aps have been; of
all of which odd notes of our situation there would, and possibly will,
be more to say--my present aim is really but to testify to what most
comes up for me to-day in the queer educative air I have been trying to
breathe again. That definite reflection is that if we had not had in us
to some degree the root of the matter no method, however confessedly or
aggressively "pedantic," would much have availed for us; and that since
we apparently did have it, deep down and inert in our small patches of
virgin soil, the fashion after which it struggled forth was an
experience as intense as any other and a record of as great a dignity.
It may be asked me, I recognise, of the root of "what" matter I so
complacently speak, and if I say "Why, of the matter of our having with
considerable intensity _proved_ educable, or, if you like better,
teachable, that is accessible to experience," it may again be retorted:
"That won't do for a decent account of a young consciousness; for think
of all the things that the failure of method, of which you make so
light, didn't put into yours; think of the splendid economy of a
real--or at least of a planned and attempted education, a 'regular
course of instruction'--and then think of the waste involved in the so
inferior substitute of which the pair of you were evidently victims." An
admonition this on which I brood, less, however, than on the still other
sense, rising from the whole retrospect, of my now feeling sure, of my
having mastered the particular history of just that waste--to the point
of its actually affecting me as blooming with interest, to the point
even of its making me ask myself how in the world, if the question is of
the injection of more things into the consciousness (as would seem the
case,) mine could have "done" with more: thanks to its small trick,
perhaps vicious I admit, of having felt itself from an early time almost
uncomfortably stuffed. I see my critic, by whom I mean my representative
of method at any price, take in this plea only to crush it with his
confidence--that without the signal effects of method one must have had
by an inexorable law to resort to shifts and ingenuities, and can
therefore only have been an artful dodger more or less successfully
dodging. I take full account of the respectability of the prejudice
against one or two of the uses to which the intelligence may at a pinch
be put--the criminal use in particular of falsifying its history