The manner of teaching the young is oral and tutorial. All through the Jesuit System the manner followed is oral: in the examinations of the lower classes, where writing is admitted, it is only as a specimen of style and composition that writing enters the examination exercises. With the younger students, the manner of teaching is oral in its most specific sense. It is not that generic quality which will suit as well the lecturer or the public speaker. But it is the tutorial manner, which includes a fund of sympathy, of that tact which supposes sympathy, of such a superiority, both moral and intellectual, as knows how to stoop, and elevate the boy by stooping, and does it all naturally, instinctively, gracefully. In the ordinary course of human affairs, this magnetic power of the teacher is more intense, according as in years he is nearer to the subject on whom his ascendancy plays, and by whom it is spontaneously admitted. I mean that inestimable and precious subject, the mind and heart of the impressionable boy, who is about to develop into manhood, first young, and then mature.
The youthful subject is rich, though not in positive acquisitions already made its own; for, in this respect, it may rather be considered _parum fructuosa_, as Sacchini says; that is, bearing little fruit as yet, either of judgment or positive acquirements. But it is rich in its promise, as it struggles upward into the sunshine of varied and beautiful truth. This is the fact which imposes upon liberal education the duty of omitting nothing that is either beautiful or polished, in imagination, thought, or style. It justifies Belles Lettres and the most finished course of Literature, as being the chosen garden of flowers and fruit, to entertain withal, richly and exquisitely, the youthful promise of mind, sentiment, and heart.
Or, inverting the figure, if we liken the mind itself in youth to the choice and prolific soil of a garden, we may note that, to till such soil, there is need of a gardener who has a delicate hand and a light touch. He must not be a lecturer who stands off, nor a speaker who declaims, nor a text-book monger who reads, and hears recitations of what a book says; nor is he to dole out methods and analyses to an inquisitive sense and emotional fancy, which, in the youthful soul, are the temporary vesture of an unfolding intellect; even, as in nature around, things tangible and palpable are bursting, to the boy's inquisitive eyes, with the great intellectual truths which they contain. Analyses, text-books, lectures are not the powers with the young mind. But, often enough, we see where the real power lies; when young men, scarcely as yet approaching the prime of life, exercise over impressionable and brilliant youths, not much beneath themselves in age, such a personal influence as bids fair to rank them among the greater forces of human nature--forces which are great in leading, because they know so well how to follow. That other form of ascendancy, more purely intellectual, and originating in wide learning and maturity of scholarship, belongs to the University Professor of a later stage of life. Hence it appears that youthfulness in the Master is an advantage for the tutorial teaching of the young.