It is
all in reality part of the same subject, because it seems to be
certain that most human beings suffer by the suppression or the
dormancy of existing faculties. It is here, I believe, that much of
our intellectual education fails, from the tendency to direct so much
attention to purely logical and reasoning faculties, and to the
resolute subtraction from education of pure and simple enjoyment. I
used to try many experiments as a schoolmaster, and I remember at one
time bribing a slow and unintelligent class into some sort of
concentration by promising that I would tell a story for a few minutes
at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily
mastered. It certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was
simple enough, description as brief and vivid as I could make it, and
brisk tangible incidents. But the silence, the luxurious abandonment
of small minds to an older and more pictorial imagination, the dancing
light in open eyes, did really give me for once a sense of power which
I never had in teaching Latin Prose or the Greek conditional sentence.
I always told stories for an hour on Sunday evenings to the boys in my
house, and though few of my intellectual and ethical counsels are
remembered by old pupils, I never met one who did pot recollect the
stories.
Now we have here, I believe, a source of intellectual pleasure which
is consistently neglected and even despised.
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