MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IOFTEN recur to the theme of young people being taught foreign language's. -I do so because I hope that my words may come to the ears or eyes of those misguided parents who imagine that it will be of benefit to their offspring if they are, between the ages of eight and eighteen, educated abroad. These parents can be divided into two main categories, namely the fools and the knaves. The fools are so sub-human in their stupidity that one is surprised to observe that they catch colds like ordinary mortals or are able to raise their forks to their mouths. They are not, however, the dangerous type of parent, since it may be possible to persuade them to change their ideas. The knaves represent a more difficult problem. One can usually identify them from the fact that they belong to the type of human being who, having failed in life, seeks to persuade himself or herself that this failure is due, not to any personal defect of mind or character, but solely to unfortunate environment. I have found that these knavish parents are extremely self-centred and immensely conceited ; they imagine, of course,' that their only wish, in insisting that their children be educated abroad, is to secure for these young people the advantages which life has denied to them themselves ; what they really feel is that our English system of education must be fundamentally faulty, in that it did not accord to their own youth those opportunities for prowess and elevation that their talents deserved. By exposing their infants to a totally different type of upbringing they are not seeking to benefit those infants ; they are seeking to assuage their own old wounds by scoring off our public-school system, and to render their children " different " from those of their friends. ' " Maudie's eldest boy," they imagine their friends say- ing, "is frightfully clever: he can speak French like a native." So off little Robert is despatched to Orleans or Lausanne. , • * * In the first place, to educate a child abroad is to deprive him of roots, and as I wrote two weeks ago the only positive rule about the upbringing of children is that they should be accorded a solid background, a strong sense of support, and a rhythm in life which is gentle, unhurried and absolutely even. Only in such rich but well-drained soils can the young shoots flourish to the point when they can safely be planted out. The conceited or knavish parept imagines that he can render his boys and girls singular. and impressive by planting them out, and in foreign soils, before they are really hardened to outdoor climates or have grown any wood of their own. The results are in almost every case disastrous. However sturdy the child may be by nature, he will be bound, since such is the infant urge to imitate, to ape the habits, ideas and appearance of some elder whom he admires. It does no harm at all to a boy if he seeks to emulate the virtue, and even copy the movements of the right shoulder, that he has admired in the Captain of the Second Eleven. Such imitation will lead him quite insensibly into adapting himself congenially to the atmosphere of his school life ; it will also be useful to him in after years when he desires to impress his superiors with the fact that his attitude towards life is healthy -and sound. But if, at Lausanne, he starts imitating the boy who won the prize in the rhetoric class, then I foresee for him a future of much frustra- tion in his native land. All his days, though he speaks French as well as any boy at Louis le Grand, he will be regarded as a foreigner both in England and in France. He will have no roots.
In the second place, what sensible man ever wants to speak a foreign language like a native " ? It is pleasant and profitable to be able to read and understand a foreign language ,as easily as one's own ; it is useful to be able to speak it fluently without searching for words, without causing embarrassment to oneself or others, and without finding that one uses expressions that one knows to be idiomatic, but does not wish to use, in place of the expressions that one wishes to use, but cannot formulate, idio- matically. It is often said that we should study a language until we find that we " think " in it. This seems to me an extremely low standard: the moment a visitor to a foreign country replies, when they knock on his door, either " Entrez," "Herein," or " Avanti," without saying to himself, "What is the German for 'Come in' ? " he is " thinking " in that language ; but this does not mean that his mastery of the tongue is much advanced. The real test of proficiency is whether, next day, we can recall if we spoke in Italian at dinner last night or in English ; if we honestly forget which language was used, then a state of pro- ficiency has been reached such as no intelligent man need seek to surpass. To "talk French like a native" may be valuable to an intelligence officer or a parachutist ; to the ordinary human being it is merely a gaud. And I should add that it is a gaud that may prove extremely detrimental to the character. A regi- mental officer, owing to the chance that he was either educated in Italy or had an Italian mother, may speak as a native the Tuscan tongue. This may tempt him to consider himself more clever than are his brother officers, with horrible results.
I have found that of all linguists the most insufferable are those who, when in my company abroad, speak ' the local language better than I do myself. It is difficult to endure this mortification without tears of rage. I was travelling to Liverpool last March and found myself seated in the restaurant car at a table for four. I eyed my companions with puzzled interest. One of them was an Englishman who appeared to be acting as host: the-other two were foreigners and addressed each other from time to time with noticeable acerbity and in a language I could not at first identify. It was certainly not a Slav or Scandinavian language, nor was it either Latin, Illyrian or Kutzo- Vlach ; it was not Turkish, although it appeared to have a curious Turanian swing ; I decided that they must be Finns. Yet they -had about them that curious scruffy, scurfy look, suggestive of those who have emerged for a while from behind the Iron Curtain. I gathered from the deference paid to him by the Englishman that the elder of the two must be a person of some consequence. I decided that he must be a Commissar on some economic mission to our industrial north. The other man was some twenty years younger, alert, loathsome, and able to under- stand and even to speak several sentences in the English language. What puzzled me was that the elder man, although obviously his official superior, did not venture to snub him when he showed off. The Commissar understood no English and knew two words only, useful words in their way. They were the words "Very nice " ; he used them whenever he was addressed. The younger man took no trouble at all to conceal his contempt.
The Englishman was embarrassed. "Would you," he asked, speaking slowly and distinctly. "prefer fried plaice or jugged hare ? " "Very nice," the Commissar replied. The younger man was annoyed at this ineptitude on the part of his official superior ; " niul," he snarled at him in a really nasty way. The old boy took this humbly, concealing under wads of silent suffer- ing what must have been a spurt of rage. I was puzzled by this humility. Obviously, I decided, the younger man has been attached to the Commissar as a Party spy. I remembered that, when I was a child at Buda Pesth, my nursery maid would repeat an adage inculcating caution. On my return I looked the proverb up in the London Library. It was " elet jobb mint halal." It means, more or less, what we mean when we say "Safety Arse' That, I concluded, was the reason why the Commissar did not allow himself the flash of fury that I, in such circumstances, would have flung.
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