ble to cope with Mme.
Chose. A smattering of the irregular verbs will not much avail him in
that emprise. Not in the dark by-ways of conjugation, but on the sunny
field of frank social intercourse, must he prove his knighthood. I would
recommend that every boy, on reaching the age of sixteen, should be
hurled across the Channel into the midst of some French family and kept
there for six months. At the end of that time let him be returned to his
school, there to make up for lost time. Time well lost, though: for the
boy will have become fluent in French, and will ever remain so.

Fluency is all. If the boy has a good ear, he will speak with a good
accent; but his accent is a point about which really he needn't care
a jot. So is his syntax. Not with these will he win the heart of Mme.
Chose, not with these the esteem of M. Tel, not with these anything but
a more acrid rancour in the silly hostility of his competitors. If a
foreigner speaks English to us easily and quickly, we demand no more of
him; we are satisfied, we are delighted, and any mistakes of grammar or
pronunciation do but increase the charm, investing with more than
its intrinsic quality any good thing said--making us marvel at it and
exchange fatuous glances over it, as we do when a little child says
something sensible. But heaven protect us from the foreigner who pauses,
searches, fumbles, revises, comes to standstills, has recourse to
dumb-show! Away with him, by the first train to Dover! And this, we may
be sure, is the very train M. Tel and Mme. Chose would like to catch
whenever they meet me--or you?

LAUGHTER, 1920.

M. Bergson, in his well-known essay on this theme, says...well, he
says many things; but none of these, though I have just read them, do I
clearly remember, nor am I sure that in the act of reading I understood
any of them. That is the worst of these fashionable philosophers--or
rather, the worst of me. Somehow I never manage to read them till they
are just going out of fashion, and even then I don't seem able to cope
with them. About twelve years ago, when every one suddenly talked to me
about Pragmatism and William James, I found myself moved by a dull but
irresistible impulse to try Schopenhauer, of whom, years before that,
I had heard that he was the easiest reading in the world, and the most
exciting and amusing. I wrestled with Schopenhauer for a day or so, in
vain. Time passed; M. Bergson appeared 'and for his hour was lord