THE FACULTY OF SPELLING. T HAT fine old question—long in bottle
and twice to the East Indies—" Ought putting two c's ' and one ' ' in ' recommend,' to disqualify an eager and high- spirited youth from serving in the Army ? " has, during the week, been raised again, and with it the whole spelling problem. Mr. Balfour, who seldom touches a question with- out quickening it with humour and imagination, asked the Secretary of State for War whether something could not be done to widen the scope of the examinations for the Army. Not to have acquired the "strange art of spelling the English language," he pointed out, now disqualified a man from entering the Army, and the whole examination system was degraded by the attaching of undue importance to "the arbitrary symbols of unusual words." We cannot help thinking that Mr. Balfour was quite right in making the protest he did make, and we trust that the Committee which Mr. Campbell-Bannerman tells us he has appointed to inquire into the whole subject of examinations for the ArMy, will be able to see its way to modifying the existing system. At present, those unhappy people who have the ill- luck to be born without the faculty for spelling have the Army completely closed against them. They may be utterly unable to spell, and yet become successful bankers, merchants, architects, dootore, engineers, editors, leader-writers, authors, publishers, or even school-inspectors; but if they belong to the class which never knows when it is " ible " and when "able," they must abandon all hope of defending their country.
Perhaps it will be said that our plea is a bad one ; and for this reason. The object of an examination is to find a substitute for patronage, and to select the ten men out of a hundred who are to have the vacant posts. Show no favouritisrq, and take the ten proved cleverest on an examination. There is the root-principle of our examination system. But not every form of examination will give you the ten cleverest men. We do not mean to say that in no case are examinations a test of ability. We accept for the moment, and for the sake of argument, the maxim that the ten cleverest can be selected by means of an examina- tion. Our meaning is that, if you had a musical examination, you would not get the ten cleverest men, because some of the men might have no ear, and so be incapable of being examined in music at all. That is obvious. We must not then take any form of examination which will exclude those who do not possess a special faculty of the musical kind,—granted, of course, that the special faculty in question is not one which is particularly useful in military service. But we believe that spelling is a special faculty, and that the inability to spell is not due to lack of brains or to lack of attention, but simply and solely to the non-possession of the spelling-faculty. That spelling is not the necessary attribute of cleverness, or in- ability to spell the necessary mark of a fool, is plain enough. No one who thinks for a minute or two on the matter will fail to remember that he knows one or two men who cannot write the simplest note without misspellings, and that these are by no means the most stupid of his acquaintance, but often the cleverest. The Duke of Wellington, it is notorious, could not spell ; and there have been plenty of other men of his mental calibre quite as illiterate. Some one has lately col- ected a list of distinguished Frenchmen who could not spell, and heads it with Thiers,—who, though not a genius, was certainly one of the cleverest men that ever lived. Thiers never could manage to spell his native language, though as a writer he was correct enough. But the point needs no elaboration. It is a matter of common knowledge that spelling and ability, either literary or practical, have no connection whatever. But it may be said, What do you mean by spelling being a special faculty ? Yon. surely don't mean to suggest that spelling comes by nature, or that it is a natural gift, like drawing ? ' No; we do not go quite so far as that. What we do mean is, that the inability to spell, or rather to learn to spell, rests upon a physical defect. Bad spelling, it is often said, comes from not paying attention ; and, properly understood, this saying is true. But this not paying attention is due to the fact that the bad speller's vision is defective, or at any rate not of a kind that will enable him to pay close attention to the letters which make up the words before him. A man who is constantly reading ought, of course, to be able to spell the words which he is repeatedly seeing on the page before him. Yet, as we know, it often happens that great readers are exceed- ingly bad spellers. Why is this ? We believe it is because the bad speller sees and reads each word as a whole, as a gramma- logue, or thought-symbol, that is, and not as so many letters. All people, of course, do this to some extent ; but we believe that the educated bad speller does it very much more than the good speller. The ordinary man, puzzled about a word, writes it to see how it looks ; and this look tells him at once whether he has spelt it right or wrong. The true bad speller is, however, not helped the very least bit in the world by this process. He is only the more puzzled by the writing on the blotting-pad. He may write the word a dozen ways, and not get one version which looks to him better than the others. The truth is, his eyes have some defect, probably of focus- sing-power, which prevents him seeing clearly the letters of the words. When he learns to read, he learns to read verbatim and not ligeratim,—and hence he sees, and has always seen, the symbol for " receive," not "receive," with the " e" always following the '1 c " and in front of the " i." This is why bad spellers will almost invariably be found to have been slow in learning to read. They were taught to read literally, but found great difficulty in the process owing to defective eyesight, and so had slowly and laboriously to learn the words as symbols of ideas, not as compounded letters. In a word, bad spelling is a defect of the eyesight, not of the mind ; and in all probability, many a case of inability to learn to spell, might be cured in children by the right pair of spectacles. It is not short-sight that makes the bad speller, so much as over- sight and difficulty in focussing the eye. Short-sighted people are, indeed, apt to spell well. They hold the book close to the eye, and see every letter standing out clearly ; for, as is well known, the effect of the short-sighted eye is to magnify. The long-sighted eye, on the other hand, sees small print as a confused and indistinct mass. The general look of the word is detected, but not the letters which make it up.
But if our view is the correct one, as we believe it is, it is,' surely very absurd to insist so strongly on spelling in our Army examinations. As a test of intelligence it is worthless, nor can it even be defended as keeping out people with weak eyesight, for it lets in the short-sighted and the colour-blinda and is thus in no sense satisfactory from a medical point of view. No doubt a certain standard of orthography ought to be kept up, but success or failure ought not to depend upon being a good or a bad speller. A lad capable of writing legibly, sensibly, and to the point, ought not to be kept out of the Army because he can't spell "fuchsia." But if spelling is to be rejected as a test, what is to be put in place P On that we cannot pronounce any opinion; but speaking generally, we do not see why the " subjects " should not be those which will be 'useful to an officer in after-life. It may be true that anything does to examine people in, but it is none the less more reasonable to let the subjects crammed be useful, than useless. There are plenty of subjects to be found which would be better than Greek or Latin. If, instead of being allowed to cram classics, he was obliged to offer a foreign language, the ordinary Sandhurst Cadet would find himself much better equipped for his professional duties. That, however, is another matter. All we want to insist on here is that it is, stupid to make entrance into the Army depend upon being able to do a series of spelling-tricks correctly,—especially since the inability to go through that performance may de- pend upon a very trivial personal defect. To say that every soldier ought to be able to spell because it is the mark of an English gentleman to spell correctly, is to state a proposi- tion as absurd as it is untrue. Hundreds, nay thousands, of English gentlemen cannot spell a bit, and repeatedly use another word, or write illegibly, because they are not sure whether it is " i " or "e." It is absurd to make spelling a fetish in the Army, when outside it is a divinity which no one r aspects.
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