environment and become modified in consonance with it, we are plainly admonished to shape environment so as to contribute best toward the ideal results desired. If we must imitate, the great educational question is how to select wisely copy that is worthy of imitation.

Every teacher ought to understand the great importance of imitation. Up to the time the child has entered school, a very large proportion of its knowledge has been gained and retained in a purely imitative way. Several of the ancient writers on education realized the importance of imitation in education. Plato shows its value in learning language, music, painting, science, dancing, literary style, and also in the formation of character. Xenophon believed that the most effective way of teaching behavior and manners is through imitation. Aristotle cautions against leaving children much with slaves, and also urges us to be careful what stories children hear. Many Greeks are known to have been solicitous that their children should mingle with those only who spoke pure Greek. Plutarch urged in his essay on The Training of Children that they should be shielded "lest, being constantly used to converse with persons of a barbarous language and evil manners, they receive corrupt tinctures from them. For it is a true proverb, 'that if you live with a lame man you will learn to halt."" Quintilian would insist that the nurse have a good moral character, and that she should "also speak with propriety. Let the child not be accustomed, therefore, even while he is yet an infant, to phraseology which must be unlearned." Walt Whitman writes:

"There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day,

Or for years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child."

Another poet wrote:

"This price the gods exact for song,—

That we become what we sing."

From Walter Pater we have the following words apropos of

the subject:

1

"Imitation: it enters into the very fastnesses of character; and we, our souls, ourselves, are forever imitating what we see and hear, the forms, the sounds which haunt our memories, our imagination. We imitate not only if we play a part on the stage, but when we sit as spectators, while our thoughts follow the acting of another, when we read Homer and put ourselves lightly, fluently, into the place of those he describes: we imitate unconsciously the line and color of the walls around us, the trees by the wayside, the animals we pet or make use of, the very dress we wear. Men, children are susceptible beings, in great measure conditioned by the mere look of their 'medium.' Like those insects, we might fancy, of which naturalists tell us, taking color from the plants they lodge on, they will come to match with much servility the aspects of the world about them." " Imitation in Language Education.-Think what it means to learn to talk! A grown person would give a great deal to learn to speak a foreign language correctly in a few years. The child at five or six years has gained almost perfect command of the oral expression of all his thoughts. Of course, his ideas and his vocabulary are limited, but his expression is almost perfect within his limited range. At this age the number of words is not so small, either, as one might suppose. An average child of six years, brought up in a good home, possesses a usable vocabulary of a couple of thousand words. He understands nearly double that many. An adult often spends years of painfully conscious labor in acquiring the vocabulary of a foreign language. Not only does imitation determine the tongue which the child is to speak, but the vocabulary, the inflection, to some extent the tone, the rapidity of speech, order of words, and choice of illustrations, are also all matters of imitation.

It is easy to recognize the rôle played by imitation in the first years of childish attempts to master the mother tongue. Children learn through imitation to clip their words, to intone them

1 Plato and Platonism, p. 245.

clearly, to talk in monosyllables, or to drawl. The boy when asked why he drawled his words replied, "Mother drawls her'n." The deaf child, unable to imitate the speech of his fellows, remains mute (unless he learns lip or throat reading). The child who lives in a home where correct language is spoken, and who hears good language among his playmates, will speak correctly, barring a few inaccuracies resulting from irregularities in the structure of the language. He will learn to syllabicate properly, utter words distinctly, and to give correct emphasis to his expressions. The teaching of language in schools is often rendered difficult because children have so much to unlearn. Years of imitation of undesirable models counteract the efforts in the right direction. Chubb in his admirable work, The Teaching of English, has some very valuable words concerning imitation. He says we shall be less prone to exhaust the child by this effort to "draw him out, and get him to overhaul and dissect and play the showman to his possessions, if we bear in mind more constantly the nature of the assimilative process; so that we may assist rather than retard it. The prehensile power of the child is not so much rational and analytic, as imaginative and imitative. The way to get him to appropriate a fact or idea is not to labor with him until he knows that he knows, but to insure some sort of unconscious imitative reaction. He must unconsciously do something about it. . . . ... We conclude that everything he sees and hears evokes a motor responsiveness in him; it comes loaded with motor suggestion and starts a process of motor reaction, a process that education may either inhibit or encourage. It is not necessary, however, that he should actually re-enact the story he has heard, that he should physically do something about it; he may react imaginatively.":

1

Roger Ascham insists that "All languages, both learned and mother tongue, be gotten, and gotten onlie by imitation. For as ye vse to heare, so ye learne to speake: if ye heare no other, ye speake not your selfe; and whome ye onlie heare, of them you onlie learne. And, therefore, if ye would

1 Chubb, The Teaching of English, p. 31.

speake as the best and wisest do, ye must be conversant, where the best and wisest are: but if you be borne or brought up in a rude countrie, ye shall not chose but speake rudelie: the rudest man of all knoweth this to be trewe."

1

In all language acquisition of the child, the most important factor is imitation—at first unstudied and purely absorptive, and gradually becoming conscious and purposive. At first the allimportant thing is to have the child hear only the purest of speech. He will then re-echo exactly as he has heard. Later he should not only hear pure speech, but he should become saturated with the forms of the choicest diction expressed in literature. Gradually the beauty of forms of expression in literature should be brought to his consciousness in order that he may rise from the stage of reflex imitation to the higher, studied idealistic stage. The primary consideration, however, is to so pre-empt the mind with the choicest form and content in literature that spontaneous expression of a similar nature will follow necessarily as a result of the laws of ideo-motor action.

Properly guarded, even definitely studied imitative reproduction of the best models is of great assistance in acquiring ideal habits of expression. Occasionally, when a pupil has read a piece of literature, it is well to have him reproduce it with all the imitativeness he can command. For what other purpose has he studied than to make the thought and the art his own? So long as the art has become integrated into his own style and is not a borrowed garment put on for the occasion, there is no danger. A careful distinction must, of course, be kept in mind between proper imitation and mere copying. Spontaneity and naturalness are prime desiderata, and are not sacrificed if the language work is made a matter of assimilation and not one of mechanical memory. The models for studied imitation should also be varied, and none long continued.

The place and meaning of imitation which are here desired to be emphasized are well illustrated in many of the present-day books on composition, in which the basis of composition work is

1 The Schoolemaster.

to be the study of the choicest literary models of the various forms of composition. The relation between composition and literature is well set forth by Principal Webster in the preface to his book on teaching composition through the study of models. He says:

"There are two classes of artists: geniuses and men of talent. Of geniuses in literature, one can count the names on his fingers; most authors are simply men of talent. Talent learns to do by doing, and by observing how others have done. When Brunelleschi left Rome for Florence, he had closely observed and had drawn every arch of the stupendous architecture in that ancient city; and so he was adjudged by his fellow citizens to be the only man competent to lift the dome of their Duomo. His observation discovered the secret of Rome's architectural grandeur; and it is the accumulation of such secrets which is the development of every art and science. Milton had his method of writing prose, Macaulay his, and Arnold his-all different and all excellent. And just as the architect stands before the cathedrals of Cologne, Milan, and Salisbury to learn the secret of each; as the painter searches out the secret of Raphael, Murillo, and Rembrandt; so the author analyzes the masterpieces of literature to discover the secret of Irving, of Eliot, and of Burke. Not that an author is to be a servile imitator of any man's manner; but that, having knowledge of all the secrets of composition, he shall so be enabled to set forth for others his own thought in all the beauty and perfection in which he himself conceives it." 1

Chubb says: "Children learn their native tongue by imitation; and imitation continues to be, throughout the school course, the chief factor in language work. The rules of grammar and rhetorical precept are later and comparatively unimportant means to the end sought. Of models, the most influential is the teacher herself; the influence of book models is heavily discounted if the teacher's own practice is not exemplary and winning. And by example we mean, first and foremost, oral example." "

1

English Composition and Literature, p. ix. Another book illustrating the same plan is that of Kavana and Beatty, Composition and Rhetoric.

2 The Teaching of English, p. 374.