text or two from the Scriptures, though through a glass somewhat darkly, for he had gradually dropped the old-fashioned habit of quoting, discouraged by the mystified look on the faces of his pupils and associates. Nevertheless, he recalled, by dint of effort, that the life was more than meat, and the body more than raiment, and that a man's life consisted not in the abundance of the things he possessed.

After all, had he not been beguiled by false ideals? Had he been right in thinking it necessary to meet his richer friends on their own ground—to make his dinners as elaborate as theirs, to dress his family as they dressed theirs? Was it desirable, after all, that he have a launch or an automobile, or even a carriage, or that his wife have a cook, a nurse-girl, and a chamber-maid? Had not his idea as to what constituted kindness to his family been, after all, a trifle distorted? Was it, after all, desirable that his wife spend her time exclusively in social and intellectual pursuits? Would she be a whit happier with no housework to do and no children to care for? Was it, after all, necessary, or even desirable, for his sons and daughters to belong to fraternities and sororities? Was it absolutely necessary that he live in a large house in the wealthy quarter of the city, and that his furniture, rugs, and china be as fine as those of his rich neighbors? Did those neighbors, after all, require it of him? Could he not retain their friendship and esteem by the dignified pursuit of an even course of life according to his own income? If not, why would it not be better to keep to

his own course, nevertheless, and rely upon nature to form him his circle of friends from among those who did the same? Why follow the many-headed beast of society at all? Was there no geniality and no sociability for men of less than fifteen thousand dollars income? Was there no friendly intercourse without elaborate dinners? Was there any law of nature, or any principle of common sense, which made it necessary for an educator of the youth of a democracy to have in his wardrobe three styles of hat, four styles of coat, two or three styles of shoe, and all the appurtenances thereto? Where was the ideal of plain living and high thinking? Why not austere living and high thinking, if necessary?

These thoughts the Professor, in communion with himself. He had been pursuing a false ideal, and had got into the wrong company. Clearly, he could not increase the numerator; ergo, he would lessen the denominator. He would amend his ways, and be happier; the simple life for him henceforth. All his good resolutions he made on the Ides, and on the Kalends began to break them. He could not free himself from the meshes—and his struggles were, to tell the truth, not very violent. The incomes of his associates must come down, or his own must come up, or society be made over, before he is relieved of his burden, or ceases to be haunted by the vision of old age and the charity fund.

Meanwhile, his consolation is in the nobility of his calling and in the delight of pursuing it.

H

E who in passing through Connecticut, on his way between New York and Boston, has heard people boarding or leaving the train at Norwich pronounce the name of that city "Nor-wich" (as it is spelled), instead of "Norrich," has been brought face to face with a problem of no inconsiderable magnitude-as Mr. Pickwick said of the study of politics. This problem is the strong influence of spelling upon pronunciation, of written language, as translated to the ear by the eye, upon spoken language.

In using our own language we Americans are particularly exposed to this influence. Our first colonization, and more especially our separation from England by the Revolution, brought about a certain disruption in old traditions; time-honored pronunciations of words, especially of proper names, were gradually forgotten, and we began to pronounce those names as we saw them written -at times to a considerable veiling of their derivation. Take, for instance, the town of Waltham, in Massachusetts; every Yankee nowadays pronounces the name "Wal-tham" (the second a like that in "ham" or "jam"), oblivious of the fact that the name really belongs to the same general family as Birmingham, Walsingham, etc., that the t and h were not originally fused into a compound consonant, that the syllabic division came after the t, not before it, and that the English pronunciation was "Walt'am" (the second a having the obscure sound of u in "sum"). That this pronunciation at once reveals the meaning of the name- -the Home of Walt' or Walter-seems of little importance to him who argues; "If W-a-l-t-h-a-m does not spell 'Wal-tham,' what does it spell?"

The Influence of Spelling upon Pronunciation

The pronunciation "Waltham" is but one out of many instances of the preponderance of what I will call the spelling sense in our relations to spoken language; it seems as if two of those three R's which form the basis

of our education had so taken hold of our whole nature that we were incapable of looking at language, save through the media of reading and writing. We seem to have an insuperable instinct to pronounce words as they are spelled.

If this influence of spelling is strikingly exemplified in our use of our own language, think what hold it must have on us when we try to learn a foreign one! To be sure, long experience has shown that by far the best way to learn a new language is through the ear, from viva-voce speech, rather than from books and written exercises. But how few of us are willing to lend ourselves receptively and flexibly to the process! So much of our knowledge has been acquired by reading, through the eye, that we have grown insensibly to distrust our ear, and feel that we have not fully mastered a new word until we know how it looks in black and white. Notice anyone asking a Frenchman the French word for a common object; what first strikes his ear is little better than a jumble of hardly articulate-seeming sounds which he cannot at once arrange in his mind according to any system known to him; after helplessly asking again and again, he at last takes refuge in, "How do you spell it?" Now, the answer to this last question is in most cases precisely the one most likely to throw him off the right track; for his accustomed phonetic interpretation of his own alphabet has become so ingrained in his mind, has taken such entire possession of him, that he is well-nigh irresistibly impelled to fashion his pronunciation in accordance with it. When most of us ask for a foreign word, what we really are after is not how the foreigner pronounces it, but how we ourselves should pronounce it if we knew how it was spelled. This is no peculiarity of ours. People of other nations are quite as bad as we.

I had a characteristic example of this tendency not long ago, when an Englishman and I were trying to get a Pole to pronounce

the word "pot" as we do. For a while our best-meant endeavors were futile; our Polish friend stuck like grim death to his highly modulated Slavic o, which is not in the least our short o. At last it occurred to me that he spoke excellent Russian, having lived some years in St. Petersburg; so I said to him, "Will you please pronounce the Russian word achotnikie?" He did so at once, and of course correctly. "Now," said I, "you have given the sound I am trying to get from you; your hard Russian a, in the first syllable of achotnikie, is exactly like our short English o, now say 'pot' as if the vowel were a hard Russian a." He did so without the slightest difficulty; the whole Slavic sound of the o had vanished. But he had to have some familiar written symbol of that sound in his mind before his ear could accurately grasp it. Yet, like Desdemona, he was an excellent musician!

On another occasion an American friend of mine, who spoke no German, was telling me of the trouble he had had on German railways. "They are so stupid," said he, "at the ticket-offices! In Berlin I told the man distinctly that I wanted erste Klasse" (pronouncing the first syllable of erste like our English "erst"), "and he gave me a second-class ticket." I told him the mistake was really his; that, instead of catching by ear the sound as Germans pronounce it, he had followed his own ideas of English spelling; that the pronunciation "urste" would never suggest the spelling e-r-s-t-e to à German, but the spelling ö-r-s-t-e, with the two dots over the o; and, as there was no such word as örste in the German language, the man naturally did not catch his meaning. If he had pronounced it "airstè,” the man would have understood. "Ah," said my friend, "I see my mistake; yes, the sound I gave was more like 'orste'" (now pronouncing the vowel like the o in "horse"). "Hold hard there!" said I; "now you are going just as wrong as before, by spelling and not by ear. You heard me say something about an o, and immediately go and give it the sound of our English o. I did not say 'orste,' but 'örste'; yet the mere knowledge that there was an o somewhere in the business was enough to close your ears and run you off the track!" Why do we persist in thus building up an impenetrable wall between ourselves and the pronunciation of a foreign language? It almost seems as if we could not help it. And

it must be admitted that we are abetted in our error just where we ought to be shown the right way-or, if not shown the right, at least warned against the wrong; by the abominable so-called phonetic spelling of foreign words in dictionaries and vocabularies. Did it ever occur to the compiler of bilingual vocabularies that, in trying to indicate the correct pronunciation of, say, French words by more or less ingenious arrangements of the letters of the English alphabet, premising our accustomed English phonetic interpretation of the same, he was attempting the impossible? For, leaving consonants out of consideration, how can vowel sounds that do not exist in our language be indicated by any combination of the letters of our alphabet? Consider the matter a moment, and see its utter hopelessness. Let us take French as an example, as good as another.

Exceedingly few of our English vowel sounds are to be found in the French language.

Our broad a (in "father") is the French circumflex á; our short e (in "met") has very nearly the sound of the French vowel in the words mes and les (when correctly pronounced, as at the Comédie-Française; not as more generally pronounced on the Paris boulevards, where the sound tends toward the close, acute é); our double o (in "boot") is exactly the French ou; our short u has in a few cases nearly the sound of the French eu-for instance, the difference between "burr" and beurre lies more in the than in the vowel-but in by far the greater number of cases the sounds are quite different; the pronunciation of "bun" is better indicated to a Frenchman by bonne than by the conventional would-be-phonetic beunne. And here, I think, the list of vowel sounds which the two languages have in common ends.

For the French short a we have no equivalent; our broad a has the same quality, but is too long drawn out. When it comes to the French acute é (of all Gallic sounds the most difficult for the average Englishman or American) and circumflex 6, we have no vowels nor combinations of vowels that even distantly approach them. Our long a (in "hate") and long o (in "note") are slightly diphthongal in character, the a ending with a hint at ee, and the o, with a similar hint at oo; the French acute é and circumflex are perfectly pure and unmodulated. Our short i

(in "pit") and short o (in "pot") are equally lacking in French equivalents, and are indeed almost impossible to a Frenchman; and so on to the end of the list.

Realizing all this, we can see that when a dictionary gives "aytay" as the pronunciation of été, or "lah mahl" as that of la malle, it commits an actual crime; it goes as far as it possibly can from the true French sounds without running the risk of detection by the least wary; if it went further, every child would see the error.

I surely have no infallible system of phonetics to propose; I am far rather arguing that no such system is possible with the letters of our alphabet in their ordinary phonetic interpretations. But I especially wish to emphasize the fact that the system now generally employed in French-English dictionaries is fundamentally and thoroughly vicious. Instead of helping the student, it does all that is needed to mislead him. And what is true of French-English dictionaries is equally so of all modern bilingual dictionaries I know. They try to do what cannot be done.

Instead of trying to improve a bad system, I would advocate throwing it overboard altogether; for it is, in the last analysis, but part and parcel of that tyranny which spelling tends everywhere to exercise over pronunciation. A dictionary is, after all, but a book; and, being such, can teach only a written language, never a spoken one. Let it then rest content with teaching a written language, and not deceive the unsuspicious by attempting the impossible. And the mere teaching of a written language is something! I once knew a woman, of a now by-gone generation, exceedingly bright, intellectual, and cultivated, one of the keenest-edged minds I ever had to do with, who in her girl

hood had studied French at school as if it had been a dead language; that is, purely and simply as a written language, without a thought of pronunciation. She could speak only a very few words of French, and badly at that; spoken French she could not understand at all; but the whole of French literature was open to her; she could take a French book and read aloud from it at sight in English with complete ease, without any hesitation. The fact is, she never really read French; she saw the French sentences on the page, to be sure, but read them, even to herself, in English. Now, a power like that is by no means despicable; and not pronouncing French at all is surely better than mispronouncing it.

But for learning a spoken language let everyone first trust to his ear alone: in other words, let him learn a foreign language by sheer imitation—as every child learns its own when it begins to talk. This training of the ear is not so difficult a matter as may be imagined; much can be accomplished by going to work in the right way. The results are at times astonishing. The most perfect English I ever heard spoken by a foreigner was spoken by Mr. Constant Coquelin, who practically did not speak English at all (at the time I am thinking of), but had caught a few sentences by ear; these he spoke without the faintest tinge of French accent, precisely like an educated Englishman. There are not a few of us who, with his ear-training, could speak just as pure French, German, Italian, or Spanish. But it is at least worth thinking of, although perhaps not absolutely indispensable, that it would be a great help to such ear-training not to know how the words were spelled; for this knowledge is in general the prime stumbling-block.

T

the beneficeNCE OF ART MUSEUMS HE interest in art museums shown throughout the country has brought the subject within The Field of Art. This department has already published some data concerning certain of the newer museums, and is to carry those inquiries still further.*

It will be with much interest that the inquiry extends itself to those other institutions of similar plan and purpose which have since grown up, and presents some of the artistic assets open to the public at the Fine Arts Academy of St. Louis, the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburg, the Corcoran Gallery of Washington, the Art Museum of Boston, and other art galleries, municipal or of private initiative. These institutions have so opened up the world of art to critics and connoisseurs, that a marked effect on general art criticism has been one of its results.

What passed for criticism during long years was a kind of literature bearing on æsthetics and supplemented by inexact biographical data and unverified attributions. This, as a matter of course; for how, before the days of art museums, numerous and intelligently managed, could the connoisseur inform himself, with so slight means of becoming acquainted with the great works of antiquity?

Incomplete collections, unauthoritative catalogues, inexact methods of reproduction, inexpert copies by color or engraving, and vague appreciation through personal examination; these were formerly the only channels through which to become acquainted with the great works of the past. When we also bear in mind that scarcely a year now goes by that does not change the attribution of some masterpiece we readily discover a cause of the modernity of art knowledge in the field of general culture. Much common sense has entered of late years into the theories held by writers of the influences which

See the February, March, and September numbers of The Field of Art.

contribute to the production of works of art, and of the periods which are supposed to be conducive to art effort, the appearance and growth of fine art in a country.

It is personal study of the works themselves that has cleared up many misconceptions that have been created concerning them by writers who used art often as a beautiful theme. Theories in regard to the geographical position of the country, the climate, the environment; the government, democratie or monarchical, as affecting art; heredity, or the absence of hereditary influence, have presented themselves to the art writer, and become subjects of thought and discussion by those who would penetrate the mystery of art creation. But a careful survey of the periods of production, and of the countries that have enriched the world by great works, show that art, like love, "goes where it is sent," and that nothing sure can be predicted of its rise or its decline. Much of this knowledge is of modern acquisition, and it has been attained through the facilities of study and inquiry afforded by museums and the many appliances of art reproduction whose basis is photography. Where formerly the world at large was dependent for acquaintance with art objects on the inaccurate medium of engraving, or of painted copies, it is now possible, by means of photography or half-tone processes, to multiply and spread broadcast the very lines of the artist's drawing. This truly enriches the reference department of an art institution, and discloses to the student the masterpieces of the world.

The familiarity thus gained is of the greatest service to the critic, while it has so stimulated the taste of the general public that an almost new set of faculties has developed among the class that forty years ago would have been contented with inartistic copies of Raphael and Titian. This new set of faculties coming into play extends the range of those pleasurable emotions that it is the province of art to excite.

This, then, is one beneficent function of