t may
carry them through the little difficulties of life at railway stations
and restaurants, is for any intellectual purpose of no conceivable
utility. I knew a retired English officer, a bachelor, who for many
years had lived in Paris without any intention of returning to England.
His French just barely carried him through the small transactions of his
daily life, but was so limited and so incorrect that he could not
maintain a conversation. His vocabulary was very meagre; his genders
were all wrong, and he did not know one single verb, literally not one.
His pronunciation was so foreign as to be very nearly unintelligible,
and he hesitated so much that it was painful to have to listen to him. I
could mention a celebrated German, who has lived in or near Paris for
the last twenty years, and who can neither speak nor write the language
with any approach to accuracy. Another German, who settled in France as
a master of languages, wrote French tolerably, but spoke it
_in_tolerably. There are Germans in London, who have lived there long
enough to have families and make fortunes, yet who continue to repeat
the ordinary German faults of pronunciation, the same faults which they
committed years ago, when first they landed on our shores.

The child hears and repeats the true sound, the adult misleads himself
by the spelling. Seldom indeed can the adult recover the innocence of
the ear. It is like the innocence of the eye, which has to be recovered
before we can paint from nature, and which belongs only to infancy and
to art.

Let me observe, in conclusion, that although to know a foreign language
perfectly is a most valuable aid to the intellectual life, I have never
known an instance of very imperfect attainment which seemed to enrich
the student intellectually. Until you can really feel the refinements of
a language, your mental culture can get little help or furtherance from
it of any kind, nothing but an interminable series of misunderstandings.
I think that in the education of our boys too many languages are
attempted, and that their minds would profit more by the perfect
acquisition of a single language in addition to the native tongue. This,
of course, is looking at the matter simply from the intellectual point
of view. There may be practical reasons for knowing several languages
imperfectly. It may be of use to many men in commercial situations to
know a little of several languages, even a few words and phrases are