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.
The special fitness of modern languages in a girl's education does not
appear on the surface, and it requires more than a superficial,
conversational knowledge to reap the fruit of their study. The social,
and at present the commercial values are obvious to every one, and of
these the commercial value is growing very loud in its assertions, and
appears very exacting in its demands. For this the quack methods promise
the short and easy way, and perhaps they are sufficient for it. A
knowledge sufficient for business correspondence is not what belongs to
a liberal education; it has a very limited range, hard, plain, brief
communications, supported on cast-iron frames, inelastic forms and
crudest courtesies, a mere formula for each particular case, and a small
vocabulary suited to the dealings of every branch of business.
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