it is necessary at once to draw a distinction, which marks the difference between the earlier and the more developed form of the new method. The mistake made by the first zealots of the new school was that they plunged the pupil without preparation into the reading of what were called “easy passages,”—passages taken from any ordinary book, and easy perhaps as compared with other passages which might have been selected, but still bristling with a multitude of heterogeneous forms and constructions. This was an “inductive method” with a vengeance; but it soon became evident that to expect a young beginner to work his way through such a jungle to the light of clear grammatical consciousness was to expect too much;[1] and even for the adult beginner the process is slow and laborious. For what is the object of grammar unless to make the facts of a language accessible and intelligible by presenting them in a simple arrangement? Here as elsewhere science ought surely to step in as an aid, not an obstacle, to understanding. What the advocates of the new school failed to see was that “nature” cannot dispense with “art”; in other words that the text which is to serve as the basis of an inductive study of the language must be specially constructed so as to exhibit those features on which the teacher desires to lay stress at a particular stage of learning.
What is the ordinary English practice at the present day? On this point others are more competent to speak than I; but I imagine I am not far wrong in saying that the first step in learning Latin is to spend a month or two in learning declensions and conjugations by rote—not, let us hope, complete with their irregularities and exceptions, but in outline. The pupil
- ↑ A distinguished representative of the Neuere Richtung admitted in conversation with the present writer some years ago that the teaching of French out of his own book was “Hundesarbeit” (horse-work.)
