​walls of human resistance. It is easier to find a royal road to learning than a royal road to self-mastery and self-respect.

      A student of Mr. Whistler's once said to him that she did not want to paint in the low tones he recommended; she wanted to keep her colours clear and bright. "Then," replied Mr. Whistler, "you must keep them in your tubes. It is the only way." If we want bright colours and easy methods, we must stay in our tubes, and avoid the inevitable complications of life by careful and consistent uselessness. We may nurse our nerves in comfortable seclusion at home, or we may brace them with travel and change of scene. It does not matter; we are tube-dwellers under any skies. We may be so dependent upon amusements that we never call them anything but duties; or we may be as devout as La Fontaine's rat, which piously retired from the society of other rats into the heart of a Dutch cheese. We may be so rich ​that the world forgives us, or so poor that the world exonerates us. In each and every case we destroy life at the roots by a denial of its obligations, a fear of its difficulties, an indifference to its common rewards.

      The seriousness of our age expresses itself in eloquent demands for gayety. The gospel of cheerfulness, I had almost said the gospel of amusement, is preached by people who lack experience to people who lack vitality. There is a vague impression that the world would be a good world if it were only happy, that it would be happy if it were amused, and that it would be amused if plenty of artificial recreation—that recreation for which we are now told every community stands responsible—were provided for its entertainment.

      A few years ago an English clergyman made an eloquent appeal to the public, affirming that London's crying need was a score of "Pleasure-Palaces," ​supported by taxpayers, and free as the Roman games. Gladiators being, indeed, out of date, lions costly, and martyrs very scarce, some milder and simpler form of diversion was to be substituted for the vigorous sports of Rome. Comic songs and acrobats were, in the reverend gentleman's opinion, the appointed agents for the regeneration of the London poor. It is worthy of note that the drama did not occur to him as a bigger and broader pastime. It is worthy of note that the drama is fast losing ground with the proletariat, once its staunch upholders. A very hard-thinking English writer, Mr. J. G. Leigh, sees in the substitution of cheap vaudeville for cheap melodrama an indication of what he calls loss of stamina, and of what Mr. Murray calls loss of nerve. "When the sturdy melodrama, with its foiled villainy and triumphant virtue, ceases to allure, and people want in its place the vulgar vapidities of the vaudeville, we may be sure there ​is a spirit of sluggish impotence in the air."

      To-day the moving pictures present the most triumphant form of cheap entertainment. They are good of their kind, and there is a visible effort to make them better; but the "special features" by which they are accompanied in the ten- and fifteen-cent shows, the shrill songs, the dull jokes, the clumsy clog-dances,—are all of an incredible badness. Compared with them, the worst of plays seems good, and the ill-paid actors who storm and sob through "Alone in a Great City," or "No Wedding Bells for Her," assume heroic proportions, as ministering to the emotions of the heart.

      The question of amusement is one with which all classes are deeply concerned. Le Monde où l'on s'amuse is no longer the narrow world of fashion. It has extended its border lines to embrace humanity. It is no longer an exclusively adult world. The pleasures of youth have ​become something too important for interference, too sacred for denial. Whatever may be happening to parents, whatever their cares and anxieties, the sons and daughters must lose none of the gayeties now held essential to their happiness. They are trained to a selfishness which is foreign to their natures, and which does them grievous wrong. A few years ago I asked an acquaintance about her mother, with whom she lived, and who was, I knew, incurably ill. "She is no better," said the lady disconsolately, "and I must say it is very hard on my children. They cannot have any of their young friends in the house. They cannot entertain. They have been cut off from all social pleasures this winter."

      I said it was a matter of regret, and I forbore to add that the poor invalid would probably have been glad to die a little sooner, had she been given the chance. It was not the mere selfishness of old age which kept her so long about ​it. Yet neither was my acquaintance the callous creature that she seemed. Left to herself, she would not have begrudged her mother the time to die; but she had been deeply imbued with the conviction that young people in general, and her own children in particular, should never be saddened, or depressed, or asked to assume responsibilities, or be called upon for self-denial. She was preparing them carefully for that failure of nerve which would make them impotent in the stress of life.

      The desire of the modern philanthropist to provide amusement for the working-classes is based upon the determination of the working classes to be amused. He is as keen that the poor shall have their fill of dancing, as Dickens, in his less enlightened age, was keen that the poor should have their fill of beer. He knows that it is natural for young men and women to crave diversion, and that it is right for them to have it. What ​he does not clearly understand, what Dickens did not clearly understand, is that to crave either amusement or drink so weakly that we cannot conquer our craving, is to be worthless in a work-a-day world.

      And worse than worthless in a world which is called upon for heroism and high resolve. A cruel lesson taught by the war is the degeneracy of the British workman, who, in the hour of his country's need, has clung basely to his ease and his sottishness. What does it avail that English gentlemen fling away their lives with unshrinking courage, when the common people, from whose sturdy spirit England was wont to draw her strength, have shrivelled into a craven apathy. The contempt of the British soldier for the British artisan is not the contempt of the fighting man for the man of peace. It is the loathing of the man who has accepted his trust for the man who can do and bear nothing; who cries out ​if his drink is touched, who cries out if his work is heavy, who cries out if his hours are lengthened, who has parted with his